INTRODUCTION
The parents in Miss Austen’s novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le père de famille est capable de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings.
These words of Samuel Butler, writing in The Way of All Flesh,1 certainly exaggerate, for none of Austen’s pères de famille approaches Butler’s own Mr Pontifex in savagery. All the same, they are based on the perfectly accurate perception that Austen refuses to idealize her families. Parents and children alike have their own personal preoccupations, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their responsibilities. The ideal is not readily combined with the particular and Austen is concerned as a novelist with the particular. Through particular actions and interactions – through the Eltons laughing together at Mr Elton’s refusal to dance with Harriet or through Fanny Price uncomplainingly cutting roses under a midsummer sun – she establishes the moral world of her characters.
Austen’s heroines develop partly because of and partly in spite of the faults and foibles of the families from which they emerge. Moral sense, after all, must involve some knowledge of and contact with evil. Unlike many of her successors and admirers, such as Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch or Penelope Fitzgerald, Austen was not particularly interested in the question of innocence as such. Her only “innocent” heroine is Catherine Morland: all of the others are acutely aware of some of the faults and failings in others. Catherine accordingly must learn about evil from other families as her own fails to provide such experience directly. The first chapter, “The Functions of the Dysfunctional Family,” looks at the three novels written at Steventon and the literary necessity of the family flaws of Morlands, Thorpes, Tilneys, Dashwoods and Bennets, both in terms of plot development and in terms of the various heroines’ maturation. The second chapter, “Spoilt Children,” examines a parental failing common to all Austen’s novels and its
12 JANE AUSTEN’S FAMILIES
varied effects on its victims, looking especially at Mr Darcy, Maria Bertram and Emma Woodhouse. The discussion of the maternal role in “Usefulness and Exertion,” the third chapter, shows the strong influence of the mother, whether living or dead, focusing on Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Relations between siblings, especially between sisters, affect the moral life of Austen’s heroines: this chapter shows how these relations respond to the mother’s character and actions, which also help form the daughters’
sense of their traditional domestic role, a moral concern in the work of a novelist so concerned with the value of exertion.
Austen was evidently fascinated by family dynamics, by the constant negotiation between one’s own claims and those of other people demanded by family life. This fascination interacts with what Claudia Johnson calls Austen’s
“scepticism about the family” (Jane Austen 72), her refusal to romanticize an institution that has often, and damagingly, been treated as sacred both in her own times and in ours. In a caustic commentary on her treatment of parent-child relations, Christopher Ricks writes that she was great
because she did not minister to the over-estimation of parental and filial love. To which might be added a different, though not contradictory admonition; not that such love is less important than we have got into the way of believing, or pretending to believe, but insofar as such love is truly important, it is far less imaginable – less sharable – than we have allowed ourselves to permit. (94)
So in the same way that she leaves her love scenes almost entirely to the imaginations of her readers, she rarely emphasizes the love between parent and child. The poignancy of such passages as those showing Mr Bennet’s concern that Elizabeth should not experience married unhappiness like his or the exaggerated feeling shown by Emma weeping over the idea of leaving her father as “a sin of thought” (369) are all the more telling. What Austen is more usually concerned with are the common interactions of everyday domestic life.
A common pattern in women’s fiction of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century is that of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda or Ann Radcliffe’s Emily, of the orphaned young woman facing the challenges of the world alone.
However, Jane Austen is certainly not alone among her contemporaries in her interest in family relations and the effects of these relations on her heroines.
For instance, Amelia Opie’s two best-known novels bear the titles The Father and Daughter (1801) and Adeline Mowbray: or, The Mother and Daughter (1804), and in the latter the theme of the harm done by foolish parenting extends over three generations: the heroine’s unhappiness is a result of her mother’s selfishness and folly, which is in turn the result of parental spoiling. Like Opie,
PART I: INTRODUCTION 13 Austen is well aware of the moral obligations of parents to their children and of the possible damage done by parental failure. However, whereas Opie represents the adverse consequences of faulty parenting as being virtually automatic, Austen’s representations of the family are less pessimistic – and perhaps more realistic. Parental faults or limitations affect every one of Austen’s heroines but Austen shows them as refusing to be determined by the dysfunctionality of others and as developing into happy women.