Tony Tanner’s Jane Austen

Tony Tanner’s Jane Austen — Mrs Abingdon as a Congreve heroine (with a small dog peering out) by Reynolds makes a apt cover

Dear friends and readers,

Is part of preparation for teaching a course on Jane Austen’s first three published novels, I’ve been rereading Tony Tanner’s Jane Austen. The last time I read it was with a group of people on Austen-l in 1998. I’ve also reread some of my oldpostings and thought I’d share some of these and my more recent perspective on the book tonight.

A basic problem with the book is Tanner writes before feminism perspectives influenced criticism so that gender is not taken into account, the woman’s outlook on the world and this just skews his presentations again and again. In his chapter on Northanger Abbey he hardly discussed the gothic: is he embarrassed by the female gothic Austen parodies and uses seriously?

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1995 Persuasion scripted Nick Dear: the close friends, Lady Russell and Anna looking past one another …

The Introduction

Tanner is concerned to answer criticisms of Austen’s works which accuse her of leaving out important aspects of life or her period. Critics of her books say she is not interested in larger social, economic, or political issues; she is deeply conservative; she also simply accepts the desperate struggle of women to get a husband: Emerson calls this “nympholepsy of a fond despair,” and finds “suicide more acceptable.” What he does is attempt to show she is interested in larger social issues, but while doing this underrates her playfulness. She delights in writing stories, in inventing witticisms and characters, in mocking and in deflating all sorts of pious hypocrisies without herself straining for some conclusion on “what we ought to do about this social problem.”

Some specifics: Tanner tries to answer the comparison made between Austen’s novels and a novel like Bronte’s Shirley he seems to me to avoid the issue. Austen nowhere refers to the specific social problems of her time. He quotes Fanny Price on how she will not marry unless she loves; but that is not the same as describing a strike. He points out how exact and careful Austen is about money and how this resonates into larger issues everywhere in a number of the novels. The real reply is when he says a social landscape like that of Shirley does not make for a better novel. Jane Eyre is successful without it.

Scott’s Old Mortality (written the same year as Emma) does make Austen’s critics’ case. One cannot think of anything in Austen which refers so specifically to events in history, and it is not just a matter of Scott being a man and Austen a woman.

Austen’s critics complain she ends her novels on marriage when that’s where adult life begins for many people (he quotes Henry James on this). Tanner finds in Austen a picture of “cruelly constricted lives.”

Austen is interested in private lives and in those sections of the introduction where Tanner responds to the text on this level he rings true. He’s beautiful when he quote Goethe’s phrase: “the politeness of the heart” and says this politeness is the outward manifestation of love. Civility is not something of the surface, but care for other people, for civilized values. Herein when Tanner brings in Woolf I think he’s right on. Woolf too is interested in private life, the nuances of existence as terribly important to the average person. Far more than large political movements on the world’s stage.

He is too didactic, too solemn, too earnest. I understand why Eva Sedgwick mocked his incessant construction of this character has to learn this or that character has to do that or that other to control, curb, and realize the limitations of whatever they dream of. Too much a normalizer.

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2007 NA scripted Andrew Davies: the country walk, discussing history and novels, the picturesque, words …

Northanger Abbey.

The man is continually digressing. It made me feel he was straining against what he felt could he infer from NA. This connects back to his defense of Austen’s art; he insists she has wider implications, yet when he moves out to these in this chapter, he presents his meditation as something not directly related to NA

The first digression stays with Austen; Tanner moves from his comment that General Tilney “is the figure of the father in the book” to talk of all Austen’s books from the perspective of fathers in Austen as follows:

“(References to the diminished authority, responsibility, and effectuality of the figure of the heroine’s father will recur throughout this account.) In anticipation I shall note here, taking the novels in chronological order, that Mr Morland is weak and passive; Mr Dashwood is dead; Mr Bennet has withdrawn from all responsibilities into his library and his negating cynicism; Sir Thomas grievously neglects the upbringing of his children, fails to appreciate Fanny, and for much of the time is absent pursuing profits in the West Indies; Mr Woodhouse is a hopeless hypochondriac, feeble, infantile, and inert; Sir Walter Elliot is simply the worst father of the lot, totally absorbed in his own vacuous vanity, utterly neglectful of all his duties, and positively malign in his treatment of Anne… the heroine therefore has to find and make her own way. How she does this provides much of the drama of the novels…

Further:

The fathers of most of the main men in the novels have died; thus Willoughby, Darcy, Bingley, Crawford, Mr Knightley and Captain Wentworth are all free — perhaps too free — This extra freedom of the male stands in contrast to the female’s relatively abandoned and often doubly precarious and vulnerable condition… This asymmetical relationshp between what we may roughly designate as male power and female plight… is at the centre of Jane Austen’s novels (1986 Harvard Press paperback, pp 46-7)

Objections: 1) is he not a too hard on Mr Morland? 2) Mr Dashwood’s death is not his fault; 3) Mr Bennet has not withdrawn from everything by any means; Villars is a recluse; Mr Bennet loves his older daughters. When Mr Bingley comes, he shoots with him. He cannot do anything about his wife and is hamstrung in what he can do to control his three younger daughters because of their natures, his wife’s and the need to marry them off 3) some of the men are not so free, as: Willoughby is under the thumb of his aunt [Brandon was made miserable and his lady destroyed by his relatives; he & Edward Ferrars are forgotten]; Wentworth is thrown over because he’s poor; Knightley is continually hemmed in by his conscience 4) why does Tanner think it a bad thing the heroines are without this “directive and constructive authority,” that they’re “abandoned.” Not at all. They’re better off in some ways because not forced into marriages (as Elizabeth is not forced to marry Collins as poor

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1995 Sense and Sensibility, scripted Emma Thompson, direced Ang Lee: Marianne at the piano, quiet passion of “The Dream”

Sense and Sensibility

When he gets to S&S he is in his element. The book answers his demand a book have deep and important truths about life–as he understands it. He clearly prefers the less comic and more grave aspects of Austen. It is a book which meditates the demand for secrecy in society and reveals the sicknesses and miseries such secrecy encourages and allows. He presents the need the individual has to keep her inner life secret as a necessary guard against the viciousness, stupidity, competition, materialism, and exploitation other people will inflict on anyone who shows their more vulnerable sides. He shows how such secrecy twists people; how it becomes a weapon in the hands of the unscrupulous. He goes through many scenes in the books where this word is used or its idea embodied in many varied forms, and connects secrecy to the necessity of lying, to the pains this inflicts. He also connects it to the use of screens in the book–Elinor is a screen painter. He brings out the period’s sense of itself as one in which people for the first time were willing to admit to or at least described “nervous disorders.” He also shows that screen-painting, secrecy when practiced on behalf of others can also be forms of sympathy, of care, of concern, and demand great Elinor and Marianne, a doppelganger figure

Since he is so moved, goes with the grain of the book, and stays with the text to bring out all sorts of important perceptions about our lives, he again and again waxes eloquent on

1) sensibility as “a fineness of feeling and disposition which took one out of the arena of more brutal abrasive appetites and desires which constituted ‘the world’ and or society at large…”

2) Marianne’s deep illness as a form of near suicide linked up to Foucault’s ideas about madness in a repressed society (pp. 82-3);

3) Onhow little we know about the people we spend hours sitting next to, and other the presence of other people often coerces us into destroying parts of ourselves while we are with them (pp. 86-8);

4) On Austen’s society being one which “forced people to be at once very sociable and very private,” and the paradox that “interior freedom amounts to interior distress” (if you have nothing to control your thoughts you will go deeper and deeper into misery, madness, loss of perspective) well taken

5) on the effort to make words coincide with things and screen us is done in order to provide us with a measure of dignity and peace (p. 93);

6) Marianne is “interested in the more primitive, even the more Dionysiac man.” She is the one who loves movement, wildness, dance, the wind, the leaves; “Elinor has an instinct for stillness and composure.” (p. 97)

7) On Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as mediating one of the themes of this book.

A lot in Tony Tanner made it into Davies’s 2009 S&S; at moments he has some of Tanner’s choices of line and insights in mind

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Samantha Harker as Jane Bennet having just said “I shall be perfectly content … ” (recalling Elinor Dashwood)

1995 P&P, scripted Andrew Davies: Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet, in distress for Jane and the Darcy letter

Pride and Prejudice.

P&P is presented as about “Knowledge and Opinion” — a philosophical exploratio. His problem is this novel was gutted and what’s left is a fairy tale in which a fabulously rich and handsome young man reforms his character in order to please a relatively poor young lady so that she will “condescend” to marry him, and we are to believe they live happily ever after. Tanner contextualizes the novel with those of the Brontes (once again), the French Revolution, Locke, Hume, and Shakespeare’s Cordelia and Iago, and turns to the text. This second long meditation is as acute in capturing the atmosphere and some of the underlying philosophical themes of the novel. He shows you why Sheridan thought P&P was one of the smartest books he’d ever read.

Tanner says the word “picture” occurs frequently in the novel and links up the word, the concept, and the art of the novel into another thread on the artistic tapestry as well as concepts underlying the book.

He looks at the use of letters in the novel. The novel works as a drama –as epistolary novels often do, with letters substituting for presences on an inner stage. The first half of P&P is heavily dramatic, but the second a mixture of “narrative, summary, and scene.” More lopping and chopping was done in the second half. Letters were paraphrased. Maybe there was more of a tour. He makes some good comments on Darcy’s letter as articulating thoughts we cannot articulate in a conversation.

The self as a perfomer. Since Austen does see people primarily as they
appear on the social scene, Austen is interested in the interplay of the self and society. His comments on those characters who can separate themselves from their roles is important: Elizabeth can re-make herself in this way; Jane can’t. The latter is “sensitive and sincere,” but the former has more capacities for imaginative depths and therefore rich life within. Next to her are the caricatures of the book: Mr Collins, Mrs Bennet, Lady Catherine). I think the reason readers are drawn to Elizabeth is our sense of her real complexity of apprehension.

The roles we must play in society can be sickening, idiotic, and (though not in this novel) ultimately pernicious. As Emma Watson retreats, so does Elizabeth. Elizabeth needs strength to keep up some of the roles she is called upon to play–and gayly at that. Tanner suggests it is central to Austen’s purpose to show us it is possible even in her world for individuals “to make new connections in defiance of society” and in despite of intense efforts by the society to control them.

The metaphor of life as a dance comes in; Charlotte will dance as a prisoner who has given up her individuality to survive; she will have recourse to “selective inattention” and live out her life in her room. In this connection Lydia’s passion comes out as the silly shallow and passing thing it is. All it will get her is a reputation and more men to dance round her (or in her bedroom) while Wickham goes off to spend money elsewhere. What counts is finally the self which one must be true to somehow and this is central to Mansfield Park too.

(Cont’d in comments)

Ellen