Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind

Beth Lau

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472488183
• eBook ISBN: 9781351401807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this volume interpret Jane Austen's fiction through the lens of various sciences of the mind and brain, especially the cluster of disciplines implicated in the term cognitive science, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, and others. The field of cognitive literary studies has rapidly developed in the last few decades and achieved the status of an established (if still evolving) critical approach. One of the most popular authors to analyze from this perspective is Jane Austen. As numerous critics have noted, Austen was a keen observer of how the mind operates in its interactions with other minds, both when it functions successfully and when, as often happens, it goes awry, and her perceptions are often in synch with current neuroscientific and psychological research. Despite the widespread recognition of the special congruity between Austen's novels and cognitive science, however, no book has been devoted to this subject. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind is the first monograph wholly comprised of readings of Austen's oeuvre (juvenilia as well as all six completed novels) from cognitive and related psychological approaches. In addition, the volume operates under the assumption that cognitive and historicist approaches are compatible, and many essays situate Austen within the climate of ideas during her era as well as in relation to current research in the sciences and social sciences. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind offers a new lens for understanding and illuminating the concerns, techniques, and enduring appeal of Austen's novels.

1 Austen’s juvenilia and sciences of the mind

William Nelles

Students of narrative theory will doubtless recall Gérard Genette recounting this anecdote in his “Preamble” to Narrative Discourse Revisited: “A famous scientist asserted in a flash of wit, at the beginning of this century, I believe: ‘There is physics, then there is chemistry, which is a kind of physics, then there is stamp collecting’.” I had forgotten, though, how he follows that line: “since then biology too has become a kind of chemistry, and even a … kind of mechanics” (8). While Genette, writing in 1983, could not have foreseen the rapid emergence of cognitive and biocultural theories into the critical mainstream over the last twenty years or so, his comments have proven prescient. In the January 2016 number of Narrative, Angus Fletcher and John Monterosso, cognitivists themselves, discuss the conviction shared by many literary theorists that these “cognitive experiments have already attracted such disproportionate attention that they are threatening to overshadow the rest of literary studies … making them seem less like a source of diversity than a danger to it,” a threat intensified by the perception that cognitive methodologies are “not only foreign, but hostile, to much of literary studies” (83). As those familiar with such theories know, this is not paranoia: several biocultural critics have confidently declared that their work will “ultimately absorb and supplant every other form of literary study,” including all poststructuralist theories (Carroll, “Three” 62), which are now “not merely obsolete but essentially void” (Carroll, “Poststructuralism” 214–15). My interest here, however, lies in presenting specific examples of practices in Jane Austen’s work that reward the application of cognitive theories of narrative, and thus more at the stamp collecting end of Genette’s scale than at the mechanics end. Suzanne Keen, in a “Response” to Fletcher and Monterosso, suggests that scientific criticism, properly conceived, can create a shared intellectual space within which “we literary readers can pivot in the direction of empiricism without fear of compromising our distinctive contributions to the understanding of readers and narratives” (110), and as we shall see, the earlier criticism cited below is not supplanted by, but usefully organized and extended by, the framework of cognitive theory.

While it might seem anachronistic to apply the views of modern science to a writer two centuries in the past, the brain science of her own time (the other of the “sciences” in my title) is closely compatible with cognitive psychology. Cognitive theory can so readily account for Austen’s model of human behavior largely because both represent a common reality and a shared view of that reality, rooted in what Mary Lascelles called Austen’s “constant tranquil preference for a true over a false vision of life” (Jane 120) that “makes her prefer the actual to the illusionary world” (“Miss” 533). The fit between Austen’s worldview and that of modern cognitivists makes biocultural theory an apt framework for studying her texts, which revolve around the problems of mate selection and family relations that are fundamental for cognitive theory. Having previously argued for the utility of biocultural theory for the study of Austen’s novels (“Jane’s Brains”), I focus here on the earlier traces of those ideas as they appear in the juvenilia.

Critical assessments of Jane Austen’s earliest writings have occupied virtually every point on the evaluative spectrum since her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh revealed in his 1870 Memoir that “there is extant an old copy-book containing several tales, some of which seem to have been composed when she was quite a girl” (217n40). He described the stories as “childish effusions” (42) “of a slight and flimsy texture” (40), and a number of later critics have agreed. Perhaps the sternest criticism offered is that implicit in Austen’s own admonition to her niece Caroline, then an aspiring eleven-year-old novelist, who recalls her saying “if I would take her advice, I should cease writing till I was 16, and that she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less, in the corresponding years of her own life”—that is, those very years during which the juvenilia were composed (174). But many of the pieces found early champions. Annette B. Hopkins claimed in 1925 that “In literary quality Love and Freindship is superior to most of the serious novels of the day” (47).¹ The eventual publication of the entire contents of the three notebooks and their increasingly wide circulation—given a boost with the controversial decision by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar to select “Love and Freindship” to represent Austen in their Norton Anthology of Literature by Women in 1985—has persuaded a sizeable cohort of modern critics that the works have very high literary merit. Margaret Anne Doody declares in the “Introduction” to her edition of the juvenilia, “Austen is engaged at the philosophic centre of the eighteenth century. To treat her early works as the slight works of a playful child is partly to mistreat their philosophic depths” (xxviii). Such a claim might seem hyperbolic given that the text specifically in question, “Jack and Alice,” was probably written when she was fourteen, but for Doody, “Her genius at an early age is as awe-inspiring as Mozart’s” (xxxv).²

The approach most frequently taken to criticism of the juvenilia, however, has been down the middle of the road, finding the early works of interest primarily to the extent that they enable us to detect in embryonic form traces of the themes, techniques, characters, situations, and plots that would resurface in the novels. As noted above, Hopkins began blazing this trail (now become a highway) in 1925: “there is not a single one of the six mature novels whose beginnings, if only minutely, cannot be detected here, in a genre, a situation, a character, or a mere name” (48). John McAleer has surveyed the works for the light they can shed upon Austen’s biography, from “environmental factors crucial to Jane Austen’s formation,” (10) such as her reading, to a developing “social awareness” (11), to her philosophical, moral, and even genealogical heritages. For Juliet McMaster, they form an integral part of her career arc: “Love and Freindship is worth mentioning among Jane Austen’s juvenilia both because it is obviously a preparation for Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility and because it forms so delightful a contrast to the more serious works” (“Continuity” 724).

Despite the myriad connections that have been made between the juvenilia and the novels, only a handful of critics have focused on elements of Austen’s emerging concept of the mind and the development of techniques for representing a character’s consciousness. More specifically, we have no systematic overview of the extent to which Austen’s juvenilia reflect those elements that have been particularly foregrounded by the abundant recent activity in the discipline of cognitive literary theory, which has taken Austen as one of its favorite subjects. Pride and Prejudice, for example, has been discussed so many times by evolutionary critics that Joseph Carroll has jokingly called it “the literary equivalent of [the] fruit fly,” which is so diligently studied by geneticists (“Human” 79). Austen’s distinctive conception of how omniscience should function, her refinement of such key cognitive categories as Theory of Mind and mindblindness, her exploration of the roles of nature and education in the development of embodied consciousness, and her depictions of social minds, all of fundamental importance for cognitive readings of the novels, make their first appearances in the juvenilia and go through the earliest stages of their development there. The cognitive elements in Austen’s juvenilia may be gathered under three broad headings: representations of the mind and cognition, the role of biology and the embodied brain, and the role of the social mind. There is considerable overlap built in here, since every mind is contained in, and developed through interaction with, both a body and a culture, but of course the interdependence of these factors is a fundamental premise of biocultural criticism.

[A] Representing cognition: Omniscience, free indirect style, Theory of Mind

D. A. Miller makes the claim that “anonymous, impersonal, universal narration (usually called, after its least important feature, omniscience)” and “free indirect style, in which the narration’s way of saying is constantly both mimicking, and distancing itself from, the character’s way of seeing,” constitute in combination “Austen’s greatest and most recognized contributions to culture” (27). I agree with Miller that to use the term “omniscience” in the traditional sense is to grab the stick by the wrong end. That traditional sense has been explicated by Meir Sternberg, who distinguishes three key components of genuine omniscience:

For one thing, the narrator has free access to the minds (“hearts”) of his dramatis personae. … For another, he enjoys free movement in time (among narrative past, present, and future) and in space (enabling him to follow secret conversations, shuttle between simultaneous happenings or between heaven and earth).

(84)

Rather than repeat arguments I have presented at length elsewhere (“Omniscience”), I’ll here simply repeat my conclusions: omniscience is a toolbox, and different novelists utilize the different tools within it in distinctive ways. Of the three tools identified by Sternberg—mindreading, omnitemporality, and omnipresence—Austen’s practice in the novels restricts her narrators to mindreading alone, and only to a tightly circumscribed variant of that. Not surprisingly, her highly original adaptation of third-person narration did not spring up full blown, and the narrating of her earliest juvenilia, by contrast with the novels, includes features of traditional omniscience that she would later eschew.

I address Sternberg’s latter points on time and space first, before moving on to mindreading and the related issues of free indirect style and Theory of Mind. In “Frederic and Elfrida,” the first item in “Volume the First,” Austen has her heroine, Charlotte Drummond, preparing for her trip from Crankhumdunderry to London: “grieved as she was, she little thought in what a strange and different manner she would return to it” (8). As modest as this prolepsis would seem coming from any other writer (Charlotte drowns herself two days later and floats back home down the river à la Malory’s Lady of Astolat), the narrators of Austen’s novels scrupulously avoid displaying knowledge of their characters’ futures. Rather than availing themselves of a godlike freedom to range omnitemporally over the past and future, Austen’s narrators are as limited to the present moment as her characters, discovering what will happen only as it happens. The introduction of this more “realistic” variant to extradiegetic narration, in combination with other seemingly minor features, will add up to produce a major stylistic difference. The earliest juvenilia also differ from Austen’s later practice in spatial mobility: in “Jack and Alice,” the second piece in “Volume the First,” “Chapter the Eighth” begins as follows: “While these affairs were transacting at Pammydiddle, Lucy was conquering every heart at Bath” (29). Again, from any other novelist such scene shifting in this casual “meanwhile back at the ranch” manner would go unremarked, as omniscient narrators are also typically omnipresent. But in Austen’s novels, the narrator is once more “realistically” limited by being spatially tethered to the protagonist: she rarely represents any scenes at which the heroine is not present, and even in those cases the heroine is always nearby. News from Bath can only be obtained by means of letters or visitors from Bath, or by putting her heroine in a coach and sending her there. By the end of the juvenilia, however, Austen has discarded omnitemporality and omnipresence from her narrative toolbox.

Even the component of mindreading is severely constrained in the novels: while the narrator is able to read many (though far from all) of her characters’ minds, characters themselves show the same ability (albeit with varying degrees of frequency and accuracy), which again helps naturalize the device in a relatively realistic manner. The juvenilia do offer numerous (deliberately) clumsy and intrusive examples of traditional omniscience: “Jack and Alice” includes such notably clunky formulae as “But as it may appear strange to my Readers, that so much worth and Excellence as he possessed should have conquered only [her heart], it will be necessary to inform them that the Miss Simpsons were defended from his Power by Ambition, Envy, and Self-admiration” (16), and “My Readers may perhaps imagine that after such a fracas, no intimacy could longer subsist between the Johnsons and Lady Williams, but in that they are mistaken” (20). Many theorists of narrative omniscience would concur with Paul Dawson that passages like these, which are numerous in the juvenilia but quite rare in the novels, demonstrate a fourth component of omniscience. As Dawson formulates the “taxonomic” issues “characteristic of omniscience,” “access to consciousness and spatiotemporal freedom” are joined by what is for him “the key feature of literary omniscience: the performance of narrative authority through intrusive narratorial commentary” (26). As is well known, Austen rejects this device almost entirely in the novels (especially after Northanger Abbey).

Instead, she will come to rely on two innovative techniques for what we might dub “familiarization” (by contrast with the Russian Formalist notion of defamiliarization) to naturalize these exercises of telepathy: for narrators, free indirect discourse (FID), which seeks to create the impression that the reader has more or less direct access to the character’s mind rather than through a firewall of narrative commentary; and for characters, the techniques of depicting characters’ Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities, by which they read each other’s minds rather than delegating all analysis of “hidden” motives and feelings to the narrator. The birth and growth of FID are of crucial interest not just for Austen scholars but for literary study generally; indeed, James Wood can claim that “the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style” (58) without fear of contradiction. Marilyn Butler identifies the origins of Austen’s eventual mastery of free indirect speech and internal monologue in two passages from “Catharine”:

Here is the first example of Jane Austen’s technique of comparing the evidence given to the mind with the mind’s insidious habit of perverting evidence: two planes of reality, the objective and subjective, respectively presented in dialogue and in a form which approaches internal monologue.

(171)

Butler’s own examples do not quite fit those categories, but she is certainly correct about free indirect speech and internal monologue appearing in the juvenilia. Charlotte, dealing with a “postilion, whose stupidity was amazing,” in “Frederic and Elfrida,” “with the greatest Condescension and Good Humor informed him that he was to drive to Portland Place” (8), rendering the direct speech “you are to drive” into indirect speech. In “Catharine” we are given several examples of true interior monologue, such as, “She must write well thought Kitty, to make a long Letter upon a Bonnet & Pelisse” (263). Austen is already using the convention of italics (i.e., underlining) to signal that this is not just a paraphrase of Kitty’s general thought, but that she is literally thinking those exact words, with just that emphasis, a device that Anne Waldron Neumann has identified as one of the key markers of FID: “indirectly reported speech or thought which quotes what we feel could be at least some of the words of the character’s actual utterances or thoughts” (366). But these examples of indirect speech and interior monologue, however often multiplied, do not amount to true FID, in which the character’s and narrator’s languages are blended.

It seems worth considering whether Austen may have found her way to FID by means of the irony that is so pervasive in the juvenilia. Louise Flavin, in a study of FID in Emma, has remarked a “consistent pattern” in which “speech is presented in free indirect form to invite ridicule of a character” (51–52), and the uses in the juvenilia all conform to that pattern. In “Jack and Alice,” for instance, “the Company retired...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• References and abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Austen’s juvenilia and sciences of the mind
• 2 Catherine’s education in mindreading in Northanger Abbey
• 3 Jane Austen and the perils of mental time travel
• 4 Mapping love in Mansfield Park
• 5 Austen agitated: feeling emotions in mixed media
• 6 Pride and Prejudice and social identity theory
• 7 “My Fanny”: the Price of play
• 8 Patterns of attention and memory in Jane Austen
• 9 Persuasion: lessons in sociocognitive understanding
• 10 Resilience and Jane Austen
• Notes on contributors
• Index