Limitations and Definitions

Jane Austen was fond of dancing and excelled in it ("Biographical Notice," NA 5). She often writes about it in her letters. It is the sort of thing one might expect, that enjoyment and ability in moving with significant grace in good time in a restricted space. In the earliest letter of hers that survives, written when she was twenty, she says, "I danced twice with Warren last night, and once with Mr. Charles Watkins, and, to my inexpressible astonishment, I entirely escaped John Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it, however" (L 2). There is a lot of action going on in that small space. Even more important, three years later we find that she did dance with John Lyford, on an evening when she had what she calls an odd set of partners. "I had a very pleasant evening, however," she tells her sister, "though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it" (L 56). She does not fight for escape but makes the best use of the conditions, and if that's not the whole of art at least that is where it begins and that is where it ends. We need not fret or labor to refute them who think her novels limited because their dimensions are limited. It was never a problem that bothered her. She knew better. Those lines, forever quoted — about the little bit of ivory two inches wide and the work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor — are not a serious account of her own art; they are quite other, an ironic contrast of her chapters with those of her schoolboy nephew who, in her affectionate fun, writes "strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow" (468–69). She knew that she had made the choice not of weakness and the merely female, but the choice of difficulty, originality, and meaning. She had always known the absurdity of an art that thinks it is strong and full and large because it tries to run in a large world.

Before she was fifteen she wrote that economic and wicked parody entitled "Love and Freindship," where the heroine of the "novel" begins her account with this: "My Father was a native of Ireland and an inhabitant of Wales; my Mother was the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an italian Opera-girl — I was born in Spain and received my Education at a Convent in France" (MW 77). That is nicely done. It spears with delight and efficiency the wordy pretensions of the romance to move us rapidly through wide kingdoms of life, and it suggests that the origin is not quite legitimate. In fact, in a romance the characters don't know where they are or when they are. They cannot handle space and time. "Our neighbourhood was small," the heroine tells her correspondent, "for it consisted only of your Mother." Well, that is small, though "small" doesn't seem to be quite the right word; but then what could be when "neighbourhood" has made the whole situation irretrievable? This one neighbor, however, seems to have been a valuable friend to expand the heroine's vision, because "Isabel had seen the World." That is, "She had passed 2 Years at one of the first Boarding-schools in London; had spent a fortnight in Bath and had supped one night in Southampton." Time and space seem to have evaporated in the course of that sounding sentence. We cannot have much faith in the wisdom Isabel can bring from these experiences, whether it be the first glorious generality — "Beware of the insipid Vanities and idle Dissipations of the Metropolis of England"; or the second and less grand admonition — "Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath"; or the concluding highly specific and personal memory — "and of the stinking fish of Southampton" (78–79). The heroine fears that there is no probability of her ever tasting these dissipations, luxuries, or fish, doomed as she is to waste her youth and beauty in a humble home in Wales, when there comes a violent knocking on the outward door of her rustic cot. This brings on a quick-fire dialogue, as the family discuss interminably the need for urgent action — "'Shall we go now?' (said my Mother,) 'The sooner the better.' (answered he.) 'Oh! let no time be lost' (cried I.)" and so forth (79–80). It is the hero, who, as one might expect, has "lossed" his way. He has, in noble manliness, scorned his father and has mounted his horse to set forward to his aunt's house. His father's house is situated in Bedfordshire, he says, his aunt's in Middlesex, "and tho' I flatter myself with being a tolerable proficient in Geography, I know not how it happened, but I found myself entering this beautifull Vale which I find is in South Wales" (81). That young man needs one more lesson before he is tolerable.

The simple geography joke is a Jane Austen kind of joke. She uses it again in "Catharine" (MW 199–200) and it turns up much later in Harriet Smith's question, "Will Mr. Frank Churchill pass through Bath as well as Oxford?" Frank Churchill is on his way from Yorkshire to Surrey, but Harriet's mind is on Bath because that is where Mr. Elton is, Mr. Elton whom she loved in vain and who is now with his bride in Bath. Emma, who had been hoping that the coming of Frank Churchill would put an end to the talk of Mr. Elton, is disappointed. "But neither geography nor tranquillity could come all at once, and Emma was now in a humour to resolve that they should both come in time" (E 189). It is amusing when a weak-minded female like Harriet has difficulty locating herself and others (and she is not the only one of her kind in Jane Austen), but even in an instance like this there is evidently something more at work than an absence of elementary information. A correct knowledge of geography — to know where one is — and tranquillity of the right sort — to live satisfactorily where one is — seem to be related virtues; both, if they come, come as earned acquisitions, in time. Harriet is ignorant and because she is ignorant she wistfully inquires after a geography that will meet her desires. With varying degrees of foolishness and awareness there are many characters in Jane Austen who do the same thing, reshape the space and time they inhabit to make it a creation of their own wishes. In that same scene of Harriet's there is Mr. Weston, a goodhearted man but one who is always reinterpreting what happens so that "every thing has turned out exactly as we could wish" (188); Mr. Weston is making the days and hours of Frank's visit, and the distances, what will best meet his idea of the happiest combinations. At a later point in the novel he makes the difference between Frank at London and Frank at Richmond the whole difference between seeing him always and seeing him never. Richmond is only nine miles and what were nine miles to a young man? — an hour's ride (so he says), where London is sixteen miles — nay eighteen — it must be a full eighteen and that's a serious obstacle. Before he is finished London might as well be in Yorkshire but Richmond is the very distance for easy intercourse. Better than nearer (317–18).

There is less innocence in this mode when a fool like John Thorpe uses it to establish his command over others (NA 45–46). Thorpe insists that he has just driven his horse twenty-five miles in two and a half hours. Actually it has been twenty-three miles, by the authority of road-books, innkeepers, and milestones; but Thorpe disregards them all because he has "a surer test of distance." It is now half after one and the town clock had just struck eleven when he left and his horse cannot go less than ten miles an hour: that makes it exactly twenty-five miles. But in fact he has lost an hour; it was ten o'clock when he left. So his horse has really taken one hour more to go two miles less, which is much more reasonable, though he is never persuaded. We know already — though Catherine Morland does not — that Thorpe is a man of such vanity and stupidity that he is below the level of awareness that can enable him to know true from false. His more artful sister Isabella has similar problems with watches (it is always a sign of danger in Jane Austen). To Isabella it is inconceivable, incomprehensible, incredible, that the hour is not what she thinks it is "and she would neither believe her own watch, nor her brother's, nor the servant's; she would believe no assurance of it founded on reason or reality," till James Morland produces his watch, and to have doubted a moment longer then would have been equally inconceivable, incredible, and impossible (67). If she arrives for an appointment five minutes too early it is her friend who has been so late. "I have been waiting for you at least this age! ... Oh! these ten ages at least. I am sure I have been here this half hour" (39). As Mary Crawford walks with Edmund Bertram in the wood at Sotherton she tries to make him give up his decision to become a clergyman; she is making an attack upon his integrity of mind. They have walked at least a mile in this wood, she says at one point. "Do not you think we have?" "'Not half a mile,' was his sturdy answer; for he was not yet so much in love as to measure distance, or reckon time, with feminine lawlessness." He is still safe. They have looked down the whole vista, he points out, and saw it closed by iron gates: it could not have been more than a furlong in length. "Oh! I know nothing of your furlongs," she answers; it is a very long wood and they must have walked a mile. "'We have been exactly a quarter of an hour here,' said Edmund, taking out his watch. 'Do you think we are walking four miles an hour?' 'Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch'" (MP 94–95). That feminine lawlessness has in this instance its charm, and it is a dangerous charm. Mary is a manipulator. She tries to obliterate lines of distinction, or being more deeply corrupt, as we know by the end of the novel, she really doesn't know where they are. But they are there, those iron gates and those coordinates, and they are real.

Time and space in Jane Austen are not what a reader raised on twentieth-century literature is likely to assume they must be by nature. They are not problematic or oppressive. They are not puzzling mysteries and they are not impositions upon the human spirit to be rebelled against or transcended. On the contrary, they have coherence and help give shape to human life; they are there to be used or abused. If they seem to simplify life they do not make it easier, because they allow no cosmic excuses. They are limited and must be understood, but the limits set the conditions within which action must be taken, here and now or not at all, and it is the ability to act with rectitude and grace under these inescapable conditions that distinguishes among human beings. Mrs. Croft, as a naval officer's wife, has been a great traveler in many places of the world, east and west, but we hear little of that; what we hear and admire is how happy she could be, as long as she was with her husband, even in the "confined" space of a man-of-war: even in a frigate, any reasonable woman may be perfectly happy in one of them (P 70). Captain Harville has been in distant countries; but we see him with pleasure, through Anne's eyes, having gathered his wife and his family together in rooms so small as to astonish but with such ingenious contrivances and nice arrangements by him as "to turn the actual space to the best possible account." It is a picture of domestic happiness (98). To be unable to stay in one place, to be restless, is to have an unsettled mind. "To any thing like a permanence of abode, or limitation of society, Henry Crawford had, unluckily, a great dislike." It is the first thing we hear of him and it is a moral judgment, because he will not settle at his country home, where he has duties to both his tenants and his sister which he neglects; his shallow kindness to his sister is that he will take her or fetch her anywhere she likes at a half-hour's notice (MP 41). After Emma has arranged for Harriet to marry Mr. Elton only to discover that Mr. Elton wants to marry not Harriet but herself, one of her difficulties is that they all must continue to live as close neighbors. "Their being fixed, so absolutely fixed, in the same place, was bad for each, for all three. Not one of them had the power of removal, or of effecting any material change of society. They must encounter each other, and make the best of it" (E 143). Mr. Elton has just announced that he is leaving Highbury for a few weeks in Bath and Emma is agreeably surprised and admires him for contriving it. But there is a littleness in Mr. Elton that makes him choose this way out — the Mrs. Elton he brings back from Bath is conclusive. Emma sees his meanness in the resentful manner of his announcement, and that she is prepared to admire the contrivance of escape is a sign of her own weakness at this point. Her own superiority is that, bad as she thinks it is to be absolutely fixed in the same place, she not only knows she has not the power of removal but she learns how to develop the superior power of encountering and making the best of it. Not many are able to do that.

To refuse, to try to break these conditions, is to refuse life, though it may seem to be freedom. In the extensive grounds at Sotherton Maria Bertram has a very smiling scene before her — it is the estate of the man she is about to marry. "But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. I cannot get out, as the starling said." Henry Crawford urges her to pass around the edge of the gate, unless she thinks she is prohibited. "Prohibited! nonsense! I certainly can get out that way, and I will" (MP 99). And so she does, as after her marriage she runs away with Henry Crawford. No sentimental starling, she has entered her cage voluntarily, but she refuses to accept the conditions of her choice. She has chosen that stupid man she marries because she is unable to endure the restraint imposed by her father and must escape from him and home as soon as possible (202). So she runs from the restraints of home to marriage, and finds that a restraint, so she runs from marriage to another man, and when that proves impossible she ends, fittingly and terribly, living with her aunt Norris in an establishment in another country — "remote and private ... shut up together with little society," in mutual punishment (465). There is no condition that can satisfy Maria because she has never learned in time, has never been taught, to accept those limiting conditions which are unavoidable and to which she must shape herself; if she were able to look within herself she could find sufficient space for the largest action, for the finest restraint. The Miss Bertrams as children thought their cousin Fanny Price prodigiously stupid because "only think, my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together — or my cousin cannot tell the principal rivers of Russia — or she never heard of Asia Minor"; they themselves have long been able "to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession ... Yes ... and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus ..." But that early information of distant geography and chronology formed their minds only as it was used by Mrs. Norris to flatter them; they were left entirely deficient in the "acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity and humility" (18–19), the more intimate and essential knowledge of time and space.

In that limited space there is much to be done. Jane Austen's characters do not have the option of solving their problems by going some place else. It is Mr. Elton who contrives to go to Bath. Frank Churchill, accustomed to selfish success in the artful management of time and space, finds himself once thwarted, is sick of England, wants to go to Switzerland. The Maria Bertrams and the Lydia Bennets run away. But Anne Elliot is dependent on time alone: "no aid had been given in change of place." What she does is to submit and she bears it. There had been no novelty, no "enlargement of society," no one had come "within the Kellynch circle" who would bear a comparison with Captain Wentworth, no second attachment possible to "the nice tone of her mind, the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of the society around them" (P 28). It is in those small limits, not only accepted but made even smaller by her own fineness of mind, that she becomes so great. Captain Wentworth is a man who can go off to sail the seas and win glory and make money fighting the French, but it is only at the end of those adventures, when he returns from that grand world to the small limits, that he is forced to face his real "enemy," as he calls it, "My own self" (247). Characters in Jane Austen do make important journeys but if it is a useful change of place it is not because limiting conditions have been relaxed but because they find themselves where they must understand a new set of definitions. Typically the journey does not take them to vistas, rocks and mountains — as Elizabeth Bennet in a moment of weakness wishes it would — but to another house with other dimensions in its rooms and with inhabitants who make new demands on them. Or if they are out of doors it is usually on someone's grounds, at Northanger or Pemberley or Sotherton or Donwell, where the impress of the owner defines the place. Give a weak head the delightful sensation of running and jumping on the Cobb at Lyme and it falls lifeless. Even at a picnic on Box Hill the essential question is whether Emma can comprehend and resist the pressures of a very strained situation. It is a powerfully ironic moment when "Emma could not resist" and said to Miss Bates, "Pardon me — but you will be limited ..." (E 370).