Bluestocking Oxford

By Maisie Corkhill

When we think about dark comedy, Jane Austen may be the last author to spring to mind. With her novels widely celebrated for their depiction of polite manners, we might anticipate some resistance to reading Austen for meanness. The civility of her characters seems to set her apart from the overt satirists that were her literary forebears and contemporaries, a rolls list that includes Dryden, Pope and Swift. The very term ‘black comedy’ was coined – by the Surrealist André Breton in 1935 – to refer to Swift’s writing. Characterised by cynicism and scepticism, black comedy relies on taboo topics to expose uncomfortable truths about society. Breton published his Anthology of Black Humour in 1940, with excerpts from forty-five writers from Swift onwards. Rather unsurprisingly, Jane Austen doesn’t make the list.  

In 1798, Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra of a miscarriage suffered by one of her neighbours:

“Mrs Hall, of Sherbonne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.” (Letters)

Many readers have been appalled that Austen could be so cruel. This is perhaps why there has been no great critical tradition of approaching Austen’s work through meanness. Not to celebrate meanness for its own sake, these instances allow us to place Austen in a lineage of darkly funny satire written by women in the 18^th century, revealing meanness as a powerful vehicle for social commentary.

Building a lineage of meanness, we encounter two writers who seem to have had a profound impact on Austen. We know that Austen read Frances Burney (1752-1840), as her name was included on the subscription list for Burney’s third novel, Camilla (1796).

Burney’s novels were hugely popular in Austen’s lifetime. Evelina was published anonymously in 1778 and offers a bitingly satirical portrait of 18^th century society, in which the legitimate but unacknowledged daughter of a nobleman is pushed by those around her to chase her inheritance. Burney writes a number of shocking scenes, including a foot-race between two old women bet on by two lords. In a more violent scene, a ‘practical joke’ is played on an old lady where she is attacked by a highwayman, tied up and thrown into a ditch. Through the comical mask of these scenes, they reveal the brutality lurking beneath so-called polite society.

Austen’s novels may not offer much physical violence, but they do present women as objects of ridicule (often, Austen’s own ridicule). Mrs Bennet’s devoted efforts to marry her daughters off are read by Mr Darcy as ‘lack of propriety’. Austen’s narrator describes Mrs Bennet as ‘a woman of mean understanding, little information and an uncertain temper’. In Emma, Austen paints a deeply unflattering image of Mrs Churchill as a controlling hypochondriac, with very few mourners once her convenient death comes around. It is difficult to be sure if Austen presents these women as caricatures produced by the expectations of a patriarchal society, or if their shortcomings simply fit into the broader agenda of her plots.

If these examples do not persuade us of Austen’s meanness, her teenage writings might. The Juvenilia (1789-93) comprise Austen’s earliest compositions, mostly short stories and fragments. In Jack and Alice, we never hear about Jack because – apart from dying – ‘he never did anything worth mentioning’. Alice often ‘finds herself somewhat heated with wine’ and falls into an argument with Lady Williams about whether a face can be too red (with her face flushed by alcohol). This interrupts Lady Williams’s story of her ‘life and adventures’, signalling a deliberate shift from sentimental forms towards satire. Here, Austen presents the discourse of ‘polite’ society, where two women, one drunk, almost ‘came to blows’ over a difference of opinion.

In The Three Sisters, Austen maintains a good level of comedy while also exposing the ridiculousness of marriage expectations for women. Mary explains in a letter that she is considering marrying Mr Watts even though ‘he is extremely disagreeable and I hate him more than any body else in the world’. Mary is willing to marry a man she despises simply because he has threatened to marry one of her sisters if she refuses, wherein Mr Watts becomes an early and less tactful version of Mr Collins (if that is possible). But Mary will not marry Mr Watts to save her sisters from a terrible fate: it is because the embarrassment of one of her younger sisters marrying before her is too much to bear. The young Austen uses her early satire to expose the weight of expectation on women to marry, becoming a competition between sisters regardless of feeling towards their potential spouse.

This story in particular has a sardonic undertone when Mary’s sisters admit to ‘practicing a little deceit’ on their eldest sister. In leading her to believe that either of them would have accepted Mr Watts’s offer, the sisters’ trick becomes an extension of patriarchal control and leads Mary to commit – for life – to a man that she hates. As satire offers a means of first exposing the conditions of a society, so we can judge them, Austen’s meanness offers a new way to consider the political dimensions of her books.

The second precursor to Austen’s meanness is Jane Collier, who wrote a satiric guide for women in 1753 called Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Now largely ignored by literary criticism, Bilger notes that Collier’s guide ‘enjoyed some popularity in the eighteenth century, going into a second edition and being reprinted in the 1790s’. Collier’s guide would have been a staple on bookshelves such as Austen’s, and offers a wickedly funny, highly nuanced satire on the position of women in Regency society. Prefaced with a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘Speak Daggers — but use none’, this book instructs the reader how best to torment those around them, including friends, husbands and servants. If you bring a large fortune to your husband, this ‘will justify you in being as insolent as you please’, but if you bring no fortune, ‘you should be as insolent as if you had increased his stores by thousands’. Some of the cruellest advice comes in the treatment of a ward or young woman in your care. Collier suggests variously to inform a quiet girl ‘that no girl ever delighted in reading, that was not a slut’, and a plain girl that ‘she may thank God, that her ugliness will preserve her from being a whore’.

This kind of insult (based on a woman’s appearance or sexuality) would not be met with a favourable reception from modern feminism. Neither would Austen’s passage in Persuasion (1817) where she describes Mrs Musgrove’s grief for her dead son Richard as ‘large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for’. She mitigates the insult with an equally insulting caveat,

“Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronise in vain—which taste cannot tolerate—which ridicule will seize”. (Persuasion, Chapter VIII)

Austen purports to be the vehicle of ridicule through her pen. But these flashes of meanness are Austen’s own, and they keenly represent the society around her. Collier presents tormenting as a woman’s art, in the absence of other forms of control. She explains that husbands have no need of tormenting when they have ‘violent measures’ to use against their wives. This distinction between men and women leaves language and words – satire – as the chief domain in which women can commit violence.

When we understand this societal pressure, we may look more favourably on Austen’s mean woman, such as Caroline Bingley, Mrs. Elton, or Mary Crawford, as products of a society where women are taught to defend their position through meanness. But in ridiculing others, they themselves become the object of ridicule. When Emma insults Miss Bates at Box Hill, she is judged harshly by the group and chastised by Knightly that it was ‘badly done’. Usually celebrated for her wit, this scene reveals how fragile the domain of meanness can be. These characters risk becoming ‘the race of SELF-TORMENTERS’ that Collier turns to at the end of her guide, who can ‘seldom find any creature who has regard for them but to be hurt by their ill-humour, but THEMSELVES’.
 

The cultural commemoration of Austen has long placed her in the realm of good manners. In celebrating Austen’s 250^th anniversary, we must not overlook how she uses meanness as a vehicle to interrogate the fragile and limited domains of power available to women. Male writers do not face the same criticism for employing cruelty as a literary device. Drawing out this aspect of Austen’s character, therefore, should not be seen as distasteful, but an essential step in bringing together the diverse pieces of Austen’s genius.

References

Austen, Jane, Kathryn Sutherland and Freya Johnston. Teenage Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Austen, Jane. Jane Austen’s Letters To Her Sister Cassandra and Others Collected and Edited By R. W. Chapman. London: Oxford University Press, 1952.

Bilger, Audrey. “Goblin Laughter: Violent Comedy and the Condition of Women in Frances Burney and Jane Austen.” Women’s studies 24.4. (1995): 323-340.

Breton, André, trans. Polizzotti, Mark. Anthology of Black Humour. California: City Lights Publishers, 2001.

Burney, Frances, Edward A. Bloom and Vivien Jones. Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Collier, Jane, and Katherine A Craik. An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.