Sunday, September 1, 2019

Back to the Classics #23

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic by a Woman. I was going to read Persuasion for this category, but decided to hold off. I want to put off having read all six of Jane Austen’s novels. Like a kid doesn’t want to open the last present under the tree because once done, Christmas will be over. I tell myself not to be silly, re-reading always offers pleasures. I remain irrationally resentful about knowing what’s going to happen, something Austen would not like. She believed in reason, not illogical procrastination, based on anxiety about what cannot be helped. I completely get why certain readers are crazy – literally, zealous and crazy -  about Jane Austen though she herself would have rolled her eyes about such unbridled enthusiasm.

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

I approached this one with trepidation. I assumed a first-novel wouldn’t be as sparkling as Pride and Prejudice, as shrewd as Sense and Sensibility, as thoughtful as Emma, or as profound as Mansfield Park.

But I was wrong to be concerned this novel might be light-weight. A 17-year-old travels and by having adventures she grows. She learns that the people who prattle about propriety and civility are the ones that likely have the ethics of alley cats. She learns that being socially agreeable is one thing, but surrendering your values to get along with others won’t do. She learns it’s okay to feel ashamed of your irrationalities and silly assumptions, but you need to move on without fussing. Austen thinks living a flourishing life is important and identifying our own values helps us deal with troubles, without which we would become slack, lazy, soft, and fragile.

I was also concerned about liking this novel because I had heard it was a parody of gothic novels, a genre in which I’m not deeply read (only Uncle Silas comes to mind). I was afraid of not recognizing the “had she but knownisms” that were being burlesqued.

In fact, I realized we all know gothic conventions even if we’ve never read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Austen includes these touchstones as familiar to us as orange and black for Halloween: set in a remote castle or country house or abbey; the damsel in distress; old papers in hidden desk drawers; a male under the burden of stress or guilt or a secret; and that old stand-by, stormy weather.

I think this message of this novel is to keep reading novels. Austen subverts the gothic conventions to encourage the reader to come off it and get real, get something more substantial out of reading than mere surprise, wonder, fear, and foreboding. She has her characters use the word “amazement” and “amazingly” to show what noodles they are, reading novels just to get sensational feelings.

She lived at a time when many otherwise smart people thought novels were trash. She had to advocate for novel reading to prove novels could be works of art, worthy of serious-minded attention. She has our hero say, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

Austen wasn’t a Victorian – she used the vigorous blunt language of Fielding and Smollet – and she means novel-haters are choosing to be stupid, arrogantly assuming they already have a real good bead on life. The powerful and influential have got everything covered - just look at the world they made.

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