June Sturrock is professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.

Jane Austen’s Families

By June Sturrock

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 June Sturrock
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-296-5

Contents

Acknowledgements, ix,
References and Abbreviations, xi,
General Introduction, 1,
Part I Family Dynamics,
Introduction, 11,
Chapter One The Functions of the Dysfunctional Family: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, 15,
Chapter Two Spoilt Children: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma, 33,
Chapter Three “Usefulness and Exertion”: Mothers and Sisters in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, 47,
Part II Fathers and Daughters,
Introduction, 67,
Chapter Four Money, Morals and Mansfield Park, 71,
Chapter Five Speech and Silence in Emma, 85,
Chapter Six Dandies and Beauties: The Issue of Good Looks in Persuasion, 99,
Conclusion “Creative Attention”, 111,
Notes, 119,
Select Bibliography, 135,
Index, 145,

CHAPTER 1

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY: NORTHANGER ABBEY, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Without Satan, Paradise is not Lost and English poetry loses its great epic. Without malevolence or folly, knaves or fools, no narrative is possible. And in many narratives the encounter with folly or malevolence leads to enlightenment: Nietzsche writes that the wisdom of Oedipus and the understanding of Hamlet are bought by unnatural acts. In Jane Austen’s fiction virtually every character and situation is affected by the flaws and contradictions on which narrative depends. When she proclaims that “pictures of perfection make me sick & wicked” (Letters 335), she writes, then, both as novelist and critic. Austen’s own critics and admirers have often quoted these words; they provide the epigraph of Mary Waldron’s Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time and the title of Reginald Hill’s clever detective story, Pictures of Perfection. There is good reason for such reiteration. None of her heroines is a picture of perfection in the mode of Hannah More’s Lucilla, though Austen felt at one time that Anne Elliot – “almost too good for me” – came perilously near it (Letters 335) and though some critics have quite mistakenly assumed that she intended poor little Fanny Price as an epitome of the Evangelical virtues.

The families that produce these young women and their friends, rivals and suitors are equally mixed. Austen certainly represents happy families but none of those families is treated so unrealistically as to be flawless. The Morlands’ affection and good sense provide Catherine with strong principles, but the lack of imagination of these “plain matter-of-fact people” (NA 86) prepares neither Catherine nor her brother James adequately for contact with other families with different codes of conduct. The Dashwood family is close and shares strong intellectual interests but the mother’s indulgence of feeling at the expense of prudence harms her daughters and especially the favourite daughter who resembles her so closely. The Darcys are loving and intelligent but too exclusive. The Woodhouses support each other affectionately but suffer from their intellectual inequalities. The Musgroves are warm, “friendly and hospitable,” but “not much educated” (P 78) and so undemanding of their children that the heir to the estate ends up idle and unambitious, though amiable. However, while no Austen family functions perfectly, some obviously manage better than others. This chapter explores Austen’s use of the less happy families.

As a convenience, I use the sociologists’ word “dysfunctional” (rather loosely) to describe those families whose interactions either harm the younger generation morally or cause the younger generation exceptional pain. All plot development in Austen’s six novels depends to some extent on such adverse interactions, as they show young women of principle learning to negotiate an imperfect world while retaining, or in some cases fully realizing, these principles. In the three Steventon novels in particular, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, the role of the less-than-perfect family is important to narrative as well as to moral development. In Northanger Abbey, the novel’s narrative depends on the heroine’s departure from her tranquil home and her encounters with two dysfunctional families. In Pride and Prejudice it is the dysfunctionality of the heroine’s own family that moves the plot along, while Sense and Sensibility, with its two heroines, combines both processes, its narrative impelled by faults both within and beyond its central family.

* * *

Northanger Abbey is commonly described as a novel dealing with a girl’s introduction to the world, in the vein of Burney’s Evelina or Edgeworth’s Belinda, or a dozen other novels: “As in so many works of the period, an inexperienced girl is on the threshold of life,” writes Marilyn Butler(170). Catherine Morland’s naiveté and innocence at the beginning of the novelare partly the result of her youth – she is only seventeen – but they are intensified by her life in the small village of Fullerton as a member of a large, tranquil and affectionate clerical family. Her circumstances cushion her. Moreover, Austen carefully normalizes the Morland family. Their behaviour shows “a degree of moderation and composure […] consistent with the common feelings of common life” (44 – my emphases). Catherine, too, is normalized: all the playful references in the first chapter to her status as a heroine establish that having been an ordinary little girl, she has become an ordinary young woman. Her family life can be seen, as Mary Waldron sees it, as “superficially ideal, but in practice unhelpful” (28). It is, perhaps, both helpful and unhelpful, in that Catherine acquires principles but lacks experience. Certainly it is hardly surprising that she expects the world to be as safe and comfortable as Fullerton Rectory, when she sets out for Bath, “free from the apprehension of evil as from the knowledge of it” (227). She is not able initially to recognize behaviour that falls below her own “‘innate principle of general integrity,'” as Henry Tilney describes it (212), unless that behaviour is dressed up in the extremes of Gothic convention. Her limited experience and under-exercised imagination guide her expectations. She is, as Juliet McMaster points out, “anchored in her own practice and unawakened to other people’s. As Tilney tells her, ‘with you it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced? […] but, how should I be influenced'” (Novelist 210). In order to function as an adult woman, Catherine needs a more complex understanding of human society, and Bath begins to provide this, with its introductions to the Tilneys and the Thorpes. Both these single-parent families suffer in various ways through parental failures, the Tilneys through an over-controlling father and the Thorpes through an over-indulgent mother.

The plot of the first volume of Northanger Abbey depends largely on Isabella and John Thorpe and the blindness of both Catherine and her brother James to their lies, their silliness, their boastfulness and their mercenary attitude towards courtship. Austen implicitly connects the follies and manoeuvres of John and Isabella to the behaviour of their widowed mother, “a good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother” (57) – “‘too indulgent,'” according to Mr Allen (119). To mean well is proverbially not enough. Mrs Thorpe’s maternal blindness to her children’s faults and her too easy compliance with all their wishes result in spite and jealousy within her family as well as the predatory aggressions of John and Isabella beyond their family. Catherine – apparently more perceptive than her older brother – is only briefly deceived by the boring and loutish John Thorpe, but for both the young Morlands Isabella’s beauty and flattery are too pleasant to invite immediate analysis.

Catherine’s adult development begins with her connection with this dysfunctional family. The extent of her development should not be exaggerated, however. At the end of the novel she is very much the frank and affectionate young woman that she was at the beginning. J. F. Burrows, in his study of idiolect in Austen, comments that, of all the characters whose speech he examined, “Catherine and Mrs Elton show least change in their idiolects as the novels unfold” (136), and, given Austen’s extraordinary capacity to communicate character and its changes through speech, this limited change indicates that Catherine is still in the process of maturing at the end of the novel (when indeed she is only eighteen). However, Marilyn Butler’s assertion that she learns little in the first volume of Northanger Abbey (176) is over-emphatic, as Catherine has, in fact, begun slowly to acquire some discernment and discrimination. By the time she leaves Bath for Northanger, she has learnt to discard any belief she may have had in the sincerity of John Thorpe’s attachment to her, and although she does not entirely suspect Isabella of being untrue to her engagement to James, Catherine is concerned enough to watch Isabella closely both with James and with his wealthier rival, Captain Tilney, and to ask Henry Tilney to speak to his brother. And later, when Isabella, disappointed of Captain Tilney, attempts to use Catherine as a go-between to patch up her engagement to James, Catherine has learnt enough to recognize instantly the “inconsistencies, contradiction, and falsehood” of her letter and to refuse to answer it (211).

In the second volume, Austen’s focus shifts from Bath to Northanger and from the Thorpes to the Tilneys. The contrast between the two families is obvious enough, and Butler argues that “the arrangement of the two pairs of brothers and sisters, the Tilneys and the Thorpes, virtually forces the reader into a series of ethical comparisons between them on the author’s terms” (178). However, Austen’s use of the conjunction of the two families is by no means as crudely and dogmatically presented as Butler seems to suggest. Certainly she provides a moral contrast between the two sets of siblings, but that contrast is too obvious to warrant much examination. Eleanor and Henry Tilney are evidently polite, scrupulous and intelligent, with intellectual interests, whereas the Thorpes have none of these qualities. However, Austen also indicates a matter of far greater interest – the parallel between the two families. The Tilney children suffer emotionally as the children of a widowed father who overexerts his parental authority and the Thorpes suffer morally as the children of a widowed mother who fails to exert any authority. Moreover, the rich widower’s defects echo those of the children of the impecunious widow. The freedoms given by money and social position have apparently the same power to corrupt as the freedoms given by an over-indulgent upbringing. Certainly the General, like Isabella and John Thorpe, is mercenary and manipulative. Like them, he uses language to mislead, to flatter, to enhance his own importance and to advance his family’s financial position, and like them he underestimates other people’s principles.

Catherine suffers through her interaction with these families, undergoing more distress at Northanger because of her greater involvement with the young Tilneys and because General Tilney has more power to behave badly than the young Thorpes. The learning that comes about through this suffering is part of Catherine’s development into an adult ready for “perfect happiness at the [age] of […] eighteen” (239). Austen shows the intellectual growth of Catherine as involving the understanding that the young and the middle-aged, the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, men and women – all are potentially exploiters. She learns, too, that human speech, like human behaviour, is more complex and more suspect in the world beyond Fullerton. The most obvious similarity between General Tilney, Isabella Thorpe and John Thorpe, is their misuse of language, through flattery, exaggeration and downright lies.

The socialization of Catherine is very much involved in her developing sense of the possibilities and pitfalls of language. In Northanger Abbey, as later in Emma, Austen insists on the importance of language: spoken language through the combination of fantasy and pedantry in the speech of Henry Tilney as well as through the falsifications already mentioned; written language through the famous defence of the novel at the end of chapter five, the many conversations about fiction and the Tilneys’ discussion with Catherine about historical writing. As with another very young heroine, Fanny Price – and to a greater degree – Catherine’s moral education comes partly from her reading. For the more bookish, more intelligent and far more vulnerable Fanny, her reading seems to have contributed to making her at least temporarily priggish, a fault that is surely more excusable in the very young and very sensitive than some critics suppose. Catherine presents a rather different case: instead of Crabbe, Cowper and Macartney, the unintellectual Catherine is consuming Mrs Radcliffe. These novels effectively and usefully introduce her to evil, but only in its most extreme forms, as crime and intrigue. She remains blind to subtleties of conduct. Noticing evil for the first time, she assumes that it must involve serious crime. After all, General Tilney is unpleasant – irritable, embarrassing and dominating, “accustomed on every ordinary occasion to give the law in his family” (236). Catherine’s (accurate) perception of him combined with her reading drive her therefore to suspect him of either murdering or hiding away his wife. After all, she has read of “dozens who had persevered in every possible vice, going on from crime to crime, murdering whomsoever they chose, without any feeling of humanity or remorse” (188).

This misjudgement, in that it involves a new readiness to see evil, is a crucial stage in Catherine’s moral development, as is her rapid reaction to Henry Tilney’s discovery of her suspicions. His immediate grasp of Catherine’s misapprehension indicates that he is well aware of his father’s failings. All the same, he has already been established as unable to resist any opportunity to teach a young woman a lesson. His humiliating interrogation of Catherine and his ensuing lecture on probability and the behaviour of English families drive Catherine to the understanding, not that she has completely misjudged General Tilney, but that

among the English […] there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad. Upon this conviction, she would not be surprised if even in Henry and Eleanor Tilney, some slight imperfection might hereafter appear; and upon this conviction she need not fear to acknowledge some actual specks in the character of their father, who, though cleared from the grossly injurious suspicions which she must ever blush to have entertained, she did believe, upon serious consideration, to be not perfectly amiable. (196–7)

Catherine discovers the possibility of “imperfection” in her immediate circle and even in those she loves best, Henry and Eleanor. This discovery, so difficult to her unsuspicious and affectionate nature, is made possible by the interaction between her reading and her actual experience of dysfunctional families, Thorpes and Tilneys. The Tilneys, she realizes, are habitually suppressed by a dominating and ill-tempered father, in whose presence they are uncomfortable. The General may, as his son asserts, have valued his wife, but he also gave her “much to bear” (194) through his temper, as he still does the daughter whose life, as the nominal mistress of his house, is one of “patient suffering” and “habitual endurance” (238), and no real power.

Catherine’s most painful lesson is naturally the one that affects her personally and directly. When she learns that the General has ordered her to be sent away from Northanger as if in disgrace, she faces directly the reality of evil. Austen compares her condition on her last night at the Abbey with her first night, which she had spent tormenting herself with Radcliffean terrors:

Yet how different now the source of her inquietude from what it had been then – how mournfully superior in reality and substance! Her anxiety had foundation in fact, her fears in probability; and with a mind so occupied in the contemplation of actual and natural evil, the solitude of her situation, the darkness of her chamber, the antiquity of the building were felt and considered without the smallest emotion. (218)

“Actual and natural evil” provide Catherine with experience that she needs and that Fullerton Rectory could never provide. Robert Miles argues:

Austen’s moral purpose and the achievement of personality in fiction are […] of a piece. Her characters change according to the company they keep because their inner selves are dynamic. And their inner selves are dynamic because there is a tension between what they feel and what they decide to do; between their desires and the moral codes that direct correct action; between self and other. (15)

Catherine must encounter “actual and natural evil” or become morally stagnant. Both the plot and the moral interest of the second volume of Northanger Abbey depend on the Tilneys’ dysfunctionality – on the General’s avarice, insincerity and bad temper, and his children’s unhappiness – just as in the first volume they depended on the falsity of the Thorpes.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Jane Austen’s Families by June Sturrock. Copyright © 2013 June Sturrock. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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