Jane Austen, Quantum Physics and Melanie Klein

[steepholm]

My daughter, who is currently reading Persuasion for the first time, met me for an outdoor lunch on College Green today. She mentioned that Austen fails the reverse Bechdel test. Not that she disapproved of this - on the contrary. As this blog on the subject puts it:

Austen, of course, being a proper Regency-era lady would never have been able to witness men talking to each other without any women around, and being the brilliant author that she was, she wouldn’t settle for secondary resources illuminating the matter.

It's certainly true that the men would have behaved differently had Austen been there to watch them. This kind of observer effect is of course familiar to those working in quantum mechanics. Captain Wentworth and Admiral Croft no doubt spend much of their time talking about waves, but in Persuasion they are always particles. Perhaps, though, we should blame Austen for not boring spy-holes (double slits, if you will) in the eyes of a family portrait to allow her to eavesdrop on the men next door? More importantly, does this excuse hold good for male authors who fail the ordinary Bechdel test?

Another urgent point that came out of our discussion was the wetness of Anne Elliot. When my daughter claimed this quality for her, my immediate response was, "Just wait till you meet Fanny Price!" But then I immediately retracted, for Fanny is nothing if not incredibly strong-willed. She may be mousy, but she is a bone dry mouse.

And, walking home afterwards, it occurred to me that the story of a chaste young woman who resists the blandishments of an eligible young man over the course of several hundred pages, and whose parents live elsewhere in straitened circumstances, was one I had read before. More to the point, so had Austen - in fact it is the plot of one of her favourite author's most celebrated books. Was Mansfield Park effectively a rewrite of Pamela, in fact? The moment I saw this, I realised its truth. Except, of course, that in Mansfield Park the role of Mr B has been split, a la Melanie Klein, into two figures: Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram.

Is this a commonplace observation, or my own discovery? It startled me, at any rate. I love Pamela (guilty pleasure though it be) and have never warmed to Mansfield Park, but armed with this new insight I may give it another go.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I have to admit that I've never warmed to Austen. Give me Elizabeth Gaskell every time!

[steepholm]

As a Hampshire girl, if nothing else, my heart will always be in the Austen camp.

[larryhammer]

In her letters, Austen was as open about her admiration of and indebtedness to Richardson as she was Frances Burney.

(At fifteen, my favorite Austen novel was Mansfield Park. I have since used this as evidence that, at fifteen, I was prig. By eighteen, when I took my only college literature class, an Austen seminar, it had switched to Pride and Prejudice. By the end of the class, it was Persuasion, and I have not been persuaded since to alter my affections.)

[steepholm]

I flirted for a while with Emma, but it's got to be Pride and Prejudice for me. For Elizabeth's sake, primarily, rather than Darcy's.

[larryhammer]

Well, yeah.

(Short shameful confession: after the first three reads, I've only able to finish Emma when forced to by it being assigned for a class.)

[oursin]

Possibly social mores had changed somewhat by the 1950/60s: but Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist one) wrote in The Wedding Group (1968): 'The reason, they say, that women novelists can't write about men, is because they don't know that they're like when they're alone together, what they talk about and so on. But I can't think why they don't know. I seem to hear them booming away all the time.'

Does it count - men talking to men - if they are in some professional or familial relation to one another? (Okay, maybe GH Lewes gave George Eliot pointers. But her novels have a fair amount of reverse-Bechdel, and it's not just Lydgate giving Casaubon the bad news about his health.)

[steepholm]

Love that Elizabeth Taylor quote!

[calimac]

Realization of how little I've ever seen comparing Austen to her contemporary or earlier novelists. Most comparative work that I've seen on her is with later writers. Placements of Northanger Abbey in the Gothic tradition aside.

Tentative suggestion that Austen doesn't write about men in the company of men less because she can't imagine what it's like than because that's not what her novels are about. It would go in to realms which are not her own. Austen is a "narrow band of ore, but it's all gold" author, a metaphor I first saw used (by Le Guin?) to describe Dunsany.

[steepholm]

Austen doesn't write about men in the company of men less because she can't imagine what it's like than because that's not what her novels are about.

A very fair point.

[sovay]

Is this a commonplace observation, or my own discovery?

If the latter, you should totally write about it! (Mansfield Park ranks among the Austen I know least, having read it once in college when a friend was reading it for a class, so I have otherwise no opinion.)

[steepholm]

Well, I suppose I've written about it here, now! To do more would involve trawling the vasty seas of Austen scholarship, and I'm not quite that much of an Ahab...

[lilliburlero]

I don't know that Mansfield Park is my favourite Austen exactly but the first page, with its incredibly concise account of how one Ward sister ends up on the edge of the aristocracy and another in a near-slum, is one of my favourite bits of writing about social class. And Henry and Edmund being a split Mr B. would explain why both of them make me feel crawly all over. I gave a couple of lectures on the novel once, and in the questions afterwards I remarked that Edmund was a terrible prig, to which the student who'd asked the question agreed fervently, "Oh, complete prick, yeah." Well, not wrong.

[steepholm]

its incredibly concise account of how one Ward sister ends up on the edge of the aristocracy and another in a near-slum, is one of my favourite bits of writing about social class

Something of which JA had firsthand knowledge, of course, though the range involved was not quite as extreme.

[conuly]

Your top link doesn't work.

[steepholm]

Thank you. Fixed.