A. It is not necessary to decide that Jane Austen belon……
In 1990, William Deresiewicz was on his way to gaining a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. Describing that time in the opening pages of his sharp, endearingly selfeffacing new book, A Jane Austen Education, Deresiewicz explains that he faced one crucial obstacle. He loathed not just Jane Austen but the entire gang of 19th-century British novelists ~ Hardy, Dickens, Eliot ... the lot.
At 26, Deresiewicz wasn’t experiencing the hatred born of surfeit that Mark Twain described when he told a friend, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone. " What Deresiewicz was going through was the rebel phase in which Dostoyevsky rules Planet Gloom, that stage during which the best available image of marriage is a prison gate.
Sardonic students do not, as Deresiewicz points out, make suitable shrine-tenders for a female novelist whose books, while short on wedding scenes, never skimp on proposals. Emma Bovary fulfilled all the young scholar’s expectations of literary culture at its finest; Emma Woodhouse left him cold. "Her life," he lamented, "was impossibly narrow. " Her story, such as it was, "seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village. " Hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, garrulous Miss Bates -weren’t these just the sort of bores Deresiewicz had spent his college years struggling to avoid Maybe, he describes himself conceding, the sole redeeming feature of smug Miss Woodhouse was that she seemed to share his distaste for the dull society of Highbury.
The state of outraged hostility is, of course, a setup. Many of Deresiewicz’s readers will already know him as the author of the widely admired Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. One of the novelist’s most appreciative critics isn’t about to knock Austen off her plinth. Nevertheless, a profound truth lies embedded in Deresiewicz’s witty account of his early animosity. He applies that comic narrative device to her six completed novels. Considered so, each work reveals itself as a teaching tool in the painful journey toward becoming not only adult but useful.
The truth is that young readers don’t easily attach themselves to Austen. Mr. Darcy, "haughty as a Siamese cat," isn’t half as appealing on the page as Colin Firth stalking across the screen in Andrew Davies’s liberty-taking film. Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland seems coltish and naive to readers of her own age today, while Emma Woodhouse, all of 20, appears loud, vain and bossy. And who, at 27 or thereabouts, now feels sympathy for the meekness of Anne Elliot, a young woman who has allowed a monstrous father and a persuasive family friend to ruin her chances of happiness with the engaging Captain Wentworth
Deresiewicz’s emphasis on Austen’s lack of appeal to young readers struck a chord. The memory still lingers of being taken to lunch by my father to meet a cultured man who might, it must have been hoped, exert a civilizing influence on a willful 20-year-old. We’d barely started on the appetizers before Jane Austen’s name came up. "I hate her," I announced, brandishing my scorn as a badge of pride. Invited to offer reasons, I prattled on, much like Deresiewicz’s younger self, about her dreary characters: all so banal, so unimportant. Glancing up for admiration, I caught an odd expression on our guest’s face, something between amusement and disgust. I carried fight on. It was another five years before I comprehended the shameless depths of my arrogance. I had matched Emma -at her worst.
It happens that Emma at her worst is the turning point in Deresiewicz’s account of his own conversion. The fictional scene that taught him to understand the subtlety of Austen’s manipulation of the reader was the picnic at which Emma, cocksure as ever, orders gentle Miss Bates to restrict her utterance of platitudes during the meal. Miss Bates blushes painfully, and yet accepts the truth of Emma’s critique. The reader has no option but to admire, however grudgingly, such quiet humility.
Although he’s a shrewd critic of Austen’s work, Deresiewicz is less at ease when entering the genre of memoir. Girlfriends come and go; a controlling father is described without ever being quite brought to life; personal experiences of community in a Jewish youth movement are awkwardly yoked to the kindly naval group evoked by Austen in the Harville-Benwick household of Persuasion. Very occasionally, as in a startling passage that offers a real-life analogy to the socially ambitious Crawfords of Mansfield Park, a sentence leaps free of Deresiewicz’s selective recollections. "You guys are lunch meat now," a friend’s rich wife advises both him and her husband. "Wait a few years -you’ll be sirloin steak. " Here, slicing up through the text like a knife blade, surfaces a statement to match Austen’s own scalpel-wielding.
Teaching became Deresiewicz’s chosen vocation. And Austen, he claims, taught him the difficult art of lecturing without beingdidactic, in just the way that Henry Tilney instructs a wide-eyed Catherine Morland -and that Austen herself lays down the law to her readers.
Rachel M. Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen offers a different approach. Excellent in her overview of Austen’s ascent of the Olympian literary slope, Brownstein speaks down to her readers from an equally dizzy height. Pity the "smart, eloquent and clubbable" former pupil Brownstein names and thanks for having, at the end of the term, "helpfully clarified things by telling me what I had been saying. " Ouch. Students, Brownstein loftily declares, are best introduced to Austen’s novels by being informed, for example, that the title "Mr. Knightley of Donwell Abbey" conceals the code words "knightly" and "donewell. " No indication is given that this formidable tutor would embrace the collaborative observations from her pupils that Deresiewicz has learned to welcome and enjoy.
Brownstein remains, however, a superb critic, seen at her best when illuminating Austen’s mastery of significant detail -a quality, she reminds us, Walter Scott was quick to discern and praise. Exasperated though I was when Brownstein remarked that partaking of the daily feasts at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center presented her with a "moral" obligation, I’d gladly forgive worse for the pleasure of learning how artfully Austen sows our mistrust of her nastier characters.
I have, however, one suggestion. Brownstein, almost as socially obsessed as her elegant scapegoat of choice, Lionel Trilling, dithers over exactly where to place Austen. Snobs, she declares, without much evidence, are among the novelist’s firmest fans. But Austen belonged neither to the aristocracy nor to the rising middle class. There’s no need for her to be pigeonholed, but if a place must be granted, how about "vicarage class" -for the position from which a parson’s clever daughter could observe the mannered comedy of all walks of life
Which of the following is true about the author’s suggestion
A. It is not necessary to decide that Jane Austen belonged to a particular class.
B. Jane Austen should not be the scapegoat.
C. The critics’ opinions are groundless.
D. Jane Austen is one of the best writers.
