Does Jane Austen undermine her own endings? No. No she does not.
An unconvincing new study.
The next Austen book club is this Sunday, 19.00 UK time. The zoom link is sent to paid subscribers over the weekend.
Because this is the year of Jane Austen’s anniversary—two hundred and fifty years since her birth—we are being treated to several new books about her work. I shall not review all of them, but some of the more promising critical options will be covered here for paid subscribers. This is a review of Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness by Inger Brodey, a book which I thought was quite poorly argued.
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Why do Jane Austen’s novels end the way they do? No wedding ceremony, no profusions of romance, no sunset scenes. A new book this year, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, argues that Austen’s endings subtly undermine the idea of marriage. Inger Brodey argues that Austen’s endings are “artificial”. It is the arrival of poultry thieves that prompt Mr. Wodehouse to give Emma permission to marry Mr. Knightly. A mysterious viscount appears at the end of Northanger Abbey, allowing a resolution. I shan’t give more example, for fear of spoiling the plots. But Brodey argues there are many “sudden resolutions” which feel “artificial, gratuitous, and anti-romantic.”
This is, of course, the Austen we want. Critics often go hunting for a feminist Austen and are often able to fashion one. Brodey has no qualms about telling us, based on a single rather thin quote in a letter, that “Austen clearly feared the loss of time and independence involved in marriage.” In fact, we know no such thing. The general critical point that Austen not only promoted the happy ending of marriage but also challenged its conventions and strictures is over-stated. You can present marriage in the ambivalent terms which Austen often does (how few of her marriage couples of set a shining example, other than the Crofts?) without that being a means of challenging the institution.
When you are steeped in the jargon and tropes of modern criticism, it is easy to see these ideas in Jane Austen: when you look at her in her own time, on her own terms, the challenge she presents to marriage seems much less theoretical and absolute.
Brodey even quotes someone saying that the coquette characters (think Mary Crawford) invent their own lives far more than the Emma-types and thus are “more of a reflection of the author”. Can this be serious? Because Jane Austen wrote novels and didn’t get married she is more of a Mary Crawford than an Anne Elliot?
Austen’s novels are structured around the moral development of her heroines: that is not a way of showing them to be hampered by their lives, or a “subtle” means of challenging marriage. Brodey claims that Austen prioritises the heroine’s moral growth over the romantic ending. In fact, Austen is prioritising that moral growth because the conventional romance novels of her time were made of formulaic plot with no regard for moral development. Good marriages, Austen tells us, are made of good morals.
Brodey tells us that Austen thinks moral growth is essential to happiness whether or not one marries. True enough. The problem with these arguments, beyond the fact that they are so obviously made up of our ideas, not Austen’s (try quoting Smith or Hume?) is that they all do get married. All of the happy characters get married at the end. Austen did not have to do that. She could have written like the more radical authors of her time. Marilyn Butler made all of this abundantly clear in the 1980s.
Brodey says “she makes a point of showing how easily things could have ended unhappily”, which actually undermines her argument. She claims that the happy ending of Sense and Sensibility is undermined by the fact that Elinor and Edward “had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasture for their cows.” Unlike Brodey, I do not find this to be a “cutting… anticlimax”. She even claims that this juxtaposition implies that Marianne is a “commodity or an afterthought equivalent to their menial farms tasks.” We are expected to swallow this interpretation after having read the whole novel?
Austen does not “associate” Brandon with the pasturage and Marianne with the cows. This is desperate stuff. Were it not written in service of feminism, it would not be taken seriously. Brodey tries to make her point with a comparison to Madame Bovary. This fails because the entirety of Madame Bovary is about this idea. Flaubert’s whole novel is a means of puncturing romantic delusion. That is not what the entirety of Sense and Sensibility is about, and to hinge an argument on a few lines doesn’t change that.
Here’s an example of why this reasoning is selective and unreasonable. Brodey claims that the relationship between the sisters is “the most important” part of the ending. But wait: what about Elinor wishing for better pasture in juxtaposition to her wish for Marianne’s marriage? Those are her thoughts, not Austen’s. Aren’t we now obliged to think that it is she who is “associating” Marianne with the cows? Isn’t it really the sisterly happiness that is subject to a “cutting… anticlimax”?
When you know what you want to find in Austen’s endings, you can find it, but it in this case it involves small evidence, not a reading of the whole book.
