How Jane Austen’s concerns in Sense and Sensibility and Emma
relate to the interests and preoccupations of the Romantic poets.
It has been widely acknowledged that, as far as her novels
are concerned, Jane Austen expressed little interest in the national and
international events that colored the social and political climate of the late
eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries and with which the Romantic poets were
particularly preoccupied.
The repercussions of the French Revolution produced a spirit
of change that William Hazlitt, in 1825, and later writers identified as having
a formative influence on the poetic achievements of the period. New perspectives were examined and man, the
individual, was seen as a boundless reservoir of potentials that needed only
the right conditions to be realized.
Jane Austen confined her examination of human nature to
small groups of individuals drawn from a social circle like her own. She chiefly retained the neoclassical view of
the individual as a more limited being (i.e. one who ought to aim for
accessible goals), who was an integral part of an ordered society.
Bearing these fundamental differences of interest and
perspectives in mind, and allowing for the diversity in the scale of their
considerations, the novels of Jane Austen nevertheless do reflect some of the
essential preoccupations and concerns of the poets of the same period.
It was a period of spiritual insecurity and doubt that was
one of the consequences of the scientific revolution and the last firm anchor
remaining was the individual self. The
poetry of the period in particular reflects the shift in views of man’s
essential nature and the contemporary preoccupation with the powers of the
imagination and the realm of feeling.
One effect of this shift was the belief that man, being part of an
organic universal order that was purposeful and harmonious towards all
sensitive creatures, was naturally benevolent and possessed of an innate moral
faculty that could be realized spontaneously through personal relations (as
explored by such prolific poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge). It is with issues of personal autonomy and
specific views of mortality that Jane Austen is especially concerned in Sense and Sensibility and Emma.
The extreme assertion of self and individual experience is
what Keats, referring to Wordsworth, termed ‘the egotistical sublime’. The poets believed the imagination to be the
source of insight and truth. To curb the
imagination would deny the poet’s vital creativity and retard his personal
development. Coleridge refers to the
imagination as his ‘shaping spirit’ in his Dejection
ode; it is an inherent gift, given by nature and as such should be celebrated
and remain unfettered. And Wandsworth
mourns the loss of the spontaneous creativity or ‘celestial light’ of the
imagination, without which life is reduced to mere ‘endless imitation’ in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality. In Emma
and Sense and Sensibility, Jane
Austen is concerned to refute this view by showing how an unfettered
imagination can create distortions and illusions that can lead to moral flaws
in the individual. She aims to show that
her heroines must learn to temper their imaginative energy by the application
of reason. In this way, she expresses
her doubt in the contemporary view that has abandoned the hierarchical view of
human nature, which produces a different hierarchy of faculties.
Wordsworth, in his Preface
to the Lyrical Ballads, defined a poet as a man ‘endued with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness’ than is common, and with this
assertion, the poets of the Romantic period were unequivocally in
agreement. It is this assertion of
sensibility that Austen parodies in Sense
and Sensibility – her aim being to show the dangers of living according to
the general tenets of the doctrine of benevolence. An aspect of this is exemplified by Marianne
Dashwood’s response to an accusation of improper conduct: ‘If there had been
any impropriety in which I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time,
for we always know when we are acting wrong.’ (Chapter 13). Austen attacks this belief squarely be
demonstrating, through Marianne’s misfortunes, how self-regarding impulses can
confound moral judgement, and how emotional self-indulgence leads to various
kinds of selfishness. The message is
rendered more effective by the author’s dismissal of sentimentality in
presenting human feelings.
Like the Romantic poets, Jane Austen was interested in the
contrary qualities of nature. Good
poetry, according to Coleridge in his Biographia
Literata, requires the coexistence of ‘opposite or discordant qualities’,
which he claimed must fuse or be ‘reconciled’ into unity. As the poetry reflected the poet’s mind, so
human nature must also encompass these dualities. In The
Prelude, Wordsworth takes up this theme:
…there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling
together
In one society.
Blake also
wrote of the dualities in human nature in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
Without contraries there is no progression.
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy,
Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence.
Jane Austen
recognized these discordant elements in human nature and pursued them in her
novels to show the need for balance if the individual is to develop and achieve
harmony within himself and society. Many
of her heroines fall chiefly into two main categories that bear some
resemblance to Blake’s suggestion that:
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
‘Evil’,
however, is too strong an adjective to apply to any of Austen’s characters, but
on the whole, a parallel can be made.
Elinor Dashwood can be described as good and passive, being emphatically
so because she obeys reason. In Elinor,
sense (or the correct application of reason) is her inherent virtue, and this
virtue reaps its own rewards—not merely in the winning of the husband of her
choice—but also in the steady support it provides her and she provides for
others in times of difficulty and unhappiness.
The suggestion here would seem to be that Austen viewed virtues not as
fixed quantities but as fluid qualities that expand as a result of continual
struggle with and opposition to their contraries. However, it could be argued that this does
not dispute the passive qualities of the virtues, but rather suggests the greater
flexibility of one quality to fuse with or reconcile itself to its
contrary. Nevertheless, this is perhaps
as far as this specific parallel can safely be taken. Jane Austen used Elinor Dashwood as an
example of correct balancing between sense and sensibility, but through
Marianne’s misjudgement of her sister, we can see how delicate this balance
is. With a little more rigid discipline
of sense over sensibility, Elinor would be in danger of possessing all the
coldness of Lady Middleton, a caricature displayed for this purpose.
Marianne
Dashwood and Emma Woodhouse seem to belong to the category of active, or
energetic characters. They are by no
means evil, but they do have their moral flaws in the form of ignorance of self
and misjudgement of others. Because of
their flaws, these characters possess a propensity to cause active mischief in
their own destinies and in those of others.
They must develop by a process of critical self-examination and
discovery to allow their intrinsic virtues to achieve fruition. As Lady Middleton relates to Elinor, so
Charlotte Palmer and Mrs Elton offer warnings to Marianne and Emma by depicting
the extreme consequences of the heroines’ follies, should these remain
uncorrected. In Emma, the good Miss Bates serves a similar purpose, as is
unconsciously registered by Emma in her description to Harriet of her declining
years as a spinster, living life vicariously through her nephews and nieces.
The
delineation of the process of self-discovery is not unlike the course of the
individuals in the epic poems of the Romantic poets and there is a common theme
of endurance and hope through disappointments and despair.
The poets
frequently chose the structure of the ballad and the image of a journey to reflect
the slow process of the inner journey towards self-discovery. In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner, on his actual
journey, by an impulsive, irrational act alienates himself by committing a sin
against his fellow creatures, and in order to resume his place in the
community, he must first expiate his sin.
For him, this is both a physically and spiritually agonising
process. Moral issues abound in
Wordsworth’s poems and he also traces the painful process of self-discovery
through his epic, meandering journey in The
Prelude. He refers to himself as ‘A
Traveller’ and traces the journey on several levels, actual excursions,
progress through time and the process of development of the poet’s imagination
– all of which interact. The ultimate
goal of these journeys is the rediscovery of nature working within himself,
which answers the quest for harmony and leads to redemption.
Redemption
for Marianne Dashwood lies in conquering the self-regarding impulses of extreme
sensibility. Illness and reflections on
her own mortality occasioned the painful but necessary process of
self-discovery. Despite earlier glimpses
into her errors, for Emma, enlightenment, in a moment of clarity ‘darted
through her with the speed of an arrow’ (Chapter 47), revealing to her the full
import of her conduct and the state of her heart.
Jane Austen
clearly demonstrates her concern for harmony and her belief that this can be
achieved through the reconciliation of the discordant qualities of nature which
are manifest in the individual and in society as a whole. Unity with society requires unity within the
individual. Human virtues and their
contraries are presented and represented through a fine structure of
characterization and plot. Caricatures are
used to parody or act as foils to her central characters; to reflect or refract
the moral nature of each heroine. It is
true that these minor characters are not fully developed. They do not take on unexpected traits, but
remain the same throughout. However,
nothing and no one is incidental to the whole scheme. The miniature worlds of Jane Austen’s
creation, within the confines of her chosen framework, encompass a broad
spectrum of human folly and virtue.
These communities cannot be taken as images of the real world, but they
are nevertheless complete in many details.
At the end of every novel, Austen effects a balancing or rounding-off
procedure, in which every action is accounted for, not little justice left unchecked
and no question left unresolved. This
attention to detail and symmetry therefore creates a final effect of harmony in
the comic writer’s novels.
This
striving for harmony pervades much of the poetry of the period. Wordsworth, in particular, draws heavily on
metaphors of music and harmony in his language.
Harmony is usually associated with reconciling outward reality to inward
reflection and Wordsworth achieved this by communing with the forms of nature
in the country which had not been trespassed on by the artificial inventions of
man. In this pure state, nature was most
beneficial to man, leading, through the poet’s reflections, to its harmonious
dispositions. It cannot here be ignored
that in Jane Austen’s novels, artifice and corruption are often associated with
the towns or cities separate from the places the central characters
inhabit. In Sense and Sensibility, the ‘villains’ come from outside the small
community of Barton and much of Marianne’s unhappiness and Elinor’s confusion
occur in London. In Emma, the intrigue that confounds the heroine’s judgement had
already taken place in Weymouth, far from the simple world of Highbury, and
Frank Churchill’s excursions from Highbury serve only to add to the
confusion. Another antagonist, Mrs Elton,
is also brought in from the ‘outer world’, the values of which she introduces
for the purpose of contrast. To return
to the poets, however, harmony was associated with a yearning for a state of
oneness with nature; an organic unity in which nature was part of man and man
part of nature, with a sympathetic soul, meaning and purpose.
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