Review: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

 Rating: 4/5 stars

I love Sense and Sensibility for being a story of female friendship between two rather different women. Despite disagreement and disappointment in each other, Elinor and Marianne remain loving and supportive. It seems rare, even in 2020, to have such a detailed character study of two women that remain friends throughout. Elinor and Marianne feel like 'real' people to me, despite being personifications of the themes of the novel, sense and sensibility, or being guided by rationality (sometimes to the detriment of emotional happiness) versus being guided by emotion. These two sisters as foils of each other made me think a little of the Zoey versus Zelda dichotomy proposed in Bojack Horseman (itself a parody of fictional personality clustering paradigms like Hogwarts Houses or Sex and the City characters; I'm an Elinor, a Zoey, a Ravenclaw, a Miranda).

I also enjoyed Jane Austen's critique of idleness in the gentry. It's a more gentle version of the censure of the idle rich that Austen penned fifteen or twenty years later in Persuasion. Although not wealthy, Elinor and Marianne surprise their acquaintances by being always preoccupied with art or music or reading. Edmund's character arc is about him recognizing that his misplaced love for Lucy Steele is actually a product of his idleness, and then him finally choosing a profession and becoming a productive, if less wealthy, gentleman. ("Instead of having anything to do, instead of having any profession chosen for me, or being allowed to choose any myself, I returned home to be completely idle; I had therefore nothing in the world to do, but to fancy myself in love.") The Middletons are respectable, apparently happy rich folk, with nothing to do except hunt when it is nice weather (Mr. Middleton), mother their children (Mrs. Middleton), and arrange dinner parties. 

I thought the framing of motherhood as Lady Middleton's sole occupation being a form of idleness was particularly interesting. In Race, Women & Class, Angela Davis discusses in detail how during this period of history, well-off women had many of their responsibilities removed from them by increasing industrialization, and that this reduction in their contribution to their households increased sexism towards women. Upper class women were restricted to the role of doting mother, with little to do to occupy their idle days. Mrs. Jennings similarly does little except care for her daughters and attempt to marry off her single female acquaintances. Mrs. John Dashwood breaks this mold a little, manipulating her husband into carrying out her wishes by expressing everything in terms of the potential benefit or harm (however tangential!) to her child.

Austen contrasts these limited social roles allowed to wealthy women with real social and economic power held by women. Mrs. Ferrars disowns Edmund when he refuses to break his engagement to Lucy Steele. Mr. Willoughby's aunt similarly cuts him off financially when she hears of his affair with Eliza. Inheritance and wealth is arbitrary, precarious, and its victims are not just women (like the impoverished Miss Dashwoods).

I thought Sense and Sensibility was notable for being one of the earliest examples of mansplaining in literature I can think of. Mr. Dashwood is so unable to imagine Colonel Brandon's generosity towards Edmund that he insists Elinor is mistaken and that she must be mistaken, Colonel Brandon clearly bequeathed the parsonage only temporarily. Elinor has to quite firmly insist that, as the person entrusted by Colonel Brandon to convey the offer to Edmund, she is quite aware of the terms of the agreement. Her begrudgingly accepts this explanation without really apologizing.

Sense and Sensibility was a little more overtly comedic than Persuasion or Mansfield Park. For example, there was a scene of Elinor and Mrs Jennings misunderstanding each other regarding what exactly Colonel Brandon discussed with Elinor. I enjoyed the fairly broad cast of somewhat ridiculous characters: Mr. John Dashwood and his conversations with his wife and with Elinor were a highlight of these. Lucy Steele's sly meanness coated in friendly civility was also amusing.

As much as I loved Elinor and Marianne's character arcs, I found those of their gentlemen rather lacking. I thought Edmund was rather flat and unremarkable (although I might be a little prejudiced against religious characters). Colonel Brandon seemed like a kind, thoughtful man, if you can get past his whole mooning-over-women-half-his-age-from-a-distance thing (a taller order in 2020 than 1820).

Review: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

 Rating: 2/5 stars

I finished Northanger Abbey wondering if I was particularly disposed to identifying with Austen heroines, but in Mansfield Park's Fanny Price I discovered at last a protagonist that I never really "got." For the first two thirds of the novel, Fanny does little more than exist as a fly on the wall, meditating disapprovingly as her cousins and their friends flirt, rehearse a play, and discuss religion and landscaping. Fanny finds much to dislike, and takes little joy in anything in life outside of her relationship with her brother William, who sees her briefly in between sea voyages, and being cared for by her cousin Edmund Bertram. Unlike Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland, who delighted in dancing and books and discovering the world, or Emma's Miss Woodhouse, who enjoys art and wit and society, Fanny Price just seems like a bit of a dour, passive wet blanket. Even her love for Edmund is expressed predominantly in terms of acquiescent sadness as she watches him develop feelings for Miss Crawford (rather than Catherine's consuming giddiness for Mr Tilney or Emma's playful admiration for Mr Knightly). The climax of the novel is in Fanny quietly standing firm in her resolution to not marry Mr Crawford, who she views as improper and amoral. And I highly value convictions and a sense of right and wrong - in myself, in my friends, in my fictional characters - but I don't have patience for people who lack passion.

The fallout to Fanny's heroic decision not to marry a charming and wealthy man felt a little facile. Everyone who was superficial or improper or mean to Fanny met an unpleasant end, unless they were able to recognize quickly enough how right and proper Fanny was to refuse Mr Crawford. The few people who were nice to Fanny and valued her had good fortune and enjoyable lives.

Austen asks "what makes people good?" But I don't feel she satisfactorily provides an answer. Fanny's cousins, Julia and Maria, become silly and superficial women because their father cares only that they "check the boxes" of being accomplished young ladies without ensuring that they are actually godfearing young ladies. Maria is particularly spoiled (and thus meets a particularly demeaning fate) because her Aunt Norris spoils her and views her absolutely without faults. Sir Thomas Bertram pats himself on the back for polishing Fanny into being an elegant young lady, but notes that her beauty is her own. But what makes Edmund a considerate and conscientious young man? He was raised in the same toxic household as his fatuous, ostentatious cousins. Most of Fanny's siblings are self-centered, but what makes her sister Susan immune to these endemic flaws? Are some of us simply born with strong moral character while the rest of us must hope that our parents and guardians instill in us a strong sense of ethics?

 The other themes in Mansfield Park seemed a little dated and uninteresting. One of the key concepts explored was the role and the respectability of the clergy - which has changed quite a bit! The position held by the improper, hedonistic characters is that men of the cloth are hypocritical and that their only ambition is to minimize their duties. The position held by the moral characters is that the clergy plays an essential role in the health of a community and are smart and self-sacrificing. The "bad guys" believe that no one really cares about religion, and that everyone simple attends for the sake of performing piety, and that church bells are a bit of a nuisance. The "good guys" long for regular chapel services to be held in Southerton Hall and that all the servants ought to attend. I found myself rather more sympathetic towards the arguments presented by the villains.

Another concept was that of remodelling and landscaping. Some types of landscaping are virtuous. Some are silly and superficial. I was a little amused that privileged people 200 years ago were as disposed to spending an entire dinner discussing landscaping as they are now. These are not my favourite types of dinner parties. Still, conversations like these can be delightful ways of exploring characters! 

However, the cast of Mansfield Park was not as colorful or as familiar or otherwise as interesting as the casts in some of Austen's other work. The personal flaws lampooned in Mansfield Park also just seem to present themselves differently now than they did then. There are still the checked-out parents, like Sir and Lady Bertram, miserly people like Mrs Norris, and ladder-climbing superficial women like Miss Crawford and Maria Bertram. But I didn't find these flaws as poignantly presented and explored as, for example, those of Sir Walter Elliot and Mary Musgrove of Persuasion.

If there are two themes in the books I've read in the last three or four months, it would be the novels of Jane Austen and nonfiction exploring the fallouts of Colonialism and slavery (for example: Race, Women and Class or The Autobiography of Malcolm X). I had some hopes that Mansfield Park, as the only work by Jane Austen that references slavery and the colonies, to be an interesting dovetailing of these two themes. However, it played an extremely minor background role, and I feel that discussions of portrayal of slavery in this book are really trying very hard to make mountains out of molehills. Is Fanny/Austen pro-slavery? Anti-slavery? You could read the handful of lines that reference the issue either way depending on your desired thesis.

I still enjoyed Jane Austen's prose, and her ability to design a scene and portray the thoughts and emotions of her characters. There were plot points I enjoyed - Fanny making her own little space in the East Room, and finally being allowed to have a fire in the hearth there, for example. But if I were in the mood for some Jane Austen, I think I would pick up perhaps any other book but this one.

Review: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

 Rating: 4/5 stars

Am I a particularly Austen-like woman, or is Austen so astute at creating realistic, relatable characters that most people find some parts of themselves in her heroines? (See my reviews of Emma and Persuasion, for example.)

I loved Catherine's dramatic imagination, her loyalty to her friends and her innocence/naiveté regarding General Tilney and Isabella's social ladder climbing ambitions. My heart rose and fell with hers as she discovered the wide(r) world of Bath and made new friends, discovered too late the social impropriety of riding in an open carriage, learned of her acquaintance manipulatively canceling her social plans or lying to her to spend more time with him, received an invitation to Northanger Abbey and was discovered poking around her friend's deceased mother's apartments. If the specifics of my own teen years were really quite different, the general tensions and reactions Austen portrayed were so vividly familiar.

John Thorpe and Isabella Thorpe were delightful antagonists. There is a particular type of pompous self-absorbed twit from whom I've previously had to disentangle myself from conversation with and it is nice to have a literary reference for the archetype... Seeing the hints of Isabella's upcoming betrayal through Catherine's unwitting and overly generous eyes was fun. Mrs Allen and Mrs Thorpe's supposed "conversations" in which they both discussed their own interests at each other rather than with each other was memorable.

Henry Tilney left a lot to be desired as a love interest. I found him rather unbearably smug and overly pleased with his own wit, and rather condescending. Still, Catherine's being so in love with him was just so adorable that I still shipped it.

In the present instance, she confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances – side-screens and perspectives – lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.

Overall, the plot of Northanger Abbey was quite simple relative to her other works. The social tensions were less layered than in Emma. Social critiques were narrower in scope and the character flaws of the protagonists and antagonists were less complex than those of Emma or Persuasion. It was fun to watch Austen aim her satire at literature and pop culture. While many of the tropes she skewers (wives locked up and murdered, manuscripts hidden in surprising old chests, spooky houses) are very familiar, I got the sense that some (many?) references went a little over my head. Still, I don't feel the need to brush up on centuries-old gothic novels - Jane Austen's satire about an extraordinarily ordinary teen girl delighted nevertheless.

Review: Persuasion by Jane Austen

 Rating: 4/5 stars

 Although I read and loved Pride and Prejudice in high school, I hadn't read Persuasion until now, and it is an interesting book to read at the age of thirty. Where Pride and Prejudice revolves around younger people blundering their way through new relationships, the cast of Persuasion are a little more experienced. Anne Ellis, having declined a proposal due to being too young, is still single some 8 or 9 years later. Other characters are widowed, looking for the second love of their life. Some have been married for a long time - a few very happily, the rest rather miserably. Through these characters, Austen explores how people change during their twenties. What acts can be forgiven? Can old relationships be rekindled? If I've presented Persuasion as being dry and academic, that is on me entirely - the characters are colorful and the prose is dripping with snark.

Somehow, Jane Austen's work became associated with romance for women, when her writing is closer to that of Dan Carlin than of Nora Roberts. I suppose it's because her incisive, acerbic commentary is centered around interpersonal relationships and the day-to-day concerns of the over-privileged and under-employed, rather than more "serious" topics like politics, war, or media. But in Persuasion, although there is the usual "will-they-won't-they" plot, Austen comments quite extensively on political matters.

One of the key themes is the decline of the aristocracy class, or the rise of the "self-made" men wealthy men. The skincare-obsessed and spendthrift Sir Walter perhaps personifies this critique of the useless navel-gazing of the gentry most starkly. He is foiled against Admiral Croft, who earned his wealth (albeit, as an instrument of brutal imperialism...) and is an upstanding gentleman with an enviably adorable relationship, and who finally did something about the draft in Sir Walter's estate's cupboards. "Productive" members of the gentry fare a little better than their more idle counterparts; Mrs Smith atones for her profligate past by industriously selling items she knits. One imagines that Austen sees herself in this class of privileged but productive aristocrats.

Feminism, or rather, questioning the existence of native differences between men and women, was thoughtfully presented. Mary Ellis decries that no one would judge a father for going to a dinner party while his child is sick, but that a mother is expected to stay home due to some presumed inborn ability to care for children that Mary doesn't recognize in herself. The resolution of the love story is spurred by Anne discussing with Captain Harville whether men and women are equally 'constant' in their love. If men and women love differently, is it due to social expectations, or due to biology, or due to (aristocratic) women having little other occupation? Austen also slyly suggests that the nature of women cannot be understood at all from books, because overwhelmingly books are written by men. I see you, Jane, and I appreciate you.