Jane Austen's "wild imagination": romance and the courtship plot in the six canonical novels.(Critical essay)

Even though it was once asserted that Jane Austen's six canonical novels have "but one plot," (1) this charge has generally been ignored in recent Austen studies and histories of the novel. To the extent that her works of fiction conform to the conventions of late eighteenth-century novels of courtship and romance, this omission is entirely understandable, for they obviously bear what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "a family" resemblance (17). What distinguishes the plot of the courtship novel is its depiction of the entrance of a young woman into adult society and her subsequent choice among competing suitors. The choice is not without its anxieties, however, for one of the unstated conventions of the courtship novel is that the lovers must undergo a traumatic experience, a violent shift from innocence to self-knowledge before their union can be consummated.

One danger confronting the authors of this familiar form is a slackening of narrative suspense: their outcomes, like the outcomes of contemporary genre fiction, often come to seem all-too predictable. Whoever will eventually win the hand of the heroine is easy to recognize early in the narrative from his prominence, if not from his obvious moral, social, or intellectual superiority. Austen does not quite manage to escape the homogeneity inherent in the form's insistence upon closure, yet the change that her novels incorporate is still noteworthy. It involves nothing less than the rejection of a single generic courtship narrative. Austen incorporates at least one distinct story pattern in each novel, in the process tossing out such overworked formulas as sexual entrapment or parental tyranny. She has been tightly praised for the way she differentiates between the various characters in her novels, but there is no reason why the same observation cannot be made about the various plots and subplots within the novels. In order to consider what is distinctive about way courtship and romance are presented in her fiction, I want to historicize the topic by singling out seven different story-lines or models in the six canonical texts. The purpose of considering the novels from such a schematic vantage point is to suggest that they reveal a far greater uneasiness about the premises of the courtship plot than might appear from a consideration of individual works in relative isolation from one another.

SEVEN MODELS OF COURTSHIP AND ROMANCE

In using the term model, I mean a structural pattern or story-line that can not only be abstracted from the text but deployed in an infinite variety of other contexts and different permutations. According to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, "a story-line is structured like the complete story, but unlike the latter it is restricted to one set of individuals" (16). Such a story-line corresponds to a limited extent to what Henry James described more globally as "the subject, the idea, the donnee of the novel" and thus is flexible enough to accommodate the array of minor characters and the finely wrought portrayal of domestic manners and mores that has always constituted the genius of Austen's fiction for many readers. James's vivid description of the donnee as "a blade which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath" points to its status as an artifact that can be employed in more than one context (411). The usual opposition between a conventional formula and a new and unique exploration of reality doesn't quite work here, for the seven models I am identifying might appear only once yet can also be susceptible to endless mutations and transformations in other works while still bearing certain enduring characteristics. Far from being mechanical repetitions of the same, they are malleable enough to be combined in the same text with other story-patterns, appear in a variety of different literary kinds, incorporate gender reversals, and find a place in same-sex romances. Austen's novels at once illuminate and are illuminated by earlier and later examples of similar patterns. Such models are not so much variations on the same rigid formula as seven different scenarios or narrative possibilities.

In Austen's novels, these story-lines are not simply narratives of events that precede the knowledge of what they mean to the characters but the disclosure of a knowledge that is always present within the narrative--in a form that is ironic and dialogical rather than sentimental and dogmatic. By far the most familiar and most frequently cited story-line is the Cinderella plot of Mansfield Park. Cinderella is a pervasive figure in sentimental courtship fiction, but the Cinderella plot takes on a tangible shape in Austen's novel. Here the earnest, self-effacing, and slighted poor relation, Fanny Price, demonstrates her difference from the Bertram family, protected from the temptation of self-indulgence, as Marilyn Butler puts it, "like the humble third child in a fairy tale, after the favoured elder cousins have succumbed" (243). Fanny goes on to win the hand of Prince Charming, Edmund Bertram, who, by virtue of his status as a younger son and prospective clergyman, also manages to avoid the snare of self-absorption. Edmund discovers his love for his first-cousin only after he comes to the reluctant realization that the glass slipper--that is, the kind of intuitive knowledge that can see through illusion and unmask error--fits her foot better than that of Mary Crawford whose worldly ambivalence renders her blind to the difference between aesthetic style and sordid reality. Austen exploits the Cinderella plot in Mansfield Park not just because of its fairy-tale possibilities but because it allows her to treat these possibilities in a way that brings out the differences as well as resemblances between the two modes.

Almost equally as familiar as a romance paradigm is the rescue plot. Austen plays amusing variations in several novels on a plot-pattern that may have taken as its point of departure Sir Charles Grandison's rescue of Harrriet Byron from the libertine kidnapper, Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, in Samuel Richardson's last novel. (2) It is particularly prominent in Northanger Abbey where Henry Tilney first rescues Catherine Morland, not so much from danger, as from what Imlac called the "dangerous prevalence of the imagination," here caused by his own auto-suggestion concerning a cabinet, along with a mode of reading gothic fiction that transforms difference into identity. (3) Henry later rescues Catherine a second time, now from the humiliation visited upon her by his father, General Tilney, after the latter had given her twenty-four hours to vacate Northanger Abbey.

A third model might be described as involving a drama of prior commitment. It can be found to a certain extent in Persuasion, where Captain Frederick Wentworth feels an allegiance to Louisa Musgrove at the very moment when he begins to become newly aware of Anne Elliott's superior merits. It occurs most prominently, however, in Sense and Sensibility, where Edward Ferrars, is actually engaged to Lucy Steele, and, unlike Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, feels honor-bound to keep the commitment rather than pursue Elinor Dashwood, the woman he now loves. An earlier example can be found in the romantic subplot of William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1676), where the heroine, Alithea, feels obligated to keep a prior promise to the foppish Sparkish even though he is inferior in almost every respect to her ardent suitor, Harcourt Courtly. In Sense and Sensibility, Edward, as we know, is released from his vows to Lucy, a woman whom he has long since ceased to love, only after she has managed to ensnare his younger and equally foppish brother, Robert. And yet, paradoxically, without this exposure to error and self-deception, Edward and Elinor could not undergo the necessary movement from illusion to reality. The resulting coexistence of desire and knowledge reveals the fractured, compensatory nature of their redefined relationship and seems, therefore, to invite the kind of criticism that Austen's liaisons have sometimes elicited. (4) On the other hand, the movement from self deception to self-knowledge is symptomatic of a certain resistance to criticism which is reflected in the fact that it forces us to see the attachments as existing on two levels and including an awareness of the very reality which they supposedly overcome.