And now! On with SBD!
Edit: Ack, I forgot! with Andi and Doug!
Persuaded
There's this ongoing kinda-debate in the romance/lit world as to whether or not Jane Austen wrote romance novels. From all that I've seen:
1. The people who believe that Austen wrote Romance are romance-readers themselves, one and all, and oh you snobby literati should get OVER yourselves because Jane was the first and best and CLEARLY Mr. Darcy is an alpha-asshole hero all the way so get off your high horse - and on and on.
2. The people who clutch the pearls and gasp, insisting that Austen most emphatically did NOT write romance novels, and who have pretty much NEVER EVEN FREAKING READ ROMANCE NOVELS and couldn't define the genre if their cushy little guest professorship (and that scholarly-looking stick up their collective ass) depended on it.
Being neither of the above, I am nevertheless a total snob AND a romance-reader. So here we go. Wheee!
I re-read Austen's Persuasion recently. I think it's my favorite of hers, or at least my most oft-read. So before I tell you where I come out on the Did Austen Write Romance debate, let me just make the following observations:
- I actually yelled at the author. Yes, at Jane Austen. Yes. I was as shocked as anyone. But gaaaah, about the 20th time that Anne gets all preoccupied with Wentworth and inwardly sighs and thinks oh! if only! (stupid wistful sentiments with exclamation points after them, argh, so uncredibly trite, she might as well write Mrs. Captain Frederick Wentworth on her Trapper Keeper in bubble letters, for godsakes), I just lost a bit of patience with our sighing heroine. I was Annoyed.
- Anne's little sister Mary is scarily like my own little sister. Scarily. And because of that, I didn't believe Anne's patience for an instant. She never snaps at Mary. I don't buy it. Or maybe I just don't want to believe anyone could be so inhumanly saint-like. Bleh.
- I absolutely love that Austen didn't show us the couple in their younger days, that first blush of romance that was thwarted.
- That letter? That Wentworth leaves for Anne at the end? Brill. BRILL. It's 100% mushy sentimental romantic girlycrap BRILLIANCE and I LOVE IT.
Persuasion is a romance novel. No, there's no nekked nookie complete with desriptions of the wet-flesh-sounds lovingly rendered in purple prose. There are no pirate-rogues after anybody's maidenhead. The cover is a classy detail of some oil painting and does not involve chest hair blowing in the breeze. Though I read ever word, I have no idea if Anne Eliot's ta-ta's are the stuff of slavering legend or if Wentworth's manroot throbbed when she walked by (though I suspect it did, I mean he was a sailor, for cryeye). But it's about a girl and a guy who are in love and manage to get together in spite of all the formidable obstacles, and who live happily ever after. That's what it is. That's what it's about. It's full of social satire and all that, too, but those other elements are only lovely trimmings. The point of the book is their romance.
Witness: That letter at the end. It makes me bawl, every time. I actually have a physical reaction to it - my heart speeds up and I get all fluttery and sniffly because awww and ooooohh and sniffsniff and gah, I'm all choked up just thinking about it. (Sidenote: I am SUCH a girl, but it takes really really high-caliber sap to get to me that way.) It's the climax of the novel and it's a downright orgy of romantic feeling. It's emotional porn for women. It's exactly what every modern romance novel strives to be, and some of them (too few) manage it with the same impact - and grace - as Austen did.
Also: All that wistful sighing from Saint Anne Eliot. She's pining all along. He's, like, her world. And she gets him in the end. Which, again, is the whole point of the story: them finding love together.
There are some things that I think would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get away with in a modern Romance. For instance, no WAY would a modern telling of the tale be so closed-mouth about the younger-years romance. You'd have to show it in flashback, or (at the very least) give the characters some strong and clear memories of their earlier romance, making the reader a voyeur to them, to see what they used to be. Instead, Austen just tells us that they had a strong understanding of one another, a very deep attachment. That's it. Now I happen to loooove that, but no way would that fly these days.
You'd also have to give a little something more from the hero's POV - though that's a relatively recent development in modern Romance. The romances I grew up with almost never had the hero's POV. And actually, this book reminds me a lot of those Harlequins I read in my teen years: no sex; no hero POV; a Long Talk at the end to resolve things, wind it all up, and tell us what he was thinking all along.
Formerly, I was of the belief that Jane Austen did NOT write Romance, give me a break, alla youse. I hereby change my tune. BUT here's the caveat, if caveat is the word I'm looking for: Persuasion is a romance novel, but that doesn't make all of her novels Romance. At all. Sense and Sensibility? Not Romance. Nope. I have only the vaguest memories of Pride and Prejudice, but I tend toward a big fat No on that one, too. Maybe Mansfield Park, I'd have to read it again. It's been way too long on all the others for me to judge.
So there. Have at me. I really want to know, too - do you think Austen wrote Romance or not? And why? Speak!
21 comments:
(I'm suddenly talkative.)
I can agree that Mansfield Park isn't a romance, but Pride and Prejudice definitely is. But it's ok, you just don't remember it clearly. ;)
You're just saying that because the P&P hero was all angsty and tortured. :P
But I'll definitely be reading it again soon, and will render judgment, and let you know.
First, the obligatory philosophical note: I almost always find a statement like "[x] is a member of [collective noun y]" to be useless until unpacked, exposing the purpose for gathering the group togther. As former President Clinton might say, it depends on what "is" is. What's included in a typical language "game" depends on whether the game you bag is something you want to eat, lie on, or mount on your wall.
Man, sometimes I wish I never listened to that scaly thing in the library of Eden and grabbed that first ripe red Rittgenstein.
Okay, da books:
One thing about SS, PP, MP, and Persuasion is how
materially grim the protagonists' lives look to be if they don't land an upper class husband (Emma being the big exception.) That doesn't mean that they need to accept ANYBODY (both Elizabeth and Fanny turn down suitors), but that they need to accept sombody "suitable." If there was a successful resolution possible in Austen's world for her women that did NOT involve marriage, she did not discover it. Marianne's experiences with Wllloughby and Colonel Brandon in SS is the most acute antiromantic statement Austen makes, but consider in PP the gentleness of Charlotte Lucas's relatively comfortable fate with the ludicrous heir Mr. Collins or Emma's "attachment" to Mr. Knightley, which consists largely of not wanting anyone else to preempt her in his heart.
What is Pride and Prejudice about? It's not about the wonderful Elizabeth or the rich/handsome/conceited/ultimately just Darcy (who, I concede, probably IS a stock figure for romance as Beth means it - leave out those four traits and do we have much left of Darcy?). It's, well, about pride and prejudice. Austen is concerned with character in the starchy ethical sense, standards of conduct and the consequences of the two.
Most prominent English novels before Austen (Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones) and close after (David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, even Middlemarch!) ended with the resolution of the protagonist's marriage. Every resolution depended on what the moral qualities a protagonist needed to be successfully married to a Suitable Person - they were Bride(-groom)'s Progress, with attendant swipes at Society's own failure to exemplify and reward those qualities in any consistent fashion. It's why, if you must resort to collective nouns, that Austen is generally more useful in "social comedy" than "romance." The author who exalted sense over sensibility and who muted rather otherwise her heroines' passion for the comparatively dull non-individual men they chose would want it that way.
And maybe Elizabeth DID grow fonder of Darcy after she saw the grounds at Pemberley. I know I did.
Oh yeah - and Persuasion is about persuasion.
LOL. I gotta say, after I read all that, Paul, I can see you truly don't "get it." You seem to be looking in the wrong place for the romance (passion) in P and P, and then declaring it's not there. At least I think that's what you said, not sure what the parts about bagging game and marriage were intended to get across, too murky for me.
*pointing graciously* The "romance" is when you read the desperate straits to which Darcy is reduced after insulting Elizabeth and being rejected. Those scenes in which he paces back and forth and then bursts out with his feeeeelings. Which insult her! So she rejects him, in SPITE of his position and what society would view as the "compliment" of his falling in love with a social inferior. And then behind the scenes, humbly in service to her, knowing he's totally screwed himself by being an @hole, he saves her family from social ruin. And she realizes it (long after we readers do). *shiver*
That's where the romance is. As to all this about what's "useful" (useful? useful for what?) yeah, social comedy is there too. Some commentary about character, yadda yadda. But the idea that the passion between Elizabeth and Darcy is purposely muted because Austen wanted to tone down the emotion is--actually pretty amusing, from a female reader's angle. Of course it is controlled, and by that control made more explosive.
P and P contains quite a lovely romantic arc that has been used and re-used in the genre. I suppose we could argue forever on the relative literary importance of that vs the character thing, but it's pretty clear you really don't comprehend which way Austen "would want it," and I can only presume that's because you are a guy and don't see what we girls can see. And Jane was, after all, one of us. ;)
Opps sorry, Anonymous is me, Laura. ;) Didn't mean to hide.
Pride and Prejudice...I'll read it at least twice a year. I have the DVD of the mid-90's BBC production (Oh God...Colin Firth...Yum!)
and it's just so good. I love how she writes the characters, the supporting characters are amazing. I laugh out loud when reading it.
Definately a romance novel.
I'm off to watch it again...see you in 6 hours.
Ah, the slings and arrows of outrageous sexism. I suppose it's appalling possibility that I like Austen because in some spindle way I don't get the distaff talk.
Okay, Laura, how's this: in light of your interesting essay, (and thinking about my reaction to the characters in your own FMLH) P&P doesn't qualify as a romance because Elizabeth is the very opposite of a placeholder heroine - her wit, her character, her individuality are the points of the book, whereas Darcy is simply a placeholder hero symbolizing "Just Desserts." You cite HIS undeniable passion - I agree, that's important in at least three ways: it's a necessary part of the marriage reward in itself; it's a necessary plot device, because otherwise someone with Elizabeth's family antecedents couldn't get him; and because it provides the spice of overpowering his scruples.
It's Elizabeth's passion that's muted - to the point she has to protest it repeatedly to her family when Darcy proposes in an acceptably humble manner, and the reader is really no wiser than they were, espcially not being privy to the "solemn assurances of attachment." Not exactly heart-throbbing and which even Jane didn't try to actually write. She certainly gained Darcy's love, which, in turn, gives her respectability, wealth and status.
Wondering - perhaps it IS male to think romantic love is what, after all, YOU feel, rather than what is felt for you. The second is merely...useful, as it was for Lizzy. Anyway.
Consider the emotional closure of the final chapter. All he get of the weddings is that Mrs. Bennet "got rid" of her two most deserving children (consider the contrast with the scheduling of sopa opera weddings during the sweeps), and then a catalog of exactly how Elizabeth's social net changed in response to her new life. Her new Life - not Love.
If another kind of life of fame and fortune were possible in Austen's world, Elizabeth might have earned that.
This emphasis on the social aspects of the reward rather than the raptures of love in a private sphere of two indicates why calling Austen a writer of romance is as anachonistic as trying scifi trying the claim the third book of Gulliver's Travels. Interesting about the plot arc, assuming the relationship between E and D is the point, but still - "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" did not transform Chopin into a Tin Pan Alleyman.
Laura - but you CAN claim another Jane - Eyre. I know you'll turn down the offer, but, on the upside, I have NOTHING to say about that book at all! Nada! It came to mind when I remembered Beth recounting the some of Flowers from the Storm as we drove in the spring sunshine, arguing from Philly to DC.
"...P&P doesn't qualify as a romance because Elizabeth is the very opposite of a placeholder heroine..."
OK. Wait. Whuh? This makes no sense.
I know you're referring to Laura's essay (which I've never read, alas) in Dangerous Men & Adventurous Women. Was Laura really arguing that a romance novel REQUIRES a placeholder heroine, and that all readers across the board use heroines as placeholders?
I ask because I'm genuinely curious.
It's been ages (over ten years?)since I've read P&P, but I remember finishing it and thinking "Ha! Holy crap! Totally a romance novel!" Everything, from the initial antagonistic relationship, to the Sudden Realization of Love, to the Black Moment, to the Sudden Confession of Love--romance, romance, romance.
Not saying it's not other things, too. Social satire, comedy of manners, what have you, yeah sure, whatever. None of these categories are mutually exclusive, after all.
Candy, you are right, in my essay I said that the best romance did NOT have a placeholder heroine, that the reader could identify (in my definition of the term, actually feel the emotions of) both the hero and heroine. The placeholder theory was proposed as part of an explanation of why readers can enjoy a romance in spite of not identifying with the heroine--because they identify instead with the hero.
Elizabeth is not a placeholder heroine. PnP is way too good for that. I don't find her feelings to be muted at all. She doesn't DISPLAY them, very true, but it's quite clear to me all along in the book precisely what they are, and as a reader I experience them myself. I also experience Darcy's frustration and desperation and self-recognition (even though I knew all along he was being a jerk, I can also experience his realization of that fact--the magic of fiction and imagination!)
So, no. Elizabeth is not a placeholder and a romance does not require a placeholder heroine. That's a misinterpretation that I specifically contradict in the essay itself.
Again, Paul, I think you are looking in the wrong place for the romance. You seem to be looking for evidence of "love" as shown by two people who are already in love. Romance (the genre) isn't about Love, it's about Conflict About Love. Romance doesn't require a wedding, and the social aspects are nice icing, but by the time the reader gets to that point in the book, all of that is just irrelevant to the emotional closure. That's already happened. It happens back when Elizabeth realizes (along with the reader) what Darcy has done for her. Anything after that is just a wrap-up. The weakest point, romance-wise, in PnP actually is the wrap-up, but that's not really a problem because there's been such a satisfying emotional arc already.
The fact that you can say "and the reader is really no wiser than they were" is just, I don't know, what can I say? Proof that you don't get it.
The reader IS wiser, the female reader knows all about it. If you don't, then you aren't picking up on what's there. Why you aren't--maybe it's not gender-based, maybe it's an individual issue. But it is there, and women see it.
I remember my English teacher saying something similar back when we would protest that, Come on, the author didn't purposely write about lakes to symbolize female sexuality. Doesn't matter, the teach said. If enough people can see it, it's there. ;)
And I suppose shepherds and mutton fanciers might see a Renaissance nativity scene as being about the lambs. ;-)
Implying what, Paul?
The underlying message there is that those of us who see what you don't are merely mutton fanciers and shepherds. Is that what you think of us?
My point was that Persuasion is Romance. Thanks for your thoughts on P&P, but I really can't speak to that at all.
Paul dear, you're full of crap when it comes to the topic of Romance. (As usual. It's kinda endearing at this point, though.) Saying that Persuasion is about persuasion and therefore NOT about a romance is like saying that Scaramouche is only about Scaramouche - and is, therefore, unworthy of a man of your intelligence. Not to mention dopey.
I think to a certain extent, yes - every reader finds exactly what s/he is looking for. That's what makes Austen so endurable, and of course one thing that defines the best writing. But just as I can't understand the hypersensitivity of a lot of the Romance community, I equally can't understand why some people so very strenuously object to (even some of) her work being called "romance novels". If we called it a "love story" instead, I really believe NO ONE would have a problem with it. They are all stories about finding appropriate and, one hopes, lasting romantic relationships. The emotional payoff does NOT come from Anne being nicely settled - it comes, as Laura noted, from the characters overcoming the ROMANTIC conflict. Not the financial or familial or social or whatever else conflicts - the romantic conflict.
If Austen didn't want us to get so caught up in it, she wouldn't have made her heroes so very dashing. And generally rich. And everything's so repressed until this burst of emotion at the end. I mean PUH-LEEEEZ, that is SO not about social satire.
Laura - Can I just change that to a lovely Arcadian shepherdess and those who look especially wonderful in fine wool sweaters. I jsut don't want to chase uo an alternative to my Christmas lamb. Anyway, the point being that the structure of P&P indicates that the romantic love is not the focus, but an element that's instrumental to another sort of resolution.
Beth - If you really find Edward and Edmund dashing, I am deeply concerned, and the same goes for Mr. Knightley as anything other than an uncle. Darcy, of course, is rich, handsome, titled, and becomes devoted, but is hardly dashing. Wentworth's presumed dash is all off-screen, and confronted by a crisis, he wisely defers to Anne. I do agree that Persuasion, as the most interior of all the novels, does focus on her feelings for Wentworth, but i still believe that Jane's determination to make the alternative to Anne's marriage (for someone for the time a bit beyond marriagability)shows that heart-love lost was not strong enough to compel the readers she had in mind.
"It's, well, about pride and prejudice. Austen is concerned with character in the starchy ethical sense, standards of conduct and the consequences of the two."
This may be true, up to a point, but to analyze Pride and Prejudice completely outside the relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth, the ROMANTIC relationship between the two is, IMO, to miss some of Austen's more subversive social commentary. For what's more subversive to a system that thrives on socially "suitable" marriage partners than exploring a relationship between two characters who are emotionally and intellectually suited, and for whom the social proprieties actually get in the way more often than not? While it might seem, from our historical perspective, that the truly liberating thing would be for Austen to find a way out of marriage as a social necessity for women, within the historical context of the book, I think that Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship, the intense passion that's communicated between them (especially, as several have pointed out, at the very times so much energy is going into quashing emotions) outwits the social mandates without sacrificing social stability. I like that about Austen, actually -- that there's a way in her books to buck the system without rejecting it. For some reason, that feels even more provocative to me.
Ah, but both members of each of Austen's successful couples come from the same tiny hereditary class, gentlemen and officers, even if the economic fortunes of their families diverge. While Austen does poke at absurd rigidities of society (pride, selfishness, greed and hypocrisy), anything even mildly subversive of the order itself - when, for example, Emma tries to marry her protegee Hazel into Emma's own class - it doesn't get far, or when Marianne cops the sort of attitudes that would have been fine in a Bronte book.
"Ah, but both members of each of Austen's successful couples come from the same tiny hereditary class, gentlemen and officers, even if the economic fortunes of their families diverge."
Exactly. That's why I see a relationship like that between Elizabeth and Darcy as more subversive rather than socially reifying. I know it seems counter-intuitive, and I know that feminist critics everywhere have blasted Austen for not challenging social class enough, but in their own way, I think Elizabeth and Darcy's emotionally and intellectually passionate relationship does challenge prevailing social attitudes in the book -- attitudes about "suitability" and compatibility and how social insularity should protect relationships (when in E&D's case, I think the relationship would have imploded if Elizabeth had married Darcy only based on the superficial criteria her mother, for example, exalts). IMO, the relationship only becomes viable for Elizabeth once she can move past what society would expect of her and meet Darcy on her own personal terms (i.e, once she has changed the terms, even if the result appears the same on the surface).
Jumping in here out of lurkdom to post re: successful couples as part of the same social class. I'm not nearly as well-spoken as Robin or Paul, sorry.
There are several interesting essays in the Norton edition of Persuasion that touch on class. The one the sticks in my mind is less about class hierarchy than it is about being a new or modern man. The author points out that Captain Wentworth's confidence in himself was one of the things that made him a "modern man", as opposed to one who felt bound by class strictures about politeness and social advancement. His disappointment in Anne was that she did not have the same modern sensibility as he did, and allowed herself to be persuaded by the arguments made by a member of the established class, Lady Russell.
Back to Beth's original blogging. Persuasion is my favorite Austen book, re-read at least once per year. I agree with you that it absolutely is a romance. If you break it down, Persuasion has many of the plot points (called cliches by some cynics) that are part and parcel of romance novels: relationship torn apart as youths because of family/friends presure, class/money division, well meaning busy body with nose in everyone's business, flirtations with others that could run dangerously awry, follwed by the ultimate realization that s/he is the ONE with appropriate resolution. It's a credit to Austen's style that all of those elements actually work together in Persuasion.
Beth - the Norton edition includes Austen's original final chapter of Persuasion, which did NOT include the letter. The original ending was less melodramatic, and not nearly as romantic as the letter. Have you read that version?
JenniferC
Holy crap, there's another version of Persuasion?? WITHOUT the letter?!
gaaaaah must find it and no letter at the end, I mean what was she THINKING??
Yeah, the letterless version of the final chapter is just plain wrong. The happy ending was just, well, not very exciting. But it reminds me that even brilliant writers have to write and then rewrite, even JA.
Difficult to believe that Darcy and Elizabeth liking each other, in addition to being a socially acceptable couple and Elizabeth obtaining a fortune, counts as subversive, especially considering more daring handling of these questions by predecessors like Richardson and Fielding. Jane's corrections on the the way her society saw things are more like small-prescription glasses.
I'm still waiting to see something that suggests "passion" in Elizabeth. Perhaps that curious passage where she declares her love for him to her father: "Indeed, he has no improper pride. He is perfectly amiable." after her conversion to Darcy-love, since this is so clearly inaccurate about a man who said at the party at Meryton, "...there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment for me to stand up with." It may be a mark of her passion that she loses what made her so admirable to the rest of us: her clearsightedness. I personally have fewer objections to the accuracy of her initial prejudice than to these statements.
But again, to focus on Darcy and Elizabeth and to ignore what Charlotte-Collins, Lydia-Wickham, and even Jane-Bingley say about the central relationship is to miss a good deal of what JA is really saying about love.
One interesting addendum to Jennifer's observations is that Anne herself, even after all that happens, is not convinced that succumbing to the antiWentworth "persuasion" in the past had been wrong. My own contrary reading of Emma is that Emma is way too herself to allow her temporary chastisement about her perspicacity to affect how she acts in the future; Anne's calm sense of her own values also seems immune to the corrections of an unexpectedly happy ever after.
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