The Language of Jane Austen (Routledge Revivals)

Norman Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136599606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1972, Norman Page's seminal study of The Language of Jane Austen seeks to demonstrate both the exceptional nature and the degree of subtlety of Jane Austen's use of language.

As well as examining the staple items of her vocabulary and some of the characteristic patterns of her syntax, attention is paid to her use of dialogue and of the letter form. The aim of the study is not simply to analyse linguistic qualities for their own sake but to employ close verbal analysis to enrich the critical understanding of Jane Austen's novels.

CHAPTER ONE

STYLE IN JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS

Confronted with Jane Austen's novels, the reader is made repeatedly and perhaps disconcertingly aware of a disparity between subject-matter and significance. A heroine is involved, it may be, in committing herself to a line of conduct in relation to some issue trivial enough in itself—or so, at least, it is apt to seem. Catherine Morland declines an invitation to join the Thorpes on a pleasure jaunt; Elizabeth Bennet gets her feet wet in visiting her sick sister; Fanny Price resists her cousins’ attempts to involve her in amateur theatricals. Examples might be multiplied many times; and, on each occasion, the sense of momentous implications, of profound moral overtones, is unmistakable. One feels that crucial revelations hang upon these trifling matters. Saintsbury recognized this nearly sixty years ago when he observed, of Emma, that whilst the novel represents ‘the absolute triumph of that reliance on the strictly ordinary’, at the same time ‘every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put sub specie eternitatis by the sorcery of art’.¹ Now a preoccupation with ‘the strictly ordinary’ is perhaps no more than might be expected of a realistic novelist who was also a woman with a strong affection for family life, and who could write, in the same novel, of ‘all those little matters on which the daily happiness of private life depends’. All this may sound like putting an argument into the hands of the depredators. The individual and the local may seem to impose severe, even fatal, limitations, and the ‘strictly ordinary’ can quickly become synonymous with the unimportant. (One recalls that J. H. Newman complained of Emma that ‘The action is frittered away in over-little things’.²) Saintsbury's phrase ‘the sorcery of art’ provides a retort without taking us very far.

This disparity between surface and content, between apparent narrowness and shallowness and actual comprehensiveness and profundity, is of course a commonplace of Jane Austen criticism. It is paralleled by an exceptional range of evaluations of her status as a novelist, from those who find in her only a snobbish parochialism (and this group includes her fellow-novelists Mark Twain and D. H. Lawrence) to those who regard her as a major writer and a profound moralist. Her critics, and particularly her recent critics, have sought to account for the contradictory natures of the appearance and the reality in a variety of ways. One of the most familiar resolutions of the problem is in terms of her ironic sense, discussed by critics from Richard Simpson (1870) to D. W. Harding (1940) and Marvin Mudrick (1952). Other attempts to reconcile the contradiction have stressed the psychological or mythopoeic dimensions of her work, the way in which her domestic stories acquire deeper meaning through the suggestion of basic or archetypal situations. In the technique of the novel, she has been claimed as a precursor of James (a critical position curiously anticipated by the Cockney in Kipling's The Janeites), and, in her use of symbolism, has been compared to Kafka. Nor has the fact that she died before either Marx or Freud was born deterred others from detecting Marxist and Freudian elements in her work.³

The emphasis of the present study, however, is placed somewhat differently. It will be argued that the ‘triumph’ of the novels is to a large extent a triumph of style, and that the fact that they constantly transcend the level of cultivated gossip or conventional story-telling is to be explained partly in terms of certain qualities of language. The achievement was not only one of individual genius, of course. Short of pastiche, a writer can use only the resources made available to him by the language of his day; and part of Jane Austen's greatness lay in exploiting the distinctive strengths of the English language as she found it, and in resisting some of the influences which were at work to change it even as she wrote. At the same time she was an innovator too, notably in prose syntax and in narrative modes. If we take into account the difference between her subject-matter (that is, her apparent field of interest) and the inner meaning of her novels as signalled, very largely, by the particular features of their language, we can begin to understand the contradictory judgments which have been passed upon them. For those who see only the surface—the morning visit and the ball, the dinner party and the picnic— her work suffers from damaging limitations; on the other hand, her power to suggest, through her style, the major issues inherent in minor incidents justifies F. R. Leavis's claim to find in her an ‘intense moral preoccupation’.⁴

To return to the point from which this chapter started: how is this sense of the far-reaching importance of the local and the ephemeral conveyed? Largely, it will be suggested, by stylistic means: it is Jane Austen's finely-controlled use of language which brings to the reader's attention the true import of episodes and conversations apparently slight in themselves. Not that the task of recovering her meaning fully and accurately is always an easy one, involving as it does a willingness to accept her linguistic resources—resources both narrower in range and more sharpedged in quality than our own—at her valuation. Certainly her achievement as a stylist has not been generally recognized, perhaps because individuality of style has often been equated with eccentricity. To some extent this has been part of a widespread indifference to the language of fiction, a neglect to which there were until very recently only a few exceptions. Even that arch-Austenite R. W. Chapman doubted whether she ‘was conscious of having a style of her own. Outside her dialogue it is not highly individual; it is just the ordinary correct English that, as Johnson had said, “everyone now writes”.’⁵ There is a half-truth in this statement, for admittedly Jane Austen is not a stylist in the not yet extinct sense of being highly idiosyncratic, as are (to give instances at random) Lamb and Carlyle and even her favourite Dr Johnson. Her language does not habitually draw attention to itself: her attitude to style is too critical to permit ‘fine writing’, and her satirical sense too strong to permit elaborate effects. What is in question often involves no more than the use of an unexpected word or phrase, or a temporary departure from normal syntax. But a concept of style which permits us even to observe of a writer that ‘he has no style’ is excessively narrow and takes into account only the most insistent features. The proper retort to Chapman's comment is that Jane Austen's English was in fact written not by everyone but by none but herself. Reading her predecessors and contemporaries in the novel—Fanny Burney and Mrs Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Mrs Inchbald—one is struck first by the stylistic elements they have in common with Jane Austen, and next by the subtle but important differences. There is a sense in which they share a common idiom, and especially a common vocabulary; but it remains equally true that a passage from any other writer could not be attributed to her. For her prose is generally of unusual distinction, an instrument both firm and flexible; and the variety of her effects is much wider than is often assumed. Many comments on her style, indeed, seem to be based on a recollection that leaves many passages of her prose out of account.

To take a single example: she is traditionally regarded as an anti-Romantic, a chronological anomaly standing perhaps somewhat timidly aside from the mainstream of the literary movements of her time. Such a verdict ignores many short but striking passages in her novels which reveal both a sensitive response to the beauty of landscape and a skill in conveying such feelings in language. It is true that, although she was a contemporary of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott, when she uses the word romantic it is most often in the eighteenth-century sense of ‘extravagant’ or ‘foolishly unrealistic’. Yet what could be more romantic, in the Wordsworthian sense, than her description of the coastal scenery of the Lyme Regis district in Persuasion?

… a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation;—the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme, and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood. (P, 95–6)

Some of the ideas of this passage are remarkably similar to those of the earlier Romantic poets: the sense of the passing of time, the taste for seclusion and for ‘sitting in unwearied contemplation’, the stress on first-hand experience and on the value of revisiting a scene, are essentially Wordsworthian. Furthermore, the language is in places close to that of Romantic poetry: not only the phrase ‘unwearied contemplation’, which might have come straight from the Lyrical Ballads, but the epithets sweet, wonderful, lovely, and the description of ‘green chasms between romantic rocks’ with its striking echo of Coleridge's Kubla Khan.⁶ A novelist who can write like this, as well as with cool analysis and epigrammatic wit, can hardly be justly accused of narrowness of style or sensibility.

All of which seems sufficient justification for embarking on a detailed exploration of certain aspects of her language. The present study does not pretend to say the last word about Jane Austen's style: since, like all great writers, she has not one style but many, this would in any case be hardly possible. But it sets out to investigate the words she uses, particularly the staple items of her vocabulary through which she assesses character and motive—those nouns and epithets which indicate some basic aspects of human nature and human behaviour, and of which many recur so strikingly both within a given novel and within her work as a whole. After a brief consideration of the syntax of her prose, it turns to her use of dialogue: both the linguistic techniques of its presentation and the use of speech to reveal character. A short chapter on letter-writing is followed by a conclusion which attempts to define the peculiar quality of her style by setting it in relationship to some of her predecessors and successors in the English novel. My aim has been not so much to use the novels as a quarry for linguistic or philological material, however intrinsically fascinating, as to endeavour to reach a deeper understanding of their meaning and artistry as works of literature, and to suggest that it may be not only appropriate but also often illuminating to approach them through a study of their style, as a complement to more traditional methods. It goes without saying that there are other novelists for whom a similar approach is possible and rewarding.

Not only are the novels of Jane Austen written in language of conscious precision and exceptional subtlety: the early novels in particular are to a striking extent about language, in that the use and abuse of words is a frequently recurring theme. Style looks inward upon itself: not only does the authorial voice draw the reader's attention to linguistic issues, but some of the characters observe themselves, and each other, in the act of using language. In the later novels the interest is less overt—the concern with language now being implicit in the variety and originality of the methods through which character and situation are presented— but Jane Austen is still in the habit of stressing the attitudes to language held by Mr Knightley or Mary Crawford. An account of some aspects of the role of language in the juvenile writings and the six major novels will, therefore, form an appropriate introduction to the more detailed and specialized discussion of the chapters that follow. What is offered in the rest of this chapter is in no sense an attempt at full-dress appreciations or interpretations of these works: a task that is beyond the scope of this book, and also one that has often been undertaken at length, and will no doubt be returned to by fresh generations of critics. My concern at this stage must be to single out, and briefly to identify and illustrate, some leading features of the language of Jane Austen's fiction, and to suggest in the process that each book possesses certain distinctive linguistic qualities which help to determine its particular nature and effects. Inevitably many questions will be raised at this point for which fuller consideration must be deferred to a later chapter.

The juvenilia occupy a substantial portion of the volume in Chapman's fine edition which is devoted to her minor writings: the Brontes apart, probably no other major English novelist provides us with a similar opportunity to study the early development of attitudes which find fuller expression in the work intended for publication. They are, in the main, more openly satirical and parodic in intention than the later writings; although the latter certainly retain something of the same spirit, it is not manifested with the exuberance and the delighted exaggeration of Love and Freindship or the short tales in Volume the First. There is, as might be expected, a difference in stylistic qualities which corresponds to this, the early writings showing a marked fondness for devices which become much more infrequent in the later work. Some of these devices are

(a) puns, as when a domestically-minded character in Lesley Castle observes, of a more artistically-minded sister, ‘ “She loved drawing Pictures, and I drawing Pullets.” ’ (MW, 129)

(b) zeugma: in the same work an erring wife is described as departing ‘in company with Danvers and dishonour’. (MW, III)

(c) comic alliteration, already illustrated twice. Elsewhere, a heroine speaks of being ‘celebrated both in Public, in Private, in Papers, and in Printshops’ (MW, 136), and a more extreme example is the dedication of A Collection of Letters (MW, 150).

(d) comic similes: one character is ‘as White as a Whipt syllabub), another ‘as cool as a cream-cheese (MW, 113, 130)

(e) the use of French words and phrases current in fashionable society: bon-mot, éclaircissement, éclat, entrée, etc.

(f) parody of Johnsonian syntax, in such balanced sentences as ‘ “Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath and of the stinking fish of Southampton.” ’ (MW, 79)

(g) the frequent use of colloquial words and idioms: two tall girls are described as ‘such tremendous knock-me-down figures', one young lady tells another to ‘set her cap at’ a young man; a dance is a ‘hop’, and so on. (MW, 127, 122, 158)

The author's keen sense of the absurd encourages a linguistic adventurousness that was to be very largely suppressed in the more fundamentally serious productions of later years, in which her awareness of the comic possibilities of language finds an outlet mainly in the speech of the foolish and the vulgar. An important consideration is that these early stories and sketches were written not for publication but for private consumption within the family circle; in later years, the letters were to retain many traces of the linguistic high spirits that could not be admitted into the fiction except upon special conditions. The normal decorum of her novelistic style permits departures from accepted standards to serve well-defined purposes: to indicate a particular kind of speaker, for example, or sometimes to mark a moment of special intensity. Thus, remembering Johnson's dictum that ‘good prose should be native in character’, Jane Austen reserves continental importations for the speech of the vulgar and the pretentious: they are fit for a Mrs Elton but not for an Emma Woodhouse.

In Northanger Abbey, the parodic spirit persists in the burlesque of the Gothic no...