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ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND \ 8107961 McKenzie , L ee Smith JANE AUSTEN, HENRY JAMES, AND THE FAMILY ROMANCE n e University o f Oklahoma Ph.D. 1980 University Microfilms i n tern at i 0n al 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Copyright 1980 by McKenzie, Lee Smith All Rights Reserved THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE JANE AUSTEN, HENRY JAMES, AND THE FAMILY ROMANCE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY LEE MCKENZIE Norman, Oklahoma 1980 JANE AUSTEN, HENRY JAMES, AND THE FAMILY ROMANCE APPROVED BY r A t DISSERTATION COMMITTEE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks go to many people for helping with this work: to my colleagues in the Oklahoma Writing Project who listened to various portions and who believed— sometimes against all the evidence--that I would someday finish. And to the three members of my committee who obligingly read and wisely ad­ vised: Professors Rudolph Bambas, Herbert Richek and Ronald Schleifer. I am especially grateful to my two directors. Pro­ fessor David French first encouraged this study, and all the way through he gave unsparingly of his time, protecting me, as much as anyone could, against my own mistakes. As for Professor Victor Elconin, he is the one I wrote this for, his approval the best reward for having done it. Last of all, Jess, Colin and Doug. They have given love and encouragement and patience, enduring a sporadic family life and never, never— well, hardly ever— complaining. Now if they will just forget all those promises I made for "When I finish my dissertation. ." Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................i ü INTRODUCTION ......................................... 1 Chapter ONE. AUSTEN AND JAMES: THE CRITICAL BACKGROUND...................................18 TWO. MARRIAGE IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND "AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE": MANNERS AS METAPHOR.......................... 41 THREE. BIOGRAPHICAL SIMILARITIES: THE MEANING OF MARRIAGE IN "CINDERELLA".................................87 FOUR. MANSFIELD PARK AND THE SPOILS OF POYNTON : RETREAT INTO THE FAMILY.......... 144 NOTES.................................................211 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY............................... 244 IV JANE AUSTEN, HENRY JAMES, AND THE FAMILY ROMANCE INTRODUCTION Ten years ago I first encountered Henry James, moving in a few weeks from the youthful gaiety of The American through the questions and crisis of The Portrait of a Lady, reaching finally the calm reconciliation of The Ambassadors. As I read, there echoed at the back of my mind an old favor­ ite, Jane Austen. In her books, from Northanger Abbey through Mansfield Park and Persuasion, I had traced that same path, guided always by the same wise, ironic voice. At first I assumed direct influence. How, otherwise, could two writers be so much alike? But when I looked for the scholarship which compares Austen and James, I found it limited, consisting almost entirely of brief suggestions about what could be done. Even more surprising, I learned that James's own comments on Austen deny any influence at all, or even similarity. I was curious enough to investigate the matter more thoroughly, and this study is the result. I still suspect James was influenced by Austen, if only unconsciously, but I have concluded that this influence would be impossible to prove. Perhaps their similarity lies merely in their perfection of a common tradition: F. R. Leavis thought so, placing Austen first in a line of great English novelists, including James. What I find more useful now than showing direct influence is to compare two great novelists— uncommonly alike, except that one wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the other at its close— and to see reflected in their work the changes which that period made in our world. In the following pages, then, I first try to estab­ lish the similarities. Chapter One deals with these in three ways: with James's opinions on Austen, with the five critics who have seen some of the same likeness that I see, and fi­ nally with the many critics who have recognized slight areas of similarity. I include this last group because, although the resemblance found by each critic alone is unimpressive, all of them together imply, I believe, a significance larger than the sum of their parts. In Chapter Two I compare Austen's Pride and Prejudice with James's "An International Episode" in order to illus­ trate, in a restricted area, the many resemblances that I see in James's and Austen's work as a whole. Using these two works, I try to demonstrate the writers' concern for form, some of the techniques which produce the ironic voice by which we recognize them both, and their use of manners— con­ ventions of speech, of dress, and of social behavior— as a metaphor to reveal profound truths about their characters and their society. I compare a faulty marriage in each novel and then two remarkably similar scenes, in order to illustrate a common theme; the use of a woman to symbolize the individual, and of the marriage union to represent the individual's ad­ justment to and reconciliation with society. The third chapter discusses this story of marriage in the works and lives of James and Austen. Both authors' closest attachments were to parents, brothers, and sisters, and their work focuses largely on family relationships. They also share a preference for one particular story, the Cinderella fairy tale. In Pride and Prejudice Austen writes a rather straightforward version of this story, but in "An International Episode," James presents the variation which can be found throughout most of his work and in an important segment of Austen's. In this variation, the heroine does not marry the romantic prince, but turns instead to a family figure. To psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim who see great value in fairy tales, marriage in these stories would symbolically represent the individual's movement from child­ hood to adulthood. Austen and James, through their variation of a Cinderella who decides to remain w ithin her childhood family, portray the individual who is unable or unwilling to move beyond her childhood refuge into full adult responsibil­ ity. In taking for my title Freud's famous phrase, "the family romance,"^ I am not giving it his meaning; children's substitution, in fantasy, of one or both parents by more ex­ alted or by humble persons, so that they themselves are imag­ ined as foundlings. Such a meaning is not entirely inappro­ priate here, since the Cinderella tale is based on this fan­ tasy. I use the term in a broader sense, however, to indi­ cate Austen's and James's turning to their childhood family for the emotional satisfactions more often obtained in mar­ riage and for the reflection, in their use of this story, of the nineteenth century's desire to take similar refuge from the anxieties and demands of the rapidly developing capital­ istic society. Chapter Four compares two books which demonstrate this plot variation, Mansfield Park and The Spoils of Poynton. Here I try to show how James and Austen use setting in a highly symbolic manner to reflect the loss of the eighteenth century's firm, protecting social conventions, which made pos­ sible a full public life. Through their incomplete court­ ships, their rejection of strongly sexual unions, they depict the fragmentation of society during the nineteenth century and the retreat from the anxieties of a new industrial and urban complexity into the intimacy of the family, with women and children cloistered in the home and innocence glorified, of­ ten at the expense of confronting life realistically. This theme is not unique to Austen and James. An im­ portant part of Austen's artistic heritage is the novel of Richardson and the eighteenth century's anti-jacobin novel, which was a conservative reaction in England against the tur- 2 moil of the French Revolution.