To Austen-l

January 31, 1996

To Austen-l

Re: The Serious Wackiness and Disjunctions in S&S

This is a very odd book in many ways. There is its strong gothic undercurrent and steely surface; there is the strong emotionalism and assertion everywhere that one must control oneself. I find myself laughing out loud as I listen because of what I find to be a third oddity. Very often there is a strong and almost surreal disjunction between the way the characters are behaving and speaking and the actual reality they are engaged in. The scenes in which Mr Palmer acs to Mrs Palmer with sneering disgust, snarling retorts, and general scorn and she responds with light laughter and happy delight are perhaps the most obvious; but this kind of thing occurs in the social scenes in the novel again and again. Lucy's malice is larded with wholly inappropriate responses to what's going on around her; as for example when she visits Elinor after the musical party in which Mrs Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood deliberately snub and come near to openly insulting Elinor and flatter Lucy, Lucy's clearly rubbing it in and her hypocrisy may be understood as not half-mad, and when she says,

"'Indeed I am perfectly convinced of your regard for me, and next to Edward's love, it is the greatest comfort I have'" (Vol 2, Ch 13, Oxford 240);

the satisfaction of her malice, envy, and jealousy may be seen as a believable source for this totally unreal assertion, but this kind of continual and indeed crazy disjunction between the truth and Lucy's is continued in this scene (and may be found in other scenes), and has a kind of cumulative effect:

"'I wonder I should never hear you say how agreeable Mrs. Dashwood was...'" (Oxford 239)

Then there is a real emotion, one of triumph in her words "'Are you ill, Miss Dashwood?-- you seem low--you don't speak;--sure you an't well'," which Elinor shields herself from by a lie which is natural and real, but then off we go again to a picture of Mrs Dashwood and Lady Middleton which is off the wall.

One might say this novel zeroes in on hypocrisy and lies; but so do other of Austen's novels, yet the characters say in P&P are not so clearly inappropriate in their descriptions of themselves as sometimes they are in S&S; in S&S the lies they tell are so gross, what they fail to see is so evident. There's a wacky quality to it, and I keep laughing almost in disbelief as yet another wholly wrong interpretation of what just happened fall from the mouth of yet another of the book's clowns or mean-spirited cold hypocrites. I must admit I am never sorry for Mrs Palmer because she's got to be mad to talk and laugh as she does, and since clearly I'm not supposed to think she's crazy, something else is afoot here. I don't think Austen means to criticize Mrs Palmer nor feel sorry for her. Nor is there much effort to make us think about Mr Palmer as a real person. I suggest that after one thinks about the real emotions or motives of this or that character and the description of him or her by another and the motives for this description (usually some self-interested gain), it emerges as a grim grotesquerie.

It's interesting to realize this book was Austen's first success; it was this which got P&P into print and encouraged her into MP.

To Janeites

August 2, 1999

Re: S&S, Chs 19-20: Wacky or Disorientating Comedy

There is something very odd about the presentation of the Palmers. I agree with Aysin that Austen appears to change her mind about how to present Mr Palmer towards the end of the book. Up to that time he is characterised as someone who married for good looks and money and now is stuck with a woman he cannot bear, whose presence embarrasses him. The origin of his misery or behavior is thus an exaggerated version of the Bennet marriage. However, his behavior is rude, obnoxious, and his way of spending his hours idle and capricious. Elinor comments that it's not so much mortification in his case (he does slip away to the library but the billiard room) as wanting to appear superior to everyone else.

I see Mr Palmer as a kind of strong caricature, but almost believable. Mrs Palmer is not. No one would in reality or probality behave the way she does: it's clear to the grossest idiot he is insulting her; to pretend he is not does not soften or fool anyone. How to explain it? Does Austen want us to laugh at social hypocrisies of this kind (people do pretend all the time that things are other than they are) and thus presents them as absurd? She certainly -- as Claudia Johnson and many others have argued -- presents a harsh view of family life and marriage as such in this book. They are no panaceas as such. Mrs Ferrars (when we meet her) is presented as the most mean and nasty and bullying of women; John and Fanny Dashwood are horrors &c&c. Moreland Perkins argues S&S is the most radical of Austen's books; I think after Lady Susan is it in some ways the hardest.

There is another way to interpret the couple: that is in terms of the other characters and what we see in them. It seems to me throughout the book Austen insists on a strong and almost surreal disjunction between the way the characters are behaving and speaking and the actual reality they are engaged in. All the task of lying fell on Elinor; Elinor insists there is a often a strong difference from the way we really feel and what we say and do in public. The scenes in which Mr Palmer acs to Mrs Palmer with sneering disgust, snarling retorts, and general scorn and she responds with light laughter and happy delight are startling instances of this disjunction. Edward's deep and touching melancholy is another way of responding to a demand he violate his inner nature. Moreland Perkins suggested his engagement with Lucy came from his lack of snobbery, of caste arrogance. It's a good point: it means he is a stranger in this world -- and the Dashwoods had better retreat from it before they get crushed or exploited and dismissed (as indeed Marianne does).

We see the same disjunction in the Steeles' case. For example, Lucy's malice is larded with wholly inappropriate responses to what's going on around her; as when she visits Elinor after the musical party in which Mrs Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood deliberately snub and come near to openly insulting Elinor and flatter Lucy, Lucy's clearly rubbing it in and her hypocrisy may be understood as not half-mad, and when she says,

"'Indeed I am perfectly convinced of your regard for me, and next to Edward's love, it is the greatest comfort I have'" (Vol 2, Ch 13, Oxford 240);

This is a totally unreal assertion -- in the same way as Mrs Palmer's insistence on how much she enjoys Mr Palmer's wit is totally unreal. Lucy satisfies her malice and desire to get back at Elinor; she warns her Edward is her man. Mrs Palmer saves face. Mrs Palmer pretends the world is a happy place; she squeals with joy over the death of her animals and plants at Cleveland. Austen did this kind of thing in the Juvenilia merrily. Here it is surreal. Lucy says I wonder you never said just how agreeable Mrs Ferrars is. Nuts. It's nuts.

The moral: some people will say anything. Others will agree loudly. And all conspire to ignore the truth because it's not to their taste or interest.

The same kind of disjunction occurs in Lady Middleton whose behavior is extreme over Annamaria. Such a darling. That's unreal. Nancy Steele can be seen as the most merry of these portraits probably because the disjunction between what she says and what is, is not aimed personally at her. Take Mrs Palmer solemnly and you would feel very upset and hurt for her. So too Nancy Steele.

To put it another way, this novel zeroes in on hypocrisy and lies. So do Austen's other novels, but in P&P the disjunctions are not so clearly inappropriate in their descriptions of themselves and behavior. In S&S the lies they tell are so gross, what they fail to see is so evident. There's a wacky quality to it. I must admit I am never sorry for Mrs Palmer because were I to believe it she'd have to be mad. I am not sorry for Nancy Steele for the same reason. I see them as partial clowns in the hands of a satirist. The result is to make scenes in the book grim, and both Lady Middleton and the two Steele sisters over the darling Middleton children and the Palmers are part of the same grotesquerie. The flip side is the melancholy and depression of an Edward, the silent repression of Elinor, the self-destructing of Marianne. The divagating yet blended tones of this comic novel are remarkable.

I would say to the remark about Colonel Brandon knowing Sir John, that one swallow doesn't a summer make. Austen stuck it in. Colonel Brandon belongs with Mrs Jennings as part of her group; he was (we are told) originally a suitor for Charlotte. Yes a figment of Charlotte and Mrs Jenning's disjunctive imaginations. But it shows he hung about them. Was there. Was in the letter Mrs Jennings wrote in the first version of the novel.

Ellen Moody

To Janeites

August 3, 1999

Re: S&S: Wacky or Disjunctive Comedy

I agree with Rosalind Gordon that one could read Mrs Palmer's laughter as poignant self-defense, but I suggest there are two problems with this: 1) I sense we are to laugh at Mrs Palmer as ridiculous, not feel for her. I can find nothing in the text to indicate that she is consciously aware the man is paining her, no hint from the narrator she is actually mortified and throwing out a carapace. On the contrary, despite the reality that Mr Palmer is rude and obnoxious, which Elinor makes us aware of, his remarks at the same time show her remarks up as absurd. What she says is continually nonsensical. It's not just that she get distances wrong; she misunderstands and her reactions to the misery of Marianne are hilariously inadequate; she puts forward her own resolve never to speak to the new wife of Willoughby in the same breathe as she evinces a naive interest in the bride's clothes and eagerness to visit. 2) Mrs Palmer also laughs at other forms of misery and pain which have nothing to do with her, such as when they arrive in Cleveland:

the loss of her favourite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,--and in visiting her poultry-yard, where, in the disappointed hopes of her dairy-maid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decrease of a promising young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment (Penguin _S&S_, Ch 42, p 257).

This is simply absurd. It's funny because it's absurd, disjunctive.

Is there evidence Austen finds Mrs Palmer a butt? is laughing at her? You could argue that easily. We could then say it's puzzling if we consider how full of feeling Austen can be towards those whose feelings are hurt. You can also find in the book sympathy for Mrs Palmer vis-a-vis the husband's cruelty, and an assertion the same chapter (42) that Charlotte has a good heart, herself instinctively likes the quiet life. She is not a pompous fool; Austen can abide fools with good hearts (e.g., Harriet Smith):

Their party was small, and the hours passed quietly away. Mrs. Palmer had her child, and Mrs. Jennings her carpet-work; they had talked of the friends they had left behind; arranged Lady Middleton's engagements, and wondered whether Mr. Palmer and Colonel Brandon would get farther than Reading that night. Elinor, however little concerned in it, joined in their discourse; and Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

Nothing was wanting on Mrs. Palmer's side that constant and friendly good humour could do, to make them feel themselves welcome. The openness and heartiness of her manner more than atoned for that want of recollection and elegance which made her often deficient in the forms of politeness; her kindness, recommended by so pretty a face, was engaging; her folly, though evident was not disgusting, because it was not conceited; and Elinor could have forgiven every thing but her laugh (Penguin, Ch 42, p 257).

There is a lovely quietude, tranquillity about this.

Now if we turn round and look to see if we find other forms of absurdity -- wacky disjunctions between what we suppose is the usual human reaction to experience and the one the character in question is having -- we find them in Nancy Steele, Mrs Jennings, Lucy, Sir John, in Lady Middleton's insistence on the how sweet and darling Annamaria is (when she is clearly a termagant). We find instances throughout the novel which resemble Mrs Palmer's response to Mr Palmer

So I suggest Austen is dramatizing a world she intuitively sees as more than a little mad, and presenting scenes she has recognized are underneath the pretense and justification of sanity or "how everyone lives" schizophrenic and cruel. We see people who pretend to one set of altruistic emotions and really have utterly egoistic -- or who don't have any strong feelings or thoughts at all beyond the need to herd (e.g., Sir John).

Ellen Moody

To Janeites

August 3, 1999

Re: S&S: Wacky or Disjunctive Comedy

In response to Nancy,

I didn't mean that the novel was dominated by wacky or disjunctive comedic mood, rather than one of the 'veins' in the book, one of its moods is funny in this way. It comes out most strongly in the way Mrs Palmer is presented, and there there is also a hardness or bleakness of approach towards the married life of this couple; it is much harder in Lucy Steele (knife-like), lighter again in the comedy of Nancy Steele's garrulous streams of talk and genial in Mrs Jennings. It is, however, offset by Elinor, Marianne, and other characters, and the mode or mood there includes the poignant, the dry and witty (acid at moments), ectasies of sorrow, and social comedies of manners too.

We could say that in this first book -- which Austen's nephew said contained some of her earliest writing in the six major novels -- the moods are less blended than in the later books, rather like early Dickens who divagates far more wildly.

Cheers to all
Ellen Moody