The Language of Jane Austen

Joe Bray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319721613
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319721620
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Joe Bray's careful analysis of Jane Austen's stylistic techniques reveals that the genius of her writing is far from effortless; rather he makes the case for her as a meticulous craftswoman and a radical stylistic pioneer. Countering those who have detected in her novels a dominant, authoritative perspective, Bray begins by highlighting the complex, ever-shifting and ambiguous nature of the point of view through which her narratives are presented. This argument is then advanced through an exploration of the subtle representation of speech, thought and writing in Austen's novels. Subsequent chapters investigate and challenge the common critical associations of Austen's style with moral prescriptivism, ideas of balance and harmony, and literal as opposed to figurative expression. The book demonstrates that the wit and humour of her fiction is derived instead from a complex and subtle interplay between different styles. This compelling reassessment of Austen's language will offer a valuable resource for students and scholars of stylistics, English literature and language and linguistics.

© The Author(s) 2018

Joe BrayThe Language of Jane AustenLanguage, Style and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72162-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Joe Bray¹

(1)

School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

End Abstract

Jane Austen’s hold on the public imagination shows no sign of loosening. Recent adaptations on the big screen include Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship (2016) (in fact an adaptation of Lady Susan) starring Kate Beckinsale, and Burr Steers’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (also 2016), an adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 novel. At the time of writing a film of Sanditon, based on Marie Dobbs’s continuation, is forthcoming, with Charlotte Rampling as Lady Denham. The plethora of film and TV versions over the past twenty years was sparked by two 1995 productions: the film of Persuasion directed by Roger Michell starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hands, and the Andrew Davies six-episode adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for the small screen (usually identified by one particular scene involving a scantily-clad Colin Firth). As Rachel Brownstein observed in 2015: ‘Especially since the Jane-o-mania of the 1990s, which was driven by dramatizations made by Hollywood and the BBC, the novelist’s name has become a household word—signifying, usually, a logic-defying combination of primness and sexiness, period romance and feminism, hard-headed materialism, wacky fantasy, and cutting-edge naughtiness’ (2015: 405). To this list can most recently be added, perhaps most logic-defyingly of all, alt-right politics (see Wright 2017).

While adaptations continue to abound, there remains a lack of critical attention to what exactly makes Austen’s language and style susceptible to such continuing diverse re-interpretation. Welcoming the reissue in 2015 of Norman Page’s (1972) study The Language of Jane Austen Brownstein notes that:

Most of the serious literary-critical commentary on Austen has focused on the plot—the marriage plot—and, most recently, the social and historical context of her life and work. In 2015, one can still say as Page said in 1971, that style, “with only a very exceptions, has been generally neglected”. (2015: 405)

This may be in part because of the prevailing view for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Austen has no style, that her writing is an effortless product of her genius. Her brother Henry Austen set the tone for this line of thought, famously observing in his ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ which was included in the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, that ‘every thing came finished from her pen; for on all subjects she had ideas as clear as her expressions were well chosen’ (2006: 311). Her most prominent twentieth-century editor 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”’ (1948: 209). This traditional, still widely-held view perhaps explains why Austen’s language and style often continues to receive at best a passing comment within more plot-driven and historicist criticism.¹

Since the increased focus on language within literary studies in the UK and the US from roughly the early 1970s onwards there have of course been exceptions, and along with Page (1972) mentioned above, Austen’s style has been the subject of notable investigation in, amongst other books, Phillips (1970), Burrows (1987), Stokes (1991), Miller (2003) and Morini (2009), to each of which this study is greatly indebted, as indeed it also is to other articles and chapters focusing on her language, which will be referenced throughout. For long the only accepted authoritative texts, Chapman’s editions have recently been superseded by those published first by Penguin in the late 1990s (under the general editorship of Kathryn Sutherland) and then by Cambridge University Press in the 2000s (under the general editorship of Janet Todd). These two superb editorial projects have shed further light on Austen’s practices of composition. Analysis of the surviving manuscripts, especially the unfinished The Watsons and Sanditon, shows the great care she took over style, and provides compelling counter-evidence to the claim that her writing came effortlessly (see Sutherland 2005a; Bree et al. 2013).²

Attention to Austen as a meticulous craftswoman should not detract though from broader consideration of how the sparkling wit and humour of her writing, which continues to enchant the popular imagination, is created. Those who have paid attention to her style have tended to take at face-value her famous comment in a letter to her nephew James Edward Austen in December 1816 on the loss of two and half chapters of his ongoing novel, which she playfully insists she has not ‘purloined’:

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of variety & Glow?—How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour? (Le Faye 2011: 337)

From this comment has arisen the impression of Austen a painstaking miniaturist. In his influential review of Emma in the Quarterly Review in October 1815, Sir Walter Scott notes that ‘the peculiar tact’ with which Austen presents characters ‘reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader’ (Southam 1968: 67). Contemporary critics have made a similar analogy; in her recent biography Paula Byrne, quoting from Scott’s review, observes that ‘the “correct and striking representation” of scenes from “ordinary life”, rendered with precision, tact and minute detail: this is indeed the essence of Austen’s art, as it is of Dutch realism in painting’ (2013: 9). As Ruth Bernard Yeazell notes, this comparison of the novel with Dutch realist painting, a common move in the period, has a double edge: ‘the perceived limitations of painting—especially painting of a certain kind—are very much to the point: to the degree that nineteenth-century viewers saw Dutch painting as the “mere” recording of material detail, the apparent stasis and meaninglessness of that detail could be at once attractive and disquieting’ (2008: 10). In relation to Austen in particular, this emphasis on ‘precision, tact and minute detail’ does not capture the full picture, as Anthony Mandal points out: ‘this interpretation, while acknowledging the subtlety of Austen’s style, occludes much of the vibrancy and range that her works also evidence. One need only read her Juvenilia in order to be struck by the rich and dynamic language that is natural to Austen, and which is rendered only in more nuanced terms in her mature writings’ (2005: 23).

This study aims to give an analysis of this richness and dynamism, from the early juvenilia through to the unfinished Sanditon. The second chapter starts with what this book argues is the distinctive feature of her style: the complex, ever-shifting and ambiguous nature of the point of view through which the narrative is presented. Throughout this and subsequent chapters, claims of a single dominant, centralising, authoritative point of view in Austen’s fiction are scrutinised and challenged, with analysis of specific examples consistently demonstrating instead a subtle flexibility and mobility of perspective. This second chapter considers the consequences of this circulatory point of view for the notion of the all-knowing or ‘omniscient’ narrator, often seen as central to the realist tradition with which Austen is often associated. Emma in particular dramatizes some of the difficulties with this concept and the way in which it is complicated by the prevalence of free indirect discourse in particular.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 advance this argument further, concentrating on how the subtle representation of speech, thought and writing enables individual characters’ perspectives to infiltrate, often fleetingly and flickeringly, the third-person narrative of Austen’s novels. While the three respective variants of free indirect discourse: free indirect speech, and free indirect thought and free indirect writing, are each shown to be crucial, each chapter argues that the dazzling, kaleidoscopic effects of Austen’s style are frequently created by rapid alternations between categories of speech, thought and writing representation, and the ambiguities between them, rather than by the application of any one single device. Those critics that have focused on Austen’s language have often concentrated on her use of free indirect thought (which has been designated by a variety of names), to the exclusion of all other techniques. These three chapters show instead how the sparkling wit and subtle humour of her writing are generated by her skilful handling of a wide range of techniques for representing speech, thought and writing, and the dexterity with which they are combined, and moved between, within the same passage.

The remaining chapters turn to three central debates surrounding Austen’s style, in each case interrogating a commonly-held critical assumption. Chapter 6 concerns the connection which critics have frequently detected in her work between the incorrect, so-called vulgar use of language and a lack of moral worth. Paying particular attention to those characters often described as vulgar by Austen critics, this chapter suggests that colloquial, imprecise language use is not necessarily linked to moral degeneracy in her writing, and can in fact be an indication of warm-hearted goodness. The chapter argues instead that there are dangers in Austen’s fiction in being too correct and fastidious over language, and that linguistic prescriptivism and snobbery is a frequent target of satire.

Chapter 7 takes another critical assumption, that Austen’s style was heavily influenced by the balanced prose of her supposed eighteenth-century master, Samuel Johnson, and suggests again that the picture may be more complicated. While the harmonious, perfectly balanced sentence can indeed be found in her fiction, another looser, less regulated style is apparent too, especially on those occasions towards the ends of novels when the narrator intervenes in the first person, apparently to tie up potentially problematic plot points. Although the emergence of this less orderly style may partly be explained by a straining to justify improbable changes of heart (for example in General Tilney changing his mind and allowing his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Point of View
• 3. The Representation of Speech
• 4. The Representation of Thought
• 5. The Representation of Writing
• 6. Morality and Vulgarity
• 7. Balance and Disharmony
• 8. Literal and Figurative
• 9. Conclusion: After Reading
• Back Matter