Jane Austen’s Darkness
by julia yost
wiseblood books, 86 pages, $8
A glance at the cover of Julia Yost’s short book on Jane Austen is enough to tell you this isn’t your typical study of Austen. No flowers or formal gardens, no manor houses, no pastels or swirls—only the shocking title, Jane Austen’s Darkness, in stark white letters against a pitch-black background. You can judge this book by its cover.
Darkness pervades Austen’s novels: in the conspiracy of “the dead hand of primogeniture and the selfishness of the living” that reduces the Dashwoods to “the genteel precariat”; in the imagery of illness, imprisonment, and corruption that makes Mansfield Park feel oppressively “claustral,” and not only for Fanny Price; in the cruelty of characters like Aunt Norris, who has made it her life’s mission to remind Fanny she’s “a nobody who deserves nothing”; in the “unequal marriage, the condition of being ‘unable to respect your partner in life.’” “Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness,” writes Yost, “and with one sparkling exception, it is a shaky one.”
Readers gloss over the shadows because we read Austen through the glittering lens of Pride and Prejudice: “If Elizabeth Bennet marries brilliantly, so must Elinor Dashwood and Fanny Price and Jane Fairfax. If Pemberley exemplifies great-house Toryism, so must Mansfield.” But Elinor Dashwood is no Elizabeth Bennet; she falls into “nonsense” when she appraises Edward Ferrars too generously, exemplifying “the fashion for praising mediocrity as excellence when it appears in those with money.” Ferrars is no Darcy; he is an “unambitious nullity—which . . . is as much as to say he is an elder son.”
We also brighten the shadows because our delight in Austen’s wit can make us forget just how mordant it is. When, for instance, Edward speaks “prettily” about engagement, Austen adds gloomily, hilariously, “What he might say on the subject a twelvemonth after, must be referred to the imagination of husbands and wives.”
Drawing on a 1940 essay by D. W. Harding, Yost makes “regulated hatred” a centerpiece of her assessment. Social convention, Harding observed, exists to enable stupid, evil people to live together in a degree of civilized harmony. The cost, Yost notes, is to allow “detestable people [to] pass as ordinary, polite, prestigious.” Austen’s morally upright characters see and despise the petty wickedness beneath the taffeta gestures: “Hatred should be regulated but is very often called for.” To be good, one must learn to be a good hater.
Mr. Darcy best embodies this virtue: “In his ‘propensity to hate every body’ . . . Darcy was ahead of the curve.” Darcy is almost never rude to the lowly, and his servants testify to his fair treatment. But he’s deliberately impolite to “empty-headed” William Lucas, cruel Caroline Bingley, feckless Wickham, his controlling aunt, Lady Catherine. Elizabeth Bennet hates right along with him, showing contempt for Lady Catherine and sensible embarrassment at her family’s conduct. In this as in so much else, Elizabeth is made in her creator’s image.
Regulated hatred is the cornerstone of a virtuous community. Darcy’s wealth affords him the luxury of selective association; poor people are thrust into relations of dependence with people they’d sooner avoid. But properly directed hatred as much as wealth allows the Darcys to form a virtuous society at Pemberley following their marriage. They exclude the George Wickhams of the world and keep the Lady Catherines in check. Eager, easygoing Charles and Jane Bingley are nearly as rich but lack moral stature because they haven’t learned to hate.
Sometimes Yost finds darkness where Austen leaves glimmers of light. Fanny’s self-denial looks pious, she writes, but “her morality is a slave morality . . . not extricable from her self-image as a nobody.” Fanny Price is the most-criticized Austen heroine, and while there is something to Yost’s critique, it is clear that Austen herself regarded her as a moral exemplar; with the exception of Anne Elliot, she is the only Austen heroine not treated with irony. Fanny never makes any serious misjudgments; Elizabeth Bennet does. While Fanny lacks Elizabeth’s strength, she, too, is a good hater, as she condemns and sees through the play-acting of the dissolute young people of Mansfield Park. Fanny’s role in the novel is to provide a moral compass, and she succeeds; her moral seriousness earns honorable mention in Yost’s pantheon of good haters. While Fanny’s marriage to Edmund Bertram won’t have the joy and solidity of the Darcys of Pemberley, hers is still a happy ending that matches, however imperfectly, merit and reward.
Crisp and witty, Jane Austen’s Darkness is bigger inside than out. I’ve encountered no book or essay on Austen with so much insight per sentence. By attending to Austen’s darkness, Yost casts fresh light in every direction.
Peter J. Leithart is president of Theopolis Institute.
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Image by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, in the public domain. Image cropped.
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