Paid subscribers can join this chat thread about Pride and Prejudice. The book club meets on 16th February. The next Shakespeare book club is 23rd February. We are discussing The Comedy of Errors. I strongly recommend watching this version from the Globe.
Regulated Hatred
In March 1939, at the Manchester Literary Society, W.D. Harding changed the way we talk about Jane Austen. Harding was not a literary critic. But his talk became the origin of a new way of seeing Jane Austen.1
Harding disagreed with the prevailing view that Austen was a “delicate satirist” who expressed “the gentler virtues of a civilised social order” and the “amiable weakness” of her characters. Instead, Harding said, her books were now being read “by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked.” She didn’t love her society: she wanted to undermine it. He called his essay “Regulated Hatred.”
The first example Harding gives is a passage from Northanger Abbey, when Henry Tilney says that in “a country like this” every man “is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies”. And he quotes one of Austen’s letters, about her mother reading a letter from her aunt—they have seen one of Cassandra’s letters (Austen’s sister) and are “in a quandary about Charles and his prospects”. The various pieces of gossip (what the aunt thought, what Cassandra said) are debated. “Never mind,” Austen writes, “let them puzzle on together.” She held this sort of spying, he said, in contempt.
Harding thinks the remark about “a neighbourhood of voluntary spies” is missed or glided over by most readers, nestled, unexpectedly, as it is, in Henry’s speech. Henry’s other remarks are more complimentary: Austen smuggles it past us. He gives further examples. When Miss Elliot is chagrined at not having been able to marry her cousin, the satire allows us to feel superior to her, until Austen writes that Mr Elliot had “as by the accustomary intervention of kind friends they had been informed, spoken most disrespectfully of them all.”
In Emma, Austen writes that Miss Bates “enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married.” She continues,
Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public’s favour, and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect.
Although this “eruption of fear and hatred” into everyday life is distasteful for most people, Harding says it is undoubtedly part of Austen’s art. Harding contrasts Pride and Prejudice to Emma. In this extract from P&P, he says all readers can feel superior to Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine.
Their table was superlatively stupid. Scarcely a syllable was uttered that did not relate to the game, except when Mrs. Jenkinson expressed her fears of Miss De Bourgh’s being too hot or too cold, or having too much or too little light. A great deal more passed at the other table. Lady Catherine was generally speaking—stating the mistakes of the three others, or relating some anecdote of herself. Mr. Collins was employed in agreeing to everything her Ladyship said, thanking her for every fish he won, and apologizing if he thought he won too many. Sir William did not say much. He was storing his memory with anecdotes and noble names.
But in this, from Emma, we are all condemned,
…the usual rate of conversation; a few clever things said, a few downright silly, but by much the larger proportion neither the one nor the other—nothing worse than everyday remarks, dull repetitions, old news, and heavy jokes.
Harding says that the phrase “nothing worse” shows that Austen knows how lucky she is that this is the worst she has to put up with, but that the comment is not that of someone who “would have helped to make her society what it was, or ours what it is.” We all want Mrs. Bennet to be a harmless figure of fun, Harding says, but just look at what Austen wrote about her.
She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married: its solace was visiting and news.
So many of her readers must be like this, Harding contends, but still—they laugh along. To explain why Jane Austen has happy endings, Harding resorts to a discussion of the Cinderella theme. It is far less convincing that his initial contentions.
Harding had clearly hit on something important about Austen’s work. In the criticism that followed, however, his notion of regulated hatred was diminished to something more like mere hatred.
Harding’s inheritors: towards a culture war
In the 1960s, Marvin Mudrick wrote a book called Jane Austen: Irony as Defence and Discovery, inspired by Harding. He sees Lizzie Bennet as an “ironic spectator” who divides people into the simple and the intricate. (She tells Bingley she is only interested in intricate people). The simple give themselves away (Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet); the intricate are more amusing to the ironic spectator. This is a psychological, not a moral, way of understanding people. Not “are they good?”, but “are they interesting?” Simple characters can be good or bad, but they hold no surprises.
Mrs. Bennett’s simplicity is despicable. Here is what Mudrick calls Mrs. Bennet’s “irrepressible vulgarity”, which is what initially makes Darcy wary of forming an alliance with the Bennet family.
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