A few days ago, while paying for
an oil change in New Hartford, the mechanic glanced at my copy of Sense and Sensibility that I had set on
the counter while rummaging through my wallet for a credit card.
“Good read?” he asked.
“Huh?”
He nodded at the still brand-new
looking Broadview Press edition.
“Yeah,” I answered as I handed
the card over the counter, casting an eye at the book I needed to read for a
class. “I’m only a page or so in.”
He took the card and swiped it,
handing it back to me.
“I bought an iPad a while back
and it came with…”—he paused and looked at the ceiling—“…Little Women and Pride and
Prejudice.”
He waited a beat for me to say
something, but I was caught up in the oddity of the moment—a man wearing blue
overalls covered in grease and sideburns, telling me that he’d read a Jane
Austen novel.
“I loved both of them,” he told me with a smile, turning around a receipt
for me to sign.
~
While the above anecdote might
serve equally well as an example of my quickness to judgment, it serves also as
a reminder that Jane Austen is the great equalizer. Who doesn’t love Jane
Austen?
It’s crass, of course, to suggest
that no one dislikes Austen’s. The
social satire is not a genre for everyone. Not every reader can appreciate the
whip-tight form of her novels’ narrations and the acrobatic insults that she manages
to sneak into the page; in her hands, what would be a curt introduction to an
antagonist becomes a slippery jewel of an insult.
Stepping back from the novels,
however, it can almost seem like a wonder that the books are so loved.
Invariably, they catalogue the romantic trials and tribulations in
pre-Victorian England. They might easily be understood as merely social
portraits of a place and time—‘historical novels’ instead of timeless
explorations of love and friendship.
But they are timeless explorations—that’s precisely what makes them such a
thrill to engage with. Even Austen’s first novel, Northanger Abbey, which I recently reread (I detested the first
time I read it in freshman year), manages to speak to the way in which we
navigate the social part of our lives.
~
Perhaps as a freshman in college,
I played the part of Northanger Abbey’s
naïve protagonist Catherine Morland more than I thought. It’s easy to hate
Catherine—she is a bumbling nightmare of confused emotions, idiotic worldviews and
(this is the key) what seem like supremely silly social expectations. So I
hated Catherine when I read about her freshman year (how can she not see that
Tilney wants to marry her? how could she think the General is has some Mrs.
Rochester-type scheme going on?), but on second reading, she clarified herself
to me.
I think that all of us have felt,
at one point or another, part of Catherine’s experience: the wondering, the
confusion, the innocence. Catherine is a magnified version of me as a freshman.
As much as I would like to remember my freshman self as a person bursting with
confidence and knowledge of the world around me, I know that I saw the world as
through a foggy window—the shapes of things like friendships, alcohol,
internships, and (to sound like a true collegian) the ‘real world’ giant
shadowy figures whose outlines were hardly discernible.
Rereading Catherine Morland’s
journey towards properly negotiating her social world, I came to see that
Catherine’s experience parallels mine—and everyone else’s. That is precisely
the quality of Austen’s work that universalizes it. Even if Catherine becomes a
royal pain by the end of the novel (and oh
does she…), you can’t help but see parts of yourself reflected in her
semi-charming naïveté.
