The Charlotte Lucas question...

[lady_schrapnell]

For sartorias, but a bit later than planned, due to an unexpected after-hours visit to the doctor (in the hospital, but only because this group use the Out-Patient facilities when not in hospital use). With Older Daughter, who got an intense pain in her side, which 2 ibuprofen and 2 paracetamol tablets only dimmed down for about 20 minutes, leaving her nauseated and white with pain. Not a kidney stone or infection, but the doc earned serious disapproval [at this point, while I was trying to correct the misspelling of 'disapproval' - I'm really tired! - stupid Xjournal went and posted...] by saying that she had 'a little pain in her tummy'. As I said to her, it's a pity such condescending jerkery is only encountered when you feel like death, as he should have been seriously reprimanded for saying that to an intelligent 20 year-old.

Anyway, the discussion at steepholm's mother's somehow got to Charlotte's decision to marry Mr Collins, and he and his mother both said she was just pragmatic and not hopeful of better. I agreed with that, and that her choices were much more limited than those of Jane or Elizabeth, but felt that though her decision was treated sympathetically it was nonetheless meant to be seen as morally inadequate. I quoted too! And then found and read out the passages I'd remembered (fairly accurately, on this occasion, at least*). Steepholm's mother said the voice of Elizabeth couldn't be equated with that of the narrator/Jane Austen, which is also correct, of course. Rebuttal number whatever though, is that Elizabeth is wrong in her judgments, but is not actually morally incorrect: if Darcy had done any of the things she mistakenly believed him to have done, then he would have been a bad, bad man indeed. The snobbery of Bingley's sisters is wrong. And when the author uses her favourite free indirect speech to show Elizabeth, feeling betrayed by Charlotte, turning even more to Jane , who is never anything but good, the reader is to see that judgment to be correct. Of course she's rather more intemperate in her earlier shock at Charlotte's acceptance of him than she is later, but I think her response to Charlotte's advice on how to catch a man - 'You make me laugh, Charlotte, but it is not sound' - sums up the author's attitude as well.

I still think, as I eloquently put it to C. after his mum had gone to bed: Jane Austen acknowledges that life sucks for women like Charlotte, but that doesn't really excuse doing something like marrying a man you can't have an ounce of respect for.

No opinions were changed, but a good time was had by all! Anyone disagreeing with me should feel free to jump in with why this is all rubbish.

* I asked for the copy to look up the remembered scenes, having been scarred by an occasion when I was studying P&P several years ago. A friend and I were having a long (also enjoyable) argument by email about Georgiana's saying that her brother could never be mistaken. Both of us had avoided watching the TV series (which we both had on video) for the whole academic year, to avoid confusion, and it still took about 3 emails on each side of discussion, before I went to check a minor detail of this scene and discovered no such thing was actually said in the book... Scary.

Comments

[emmaco.livejournal.com]

So you don't know what the pain was? I hope she's feeling better!

I haven't read P&P in far too long so can only remember my own feelings rather than Elizabeth's/Jane's. I thought it was clear that Charlotte didn't expect much different so it wasn't so unsound a decision for her. But I have had so many prompts to re-read this book that I actually need to go do it :)

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Hmmm - tried several times to reply to your comment, but LJ wasn't having it! Now I've mostly forgotten what I wanted to say anyway. But a reread of P&P sound lovely... If you waited till you got over this way, you could even combine a Persuasion and/or Northanger Abbey reread with a trip to Bath en route to Bristol. (It's very close!)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think the telling line in the Charlotte Question is somewhere further along when Elizabeth notes that Charlotte is enjoying her own home, poultry, etc =while she still can=. So she's just a shade over into the red on the morality question. Though I wonder if Charlotte's decision really isn't more amoral. But it's definitely rationally made.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Sorry - I had a complete brain melt-down for all matters other than the essay outline I was trying to do and couldn't make it re-gel enough to respond to this or anyone else's comments.

Yes, I just checked that quote, and it's interesting: 'Poor Charlotte! - it was melancholy to leave her to such society!' - But she had chosen it with her eyes open; and though evidently regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion. Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.'

Makes you shudder, doesn't it? But I think amoral might be just about it - and I don't think amoral is enough to merit authorial approval.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yep--there's the hammer of finality to that 'not yet lost their charms'. And considering what Collins is, that's really quite chilling.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Rebuttal number whatever though, is that Elizabeth is wrong in her judgments, but is not actually morally incorrect: if Darcy had done any of the things she mistakenly believed him to have done, then he would have been a bad, bad man indeed.

Charlotte Lucas aside, I’m not sure I’d go along with this the whole way. In a way JA makes it easy for Elizabeth (and us) by revealing Wickham to be such an out-and-out cad, Collins such a morally insipid toady, and Lady Catherine so snobbish and impossible in her demands.* EB’s big moral judgements are vindicated (which isn’t the same as saying that she’s always right, as you point out); but I think we also see her sense of, shall we call it social morality, being changed by getting to know Darcy. I hope I’m not just channelling Andrew Davies when I say that by seeing her family and friends through Darcy’s eyes she gains access to a level of perception which in him may issue in unhealthy and dismissive pride, but in her becomes a kind of pained awareness of (for example) her father’s moral indolence, something she hadn’t really been very conscious of before. And it’s a better and more subtle book for that, than it would be if all she had to learn was not to leap to conclusions.

* I wonder whether JA came to feel that this was a bit of a cop-out, in fact, and whether a book like Mansfield Park, in its depiction of the Crawfords, was an attempt to show how real life situations are less clear cut, and moral decisions nicer (in the Tilneyan sense, of course!). I supplementarily wonder if JA, like Woody Allen, ever got bugged by people asking her to do another of her ‘early, funny ones’. Was Northanger Abbey her Sleeper? Is Mansfield Park her Stardust Memories?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

A friend who visited the actual MSes is certain that the first half of Northanger reads with such brilliance while the second half is in effect a drawn-out single joke because she was rewriting it after she'd gotten several novels under her belt. But he doesn't pinpoint when...did she pick it up as recreation after she abandoned Watsons on the death of her father? Good questions.

What I really want to know is if she forced the ending to MP after outward influence, or inward.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

As steepholm is currently running around the British Museum (or about to be running around), I'll hop in on the reply to him.

Do you buy the Northanger Abbey argument? I'm not entirely convinced (though I'd love to see the MSes!). Did he say why she would have rewritten the parts differently? Maybe it's too obvious a line but it seems to me that a lot of the difference is due to the fact that she's parodying the sentimental novel in the first half, and the Gothic in the second, and the Gothic is so much OTTer to start with.

I must try to reread the article we had for the 19th Century Novel course which argued that the political commentary in NA was quite radical really. (By Isobel Armstrong - aka DWJ's sister. As I learned later from Charlie.) Wittering now, so definitely time for bed...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I thknk the mses are at the Bodleian. Not sure tho.

I do buy his argument--his reasons were meticulous and clear, though I don't remember them all now. But the biggest was the astonishing difference in style: he thinks Ja abandoned the rewrite after getting to the joke about Mr Tilney's curricle and many-caped coat as opposed to being abducted by mysterious horsemen right off the road.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I don't think I quite get the 'social morality' idea entirely. In part, I'm not exactly sure when she becomes aware of her father's moral indolence, though she's well aware of her mother's flaws and shortcomings before Darcy's obvious disdain of them. But is that more acute humiliation at the way her family all show their worse sides in front of him (inevitably!) really some kind of greater morality?

I'm also not sure this was a cop-out (though I have said it was a little bit of a one in F&H, when Polly *twice* gets to say 'thank you for making it easier for me' - consistency, thy name ain't Lady-S!), though the nasty characters are painted more broadly than the nice ones, of course. But there's some pairing going on too, which is significant: Lady Catherine is as much a match-making mamma as Mrs Bennet; Caroline Bingley parades herself in front of Darcy just like Lydia and the officers; and so on. (I think I've lost the plot again...) Anyway, she does give a bit more shading to the caddery in Willoughby's case too, doesn't she? And Mr Eliot, I guess. Mansfield Park I just don't know about, as it's been too long since I've reread, for reasons that don't need repeating atm.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But is that more acute humiliation at the way her family all show their worse sides in front of him (inevitably!) really some kind of greater morality?

Not in itself, certainly. Of course, Jane Austen does sometimes use shame as a spur to moral realization (cf. Emma's rebuke over Miss Bates), but in this case it's not her own behaviour that EB feels shame over, and that's a pretty significant difference, I admit.

However, while I'm not exactly sure of when EB becomes aware of her father's moral indolence, and I haven't the chapter and verse to say that Darcy was the catalyst for this (I may go and look, later), I do think that Mr Bennett, with his intelligence, love of books, dry and ironic sense of humour (not unlike JA's own, in her early work) is a figure that could be very subtly tempting to both the reader and to Elizabeth - who is the only person who is able to understand him, and who is rewarded by being his favourite. The temptation (and how well I know it) is to be ironic about everything, or at least never to make a statement without providing oneself with a buckler of irony to hide behind. To be able to pull away from Mr B and to see his faults, and to take them seriously, is something EB would probably have managed on her own, given time. But perhaps seeing him through Mr Darcy's eyes, however reluctantly, speeded up the process?

As for the cop-out, I don't say this about P&P myself, but wonder whether JA came to feel it. That's too crude - and the more I think about this the more complicated the subject becomes; but I do think that with JA there's a creeping tendency to want to write a palinode, and that MP is as close as she ever came to a formal one.