Austen, Jane,--1775-1817--Criticism and interpretation

The character of Elinor Tilney in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey states, "A mother could have been always present. A mother would have been a constant friend; her influence would have been beyond all others" (180). Ironically, however, Jane Austen's portrayal of the protagonists' mothers is inevitably less than the paragon that Tilney describes. Mrs. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Morland in Northanger Abbey, and Mrs. Price in Mansfield Park all fail their daughters. Mrs. Dashwood, like her daughter Marianne, falls into the excesses of emotion that mimic the Romantic era. Mrs. Bennet errs because of defects in her character and her failure to understand the elements necessary for a successful marriage. Mrs. Morland neglects her daughter, and Mrs. Price virtually abandons hers. Seen against the standards of motherhood from the eighteenth-century philosophers, the eighteenth-century courtesy literature, and letters from the author, the heroines' mothers present a portrait of bad mothering of the period.

Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor possess essentially religious imaginations. The character of their work is determined by the degree of similarity or difference between their beliefs and those generally held by their intended audiences. Austen, an orthodox Anglican in a fundamentally religious era, creates a fiction of restraint: gently satiric, ultimately comic in form and intent, directed to a reader who shares her vision of spiritual and moral order revealed through social structure. O'Connor, a Catholic in an age of unbelief, writes a fiction of extremity, characterized by fierce satire, violence, grotesquerie, and the juxtaposition of comic characters and situations with tragic form and meaning, directed to an unbelieving reader whom she wishes to "shock" into a new awareness of the sacred. A comparison of the work of Austen and O'Connor in this context leads to a renewed appreciation of the interdependence of imagination and reality in determining the distinctive qualities of a writer's oeuvre.

Passive-aggression is an insidious form of tyranny that uses hypochondria and other tactics to manipulate. Presumably with her mother in mind, Jane Austen frequently portrays the passive-aggressive character and ridicules hypochondria, as in the satirical Sanditon. Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Churchill are life-denying parental figures in Emma, who use illness and hypochondria to manipulate their children, much like Mansfield Park's Lady Bertram, who uses hypochondria and social withdrawal to control her family. In Persuasion Mary Musgrove, a young copy of Lady Bertram, uses hypochondria and hysteria to manipulate, and Mrs. Clay passively ingratiates herself with the Elliot family in an attempt to become the next Lady Elliot. Through her novels Jane Austen shows the effects of this damaging, despotic behavior.

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Anthony Trollope's The Warden and Barchester Towers all follow the experiences of a timid heroine or hero. The setting and the dramatic irony of each novel play important roles in the characterization of these gentle "heroes." Elements of irony and of setting thus are inseparable from the portraits of both Austen's Fanny Price and Trollope's Mr. Harding. An exploration of each element--of the timid hero, of the element of place, and of dramatic irony--proves that the three elements are equally important in determining the novels' distinctive portraitures.

Despite well documented evidence that Jane Austen's relations with her father were harmonious and affectionate, only one of the twenty-one fathers and surrogate fathers depicted in her six major novels approaches the ideal of the patriarchal family--a wise and humane father. The preponderance of fallible fathers is a unifying metaphor for a disintegrating family structure, the inevitable legacy of a failed patrimony. The phallocentric heritage has rendered the lineal society anachronistic by fostering paternal irresponsibility due to unfettered privilege, by permitting the poorly prepared, succeeding generation of inheritors to govern, and by reducing the status of women to submission and dependency.

Despite her youth, Jane Austen knew enough about human nature to invest each of her characters with a different personality, yet underlying each was their common humanity. The anti-heroes and heroes of her fiction were all endowed with mixed strengths and weaknesses, just as she found people to be in the real world. None of her anti-heroes were devils, and none of her heroes were superheroes. The village atmosphere which was the locale of her works gave her the opportunity to enlarge on the personalities of her characters: their foibles, secret hopes, downfalls, and eventually the happy endings for the worthy protagonists. Although her plots appear to be "boy meets girl" with problems before the "boy gets girl" conclusion, the satire, the complications, the intricacies, and the heartaches in between are what make Jane Austen's skill as a writer shine through her work even today.