Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision. by David Monaghan; Jane Austen and the FrenchRevolution. by Warren RobertsReview by: Thomas LockwoodNineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jun., 1981), pp. 99-102Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044557 .

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Reviews 99

DAVID MONAGHAN, Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision. London: Macmillan, 1980. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1980. Pp. viii + 176. ?12.00. $24.00.

WARREN RoBERTs, Jane Austen and the French Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1979. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979. Pp. xi + 224. ?12.00. $18.95.

While there is no special link between these two recent books about Jane Austen, and I have not assumed that they can be taken to illus- trate any new trend, it is still hard not to notice that both books ap- proach Jane Austen from nonliterary directions (social history, history of ideas) and that both approaches seem crude and disruptive for a writer whose expressive medium is as delicately elliptical as Jane Aus- ten's. Disciplines other than language-and-literature may be capable of providing useful terms for a discussion of Jane Austen, obviously; but the history of such ventures in Jane Austen criticism is troubled and barren, partly no doubt because her material is just not as adaptable to those systems of interpretation as the novels of Defoe or Richardson or Dickens. There are exceptions, as in the books by Alistair Duckworth or Marilyn Butler, but these show not merely that the job is possible but also, more tellingly, what tact and watchfulness it requires if some vital characteristic in Jane Austen's way of making her meanings felt is not to be distorted by the heavy machinery necessary to discover and draw out sociological, economic, or intellectual inferences for exhibi- tion.

David Monaghan begins Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision with the unexceptionable idea that Jane Austen's subject is "polite social relationships between members of the landed classes within the context of the village and the great house" (p. 5) and that such a sub- ject in her time is not evasive or escapist but is felt to be of central im- portance. So far so good. Monaghan proposes a study of "the formal social occasion" in Jane Austen's novels, and though the term is never well enough defined it seems to include any sort of gathering or occasion of a decidedly ritualized form: balls, dinners, evening parties, and visits are examples he names. An introduction on "The Novels and Their World" is followed by six chapters, one given to each of the novels from Northanger Abbey to Persuasion.

We depend mainly on the introduction for an understanding of the thesis being advanced, but we get from it only an unconcentrated survey of the importance of manners in Jane Austen's society-manners considered as an idealized expression of moral character-followed by an uncertain application to Jane Austen, in whom the formal social occasion is revealing because "it is largely through manners that Jane Austen works out the question of social morality and power" (p. 10).

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100 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

It seems to me that Monaghan doesn't worry nearly enough about how and why, exactly, Jane Austen's novels should be approached in this way. How does it help to think of the picnic at Box Hill as a "formal social occasion"? How will it not help? Why should Jane Aus- ten be treated as a writer who seeks to "demonstrate her thesis that the fate of society depends on the ability of the landed classes to live up to their ideal of concern for others" (p. 7)? I am bothered less by the thesis being attributed to her than by the hopeful assumptiona that this way of looking at Jane Austen's pages-she hard at work demonstrating a thesis-will give us faithful views of her practice and purposes as a writer. I don't mean that such an approach should be prohibited but only that any approach needs to be questioned at least as vigorously as it is being pursued.

The practical results of Monaghan's approach are disappointing, as he is repeatedly led into obvious restatements of Jane Austen's mean- ing, synthetically formulated in the language of the critical thesis. "Wh,ereas Tilney employs conversational trivialities to express his awareness of the needs of others, Isabella makes them serve as a source of self-glorification" (p. 22): surely this is true only in a highly artificial sense-it could equally be said that Tilney employs language to express his awareness of others whereas Isabella uses language for self- glorification. Would this be saying anything? Or to take a different example, Monaghan refers to the end of Emma, where Jane Austen writes: "They sat down to tea-the same party round the same table- how often it had been collected!-and how often had her eyes fallen on the same shrubs in the lawn, and observed the same beautiful effect of the western sun!-But never in such a state of spirits, never in any- thing like it." About this Monaghan says that "the tea ceremony in which Emma takes part is a familiar one but, by having involved her- self in the kind of responsible change that is possible without breaking prescribed limits, she is able to apprehend it as something new" (p. 141). My objection to this interpretation, which I dwell on as represen-- tative, is that it is critical manhandling of the material-describing the event and the character as if Jane Austen were taking the same sort of interest in the scene that the critic has, namely as a formal social oc- casion; while if anything her interest here is quite otherwise, and the tea ceremony, like the shrubbery and the sunlight, have importance mainly as they reflect Emma's new feelings. Whatever else this scene is about, I would not have thought it could be Emma's apprehension of the tea ceremony as something new.

At times the roundabout obviousness of the conclusions produced by Monaghan's method and focus is astounding. Mr. Collins "shows little awareness of Christian charity," Monaghan observes, indeed is without "any of the proper qualifications to be vicar of Rosings," and so "we must assume that Lady Catherine's decision to entrust him with the spiritual life of the community under her charge was based en-

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Reviews 101

tirely on his ability to offer her unstinted approval.... This tells us something very important about how affairs are conducted at Rosings" (pp. 82-83). Such victories over common sense would be less annoying if it weren't that Monaghan also shows himself capable of real insight, as in the good account he gives (pp. 117-20) of the dullness of life for Emma, whom he pictures sensitively as the creature of a complicated sort of emptiness for which she both is and isn't responsible. But the muddled thesis and repeatedly false judgments of critical significance largely defeat this book.

Warren Roberts gives "the impact of the French Revolution on Austen's thinking and writing" as his subject in Jane Austen and the French Revolution: a surprising subject, he allows (rightly), since "Austen never referred to the Revolution in any of her novels, at least directly, nor did she do so in any of her extant correspondence" i(p. 4). Later Roberts says, with the same cheery candor, that "the main source for trying to reconstruct Austen's response to the Revolution is her fiction." The letters are of no use: "The only fact about the Revolution that one can glean from her letters is that she never discussed it" (p. 18). But it turns out that the fiction of the 1790s, the crucial years as far as this matter is concerned, isn't of much use either, as only two works, "Catharine" and Northanger Abbey,"show an awareness of the French Revolution and its impact on English life, at least insofar as I have been able to determine " (p. 18). But as these concessions mount up the subject melts away. If Roberts himself can't determine more than this in favor of his subject-however conscientiously the absence of relevant evidence is reported-then what is the book about?

The fact is that there is no subject, and this is simply not a very worthwhile book. It contains four chapters, on "Politic,s," "War," "Religion," and "Women and the Family," in each of which Roberts begins with a question about Jane Austen's response to the issue under study in that chapter-the Revolution, Evangelicalism, Mary Woll- stonecraft-and then reviews at length the historical background, al- together without reference to Jane Austen or her novels, concluding with the most tenuous and indefensible sort of speculation about Jane Austen's "views" on these topics of concern. But of course she left no record of such views, and so Roberts has to make do. An ironic allusion to troop movements in one of Jane Austen's letters to Cassandra (30 August 1805) is the basis of an eight-page discussion from which we learn (1) that "Austen knew about England's struggle with France" and (2) that she was making fun of her neighbors for worrying more about the inconvenience the troop movements might cause to them. selves than about the possible French invasion such movements could imply (pp. 86-87). The scene in Northanger Abbey in which Henry Tilney disabuses Eleanor of the idea of a riot being about to happen in London is taken as evidence of "Austen's awareness of the apprehension that gripped England during the 1790s" (p. 27), which it may be but

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102 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

only in a quite meaninglessly generalized way. Or this: "There is not one reference to Wollstonecraft in Austen's writings, either her fiction or correspondence. Since most of Austen's letters have been loist or were destroyed it is entirely possible that she did comment on this con- troversial author; if so, her remarks undoubtedly expressed censure or disapproval" (p. 156). Of such stuff is this book made. It is also filled with unreassuring mistakes, as "John" for "George" Knightley (p. 37), Mr. Gardiner "a lawyer from London" (p. 49), "Dracy" (p. 48), "D. H. Harding" (p. 69), and so on.

THOMAS LOCKWOOD University of Washington

ARLIN TURNER, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Pp. xii + 457. $20.00. ?13.00.

JAMES R. MELLOW, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Pp. xiii + 684. $19.95.

Despite his uncontested status as a classic American writer, Nathan- iel Hawthorne has not until now been the subject of a full-scale, mod- ern, scholarly biography. Julian Hawthorne's two-volume Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884) remained the standard work until Randall Stewart's Nathaniel Hawthorne (1948). But although Stewart was thoroughly familiar with the large amount of new information on Hawthorne which had come to light in the twentieth century-had in- deed been responsible for some of it-his approach was summary, with sparse documentation. Apparently he assumed that all his readers would know the details as thoroughly as he did. Now, ironically, two big and thorough works have appeared within six months of each other. One of them, by the late Arlin Turner, is the culmination of a distinguished career devoted to American literary scholarship; the other, by James R. Mellow, is the work of a professional biographer who intends to write three more books about nineteenth-century liter- ary New Englanders. Both of these books fill the scholarly need satis- factorily, though each has different strengths and emphases. Neither surmounts some of the vexing problems that Hawthorne's life presents to the would-be chronicler.

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. His father, a ship's captain, was mostly at sea and died abroad when Hawthorne was only four. The youth grew up in the household of his mother's extended family, the Mannings, who jointly sent him to Bowdoin Col- lege in 1821. After graduating in 1825 he returned to Salem, where for twelve years he lived in the family home with his mother and two sis- ters, working at his craft. Some of his more ambitious literary efforts

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