Jane Austen’s Art of Rudeness

JANE AUSTEN'S ART OF RUDENESS EDD WINFIELD PARKS T HE comedy of manners is most entertaining when it is generously spiced with iII-manners. Jane Austen seems to have realized this instinctively, for she uses social rudeness as a motivating dramatic force often, and builds one novel largely around it. Her people live within, if not always by, a strict code of manners; without some such code, rudeness could not exist. Practically all novelists who are also social commentators recognize this truism and take advantage of it for incidental effects, but Miss Austen goes farther: in Pride and Prejudice she makes rudeness a part of the novel's fabric. The professional Janeites, I understand, rank Pride and Prejudice last among Miss Austen's books on the ground that it is primarily a witty Cinderella story and that Elizabeth Bennet in becoming Mr. Darcy's sweetheart became also the world's sweetheart. The nonJaneite may well admit the partial truth of this judgment, though perhaps murmuring that the Cinderella theme is as, old and as new as story-telling, but he also feels that the dramatic power and artistic integrity of Pride and Prejudice have been underrated. In it, particularly , social rudeness has been lifted to the plane of fine art. If there is softness in the love story, there is spice and bite in the relations between characters. For the rudeness does not exist as extraneous diversion (in both meanings of the word) or simply as wit; it reveals character, advances the action, and is integral to the story. It does so because the combatants, if not invariably equal, are at least worthily matched. The infractions are in a sense minor. There is nothing to equal the act of inhospitality in Northanger Abbey when General Tilney orders Catherine Morland out of his house immediately, after discovering on a journey that she is not an heiress and therefore not worthy of his son. This episode is integral to the action as Miss Austen had planned it, but it has pathos rather than power. Catherine is not an antagonist but a sacrificial victim. Her father is too far away to protect her, and she is too helpless to protect herself. Most important of all, the extreme haste and high-handedness seem out of focus in a man who values family consequence as much as money or power; the same effect could have been secured by less drastic orders. But in that case the story might never have been properly resolved, since an easy-going Henry Tilney might not have been forced into rebelling against his father and championing the cause of Catherine. 381 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, vol. XX, no. 4, July, 1951 382 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Elizabeth Bennet needs no champion. When she meets undue pride with prejudice, she meets it effectively. At the first meeting her prince charming seems utterly lacking in charm; when she is sitting out a dance and the idle Darcy is requested to dance with her, he looks her over critically and responds: "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." Elizabeth is not crushed. She employs levity and ridicule so effectively on later occasions that the genteel novelist Miss Mitford deplored "in every word of Elizabeth, the entire want of taste which could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine as the beloved of Darcy." In a freer age we appreciate the light touch and the sarcastic rejoinder. The meek may inherit the earth, but it is men and women de bon air who give life and liveliness to the novel of social manners. Elizabeth has this quality. She did not belong to the fainting school of femininity so common to the novels that Jane Austen satirized, and so little common in actual life; as G. K. Chesterton remarked, she "received two proposals from two very confident and even masterful admirers; and she certainly did not faint. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did." Pride she assuredly has, and possibly impertinence, but she lives up to her...