The next Austen book club is this Sunday, 19.00 UK time. The zoom link is sent to paid subscribers over the weekend. We are discussing Sense and Sensibility.
This is a review of Debra Gettelman’s 2024 book Imagining Otherwise, a book I really loved and will write about again quite soon.
The first part is free. To read the rest, and to read all my work about Austen such as whether Jane Austen hates you, Mr. Bennet’s not-so-bad parenting, or why Lizzie Bennett will never be poor, become a paid subscriber. You’ll be able to come to the book clubs (Austen and Shakespeare), as well as read through the archives about Victorian novels, Shakespeare’s plays, and my irregular review of reviews, along with all the other things I write, including why you should stop trying to be happy if you want to find your thing.
Alternative endings?
Three of Austen’s novels include near the end an account of how the main courtship could have ended differently: Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility.
Why would Austen include three hypothetical plots just at the point when she was concluding her own story? Debra Gettelman’s very excellent 2024 book Imagining Otherwise has the answer.
So many modern scholars and critics rely on theoretical ideas, and perform so-called close readings to find whatever they want to in Austen’s novels. (Coming soon, I have a highly critical review of the new book Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness which does exactly that). Gettelman, in contrast, has paid close attention to the text of the novels and the context in which they were written, so her answers is fascinating and persuasive. It is the most engaging critical work I have read for a while.
Austen knew exactly what she was doing with these alternative endings. She was arguing with her readers.
Not the happy ending we wanted
To see how Austen was reacting to the culture of her time, we need to go in time back a little. Novel reading in the eighteenth century was highly suspect. People worried that it made readers solitary. Gothic novels were thought to “seduce the reader” to an inner world. William St. Clair reports people worrying that reading Byron would stimulate “erotic fantasy”, and this would lead to masturbation and physical decline.
Jacques duBeaux wrote in The Accomplish’d Woman in 1753, that people become “wholly changed” after reading fiction: “they lead quite another life.” In 1750, Johnson worried about the enervating effects of realistic fiction, and wrote that “care ought to be taken that, when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited.”
In Austen’s time, there was great interest in her use of ordinary details. Everyday life had taken over from Gothic and the Romance. But, Gettelman writes, this might have made fiction more risky. Wild fantasy is harmless compared to the way quotidian novels blur the line between reality and fiction.
And we know that reading did affect people’s imaginations. Andrew Piper has argued that the popularity of miscellanies lead to more fragmentary imaginations, for example. (Maybe the medium really is the message.)
What is significant for Austen’s endings, is that reading became participatory. Marginalia of the period frequently contains two sets of ideas: the reader’s compared to the author’s. Romanticism invited readers to use their imagination, to dream while reading. Walter Scott, in his praise of Austen marvelled at how possible this was in Emma as well as in Gothic fiction.
Knowing the characters
It became quite normal, as it is for us, for readers to speak as if they knew the characters. The “natural” or “probable” nature of Austen’s novels, meant readers really could imagine themselves in the fictional world. One reader, Mrs. C. Cage, wrote: “I am at Highbury all day, and I can’t help feeling I’ve just got a new set of acquaintances.” Another wrote that “in Miss A’s works… You actually live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family.” In 1859, George Henry Lewes wrote: “the reader breakfasts, drives, walks, and gossips with the various worthies, till a process of transmutation takes place within him, and he absolutely fancies himself one of the company.”
Gettelman equates this to the way we call novels “relatable”. And indeed, it is now a commonplace to say you have lived with a book, or that you know the characters. The most common remark about War & Peace is that you do not read the book but live it.
What we must remember, is that this was all new to Austen and her contemporaries. It was a strange new development. For us it is the norm. For them, it was emergent, exciting, and threatening.
The ending we want?
At this time, what Gillian Beer calls “wish-fulfilment literature” was filling up the circulating libraries. These books were made of flat characters, melodrama, episodic plots. But it gave readers the endings they wanted, the plot formulas they craved. Readerly participation lead to readers expecting these endings from the novels they read.
Austen refuses us such things. She enjoyed readerly participation: she provided her family with “little particulars” about her own characters, such as what happened to them after the novel ended. But when she addresses the reader, she is often mocking the conventions of these wish-fulfilment novels, and thus mocking the reader’s expectations.
The hypothetical endings Austen included are very similar to the “popular formulaic romance plots that she knew, and knew her readers expected.”
Imagining the ending
Austen knew her readers were imagining the endings. At the end of Mansfield Park, she “purposefully abstains from dates … that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own.” This is a direct invitation to the readers whom she knew wanted to participate in how the story ended. When she writes “let other pens dwell on misery” she is being ironic, but also serious. She knows her readers will do exactly that.
Gettelman’s book traces this throughout the nineteenth century, and I shall be writing about her work and Middlemarch soon. For now, let’s see what this can show us about the ending of Sense & Sensibility.
The dastardly Willoughby’s just deserts?
Towards the end of Sense & Sensibility, we are told that, far from pining away his life in misery after having lost Marianne, Willoughby goes on to live in fine style.
…that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself.
Gettelman calls this a “mock recitation of novelistic cliches… a rejection of how a predictable romance plot might end.” Readers want Willoughby to be miserable, to suffer for his misdeeds. Austen refuses us the fleeing from society and the broken heart. Far from contracting a gloom of temper
His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.
Instead of the imagined, conventional ending, we get life as it probably does carry on. Austen brings in this imagined alternative because she knows her readers are already imagining it, and she wants to deny it.
This is a way of purging readers’ expectations. Look at Elinor’s stern advice for Marianne.
Had you married, you must have been always poor. His expensiveness is acknowledged even by himself, and his whole conduct declares that self-denial is a word hardly understood by him. His demands and your inexperience together, on a small, very small income, must have brought on distresses which would not be the less grievous to you, from having been entirely unknown and unthought of before. Your sense of honour and honesty would have led you, I know, when aware of your situation, to attempt all the economy that would appear to you possible: and, perhaps, as long as your frugality retrenched only on your own comfort, you might have been suffered to practice it, but beyond that—and how little could the utmost of your single management do to stop the ruin which had begun before your marriage?
What Marianne imagines as a life of passion, romance, and feeling is reimagined by Elinor as one of hardship, incontinence, and difficulty. Gettelman says this is a “talking cure” a century before Freud. It is only when Elinor reimagines Marianne’s conventional romance as real life that Marianne finally “gets over” Willoughby.
Just as Marianne’s expectations are purged by Elinor’s alternative ending, so are the readers’ with Austen’s.
Imagining otherwise
Think of that moment when the servant comes in and announces that Lucy Steele (hiss) is married to Mr. Ferrars. We imagine how hard this is for poor Elinor. Here is what happens in Elinor’s imagination.
She saw them in an instant in their parsonage-house; saw in Lucy, the active, contriving manager, uniting at once a desire of smart appearance with the utmost frugality, and ashamed to be suspected of half her economical practices;—pursuing her own interest in every thought, courting the favour of Colonel Brandon, of Mrs. Jennings, and of every wealthy friend. In Edward—she knew not what she saw, nor what she wished to see;—happy or unhappy,—nothing pleased her; she turned away her head from every sketch of him.
We are left in this position for six pages. What actually happens gets much less attention. Six pages of thinking about a marriage that doesn’t take place seems quite extraordinary. What doesn’t happen is somehow more vivid.
Austen is not trying to give you the expected ending. She wants no conventional plot. Gettelman says that if we read Austen looking for convention, we are like Captain Berwick in Persuasion, who reads poetry “for the various lines which imagined a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness.” Likewise, Catherine Moreland reads only bad novels, and Sir Walter Eliot reads only the baronetage.
Austen talks to us as better readers. She gives “reparative narrative justice”. She shows us the ending we imagined, the ending we expected from convention, and then shows that we don’t need to regret its loss.
Austen makes us imagine better.
