A Jane Austen Education: Emma

Everything about A Jane Austen Education looks like it's geared towards women, from its typeface and effusive subtitle ("How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter") to its paper doll illustration on the soft lavender background. I was scanning it at the bookstore yesterday and it surprised me, on page two, to realize the author was a man (William Deresiewicz). Ok, well that was cool. I don't often hear about Jane Austen from men, so I was interested. And then surprised again on page to find this was a straight man. Sold!

His books is divided into seven chapters, six of which deal with a novel and a life lesson he learned while reading. The first chapter is on Emma, a novel that I trudged through a couple years ago, all the while preferring the Clueless version. Deresiewicz is much smarter than I am, because he fell in love with Austen while reading it, and informed me it is considered to be her masterpiece. Challenge accepted! I will try again.

Deresiewicz alternates between portraying his 26-year-old self as a raging sexist; totally arrogant and unlikeable, and observations on Emma and Austen that are touchingly passionate. I have a suspicion he's going overboard on how unlikable he was, as that is the current vogue in memoirs (Giles Harvey on the "Failure Memoir"), and he was obviously really intelligent. How else could he come to the conclusion while reading Emma that Austen incited a certain response in her readers, in order to expose them and show us our own "ugly face" (12)? And by the way, that observation blew my mind.

Deresiewicz does offer the opinion of Austen I tried to articulate yesterday. To his modernist-loving younger self, Austen was the godmother of those boring 19th century British novels: "What could be duller [...] than a bunch of long, heavy novels, by women novelists, in stilted language, on trivial subjects?" (2) and he quotes Mark Twain on Austen, who said her work made him feel "'like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven.' 'It seems a great pity to me,' he taunted an Austen fan, 'that they allowed her to die a natural death.' 'Every time I read Pride and Prejudice,' he told another friend, 'I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone'" (19).

And yet, this "'little old maid'" (19) would teach Deresiewicz, in his words: "everything I know about everything that matters" (1).

Well, ok.

It was exciting to read the first chapter, just because it's wonderful to read someone articulate why you love something. Like my former classmate, Maggie, said about P&P and E: "There's something comforting about them. Life gets real, but not in a overly horrific way" or the character Humberstall in Rudyard Kipling's "The Janeites:" "There's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place" (20). Yes, her writing is comforting. It's not big and dramatic, you aren't going to be dragged through the wringer, and they all have happy endings. 

So what? When I put it that way, it does sound dull. But her novels absolutely are not. They are lively and fun, she is totally refreshing and on point, as when she describes dancing with an unappealing partner: "Mr. Collins, awkward and solemn, apologizing instead of attending, and often moving wrong without being aware of it, gave her all the shame and misery which a disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give. The moment of her release from him was ecstasy  (78-79, P&P). How charming is that? I could listen to that voice for hours, couldn't you?

In her talk at the Spring Gala, Amy Patterson spoke about the escapism of romance novels, with their studly heroes and supermodel heroines, and said instead of that, Austen encourages us to uncover what in our life is romantic. Mentioning Austen in the same breath as Jesus and Socrates, Deresiewicz says she was teaching us in her own version of parables that the "little particulars" in our life really mattered; "That, she was telling us, is what the fabric of our years really consists of. That is what life is really about" (13). She is the anti-escapist. And if you "got" her, he says, "you felt like you'd joined a secret club, with its own code words and special signs and degrees of initiation" (19). That's how it felt Saturday at the Gala. The same way it feels to go to a leather convention, or a Comic Con I imagine. I guess what I'm saying, is that people love Austen like some people love fisting or Batman. Like fisting, Austen is quiet, peaceful, and attentive to small details. She is intimate and slow-paced, and as with fisting, enjoying an Austen novel can be as elevating as a religious service. 

Saturday I knew I was an outsider. I knew just enough to have a conversation; I had the love but not the deep knowledge or experience to be a part of the Janeites. Plus, I didn't have a fabulous hat. But it wasn't like attending CLAW, where I felt like an outsider, appreciating the community but knowing I wasn't ever going to be a part of it. At the Gala I felt I was with people I wanted to be with for a long time. Austen holds a real appeal to me; in her quietness, her wit, her intelligence, and her selection of the everyday over the epic. 

I haven't felt this inspired in awhile.