Men on Austen
D. A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style is a very short book, extremely well written, dense with fascinating thought. Disquieting thought, even, as I find myself wanting to explain, excuse, make everything nice when he discusses the comfortable het world’s assumptions about Austen's books from a non-het POV. Like his analysis of the Famous First Sentence in P&P. I’ve only begun this book, short as it is, as my reading time is even shorter--shrunk down to stolen minutes a day--and I keep wanting to return to the novels. Both of these writers prompt me to get down my copies, hunt up the scenes, and read closely before I agree, disagree, or at least reformulate my own comprehension enough to proceed to the next point.
Like this bit Miller brings up: (When Mr. Knightley pronounces Frank Churckill’s script “like a woman’s writing” even the women he is addressing, Emma and Mrs. Weston, leap to vindicate it against what they consider a “base aspersion.”
Whoa. We don't want Frank being thought one of "those" kind of men, do we!
Miller opens with a description of those who discover Austen at a very early age. Then comes this provocative statement:
Yet sooner or later, this experience of reading Jane Austen found itself contradicted--felt itself disabled--by the quite different experience of being read reading her. If the one moment, private and elective, united us all in common ecstacy, the other, public and compulsory, brought alienation into our midst, the mutual alienation of “girls and “boys.” For eventually--whether the “event” followed on our raptures, or occurred even before they had commenced (with trauma, who can be certain of sequence?)--popular opinion let us know that what should have sundered us from all identifying labels had in fact glued onto us one in particular: in short, that what we took for Style, everyone else took for Woman.
And, later on, But the same discovery that, sometimes even despite herself, made a good girl good, made the boy all wrong. Plied with a Style whose unknown strength went straight to his head, he had fancied himself conquering the world with his swank Excalibur; now he woke to sobering sounds of derision and found that, during his intoxication, just as Lydia Bennet had done to another would-be soldier in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had put him in a dress.
Gender politics and Austen, eh? I don’t know that men--whether gay or straight--now get castigated for a taste in Austen the way Miller describes, but his following observations about the gay man reading Austen and finding all the jabs and prickles of the het world’s view of Austen’s place in literature jabbing him back into his closet make one take a good hard look not just at Austen but at the experience of reading, and how ‘one is being read.’
Here’s the opening blurb on the back of the book:
“What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer’s unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen’s style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.
I have not gotten nearly far enough to see how well Miller sets all this up (or who he thinks Austen really is) but so far his writing comes at the books from such an unexpected, interesting angle I keep having to stop and think. (At red lights, or folding laundry, or in between sets of papers, or while prowling the lunch tables in the withering heat.) And of course feverishly hunt up the texts.
The second book is by another male writer, Richard Jenkyns. His A Fine Brush on Ivory is a more conventional analysis. It’s delightfully written, by someone who has obviously been over the text as many times as I have (his observations on Miss Nash in Emma are evidence of very close reading). Again someone approaches the text in a new way--for example, in his discussion of Austen’s villains, he offers up not Mrs. Norton as the first and most obvious choice, but instead he turns to Emma, bypassing Mrs. Elton and alighting on--Mr. Woodhouse. Austen’s narrator keeps reminding us how beloved Mr. Woodhouse is, to the extent that readers will accept the words and regard him as a kindly, if peculiar but harmless old buffer, but when his actions are illuminated, he really does come off as a monster.
Further, Jenkyns shows us how Mrs. Norton is more pathetic than evil--the only sister who apparently didn’t marry for love, probably didn’t get much affection (to say no more, other than pointing out that her husband was older and did not give her children), who is always restless and needs to keep moving, trying to invent little ways to be important, but no one ever really acknowledges her work.
This is such good stuff for writers! How many ways can one read a text? And I don’t mean reading to impose one’s party line on it--as we have seen in far too many analyses that distort the text in order to force it to fit some category--but viewing the words actually on the page, and building a picture of what they mean, drawing on one’s own experience. We already know we cannot possibly control a reader's experience, but it's a good lesson, at least for an image-driven writer like me, to struggle for detachment enough to really examine just what the words on the page might say not to me who put them there, but to someone whose experience is radically different from mine.
Like this bit Miller brings up: (When Mr. Knightley pronounces Frank Churckill’s script “like a woman’s writing” even the women he is addressing, Emma and Mrs. Weston, leap to vindicate it against what they consider a “base aspersion.”
Whoa. We don't want Frank being thought one of "those" kind of men, do we!
Miller opens with a description of those who discover Austen at a very early age. Then comes this provocative statement:
Yet sooner or later, this experience of reading Jane Austen found itself contradicted--felt itself disabled--by the quite different experience of being read reading her. If the one moment, private and elective, united us all in common ecstacy, the other, public and compulsory, brought alienation into our midst, the mutual alienation of “girls and “boys.” For eventually--whether the “event” followed on our raptures, or occurred even before they had commenced (with trauma, who can be certain of sequence?)--popular opinion let us know that what should have sundered us from all identifying labels had in fact glued onto us one in particular: in short, that what we took for Style, everyone else took for Woman.
And, later on, But the same discovery that, sometimes even despite herself, made a good girl good, made the boy all wrong. Plied with a Style whose unknown strength went straight to his head, he had fancied himself conquering the world with his swank Excalibur; now he woke to sobering sounds of derision and found that, during his intoxication, just as Lydia Bennet had done to another would-be soldier in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had put him in a dress.
Gender politics and Austen, eh? I don’t know that men--whether gay or straight--now get castigated for a taste in Austen the way Miller describes, but his following observations about the gay man reading Austen and finding all the jabs and prickles of the het world’s view of Austen’s place in literature jabbing him back into his closet make one take a good hard look not just at Austen but at the experience of reading, and how ‘one is being read.’
Here’s the opening blurb on the back of the book:
“What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer’s unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen’s style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.
I have not gotten nearly far enough to see how well Miller sets all this up (or who he thinks Austen really is) but so far his writing comes at the books from such an unexpected, interesting angle I keep having to stop and think. (At red lights, or folding laundry, or in between sets of papers, or while prowling the lunch tables in the withering heat.) And of course feverishly hunt up the texts.
The second book is by another male writer, Richard Jenkyns. His A Fine Brush on Ivory is a more conventional analysis. It’s delightfully written, by someone who has obviously been over the text as many times as I have (his observations on Miss Nash in Emma are evidence of very close reading). Again someone approaches the text in a new way--for example, in his discussion of Austen’s villains, he offers up not Mrs. Norton as the first and most obvious choice, but instead he turns to Emma, bypassing Mrs. Elton and alighting on--Mr. Woodhouse. Austen’s narrator keeps reminding us how beloved Mr. Woodhouse is, to the extent that readers will accept the words and regard him as a kindly, if peculiar but harmless old buffer, but when his actions are illuminated, he really does come off as a monster.
Further, Jenkyns shows us how Mrs. Norton is more pathetic than evil--the only sister who apparently didn’t marry for love, probably didn’t get much affection (to say no more, other than pointing out that her husband was older and did not give her children), who is always restless and needs to keep moving, trying to invent little ways to be important, but no one ever really acknowledges her work.
This is such good stuff for writers! How many ways can one read a text? And I don’t mean reading to impose one’s party line on it--as we have seen in far too many analyses that distort the text in order to force it to fit some category--but viewing the words actually on the page, and building a picture of what they mean, drawing on one’s own experience. We already know we cannot possibly control a reader's experience, but it's a good lesson, at least for an image-driven writer like me, to struggle for detachment enough to really examine just what the words on the page might say not to me who put them there, but to someone whose experience is radically different from mine.