RE: [Marxism] Pride & Prejudice

["Jack Cade" <jack.cade@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is an appreciation of Austen by the English Marxist
Historian TA Jackson, biography here:

http://graham.thewebtailor.co.uk/archives/000087.html

The British working-class intellectual, Thomas Alfred Jackson,
was born in London in 1879. Tommy Jackson - always TA to the
world - he is remembered as the working-class autodidact. As a
young man, he read classics works mainly since contemporary
literature was too expensive. (A survey found that while 55
percent of working-class adults read books, they rarely bought
new books.) He built up an impressive library by haunting
used-book stalls and generally scavenging. His obsession with
books led him to rather neglect his attire and appearance! 


THE Incomparable JANE

By TA Jackson (1879-1955)

Chapter 8 of 'Old Friends to Keep' - Studies of English Novels
and Novelists
Lawrence and Wishart 1950

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817) : wrote six novels: Sense and Sensibility
(1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma
(1816), Persuasion (1818) and Northanger Abbey (1818).

The classic model in the novel, set up by Henry Fielding, is far
harder to maintain continuously than might seem possible to
anyone who never tried.

The normal, avoiding all excess or exaggeration in every
direction, is a quality that only the most complete masters of
the writing craft can attain consistently through their whole
life's work.

In fact, one writer alone in English literature, so far, has
successfully maintained Fielding's ideal consistently - the
incomparable, the altogether admirable Jane Austen.
The daughter of a country clergyman, Jane Austen practised the
writing craft at first for the amusement of herself and her close
relations.

Only later on, after infinite and delicate care bestowed upon
revising, retouching, polishing and pruning, did she consent to
publish her novels.

This was more to please her admiring family (she was an ideal
aunt) than with any extravagant hope of gaining either fame or
fortune.

But Jane Austen's novels - there are only six complete ones -
have more than maintained their popularity for well over a
century.

In fact, the radio has brought new conquests. A BBC reading of
Emma (generally regarded as her best) provoked a stage version
and earlier there was a film of Pride and Prejudice. All good
Jane-ites deplore both play and film, since they each leave out
Jane and her superb technique, her dexterous asides, sub-acid
satirical comments, her mockheroic flourishes - in short, all her
subtle weighting of each and every situation.

She herself would have laughed consumedly to think that a
maiden-aunt, who died quite early, and whose work she herself
likened to miniatures painted upon ivory, should after so many
years produce so much of a fuss.

Her titles show how steadfastly she held to the classic ideal -
"nothing in excess; everything in its proportion". Pride and
Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion might be the
titles of theses presented for a doctoral degree in moral
philosophy, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey might be guide
books, while Emma might be just anything. Until you actually
sample them there is nothing to tell you of their rich and
sparkling entertainment, in which gaiety, fun, satire, amusement
and (mild) pathos and excitement follow each other in endless
variety.

Jane's method is to take as her subject the life of women
situated like herself.
Only people such as a young woman born in a country rectory, or
its social equivalent, could normally be expected to meet are
allowed entry into her stories, and the things that happen to
them are the humdrum everyday things that might happen to such
people any day. Nothing violent or drastic is allowed to create a
disturbance or raise a dust. There is an elopement, but it is
soon brought under control and regularised - the silly chit who
elopes, thus escaping (through no contrivance of her own) the
drastic things she had virtually "asked for". There are deaths,
but they take place normally and tidily off-stage.

But Jane never ceases to astonish and delight by her skill in
extracting surprise, suspense, conflict, contradictions, and
finally a successful resolution of all doubts and difficulties;
out of commonplace things, average people and perfectly normal
situations.
You may be tempted to conclude that Jane was content personally
to endure, placidly, in practice, the restrictions she imposed
upon her characters - ignorant of all beyond her own ivory-tower
existence.

That conclusion would be, I am convinced, a great injustice - and
all the more so since it would make the satirical undercurrent,
present in every one of her novels, not merely needless but a
positive artistic fault a discordance.

Jane lived through the stirring events of the French Revolution
and the Napoleonic Empire which followed - that is, through the
20 years of war between Britain and, first, the French Republic,
then the French Empire.

She was one of a large family, and a family as united as it was
cultured and vivacious. Two of her brothers were high-ranking
naval officers: one a personal friend of Nelson himself. Another
brother was an army officer.

It is not to be supposed that such a family would not debate
keenly every event that happened in that stirring time.

It is, I think, in the light of this fact that we must judge the
almost absolute silence of the novels upon the fact that
world-shaking events, revolutions and wars are waging while
their charming characters are engrossed in the amusing
trivialities of their restricted lives.

We know that many men of learning and culture of that time took
in private a much more profoundly sympathetic view of the French
Revolution than they would have cared to avow in public. It seems
more than likely that the Austen family shared this bias, Jane
among them, and that this made her extra-careful to say nothing
in her novels that might let this awkward cat "out of the bag".

There is, admittedly, no trace of Jacobinism in Jane Austen's
novels, and there was little room for its intrusion. But it is,
to my mind, decisively significant that there is not a trace of
anti-Jacobinism either, though this, in a number of ways, could
have been introduced without force, or elaborate artifice.

Jane's work is to be valued primarily as satire. She accepted the
arbitrary limitations of woman's sphere, conventional in the
practice of her time, and still more in the then fashionable
fiction, with a carefully straightened face - with simulated
humility and mocking compliance - and then proceeded to make
these limitations look ridiculous by making her characters one
and all become absurd at some point or another.

Certainly no writer since Jane has dared to limit women in this
way. Jane saw to that. After Jane (the last of the classics) the
sisters Bronte became inevitable, sooner or later.



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