Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism: Courtly Love and Happy Endings 1611463505, 9781611463507

Citation preview

Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism

Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism Courtly Love and Happy Endings Tiffany Schubert

LEHIGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bethlehem

Published by Lehigh University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Cover image: [Winchester Cathedral.] Ward and Lock's Illustrated Historical Handbook to Winchester Cathedral, etc. [electronic resource] - 1890 - The British Library, United Kingdom - Public Domain. https://www.europeana.eu/item/2059209/ data_sounds_ark__81055_vdc_000000002862 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schubert, Tiffany, 1986– author.  Title: Jane Austen's romantic medievalism : courtly love and happy endings / Tiffany Schubert. Description: Bethlehem : Lehigh University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism describes the Georgian Jane Austen, immersed in the Middle Ages, and particularly the tropes of medieval romance. Reading Austen’s novels through the lens of romance gives readers a richer understanding of her views on love and happiness, her use of irony, and her understanding of providence”—Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023034936 (print) | LCCN 2023034937 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611463507 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611463514 (epub)  Subjects: LCSH: Austen, Jane, 1775-1817—Criticism and interpretation. | Medievalism in literature. | Romances—Influence. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PR4038.M42 S38 2024  (print) | LCC PR4038.M42  (ebook) | DDC 823/.7—dc23/eng/20230726 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034936 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034937 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To David Whalen, who embodies a life lived in pursuit of true happiness. To my husband Aaron Schubert, who has been a partner of whom even Jane Austen would approve, and to my son Edmund and daughter Alina Jane, may you both have the happiest of happy endings.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Romance and Chivalry in the Eighteenth Century Chapter 2: Jane Austen’s Medieval Reading Chapter 3: Romance in the Novels





35



Chapter 4: Emma as Medieval Romance

61

77

Chapter 5: Redefining Courtly Love and Winning Perfect Happiness in Emma Chapter 6: Providential Romance in Persuasion

93 125



Chapter 7: Austen’s Medieval Irony: Marriage and Pasturage Chapter 8: Joy and Happiness: A Romantic Education Conclusion





157 193

205

Bibliography Index

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209

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About the Author



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vii

Acknowledgments

This book, like all intellectual projects, has benefited from the many excellent guides I have had along the way—guides who have offered support, correction, and wisdom, without whom this work would never have been begun, let alone completed. I would like to thank my professors at Hillsdale College, particularly Dr. Stephen Smith, who first kindled my interest in comedy as a genre governed by grace, and Dr. David Whalen, who taught me to read literature with aesthetic and historical sensitivity and who embodies the playful seriousness and festive joviality of comedy. Their influence helped inspire my interest in happy endings. I also am indebted to the professors at the University of Dallas who saw the beginning stages of this work in the dissertation and whose expertise and passion are examples that I daily strive to emulate. Dr. David Davies deserves thanks for approving a rather unusual dissertation that included both Middle English romances and Emma. Dr. Theresa Kenney, my dissertation director, taught me how to read Jane Austen with care, directed me to important resources, and continually pushed my work to greater and greater excellence. Dr. Gregory Roper helped me see the importance of the novel to my overall work. Dr. Robert S. Dupree introduced me to Emaré. Dr. Kathryn Davis provided constructive criticism at various stages of this project, and her own work on Austen, especially her book Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, has repeatedly served as a fitting model for my own. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate students at the University of Dallas for their assistance with this project at the dissertation stage, but more importantly for their intellectual friendship and stimulating conversation. Matthew Spring was my dissertation partner, Matthew Brumit gave careful and detailed corrections of earlier work on Sir Orfeo and Havelok, and Rachel Kilgore offered timely suggestions, showed continual interest in my project, and led me to the work of Margaret Atwood. ix

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Susan Allen Ford and Veronica Clarke for their work on parts of the book which were previously published in article form. Parts of chapters 4 and 5 first appeared as “Fair Lady and Humble Knight: Chivalric Education in Emma” in JASNA’s 2016 Essay Contest and as “‘She heard all Mrs. Elton’s Knight-Errantry on the Subject’: Emma as Chivalric Romance” in Persuasions 39 (2017). Some reflections on Anne Elliot as knight and on Mary Wollstonecraft’s critique of chivalry in chapter 6 were first published in “Lessons from Jane Austen,” in First Things, online (August 8, 2022). I would also like to thank the editors of Lehigh Press, especially Katherine Crassons and Tricia J. Moore, for their advice and assistance, as well as the anonymous reader whose feedback inspired the composition of chapter 7. Emma Jermann also deserves thanks for proofreading the bibliography, along with Hannah Renouard for her editing assistance. My friends and family have also made this book possible. Amanda Junkel directed my attention to weaknesses in the introduction. Anna Schubert watched my son so that I had hours of uninterrupted time to work on this project when it was still at the dissertation stage. My in-laws, David and Marilyn Schubert, have both treated me with kindness and care, and my parents, David and Stacey Niebuhr, have been a source of unfailing support and generosity. The greatest thanks goes to my husband, Aaron Schubert, for his steadfast encouragement and willingness to listen to my arguments, both tenuous and polished. Thank you for providing meals, caring for our son and daughter, and attending to daily household affairs so that I had time and space to complete this project. I simply could not have finished it without you. In the words of the anonymous author of the fourteenth-century Emaré, Jhesus, that settes yn Thy trone, So graunte us wyth The to wone In thy perpetuall glorye! Amen.1

NOTE 1. “Emaré,” in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), lines 1033–35, https:​ //​d​.lib​.rochester​.edu​/teams​/text​/laskaya​-and​-salisbury​-middle​-english​-breton​-lays​ -emare.

Introduction

In 1791, at the tender age of fifteen, Jane Austen, daughter of an Anglican clergyman and regular churchgoer herself, confessed, “As I am myself partial to the roman catholic religion, it is with infinite regret that I am obliged to blame the Behaviour of any Member of it; yet Truth being I think very excusable in an Historian, I am necessitated to say that in this reign [that of James I] the Catholics did not behave like Gentlemen to the protestants.”1 There is much in this passage that is classic Austen—the playful tone, the masterful understatement, the marvelous sentence structure. But there is also her professed partiality for Catholicism, a partiality that is striking given the traditional Protestant antipathy toward Catholics.2 Indeed, Austen was aware of that antipathy. In her defense of the piety of Mary, Queen of Scots, she asks, “And Yet could you reader have beleived it possible that some hardened and zealous Protestants have even abused her for that Steadfastness in the Catholic Religion which reflected on her so much credit?”3 That conventional Protestant antipathy was combined with disdain toward that most Catholic and most benighted of eras, the Middle Ages. Roger Ascham, Latin tutor and secretary to the Tudors, rather luridly describes the Middle Ages as a time “whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of Cheualrie.”4 Protestants saw the Middle Ages as a barbaric and superstitious period tyrannically ruled by priests and popes, whose people were entertained by morally degenerate stories of violent and lascivious knights and ladies. However, during the eighteenth century, attitudes toward both Catholicism and the Middle Ages were changing. For example, Beth Kowaleski Wallace notes that Austen’s “lifetime witnessed not only the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778, 1782, and 1791, but also the 1800 Act of Union, which—though not yet resulting in full Catholic emancipation—initiated the wider debate facilitating the Catholic Relief Act of 1829.”5 Wallace says of the debate over the Relief Act of 1791, “Far from being partisan or antagonistic, the debate . . . was remarkably civil, with full and ready consensus that Catholics were loyal and peaceful members of British society who deserved full rights and access to the privileges afforded to other Britons. Both sides of the aisle 1

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appeared eager to promote tolerance and both invoked modern principles of inclusion.”6 Gabriel Glickman argues for “the extent of Catholic involvement in the life of eighteenth-century Britain” and observes, “It was a Catholic poet, Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man defined the temper of an early English Enlightenment; a Catholic architect, James Gibbs, who returned baroque forms to the London skyline; a Catholic composer, Thomas Arne, who produced the score to Rule Britannia.”7 The eighteenth century was also experiencing a renewed interest in the Middle Ages, a renewal that began with antiquarian research but quickly spread to popular literature.8 In 1749, Horace Walpole began designing his home, Strawberry Hill, to be an eighteenth-century monument to medieval architecture. It featured crenellations, spires, and arched windows. In 1764, Walpole published the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, set during the First Crusade.9 The Gothic revival began well before Lyrical Ballads, Sir Walter Scott, or the Pre-Raphaelites. Both Catholicism and the Middle Ages were undergoing reexamination in eighteenth-century England. Wallace speaks of “the ambient noise of Catholicism” and asks, “What is the significance of far-reaching effects of Catholic political life on Austen’s work?”10 In this book, I would like to explore “the ambient noise” of the Middle Ages, a topic of some importance in eighteenth-century politics, religion, and art. What was the legacy of the Middle Ages in the eighteenth century and how did that legacy, whether through direct engagement with medieval sources or mediated through works closer to her own era, affect Jane Austen? Other scholars have explored Austen’s relationship to the medieval period. In his work Jane Austen and the Reformation: Remembering the Sacred Landscape, Roger Moore has shown Austen’s critical response to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and her close, personal connection with Gothic buildings throughout her life.11 Rather than architecture, I will focus on literature, on the medieval romance in particular, that precursor to the novel that constituted the popular literature of the Middle Ages. I intend to pay particular attention to the medieval romantic tradition of courtly love and the narrative structure of the medieval romance that tends to end with providentially arranged happiness. Often that happiness finds its fullest consummation in a loving, faithful marriage. Such a narrative structure has, through Shakespeare and the great novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, become a part of the modern imagination, even shaping our expectations for the narrative structure of our own romances. The legacy of the Middle Ages has been difficult to shake. To ask my governing question with greater specificity, how did the far-reaching effects of medieval romance, specifically its depiction of love and happiness, shape Austen’s work?

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It may seem strange to connect Austen to medieval romance or any novel to the romantic tradition. After all, scholars have long associated the novel not with romance and tradition but with realism and iconoclasm. In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode describes the novel as “an attempt to evade the laws of . . . ‘the land of fiction’—the stereotypes which ignore reality, and whose remoteness from it we identify as absurd.”12 In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt, influential historian of the novel, declares that the “primary criterion [of the novel] was truth to individual experience—individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.”13 Since it is true primarily to individual experience, “[t]he novel rejects past literary works: it is . . . damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary work.”14 According to Kermode, the novel must perpetually rebel against the very precedents it establishes: “such new laws and custom as it creates have themselves to be repeatedly broken under the demands of a changed and no less brutal reality.”15 The novel, unlike the romance, seeks to bring us close to reality and is a perpetually iconoclastic form, establishing new literary laws, only to break the very laws it establishes in favor of new ones. But this view of the novel, as realistic and iconoclastic, is wrong, or at the very least incomplete. Margaret Doody has persuasively shown that the novel “as a form of literature in the West has a continuous history of about two thousand years.”16 That history includes the medieval romance, which, though often written in verse, powerfully shaped the modern novel. Indeed, as Christine Lee explains, “roman serves as the standard name for all forms of fiction in France; the same has become true of the Italian romanzo, the German Roman, the Portuguese romance, and the Russian roman. Something similar could be said of the English ‘romance’ until the late eighteenth century, when it was eventually superseded by the term ‘novel.’”17 The romance and the novel are thematically and linguistically connected. Although the medieval romance is the literary ancestor of the novel, it was disowned by its descendant. Doody explains that “[t]o counter the sweeping attack, a pro-novel critic of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century must go back to the Renaissance’s best Aristotelianism, sacrificing some fiction on the way. It has become a cliché by 1717 to decry the old barbarous fiction of knights, dragons, castles. That is, medieval fiction could be offered as a propitiatory sacrifice to the new doctrine of the ‘verisimilar.’”18 The new doctrine demanded that fiction be verisimilar; medieval romance was not verisimilar; therefore, the novel had to repudiate its romantic affiliations. In doing so, it gained prestigious literary status: “At the price of getting rid of its medieval phase, the Novel (or ‘Romance’) could enter the Kingdom of Literature—or the Republic of Letters.”19 Though such an offering may have been necessary to appease the governing deities of realism, it did not wholly eradicate the influence of medieval romance. The knights, dragons, and castles

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fell out of favor, but the structure of medieval romance pervaded the novel. Indeed, despite the novel’s ostensible repudiations, it transformed the structure of the romance so little that Northrup Frye claims, “It would hardly be too much to say that realistic fiction, from Defoe to Henry James, is, when we look at it as a form of narrative technique, essentially parody-romance.”20 The novel transmits the medieval romance to modern readers. Modern critics must not make the same mistake as critics of the eighteenth century, who sought to “rid” the novel “of its medieval phase.” We must instead seriously consider that phase. In the following pages, I intend to celebrate rather than banish the novel’s medieval phase by exploring, in Michael McKeon’s phrase, “the persistence of romance,”21 in one of the world’s greatest novelists—Jane Austen. McKeon sees “the persistence of romance” in Henry Fielding as problematic to Watt’s argument about the realism of the novel. The romance of Jane Austen is also problematic; her novels brim with romantic language, motifs, and narrative structure. In order to read her well, we must see that she is a romancer as well as a novelist. Other critics of Austen have explored the romance in her novels. Laura Mooneyham White situates Austen’s “comic romance”22 within “[t]he long line of New Comedy”23 which originated with Menander. Kathryn Davis argues that Persuasion is a romance in the tradition of The Winter’s Tale.24 Gary Kelly categorizes Austen’s novels as “Anglican romances,”25 and Ashley Tauchert dubs them “realist-romances.”26 Still others have explored her relationship with the romantic novels of her own day. Kenneth Moler has shown how Austen uses the romances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with their beautiful heroines of lowly or apparently lowly birth, who have adventures and ultimately find true love.27 Natasha Duquette explores Austen’s debt to the Gothic romancer Ann Radcliffe, arguing that Austen was influenced by “Radcliffe’s construction of contemplative sublimity.”28 Susan Allen Ford explores romance in Emma and Madame de Genlis’s Adelaide and Theodore.29 I see myself in line with all these scholars; however, I am seeking to fill a missing gap in the story of Austen’s relationship with romance by exploring her relationship with medieval romance in particular. That relationship proves the long reach of the oft-maligned romance. And why does establishing such a relationship matter? Certainly, it gives us a better sense of Austen’s relationship to history, both to her immediate era and to the medieval one. Reading Austen as ahistorical has, thankfully, become an antiquated approach. She was not naively isolated from the great intellectual concerns of her day, but rather intimately and incisively engaged with them. She is part of the medieval revival of the eighteenth century, and her work should be understood as such.

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But beyond the literary scholar’s delight in accurate generic classification and the historian’s appreciation for the history behind a text, understanding Austen’s novels as romantically rooted can help answer important questions that have troubled Austen scholars—questions about gender, religion, narrative structure, and happiness. Does Austen tame her vibrant heroines, chastening their exuberance into silence? Is she an oppressive conservative, asserting that women are only fit for marriage? Are her happy endings too wildly perfect to be taken seriously? AUSTEN AND THE WOMAN QUESTION Situating Austen within the tradition of medieval romance helps us answer these questions. Reading Austen through the legacy of courtly love provides a better view of the gender dynamics found in her novels. Though by no means recent, feminist scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar still shape scholarly approaches to female authors. Gilbert and Gubar read Austen as punishing her intelligent heroines with marriages to more powerful men. They argue that Austen tames the intelligent and vivacious Emma Woodhouse with a marriage to the older Mr. Knightley, rendering her silent.30 Navya Dasari writes, “because she [Emma] understands her independence and pride as mutually exclusive from marriage, feminist critics have sometimes seen her agreement to marry Mr. Knightley after her ‘education’ as a submission to society’s expectations of women.”31 According to Kathyrn Sutherland, “many of her novels do include sections in which the heroine is educated by the hero. Sometimes too, the hero is rather older and, in some senses, wiser than the witty heroine who, to some extent, has to be tamed.”32 While Sutherland does not name any of the novels, her witty heroine certainly must include Emma, who is sixteen years younger than Mr. Knightley. In this feminist tradition, the witty shrew is tamed by the wiser man. For her sins against conventional gender behavior, for her independence and her pride, Emma must make atonement and marry an older and wiser man who can benevolently but definitively control her. I argue that this reading is wrong. If we attend to the medieval tradition of courtly love, we will see that Austen is not punishing the spirited Emma or taming women to conform to a patriarchal society, but rather championing women’s ability to grow in virtue. In the courtly love tradition, the lady generally remains statically perfect, while the knight undergoes moral growth. In Austen’s reworking of the tradition, the woman fails and grows. The lady turns out to be just as capable of ethical maturation as the knight who serves her. Emma marries Mr. Knightley not because remarkable women must submit to more powerful men, but because a flawed woman grows in humility

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and love and obtains a rational companion for life. She has a moral dynamism not often granted to the fine ladies of courtly love. Feminist scholars tend to read Austen from the perspective of modern feminism, while I am reading her, in this book at least, from the perspective of the literary tradition that precedes her. I read from the past forward to Austen; they read from the present back to Austen. By twenty-first-century standards, Austen is certainly a harsh moralist who does not grant her heroines individuality, passion (at least sexual passion outside of marriage), or rebellion. Her heroines do not become artists or authors or members of parliament, nor do they even become or remain independently wealthy spinsters (though Lady Russell does not marry Sir Walter). However, if we look at literary depictions of women before Austen, we see that she advocates for the moral depth and complexity of women. She is a moralist, but one who champions female virtue rather than one who harshly curtails female freedom. For Austen, women are not the perfect creatures that the courtly tradition depicts. They are not, to use the language of Mrs. Croft, “fine ladies” but “rational creatures.”33 Austen’s heroines insist, in the words of Elizabeth Bennet, “Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.”34 Unlike the fine ladies of medieval romance who become objects of chivalric elevation, hiding their feelings with coy evasions, Austen presents women as rational creatures in need of and capable of moral growth. In this way, Austen allies herself not with patriarchal oppression but with a tradition of feminist writers like Mary Wollstonecraft who condemned such elevation—the “vestige of gothic manners”35—for encouraging excessive sensibility and vanity and denying female rationality. Emma learns from Mr. Knightley, who treats her not as a child in need of correction or a delicate lady in need of cloying praise, but as a rational woman in need of growth in virtue. Both Mrs. Croft and Elizabeth, rebuking the masculine perspective, revise the gendered language of “fine ladies” and “elegant female” to the more general term “creature,” which classifies women as beings created by God rather than as members of a refined social class. Women are creatures of God, specifically rational creatures. Reason is neither male nor female, and all rational creatures, regardless of their sex, need virtue. Though Austen creates luminous women, she is not exclusively interested in female virtue. Charity, humility, courage, prudence—these are the virtues that Austen’s heroines exercise or acquire. They are not specifically female virtues, but the virtues that any rational creature needs for happiness. While Austen certainly sees differences between men and women, her novels are not conduct books for young women, works that, according to Wollstonecraft, enable masculine tyranny: “To account for . . . the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of

Introduction

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virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character.”36 According to the masculine moral tradition, women are suited for different virtues than men, but, according to Wollstonecraft, those virtues do not deserve the name of virtue: “women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet . . . allowing them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by providence to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness.”37 Austen does allow her heroines “sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue.” They acquire virtues appropriate for human beings, not accomplishments that society deems appropriate for delicate females. To be sure, Austen is socially conservative in her feminism. She does not oppose the traditional structures of her society by urging her readers to attack the patriarchy or to overturn marriage as an institution that legitimizes rape. At the same time, Austen does not encourage the suppression of women by superior men as Gilbert and Gubar suggest. Austen neither fully embraces nor fully rejects the social conventions of her day. According to Vivien Jones, this tension, “uncomfortable though that has sometimes been for feminist commentators,”38 is part of Austen’s legacy, and it ought to be acknowledged by her readers as such. However, Jones goes so far as to argue that Austen is postfeminist, someone who has the “sense that revolutionary feminism has been taken on board and superseded.”39 But if we classify Austen as postfeminist, we must classify Wollstonecraft as postfeminist as well. She also seeks reform within traditional structures, condemning books written “by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.”40 Wollstonecraft wants not sexually liberated women or female prime ministers, but loving wives and sensible mothers rather than simpering mistresses. Opposing courtly love’s tendency to elevate women to objects of worship, Wollstonecraft contends that women are human beings. In this contention, she and Austen are united in their feminism. If we look at Austen’s work through the lens of courtly love, we see her continually upending traditional gender roles in order to show that women are not alluring mistresses to be flattered but human beings capable of moral growth. Both Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot, the two heroines I will primarily attend to in this work, behave not as fine ladies but as rational creatures and even, at times, as brave and humble knights. However, through this complex portrayal of women, Austen does not seek to transform her novels into a philosophical treatise on gender equality as if to follow in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft. Nonetheless, in the history of fiction, her intelligent, virtuous, fully human heroines are revolutionary.

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Introduction

ONTOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES AND HAPPY ENDINGS Their endings, however, are not. All of Austen’s heroines find happiness in conventional, monogamous, heterosexual marriages. All the novels end with some version of happily ever after. Her heroines are real human beings with real moral and financial struggles, but those struggles seem to be swept aside in tidy endings. Perhaps Austen is not punishing her vibrant heroines through marriage, but is she betraying her own clear-eyed critiques of social injustice by creating perfectly happy endings? Tauchert notes, “[l]ate twentieth-century feminist criticism has pointed out that the ‘fairy-tale’ heterosexual love endings in Austen’s novels are ‘politically suspect,’ and fail to follow through the sharp critique of the real ‘social problems’ facing her heroines.”41 Austen depicts heroines with real social problems, but her solution is marriage to an excellent man. Money problems are solved by marriage; realism is alleviated by romance. How could Austen, so attentive to the real troubles that her heroines face, have solved those problems with unrealistic marriages, the literary equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Is she not only a poor artist, but also a weak thinker who cannot discover a realistic solution or confront tragic reality? Are her happy endings a betrayal of the real suffering of real women? I contend that reading Austen through the lens of medieval romance can help us understand not only the complexity of her heroines, but also the wider significance of her happy endings. Medieval romances tend to feature implausibly happy conclusions—in Sir Orfeo (early fourteenth century), the wife kidnapped by fairies is rescued and lives with her husband in perfect bliss until they die; in Emaré (late fourteenth century), the wife unjustly accused and abandoned at sea is miraculously reunited with her husband; in Havelok (c. 1295–1310), the noble maiden who grudgingly marries a poor man suddenly finds out that he is a king.42 Virtuous heroes and heroines are rewarded; villains are justly punished. In the providential world of medieval romances, that which has been lost may miraculously be found and sorrow may turn to joy. The romances do not strive for the same kind of realism as a nineteenth-century novel of manners, but nonetheless both novel and romance imitate a larger shared reality, the theological reality of Christianity: The great age of romance was also the great age of faith. The doctrine of salvation, in which the terrible events of the Passion and Crucifixion were made the means by which fallen mankind was restored and the bliss of Heaven once more became possible, received its full theological formulation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Romance, with its typical pattern of an opening disruption of a state of order, followed by a period of trial and suffering, even an encounter

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with death, yet with a final symbolic resurrection and better restoration, offers a secular equivalent to that divine order.43

In many ways, Austen shares that great faith and sense of divine order. She shares with the medieval romancers what Brian McHale calls “ontological landscapes.”44 McHale explains, “[o]ntological landscapes may be double, as in the many cultures that distinguish sacred and profane levels of reality.”45 Austen’s landscape, like that of the romancers, is double, admitting both the sacred and the profane. But the landscape of her readers “may occupy only a single plane, for instance in the strictly this-worldly ‘literal’ ontology of hard-core positivism.”46 The nature of that single terrain is disputed. Is it orderly or chaotic? Governed by chance? By cause and effect? Inherently bleak and tragic? For some readers, more postmodern than modern, the landscape is plural, even anarchical: “anarchism, the refusal either to accept or to reject any of a plurality of available ontological orders . . . is precisely the postmodernist condition.”47 These differences in ontology have sometimes proved deeply challenging for Austen’s readers, impeding both accurate interpretation and readerly delight. Ontological landscapes have narrative consequences. For a modern author like Margaret Atwood, the ontological landscape is single, and therefore death is the only true ending for a story. “Don’t be deluded by any other endings,” she declares, “they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality. The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die.”48 Atwood’s conviction that death is the end of life shapes her literary judgment; that which ends life becomes the only legitimate way to end a story. My purpose in this book is not to adjudicate between different ontological landscapes, but rather to contend that hermeneutical problems arise when readers apply an ontological landscape to an author that that author would reject. We must ask, does Austen’s ontological landscape allow for the possibility of happy endings as well as broken marriages, unjust societies, and flawed human beings? Austen, a devout Christian, had a double ontological landscape. Christianity is not the only religion that has a such a landscape, but it is the religion that Austen practiced, and it did shape her art. Austen’s ontological landscape made her open to a more romantic narrative structure, a narrative structure in which already virtuous characters grow in virtue and find happiness that exceeds their deserts. Although scholars have doubted Austen’s faith in recent decades, Laura Mooneyham White, Michael Giffin, Peter Leithart, and Roger Moore have all turned their attention to her religious commitments and argued that Austen was a sincere Christian.49 I draw on their work and side

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with their conclusions over those who have questioned Austen’s religious convictions. To take Austen’s Christianity seriously is not to endorse a hagiographical portrait of her or to accept “the long-dominant narrative that presented Austen as a clever spinster, writing for the amusement of her friends and family but never seeking lasting fame.”50 We do not have to endorse the prissy and patriarchal censorship of Austen’s nephew James Austen-Leigh who, by removing biting comments about individual people and references to literary works and politics in Austen’s letters, “censored her spark—her vivacious bite and self-confident dash—and presented a drab, humble paragon of propriety.”51 Austen was a serious author, a sparkling, vivacious, and flawed human being, and a devout Christian. Those flaws have made it hard for some scholars to accept her Christianity. According to Mooneyham White, Austen critics assumed that because her wit was sometimes cruel, she could not be a Christian: “Those who find it hard to take Austen’s Christianity seriously seem to insist on moral perfection from believers, a position far from that taken traditionally by the church.”52 Austen herself was aware of the moral pitfalls of wit; “[w]isdom,” she told her niece, “is better than Wit, & in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.”53 The moments of cruelty in her narratives show her complex humanity, not her unbelief. There is much evidence of Austen’s Christianity. Peter Leithart notes, “She was the daughter of a clergyman, two of her brothers were clergyman, she was baptized into the church of England, and spent her entire life as a member of that church. On her deathbed, her brothers were there to administer communion, and her last words were a request that her sister, Cassandra, pray that she have patience.”54 Her brother Henry informs us that she “was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God”; “On serious subjects she was well-instructed, both by reading and meditation, and her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church.”55 James Austen-Leigh describes her as “a humble, believing Christian.”56 Austen also lived in a particularly devout part of England: “In ‘worship density,’ defined as the density of places of worship per 10 square kilometers, Hampshire ranked among the top two counties, and its levels of occupancy . . . were also very high.”57 Hampshire was full of churches, and those churches were full. The devout Austen lived in a devout county. We also have Austen’s own writing on her faith. After the death of her father, she finds consolation in the reality of another world: “We can already feel that a thousand comforts remain to us to soften it”; among those she includes his “constant preparation for another world.”58 The fact that her father’s preparation for heaven brings comfort after his death points to the sincerity of Austen’s faith. For her, death is not the end. Such faith may sound sentimental to modern ears. Indeed, Atwood levies charges of “downright

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sentimentality” at those who refuse to see death as the only valid ending.59 But Austen does not share Atwood’s ontological landscape. She can, without sentimentality, find consolation for the loss of her father in the hope of a world that exists after death. Austen’s faith included a strong confidence in a benevolent providence— not to be confused with a strong confidence in predestination. “Providence,” Mooneyham White explains, “denotes God’s creation of the world with its ultimate redemption in view, his sovereignty over history and events, and his continual agency in ordinary people’s lives.”60 Providence oversees both cosmic history and individual lives; it has both general and particular concerns and its oversight is benevolent. As part of the Established Church, Austen would have been familiar with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which instructs the faithful to make the following petition to God: “Mercifully assist our prayers that we make before thee in all our troubles and adversities whensoever they oppress us, that those evils which the Craft and subtilty of the devil or man worketh against us, be brought to nought, and by the providence of thy goodness they may be dispersed.”61 Providence here is joined to goodness; it is a power that protects men from evil, whether natural or supernatural. In the Collect for the second Sunday after Trinity, the parishioners plead, “Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence.”62 Providence protects. But providence also permits suffering: “Anglican theology . . . assured each Christian that suffering was the believer’s walk of the Cross, a parallel experience of Christ’s passion that helped prepare one for heaven.”63 Suffering served the providential purpose of preparing the believer for eternal happiness, and the Christian sufferer was a type of Christ: “Eighteenth-century minds were particularly bent to adopt a certain inflection of typology, in which individual believers themselves are understood to enact the passion narrative by moving through life with its sufferings and moral trials.”64 Jane Austen does not overtly present the suffering of her characters as participation in the suffering of Christ. Nevertheless, their suffering is meaningful, overseen by providence, refining their virtue and making them worthy of the happiness they receive at the end. Austen’s understanding of providence did not deny human agency. According to Philippa Koch, “Scholars of the eighteenth century and Christianity have . . . generally seen providential thought as promoting human passivity through its strong emphasis on God’s direction,”65 but, as she observes, “providential thought and narration proved to be active and motivating forces behind the missionary endeavors of eighteenth-century protestantism.”66 A robust sense of providence does not become an excuse for inaction but rather motivates the believer to become an agent of that providence. As I will discuss in later chapters, Anne Elliot yokes exertion and providence together in her newfound commitment to romance. Austen, of

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course, has little interest in missionary endeavors, but her view of providence leaves space for human action. That providence is concerned with human happiness, both eternal and temporal. In one of her own prayers, Austen asks for “forbearance and patience . . . which, while it prepares us for the spiritual happiness of the life to come, will secure to us the best enjoyment of what this world can give.”67 Austen’s prayer reveals her belief in a life after death. For her, heaven is real, and it is characterized by happiness. That she makes the request at all indicates her trust that providence cares for human happiness. It is a suitable subject for prayer. But happiness is not exclusively a heavenly matter. There is also “the best enjoyment of what this world can give.” While her prayer intimates the superiority of “the life to come” over “this world,” Austen’s primary concern, as a novelist, is with present enjoyment. What, her novels ask, makes for a good life here? Austen’s belief in a better world does not preclude her artistic concern for earthly enjoyment. As her prayer makes clear, a Christian may attend to both. We also see in this prayer the implicit connection that her novels make between virtue and earthly happiness: forbearance and patience prepare us for eternal happiness and secure temporal happiness. Happiness depends on virtue. In her novels, Austen’s characters secure their temporal happiness through grace but also through their growth in virtue. Their virtue allows for and protects their happiness. Of course, the job of a literary critic is not to determine the state of an author’s soul. According to orthodox Christianity, such a job belongs to God alone. But there is ample evidence of Austen’s commitment to Christianity, and, I would argue, that her commitment to her faith shaped her art. She believed in a benevolent providence who could use suffering to refine the faithful and who was concerned with temporal happiness. She also believed in life after death and in the hope of eternal happiness. Thus, her ontological landscape helps us see that her endings need not be artistic failures, the result of a weak woman’s inability to confront the real challenges of her society. Rather, Austen’s stories share the comic narrative of Christianity. Alasdair MacIntyre contends that “Jane Austen writes comedy rather than tragedy for the same reason that Dante did; she is a Christian and she sees the telos of human life implicit in its everyday form.”68 As a Christian, Austen sees that the process of moral reformation has a telos, a goal toward which it strives. That goal is happiness, full human flourishing. “[A]ny specific account of the virtues,” MacIntyre argues, “presupposes an equally specific account of the narrative structure and unity of a human life and vice versa.”69 A conception of virtue, or more broadly, a theological vision that encompasses an account

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of virtue, gives a narrative shape to human life, and, I would add, a narrative shape to fictional accounts of that life. Jane Austen’s narrative, like a medieval romance, embodies and enacts “the central myth of Christianity” in its comic ending.70 Leithart writes, “her novels . . . may be read as allegories of redemption. The moral insight achieved by her heroines often looks like a religious conversion, and even the sudden surprise of love pierces like an arrow of grace.”71 Her heroes and heroines are also delivered through the intervention of providence working through natural means or, as Mooneyham White states, “the happy endings for Austen’s heroines are rarely the result of the heroine’s own direct dealings; Providence in the form of the author must intervene.”72 The conversion and deliverance of her characters lead to the earthly bliss of an ideal marriage, and sometimes even a paradisal home: “Delaford, Pemberley, and Donwell are three estates . . . each of which Austen describes in reverent terms as a paradise on earth; and each of which is venerable, in harmony with nature.”73 Even Fanny Price comes to consider Mansfield Parsonage, “which . . . [she] never been able to approach but with some painful sensation of restraint or alarm . . . as dear to her heart, and as thoroughly perfect in her eyes, as everything else within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park had long been.”74 Marianne and Colonel Brandon, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Emma and Mr. Knightley, and Fanny and Edmund, through their rejection of vice and refinement of virtue and through the deliverance of providence, obtain marital bliss in paradisal homes. The Christian comedy—the creation of man, his fall from blessedness, his redemption through the death and resurrection of Christ—ends in marriage. In chapter 19 of the book of Revelation, a voice cries out, “Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready” and “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.”75 Medieval romances often end with some kind of feast. Dante describes the “perpetual marriage feasts in heaven.”76 Emma is the only Austen novel that ends with the actual marriage ceremony, a modest affair—the “comic close [is not] riotously festive, for Austen’s suspicion of unrestrained pleasure . . . dictates that the final scene is civilized and restrained in its felicity.”77 Pleasure, even festive pleasure, is properly moderated in Austen; the wedding of Emma and Mr. Knightley is simple and quiet, not a Bakhtinian carnival. But Mooneyham White continues, “we are assured that this wedding, in keeping with the Western comic tradition, constitutes a putative guarantee of comic happiness.”78 Thus, Austen both revises and preserves the festive ending, restraining the pomp and spectacle, all the while assuring us of the continued happiness of the couple. And their wedding feast is enriched by the weddings of the other couples in the novel: “the final scene is the wedding of the principle lovers, but the sense

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of comic completeness is amplified by the reader’s knowledge that one other couple has just completed its nuptials (the Robert Martins) and another will be a married a month hence—Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax.”79 For all the novel’s restrained festivity, it, as Shakespearean comedies so often do, ends with marital abundance. Even though Emma is the only novel that ends with the marriage ceremony, the other five end with the triumphant celebration of happy marriages. All Christian comedies that end in marriage, from medieval romances to Shakespeare to Fielding to Austen, echo the marriage at the end of time. I am not arguing that we ought to read Austen’s endings allegorically, if by allegorical we mean mere substitution (the moral growth of the heroines stands for Christian salvation; the marriages stand for the marriage between Christ and his church), but we must see that the anagogical teachings of Christianity have an effect not only on the narrative structure of the romance but also of the novel. Those teachings constitute Austen’s ontological landscape, which in turn shapes her stories. Those stories depict lovable but flawed heroes and heroines who fall, recover, and obtain happiness through the benevolence of providence and their own moral growth. Thus, I contend that we must take Austen’s endings seriously; she is not betraying social realities with false solutions or simply giving her readers an enjoyable convention, though she may be doing that as well; she is also, like the medieval romancers, crafting a narrative that has moral and theological justification—a narrative that, like theirs, is part of her metaphysics. Like the medieval romancers before her, she composes providential romances. WHY EMMA AND PERSUASION? Any of the major novels would work for this project, and, indeed, I will refer to Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park throughout. Northanger Abbey would be an obvious place to start. However, Roger Moore has already explored the novel’s medievalism, focusing on the Abbey itself and Austen’s response to Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.80 Beth Kowaleski Wallace notes Catherine’s eager to desire to hear some story about “an injured and ill-fated nun”81 and wonders what kind of nun Catherine is thinking of.82 Catherine’s interest in nuns reflects a wider cultural interest: “Eighteenth-century educational writing and fiction commonly address the religious, ethical, and educational efficacy of convent life.”83 Radcliffe’s Adeline, the heroine of The Romance of the Forest, refuses her father’s wish that she enter a convent.84 The medieval elements of Northanger Abbey, mediated as they are through the Gothic romance, have already been uncovered.

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For that reason, I would like to look at two other works in some detail— Emma and Persuasion. Emma is, on a linguistic level, the most engaged with the medieval tradition of courtly love. Words like gallantry, service, fair, lady, knight-errantry, and, of course, Mr. Knightley appear throughout the novel. The correspondence to the courtly love tradition is not just linguistic. The conventions of courtly love, in which a devout knight serves a beautiful lady, have shaped Emma’s imagination. But Emma misunderstands the true nature of service and, as the beautiful lady, worshipped by the men around her, falls prey to the moral temptations of that worship. As Emma confronts her own moral failures, she learns the service and submission necessary for a true knight. In turn, Mr. Knightley also becomes knightlier as he learns to elevate his beloved, rather than simply correct her. The conventions of courtly love have, in Austen’s novel, become mutual. The knight and lady both serve each other. In the end, both find a perfectly happy ending through this mutual submission and elevation. Even the dour Marvin Mudrick concedes that “Jane Austen does succeed on her primary levels in achieving her ‘ripest and kindliest,’ her most perfect love comedy”85 in Emma. Medieval romances often end with a perfectly happy marriage between two virtuous people. Since the happy ending is the romantic convention that I am most interested in, Emma, with its insistence on perfection, is the ideal choice. All of Austen’s happy endings come about through providential intervention, but Persuasion, with its emphasis on the unexpected recovery of lost love and the explicit role of providence, is an obvious choice for this project. The union, followed by separation and ending in reunion, unique in Austen’s oeuvre, is a romantic structure. Matilda Bruckner describes the narrative structure of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances, a structure that sounds a great deal like Persuasion: An initial problem or lack launches the hero on a quest, which is realized in a series of episodes. The hero’s success is celebrated by marriage with his beloved, discovered and won as a result of his prowess. But a crisis soon disrupts their happiness. The hero’s reputation cast in doubt, he must once again set out on a series of adventures to redefine his identity. His success in these further trails sets a new level of extraordinary achievement and culminates in the celebration of the hero’s triumph.86

Anne and Wentworth are not married at the beginning of the novel, of course, but they are engaged and then separated. Providence reunites them and delivers them from dangers beyond their control. That deliverance inspires wonder, a passion that is characteristically romantic. Anne, the daughter of a baronet despised by her father and eldest sister, resembles the overlooked or

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displaced heirs of romance, who loses, not her kingdom, but her true love, and is providentially reunited with him, finding perfect happiness. Even the novel’s maritime setting enhances its standing as a providential romance. In the romantic tradition, the sea is associated with providence. As Claudia Johnson states, “Fortune, Providence, luck, chance—these are extremely prominent entities in the novel, and are emblemized by the sea itself.”87 Early in the novel, the narrator informs us that Anne “learned romance as she grew older”;88 the romance that she learns is, I will argue, not primarily that of Wordsworth and Byron, but the providential romance of the Middle Ages. OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS In the chapters that follow, I aim to show Austen’s romantic medievalism, focusing on her nuanced critique of courtly love and her embrace of happy endings. Chapter 1 begins by exploring the status of the medieval romance and the medieval era in the eighteenth century, considering in some detail both the attacks of authors like Henry Fielding, Thomas Warton, and David Hume and the antiquarian rehabilitation of the Middle Ages. In chapter 2, I situate Austen within the medieval revival of the eighteenth century by looking at the sources she read that transmitted to her the medieval world and medieval romance. From William Gilpin, she learned that “among all the objects of art, the picturesque eye is perhaps most inquisitive after the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles, and abbeys.”89 From Shakespeare, she inherited the narrative structure of medieval romances as well as the conventions of courtly love. She also encountered the tropes and language of medieval romance from Samuel Johnson, who was, according to Eithne Henson, “addicted to chivalric romance.”90 In Charlotte Lennox, Austen found an author who critiqued courtly love’s worshipful elevation of women. From the Queen of the Gothic Romance herself, Ann Radcliffe, Austen would have received long descriptions of Gothic architecture and the familiar tropes of courtly love—the brave knight rescuing the fair maiden. She would have also encountered the language of courtly love through Lord Byron, whom Austen references explicitly in Persuasion. And, of course, Sir Walter Scott provided an imaginative entrance into medieval romance for Austen. Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick discuss Marmion, and Fanny Price quotes The Lay of the Last Minstrel. In sum, Austen’s reading was surprisingly medieval. Having established the renewed interest in the medieval era in the eighteenth century and Austen’s familiarity with the tropes of medieval romance, I then, in chapter 3, explore the varying meanings of the word romance throughout her novels. Though the word rarely refers to medieval romance,

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Austen’s varied uses develop indirectly from medieval romance. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on Emma; chapter 4 establishes the medieval lexicon of the novel, and chapter 5 explores how its medieval structure allows us to read its happy ending. Chapter 6 examines the role of providence in Persuasion and makes the argument that Austen’s novels should be read as providential romances. In chapter 7, I address the problem that Austen’s irony seems to present to her romance; after all, she regularly undermines climactic moments of passion. In fact, her irony, like her romance, stems from the ontological landscape she shares with the medieval romancers; thus, her romances are ironic providential romances. In chapter 8, I reflect on Austen’s education of what Adam Smith calls “moral sentiments,” focusing particularly on how Austen educates her readers in joy, the proper emotional response to romances that end with lovers happily united.91 For Smith, moral action is based on our ability to imagine what someone else is experiencing and how we would feel if we were experiencing the same thing. That ability, for Smith, extends beyond real people to fictional characters. We are able to respond emotionally to stories; we feel joy in deliverance, grief in distress—fellow feeling with misery and happiness. While our emotional response to characters is natural, it can also be educated. Austen creates characters with whom we sympathize in order to educate our emotions, to direct them toward what she sees as the proper object. Like Smith, she thinks that emotions have a moral heft, that we can feel justly or unjustly. She wants her readers to learn to rejoice in the happiness of her characters. She wants them to experience joy in the deliverance and well-being of characters who have found happiness in love within a providential cosmos. There is great popular enjoyment in the romance of Jane Austen, in the love between her characters and the happiness they obtain. But there is a need for scholarly justification of the popular enjoyment of Austen’s lovers and their happy endings, of her romance. Indeed, there is a dearth of work on happy endings in general, which are often treated as mere fantasy, ontological cowardice, and artistic triviality. But such assessments do not engage with the more fundamental question of why Austen sees the happy ending as worthy of aspiration. Instead of dismissing the happy ending as a form of delusion, a pusillanimous evasion of nasty reality, this book considers the value of Austen’s narrative resolutions. The romantic happy endings of her novels teach us about the nature of human desire and give us opportunities for developing and exercising imaginative sympathy.

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NOTES 1. Jane Austen, “The History of England,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 186. 2. I certainly do not wish to overlook Austen’s playfulness and fall into the trap of over-earnest scholarship. The partiality she declares here is part of her satirical critique of Goldsmith’s biased history, and she is certainly capable of using Catholicism as a comic solution. In Lesley Castle, Margaret Lesley writes that her brother “has turned Roman-catholic, obtained one of the Pope’s bulls for annulling his 1st marriage and has since actually married a Neapolitan Lady of great Rank and Fortune.” And his wife also “turned Roman-Catholic, and is soon to be married to a Neapolitan Nobleman.” Catholicism becomes a convenient solution to an unhappy Protestant marriage. Jane Austen, “Lesley Castle,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 174. 3. Jane Austen, “History of England,” 184. 4. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: 1570), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/ cache​/epub​/1844​/pg1844​.html. 5. Beth Kowaleski Wallace, “‘Penance and mortification for ever’: Jane Austen and the Ambient Noise of Catholicism,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 31, no. 1 (March 2012): 159, https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/43653594. 6. Wallace, “‘Penance and mortification,’” 166. 7. Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture, and Ideology, vol. 7 of Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political, and Social History, ed. Tim Harris, Stephen Taylor, and Andy Wood (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013), 4. 8. Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004). 9. Horace Walpole, “The Castle of Otranto,” in The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey, ed. Andrew Wright (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). 10. Wallace, “‘Penance and mortification,’” 160. 11. Roger E. Moore, Jane Austen and the Reformation: Remembering the Sacred Landscape (London: Routledge, 2016). 12. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 128. 13. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 13. 14. Watt, Rise of the Novel, 13. 15. Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 129. 16. Margaret Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 1. 17. Christine Lee, “The Meanings of Romance: Rethinking Early Modern Fiction,” Modern Philology 112, no. 2 (2014): 306, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/678255. 18. Doody, True Story of the Novel, 281. 19. Doody, True Story of the Novel, 286.

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20. Northrup Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 39. 21. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 21. 22. Laura Mooneyham White, “Emma and New Comedy,” Persuasions 21 (1999): 129. 23. Mooneyham White, “Emma and New Comedy,” 130. 24. Kathryn Davis, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2016). 25. Gary Kelly, “Religion and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 169. 26. Ashley Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen: Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 24. 27. Kenneth Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 1968. 28. Natasha Duquette, “‘Motionless Wonder’: Contemplating Gothic Sublimity in Northanger Abbey,” Persuasions On-Line, 30, no. 2 (Spring 2010), https:​//​jasna​.org​/ persuasions​/on​-line​/vol30no2​/duquette​.html. 29. Susan Allen Ford, “Romance, Pedagogy and Power: Jane Austen Re-writes Madame de Genlis,” Persuasions 21 (1999) 172–87. 30. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020). 31. Navya Dasari, “No Teacher But Herself: Education, Feminism, and Romance in Emma,” Jane Austen Society of North America, 2016, http:​//​www​.jasna​.org​/ essaycontest//​2016​/undergraduate​-2​.html. 32. Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen: Gender and Morality, video, https:​//​www​.bl​ .uk​/romantics​-and​-victorians​/videos​/jane​-austen​-gender​-and​-morality. 33. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 50. 34. Jane Austen, Persuasion, 79. 35. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 105–6. 36. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 21. 37. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 21–22. 38. Vivien Jones, “Feminisms,” in Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 360. 39. Jones, “Feminisms,” 363. 40. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 10. 41. Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen, 18. 42. “Sir Orfeo,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 174–90; “Emaré,” in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), https:​//​d​.lib​.rochester​.edu​/teams​/text​/laskaya​-and​-salisbury​

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-middleenglishbreton​-lays​-emare; “Havelok,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A., Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 3–74. 43. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5. 44. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen & Co., 1987), 37. 45. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 37. 46. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 37. 47. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 37. 48. Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings, https:​//​learning​.hccs​.edu​/faculty​/selena​ .anderson​/engl2328​/readings​/happy​-endings​-by​-margaret​-atwood​/view, 3. 49. Laura Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016); Michael Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Peter J. Leithart, Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2004); Moore, Jane Austen and the Reformation. 50. Cheryl A. Wilson, “‘Something like Mine’: Catherine Hutton, Jane Austen, and Feminist Recovery Work,” Eighteenth Century 56, no. 2 (2015): 154, http:​//​www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/24575158. 51. Emily Auerbach, “Searching for Jane Austen: Restoring the ‘Fleas’ and ‘Bad Breath,’” Persuasions 27 (2005): 36; Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 52. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 43. 53. Jane Austen, “Letter 109,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 292. 54. Leithart, Miniatures and Morals, 31. 55. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 270. 56. James Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (London: Century, 1987), 175. 57. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 83. 58. Jane Austen, “Letter 40,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100. 59. Atwood, Happy Endings, 3. 60. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 83. 61. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer (Cambridge: John Baskerville, 1762), 29, http:​//​justus​.anglican​.org​/resources​/bcp​/1662​/Baskerville​.pdf. 62. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer, 100. 63. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 84. 64. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 85. 65. Philippa Koch, “Slavery, Mission, and the Perils of Providence in Eighteenth-Century Christianity: The Writings of Whitefield and the Halle Pietists,” Church History 84, no. 2 (2015): 370, https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/24537464. 66. Koch, “Slavery, Mission, and the Perils of Providence,” 371.

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67. Jane Austen, The Prayers of Jane Austen (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2015), 52. 68. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 241. 69. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 241. 70. Northrup Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 133. 71. Leithart, Miniatures and Morals, 10. 72. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 87. 73. Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion, 35. 74. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 321. 75. Revelation 19:7; 19:9. 76. Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 32.75. 77. Mooneyham White, “Emma and New Comedy,” 140. 78. Mooneyham White, “Emma and New Comedy,” 140. 79. Mooneyham White, “Emma and New Comedy,” 139. 80. Roger E. Moore, “The Hidden History of Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and the Dissolution of the Monasteries,” Religion & Literature 43, no. 1 (2011): 55–80, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/23049354. 81. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 96. 82. Wallace, “‘Penance and mortification,’” 169. 83. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 79. 84. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (London: J. Limbird, 1824; Project Gutenberg, 2021), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/64701​/64701​-h​/64701​-h​.htm. 85. Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 201. 86. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance in Medieval France,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 23. 87. Claudia L. Johnson, “Persuasion: ‘The Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day,’” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2004), 161. 88. Jane Austen, Persuasion, 23. 89. William Gilpin, “Essay Two: On Picturesque Travel,” in Five Essays on Picturesque Subjects with a Poem on Landscape Painting, 3rd ed. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), 46. 90. Eithne Henson, The “Fictions of Romantick Chivalry”: Samuel Johnson and Romance (Vancouver, BC: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), 19. 91. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982).

Chapter 1

Romance and Chivalry in the Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, the medieval romance was, according to some novelists, literary critics, and philosophers, a suspect genre. In 1749, Henry Fielding declared, “truth distinguishes our writings [namely, Tom Jones] from those idle romances which are filled with monsters, the productions, not of nature, but distempered brains.”1 In 1754, Thomas Warton, in his Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser, speaks of the Italian Renaissance as a time “when the pure and uncorrupted forces of antient poesy and antient criticism were opened, and literature in general seemed emerging from the depths of Gothic ignorance and barbarity, it might have been expected, that, instead of the romantic species of poetical composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have succeeded.”2 For Warton, that literary evolution out of the Gothic romance was, unfortunately, slow to come. Ignorance, barbarity, and romance were all stubbornly persistent: “But it was a long time before such a change as this was effectd; and we find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth for magic.”3 To continue writing romances rather than embracing the classical models was, to Warton, “bad taste.”4 In 1759, David Hume praised Homer for “true, natural manners” and criticized Spenser for “being employed in drawing the affectations, and conceits, and fopperies of chivalry.”5 In the preface to her 1784 translation of Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye’s Memoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, Susannah Dobson explains that she has to defend the medieval romance because so many dismiss the entire genre: “it is a great weakness to hold any work in contempt on account of its title, or because a multitude of trifling or bad productions bear the fame; and was it not done by many, it should seem quite unnecessary to make the remark.”6 Dobson’s frustration at having to make this unnecessary argument is palpable; it is silly to despise a work because of its title, but so many have shown such weakness that she 23

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is obliged to make this rather obvious point. The disdain for romance has clouded common sense. Dobson’s frustration shows that the romance had its eighteenth-century defenders as well as its detractors. Eighteenth-century attitudes toward the Middle Ages were heterogeneous. In some circles, the period, its values, and its literature were written off as childish, barbarous, and superstitious. Medieval romance violated the symmetry, rationality, and intellectual maturity of the neo-classical world. And yet that same historical epoch was simultaneously the object of an antiquarian revival that affected architectural preferences and literary tastes, a revival that began with scholars but eventually made its way into the popular imagination. In the same century that David Hume dismissed chivalry as foppish, Horace Walpole transformed his home into a Gothic castle. In this chapter, I will explore both detractors and defenders in order to establish the broad historical view of the Middle Ages and the medieval romance that preceded and surrounded Austen. DETRACTORS OF THE MIDDLE AGES The scorn for medieval romance articulated by authors like Warton goes much further back than the eighteenth century. Frances Gies writes, “The chivalric mystique was rebuffed not only by Renaissance humanism but by Protestantism. Elizabethan moralist Roger Ascham identified the Middle Ages with Catholicism and regarded chivalric literature as the creation of ‘idle monks or wanton canons.’”7 Ascham mentions Morte d’Arthure by name, condemning its “mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye: In which booke those be counted the noblest Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarell, and commit fowlest aduoulteres by sutlest shiftes.”8 Ascham’s denunciation articulates perennial concerns about immorality in literature; indeed, his description of the romances sounds like the warnings and ratings given to modern film. Medieval romance: rated R for explicit violence and immoral sex. In addition to facing accusations of immorality, the medieval romance, once “the major genre of secular fiction,” was also an object of satire.9 According to Helen Cooper, “[i]t was not humanism or Protestantism that finally drove [romances] . . . out of high cultural visibility, but satire.”10 Thomas Shelton began translating Don Quixote, the greatest satire of medieval romance, into English in 1612. Likewise, “at the same time, Samuel Rowlands was composing his Melancholie Knight, which did for the native tradition of romance what Don Quixote had done for the Spanish.”11 Samuel Butler also satirized the romance tradition: “A few decades later [after the Melancholie Knight], Sir Hudibras made the happy discovery that the questing knight needs only

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one spur, since if one side of his horse goes faster the other is likely to keep up: the effort of winning your spurs can be halved in economic terms without operational penalty.”12 Such economical calculations are utterly opposed to the liberality expected of a romantic hero. The noble knight had fallen to satire. By the latter half of the sixteenth century, Romance had ceased to have a living meaning, its powering ideas rendered obsolete by social change, market economies, and the skepticism towards ideals and towards wonder attendant on the growth of experimental science and literary realism. From being the reading-matter of kings, the stories became the amusement of the semi-literate, the provincial, and children.13

The wonder and idealism of romance was antithetical to an age that prided itself on science and reason. A genre that had once encapsulated the ideals of the highest levels of society was relegated to the lowest, and by the eighteenth century, the dismissal of romance was a literary cliché. The attack on romance was part of a broader assault by Renaissance and neo-classical thinkers alike on the Middle Ages. By the eighteenth century, the barbarous, superstitious Middle Ages had become a stereotype. Joseph Addison, though he enjoys the rich imaginative world of medieval literature, also describes the darkness and superstition of later ages [surely the Middle Ages], when pious frauds were made use of to amuse mankind, and frighten them into a sense of their duty. Our forefathers looked upon nature with more reverence and horror, before the world was enlightened by learning and philosophy, and loved to astonish themselves with the apprehensions of witchcraft, prodigies, charms, and enchantments.14

According to Addison, because they lacked knowledge and enlightenment, the men of the Middle Ages were more inclined to worship and fear the natural world. They lived in a dark, terrifying, and enchanted world whose spell was broken by the liberating power of learning and philosophy. In Spectator 63, Addison describes a dream he had in which he traveled to a country “governed by the goddess of Falsehood, entitled the Region of False Wit.”15 In that region, he “discovered in the center of a very dark grove a monstrous fabric built after the Gothic manner, and covered with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture.”16 The structure is “a kind of heathen temple consecrated to the god of Dullness” and “the deity of the place [is] dressed in the habit of a monk.”17 At the end of the dream, the goddess Falsehood is defeated by the light of Truth, who is accompanied by figures like heroic poetry, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, and epigram. The dream is clearly an

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allegorical rendering of the defeat of the false and wild works of romances by the true works of the neo-classical era. The attack against romance was primarily ontological. The characters, their manners, and the adventures they experienced were alluring but false and unnatural. Warton describes the romance as featuring “unnatural events, the machinations of imaginary beings, and adventures entertaining only as they were improbable” and regrets that the genre did not more quickly give way to “justness of thought and design, and to that decorum which nature dictated, and which the example and the precept of antiquity had authorised.”18 The miraculous and supernatural elements of the medieval romance were particularly suspect, even for those who held religious convictions. According to Henry Beers, Addison was “[a]mong the Queen Anne wits . . . the man of most genuine religious feeling”; however, “his religion is of the rationalizing type, a religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual experience are almost entirely absent.”19 Supernatural intervention, so common in medieval romance, was distasteful to men whose religion emphasized this world. Miracles did not suit the temperament of those who saw religion primarily as a system of ethics. As Addison’s dream reveals, the medieval world, with its openness to the supernatural, had become synonymous with credulous superstition. THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL AND ITS DEFENDERS But scorn was not the only response to the Middle Ages. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke laments, “the age of chivalry is gone.”20 Shocked by the treatment of Marie-Antoinette, Burke fears that the loss of chivalry will be followed by the loss of Europe itself because chivalry “is what has given modern Europe its character. It is what has distinguished Europe under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia and possibly from the states that flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world.”21 Burke’s lament was certainly not universally appreciated, as Claudia Johnson observes, “To political opponents, Burke’s adoration of Marie-Antoinette seemed both beside the point— take Paine’s famous put-down about pitying the plumage but forgetting the dying swan—and also unwholesomely servile . . . even allies at first considered Burke’s worshipfulness overheated and embarrassing.”22 According to Johnson, Burke is less concerned about the French queen herself and more concerned about declining masculinity: “Such is the brilliance of Burke’s description of the glittering queen that readers sometimes forget that Burke

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is not so much lamenting the fall of Marie-Antoinette as he is the fall of sentimentalized manhood, the kind of manhood inclined to venerate her.”23 That sentimentalized manhood is chivalric. Burke sees chivalrous men not as affected fops, as Hume would, but as men far superior to the “logical tricksters, economists, and calculators”24 of the modern age. While Burke is likely more concerned about the decline of masculinity than about Marie-Antoinette herself, he certainly wants to preserve the chivalrous veneration of women so essential to medieval romance. Yet, despite Burke’s sorrow over the loss of chivalry and the subsequent decline of Europe, scholars of the eighteenth century were turning their attention to the Middle Ages. Although historians tend to focus on the medieval revival of the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century also experienced its own revival. Writing in 1899, Henry Beers went so far as to compare that revival to the Renaissance: “Just as, in the fifteenth century, the fragments of a half-forgotten civilization were pieced together . . . till the complete image of the antique world grew forth in august beauty . . . so, in the eighteenth century, the despised ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their claims upon the imagination.”25 Romances, the literature of the Middle Ages, also began to reassert their claims on the imagination of scholars. Susannah Dobson praises medieval romances for their historical accuracy and powerful representation of virtue. She writes, “those who described them [the ages of chivalry] (which were chiefly the old romance writers) described simply what they saw; and have always been found in accord with historians of the greatest authenticity.”26 For her, the authors of medieval romances should be treated as “the historians of those times,”27 particularly historians of manners, interested in “the manners in the courts of Henry the Fourth, Lewis the Thirteenth, and Lewis the Fourteenth.”28 Unlike Ascham, who saw romances as corrupt, Dobson argues that they offer moral instruction, particularly of interest to women: “They taught generous firmness, judicious observance of superiors, and constant love, to unite in the same hearts: they taught to honour the valiant, to attend the wounded, to relieve the distressed, and to dispense the sweet solace of cheerful and gentle manner to all around them.”29 Dobson’s description makes the medieval romance sound like a novel of manners, but the manners of a medieval court rather than an eighteenth-century ballroom. Among eighteenth-century scholars and writers there were two main schools of thought concerning the Middle Ages and its scholarly study: The rationalist philosophers scorned all things medieval as barbarism, superstition, and ignorance. But a body of conservative scholars, the most famous of them J.-B. de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye . . . studied the art, subjected the history to critical examination, and edited the literature of the Middle Ages.

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Sainte-Palaye’s Memoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie (1759), with its description of dubbings and tournaments and account of the code of chivalry, exerted a powerful influence on European intellectuals, including Gibbon, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Southey.30

Those conservative scholars also influenced the language of medieval scholarship. As Gies points out, “so much of the terminology of medieval history and criticism is the invention of the eighteenth century,”31 and “[m]any of the printed editions of medieval chronicles, literary works, and documents used today were prepared by scholars of the eighteenth century.”32 The medieval revival began with these scholars and their work; as Beers explains, “A literary movement which reverts to the past for its inspiration is necessarily also a learned movement. Antiquarian scholarship must lead the way. The picture of an extinct society has to be pieced together from the fragments at hand, and this involves special research.”33 In 1707, the Society of Antiquaries considered chivalry “as one area in need of antiquarian inquiry.”34 That special research, Sir Leslie Stephen argues, led to love for the time period: “An antiquary is naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love the times whose peculiarities they were so laboriously studying.”35 Unlike the critical Hume, the antiquarians were not so dismissive of the folly of chivalry, and their scholarly work played an essential role in reviving the reputation of the medieval era. This medieval revival included an interest in Gothic architecture. Michele Cohen writes, “By the 1740s, Gothic architecture, long regarded as a ‘non-classical muddle and as such unworthy of the Man of Taste,’ had not only received appreciative attention from many but ‘had become a fashion,’ and Gothic had ‘ceased to be synonymous for barbarous or violent.’”36 Among those interested in Gothic architecture was Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto “was the parent of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances . . . [which in turn] broke the ground for Scott’s creation of the historical novel”;37 Walpole was particularly attracted to medieval architecture and “began to turn his house into a miniature Gothic castle.”38 The renovation attracted tourists and started a fashion trend among the elites of English society: “The best families had considered it [the Gothic] a parvenu style, but when the fastidious and aristocratic Walpole turned his country place into a Gothic mansion, the style could no longer be snubbed.”39 Even before Walpole, “[t]he Tory peer Lord Bathurst of Bathurst Park near Cirencester built a fake ‘Gothic’ ruin, Alfred’s Hall, within his grounds in 1723, alluding to an era of political liberty which the Whig political regime, from which he was excluded, had destroyed.”40 Gothic architecture was a political as well as a fashionable statement. The antiquarian revival soon became a popular one. Popular magazines of the eighteenth century, like The Gentleman’s Magazine, “testify to the

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growing popularity of the Gothic, and not only in architecture but all phases of life in the Middle Ages.”41 Rosemary Sweet explains that “by the later eighteenth century the emphasis was less on antiquarian erudition than the evocation of a bygone period in which knights inhabiting Gothic castles led lives governed by a strict code of honour, attending tournaments, performing acts of gallantry, and being entertained by troubadours.”42 The medieval era spoke to the imagination: “Part of the attraction of castles came to reside not in their historical importance, or even their picturesque qualities, but in their capacity to conjure up images of gallant actions and chivalry.”43 Indeed, these gallant and chivalrous images still form our mental picture of the Middle Ages. This revival was part of the move from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era, from an age of reason to an age of sentiment. Indeed, for Beers, “Romanticism . . . means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and thought of the Middle Ages.”44 This romanticism “relaxed the classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary mind into a receptive, expectant attitude favorable to original creative activity.”45 The romantic reproduction of the Middle Ages began well before Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads or Keats composed “The Eve of St. Agnes” and well before the nineteenth-century Gothic revival. The Middle Ages captured public imagination in the eighteenth century, the century that Austen was born in and in which she began her writing career. HURD’S LETTERS ON CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE The medieval revival is especially important for Austen’s views on romance and chivalry. Her novels show her deep familiarity with the structure of medieval romance and with chivalric expectations for relationships between the sexes. Before exploring the roots of Austen’s personal engagement with medieval literature (the topic of chapter 2), it is first important to investigate the broader reevaluation not only of the Middle Ages, but specifically of the medieval romance that was taking place in the eighteenth century. For some, chivalric literature, though obviously inferior to contemporary literature, had its charms. Even Warton, who regretted the longevity of romance, acknowledges the appeal of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Although The Faerie Queene “does not exhibit that economy of plan, and exact arrangement of parts which Epic severity requires, yet we scarcely regret the loss of these” because “it engages the affection of the heart, rather than the applause of the head” and “the faculties of creative imagination delight us, because they are unassisted and unrestrained by those of deliberate judgment.”46 In

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reading the poem, Warton declares, “we are not satisfied as critics, yet we are transported as readers.”47 Though romance did not follow the rational rules of neo-classicism, its emotional appeal and imaginative creativity appealed to eighteenth-century readers. I have already mentioned Susannah Dobson’s defense of romance’s ability to teach lessons in manners and morals. The eighteenth-century defenders of romance were also interested in the relationship between the sexes in medieval romances. Burke’s lament over the loss of chivalry is, as noted above, distinctly gendered. The lack of gallantry toward the queen shown by the Frenchmen who stormed Versailles deeply distresses him: “I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.”48 For Burke, the decline of chivalry is seen in the decline of the knightly instinct to protect the fair lady. The Reverend Richard Hurd, whose extract “The Difference Between True and False Politeness” appears in Elegant Extracts: Or Useful and Entertaining Passages in Prose,49 was among the most influential scholars of the eighteenth century who argued in favor of medieval romance and who saw the knight-lady relationship as essential to chivalry. In 1762, Hurd published Letters on Chivalry and Romance, a copy of which Edward Knight, Austen’s older brother, had in his library at Godmersham Park.50 Although Hurd repeats the eighteenth-century clichés about “the superstition of the Times, in which Chivalry arose,”51 he argues for “[t]he pre-eminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the classic.”52 Audley Smith writes, “[i]t was in his insistence upon the superiority of the Gothic manners over the classic that Hurd was the most original and the most anti-neo-classical.”53 Warton acknowledges the imaginative appeal of The Faerie Queene but insists on its critical inferiority to neo-classical works. In his Letters, Hurd explains the origins of chivalry and of romance. He sees it as “a distinct military order”54 that arose from “the FEUDAL CONSTITUTION”55 in which petty lords, though under the governance of a prince, had so many vassals under them that they became a sovereign in their own right, often at war with other lords. This “military order” encouraged men to practice feats of arms, feats recorded by Gothic romancers. For Hurd, chivalry was a short-lived historical reality that gave rise to an enduring literary form: “The spirit of Chivalry, was a fire which soon spent itself: But that of Romance, which was kindled at it, burnt long, and continued its light and heat even to the politer ages.”56 That light and heat spread, not only to the Gothic romance, but also to the novel of manners. Hurd also explains the historical origins of gallantry toward women, one of the most important medieval conventions to defenders of chivalry and romance. The historical situation of the feudal vassals who spent much of their time in “the castles of the Barons”57 also gave rise to the practice of

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gallantry, the courteous treatment and protection of women: “The free commerce of the ladies, in those knots and circles of the great, would operate so far on the sturdiest knights as to give birth to the attentions of gallantry.”58 In the close quarters of a medieval castle, men and women, more particularly the wife of the lord and his knights, would inevitably run into each other and had to develop social forms by which to behave. Such forms were elevated because the knight was under the close scrutiny of his lord, perhaps watching how the knight would treat his wife, and because the knight was nobly outraged by the sufferings that war caused women: But this gallantry would take a refined turn, not only from the necessity there was of maintaining the strict forms of decorum, amidst a promiscuous conversation under the eye of the Prince and his own family; but also from the inflamed sense they must needs have of the outrages committed, by their neighbouring clans of adversaries, on the honour of the Sex, when by chance of war they had fallen into their hands.59

According to Hurd, gallantry arose from political necessity and from the outrages of war, and consequently, women become objects of courtesy and protection. Such gallantry appears in the chivalry-kindled romances though the author’s imagination enhances the beauty of the lady to an otherworldly standard: “The knights of romance were used to dedicate their services to some paragone of beauty, such as was only conceived to exist in the land of Faery, and could no where be found in this vulgar disenchanted world.”60 Those knights served such extraordinary ladies through courteous words and valorous deeds, which Hurd calls “services,” drawing on the traditional language of courtly love. Medieval gallantry was of particular interest to the eighteenth-century defenders of romance. In his influential Memoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, Sainte-Palaye, that great medievalist of eighteenth-century France and a predecessor of Hurd, states, “The first lessons given to the page [training to be a knight], consisted principally in the love of God, and attachment and respect to the fair sex.”61 The knight-in-training learned first of God and of women. While Burke sees gallant treatment of women as distinctly European, Sainte-Palaye sees it as distinctly French: “the precepts of love, spread over the commerce with the fair sex, that circumspection, that tender respect, and attention, which has never been effaced, but has always been the particular character of the French nation.”62 This much-lauded gallantry of the Middle Ages and medieval romances captured the popular imagination in the eighteenth century and shaped the way the novel depicted relationships between the sexes.

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As I have shown in this chapter, the eighteenth century, that age of neo-classical rationalism, experienced a robust revival of interest, both scholarly and popular, in the Middle Ages. That Jane Austen should be situated within this medieval revival is not immediately apparent. She was not an antiquarian. She had no grand estate to transform into a crenelated and turreted castle. Unlike Horace Walpole or Sir Walter Scott, who composed historical romances set in the Middle Ages, Austen wrote about her own time and place. Her depictions of polite society seem far removed from knightly duels and fair ladies. Yet, in subtle ways, she is responding to the medieval world, particularly to the chivalrous conventions of love it establishes. She too participates in the medieval revival. And, once we see how ubiquitous and multifaceted the medieval world was in her reading, it is no surprise that she too engages with that barbarous, superstitious, enchanting, chivalrous age. NOTES 1. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 1749), 133. 2. Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene (Oxford: R. and J. Dodsley and J. Fletcher, 1754), 1, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 3. Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene, 1–2. 4. Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene, 3. 5. David Hume, The History of England, under the House of Tudor. Comprehending the reigns of K. Henry VII. K. Henry VIII. K Edward VI. Q. Mary, and Q. Elizabeth, vol. 2 (London: A. Miller, 1759), 739, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 6. Susannah Dobson, “Preface,” in Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry: To which are Added, the Anecdotes of the Times, from the Romance Writers and Historians of Those Ages, trans. Susannah Dobson (London: J. Dodsley, 1784), x–xi, https:​//​archive​.org​/ details​/memoirsancientc00susgoog​/page​/n20. 7. Frances Gies, The Knight in History (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 203. 8. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: 1570), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/ cache​/epub​/1844​/pg1844​.html. 9. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2. 10. Cooper, English Romance in Time, 39. 11. Cooper, English Romance in Time, 39. 12. Cooper, English Romance in Time, 40. 13. Cooper, English Romance in Time, 40. 14. Joseph Addison, “No. 419,” in Essays in Criticism and Literary Theory: Addison, ed. John Loftis (Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1975), 172. 15. Joseph Addison, “No. 63,” in Essays in Criticism and Literary Theory: Addison, ed. John Loftis (Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1975), 78. 16. Addison, “No. 63,” 79.

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17. Addison, “No. 63,” 79. 18. Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene, 1. 19. Henry Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 42. 20. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Dover Publications, 2006), 74–75. 21. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 75. 22. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3. 23. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 4. 24. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 75. 25. Beers, History of English Romanticism, 30. 26. Dobson, “Preface,” ix. 27. Dobson, “Preface,” xvii. 28. Dobson, “Preface,” xi–xii. 29. Dobson, “Preface,” xix. 30. Gies, Knight in History, 204. 31. Gies, Knight in History, 56. 32. Gies, Knight in History, 204. 33. Beers, History of English Romanticism, 187. 34. Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), 333. 35. Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1962), 378. 36. Michele Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830.” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 316, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/427127. 37. Stephen, History of English Thought, 378. 38. Beers, History of English Romanticism, 230. 39. Agnes Addison Gilchrist, Romanticism and the Gothic Revival (New York: Gordian Press, 1967), 42. 40. Sweet, Antiquaries, 248. 41. Gilchrist, Romanticism and the Gothic Revival, 49–50. 42. Sweet, Antiquaries, 333. 43. Sweet, Antiquaries, 333–34. 44. Beers, History of English Romanticism, 2. 45. Beers, History of English Romanticism, 423. 46. Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene, 13. 47. Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene, 13. 48. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 74. 49. Susan Allen Ford explains the Austen’s relationship to Elegant Extracts, both the prose and the poetry anthology, in great detail. In short, she was surrounded by the anthology:

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The massive anthologies assembled by Vicesimus Knox were extremely popular, going through many editions from the early 1780s through the 1820s. That popularity is reflected in the Austen family libraries. According to Irene Collins, the Reverend George Austen “thought so highly” of Elegant Extracts in Prose that in 1788 “he gave the fourteen-yearold Frank a copy of it to take with him on board ship bound for the East Indies, assuring him that its passages from approved authors would furnish him with ‘every requisite for belief and practice’” (51). Jane Austen herself owned a copy of the volume of prose (now at Jane Austen’s House, Chawton), which she gave to her eight-year-old niece Anna in 1801 (Gilson 433), when the family’s library was sold preparatory to the move to Bath. And Alice Marie Villaseñor has pointed to a copy of Elegant Extracts in Poetry signed “Edward Austen 1808,” part of the Knight Collection at Chawton House Library.

Susan Allen Ford, “Reading Elegant Extracts in Emma: Very Entertaining!” Persuasions On-Line 28, no. 1 (2007), http:​//​jasna​.org​/persuasions​/on​-line​/vol28no1​/ford​ .html. 50. This does not prove that Austen read Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, so I have not put him in the following chapter, where I discuss her literary influences. 51. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), ed. Hoyt Trowbridge (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1963), 20, https:​//​babel​.hathitrust​.org​/cgi​/pt​?id​=mdp​.39015015381141​&view​=1up​ &seq​=5​&skin​=2021. 52. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 76, emphasis in original. 53. Audley J. Smith, “Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance,” English Literary History 6, no. 1 (1939): 67, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2871604. 54. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 6. 55. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 7. 56. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 3–4. 57. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 9. 58. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 17. 59. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 17–18. 60. Richard Hurd, “Letters on Chivalry and Romance,” in Moral and Political Dialogues, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (London: W. Bowyer, 1771), 321, https:​//​play​.google​.com​/ books​/reader​?id​=IDQCAAAAQAAJ​&pg​=GBS​.PA194​&printsec​=frontcover. 61. Jean Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry: To which are Added, the Anecdotes of the Times, from the Romance Writers and Historians of Those Ages, trans. Susannah Dobson (London: J. Dodsley, 1784), 7, https:​//​ archive​.org​/details​/memoirsancientc00susgoog​/page​/n20. 62. Sainte-Palaye, Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, 8.

Chapter 2

Jane Austen’s Medieval Reading

When bad weather delays the Tilneys from keeping their appointment with her in a timely manner, Catherine Morland is lured from home by John Thorpe’s description of Blaize Castle. The enthusiastic Catherine eagerly asks, “What, is it really a castle, an old castle?” and “are there towers and long galleries?”1 She imagines the castle in Gothic terms, like Udolpho, the titular castle in Radcliffe’s famous novel. Catherine anticipates “the happiness of a progress through a long suite of lofty rooms, exhibiting the remains of magnificent furniture, though now for many years deserted—the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults, by a low, grated door; or even of having their lamp, their only lamp, extinguished by a sudden gust of wind.”2 Despite Thorpe’s declaration that Blaize Castle is “the oldest in the kingdom,”3 the castle was a folly built in 1766, part of the medieval architectural revival of the eighteenth century spearheaded by Horace Walpole. Tom Keymer calls it “an overblown exercise in cod medievalism.”4 Poor Catherine never makes it to Blaize, but Austen’s decision to include this structure, part of the Gothic revival in architecture, shows her familiarity with the medieval revival of the eighteenth century. In addition to Blaize Castle, Austen knew medieval architecture firsthand: “From her schooling in the gatehouse of the former Reading Abbey, to her visits to cousins at Stoneleigh Abbey, to her wanderings through the ruins of the religious house at Netley, evidence of past religious turmoil was constantly before her. For the first 25 years of her life, she worshipped in the twelfth-century Church of St. Nicholas at Steventon.”5 When Austen moved into Chawton House with her mother and sister, they added “a large and pretty Gothic” window “on the garden side.”6 The titular castle in Lesley Castle, an unfinished Novel in Letters is an “old and Mouldering Castle, which is situated two miles from Perth on a bold projecting Rock, and commands an extensive view of the Town and its delightful Environs.”7 Evelyn features “a Gloomy Castle blackened by the deep shade of Walnuts and Pines.”8 And, 35

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as Roger Moore observes, Northanger Abbey is not the only mature Austen novel concerned with medieval architecture: Remnants of the monastic past fascinated Austen, and the ruins of former monasteries appear in many of her novels. Emma’s Mr. Knightley lives at Donwell Abbey; Elinor and her sister talk of walking among the ruins of the “Abbeyland” in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price reveres sumptuous monastic churches and worships at the Garrison chapel in Portsmouth, a remnant of a medieval hospice closed in 1540 as part of the Dissolution.9

Moore is particularly interested in the religious buildings of the Middle Ages and interprets Austen’s fascination with England’s monastic past as part of her critique of the barren spirituality of modern England. But it was predominantly through her reading that she encountered the medieval world. In this, she was not unique: “Because a certain amount of information about the Middle Ages was part of the currency of the age, no reasonably well-educated, well-read member of society could be ignorant of the ‘revival.’”10 Austen was a reasonably educated and very well-read member of society, and through her reading, both of her contemporaries and her ancestors, she encountered the Middle Ages—its architecture, the language of courtly love, and the structures of romance. WILLIAM GILPIN AND THE PICTURESQUE The picturesque was a popular aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century that contributed to a renewed interest in medieval architecture. Rosemary Sweet argues that “[i]t was a taste for the picturesque, rather than historical curiosity, or a fascination with the evolution of the pointed arch, which accounted for the rapid growth in volumes devoted to delineating Gothic antiquities.”11 Though Austen was certainly not a medieval scholar, she did read William Gilpin, the greatest popularizer of the picturesque. In Love and Freindship, Augusta’s “curiosity to see that part of the World had been so much raised by Gilpin’s Tour to the Highlands, that she had prevailed on her Father to undertake a Tour to Scotland.”12 According to Gilpin, “among all the objects of art, the picturesque eye is perhaps most inquisitive after the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles, and abbeys.”13 For Gilpin, the picturesque is that which is suitable for a picture, and “the pencil . . . ever delights in the bold, free, negligent strokes, and roughness of nature.”14 Such drawing rejects “the least intrusion of art—or however allowing only the admission of such objects as have about them the carelessness, the simplicity, and the freedom of nature.”15 The

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picturesque embraces the natural object rather than the artificial; “[s]uch [objects],” Gilpin declares, “in a particular manner are ruins,”16 and England is particularly rich in Gothic ruins, especially in Gothic abbeys. Indeed, Gilpin declares that abbey ruins “might indeed without much impropriety, be classified among . . . [England’s] natural beauties.”17 Abbeys, though originally constructed by human skill, are natural and picturesque beauties. Gilpin declares, “so many elegant ruins of this kind are left; that they may be called, not only one of the peculiar features of English landscape, but may be ranked also among its most picturesque beauties.”18 Ruined abbeys belong to England uniquely because it is a Protestant country: “Where popery prevails, the abbey is still entire and inhabited; and of course less adapted to landscape.”19 Catholic countries still used their abbeys, but Protestant England left them to picturesquely crumble. In The History of England, Austen, making fun of Gilpin’s seemingly naive unconcern about how the medieval ruins became ruins, declares of Henry VIII, “nothing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general.”20 Austen takes a swipe at both Henry and the picturesque. Gilpin’s tours in search of the picturesque inspired others: “The finding and describing of picturesqueness became something of a cottage industry in the latter part of the [eighteenth] century. . . . [Gilpin’s] . . . descriptive tours popularized the quest for picturesque scenery.”21 Anne Toner notes that “[t]he route that Elizabeth takes with the Gardiners follows identically William Gilpin’s route described in sections II–IV of his Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty.”22 In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney teaches Catherine Morland to look for the picturesque in a landscape on their walk around Beechen Cliff. Eventually, she grows bold enough to reject the whole city of Bath as unfit for a picture. Catherine also shows picturesque sensibilities in her response to the modern improvements made to Northanger Abbey. Like a good disciple of Gilpin, she is disappointed by the Abbey’s windows, which have not been allowed to decay: “To be sure, the pointed arch was preserved—the form of them was Gothic—they might be even casements— but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.”23 Catherine wants a ruin, an object more connected to the natural world of dirt and cobwebs, rather than a renovated, comfortable home. A faithful disciple of the picturesque, she likes her Gothic architecture well aged.

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AUSTEN’S READING: MEDIEVAL AND MODERN Of course, knowledge of medieval architecture, which dominated England’s landscape, does not make Austen a medieval scholar, nor does it prove that she knew the narrative structure and language of medieval romances. We must consider her reading in more detail to prove her familiarity with romance. Austen and Chaucer Though Austen probably did not read medieval romances in Middle English, she may have read contemporary translations of Chaucer, particularly The Canterbury Tales. Jocelyn Harris reads Persuasion as a retelling of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Austen’s brother Edward had a copy of The Canterbury Tales and Dryden’s translation of “The Knight’s Tale,” which appears in Elegant Extracts: Poetry, in his library at Godmersham Park. “The Knight’s Tale” features many of the tropes of courtly love: the Greek hero Theseus, in Dryden’s translation, promises “by the faith which knights to knighthood bore, / And whate’er else to chivalry belongs”24 to avenge the suffering of women who have been wronged by Creon of Thebes, and two knights are deeply in love with Emily who is “fairer to be seen / Than the fair lily on the flow’ry green.”25 As we shall see when we turn to Emma, Austen knows these chivalric tropes intimately. Austen and Shakespeare Perhaps Austen’s most important link to the medieval romance comes through Shakespeare. She was intimately familiar with the great playwright. Catherine Morland reads Shakespearean extracts, Emma Woodhouse quotes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry Crawford reads a passage from Henry VIII, and Edmund Bertram celebrates Shakespeare’s influence on the English language. In a letter, Austen compares Cassandra to Portia, heroine of The Merchant of Venice: “Your answer about the Miss Plumtrees, proves you as fine a Daniel as ever Portia was.”26 As John Wiltshire catalogues, early critics were fond of comparing Austen’s talents to Shakespeare’s; in 1870, Richard Simpson “introduced the new idea that her relation to Shakespeare was not one of resemblance merely, but of indebtedness or influence.”27 For Wiltshire, “Shakespeare’s influence on Austen is not to be discovered on the surface, but is structural.”28 He points to parallelism in various characters—four different children respond to the death of their fathers in Hamlet; Emma must deal with a hypochondriac father just as Frank Churchill must deal with a

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hypochondriac aunt29—and to the character’s rich, complex “inner life”30 as structural similarities between the two. While I agree with Wiltshire that Shakespeare’s influence on Austen is structural, Shakespeare’s own structure, particularly his narrative structure, is medieval. Helen Cooper argues that in his comedies, Shakespeare follows medieval romance rather than Renaissance critical theory: “Renaissance theorists define the genre in classical terms: comedy requires low-life characters and low style, and has the aim of reforming the audience through satiric laughter. Shakespeare largely confines such elements to minor characters and subplots, and patterns almost all his comedies instead on romance.”31 Shakespeare’s romances focus on “high-born characters . . . whose falling in what eventually turns out to be right love is treated as normative.”32 Austen does not depict the upper levels of aristocracy, as Shakespeare often does, but her heroes and heroines are well born, well educated, intelligent, and virtuous, who speak elegantly and whose falling in love is the focus of the plot. Austen’s comedies are something of a blend of the classical/Renaissance and the medieval. She is aiming to reform her readers through satiric laughter at the foibles of ridiculous individuals and a flawed society, but she also focuses on love between intelligent and virtuous heroes and heroines. In medieval romances, the characters obtain perfect happiness through supernatural intervention. Shakespeare’s last plays, with their openness to the supernatural, are his most romantic. R. S. White writes, “when Shakespeare in his last plays allows a greater degree of the supernatural, like the intervention of Jupiter in Cymbeline, the vision of Diana in Pericles, and Prospero’s divine powers in The Tempest, he is building not upon Renaissance theory of verisimilitude but upon the precedent of the supernatural in medieval romance.”33 Shakespeare, I contend, writes providential romances following the conventions of medieval romance (in chapter 6, I will discuss The Tempest as providential romance in more detail). Austen does not allow the supernatural much play in her novels, but happiness comes to her heroines and heroes not entirely through their own efforts: Emma and Mr. Knightley are brought together through the death of Mrs. Churchill, Catherine and Henry are allowed to marry because of the sudden social ascension of Eleanor’s suitor, Fanny and Edmund are saved from the Crawfords when Henry and Maria run away together, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth are unexpectedly brought back together after a long absence, and he is delivered from his obligations to Louisa Musgrove because she falls off a wall and falls in love with another man. Although these events are natural, they are not under the control of the lovers. They receive their happiness through intervention. In medieval romances that end happily, the characters are often brave and wise, but also in need of God’s assistance in order to restore their marriages or reclaim their

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kingdoms. Shakespeare’s romances follow this pattern of supernatural intervention, and Austen adapts that pattern to the novel. Not only does her narrative structure resemble Shakespeare’s; so too does her depiction of love. Juliet McMaster writes, “Jane Austen, like Shakespeare in his comedies, makes love and the conventions surrounding it her subject. It is not just an emotion among others, it is a topic for debate, and for informed and playful commentary.”34 Love is not pure, natural passion; it comes with artificial conventions, forms, and established vocabulary, all of which Austen knew well. McMaster provides “a swift consideration of the Renaissance convention on love as Jane Austen inherited it”;35 the Renaissance convention treats love as a disease with certain symptoms: a pale cheek, sleeplessness, poor appetite, attachment to the beloved’s image, blindness to faults, sighing, versification. Austen would have found many of these conventions in Shakespeare, but those conventions, like so much in Shakespeare, come from the Middle Ages. Austen and Samuel Johnson Austen would also have been encountered the Middle Ages and the tropes of romance through near contemporaries like Samuel Johnson, whom Austen refers to affectionately as “my dear Dr. Johnson.”36 Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland is full of medieval architecture. On the island of Icolmkill, Johnson sees two churches, “The arch of the first church is Roman, being part of a circle; that of the additional building is pointed, and therefore Gothick.”37 Johnson describes the remains of other characteristically medieval structures: “Of the chambers or cells belonging to the monks, there are some walls remaining, but nothing approaching to a complete apartment,” and “[t]he cemetery of the nunnery was, till very lately, regarded with such reverence, that only women were buried in it.”38 Scotland is also full of castles, the sight of which often put Johnson in mind of medieval romance. He writes, These castles afford another evidence that the fictions of romantick chivalry had for their basis the real manners of the feudal times, when every Lord of a seignory lived in his hold lawless and unaccountable, with all the licentiousness and insolence of uncontested superiority and unprincipled power. The traveller, whoever he might be, coming to the fortified habitation of a Chieftain, would, probably, have been interrogated from the battlements, admitted with caution at the gate, introduced to a petty Monarch, fierce with habitual hostility, and vigilant with ignorant suspicion; who, according to his general temper, or accidental humour, would have seated a stranger as his guest at the table, or as a spy confined him in the dungeon.39

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In his travels, Johnson finds evidence that medieval romances, what he calls “the fictions of romantick chivalry” had some foundation in reality. Real lords dwelt in real castles and welcomed or imprisoned strangers at real tables and in real dungeons. Feudalism was a real social structure. The sudden shift from wilderness to castle also gave proof that “[t]he fictions of the Gothick romances were not so remote from credibility as they are now thought.”40 Johnson imagines the medieval hero in the same landscape he himself is currently exploring: In the full prevalence of the feudal institution, when violence desolated the world, and every baron lived in a fortress, forests and castles were regularly succeeded by each other, and the adventurer might very suddenly pass from the gloom of woods, or the ruggedness of moors, to seats of plenty, gaiety, and magnificence. Whatever is imaged in the wildest tale, if giants, dragons, and enchantment be excepted, would be felt by him, who, wandering in the mountains without a guide, or upon the sea without a pilot, should be carried amidst his terror and uncertainty, to the hospitality and elegance of Raasay or Dunvegan.41

Johnson here describes a scene familiar to readers of medieval romance: a knight wandering in the wilderness stumbles upon a castle. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a castle appears suddenly in the midst of a thick forest, and Gawain is carried out of “his terror and uncertainty” to the ambiguous “hospitality and elegance” of Hautdesert. Of course, the contemporary adventurer, while undergoing the same sudden shifts from gloom to gaiety, does not encounter giants, dragons, or enchantments. Johnson’s diction here shows that he is deeply familiar with the tropes of medieval romance: adventurer, wanderer, forests, castles, dungeons, giants, dragons, enchantments. Johnson’s familiarity with the tropes of romance were more than just the passing interest of the enthusiastic tourist. Johnson was friends with some of the important medieval scholars of the eighteenth century, including Richard Hurd, and was, according to Eithne Henson, “addicted to chivalric romance.”42 Boswell tells us that Johnson, “when a boy . . . was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life.”43 Henson observes that “[t]he titles of The Rambler and The Adventurer . . . illustrate Johnson’s sense of himself as a knighterrant.”44 His lexicon is deeply romantic: “Johnson’s consistent use of quest metaphors, his images of siege, seduction, assailants, and imprisonment, and his frequent application of them to ‘the heroes of literature’ show that he sees himself as errant, whether as a ‘northern adventurer’ or as ‘a lonely wanderer in the wilds of life,’ abandoned to the stream of chance.”45 This self-identification as a knight-errant may have contributed to Johnson’s

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lifelong professional restlessness. Boswell records a close friend of Johnson, Dr. Percy, who recalled, “I have heard him attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which prevented his ever fixing in any profession.”46 Johnson’s “unsettled turn of mind” may have been shaped by the unsettled wanderings of brave knights. Johnson saw romances as beneficial—“there are good reasons for reading romances; as—the fertility of invention, the beauty of style and expression”47—but fundamentally childish: “at the time when very wild improbable tales were well received, the people were . . . on the footing of children.”48 In his Preface to Shakespeare, he begins with the familiar eighteenth-century trope about the barbarous Middle Ages: “The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity.”49 Because of their immaturity, they were not yet ready for the more realistic fiction of Johnson’s day: A people newly awakened to literary curiosity, being yet unacquainted with the true state of things, knows not how to judge of that which is proposed as its resemblance. Whatever is remote from common appearances is always welcome to vulgar, as to childish credulity; and of a country unenlightened by learning, the whole people is the vulgar. The study of those who then aspired to plebeian learning was laid out upon adventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments. The Death of Arthur was the favourite volume.50

The Elizabethans were accustomed to medieval literature, which appeals to the vulgar who do not know the true state of things. Johnson explains, The mind, which has feasted on the luxurious wonders of fiction, has no taste of the insipidity of truth. A play which imitated only the common occurrences of the world, would, upon the admirers of Palmerin and Guy of Warwick, have made little impression; he that wrote for such an audience was under the necessity of looking round for strange events and fabulous transactions, and that incredibility, by which maturer knowledge is offended, was the chief recommendation of writings.51

Truth would not have interested Shakespeare’s audience, accustomed as they were to wondrous falsehoods, so, in order to appeal to them, he had to include the extraordinary. A less mature audience requires a less mature art form. Medieval romance is childish. But even as he is denigrating medieval romances, Johnson proves his deep acquaintance with them, mentioning some by name. Guy of Warwick was one of the most popular Middle English romances, both in the Middle Ages and after.52 Unlike medieval romance, modern works of fiction show daily life as it truly is, without relying on showy, vulgar wonders. In “Rambler 4,” Johnson

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writes, “[t]he works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.”53 Johnson distinguishes these works, which he calls “the comedy of romances,” from “the heroic romance”:54 in the comedy of romance, an author works “to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder.”55 Because the comedy of romance relies on natural events, “it is therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity; it can neither bewilder its personages in deserts, nor lodge them in imaginary castles.”56 Although Johnson does not use the word novel, his distinction between “the comedy of romances” and “the heroic romance” sounds like the distinction that Fielding makes between his own novel and romances. The novel, clearly the superior genre for both men, relies on the natural, not the wondrous, and depicts real human passion. Despite his denigration of the heroic romance, Johnson employs its language to talk about the comedy of romance: “But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope by observing his behaviour and success to regulate their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part.”57 The hero of a comedy of romance has experiences that might happen to anybody else, unlike the hero of a heroic romance. However, he, like his medieval predecessor, is as an “adventurer.” Though the comedy of romance focuses on ordinary events, it retains some of the narrative structure of the heroic romance. The medieval romance lives on in the modern novel. Johnson’s emphasis on virtue in fiction also follows the tradition of medieval romance. He argues that the more realistic fiction of his day should focus on imitating virtue of “the highest and purest that humanity can reach.”58 In medieval romances, all knights are the bravest fighters and all ladies the fairest and most virtuous women ever seen. For Johnson, contemporary fiction, though more natural, should not reject the ideal. Of course, he does not consider the ideal impossible; after all, he wants authors to depict the highest and purest virtue that human beings can reach. In his commitment to the ideal, we see a vestige of the medieval romance, though ideal virtue is now displayed in the drawing room rather than on the battlefield. Henson, who sees the imagery of romance all throughout Johnson’s work, argues that it reveals that romance narrative does offer a valid image of the human condition as a quest directed toward a goal, wherein the individual is in conflict with all

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kinds of assailants and the odds are against him. Yet it remains an essentially optimistic view, which sees good triumph. . . . But the hero may just as likely be a Quixote, misled by false pictures of the world; here the underlying message may be less optimistic, the human condition seen as essentially comic, but also as essentially sad. In either case, the battle may sometimes be an image of the external world of accident and adventure, but the arena in which much of this romance metaphor plays is the human mind, with its moral challenges, its choices of life, its ordeals.59

This sounds like the description of Austen’s novels, though she combines the two storylines. Her heroines struggle to remain virtuous in the face of society’s corruptions, but they often have Quixote-like tendencies, mistaking their own imaginings for reality. Her heroines face obstacles, not from giants or dragons or enchantresses, but from external injustice and their own moral shortcomings. In the end, good triumphs, not in any easy, superficial way, but in the genuine flourishing that her true heroines obtain. She has an essentially comic view of the human condition even as she is aware of the tendency to self-deception and the imperfection of the human race. Her stories adopt the romantic quest-narrative. And the good they are questing for is happiness. Gloria Sybil Gross declares that “[f]or Austen and Johnson, the search for happiness pervades the very texture of their writings.”60 In Austen’s novels, the search for happiness is part of the heroine’s adventure as she travels through the dangers of society, striving and failing to be virtuous, and growing more so. In the end, she wins a happy marriage. Both Austen and Johnson see life as an adventure toward happiness, an inheritance of the romance genre, which is most naturally oriented toward the happy ending. The hero sets out on his quest, and through testing his virtue, wins happiness in the end, often in the form of wife and kingdom. In Johnson, Austen would have found an author knowledgeable about and attracted to the conventions of romance, though also critical of their unnaturalness. She would have found an author whose imagination was shaped by the structure and language of romance although he belittled its proclivity for wonder. She would have found an author with a nuanced relationship to romance, a nuance that she herself shares. Austen and Charlotte Lennox Austen would also have been familiar with the chivalric tradition through novels like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, which “is a burlesque of the voluminous seventeenth-century French romances of La Calprenede and Madeleine de Scudery”61 and which Austen read more than once. She tells

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Cassandra, “the ‘Female Quixote’ . . . now makes our evening amusement; to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it.”62 The novel, published in 1752, was described by the author as depicting “[t]he bad Effects of a whimsical Study, which some will say is borrowed from Cervantes”63 who himself is parodying medieval romances. In Lennox, Austen would have found an author who critiqued courtly love’s worshipful elevation of women. The Doctor, with whom Arabella speaks in a chapter described as “Being, in the author’s opinion, the best chapter in this history,”64 condemns the romances that she has been reading: “Every page of these volumes is filled with such extravagance of Praise, and expressions of obedience as one human Being ought not hear from another.”65 The obedience a lover promises his lady is a kind of idolatry, utterly inappropriate for a human being. These books “teach women to expect not only worship, but the dreadful worship of human sacrifices.”66 In them, “[t]housands are slaughtered for no other purpose than to gain a smile from the haughty beauty, who sits a calm spectatress of the ruin and desolation, bloodshed and misery, incited by herself.”67 This passage bears some resemblance to Lydia’s fevered imaginings of triumphant conquests in Brighton: She saw, with the creative eye of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing-place covered with officers. She saw herself the object of attention, to tens and to scores of them at present unknown. She saw all the glories of the camp—its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet; and, to complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.68

Lydia is not imagining thousands of men slaughtering each other for her sake, but she does imagines “ten” and “scores” of them paying homage to her. She is the “object of attention,” and her immensely flattering vision, emphasized with the four-fold repetition of “she saw” culminates with herself enthroned and surrounded by admirers. She is not “a calm spectatress” but a tender flirt; nevertheless, like the fair lady the Doctor describes, she is inciting a crowd of masculine attention, not looking for a partner with whom she might share mutual affection. Lydia’s fancy is courtly. Even the detail of “herself seated beneath a tent” has a medieval connotation, the fair lady watching the tournament from her pavilion. Lennox sees courtly love as a form of idolatry that encourages women to expect worship and human sacrifice. Her critique sounds like Ascham’s critique of romances as immoral and violent, though Lennox is particularly focused on the treatment of women. According to the Doctor, courtly love becomes a false, perverted religion that elevates women to a divine status and then glories in the sacrifices made to that deity. Austen displaces this

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heavy-handed concern about medieval romance into the more realistic world of social flirtation. While Austen’s critique is less overt, less concerned with violence, and more nuanced, she too sees courtly love’s elevation of women as problematic because it places women in real moral danger. According to Margaret Doody, Lennox’s own relationship with the romantic tradition is more complex than The Female Quixote suggests: “Lennox’s own first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart (1750), contained numerous elements of the older fiction [romantic fiction], including voyage and shipwreck. Harriot . . . tries to kill a would-be rapist.”69 But then, “[i]n The Female Quixote Arabella has to believe not only that she should have no history, but—preposterously—that rape never happens outside of bad books written by women. Lennox is visibly chagrined at discovering the literary tradition she had inherited had just been declared defunct.”70 Arabella must reject the romantic tradition and in doing so she, according to Margaret Doody, repudiates the female romantic tradition: “Arabella has to realize that the novels, her inheritance . . . from her mother, constitute a mere female tradition, which is useless and wrong and should never have got into the library. Arabella must relinquish her books.”71 While Catherine Morland must temper her enthusiasm for Radcliffe’s novels, Austen does not ask that her heroine “relinquish her books,” and in her spirited defense of the novel, she defends the novel’s female readership and female heroines. Anne Elliot famously points out the bias of the masculine literary tradition during her discussion with Captain Harville about female constancy. Austen’s critique of the romantic tradition does not lead her to repudiate its feminine associations. Nevertheless, despite their differences, Austen encountered in Lennox another female author thinking carefully and critically about the effects of courtly love on women. Austen and Radcliffe From Ann Radcliffe, Austen encountered romance as a literary term. Three of Radcliffe’s novels have romance as part of their title: The Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, and The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance Interspersed With Some Pieces of Poetry. The line between novel and romance is thin, and, for Radcliffe, the romantic genre is clearly connected with the Middle Ages. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Blanche imagines “a sort of legend to which she had once or twice obtained access in the library of her convent, that, like many others, belonging to the monks, was stored with these relics of romantic fiction.”72 Romantic fiction belongs to convents, monks, and relics, the world of the Middle Ages. The Mysteries of Udolpho, though set in 1584, abounds with medieval tropes. While Austen experienced actual medieval architecture in the school and church she attended, Radcliffe’s novels provided her with lavish

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descriptions of the Gothic style: “As Blanche drew nearer, the gothic features of this antient mansion successively appeared—first an embattled turret, rising above the trees—then the broken arch of an immense gateway.”73 Turrets and arches are undeniably medieval. And, in dutiful adherence to the conventions of the picturesque, Radcliffe’s arch is “broken” and her mansion “ancient.” No recently remodeled or fashionable chateau for the queen of Gothic romance. Such descriptions appear repeatedly in Radcliffe’s romance: Though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign.74

Like her friend Blanche, Emily’s perception of this “mouldering” gothic structure is informed by the standards of the picturesque. The wall is tinted purple and the battlements are glowing with a brighter light as the castle blends with nature. The adjectives “gloomy,” “sublime” (repeated twice), and “melancholy” are all conventional descriptors of the picturesque. And, after the sun sets, Emily sees the “silent” and “solitary” castle in the dark, the best time to see ruins. In addition to mouldering and melancholic “gothic greatness,” Radcliffe also transmitted to Austen the language of courtly love. Blanche “almost fancied herself approaching a castle, such as is often celebrated in early story, where the knights look out from the battlements on some champion below, who, clothed in black armour, comes, with his companions, to rescue the fair lady of his love from the oppression of his rival.”75 The phrase “early story,” like “the ancient mansion,” connotes the distance of the Middle Ages. In those ancient stories, fair ladies were rescued by knights who loved them. Radcliffe’s romances also preserved and passed down the happy ending of medieval romances. As I will discuss in more detail in chapter 8, the Romance of the Forest ends with a joyful and musical celebration that resembles the festivities often found at the end of medieval romances. While Austen does not end her novels with grand feasts or musical performances, her happy endings capture the festive joy so common in romance. Though Catherine Morland indulges too much in Radcliffean romance, Austen learned much about the tropes and structures of romance from her Gothic predecessor.

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Austen and Byron A. Walton Litz, Ann Astell, and Sarah Wootton have argued that Austen was influenced by the romantic movement, with its emphasis on nature and emotion.76 She was also influenced by the movement’s interest in the Middle Ages. In Persuasion, Anne and Captain Benwick discuss Lord Byron several times. He comes up just moments before Louisa Musgrove’s fall: “Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her. Lord Byron’s ‘dark blue seas’ could not fail of being brought forward by their present view.”77 The whole atmosphere of Anne’s visit to Lyme is shaped by the sea, and here Anne and Benwick think of a Byronic description of the sea. But Austen would have found more than moving descriptions of blue seas in Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” a poem “deliberately subtitled . . . ‘A Romaunt,’”78 with an archaic, medieval lexicon—“wight,” “hight,” “lemans”—and a protagonist who, like the knights of old, wanders through the world. Of course, Harold is trying to escape his own world-weariness as he travels to a foreign land; he is not looking for maidens in distress. But perhaps this wandering hero influenced Anne’s wanderings; she is one of Austen’s most mobile heroines, “a nomad [moving] through spaces not her own,”79 especially compared to the essentially static Emma. Unlike Anne and the knights of romance, Byron’s Harold is no paragon of virtue; he “ne in virtue’s ways did take delight” and is “a shameless wight.”80 His flaws are part of the appeal of the Byronic hero. Nevertheless, the language of chivalry appears throughout the poem: “Where blazon’d glare names known to chivalry;”81 “Lo! Chivalry, your ancient goddess, cries;”82 “None hugg’d a conqueror’s chain, save fallen Chivalry!”83 Byron’s descriptions of men and women are conventionally medieval: “Belgium’s capital had gather’d then / Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright / The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.”84 In the realm of romance, women are fair and men are brave. Byron also evokes the religious tropes of romance when he describes “‘Our Lady’s House of Woe;’ / Where frugal monks their little relics show.”85 He depicts the violence of the romantic tradition, alluding to an ancient battle between Christian knights and pagan warriors: Whilome upon his banks did legions throng Of Moor and Knight, in mailed splendour drest: Here ceased the swift their race, here sunk the strong; The Paynim turban and the Christian crest Mix’d on the bleeding stream, by floating hosts oppress’d.86

The clash between pagan and Christian is central to the romantic tradition of the Middle Ages. Even Byron’s language in this passage is

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medieval. “Paynim” is an archaic, Middle English word for pagan; the adverb “[w]hilome” is the Middle English version of “once upon a time”—both “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” begin with “Whylom.” Austen is no war poet, but through Byron she would have encountered both the love and the violence of the romantic world.87 Byron was personally interested in the Middle Ages as his family owned an abbey, Newstead Abbey, a fact that would have delighted Catherine Morland. Byron even “revived the ancient family motto, ‘Crede Biron,’ and emblazoned it on his chaise, thereby defining a self-dramatic role which he felt his title obliged him to act out.”88 Thus, Byron’s interest in the Middle Ages was not merely poetic fantasy, but familial connection, even personal identity: “For Byron . . . the family heritage extended deep into a Medieval and chivalric tradition. He was descended from a line of knights and cavaliers, servants of the King and of a chivalric code, whose identities were determined by the heroic values embraced in a knightly ideal.”89 Although the Middle Ages were far enough in the past to be the subject of antiquarian interest, they were close enough to shape Byron’s sense of self as “heir to a tradition.”90 Thirteen years younger than Austen, Byron had deep roots in the Middle Ages. It is not so surprising that she did as well. Austen and Sir Walter Scott Perhaps the most renowned champion of romance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was Sir Walter Scott, a near contemporary of Austen, who, like Byron, is also mentioned in Persuasion. Although Ivanhoe was published after her death, Austen was familiar with some of Scott’s earlier romances, including Marmion, which Anne and Benwick discuss, and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which Fanny Price quotes in Mansfield Park. In a letter to Cassandra, written from Godmersham, Austen asks, “Ought I to be very much pleased with Marmion?—as yet I am not.”91 In another letter from Godmersham, Austen describes a gathering as small, “not at all like the gathering in the Lady of the Lake.”92 Austen also read the Waverley novels. In a letter to her nephew James, Austen playfully suggests that they both include sermons in their respective novels: “we could make our Heroine read it aloud of a Sunday Evening, just as well as Isabella Wardour in the Antiquary [the third Waverley novel], is made to read the History of the Hartz Demon in the ruins of St. Ruth.”93 Scott, in turn, was familiar with Austen’s work, which he described in romantic language; according to him, Emma Woodhouse is “the princess paramount.”94 Austen herself read this review and was only disappointed that he did not mention Mansfield Park.95 Like Byron, Scott had a personal connection to the Middle Ages. Alice Chandler writes, “Scott’s scholarship began at home, for he learned much

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about the past from his childhood exposure to the lingering medieval tradition.”96 Scott encountered the stories and songs of medieval Scotland from his family. He also read Spenser, about whom he declared, “Spenser I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society.”97 Scott confesses, “all that was adventurous and romantic I devoured without much discrimination, and I really believe I have read as much nonsense of this class as any man now living. Everything which touched on knight-errantry was particularly acceptable to me.”98 The young Scott encountered the trappings of romance with little hermeneutic sophistication, but with great enthusiasm. This childhood experience, which Chandler calls “the unconscious medievalism that was part of his family life” became “the conscious medievalism that shaped his maturity”99 when he read Bishop Percy’s Reliques, a moment of profound intellectual significance for him. Scott wrote of the delight [with which] I saw pieces of the same kind which had amused my childhood, and still continued in secret the Delilahs of my imagination, considered as the subject of sober research, grave commentary, and apt illustration, by an editor who showed his poetical genius was capable of emulating the best qualities of what his pious labor preserved. . . . The summer day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet.100

At the age of thirteen, Scott realized that his childhood interest in the poetry of the Middle Ages could be a subject of scholarly focus. As an adult, Scott showed himself both capable of preserving and emulating the medieval tradition. Around the same time he read Reliques, Scott experienced “the awaking of that delightful feeling for the beauties of natural objects which has never since deserted me.”101 His delight in the beauty of natural objects was decidedly romantic and picturesque, influenced by the medieval ruins so prominent in Scotland. Scott writes, The neighborhood of Kelso [where he lived as a child], the most beautiful, if not the most romantic village in Scotland, is eminently calculated to awaken these ideas. It presents objects, not only grand in themselves, but venerable from their association. The meeting of two superb rivers, the Tweed and the Teviot, both renowned in song—the ruins of an ancient abbey—the more distant vestiges of Roxburgh Castle—the modern mansion of Fleurs, which is so situated as to combine the ideas of ancient baronial grandeur with those of modern taste—are

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in themselves objects of the first class; yet are so mixed, united, and melted among a thousand other beauties of a less prominent description, that they harmonize into one general picture, and please rather by unison than by concord.102

In describing the natural beauty of Kelso, Scott notes two “superb rivers,” but he spends more time describing the ruins of an abbey and a castle, a modern mansion, and the overall picture the varied elements create. His appreciation for the beauties of Kelso is Gilpin-like. And the landscape that surrounded him melded with the history and stories he heard: “The romantic feelings . . . naturally rested upon and associated themselves with these grand features of the landscape around me; and the historical incidents, or traditional legends connected with many of them, gave to my admiration a sort of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bosom.”103 The association of legend and landscape filled Scott with a deep reverence. Scottish landscape, medieval ruins, and traditional legends all become entwined together in his heart. Certainly, such a union was conventional in the eighteenth-century picturesque tradition, but Scott describes a genuine, heartfelt encounter, born out of personal experience rather than fashionable affectation. Scott’s works evince his heartfelt affection for romantic landscape. For example, at the beginning of the second canto of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott reveals a picturesque preference for ruins at night: If thou woulds’t view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moon-light; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‌‌‌ Then go—but go alone the while Then view St. David’s ruined pile; And, home returning, soothly swear, Was never scene so sad and fair!104

The beauty of ruins, which Gilpin praised as one of England’s natural treasures, moves the narrator of Scott’s romance. Genuine lover of romantic landscapes that he is, he wants his ruins authentically ruinous, lit only by the pale moon, not the garish sun. He also prefers to visit them alone, perhaps the better to brood over their melancholy beauty? This melancholy image of an abbey at night is part of the picturesque tradition, and also, as Roger Moore observes, common in the tradition of monastic nostalgia.105 Austen herself uses the image in her comic “Ode to

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Pity,” written in 1793, well before Scott’s poem, which was published in 1805. Under the light of the moon, the speaker of her poem sees “the Abbey too a mouldering heap,” behind some pines from which it “doth take a peep.”106 Like Gilpin, Radcliffe, and Scott, Austen lingers over architectural decay, even using the same adjective, “mouldering,” that Radcliffe uses to describe the ancient mansion in The Mysteries of Udolpho. As I noted earlier in this chapter, Austen also describes Lesley Castle as “mouldering.” From a young age, Austen was conversant with the language and the images of the romantic, Gothic, picturesque preference for mouldering ruins illuminated by moonlight. Her image of the abbey peeping above aged pines is something of a comic send-up of the conventionally serious and gloomy descriptions of Gothic ruins appearing in the woods.107 Scott played a major role in the medieval revival, but he was only an important contributor to the revival that the antiquarians of the eighteenth century had already begun. Like those antiquarians, Scott delighted in the old and the archaic, including old and archaic words, which fill his works: “Scott did have an interest in words; he had the antiquary’s interest. He liked old things—old battlements and towers, old adjectives and verbs. . . . One frequently has the feeling that Scott has just returned to his desk after a pleasant research that has turned up old history, old legend, old architecture, old customs, old words.”108 Those old words included ones “which were rare in the eighteenth century, but not obsolete; . . . chivalry, tournament, tilt, knight-errant, and many others.”109 In Marmion, which Austen struggled to enjoy, the narrator asks, “what ’vails the vain knight-errant’s brand?”110 In Emma, the narrator will tell us that the titular heroine heard all Mrs. Elton’s “knight-errantry” toward Jane Fairfax.111 The chivalric language of the Middle Ages, rare in the eighteenth century, appears in Scott’s historical fiction and in Austen’s very contemporary novel. Jane Austen speaks in her own voice about Marmion, and Fanny Price quotes from Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel to express her disappointment in the chapel at Sotherton; she laments to Edmund that the chapel reveals “[n]o signs that a ‘Scottish monarch sleeps below.’”112 In Scott’s poem, an aging minstrel tells the story of two clans at war. Although the minstrel’s story is set in the sixteenth century, it features many of the tropes and language of the medieval romance: minstrels, harps, castles, convents, monks, wizards, fair ladies, and knights. Austen would have seen in Scott’s work the association of the term romance with the medieval world. In Marmion, the poet, having just heard Nature tell him that it is better to float a reed in the river, or listen to the milkmaid’s song, or learn the ancient shepherd’s story, declares his attraction to romance:

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But thou, my friend, canst fitly tell, (For few have read romance so well,) How still the legendary lay O’er poet’s bosom holds its sway; How on the ancient minstrel strain Time lays his palsied hand in vain; And how our hearts at doughty deeds, By warriors wrought in steely weeds, Still throb for fear and pity’s sake.113

Scott feels some need to defend his decision to ignore the voice of Nature, so he appeals to the irresistible power of romance over the poet, despite the passage of time. The romance that still “holds its sway” over the poet despite its age is the romance of the Middle Ages. This is clear from Scott’s list of some of the doughty deeds that still move the heart to fear and pity: As when the Champion of the Lake Enters Morgana’s fated house, Or in the Chapel Perilous, Despising spells and demons’ force, Holds converse with the unburied corse; Or when, Dame Ganore’s grace to move, (Alas, that lawless was their love!) He sought proud Tarquin in his den, And freed full sixty knights; or when, A sinful man, and unconfess’d, He took the Sangreal’s holy quest, And, slumbering, saw the vision high, He might not view with waking eye.114

The Champion of the Lake is Lancelot, the greatest of King Arthur’s knights, who loved Queen Guinevere (Dame Ganore) and failed to obtain the Holy Grail. Even though Marmion, which Scott calls “[a] knightly tale of Albion’s elder day,”115 is set in the sixteenth century and is not part of the Arthurian legends, it does associate the word romance with the stories of the Middle Ages. It also asserts the longevity of the romantic tradition. In his defense of romance, Scott observes that “[t]he mightiest chiefs [Spenser, Milton, and Dryden] of British song, / Scorn’d not such legends to prolong.”116 Romance, which I will discuss at length in the next chapter, is a word with a long and varied history. Among the many meanings available to her, Austen would have known, from Scott’s poem, that romance could refer to the medieval world of bold knights and lovely ladies and that it was a genre with a long and august history.

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From Scott, she would have heard the virtues of those knights and ladies praised in superlative terms. In Marmion, Scott describes the exemplary Lochinvar, who Through all the wide Border his steed was the best; And save his good broadsword, he weapons had none, He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone; So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.117

Lochinvar embodies the two most important virtues for a knight: courage in battle and fidelity in love. He rescues his beloved from a man who is “a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,” the antithesis of a worthy knight.118 Lochinvar’s rescue involves asking his lady to dance, an example of chivalric service that perhaps was the inspiration for Mr. Knightley asking Harriet to dance. For Scott, love is the greatest good in the romantic tradition. In the envoy to the reader at the end of Marmion, Scott asks, “To every lovely lady bright, / What can I wish but faithful knight? / To every faithful lover too, / What can I wish but lady true?”119 Scott’s language here is medieval. At the end of “The Franklin’s Tale,” the Franklin assures us that Averagus and Dorigen are perfectly happy: “he cherisseth hire as though she were a queene, / And she was to hym trewe for everemoore.”120 Dorigen is a true wife, the true lady that Scott wishes for “every faithful lover.” Medieval romancers often end their stories with a prayer for heavenly bliss for the reader. Here Scott follows that tradition, though he wishes not for eternal bliss, but for faithful and true lovers. Scott celebrates the mutual trust between lovers so cherished in the courtly tradition. It is this tradition of courtly love that was most influential on Austen and on the whole novelistic tradition that grew out of the medieval romance. Austen’s wide-ranging reading exposed her to conventional eighteenth-century critiques of medieval romance as barbarous, childish, and full of wonder, to flowery descriptions of Gothic architecture, to the narrative structure of medieval romance, and to the image of the brave and valiant knight-errant. The Middle Ages flowed to her through many different channels. But it was the conventions of love coming from the medieval world that shaped her art the most. In his The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis argues that the literature of courtly love is the reason we expect stories to focus on love. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott’s fictional minstrel declares love “the dearest theme / That ever warmed a minstrel’s dream.”121 Such a declaration about love from a nineteenth-century poet is only possible because of the medieval romantic tradition. Lewis writes,

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If we have not outgrown, we have at least grown away from, the Romance of the Rose. . . . [But] Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our mind.122

The indelible traces of medieval romance linger in Austen both in her diction and her narrative structure.123 Like Scott’s minstrel, Austen takes love as her dearest themes. An astute observer of narrative conventions from a young age, Austen also observed the conventions of the medieval romance, particularly the conventions of love, which she both celebrated and critiqued. “Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still”; the medieval knights and ladies that once were live on, no doubt transformed, but still preserving “the sentiment of this old poetry.” The indelible traces of medieval romance should be acknowledged if we wish to understand Austen and the novel more deeply. NOTES 1. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 57. 2. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 59. 3. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 57. 4. Tom Keymer, Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 45. 5. Roger E. Moore, Jane Austen and the Reformation: Remembering the Sacred Landscape (London: Routledge, 2016), 63. 6. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 212. 7. Jane Austen, Lesley Castle, an unfinished Novel in Letters, in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 144. 8. Jane Austen, “Evelyn,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 240. 9. Roger E. Moore, “The Hidden History of Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and the Dissolution of the Monasteries,” Religion & Literature 43, no. 1 (2011): 5. 10. Ronald Allan Schroeder, “Byron and the New Romance: ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ I–II and Medieval Tradition.” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 5. https:​//​wsl​.idm​.oclc​.org​/login. 11. Sweet, Antiquaries, 318. 12. Jane Austen, “Love and Freindship,” in Juvenilia, edited by Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 136.

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13. William Gilpin, “Essay Two: On Picturesque Travel,” in Five Essays on Picturesque Subjects with a Poem on Landscape Painting, 3rd ed. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), 46. 14. William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, vol. 1 (London: R. Blamire, 1786), xv, https:​//​play​ .google​.com​/books​/reader​?id​=7y4JAAAAQAAJ​&pg​=GBS​.PP8​&hl​=en. 15. Gilpin, Observations, xv. 16. Gilpin, Observations, xv. 17. Gilpin, Observations, 12. 18. Gilpin, Observations, 17. 19. Gilpin, Observations, 13. 20. Jane Austen, “The History of England,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 181. 21. Dabney Townsend, “The Picturesque,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 4 (1997): 365, http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/430924. 22. Anne Toner, “Landscape as Literary Criticism: Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld and the Narratological Application of the Picturesque,” Critical Survey 26, no. 1 (2014): 9, http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/24712586. 23. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 111. 24. John Dryden, trans., “The Knight’s Tale,” in Elegant Extracts: Or, Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, ed. Vicesimus Knox, vol. 3 (London, 1801), 312, https:​ //​books​.google​.com​/books​?id​=​-Wg9AAAAYAAJ​&pg​=PA312​&source​=gbs​_toc​_r​ &cad​=4​#v​=onepage​&q​&f​=false. 25. Dryden, “The Knight’s Tale,” 313. 26. Jane Austen, “Letter 75,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 202. 27. John Wiltshire, “‘The Hartfield Edition’: Jane Austen and Shakespeare,” Persuasions 21 (1999): 213. 28. Wilshire, “‘Hartfield Edition,’” 215. 29. Wilshire, “‘Hartfield Edition,’” 219. 30. Wilshire, “‘Hartfield Edition,’” 219. 31. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 260–61. 32. Cooper, English Romance in Time, 261. 33. R. S. White, Let Wonder Seem Familiar: Endings in Shakespeare’s Romance Vision (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985), 15. 34. Juliet McMaster, Jane Austen on Love (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1978), 9. 35. McMaster, Jane Austen on Love, 9. 36. Jane Austen, “Letter 50,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 126. 37. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775; Project Gutenberg, 2005), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/2064​/2064​-h​/2064​-h​.htm.

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38. Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands. 39. Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands. 40. Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands. 41. Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands. 42. Eithne Henson, The “Fictions of Romantick Chivalry”: Samuel Johnson and Romance (Vancouver, BC: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), 19. 43. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 36. 44. Henson, “Fictions of Romantick Chivalry,” 68. 45. Henson, “Fictions of Romantick Chivalry,” 226. 46. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 36. 47. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1076. 48. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1076. 49. Samuel Johnson, “The Plays of William Shakespeare: Preface,” in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 434. 50. Johnson, “Preface,” 434. 51. Johnson, “Preface,” 434–35. 52. It was also an important source for later works: “The indebtedness of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684) to Guy of Warwick and other stories has been well documented.” Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 288. 53. Samuel Johnson, “The Rambler, No. 4” in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175. 54. Johnson, “The Rambler, No. 4,” 175. 55. Johnson, “The Rambler, No. 4,” 175. 56. Johnson, “The Rambler, No. 4,” 175. 57. Johnson, “The Rambler, No. 4,” 176. 58. Johnson, “The Rambler, No. 4,” 178. 59. Henson, “Fictions of Romantick Chivalry,” 93. 60. Gloria Sybil Gross, “In a Fast Coach with a Pretty Woman: Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Journal 12 (2001): 203. 61. Frank W. Bradbook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 90. 62. Jane Austen, “Letter 49,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 120. 63. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: A. Millar, 1752; Project Gutenberg, 2015), vol. I, book I, chap. 1, https:​ //​ www​ .gutenberg​ .org​ /files​ /50054​ /50054​-h​/50054​-h​.html. 64. Lennox, Female Quixote, vol II, book IX, chap. XI. 65. Lennox, Female Quixote, vol. II, book IX, chap. XI. 66. Lennox, Female Quixote, vol. II, book IX, chap. XI. 67. Lennox, Female Quixote, vol. II, book IX, chap. XI. 68. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 160, emphasis added. 69. Doody, True Story of the Novel, 289.

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70. Doody, True Story of the Novel, 289. 71. Doody, True Story of the Novel, 289. 72. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 468. 73. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 468. 74. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 226–27. 75. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 468. 76. A. Walton Litz, “New Landscapes,” in Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 229–44; Ann W. Astell, “Anne Elliot’s Education,” in Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013), 244–56; Sarah Wootton, “The Byronic in Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice,’” Modern Language Review 102, no. 1 (2007): 26–39, http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/ 20467150. 77. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 78. 78. Schroeder, “Byron and the New Romance,” 7. 79. Mary Ellen Bertolini, “The Grace to Deserve: Weighing Merit in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” Persuasions-Online 39, no. 1 (Winter 2018), https:​ //​ jasna​ .org​ /publications​-2​/persuasions​-online​/volume​-39​-no​-1​/the​-grace​-to​-deserve​-weighing​ -merit​-in​-jane​-austens​-persuasion. 80. George Gordon Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” in The Poetical Works of Byron (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 1.2.11; 14. 81. Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1.24.294. 82. Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1.37.406. 83. Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1.85.881. 84. Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 3.21.182–84. 85. Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1. 22.255–56. 86. Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1. 34.382–86. 87. While Austen’s mature novels are free of violence, her Juvenilia is full of it. In Henry and Eliza, the long-suffering Eliza returns home, and “[n]o sooner was she reinstated in her accustomed power at Harcourt Hall, than she raised an Army, with which she entirely demolished the Dutchess’s Newgate, snug as it was, and by that act, gained the blessings of thousands, and the Applause of her own Heart.” Eliza also throws her children out a window. Obviously, this childish violence predates Byron’s poem. The young Austen was already aware of the pervasive violence found in romance. Jane Austen, “Henry and Eliza,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 45. 88. Schroeder, “Byron and the New Romance,” 1. 89. Schroeder, “Byron and the New Romance,” 38. 90. Schroeder, “Byron and the New Romance,” 39. 91. Jane Austen, “Letter 53,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136. 92. Austen, “Letter 75,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 202.

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93. Austen, “Letter 146,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 337. 94. Sir Walter Scott, “Sir Walter Scott on Jane Austen,” in Famous Reviews, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London, 1914; Project Gutenberg, 2004), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​ .org​/cache​/epub​/11251​/pg11251​-images​.html. 95. Austen, “Letter 139,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 327. 96. Alice Chandler, “Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19, no. 4 (March 1965): 316, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2932872. 97. Sir Walter Scott, “Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott, written by himself” in Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott in Ten Volumes, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1901; Project Gutenberg, 2008), chap. 1, https:​//​www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/24497​/24497​-h​/24497​-h​.htm. 98. Scott, “Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott,” chap. 1. 99. Chandler, “Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival,” 317. 100. Scott, “Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott,” chap. 1. 101. Scott, “Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott,” chap. 1. 102. Scott, “Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott,” chap. 1. 103. Scott, “Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott,” chap. 1. 104. Sir Walter Scott, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), Canto 2.I, p. 8. 105. Moore, Jane Austen and the Reformation, 26–27. 106. Jane Austen, “Ode to Pity,” in The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family, ed. David Selwyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), lines 14, 16. 107. I am indebted to David Selwyn for drawing my attention to the comic connotations of “peep” in his notes to The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family, ed. David Selwyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 78. 108. Paul Roberts, “Sir Walter Scott’s Contributions to the English Vocabulary,” PMLA 68, no. 1 (1953): 203, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/459915. 109. Roberts, “Sir Walter Scott’s Contributions,” 191. 110. Sir Walter Scott, “Marmion,” in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), Canto 6.20, p. 162. 111. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 304. 112. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 61. 113. Scott, “Marmion,” Introduction to Canto First, 92. 114. Scott, “Marmion,” Introduction to Canto First, 92. 115. Scott, “Marmion,” Introduction to Canto First, 93. 116. Scott, “Marmion,” Introduction to Canto First, 92. 117. Scott, “Marmion,” Canto 5, XII, p. 142. 118. Scott, “Marmion,” Canto V, XII, p. 142. 119. Scott, “Marmion,” L’envoy, 170.

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120. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Franklin’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 1554–55. 121. Scott, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Canto 3. I, p. 15. 122. C. S. Lewis, Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 1. 123. Larry Benson provides amusing proof of courtly love’s longevity: My subject is courtly love, that strange doctrine of chivalric courtship that fixed the vocabulary and defined the experience of lovers in our culture from the latter Middle Ages until almost our own day. Some of its traces still survive—or at least they do in the old Andy Hardy movies. If you are old enough to have seen some of these films, or young enough to stay up for the really late, late movie, you will surely recall the obligatory scene, around reel two, when a despondent Andy (the younger Mickey Rooney), murmuring the name of the girl next door (Judy Garland), slowly leaves the table, his food untouched. Lewis Stone, stern but kindly judge Hardy, frowns and turns to Mrs. Hardy: “What on earth’s gotten into that boy? He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. He just moons around like a sick calf.” And Mrs. Hardy—Fay Bainter—smiles with motherly understanding: “Pshaw! Can’t you see the boy’s in love?” And of course we can. Some, of an older generation than mine, may even have shared some of Andy’s emotions, for the pangs of unrequited love and the suffering that necessarily accompanies it have been part of Western courtship for centuries.

Larry Benson, Courtly Love and Chivalry in the Later Middle Ages, 238, https:​//​ chaucer​.fas​.harvard​.edu​/pages​/courtly​-love​-and​-chivalry​-later​-middle​-ages.

Chapter 3

Romance in the Novels

Before attending to some of the indelible traces of medieval romance in Austen’s novels, I would like to explore how she herself uses the term romance. It appears throughout her canon, though I have only found one passage where she uses it to refer directly to medieval romance. Nevertheless, many of the various meanings of romance available to Austen had roots in the Middle Ages. I would like to look at two in particular: romance and its various Gothic associations and romance and its associations with the cult of sensibility. The Gothic Romance looked to the medieval romance for inspiration and the sensitive emotions and erotic expectations celebrated by the cult of sensibility had their origins in the courtly love of the troubadours. MEDIEVAL ROMANCE There is, I believe, at least one reference to medieval romance in Austen’s oeuvre. In Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford, talking to Fanny about her brother’s love for Sir Thomas’s shy and timid ward, declares, “Henry is quite the hero of an old romance, and glories in his chains. You should come to London to know how to estimate your conquest.”1 The adjective “old” suggests that Mary is not referring to the more contemporary romances of Austen’s day. In A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Johnson mentions “the giants of antiquated romance.”2 Johnson’s “antiquated romance” is clearly the romance of the Middle Ages, not the Gothic romances of Walpole or Radcliffe. Mary’s “old romance” features a hero who delights to be a slave of love, a description that sounds medieval; in courtly love, the knight pledges obedience to the lady, making himself a kind of slave to her wishes. The romantic Henry is not ashamed of his chains, but rather glories in them. Mary seems to imagine that this heroic Henry will impress Fanny; who wouldn’t want the hero of an old romance and what women wouldn’t gloat over such a conquest? Fanny is not opposed to the chivalrous hero of romance, as she does win Edmund 61

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in the end, a man whose name “is a name of heroism and renown—of kings, princes, and knights; and seems to breathe the spirit of chivalry and warm affections.”3 She simply does not see Henry as a name or a man who breathes “the spirit of chivalry.” Although this is the only instance that Austen uses the term romance in its medieval sense, the medieval romance influences her depiction of love and the shape of her happy endings. THE GOTHIC ROMANCE As we have seen, Gothic was a popular eighteenth-century term for the Middle Ages and for barbarism and superstition of any kind. But the traditional meaning began to change after Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which, as Agnes Addison Gilchrist explains, “started a school of prose writers and gave a new meaning to the word Gothic. . . . Gothic came to signify something wondrous, supernatural, weird, strange, and out of the ordinary.”4 This meaning “was gradually substituted for its earlier meaning of barbarous and uncouth.”5 The Gothic romance drew inspiration from the medieval romance, a genre full of wondrous and supernatural happenings, happenings generally despised by neo-classical critics. Walpole himself was both drawn to the wondrous but also careful to distance himself from actual belief in miracles. In the preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, he calls the Middle Ages, the period in which the novel is set, “the darkest ages of [C]hristianity.”6 Walpole classifies his work as a romance, and, like a good eighteenth-century author, apologizes for its romantic elements, particularly its miraculous and magical happenings, inventing a manuscript written in 1529 but describing events sometime between 1095 and 1243. He speculates that the original author was a priest combating the influence of the Renaissance: “It is not unlikely that an artful priest might endeavour to turn their own arms on the innovators, and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions.”7 Walpole imagines this hypothetical author as a propagandist for superstitious Catholicism. Of course, in the enlightened era in which Walpole is writing, readers are in no danger of believing such propaganda; sophisticated and civilized, they will take the story simply as entertainment because “[m]iracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances.”8 Miracles, visions, necromancy, and dreams are very entertaining, but no one is tempted to believe in them, now that the dark ages have passed. Indeed, such supernatural trappings are no longer permitted in the romances of Walpole’s era. Thus, Walpole must present himself as having discovered an ancient manuscript which he did not write himself in order to indulge in the pleasures of

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romantic fiction without appearing to endorse its absurd metaphysics. He is simply a faithful historian, representing the simplistic manners of a less refined, though very entertaining, age. However, his true ambitions go beyond simply representing the manners of the Middle Ages; he wants to create a new kind of romance. In his preface to the second edition of Otranto, Walpole dispenses with the facade of a cunning priest and reveals himself directly as the author and explains that he sees himself as “having created a new species of romance”9 that “blend[s] the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.”10 Ancient romance was improbable; modern romance is natural. Ancient romance embraced the wild fancies of the imagination; modern romance imitates life. The two romances have been at war with each other: Invention [in modern romances] has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if, in the latter species, Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, and conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days, were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion.11

Ancient romance excluded nature, and modern romance has excluded imagination. Ancient romance, with its miracles and visions and dreams, indulged the fancies of the imagination at the expense of a credible depiction of human nature. Modern romance has been confined to common life. Walpole seeks to bring these erstwhile opponents together: The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions.12

Even though ancient romance encouraged superstition, Walpole longs for the imaginative freedom it permitted. Nevertheless, he wants his characters to come from the natural realm of modern romance. Walpole’s new species of romance reveals the complexity of the eighteenth-century response to medieval romance—a longing for imaginative freedom combined with a sense of superiority over the credulous readers of the Middle Ages who actually believed all the marvels their romances depicted.

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It is this ancient definition of romance, mediated through contemporary romances, that Austen is thinking of in Northanger Abbey when she declares, “The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened.”13 Now, Catherine has not fallen under the enchantment of the Middle Ages—The Mysteries of Udolpho is set in 1584—but she has fallen under the sway of Gothic romances that, like the ancient romances that Walpole describes, do not depict realistic human beings. Catherine has come to a simplistic view of human nature, and, after her painful conversation with Henry, she realizes that “[c]harming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for.”14 Here we see Austen’s nuanced response to Gothic literature; it is a charming genre, worth reading, but not a pattern of human nature. Young Catherine realizes that people are not either fiends or angels, as they appear in romances, but rather a mixture of good and bad. Austen is not utterly rejecting the Gothic, in the way that the Doctor utterly rejects Arabella’s reading in The Female Quixote as immoral, even idolatrous. She enjoys the spookiness of the Gothic romance as much as Catherine, but she also realizes the genre’s limitations.15 For Catherine, romance has come from the imagination, not from nature. She has imagined all sorts of improbable cruelty, cruelty that is unlikely to have happened in real life. Mrs. Tilney has not been imprisoned for years. In the end though, Catherine’s romantic vision is somewhat vindicated; the General does not perpetrate Gothic cruelty, but he is capable of the more pedestrian cruelty of selfishness, greed, and inhospitality. As the visions of romance vanish, Catherine returns to ordinary life: “The anxieties of common life began soon to succeed to the alarms of romance.”16 Catherine begins to worry about Isabella’s silence; she is drawn out of the alarming, strange, improbable world in which husbands lock their wives in dungeons and into the regular world in which flirtatious girls ditch their fiancés for more promising suitors. She has left the ancient romance for the modern one, in which “nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.”17 That realm is one of “anxieties” rather than “alarms.” In Persuasion, Austen uses this kind of imaginative license as a verb. Mrs. Smith tells Anne, “When I talked of a whole history therefore, you see, I was not romancing so much as you supposed.”18 Here Mrs. Smith seems to be using “romancing” to mean something like “making things up” or “filling in the blanks with the imagination.” Mrs. Smith is not doing what Catherine or the ancient romances do, but is instead telling the truth. Yet, her story, which paints Mr. Elliot as a heartless villain, is rather Gothic. Indeed, Mrs. Smith calls Mrs. Rooke, the source of some of her information, “my

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historian.”19 With wonderful economy, Austen plays with the conventional romantic trope of inventing some source for one’s story, with Mrs. Rooke serving as a less superstitious and more reliable source than Walpole’s artful priest. Persuasion is full of romance, including romantic scenery that evokes Gothic romance. Austen describes “Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest-trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state.”20 A romantic rock, one fitting for a picturesque scene, has what Gilpin calls a “fractured surface [which] . . . in general has a better effect [for painting] than a smooth one.”21 The picturesque preference for fractured over smooth shapes the landscape in Gothic romances. The duke in Ann Radcliffe’s The Sicilian Romance “found himself in a beautiful romantic country; and having reached the summit of some wild cliffs, he rested, to view the picturesque imagery of the scene below.”22 He sees a dell “buried deep among the rocks,”23 with trees and grass, and a lake that reflects the cliff. Radcliffe’s scene, like Austen’s, has cliffs and deep rocks interspersed with greenery. There seems to be no irony in Austen’s very Radcliffean description of Pinny’s romantic rocks. Indeed, her whole description of Lyme and its surrounding environs resounds with romantic enthusiasm for natural beauty. No one’s vision of romance vanishes forever. We also see Austen’s familiarity with romantic Gothic settings in her Juvenilia. In the youthful Love and Freindship, an older Laura writes that in her youth “[o]ur mansion was situated in one of the most romantic parts of the Vale of Uske.”24 Peter Sabor glosses this use of romantic as Johnsonian, “in the sense of ‘full of wild scenery.’”25 Gothic romances preferred wild scenery like Radcliffe’s “wild cliffs,” to tame, orderly gardens. The wild picturesque was the appropriate backdrop for Gothic romance. After her ridiculous adventures, which involve a surprising amount of petty theft, Laura “took up . . . Residence in a romantic Village in the Highlands of Scotland.”26 Scotland, as Austen would have known from Gilpin and Johnson, was particularly picturesque and romantic. Johnson journeys to the western islands of Scotland, and the full title of William Gilpin’s work on the picturesque is Observations Relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1776: On Several Parts of Great Britain; Particularly the Highlands of Scotland. Scotland’s picturesque beauty comes in part because the lingering elements of the Middle Ages: “ancient fortifications still dominated the landscape [and] the feudal system of land tenure still prevailed.”27 A romantic village in Scotland is a picturesquely perfect dwelling for Austen’s Gothic heroine to “indulge in a melancholy solitude.”28 Throughout her career, Austen was keenly aware of the literary conventions of Gothic Romance.

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ROMANCE AND THE CULT OF SENSIBILITY Romantic Delicacy In addition to the Gothic novel, Austen also associates romance with the cult of sensibility, whose values were represented in the sentimental novel. Indeed, the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility were not mutually exclusive. Love and Freindship makes fun of the narrative conventions of both. Laura enthusiastically describes her first meeting with Sophia, who “was all Sensibility and Feeling”: “We flew into each others arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Friendship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward Secrets of our Hearts.”29 This kind of effusive and immediate emotional attachment was central to the novel of sensibility. The cult of sensibility praised an emotional delicacy that Austen sees as opposed to common sense. Emma declines to show such romantic delicacy toward Harriet after Mr. Knightley proposes: “for as to any of that heroism of sentiment which might have prompted her to entreat him to transfer his affection from herself to Harriet . . . Emma had it not.”30 The narrator tells us that “no flight of generosity run mad, opposing all that could be probable or reasonable, entered her brain.”31 Emma knows that she has wronged her friend, but she does not behave with any romantic excess. According to Cronin and McMillan, Austen “probably has in mind the improbable selflessness often attributed to fictional characters. Almost all the women who fall in love with [Samuel Richardson’s] Sir Charles Grandison . . . demonstrate their nobility by insisting on their willingness to give him up to another woman whose claims are thought stronger.”32 For Austen, romantic heroism does not trump rational judgment. Austen’s most sustained critique of romantic delicacy comes in Sense and Sensibility, though such critique is not unique to Austen. Kenneth Moler writes, “studies of contrasting ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ characters and their fortunes and misfortunes abound in the novels of Jane Austen’s day. . . . Jane Austen was manipulating what she and her audience would have considered stock properties, materials common to novelists who sought to counteract the influence of the cult of sensibility.”33 While Marianne is the character most prone to romantic delicacy, her mother is also susceptible. Despite Elinor’s sensible council, Mrs. Dashwood refuses to ask Marianne if she is engaged to Willoughby, declaring, “I would not attempt to force the confidence of any one; of a child much less; because a sense of duty would prevent the denial which her wishes might direct.”34 Elinor does not approve of her mother’s emotional refinement, especially toward such a young daughter: “Elinor thought this generosity overstrained, considering her sister’s youth, and

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urged the matter farther, but in vain; common sense, common care, common prudence, were all sunk in Mrs. Dashwood’s romantic delicacy.”35 This romantic delicacy shows Mrs. Dashwood’s lack of parental prudence; she is so concerned with respecting the emotions of her daughter that she allows Marianne to indulge in unhealthy secrecy. Romantic delicacy appears again in Mansfield Park when Fanny Price reflects that Sir Thomas is not afflicted with it because he “had married a daughter to Mr. Rushworth: romantic delicacy was certainly not to be expected from him.”36 Given his treatment of his own daughter, Fanny does not expect Sir Thomas to show much concern for her emotional state. While Mrs. Dashwood’s delicacy is imprudently generous, Sir Thomas ought to show more sensitivity to the emotions of others than he does. His unwillingness to end a financially and socially advantageous marriage for his daughter reveals his insufficient care for her well-being. Mrs. Dashwood needs less romantic delicacy, Sir Thomas more. The romantic delicacy of the cult of sensibility, like the Gothic Romance, has a medieval legacy. Chaucer’s Prioress “was so charitable and so pious, / She wolde wepe if that she saw a mouse / Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.”37 Catherine Morland, on the other hand, is marked by her noticeable lack of such delicacy: “She was fond of all boy’s plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird.”38 Catherine is not afflicted by excessive effusions of romantic delicacy, whether toward mice or canaries. She is not like Chaucer’s Prioress or the heroines of Austen’s day. Erotic Expectations In addition to romantic delicacy or heightened emotional sensitivity, both in one’s self and toward others, the cult of sensibility also shaped expectations about erotic love. Marianne Dashwood is Austen’s most emphatically romantic heroine, full of eager and definite expectations for love. Colonel Brandon asks Elinor, “‘Your sister, I understand, does not approve of second attachments.’ ‘No,’ replied Elinor, ‘her opinions are all romantic.’”39 For Marianne, first love ought to be forever because true love is deathless. While Elinor coolly hopes that Marianne will soon grow out of such romantic opinions, Colonel Brandon objects, “No, no, do not desire it; for when the romantic refinements of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too dangerous!”40 Colonel Brandon agrees with Hannah More, who in 1799 declared, “It is cruel to chill the precious sensibility of an ingenuous soul” by suggesting that “when she knows the world, that is, in other words, when she shall be grown cunning, selfish, and suspicious, she will be ashamed of her present glow of honest warmth, and of her lovely susceptibility of heart.”41 More

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cries out, “May she never know the world, if the knowledge of it must be acquired at such an expense!”42 Like More, Colonel Brandon does not want Marianne to lose her romantic refinements by growing more familiar with the world; his voice in the novel counterbalances Elinor’s rational detachment. Perhaps there is some regrettable loss of innocence that accompanies the loss of romance. Pride and Prejudice’s prudent, practical Charlotte Lucas stands opposed to the ardent Marianne: “I am not romantic,” she tells Elizabeth, “I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connection, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.”43 Charlotte might be using the term in both the emotional and the erotic sense. She does not have terribly refined emotions, nor does she have idealistic expectations for love. She is a practical woman, looking for material comfort, rather than an intense, passionate connection with a man. Austen does not condemn Charlotte as “cunning, selfish, and suspicious,” as Hannah More might. Certainly, in the bright and sparkling Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s more romantic view toward marriage leads her to greater happiness than Charlotte’s practical approach, but Charlotte is treated with sympathy. Unlike Charlotte, the cunning Lady Susan describes herself as romantic. She confides to Alicia, “I have more than once repented that I did not marry him myself; and were he but one degree less contemptibly weak I certainly should: but I must own myself rather romantic in that respect, and that riches only will not satisfy me.”44 She is certainly no Marianne Dashwood, yet here she presents herself as desiring a man for more than economic security. But her commitment to romantic love is highly questionable. She disapproves of her daughter’s romantic love for Reginald De Courcy: “Her idle love for Reginald, too! It is surely my duty to discourage such romantic nonsense.”45 Lady Susan’s romantic notions are selfishly motivated; she can afford to be romantic for herself or at least present herself as romantic, but when the romance of others interferes with her plans, they must be discouraged. Marianne’s romantic notions about love, which Charlotte does not share and Lady Susan only pretends to, though very much a product of her time and the influence of the cult of sensibility are, in origin, medieval. Although the language of Sense and Sensibility is not particularly medieval, Mary Poovey argues that Marianne “fancies (in accordance with the promises of romantic novels) that her beauty will win the heart and hand of an errant knight.”46 Whether or not Austen is thinking about medieval romance in the novel, Marianne’s attachment to romantic love is a legacy of the Middle Ages. As Lewis explains, “French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of

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passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth.”47 The excesses of romantic love that concern Austen’s heroine descend from the medieval tradition of courtly love, with its emphasis on emotional refinement. Medieval lovers feel deep pain, turn pale, and mourn if they cannot be with their beloved. Unlike Charlotte Lucas, they are not looking for a comfortable home. They are madly in love with a woman who is the object of their deepest desire. Lewis helps us imagine the world before the troubadours: “We must conceive a world emptied of that ideal of, ‘happiness’—a happiness grounded on successful romantic love which still supplies the motive of our popular fiction.”48 According to Lewis, the ancient world was such an emptied world: “In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated of as a tragic madness . . . which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace.”49 Though Lewis simplifies the historical account,50 the medieval elevation of romantic love shaped the literary tradition that followed, including Jane Austen’s novels. Of course, by Jane Austen’s time, adultery had fallen out of favor, and romantic love had been applied to marriage. Nevertheless, the elevation of an intense emotional experience of love endured, shaping the novels of the day. Austen herself asserts the importance of love in marriage. While she makes fun of Marianne’s excessive devotion, Austen, in a letter to Fanny Knight, unironically tells her young niece, “nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love.”51 While neither Austen nor Marianne is likely reading eleventh-century Provencal poetry, their prizing love as central to happiness has deep roots in the Middle Ages. PERSUASION: ROMANCE TRANSFORMED Marianne, committed to her romantic ideals, nearly destroys herself. Reflecting on her actions, she confesses to Elinor, “Had I died,—it would have been self-destruction.”52 The romantic Marianne felt that she must surrender to her agony; to fight against it would be to betray her romantic principles. Jane Austen understands the self-destructive power of romantic principles, how the indulgence of passion and unrequited love can prevent one from exercising fortitude in the midst of suffering. But in her last finished novel, Austen celebrates romance. If Marianne grows from romance to prudence, Anne Elliot grows from prudence to romance: How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been,—how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion

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and distrust Providence!—She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.53

Romance here is on the side of warm attachment and cheerful confidence, and on the side of providence. The romance Anne learns is not a literary genre or even an emotional state, but a kind of virtue set in contrast to anxious prudence. It is a paradoxical virtue, comprised of human effort and divine intervention.54 It blends love and trust—deep love for another and trust in God’s future provision. Romance depends on the warmth of the human heart and on the goodness of providence. Providence plays an important role in the romantic literary tradition. Helen Cooper explains that providence’s “workings are stressed in romance when they operate to preserve the innocent or the true ruler.”55 Even in the secular romances of the Middle Ages, providence protects the innocent and the virtuous and makes possible their happy ending. Anne Elliot is a providential heroine in a providential romance—a category I will explore at greater length in chapter 6. Here I would like to explore briefly how Anne exercises the virtue of romance. Rather surprisingly, Anne’s “early warm attachment”56 to Wentworth has Marianne-like elements, as she rejects any possibility of a second attachment: “Her affection would be his [Wentworth’s] for ever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation.”57 Mature Anne sounds like earnest Marianne. In the end, Anne is reunited with her first love, to whom she has been constant. Anne’s first attachment endures. Why does Austen mock Marianne’s eternal devotion and praise Anne’s? How is Anne’s romance different from Marianne’s? She remains eternally constant to her lover, yet she does not indulge in self-destruction as Marianne nearly does. Of course, Anne was the one who broke off her relationship with Wentworth; Willoughby left Marianne with no explanation. And Wentworth is a much nobler man than Willoughby, a man worthy of “eternal constancy.”58 However, unlike Marianne, Anne accepts “the duty and benefit of struggling against affliction,”59 a duty that she encourages Captain Benwick to practice. Captain Benwick, a romantic figure, “had a pleasing face and a melancholy air, just as he ought to have, and drew back from conversation.”60 This melancholic captain is so drawn to poetry that Anne feels she must advise him: “he repeated with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope that he did not always read only poetry.”61 Anne, acting as a kind of doctor of the soul, realizes that the patient is overindulging in poetry and needs the

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bracing effect of moral prose; she prescribes “such works of our best moralists, such collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the strongest examples of moral and religious endurances.”62 In her role as doctor of the soul, Anne echoes Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, chiding the Muses because their works intensify rather than console Boethius’s grief: “Not only do they afford no remedies to relieve his pains, but their succulent poisons intensify them.”63 Benwick has been feeding his grief with descriptions of agony and wretchedness rather than accepting the duty and benefit of struggling against affliction. Benwick’s indulgence in tragic love is also a legacy of the troubadours. In his influential work, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont writes, “Love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature, alike as regards the oldest legends and the sweetest songs.”64 Rougemont ascribes the rise of this fatal love, which he dubs passion, to the Provencal troubadours of the twelfth century. The passion of the troubadours focused not on the beloved as an individual person, but on passion itself, which, according to Rougemont is ultimately a desire to escape the imprisonment of the body, a Manichean rejection of the goodness of creation, and a longing for suffering and death: “To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has been to love to suffer and to court suffering all the way from Augustine’s amabam amare down to modern romanticism.”65 Andreas Capellanus, that great medieval authority on love, defines it as “a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex.”66 Benwick does not necessarily love love more than his beloved, and he is not a Manichean rejecting creation. Yet, by nourishing unfulfilled passion for his dead fiancé, he is courting suffering. Rougemont argues, “Considered chronologically, the great body of European literature expresses nothing other than an increasing secularization of the myth [the myth of passion], or—as I would rather say—successive ‘profanations’ of its content and form.”67 While Rougemont is wrong when he declares that “happy love has no history,”68 he recognizes the enduring romantic relationship between love and suffering. Benwick is a brooding romantic hero, a man full of the agony of lost love, an agony which he feeds with poetry, that ancient refuge of passionate lovers. Anne herself does struggle against affliction; she is not a tragic romantic heroine. The advice she gives suggests that she has not overdosed on poetry. She has read the same poems as Benwick, but she has diluted the poets with the moralists. She has read works containing “the strongest examples of moral and religious endurances.”69 Anne has filled her imagination with images of those whose religion allows them to endure suffering, whose trust

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in God’s goodness inspires them. As she grieved for her father, Austen herself found comfort in his example of “religious endurances,” recalling his “constant preparation for another world.”70 Unlike the troubadours who “court suffering,”71 Austen saw suffering as “a parallel experience of Christ’s passion that helped prepare one for heaven.”72 Suffering is not a good in itself, but an opportunity for moral and religious growth. For Austen, the Christian can face suffering with courageous trust because of God’s “sovereignty over history . . . and his continual agency in ordinary people’s lives.”73 Providence enables courageous endurance, rather than emotional indulgence. Though Austen does not make this point explicit, I believe that Anne’s trust in providence allows her to endure what Marianne and Benwick cannot. She does not feed her agony as they do. Instead, we see her rouse and fortify herself throughout the novel; she helps her sister Mary, is kind to her father’s tenants, and plays the piano so that others might dance. Yet, she remains faithful to Wentworth, even though she believes that she has lost him. She endures affliction, yet her heart belongs eternally to her first love. Anne is certainly not ecstatically happy when we first meet her, nor is her reunion with Wentworth immediately joyous, but even before the novel begins, she has learned the value of “warm attachment” and “a cheerful confidence in futurity.” Her failed romance, though deeply painful, has not left her in despair, but has instead strengthened her trust in providence over prudence. In Austen’s final novel, romance becomes, not unrealistic flights of Gothic imagination, excessive emotional delicacy, or the indulgence of suffering love, but rather a sanctified virtue that combines heartfelt devotion and trust in providence. Austen rejects the darkly glamorous passion of the troubadours and instead champions the romance of happy love and divine blessing. Persuasion is the apotheosis of romance for Austen and an appropriate novel with which to end this work. Serious Romance At one point in her literary career, Jane Austen categorically rejected romance. In 1816, in a letter to James Clarke, the librarian to the Prince Regent who requested that she write a novel about a clergyman, she writes, “Historical Romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity . . . but I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance.”74 The qualifying adjectives are important here. Austen cannot write “[h]istorical” and “serious” romance. Indeed, she repeats “serious” twice, first as an adverb and then as an adjective. The serious doings of an illustrious German house, seriously told, do not interest the creator of Longbourne and Highbury, of Mr. Collins and Mr. Woodhouse. Austen’s sphere is the domestic, not the dynastic. Her refusal is playful—she

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is sure that she would not be able to keep from laughing at herself or others—but firm. With all the confident audacity of a master artist, she denies Clarke’s request and affirms her own artistic choices. However, her repudiation of one kind of romance does not, I contend, include all types of romance. What I hope to show in the next chapters is that although Austen cannot write historical romances about German families, she can write comic, domestic, providential romances that draw on the tropes of medieval romance, both explicitly and implicitly. This medieval legacy is best seen in Emma even though the term romance only appears three times in the novel: when Emma visits a poor family75 and when Harriet twice mentions Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest.76 Nevertheless, the language and structure of the novel align it with the medieval romance. Of course, Austen, the novelist of ordinary life, is more interested in the love affairs of knights and ladies than in bloody jousts or deadly dragons. Unlike Scott, author of historical romances, Austen is not enticed by the shields, or fairies, or wizards, or castle cells. Instead, she focuses on love, that great theme of romance. NOTES 1. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 244. 2. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775; Project Gutenberg, 2005), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/2064​/2064​-h​/2064​-h​.htm. 3. Austen, Mansfield Park, 145. 4. Agnes Addison Gilchrist, Romanticism and the Gothic Revival (New York: Gordian Press, 1967), 44. 5. Gilchrist, Romanticism and the Gothic Revival, 44. 6. Horace Walpole, “The Translator’s Preface,” in The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey, ed. Andrew Wright (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 3. 7. Walpole, “Translator’s Preface,” 3. 8. Walpole, “Translator’s Preface,” 4. 9. Horace Walpole, “Preface To this second Edition,” in The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey, ed. Andrew Wright (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 14. 10. Walpole, “Preface To this second Edition,” 9. 11. Walpole, “Preface To this second Edition,” 9. 12. Walpole, “Preface To this second Edition,” 9–10. 13. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 136. 14. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 137.

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15. Perhaps Radcliffe resembles Austen more than the latter realized. Nelson C. Smith argues that “Mrs. Radcliffe’s interest lies not in discussing the supernatural, but rather in exposing it in order to temper and chastize her young heroes and heroines, and her readers. As a champion of common sense, she must explain away the horrific effects, so that when they hear the explanations at the end of the novel, they will be ashamed of their absurd feelings.” Common sense triumphs over sublime terror: “After having excited the sublime emotions of terror, she explains away every ghostly appearance in the light of common sense.” Unlike Walpole’s imagined priest, who wants to indoctrinate his audience in superstition, Radcliffe wants to enlighten her readers. Nelson C. Smith, “Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13, no. 4 (1973): 586–87; 587, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /449801. 16. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 138. 17. Walpole, “Preface To this second Edition,” 9. 18. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 144. 19. Austen, Persuasion, 144. 20. Austen, Persuasion, 69. 21. William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, Vol. 1. (London: R. Blamire, 1786), 107. 22. Ann Radcliffe, The Sicilian Romance (Las Vegas: IAP, 2009), 57. 23. Radcliffe, Sicilian Romance, 57. 24. Jane Austen, “Love and Freindship,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 104. 25. Peter Sabor, “Notes,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 429. 26. Austen, “Love and Freindship,” 140. 27. Alice Chandler, “Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19, no. 4 (March 1965): 316–17. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2932872. 28. Austen, “Love and Freindship,” 140. 29. Austen, “Love and Freindship,” 114. 30. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 469–70. 31. Austen, Emma, 470. 32. Austen, Emma, 596. 33. Kenneth Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 418. 34. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Claudia Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 63. 35. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 63. 36. Austen, Mansfield Park, 224. 37. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (London: Houghton Miller, 1987), lines 143–45.

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38. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 5. 39. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 43. 40. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 43. 41. Hannah More, “From Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education,” in Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 296. 42. More, “From Strictures on the Modern System,” 296. 43. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 90. 44. Jane Austen, Lady Susan (Project Gutenberg, 1997), letter II, https:​//​www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/946​/946​-h​/946​-h​.htm. 45. Austen, Lady Susan, letter XXV. 46. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), 188. 47. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 4. 48. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 4. 49. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 4. 50. Certainly, Lewis overlooks the classical tradition of love, primarily contained in its novels. According to Doody, “If one is taught that certain statements about Love are conceits and clichés of the Middle Ages, clichés later revived by Sidney and Spenser . . . then it is a surprise to read a passage [from Kleitophon and Leukippe, a Greek novel] such as this: ‘As soon as I saw her, I was lost. Beauty indeed wounds deeper than an arrow, and strikes through the eyes unto the soul, for the eye is the route of love-wounds.’” Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 6. 51. Jane Austen, “Letter 114,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 299. 52. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 244–45. 53. Austen, Persuasion, 22–23. 54. I am indebted to Kathryn Davis, who also sees romance as a virtue, “a comprehensive virtue which includes practical wisdom but which also requires Christian hope.” Davis argues that Austen reconciles romance and prudence in the end: “Austen invites readers to seek a more complete form of excellence in Anne Elliot, one which combines patient exertion with trust in Providence. Austen places Anne in a class of Shakespearean heroines like The Winter’s Tale’s Hermione, for whom the union of ‘prudence’ and ‘romance’ becomes redemptive.” Kathryn Davis, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2016), 26. 55. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 110. 56. Austen, Persuasion, 21. 57. Austen, Persuasion, 127. 58. Austen, Persuasion, 135. 59. Austen, Persuasion, 72. 60. Austen, Persuasion, 70.

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61. Austen, Persuasion, 72–73. 62. Austen, Persuasion, 73. 63. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David B. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4. 64. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 15. 65. Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 50. 66. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1969), 28. 67. Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 137. 68. Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 15. 69. Austen, Persuasion, 73. 70. Jane Austen, “Letter 40,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100. 71. Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 50. 72. Laura Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 84. 73. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 83. 74. Jane Austen, “Letter 138,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 326. 75. Austen, Emma, 93. 76. Austen, Emma, 28, 32.

Chapter 4

Emma as Medieval Romance

“Before Emma had forfeited her confidence, and about the third time of their meeting, she heard all Mrs. Elton’s knight-errantry on the subject.”1 So the narrator of Emma describes the officious fuss Mrs. Elton makes over Jane Fairfax. The knightly language is surprising for a novelist so concerned with the everyday trials of rural England in the early nineteenth century rather than the adventures of the wandering knights in romance who encounter a deadly enemy or beautiful maiden around every corner. Yet “knight-errantry” is only the most obvious of many uses of romantic diction throughout the novel, diction that descends from the medieval tradition of courtly love. THE LANGUAGE OF COURTLY LOVE In his section on Cleopatra from The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer, employing the terms of chivalric romance, transforms the Egyptian queen and her Roman lover into a medieval knight and lady. We are told that Antony “thought there nas nothing to hym so due / As Cleopatra for to love and serve.”2 In the chivalric tradition, the knight renders service to his lady, placing himself in a position of submission to the woman he loves and pledging his devotion and protection: “Hym [Antony] roughte nat armes for to sterve / In the defence of hyre and of hire ryght.”3 And in return the lady loves her knight: “This noble queen [Cleopatra] eek lovede this knight, / Thourgh his desert, and for his chyvalrye.”4 The devoted knight renders service to his lady, who loves him because he is the embodiment of chivalry, of the ideals of courage and courtesy: “He [Antony] was, of persone and of gentillesse, / And of discrecioun and hardynesse, / Worthi to any wyght that liven may.”5 Though Chaucer is probably using “gentillesse” here to mean noble birth, the term can also refer to refined, courtly manners. The knight is brave, noble, and courteous, and the lady “was fayr as is the rose in May.”6 In a few lines, Chaucer encapsulates the tradition of courtly love. A brave and 77

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courteous knight devotedly serves a fair lady for whom he is willing to die. In his Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Richard Hurd quotes at some length from Edmund Spenser, whom he calls “the great master of chivalry”: It hath been thro’ all ages ever seen, That, with the praise of arms and chivalry, The prize of beauty still hath joined been; And that for reason’s special privity: For either doth on other much rely; For He mee seems most fit the fair to serve, That can her best defend from villany; And She most fit his service doth deserve, That fairest is, and from her faith will never swerve.7

For Spenser, there is a mutual reliance between the chivalrous man who serves and the fair woman who is served; they need each other’s respective excellences. The man who has the greatest ability to defend the lady is the one most fit to serve her, and the woman who is fairest and unswervingly faithful is most fit for his service. “[M]ost fit” and “his service doth deserve” connote justice; the mutual reliance on excellence is a matter of desert. The linguistic tradition of courtly love extends beyond the Medieval to Shakespeare and the modern novelists, including novelists that Austen knew well. In Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, referenced in Emma, Louis tells Adeline, “What I have to request is, that whenever I can be of service to you, you will command me. I should esteem myself most happy if I could be of service to you.”8 Louis employs the conventional language of courtly love. And “[h]e spoke this with an accent so tender, that Adeline, for the first time, perceived the sentiments of his heart. A mind more fraught with vanity than hers would have taught her long ago to regard the attentions of Louis as the result of something more than well-bred gallantry.”9 The offer of service accompanied by “an accent so tender” speaks of sincere love. True service could simply indicate “well-bred gallantry,” but when accompanied by true feeling, it is an expression of love. It is this linguistic tradition, popularized by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and the novelistic tradition that followed them that Jane Austen draws from in Emma, a linguistic tradition that she would easily have imbibed from her wide reading. Words like gallantry, service, fair, lady, knight-errantry, and, of course, Mr. Knightley appear throughout the novel. The word adventure, also associated with medieval romance, appears when Emma considers Harriet’s encounter with the gypsies. Mark Schorer argues that “our surest way of knowing the values out of which a novel comes lies in an examination of style,” to which I would add, an examination of diction.10 In examining

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Austen’s diction, we see the values of courtly love though those values are not simply celebrated but critiqued and ultimately transformed. EMMA WOODHOUSE: ROMANCER The romantic language of the novel is especially revelatory of Emma’s understanding of love, for the matches she makes, attempts to make, or simply imagines are romantic matches, shaped by the tradition of courtly love. Early in the novel, Emma triumphantly tells her father, “Ever since the day (about four years ago) that Miss Taylor and I met with him in Broadway-lane, when, because it began to mizzle, he darted away with so much gallantry, and borrowed two umbrellas for us from Farmer Mitchell’s, I made up my mind on the subject. I planned the match from that hour.”11 Mr. Weston’s chivalrous deed, the fetching of an umbrella, becomes the inspiration for Emma’s matchmaking plans. She does not base the match on moral character or temperament or friendship, but on Mr. Weston’s gallantry. He serves his lady by procuring an umbrella, and therefore, Emma concludes, they are meant to be together. The whole medieval apparatus of the gallant knight rescuing his lady informs Emma’s views of love, though Mr. Weston fetches an umbrella rather than slaying a dragon. Such service is obviously the basis of love. Nothing else would do. Even the matches that Emma simply imagines rather than actively creates have the flavor of a medieval romance. Emma, taken with the idea that Mr. Dixon rescued Jane Fairfax from drowning, imagines an illicit love affair between the two. Miss Bates tells Emma of “the service he [Mr. Dixon] rendered Jane at Weymouth, when they were out in that party on the water, and she, by the sudden whirling round of something or other among the sails, would have been dashed into the sea at once, and actually was all but gone, if he had not, with the greatest presence of mind, caught hold of her habit.”12 Like a knight rescuing a fair maiden from an oafish giant, Mr. Dixon rescues the fair Jane from a watery death; he renders her a great service, a term long associated with courtly love. Arnaut Daniel, “the culmination of the troubadour poets,”13 renders service to his lady in his poem “L’aura amara.” In As You Like It, the shepherd Silvius, in his litany of love, explains that love “is to be all made of faith and service.”14 “The very instant that I saw you, did / My heart fly to your service,”15 says Ferdinand to Miranda as she distracts him from his log-bearing labor. Like the troubadours before them, Silvius and Ferdinand see service as essential to love, and through her diction, Austen is following in the same literary tradition, a tradition so pervasive that even a prosaic, unimaginative character like Miss Bates can participate.

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Although “service” is Miss Bates’s word, Emma sees the story as proof of love. Later in the novel, when she and Frank are discussing Mr. Dixon as the possible source of Jane’s mysterious pianoforte, Emma brings up the rescue as evidence of an attachment: “And then, he saved her life. Did you ever hear of that?—A water-party; and by some accident she was falling overboard. He caught her.”16 Frank witnessed the scene, but detected no signs of love between the two. Undaunted, Emma declares, “If I had been there, I think I should have made some discoveries.”17 Emma is confident that she would have discovered love in this moment of dramatic rescues. In their notes to Emma, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan observe that “discoveries” is “a word strongly associated with fiction.”18 Had Emma been there, she would have discovered, or rather, created a fiction, specifically a medieval romance of love in response to gallant service. When she is there for a similar situation (or rather there for the aftermath), she does indeed discover an adventure. On hearing how Frank rescued Harriet from the gypsies, Emma is thrilled: Such an adventure as this,—a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?—How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such a ground-work of anticipation as her mind had already made.19

Emma has already considered a Frank-Harriet match, but this exciting rescue inflames her imagination. Even a cold mathematician would be stirred by the scene. Such a circumstance must make Frank and Harriet interesting to each other. After all, ladies fall in love with the knights who rescue them, and knights fall in love with the ladies they rescue. They are thrown together through adventures, a term closely associated with medieval romances, which “descend directly from fairy tale and adventure.”20 W. P. Ker declares that “[c]ourteous sentiment, running through a succession of wonderful adventures, is generally enough to make a romance.”21 In the world of medieval romances, adventures are events that befall, that happen to one; Palamoun, one of the protagonists of Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” escapes from prison either “by aventure or destinee.”22 Hurd explains that those devoted to chivalry sought to rescue the oppressed both “when they knew where they were to be come at; or to seek them out with diligence, when they did not. This last service they called, Going in quest of adventures.”23 In fact, according

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to Hurd, this questing after adventure is the essence of knight-errantry: “we find the Knights errant, as they were now properly styled, wandering the world over in search of occasions on which to exercise their generous and disinterested valour.”24 Emma sees an incident, in which a man rescues a woman from danger, as an adventure, the proper business of the knight errant. That Emma conceives of this event in the terms of courtly love is confirmed in her subsequent conversation with Harriet in the next chapter. After Harriet has burned her precious treasures and confessed that there is another man far superior to Mr. Elton whom she admires, Emma, believing she means Frank Churchill, declares, “The service he rendered you was enough to warm your heart.”25 In response, Harriet cries, “Service! oh! it was such an inexpressible obligation!—The very recollection of it, and all that I felt at the time—when I saw him coming—his noble look—and my wretchedness before. Such a change! In one moment such a change! From perfect misery to perfect happiness.”26 Harriet, of course, is thinking of a very different kind of service, of Mr. Knightley’s courteous invitation to dance, but her description sounds like the description of a woman in a dangerous situation who looks up to see a noble knight riding to her rescue. Emma responds, “It is very natural. It is natural, and it is honourable.—Yes, honourable, I think, to choose so well and so gratefully.”27 Emma judges that Harriet’s love, a response to gallant service, is perfectly natural, the way love normally works, and honorable, revealing her virtue, namely her discernment and her gratitude. Emma is not at all surprised that Harriet cares for the gallant Frank Churchill who rescued her from the gypsies. Such is the way of love. Such is the way men and women relate to one another. And Harriet confirms that belief, for though she is thinking of a different man and a different service, she does suggest that her love, at the very least her gratitude, the source of her love, began with service. Cohen writes that Mr. Knightley’s gesture “can only be called a chivalrous gesture,” for he “rescue[s] her [Harriet] from the humiliation Elton inflicted upon her.”28 Though the women are both thinking of two different men and two different types of service, both use the concept of service as the basis of love. The word “service” becomes the source of both remembrance and confusion between the two women in one of the most pivotal scenes in the novel. Emma, attempting to clarify the miscommunication between the two about Harriet’s love interest, declares, “I am sure the service Mr. Frank Churchill had rendered you, in protecting you from the gypsies, was spoken of.”29 She remembers telling Harriet “that considering the service he had rendered you, it was extremely natural,”30 and she remembers Harriet “mentioning even what your sensations had been in seeing him come forward to your rescue.”31 Harriet finally understands and explains that she was referring to Mr. Knightley’s kind request: “That was the kind action; that was the noble

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benevolence and generosity; that was the service which made me begin to feel how superior he was to every other being upon earth.”32 The confusion between the two is based on the confusion of a word, not on its general meaning, but on its particular reference. They both acknowledge the concept of gallant service, but Emma mistakes the particular service rendered. In some sense, Emma rightly understands that gallant service can lead to love, but misunderstands the kind of service, or, at the very least, is more captivated by a dramatic rescue than a kind action. Juliet McMaster, reflecting on this scene, writes, “there are two kinds of rescue, the genuine and the spurious, and only one is the kind that arouses and deserves love.”33 Or to render this claim more chivalric, there are two kinds of service—the spurious (Frank Churchill’s) and the genuine (Mr. Knightley’s). To be fair, Frank’s service is genuinely helpful, but it is not the type of service that deserves love. Ordinary kindness is a truer form of service than extraordinary gallantry. As Peter Leithart writes, “For Austen, the sensational or extraordinary do not provide a sound basis for moral education and experience . . . the greatest ethical challenges come in the midst of daily life, precisely when ‘nothing is happening.’”34 Harriet, in her assessment of these men, shares this ethical vision. Mr. Knightley deliberately chooses to invite her to dance, a simple gesture “in the midst of daily life” that reveals his genuine virtue. Frank Churchill stumbles upon an extraordinary situation. Mr. Knightley’s action stems from a character habitually disposed to virtue. Throughout the novel, Mr. Knightley treats others, particularly those less fortunate, with kindness and generosity, indeed, even with a kind of chivalry. Duckworth praises him because he “bring[s] into the daily life of Highbury the spirit of chivalry—providing his coach as transport for Miss Bates whenever she needs it.”35 Frank’s action, while virtuous, seems to arise from the drama of the moment rather than habit. Harriet actually shows better judgment than Emma in this scene because she responds to the genuine rather than the spurious service with love. Of course, chronology plays a role—Mr. Knightley’s service comes before Frank’s; Harriet’s love for Mr. Knightley protects her from falling in love with Frank. Nevertheless, by connecting the scenes linguistically, Austen intends for the reader to compare them and to conclude that Mr. Knightley’s ordinary courtesy is a more solid foundation for love than Frank’s extraordinary gallantry. Emma, of course, who has seen both, responds with all the fervor of an “imaginist” to the more dramatic service; she knows that young ladies fall in love with men who rescue them from gypsies—or bring them umbrellas. But Emma’s attraction to dramatic service is not the only reason she cannot imagine a romance between Harriet and Mr. Knightley. After all, in light of Mr. Weston’s umbrella-fetching, Emma’s failure to imagine a love

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affair between Harriet and Mr. Knightley should probably strike us as odd. How unlike Emma to fail to detect the beginnings of love in even the most mundane events! Though she prefers the dramatic, she does not need gypsies every time. But she cannot imagine such a story for Mr. Knightley because he cannot possibly be in love with anyone but herself—an important piece of self-knowledge that Emma lacks until this conversation. She is quite adept at seeing the potential for romance in both mundane and dramatic gestures of service, yet she cannot imagine a romance for Mr. Knightley whose rescue of Harriet is not entirely unlike Mr. Weston’s rescue of Miss Taylor from an unpleasant rainstorm. Emma’s inability to interpret Mr. Knightley as a knight serving the lady he loves arises from her love for him. THE FEMALE QUIXOTE AND EMMA AS AUTHORESS The failings of those with imaginations shaped by courtly love have an illustrious, or perhaps ignominious literary heritage, stretching back at least to Dante’s Francesca, whose sin “was a desire to be like the characters in the books. . . . Adultery here rests not on simple lust but on what has recently been called, through the influence of Rene Girard, ‘mediated desire,’ which is very often bookishness, Don Quixote’s or Emma Bovary’s kind.”36 Francesca, Don Quixote, and Madame Bovary are all led astray by the romantic books they read and their desire to be like those characters in the books. Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella is also a victim of mediated desire inspired by medieval romances. Though Emma, like these fictional forebears, has been misled by her desires, she, unlike them, desires to be not mere character, but authoress. She does not want to be the lady with whom the knight falls in love; she wishes to set up the lady and the knight. She wishes to be a romancer, not a romantic heroine. But Austen does not have her read romances. As Moler argues, “a close look at Emma reveals that it is a female Quixote novel from which the crude device of novel-reading, as the sole cause of the heroine’s absurdities, has been removed.”37 Unlike Catherine Morland, whose imagination is clearly shaped by Gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emma does not frequently refer to specific novels or romances, though she does make reading lists that Mr. Knightley admires and she does refer to Adelaide and Theodore after the birth of Mrs. Weston’s daughter. In Emma, Austen changes the female Quixote genre by not accusing specific novels or romances of misleading her heroine and by having that heroine desire to be an author rather than a character. Emma places herself in a position of power as authoress, a position that is full of moral temptations to pride and control over the fates of fellow human beings. Indeed, we might say that as part of her maturation

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she must move from author to character. Mr. Knightley certainly thinks that falling in love would be good for her. While Austen sees the dangers of an imagination nourished by romance and courtly love, she does not deliver heavy-handed condemnation. No doctor condemns Emma for her reading as happens in The Female Quixote. Nor does a Henry Tilney condemn her for taking Gothic novels too seriously as happens in Northanger Abbey. Austen’s critique of her heroine’s imaginative confusion has become more subtle and nuanced. MR. ELTON: GALLANTRY GONE AWRY Though Emma aspires to be an authoress of chivalric romances, the narrator does not wholeheartedly endorse the genre, nor does Emma herself approve of all its excesses. Mr. Elton, the most ostensibly gallant man in the novel, proves to be vain and calculating. Externally, he is the perfect lover, fulfilling many of the conventions, or what Juliet McMaster calls the “symptoms,” of love, the pale cheek, the sleeplessness, the poor appetite, the attachment to the beloved’s image, the blindness to faults, the sighing, and the versification. Arcite, one of the protagonists of “The Knight’s Tale,” suffers for love: “His sleep, his mete, his drink is him biraft, / That lene he wax and drye as is a shaft.”38 He also “gan to syke.”39 Mr. Elton does not become ill or stop eating, and we do not know about his sleeping habits, but he does enthuse about his beloved’s art, compliment and sigh a great deal, and compose verse that embodies many of the tropes of courtly love and which Emma interprets as revealing his blindness toward Harriet’s faults. Mr. Elton fawns over, not quite his beloved’s image, but over the portrait that she has drawn. He has nothing but praise for Emma’s rendering of Harriet, praise the portrait doesn’t really deserve and which Emma wrongly interprets as intended for Harriet. After the completion of the portrait, Mr. Elton chivalrously offers to travel to London to purchase a frame. It is at this point that the narrator tells us, “His gallantry was always on the alert.”40 Though perhaps colored by Emma’s perspective, this description seems to come from the narrator; the bluntness of the simple sentence suggests an awareness of Mr. Elton’s true character that Emma does not yet have. The adverb “always” indicates Mr. Elton’s perpetual state and the prepositional phrase, “on the alert,” suggests a calculating vigilance, a desire to insinuate himself into Emma’s good graces whenever possible. Though Emma does not yet see Mr. Elton in this way, she does take up the narrator’s word:

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“This man is almost too gallant to be in love,” thought Emma. “I should say so, but that I suppose there may be a hundred different ways of being in love. He is an excellent young man, and will suit Harriet exactly; it will be an ‘Exactly so,’ as he says himself; but he does sigh and languish, and study for compliments rather more than I could endure as a principle.”41

Here gallantry is something of a problem; its very excess suggests deficiency, for too much gallantry may mean too little love. Emma’s concession that there “may be a hundred different ways of being in love” shows that Mr. Elton’s way is not for her; she cannot abide his sighs and compliments. This is rather an amusing confession from Emma as she is primarily interested in one way of being in love—the courtly way—but it does show her innate good sense in finding Mr. Elton’s overdone gallantry distasteful. Compliments are an important part of gallantry in Austen’s world. Mr. Elton, like Mr. Collins, is “happy on every occasion to offer those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable to ladies.”42 Perhaps Mr. Elton would agree with Mr. Collins’s boast that “I always wish to give them [my compliments] as unstudied an air as possible,”43 but Emma sees in his compliments something planned and forced, not the spontaneous praise of the moment. Emma does not yet perceive the moral failings his excessive gallantry both reveals and conceals, for she still believes him to be an excellent young man who will please Harriet; his manner of lovemaking is simply distasteful to her. Though Emma has enough sense to dislike Mr. Elton’s false gallantry, she continues to employ that gallantry as the standard by which to judge love. When Mr. Elton expresses regret that Harriet will not be able to attend dinner at Randalls because of a cold, Emma judges his words appropriate but his sigh too short: “This was very proper; the sigh which accompanied it was really estimable; but it should have lasted longer.”44 Emma herself does not enjoy his sighs, but she interprets them as evidence of love and is alarmed by the shortness of his. The length of the sigh becomes the measurement of love. Jane Austen herself determined love, though probably not seriously, through sighs. In 1796, she tells Cassandra of “a last and indisputable proof of Warren’s indifference to me, that he actually drew that gentleman’s picture for me, and delivered it to me without a sigh.”45 No sigh, no love. Mr. Elton continually plays the role of chivalrous lover. In his charade, Mr. Elton presents himself as the lowly lover in the hands of his powerful lady: “Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown; / Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, / And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.”46 In the charade, the man is the powerless slave, and the woman is the powerful monarch in the realm of courtship. In Austen’s own poem, “On the Marriage of Mr. Gell of East Bourn to Miss Gill,” the titular Mr. Gell declares to his

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beloved, “with some sighs / I am the slave of your I.s.”47 Male lovers routinely present themselves as enslaved to their beloved. Such a posture is characteristic of the courtly love tradition in which the man pledges complete obedience to his lady. Even the references to the lady’s “soft eye” or, playfully, “your I.s” are reminiscent of the traditional focus on love entering through the eyes. Chaucer’s Knight tells his audience that Palamon “caste his eye upon Emelya, / And therewithal he bleynte and cryde ‘A!’”48 Emma approves of this charade: “Very well, Mr. Elton, very well, indeed. I have read worse charades.”49 Her repeated “very well” conveys ready assent, a sort of “yes, yes, this is all normal and appropriate.” But McMaster observes that such versification is actually rare in Austen: “Except for Mr. Elton’s charade, the lover’s inclination to versify is not abundantly demonstrated in Jane Austen’s novels.”50 The courtly love tradition, begun by the twelfth-century troubadours, was one of versified love. Mr. Elton, the consummate lover, displays the conventions, the outward forms of love. He is the paragon of a lover, who, we realize, is utterly insincere in that love. Emma interprets this charade according to the medieval and Renaissance tradition that love is blind. As McMaster explains, “Cupid’s blindness is supposedly communicated to the lover, who, on being smitten by the arrow, loses his power to see the defects of his beloved.”51 Emma interprets what she perceives as Mr. Elton’s blindness toward Harriet’s wit as a proof of his love for her friend: “Humph—Harriet’s ready wit! All the better. A man must be very much in love indeed, to describe her so.”52 Emma knows that Harriet has no “ready wit,” but she assumes that love must blind Mr. Elton to that reality: “If Elton can talk of Harriet’s ‘ready wit’ he must be in love.”53 Emma draws conclusions based on a long-standing premise about the symptoms of love; love blinds the lover to the beloved’s faults. Mr. Elton is blind to Harriet’s lack of wit; therefore, he must be in love. Mr. Elton’s praise in this charade is not inaccurate, for he is describing Emma, who does have “ready wit” (which she frequently abuses), but it is insincere, for he does not really love her. After Mr. Elton proposes, Emma reflects and realizes his insincerity: “Sighs and fine words had been given in abundance; but she could hardly devise any set of expressions, or fancy any tone of voice, less allied with real love.”54 Mr. Elton played the part, flattering and obeying ladies, but he did not truly love Emma. His proposal was formally correct, for he spoke and behaved as a gallant lover ought, with compliments and sighs, but his heart was incorrect. The problem is not that Mr. Elton gallantly serves fair ladies; it is that he does so insincerely. His compliments and sighs and laments do not come from a heart deeply attached, but from a desire to marry a wealthy and socially respectable woman. For Austen, true gallantry is much more than external manners.

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MRS. ELTON: VAIN KNIGHT AND LADY The romantic language in Emma is varied and complex. Emma herself uses it to create romances and judge lovers, and the narrator uses it to expose Mr. Elton’s insincerity. She also uses it to unite and contrast Emma and her foil, Mrs. Elton. During their conversation in which Emma hears Mrs. Elton’s “knight-errantry”55 concerning Jane Fairfax, the vicar’s wife explains the kind of errantry she has in mind: “we must exert ourselves and endeavour to do something for her. We must bring her forward.”56 According to the OED, “knight-errantry” means “readiness to engage in romantic adventure. Often depreciative: [q]uixotic behavior.”57 In this scene, it certainly is depreciative. While the narrator describes Mrs. Elton’s interference directly as “knight-errantry,” both Mrs. Elton and Emma practice this interfering form of errantry; Emma is doing to Harriet what Mrs. Elton is doing to Jane, though Harriet is perhaps more in need of being brought forward and more genuinely attached to her benefactress. Jane endures, but Harriet welcomes knight-errantry. Both Emma and Mrs. Elton then are in a more traditionally masculine role, trying to rescue the socially distraught damsels in their care. Despite the similarities between the women, Mrs. Elton is a foil to and warning for Emma, who never goes as horribly astray as the vicar’s wife. Austen exposes Mrs. Elton’s false pretensions by using a noble term to express unwanted interference. Her knight-errantry does not arise primarily from a desire to serve Jane, but a desire to benefit herself; it is a false form of charity: “In addition to directing the lives of the less fortunate, Mrs. Elton also sees charity as a matter of style. In her estimation charity is what those in power offer to those without power: it both assists the beneficiary, and increases the positive social image and self-image of the benefactor.”58 Mrs. Elton’s knight-errantry is the charity of condescension, the charity the important show toward the unimportant or unacknowledged to increase their own glamorous image. Sarah Emsley writes, “Early in the novel, Emma is guilty of conceiving charity in just this way, and the introduction of Mrs. Elton to Highbury is a reminder to her of how charity should not be conducted.”59 Though Austen uses “knight-errantry” playfully and sarcastically here, as we might expect a Regency author looking back at the Middle Ages to do, she is not denouncing the service that the powerful render to the powerless. She certainly approves of Mr. Knightley’s knight-errantry toward Harriet, Jane, and Miss Bates, and of Emma’s compassionate and sensible care for the poor of Highbury. But Mr. Knightley genuinely cares for those he serves and has little interest in enhancing his self-image. Throughout the novel, Mrs. Elton is the vulgarization of the romantic model that Emma imagines and lives in. Just as Emma enjoys her elevated

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position as lady, so too does Mrs. Elton, though she is far less discerning than Emma. She is quite charmed by Mr. Woodhouse’s gallant behavior toward her: “Here comes this dear old beau of mine. . . . Only think of his gallantry in coming away before the other men!—what a dear old creature he is;—I assure you I like him excessively. I admire all that quaint, old-fashioned politeness; it is much more to my taste than modern ease; modern ease often disgusts me.”60 The humor of this passage comes from the fact that Mrs. Elton is herself a practitioner of the modern ease that so disgusts her, with her “Mr. E” and her “Knightley.” Yet she enjoys the old-fashioned gallantry of Mr. Woodhouse, flattered by his attentions and believing that he is singling her out, “this dear old beau of mine.” She does not understand that Mr. Woodhouse is generally courteous to women and that she herself has done nothing remarkable to inspire his gallantry. Though Mrs. Elton and Emma both enjoy the gallantry of men, Emma has the good sense to grow weary of its excess. Perhaps Emma would have liked the flattery of John Knightley, as we shall see shortly, but she certainly does not like the flattery of Mr. Elton. We suspect that Mrs. Elton would and has. Her vanity blinds her completely. Austen is here imagining courtly love, not from the man’s perspective, but from the woman’s; she perceives that it can become a temptation to vanity for the woman who sees, not universal courtesy toward her sex, but particular notice for herself. FAIR LADIES While the men of the novel gallantly serve, the women are fair. The narrator tells us that John Knightley “was not a great favourite with his fair sister-in-law.”61 The adjective “fair” in this sentence probably does not belong to John or Emma’s points of view; Emma is not personally vain, not prone to reflect on her own appearance, nor does she tend to imagine herself as the lady in a romance (she is too busy creating romances for others), and John Knightley does not speak this way; he is the least gallant of all the important men in the novel. “Fair” is certainly not an unusual word to describe a pretty girl, yet it is fitting for this novel because of its deep ties with the chivalric tradition. The narrator chooses to use this adjective to describe Emma while describing her dislike for the un-gallant John Knightley: “Perhaps she might have passed over more had his manners been flattering to Isabella’s sister, but they were only those of a calmly kind brother and friend, without praise and without blindness.”62 John does not flatter and praise this fair lady; he treats her with calm affection. The adverb “[p]erhaps” and the conditional “might” suggest possibility; we do not know if his flattery would make Emma like him better, but we do know that no amount of flattery could make

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her overlook his lack of respect for her father.63 Emma may imagine that she wishes to be flattered, but she rightfully understands that no flattery can amend for a failure in virtue. The word “fair” also appears in the context of the gallant Mr. Elton’s treatment of ladies. When Emma advises him to stay home rather than attend dinner at Randalls, Mr. Elton is confused, “for though very much gratified by the kind care of such a fair lady, and not liking to resist any advice of her’s, he had not really the least inclination to give up the visit.”64 Mr. Elton, as a good courtly lover, wants to obey the commands of his lady, but he also wants to spend an evening out. The narration here comes from his perspective, for he uses the term “fair” in indirect discourse soon afterward: “there was a great deal of sentiment in his manner of naming Harriet at parting; in the tone of his voice while assuring her that he should call at Mrs. Goddard’s for news of her fair friend.”65 The word also appears in connection to Mr. Woodhouse’s polite treatment of his guests, “paying his particular compliments to the ladies”; having done so, “[t]he kind-hearted old man might then sit down and feel he had done his duty, and made every fair lady welcome and easy.”66 Women are handsome, beautiful, pretty, and elegant in Emma, but they are also fair, a word that belongs to the realm of chivalric romance. Chaucer’s Emily “fairer was to sene / Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene.”67 Heurodis, the heroine of the fourteenth-century romance Sir Orfeo, is “[t]hat fairest levedi, for the nones, / That might gon on bodi and bones.”68 Unlike the ladies in romance, Emma and Harriet do not receive the comparative or the superlative; they are only fair. Nevertheless, they are etymologically connected to their romantic predecessors. In the eighteenth century, the adjective had associations with the gallant treatment of women, though not always positive associations. Wollstonecraft speaks of “the fair sex”69 and scathingly describes Dr. Fordyce’s sermons70 in which “[f]lorid appeals are made to heaven, and to the beauteous innocents, the fairest images of heaven here below, whilst sober sense is left far behind.”71 Wollstonecraft is particularly disgusted by the flattering, condescending style with which fair women are addressed by preachers: “It moves my gall to hear a preacher descanting on dress and needle-work; and still more, to hear him address the British fair, the fairest of the fair, as if they had only feelings.”72 For Wollstonecraft, “fair” is a patronizing term that suggests that women are emotional rather than rational beings. For her, the courtly treatment of women, including the adjective “fair,” has become a way of denying women moral and intellectual independence. Austen, as I will explore in subsequent chapters, shares some of Wollstonecraft’s concerns. Though Austen’s use of romantic language in Emma is complex, it evokes a longstanding view of love and a pattern for how men and women behave toward each other, a pattern in which a devoted knight gallantly serves

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the fair and perfect woman. This enduring tradition of love, a tradition in which a knight can say of his fair lady “I noot wher she be womman or goddessse,”73 is, as Austen sees, vulnerable to criticism. Yet, it has such an enduring hold on the imagination that it should not be utterly dismissed. Austen critiques courtly love for its worshipful elevation of women, but, as I shall explore in the next chapter, also transforms that one-way elevation into mutual admiration. NOTES 1. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 304. 2. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Legend of Good Women,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 603–4. 3. Chaucer, “Legend of Good Women,” lines 605–6. 4. Chaucer, “Legend of Good Women,” lines 607–8. 5. Chaucer, “Legend of Good Women,” lines 610–12. 6. Chaucer, “Legend of Good Women,” line 613. 7. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), ed. Hoyt Trowbridge (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1963), 18. https:​//​babel​.hathitrust​.org​/cgi​/pt​?id​=mdp​.39015015381141​&view​=1up​ &seq​=5​&skin​=2021. 8. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (London: J. Limbird, 1824; Project Gutenberg, 2021). https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/64701​/64701​-h​/64701​-h​.htm. 9. Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest. 10. Mark Schorer, “The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse,” Jane Austen: Emma: A Casebook, ed. David Lodge (Nashville: Aurora Publishers, 1970), 171. 11. Austen, Emma, 11. 12. Austen, Emma, 171. 13. Frances Gies, The Knight in History (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 69. 14. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 5.2.84. 15. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 3.2.64–65. 16. Austen, Emma, 235. 17. Austen, Emma, 235. 18. Austen, Emma, 570. 19. Austen, Emma, 362. 20. Erich Auerbach, “The Knight Sets Forth,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 420. 21. W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 328.

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22. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Knight’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), line 1465. 23. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 14. 24. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 15. 25. Austen, Emma, 370. 26. Austen, Emma, 370. 27. Austen, Emma, 370. 28. Michele Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 327, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/427127. 29. Austen, Emma, 442. 30. Austen, Emma, 443. 31. Austen, Emma, 443. 32. Austen, Emma, 443. 33. Juliet McMaster, Jane Austen on Love (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1978), 74. 34. Peter J. Leithart, Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2004), 27. 35. Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 156. 36. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 192. 37. Kenneth Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 169–70. 38. Chaucer, “Knight’s Tale,” lines 1361–62. 39. Chaucer, “Knight’s Tale,” line 1540. 40. Austen, Emma, 50. 41. Austen, Emma, 51. 42. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 49. 43. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 49. 44. Austen, Emma, 123. 45. Jane Austen, “Letter 2,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. 46. Austen, Emma, 76. 47. Jane Austen, “On the Marriage of Mr. Gell of East Bourn to Miss Gill,” in The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family, ed. David Selwyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), lines 5–6. 48. Chaucer, “Knight’s Tale,” lines 1077–78. 49. Austen, Emma, 76. 50. McMaster, Jane Austen on Love, 25. 51. McMaster, Jane Austen on Love, 15. 52. Austen, Emma, 76. 53. McMaster, Jane Austen on Love, 16.

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54. Austen, Emma, 146. 55. Austen, Emma, 304. 56. Austen, Emma, 305. 57. “knight-errantry, n.” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press, https:​//​www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/104029​?redirectedFrom​=knight​-errantry. 58. Sarah Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 135. 59. Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy, 135. 60. Austen, Emma, 326. 61. Austen, Emma, 100. 62. Austen, Emma, 100. 63. Austen, Emma, 100. 64. Austen, Emma, 118. 65. Austen, Emma, 119. 66. Austen, Emma, 318. 67. Chaucer, “Knight’s Tale,” lines 1035–36. 68. “Sir Orfeo,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), lines 53–54. 69. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch. 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 26–27. 70. Both Wollstonecraft and Austen are critical of Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, which in Pride and Prejudice Mr. Collins reads out loud, much to Lydia’s disgust. Conduct books like Fordyce’s sermons were very popular as Susan Allen Ford explains, “William St. Clair estimates that between 1785 and 1820, somewhere between 59,500 and 119,000 copies of conduct or advice books were sold to a population of some 320,000 families with incomes of at least £65 per year. ‘[I]t is evident,’ he argues, ‘that a high proportion of the upper and middle classes must have owned copies of at least one advice book.’ Moreover, ‘[m]any were sold in fine bindings, . . . an indication that they were meant to be kept and consulted.’ According to St. Clair, Dr. Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) was the most frequently reprinted, with Chapone’s Letters and Fordyce’s Sermons following.” Susan Allen Ford, “Mr. Collins Interrupted: Reading Fordyce’s Sermons with Pride and Prejudice,” Persuasions On-Line 34, no. 1 (2013), http:​//​www​.jasna​.org​/persuasions​/on​ -line​/vol34no1​/ford​.html. 71. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 100. 72. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 101. 73. Chaucer, “Knight’s Tale,” line 1101.

Chapter 5

Redefining Courtly Love and Winning Perfect Happiness in Emma

Having established that Emma is linguistically engaged with the romantic tradition, I will show how that tradition shapes our understanding of the novel’s happy ending, a convention native to the romantic genre. For it is through Austen’s redefinition of courtly love that we learn to desire the happy ending for Mr. Knightley and Emma. Some critics deny that Emma ends happily at all. Marvin Mudrick declares, “The irony of Emma is multiple; and its ultimate aspect is that there is no happy ending . . . if we care to project confirmed exploiters like Emma and Churchill into the future of their marriages.”1 For Mudrick, Emma does not undergo change, and Mr. Knightley capitulates to her seductive charm (in the same way Jane Fairfax capitulates to Frank Churchill): “[Frank and Emma] are lucky . . . because in their social milieu charm conquers, even as it makes every cruel and thoughtless mistake; because, existing apart from and inevitably denying emotion and commitment, it nevertheless finds committed to it even the good and the wise, even when it is known and evaluated.”2 Goodness and wisdom fall prey to charm, even the charm they accurately perceive, and that same charm will lead to misery in marriage. Someone like Emma, charming, cruel, and foolish, cannot have a happy marriage. While Mudrick thinks that Emma, the inveterate and charming exploiter, would be the cause of the unhappy marriage, Lord Brabourne, the son of Austen’s niece Fanny and an early critic, believes that Mr. Knightley, the perpetual lecturer, would be to blame: I have never felt satisfied with the marriage, and feel very sure that Emma was not nearly so happy as she pretended. I am certain that he frequently lectured her, was jealous of every agreeable man that ventured to say a civil word to her, and evinced his intellectual superiority by such a plethora of eminently suitable 93

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conversations, as either speedily hurried her to an untimely grave, or induced her to run away with somebody possessed of an inferior intellect, but more endearing qualities.3

Brabourne imagines that once Mr. Knightley and Emma are married he will continue to behave as he has done throughout the novel—confidently correcting the foibles of others and heartily jealous of his rivals. Feminist critics are also skeptical of the ending, arguing that Austen punishes Emma for her vivid imagination and her defiance of gender norms, forcing her to submit to Mr. Knightley in marriage, not out of love, but necessity. According to Gilbert and Gubar, Austen is “[a]ware that male superiority is far more than a fiction . . . [and] always defers to the economic, social, and political power of men as she dramatizes how and why female survival depends on gaining male approval and protection.”4 Thus, Emma must submit to Mr. Knightley and acknowledge his superiority in order to survive in the misogynistic world in which she lives. This submission is more than just a wily compromise that the powerless must make to gain power, but a punishment for Emma’s attempt at independence: “Austen could not punish her [Emma] more thoroughly than she does”;5 the authoress “mortified, humiliated, even bullied [her heroine] into sense.”6 Emma, with her brilliance and independence, must be made an example of. The punishment of such a woman is particularly appealing to members of the patriarchy: “Dramatizing the necessity of female submission for female survival, Austen’s story is especially flattering to male readers because it describes the taming not just of any woman but specifically of a rebellious, imaginative girl who is amorously mastered by a sensible man.”7 In the end, Emma—beautiful, intelligent, independent—must conform to social expectations, as embodied by Mr. Knightley. Even a girl as sparklingly vivacious as she may be tamed. Such skeptical readings from Mudrick, Brabourne, and Gilbert and Gubar must be taken seriously, for they call into question the legitimacy of the happy ending. If they are right, then my argument that the novel is part of the comedic tradition of medieval romance falls apart. If Emma were to remain an exploiter or Mr. Knightley a tireless lecturer, then their marriage would indeed be miserable. If Austen is punishing Emma for her imagination and forcing her heroine to submit to a man out of necessity, then how can we call the novel’s ending a happy one? Such readings overlook the genuine growth and mutual submission that Emma and Mr. Knightley experience. By the end of the novel, Mr. Knightley has become an amiable, chivalric lover, who thinks Emma faultless in spite of her faults, and Emma has learned humility and charity. Both have learned to submit to the other, not out of necessity, but of love. We must see their growth and understand their submission to accept their happy ending.

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We can best see that growth and mutual submission by reading the novel as a medieval romance redefined. The blunt, straightforward Mr. Knightley renders service to his lady, not by fetching umbrellas like Mr. Weston, or delivering overwrought compliments like Mr. Elton, or by physical prowess like Frank Churchill or the knights of old, but by his concern for Emma’s moral growth. Mr. Knightley, so different from the flattering and sighing Mr. Elton, is Austen’s redefinition of knighthood. But Mr. Knightley must also become more like the traditional knight who gallantly submits himself to his lady. He has to cease lecturing, put Emma on a pedestal, and become the humble lover, eager to please his beloved. He must acquire an amiability that expresses itself as gallantry toward the woman he loves. As we watch the transformation of this truthful man into uncertain lover, we eagerly desire his happiness and can truly say, by the end of the novel, that he is, like the thirteenth-century hero Havelok, “te beste knith at need,”8 or at least the best knight for the fair Emma. Of course, Emma is far more active than the conventional lady of courtly love. While the heroines of medieval romance remain static in their perfection, Emma, creator of chivalric romances and perfect lady, gallantly admired and served by the men around her, must undergo moral development. Emma, in danger of being pleased with her own perfection, must be humbled, intellectually and morally, before she can truly become the lady Mr. Knightley loves and admires. As experience and Mr. Knightley reveal her flaws, she responds with self-examination, repentance, and resolution to reform. Emma is responsible for her own moral development, but she grows because she loves Mr. Knightley (though she does not know it until late in the novel) because she wants to be the kind of woman he could love. Emma receives the service of Mr. Knightley, his truthful correction, and in turn renders him service, as she is ennobled by her love of him; she is both lady and knight. By reversing the traditional gender roles of romance, Austen humanizes women, showing that they too are moral agents in need of growth. Though Austen understands the peculiar dangers to which women are exposed in her society, she does not, as Gilbert and Gubar claim, see women exclusively as victims of patriarchal oppression, but as free moral agents, much as she sees men: “While Austen has a highly defined sense of the situation of women in her society—of how they are powerful as well as how they are vulnerable— within the model, and its constraints of free will and necessity, she allows women and men equal latitude to develop and mature.”9 For Austen, a moral life naturally belongs to human beings, regardless of sex. According to Lionel Trilling, Emma “has a moral life as a man has a moral life. And she doesn’t have it as a special instance . . . but quite as a matter of course, as a given quality of her nature.”10 However, as Trilling notes, such a moral life for a woman is rare in literature: “Women in fiction only rarely have the peculiar

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reality of the moral life. . . . Most commonly they exist in a moonlike way, shining by the reflected moral light of men . . . they seldom exist as men do—as genuine moral destinies.”11 Unlike so many fictional women, Emma exists as a “genuine moral” destiny, as a complacent creature, convinced of her own excellence, who must recognize her imperfections and joyfully submit to a lover she acknowledges as superior. By reading the novel through the lenses of a medieval romance, we can better understand this submission as a championing of a woman’s moral life. Austen is not depicting the wayward woman tamed by the wiser man; she is offering another role for women besides beautiful angel or seductive temptress—that of a flawed human being in need of moral growth who obtains perfect happiness. By watching Emma, the fair princess, mature in her understanding of love and of herself, we desire her happiness. By reinterpreting the tradition of courtly love, Austen helps us desire the particular relationship that Mr. Knightley and Emma have and the happiness they attain. Her reinterpretation makes possible the romantic ending of the novel, with “the perfect happiness of the union.”12 We are left with an ideal marriage that combines the courtly love ideal of service and admiration with the desire for the moral and intellectual growth of the beloved. Their marriage is ideal, a union of two imperfect people who find perfect happiness, a union that leaves us with a golden vision of happy love. MR. KNIGHTLEY: THE REDEFINITION OF GALLANTRY Mr. Knightley’s very name reveals his chivalric identity. Though Austen’s brother Edward had changed his last name to “Knight,” in tribute to the couple who adopted him as their heir, Cohen argues “that Mr. Knightley’s patronym represents not a celebration of family affection but a new ideal of gentlemanliness that incorporates elements of chivalric masculinity.”13 Of course, the patronym could owe itself to both sisterly affection and ideal representation. Unlike the gallant Mr. Elton and the amiable Frank Churchill, with their French refinement, Mr. Knightley represents, for Austen, an English conception of knighthood, a man who serves women, not through flattery or physical prowess, but through honest speech and kind action. Mr. Knightley rejects what he sees as the French form of gallantry—excessive, insincere politeness to women—and embodies an English form of gallantry—truthful speech and honorable behavior. He becomes the ideal English knight. Whereas the gallant Mr. Elton sighs and flatters, the chivalric Mr. Knightley speaks to Emma openly and honestly about her intellectual and moral errors. Mr. Knightley’s commitment to truth telling is one of the distinctive traits of a chivalrous knight, as least the knight as understood by the eighteenth

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century. In 1778, Gilbert Stuart wrote, “[the knight] professed the most scrupulous adherence to truth and justice. . . . To utter a falsehood, was an offense of which the infamy was never to be effaced. The culprit was degraded from knighthood; a punishment more terrible to the warrior than death.”14 Mr. Knightley, true knight that he is, must speak truth to his lady even if it displeases her. Indeed, his failure to flatter stems from his commitment to truth. Cohen writes, “Mr. Knightley tries to please Emma least, for it would have to be at the expense of truth.”15 Mr. Knightley has a chivalrous purpose in speaking truth to Emma, for he is deeply concerned with her moral and intellectual well-being. As a good knight, he seeks to serve his lady. Where Mr. Elton refuses to admit any fault in Emma’s portrait of Harriet and Mr. Weston associates Emma’s name with perfection, Mr. Knightley thinks that Emma has made Harriet too tall, and after her cruelty to Miss Bates on Box Hill, he bluntly chastises her. He refuses to flatter Emma or overlook her faults. This refusal to flatter, expressed in blunt criticism, might seem like a patriarchal exertion of power. Independent Emma must be made to submit to wiser Mr. Knightley, the weaker woman capitulating to the stronger man. However, his lack of gallantry in addressing Emma is not an attempt to control her but rather an acknowledgement of her rationality. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft condemns the excessive praise lavished on women by the chivalric tradition, or what she calls “this vestige of gothic manners.”16 She protests, I particularly object to the lover-like phrases of pumped up passion, which are every where interspersed. If women be ever allowed to walk without leading-strings, why must they be cajoled into virtue by artful flattery and sexual compliments? Speak to them the language of truth and soberness, and away with the lullaby strains of condescending endearment! Let them be taught to respect themselves as rational creatures.17

Wollstonecraft objects to the flattering, pseudo-romantic way that women are addressed by those attempting to school them in virtue because such forms of address infantilize women, denying their independent and grown-up rationality. “[G]othic manners” are contemptible because they treat women as exclusively emotional creatures, who must be excessively praised and coaxed into virtue, like a truculent child. If we look at Austen from the perspective of the medieval tradition and its legacy in her own day, we see that Mr. Knightley’s corrections are not demeaning, but rather elevating. He does not use the false floweriness of Fordyce and the conduct books, but speaks to Emma as a rational, moral agent, not as an exotic, delicate creature.

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Like Wollstonecraft, Mr. Knightley views “gothic manners” with suspicion. He watches Frank Churchill play the alphabet game with growing alarm: “Disingenuousness and double-dealing seemed to meet him at every turn. These letters were but the vehicle for gallantry and trick. It was child’s play, chosen to conceal a deeper game on Frank Churchill’s part.”18 Gallantry is yoked with trick, disingenuousness, and double-dealing. In this context, the word probably means something like “amorous intercourse or intrigue” rather than “polite or courteous bearing or attention to ladies.”19 Mr. Knightley suspects Frank of intrigue, of putting on a front, and of playing with women’s hearts. Despite Emma’s protest, Frank passes the letters spelling DIXON to Jane: “This gallant young man, who seemed to love without feeling, and to recommend himself without complaisance, directly handed over the word to Miss Fairfax, and with a particular degree of sedate civility entreated her to study it.”20 The verb “seemed” suggests that we are still observing Frank from Mr. Knightley’s perspective. To Mr. Knightley, Frank appears to love without feeling. He is gallant without being truly amiable. Gallant here probably means courteous to ladies, but it is used ironically; Frank’s courtesy is actually heartlessness. Where Emma sees gallantry as a proof of love, Mr. Knightley sees it as a sign of deception and heartlessness. We do not yet know that Frank is engaged to Jane, so we assume the unfeeling love refers to Emma, but it is also a fitting description for his relationship with Jane, for though he loves her deeply, he treats her thoughtlessly. For Mr. Knightley, gallantry is suspect when it is divorced from amiability. In a conversation with Emma, during which the two discuss Frank Churchill’s character, Mr. Knightley declares, “No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very ‘aimable,’ have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.”21 Mr. Knightley distinguishes between the French “aimable,” which denotes good manners, and the English “amiable,” which denotes genuine concern for others. The one is mere social convention; the other is a virtue. Sarah Emsley argues that for Austen, amiability is an aspect of charity.22 The amiable man does not merely use polite language but treats others with respect out of a desire for their good. True amiability consists not in polished manners, but in kind consideration. Of course, true amiability involves good manners: “Civility is to amiability what manners are to morals: ideally the outward manifestation of real goodness, politeness based on respect, tolerance, and understanding.”23 Thus, the man who is amiable is also aimable.

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Mr. Knightley Learns Gallantry Though Mr. Knightley is an admirable character, he is not perfect and, like his cherished lady, must mature in knightly gallantry. Indeed, critics like Brabourne—who see his tendency to lecture, however truthful and sober, as disagreeable—have a point. No woman would long endure such treatment from a husband. Mr. Knightley must cease to be the superior lecturer and become the submissive lover in order to be truly happy with Emma. Austen, though wary of “gothic manners,” is not merely dismissive of the medieval tradition; the knight’s veneration for his lady has a place in true love, and Mr. Knightley must grow in that veneration. While Mr. Knightley’s distinction between aimable and amiable reveals his commitment to genuine virtue rather than showy pretense, Theresa Kenney points out the irony of this scene: To say that English amiability is constituted by genuine delicacy toward the feelings of other people in the midst of an unnecessarily heated argument with a dear friend, in which he advocates dogged pursuit of duty regardless of the feelings of easily-irritated adoptive parents, reveals Mr. Knightley’s own bull-in-a-china-shop approach to human relations.24

Mr. Knightley fails to be amiable even as he advocates for it, and he fails to consider that Frank might be genuinely amiable rather than weak in showing concern for the feelings of Mr. and Mrs. Churchill. Of course, Mr. Knightley is right to criticize Frank for failing to perform his duty (Frank certainly had power to oppose the Churchills), but his manner is flawed: “He wants Emma to concede to his encomium of the dutiful man’s will but offers her a display of the high-handed bossiness that would be repulsive in a love relationship.”25 He “blusters away at Emma, not even thinking of her reaction to his angry and . . . sputtering speech.”26 Of course, Mr. Knightley’s anger in this scene springs from jealousy, but his manners do not recommend him as a lover; instead, they leave Emma puzzled at his prejudice against and injustice toward Frank Churchill. This man of truth, so scornful of gallantry and French manners, must become more gallant himself. This man, so confident in his own judgment, must learn the service of a true knight, who submits to his fair lady. As Kenney argues, he must become “amiable, to both heroine and reader.”27 Emsley writes, “True amiability involves civility to family, friends, and strangers, according to their due.”28 The appropriate civility due a lover is a kind of gallantry, a gesture of submissive adoration for the beloved. A truly amiable man must become gallant toward the woman he loves; he must serve and admire her, not simply blame and lecture. We see this transformation

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in Mr. Knightley especially during his proposal and his treatment of Emma afterward. Indeed, we see a more gallant Mr. Knightley even before the proposal. Though Emma declares that Mr. Knightley is not gallant, but humane, she finds his gallantry toward herself appealing. On hearing that Emma has visited Miss Bates after her rude comment on Box Hill, Mr. Knightley takes Emma’s hand as if to kiss it. He does not, but “whether it was that his manners had general so little gallantry, or however else it happened, but she thought nothing became him more.—It was with him, of so simple, yet so dignified a nature.—She could not but recall the attempt with great satisfaction. It spoke such perfect amity.”29 Emma is quite pleased with the act though she wishes that he had actually kissed her hand. Emma is not sure why she finds his simple and dignified gallantry so appealing; perhaps because it is unusual for him. Emma does not think that the act itself has “so little gallantry,” but rather that Mr. Knightley does not normally behave in this gallant manner. The humane man’s sudden transformation into a gallant man pleases her. When Mr. Knightley puts himself in the position of a lover, kissing his fair lady’s hand, Emma finds nothing more becoming. This simple gesture, an act of admiration and passion, endears Mr. Knightley to the reader and reveals him as more than just a stern corrector. The gallant gesture reveals “perfect amity,” perfect friendship, perfect amiability. This is gallantry at its best—an outward demonstration of an inward state of gratitude and admiration for the beloved. During his proposal, Mr. Knightley acknowledges his own errors and praises Emma. He confesses, “I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have.”30 Mr. Knightley realizes that his blaming and lecturing have not exactly been the food of love, and he marvels at Emma’s patient forbearance; indeed, she is peerless, for no other woman in England would have borne such treatment. “God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover,”31 he admits. Emma does not directly respond to these confessions of failure, but as Kenney observes, “Mr. Knightley really has not needed to change much to gain her hand, though she certainly feels the change. From the author’s perspective, however, something has been lacking. Emma herself need not ratify his evaluation of his behavior toward her for us to recognize the author’s point.”32 Of course, Emma’s approval of his attempt to kiss her hand and her wish that he had are implicit ratifications of his changed behavior; she does indeed appreciate his gallantry. Nothing becomes Mr. Knightley more than the humble submission of a lover. After the proposal, in a passage of indirect speech, Mr. Knightley refers to Emma as “this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults.”33 Emma is now superlative—sweetest, best, and faultless;

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Mr. Knightley now agrees with Mr. Weston’s gallant riddle. Emma has become perfect, for him. Though the narrative is colored here, we should not dismiss Mr. Knightley’s language simply as the hyperbolic effusions of a lover. Of course, Emma, remarkably endearing as she is, is not objectively the best or sweetest of all creatures—Jane Fairfax is more accomplished and Harriet is much sweeter—but such language is appropriate for a lover because it reveals “the humility Austen thinks necessary in romantic love.”34 Even Wollstonecraft approves of the praise of the lover: “The lover, it is true, has a poetic licence to exalt his mistress . . . he does not utter a falsehood when he borrows the language of adoration. His imagination may raise the idol of his heart, unblamed, above humanity.”35 Mr. Knightley speaks the language of adoration, lifting Emma above the rest of humanity, she who is sweetest of all creatures. “[H]appy would it be for women,” Wollstonecraft declares, “if they were only flattered by the men who loved them . . . who love the individual, not the sex.”36 Gallantry, at least in Austen’s time, prescribed a way of speaking to women in general. Such generality does not come from love and has pernicious results. But the gallantry that comes from love and is directed to one woman is fitting. Mr. Knightley speaks “the language of adoration” to a particular woman, not to the whole sex, and he genuinely loves the woman he adores; he is not flattering her in order to appeal to her vanity or for his own selfish profit, as Mr. Elton did. The truthful and overbearing Mr. Knightley has become amiable and gallant. We can see his truly chivalrous attitude toward Emma in the chapters that follow the proposal. Perhaps the length of the denouement, the longest in Austen’s canon, may be explained in part because it allows us to see Mr. Knightley as lover rather than lecturer. He speaks to Emma with gentleness and tenderness, rather than sternness and reproof. He continues to regret his previous treatment of her: “My interference was quite as likely to do harm as good.”37 And he has softened toward her faults. He tells her, “I am losing all my bitterness against spoilt children, my dearest Emma. I, who am owing all my happiness to you, would not it be horrible ingratitude in me to be severe on them?”38 The happiness Emma has brought him has softened his former displeasure with spoiled children. The severe moralist shows here tender indulgence toward the faults of his beloved. When he tells Emma of Harriet’s engagement, he is worried about how the news will affect her. Though pleased himself, Mr. Knightley is concerned that Emma will not approve of her friend’s choice. After he tells her, he declares, “You like it, my Emma, as little as I feared.—I wish our opinions were the same. But in time they will. Time, you may be very sure, will make one or the other of us think differently; and, in the meanwhile, we need not talk much on the subject.”39 Mr. Knightley does not lecture Emma or attempt to persuade her to accept his opinion. Indeed, he even concedes that he might change,

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“one or the other of us” may “think differently.” This is quite a change from the earlier Mr. Knightley, who rarely missed an opportunity to speak his mind to Emma, who is unimpressed by her matchmaking skills, who criticizes her friendship with Harriet Smith and her dislike of Robert Martin, who repeatedly points out her neglect of Jane Fairfax, and who reproves her for her cruelty to Miss Bates at Box Hill. Though he still believes her ill-disposed toward Robert Martin, he does not blame or lecture, but speaks with kindness. The tender use of the personal possessive pronoun before her name also reveals his softened manner. We see him in this scene as the gentle lover and delight in his happiness. Mr. Knightley has always had the courage of a knight, bravely speaking truth to Emma rather than flattering her, and by the end he has learned the gallant courtesy of the knight toward the lady he loves. Kenney writes, His anxiety to attach Emma to him, to please Emma, has to become an element in his love for her so that he will not merely be a father or teacher. At the end of Emma, Mr. Knightley thinks his beloved a “woman worthy of being pleased” and can finally live up to his name through his truly chivalrous attitude toward the one woman he cannot live without.40

In uniting courage and courtesy, Mr. Knightley has become neither father nor teacher, but knightly lover. EMMA: THE PRIVILEGED PRINCESS At the beginning of the novel, we learn that “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”41 Sir Walter Scott’s review of Emma, which I briefly quoted in chapter 2, describes Emma’s remarkable privilege: “Miss Woodhouse walks forth, the princess paramount, superior to all her companions in wit, beauty, fortune, and accomplishments, doated upon by her father and the Westons, admired, and almost worshipped by the more humble companions of the whist table.”42 Emma is the beautiful, intelligent, wealthy, comfortable, content princess, worshipped by those around her. But she only seems to unite the best blessings of existence. What then does she lack? “The real evils of Emma’s situation,” the narrator tells us, “were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.”43 Emma is a little spoiled and a little vain, and the two evils feed one another. Emma’s confidence in her own judgment leads her to overreach, and in having her own way, she has learned to think

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too well of herself. Emma faces the moral temptations of being the fair lady, the beautiful and powerful princess in her castle, adored by her faithful attendants and served by her flattering knights. Courtly elevation can be a moral danger for the woman, and Emma must resist becoming like Mrs. Elton, who imagines that every attention is a gallant expression of admiration and whose knight-errantry is a self-indulgent exercise of power. Mrs. Elton is the princess and knight gone permanently bad. Emma, however, learns that she cannot control those around her and that she is not quite as perfect as she thinks. As Elaine Bander declares, “moral progress in the novel is not so much a metaphorical climb from base camp to peak as it is an acknowledgment of her need to keep climbing. Paradoxically, to achieve perfection, Emma must recognize that she is not perfect.”44 Emma’s moral growth involves learning that she has thought too well of herself. In recognizing her imperfection, Emma learns to interpret herself and those around her more accurately. Giffin writes, “For Austen, interpretation is the key to maturity. . . . That maturity depends on a character interpreting self, world and other ‘correctly’; and on arriving at a ‘proper’ understanding of their dependent and interdependent social situation or context.”45 Emma matures because she becomes a better interpreter of herself and of others. To combine my argument with Giffin’s, Emma matures because she becomes a better interpreter of courtly love. Of course, critics make many varied claims about Emma’s growth. Adena Rosmarin provides a brief and helpful catalogue: “we have one critic arguing that Emma represents its heroine’s moral awakening, another that it represents her sexual awakening, and yet another that it represents her perceptual purification, her passage from quixotic illusion to seeing self and world as they ‘really’ are.”46 I see no textual evidence that indicates these awakenings are mutually exclusive; Emma becomes more humble and charitable, realizes that she is deeply in love with Mr. Knightley, and comes to see how inaccurately she has understood herself and others. I am simply narrowing my focus based on my interest in the chivalric lexicon of the novel. Part of Emma’s growth in humility is her adoption of chivalric submission toward the beloved. Her chivalrously shaped view of love is not entirely wrong, for as we see by the end, love is based on service to and elevation of the beloved, but Emma must learn to expand her definition of service and must humbly elevate her own beloved. She learns that the service of love is more than gallant acts, dramatic rescue, or fine compliments; the lover may render service through his concern for the moral improvement of the beloved. Emma does not reject courtly love, but rather must adopt for herself its posture of humility. In acknowledging Mr. Knightley’s superiority, Emma becomes truly chivalrous herself, rendering service to her beloved and becoming ennobled by that service. Just as Mr. Knightley must discover true

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gallantry that is neither insincere flattery nor stern reproof, Emma must learn to be truly chivalrous as well. Such growth is essential for Emma’s happiness. Despite her happy disposition, she is not truly happy. Austen’s use of the term “disposition” in the opening sentence is significant; the OED defines it as a “[n]atural tendency or bent of the mind.”47 Emma is naturally bent toward happiness, she is a naturally cheerful person, but she does not actually possess the happiness that comes with virtuous action or the full possession of the goods one loves. Having her own way and thinking too well of herself are “the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.”48 The language in these sentences—“disadvantages” “threatened” “danger”—is striking. Emma seems happy but her vices—vices to which courtly elevation disposes her—are actually dangerous threats to her happiness. Only by overcoming those dangers can Emma move from “a happy disposition”49 to “the perfect happiness of the union.”50 The Dangers of Courtly Elevation For a woman like Emma, who thinks a little too well of herself, gallant flattery is a moral temptation. Though Emma does not enjoy Mr. Elton’s gallantry, she is not above being flattered. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the narrator suggests that part of her dislike of Mr. John Knightley is that fact that he does not flatter her: “Perhaps she might have passed over more had his manners been more flattering to Isabella’s sister.”51 Though conditionally pleased with John’s flattery, she is indicatively pleased with the gallant riddle Mr. Weston offers on Box Hill: “Understanding and gratification came together. It might be a very indifferent piece of wit; but Emma found a great deal to laugh at and enjoy in it.”52 Emma enjoys Mr. Weston’s pleasant compliment that the letters “M” and “A” spell perfection; she is quite gratified to be thought perfect. Emma, we know, is “never loth to be first.”53 Nor is Emma immune to the gallant attention of Frank Churchill. From the beginning of their relationship, she enjoys his compliments. At Box Hill, Emma, disappointed in finding herself less happy than she expected, publicly flirts with Frank: Every distinguishing attention that could be paid, was paid to her. To amuse her, and be agreeable in her eyes, seemed all that he cared for—and Emma, glad to be enlivened, not sorry to be flattered, was gay and easy too, and gave him all the friendly encouragement, the admission to be gallant, which she had ever given in the first and most animating period of their acquaintance.54

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Frank behaves like the gallant knight attending to and complimenting his lady, and Emma clearly enjoys being the flattered lady. His flattery does not make her truly happy, nor does it win her love (she does not believe he is trying to), but it does bring her some pleasure. While Emma has the good sense to dislike Mr. Elton’s fawning, insincere gallantry, she does enjoy Frank’s attentions, though to be fair to Emma, Frank is a more skillful flatterer than the mercenary Mr. Elton. In trying to explain to Mr. Knightley her relationship with Frank and the temptation he posed, Emma confesses, “in short, for (with a sigh) let me swell out the causes ever so ingeniously, they all centre in this at last—my vanity was flattered, and I allowed his attentions.”55 Emma’s sigh here is no lover’s sigh, but a sigh of regret and resolution. The simplicity of the final two clauses, with the use of the first-person pronoun, indicate Emma’s straightforward resolution to accept personal responsibility. Though she begins her explanation with Frank as the subject, his relationship to Mr. Weston and his constant presence, she shifts to herself as the subject and then finally to the essential cause—her own vanity. Emma refers to Frank’s manners as “a trick,” picking up the term Mr. Knightley earlier associated with Frank’s gallantry. Though she now sees them for the trick they were, the diversion from his real affection for Jane, she did at one point enjoy the attention. Like Mrs. Elton, Emma falsely believes that his gallantry is a special compliment to herself. But unlike Mr. Woodhouse, who is universally gallant, Frank is deliberately trying to disguise his true feelings for Jane by paying special attention to Emma. Emma’s assumption that he cares for her is not as vain as Mrs. Elton’s assumption that Mr. Woodhouse is her particular beau. Emma responds to Frank not because she truly loves him, but because she finds his flattery pleasant. It confirms her tendency to think too well of herself and of having too much of her own way, for gallant men attend to the wishes and commands of fair ladies. The structure of courtly love—adoring man who flatters and obeys a fair lady—can actually be morally dangerous for the lady herself. Box Hill: The Princess Totters Austen reveals these moral dangers throughout the novel, but especially at Box Hill. Though Box Hill is not the only nor the first moment when Emma totters from her elevated position, it provides the most dramatic contrast between her perceived perfection and her actual flaws. The courtly elevation that results from Frank and Mr. Weston’s gallant attention contrasts with Emma’s cutting remarks toward Miss Bates. Bander writes, “Box Hill may be geographically the highest elevation reached in the novel, but morally it is

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the nadir, not the peak, of Emma’s perfection.”56 There is no apple involved, but Box Hill is the setting for Emma’s fall. Though Box Hill is certainly Emma’s moral nadir, it may also be the peak of her courtly power as Frank places himself under her command. She tells him, “You are comfortable because you are under command,” and he responds, “Your command?—Yes.”57 Frank even asks Emma to choose a wife for him—a task she has already anticipated and which appeals to her desire to manage the lives of those around her. Albert Wilhelm argues, “Emma reaches the peak of her power. Here Emma is most pointedly a usurper and a despot. Emma opens her court at Box Hill by assuming command of Frank Churchill and making him her lieutenant.”58 The submission of Frank in this scene is surely a parody of courtly submission; he is merely playing the role of the submissive knight, not genuinely and lovingly surrendering to his lady. Under Frank’s baleful influence, Emma becomes the haughty, tyrannical lady, issuing commands to those around her. This moment resembles those romances that Lennox’s Doctor condemns: “[t]housands are slaughtered for no other purpose than to gain a smile from the haughty beauty, who sits a calm spectatress of the ruin and desolation, bloodshed and misery, incited by herself.”59 While no one is being slaughtered for Emma’s smile, Frank demands clever remarks from the others in order to amuse her. The power dynamic is similar even if such violence is utterly foreign to Austen’s world. Flushed with the power Frank has granted her, Emma insults Miss Bates’s talkativeness. This insult, to a tiresome but kind and loving woman, is Emma’s cruelest act. Ironically, Emma behaves imperfectly and is then told by Mr. Weston that her name spells perfection. Her nasty behavior is immediately juxtaposed with the gallant flattery she constantly receives and does not deserve. After Mr. Weston’s compliment, Mr. Knightley remarks angrily, “This explains the sort of clever thing that is wanted, and Mr. Weston has done very well for himself; but he must have knocked up everybody else. Perfection should not have come quite so soon.”60 Mr. Knightley might be angry with both Emma and Mr. Weston, the former for her rudeness and the latter for his flattery that insulates Emma from rather than exposes her to her own imperfection. Though I do not wish to argue that the flattering attention of Frank and Mr. Weston causes Emma to insult Miss Bates, a chronological impossibility since Mr. Weston’s compliment comes after the insult, such attention, which she has received throughout her life from those around her, has insulated her from her own faults. Had Mr. Knightley not intervened, Emma, unaware of her own flaw and surrounded by eager flatterers, might never have realized her cruelty toward Miss Bates. Mr. Knightley is right when he tells Mr. Weston that perfection should not have come so soon. Emma must realize her own imperfection before she can grow into her perfect happiness.

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At the same time that the scene shows us the dangers of courtly elevation, it also shows us the benefits of true chivalric service; Mr. Knightley, unlike Frank or Mr. Weston, does not flatter Emma, but instead speaks the truth, pointing out her rudeness to Miss Bates. Whereas Frank and Mr. Weston render service to Emma through flattery, Mr. Knightley renders service through correction: “I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do: a privilege rather endured than allowed, perhaps, but I must still use it. I cannot see you acting wrong without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?”61 The repetition of “I must” reveals that Mr. Knightley believes that his correction will be met with displeasure; he is rousing himself to speak. He takes no joy in addressing Emma in this manner, but he courageously resolves to speak the truth. Mr. Knightley, in rendering service to Emma by rebuking her for her unkindness, courageously risks alienating the woman he loves by telling her the truth. Sir Orfeo rescues Heurodis from the fairy king through music and deception; Havelok returns his wife Goldeborw to her rightful role as queen by killing the traitor who had claimed her throne; Mr. Knightley rescues Emma from her moral blindness through his courageous honesty. Emma’s Moral Maturation Such courage is necessary because there is no indication that Emma realizes how cruel she has been. Circumstances revealed her misjudgment of Mr. Elton, but she needs Mr. Knightley to reveal her lack of charity toward Miss Bates. Of course, Emma is no passive lady; she is intelligent, active, and responsible for her own moral growth. A close reading of her thoughts and actions after Mr. Knightley’s rebuke reveals Emma’s honest self-assessment and willingness to change; we must realize both truths in order to desire her marriage with Mr. Knightley. Her happiness, and our acceptance of that happiness, are both dependent on our perception of her growth. Though Emma initially tries to brush aside Mr. Knightley’s corrections, she very quickly perceives her error. Mr. Knightley believes Emma remains silent out of anger toward him, but the narrator assures us that she already feels “anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern.”62 This detail from the objective narrator is important because it contrasts with her reaction to Mr. Elton’s proposal. In that situation, Emma does not immediately admit her own culpability in encouraging Mr. Elton. She is astonished at his presumption and conceit. It takes time for her to admit that her behavior might have misled Mr. Elton. By the time Mr. Knightley corrects her at Box Hill, Emma—with very little protest—can quickly discern and confess her error. She spends much less time justifying herself; she has already learned that

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her judgment is not perfect, and her swift response to Mr. Knightley’s rebuke shows her growth. In fact, Emma judges her error more harshly than Mr. Knightley does: “Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life.”63 Emma has never felt so distraught before, and the participles describing her emotional state build in seriousness; “mortified” and “grieved” have a religious valence. Emma is agitated, mortified, and grieved, not with Mr. Knightley, but with herself: “How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued!”64 Mr. Knightley uses the adjectives “unfeeling” and “insolent”; Emma adopts his anaphora but replaces his adjectives with “brutal” and “cruel.” Emma assesses her behavior with far more severity than Mr. Knightley. His words make her comment seem a matter of rudeness or impropriety; her words, however, make it seem a serious sin. Such a description contrasts with her evaluation of her behavior toward Mr. Elton and Harriet, which she sees as a foolish mistake, not a “brutal” act. That she is able to judge herself more severely after Box Hill shows how much she has grown even in the midst of her fall. The duration of her distress, told in colored narrative, also reveals Emma’s moral growth: “Time did not compose her. As she reflected more, she seemed but to feel it more. She had never been so depressed.”65 Her distress continues in the next chapter: “The wretchedness of a scheme to Box Hill was in Emma’s thoughts all the evening.”66 These sentences are colored by Emma’s sensations; she, not the narrator, has “never been so depressed,” and she, not the narrator, associates Box Hill with “wretchedness.” The colored narration stays close to Emma’s thoughts just as she remains close to her own feelings. In contrast, after Mr. Elton’s proposal, the narrator assures us that “to youth and natural cheerfulness like Emma’s, though under temporary gloom at night, the return of day will hardly fail to bring return of the spirits.”67 The objective narrative and the tone of general observation distance this comment from Emma’s emotions and perspectives. Just as she has emotionally distanced herself from her anxiety, the narrative also distances the reader from Emma. In light of this description, it is extremely important that instead of telling us about Emma’s quick return to good spirits, the narrator emphasizes her lingering agitation after the Box Hill affair. She cannot so easily dismiss her sin this time; she feels more deeply the wrong she has done to another. She also grows in courage. After Mr. Elton’s proposal, Emma was glad to avoid Harriet, but she visits Miss Bates the day after making her insulting remark (she does avoid Harriet after realizing that she herself loves Mr. Knightley; her growth is not perfect). Emma does not wallow in misery and guilt. Instead, she seeks to make reparation by going to the house she has tried so assiduously to avoid. Her fall from perfection allows for her growth

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because Emma must realize how imperfect she is before she can begin to strive for perfection: “without Box Hill, Emma’s insult, Mr. Knightley’s rebuke, and Emma’s ‘extraordinary tears’—in short, without the pique of her putative perfection—she might never have reached the peak of perfection.”68 Box Hill is something of a felix culpa for Emma. The Humility of a Lover Of course, Emma’s lesson in humility continues after Box Hill. The revelation of Frank and Jane’s attachment humbles Emma’s judgment yet again, and the subsequent revelation of Harriet’s feelings for Mr. Knightley reveals her own feelings and forces her to learn the humility of a lover who is uncertain of her beloved’s feelings and is able to acknowledge his superiority. Emma cannot believe that her feelings for Mr. Knightley are reciprocated; she acknowledges the justice of Mr. Knightley’s reproof at Box Hill, but cannot see in his behavior the symptoms of love since he spoke “[n]ot too strongly for the offense—but far, far too strongly to issue from any feeling softer than upright justice and clear-sighted good will.—She had no hope, nothing to deserve the name of hope, that he could have that sort of affection for herself which was now in question.”69 Justice and good will, not love, must motivate Mr. Knightley. No lover could speak to her as he has. After all, blindness, not clear-sightedness, is a symptom of love. Emma concludes that because Mr. Knightley is not blind to her faults, he cannot be in love with her. Of course, as we have learned from Mr. Knightley’s confession of his inadequacies as a lover, Emma is partially right. No lover should speak only with the tone of reproof; he should also speak with surrender and admiration. If Mr. Knightley had continued to reprove Emma throughout the entire novel, then their marriage would be as unhappy as Lord Brabourne predicts, with Emma dying young or running off with another man. Mr. Knightley must learn to leave off lecturing. But neither Brabourne nor Emma understand that Mr. Knightley speaks to her honestly because he loves her, because he is concerned with her moral and intellectual formation; his love has made him anxious about her faults and eager for her moral growth. Emma must learn that blindness, of the kind Mr. Elton pretends to, is not always a symptom of love; perception of the beloved’s faults and a desire to help her improve may be truer symptoms of love. Of course, Mr. Knightley does declare Emma faultless in spite of her faults, but I do not think this phrase means that Mr. Knightley, having fallen prey to Cupid’s arrow, can no longer see Emma’s flaws. He realizes that despite her flaws, she is the perfect woman for him, the woman most suited to be his companion, and an object worthy of chivalric admiration and submission.

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In addition to learning that love is not necessarily blind, Emma must also learn to humbly accept love’s correction as a kind of service; she must learn that Mr. Knightley’s bluntness toward her is just as much if not more of a service to her than the dramatic rescues of Frank Churchill or Mr. Dixon. Though Austen does not include a scene in which Emma explicitly realizes that Mr. Knightley’s service at Box Hill was an act of love, she is able to wish, after their engagement, that she could acknowledge the “important service which his better sense would have rendered her”70 had she heeded his warning about befriending Harriet. Advice that was formerly unwelcome has now become “important service.” Emma has experienced and imagined service as concrete acts—fetching an umbrella, grabbing a habit, rescuing a helpless girl from gypsies—or as flattering compliments. She now sees that genuine service may be judicious advice that seeks the moral maturity of the beloved, not merely her physical safety, and treats her not as an object of perfection to be endlessly worshipped but as a flawed being capable of growth. Not only does Emma learn to humbly accept Mr. Knightley’s moral service; she also learns how to express the worshipful submission of a courtly lover, sincerely acknowledging Mr. Knightley’s superiority. We can see Emma’s growth in her approval of John’s congratulatory letter: He writes like a sensible man. . . . I honour his sincerity. It is very plain that he considers the good fortune of the engagement as all on my side, but that he is not without hope of my growing, in time, as worthy of your affection, as you think me already. Had he said anything to bear a different construction, I should not have believed him.71

Though the narrator suggests earlier that Emma might like John better if he were more flattering, she is able, by the end of the novel, to honor and trust his sincerity. She even agrees with him: “He and I should differ very little in our estimation of the two . . . much less, perhaps, than he is aware of, if we could enter without ceremony or reserve on the subject.”72 Emma believes Mr. Knightley her superior and hopes to grow more worthy of him in the future. She has adopted the humble posture of the knight who hopes to be ennobled by his lady; she even renders knightly “service” to Harriet by keeping the girl’s feelings for Mr. Knightley secret.73 Whether or not Mr. Knightley is her superior is beside the point; such humility is appropriate for a lover. As we have seen, Mr. Knightley also adopts such humility, describing Emma as faultless, praising her patience, and growing more indulgent toward spoiled children. After Harriet’s engagement to Robert Martin relieves her one remaining concern, Emma reflects, “What had she to wish for but to grow more worthy of him, whose intentions and judgment had been ever so superior to her

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own. Nothing, but that the lessons of her past folly might teach her humility and circumspection in the future.”74 This is courtly love at its best. Love for Mr. Knightley ennobles Emma as she wishes to become more worthy of him. She assents to the superiority of his judgment and resolves to be humble and prudent in the future. The alliteration of “folly” and “future” aurally unites that which Emma wishes to separate; the two words, connected by sound, are divided in Emma’s mind; she resolves to sever “folly” from her “future.” And in her final discussion with Frank Churchill, Emma again humbly acknowledges Mr. Knightley’s superiority: “‘If not in our dispositions,’ she presently added, with a look of true sensibility, ‘there is a likeness in our destiny; the destiny which bids fair to connect us with two characters so much superior to our own.’”75 The prepositional phrase “with a look of true sensibility” is the narrator’s judgment. Emma truly feels Mr. Knightley’s superiority. Such a gesture of humility from the fair princess is endearing. As we have seen, feminist critics like Gilbert and Gubar find Emma’s submission to Mr. Knightley troubling. However, if we read the novel attending to the language of courtly love, we actually see that Austen, by having Emma submit to Mr. Knightley, is championing a woman’s moral life and her ability to love. Austen reverses the traditional gender roles by portraying Emma as the knight acknowledging the superiority of the lady. Emma’s declaration of Mr. Knightley’s superiority is not an endorsement of domineering patriarchy, but an expression of her moral growth and of “the humility Austen thinks necessary in romantic love,”76 a humility shared by both lady and knight. Gilbert and Gubar overlook the mutual chivalric submission that Austen shows in both men and women. They also overlook the wit and spunk with which Emma addresses Mr. Knightley after they are engaged. She is certainly not forced “into a secondary role of service and silence.”77 I confess that I am rather astounded by Gilbert and Gubar’s claim that Emma is rendered silent, given how much she talks to Mr. Knightley after their engagement. Such a claim overlooks considerable textual evidence. And, as we have seen, Mr. Knightley grows in humility too as he grows in amiability. Appreciation for the beloved’s superiority is humble charity, not servile capitulation. As long as that appreciation is mutual, both lovers become the adoring knight and adored lady, or as Patrick Fessenbecker argues, both lovers become both student and teacher: “The characters [in Austen’s novels] demonstrate their succumbing by granting the other the status of teacher,”78 and “when Austen’s heroes learn a lesson, it has as much to do with acknowledging someone else as a teacher and oneself as a student as it does with the content of education.”79 Emma must learn to accept a teacher, to submit to the humble role of student, and Mr. Knightley must do the same, as he learns to be less severe toward spoiled children or more seriously, as he learns the

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gentle courtesy of love. Both submit to the instruction of the other, and that submission is just as important as the actual lessons they learn. Perhaps Mr. Knightley is Emma’s superior in some ways, but the presence of superiority in a romantic relationship is not inherently problematic: “[T]he existence of a power differential in a relationship is not sufficient reason to say it is not a loving relationship. . . . If both parties agree to submit to the other in some sense, then the power dynamics do not preclude the possibility of love.”80 Critics like Gilbert and Gubar see the power dynamics in Austen as exclusive; Mr. Knightley, as a man, holds the power, and Emma must submit to him in order to survive. Certainly, Mr. Knightley is more virtuous than Emma, in part simply because he is older. His estate is much larger than her father’s. Yet he sees her as perfect and peerless, able to bear what no other woman in England could. Both offer knightly service and submission to the other, and in that mutual submission, both find extraordinary happiness. SUFFERING INTO HAPPINESS That happiness comes after a period of suffering. Of Mr. Knightley, Theresa Kenney argues that “[h]is ability to suffer for love” contributes to “the true romantic hero that he becomes.”81 After all, love is “a certain inborn suffering.”82 Indeed, both Knightley and Emma suffer for love, convinced that the other loves someone else, and both become true romantic heroes in the process. Mr. Knightley must helplessly watch the woman he loves flirt with an inferior young man: “This supposedly active and vigorous hero must wait passively for a deus ex machina to deliver his beloved to his arms.”83 Toward the end of the novel, he attempts to escape his suffering and Hartfield by traveling to London, but instead finds a new source of suffering, for Isabella is too like Emma and the home she has created is too happy. Mr. Knightley can only suffer and wait until grace intervenes to turn his story from sorrow to joy. Emma, in addition to the suffering she undergoes after misjudging Mr. Elton and speaking cruelly to Miss Bates, also suffers for love. After she realizes her love for Mr. Knightley and recognizes Harriet as a potential rival, she spends a miserable night reflecting on the prospect of misery awaiting her, of the loneliness in her life without him—a loneliness she believes she has brought on herself. She imagines the removal of all other actual and potential friends; the baby will busy Mrs. Weston, and Frank and Jane will soon leave Highbury. Jane, who used to be a source of envy and misguided fancy, has now become one of the good things that Emma laments losing, another indication of her growth in charity. The narrator then moves into free indirect discourse: “All that were good would be withdrawn; and if to these

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losses, the loss of Donwell were to be added, what would remain of cheerful or of rational society within their reach?”84 Emma imagines herself as totally bereft of genuine society with the loss of Mr. Knightley and blames herself for that loss: Mr. Knightley to be no longer coming there for his evening comfort! No longer walking in at all hours, as if ever willing to change his own home for their’s! How was it to be endured? And if he were to be lost to them for Harriet’s sake; if he were to be thought of hereafter, as finding in Harriet’s society all that he wanted; if Harriet were chosen, the first, the dearest, the friend, the wife to whom he looked for all the best blessings of existence; what could be increasing Emma’s wretchedness but the reflection never far distant from her mind, that it had been all her own work.85

Emma clearly understands cause and effect. Had she not formed a friendship with Harriet, had she not convinced Harriet to reject Robert Martin, had she not persuaded Harriet to imagine her claims in society to be higher than they were, had she not unwittingly encouraged Harriet, then she would not have ever dared to think of Mr. Knightley with hope. Emma believes that much of her suffering is self-inflicted. She has been her own worst enemy. Of course, in the dark night, or evening, of her soul, Emma does not know that everything will be made right. And while a second- or third- or fourth-time reader may be tempted to smile at Emma’s dramatic melancholy, knowing that Mr. Knightley truly loves her, the narrator treats her feelings with little ironic distance. We are meant to participate in Emma’s painful reflections, reflections that lead her to conclude that “the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself.”86 In July, albeit a cold and stormy July evening, Emma’s thoughts turn gloomily toward winter, “every winter,” as if winter will be the only season that she experiences without Mr. Knightley. Her resolve to be more rational and more acquainted with herself is admirable, yet such rational self-knowledge is rather gloomy without companionship. Though we applaud Emma’s noble resolutions, which seem more lasting than her resolutions to read more or practice the piano, we do not want her wintery imaginings to come true. Emma, after her night of misery, finds that joy indeed comes in the morning; the gloomy, stormy evening gives way to a sunny afternoon, bringing with it Mr. Knightley and his offer of cheerful, rational society for life: The weather continued much the same all the following morning; and the same loneliness, and the same melancholy seemed to reign at Hartfield—but in the

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afternoon it cleared; the wind changed into a softer quarter; the clouds were carried off; the sun appeared; it was summer again.87

The weather mirrors the move from tragedy to comedy as winter gives way to summer. The short, simple clause, “it was summer again,” toward which the clauses about wind, clouds, and sun build is a powerful and confident expression of renewed hope. AUSTENIAN EUDAIMONIA The suffering both characters undergo is conducive to happiness because it makes possible growth in virtue, an integral part of true happiness, of true flourishing, of what Aristotle calls eudaimonia. For Austen, as for Aristotle, true happiness is based on virtue. Anne Ruderman argues that the relationship between virtue and happiness in her novels distinguishes Austen from modern ethicists: “Another sign of Jane Austen’s unmodern doubt that humans can be anything they want to be, and her belief that human nature is perfected by virtue, is her clear suggestion that the reward of virtue is happiness.”88 Human beings have a clear nature and a clear end; they are made for the happiness that virtue makes possible. Happiness is the reward for virtue, but it is not an external reward for being virtuous—the characters are not given treats or patted on the head for doing their duty; rather, it is the full flowering of that virtue because the virtue and the happiness are naturally and inextricably linked. Mr. Knightley and Emma could not be as happy as they are were they not as virtuous as they are or have become. The novel joyfully concludes with the perfectly happy marriage of this couple, both of whom have grown in humility and charity, both of whom submit to and elevate the other. Their respective virtue makes possible their true happiness. This intimate relationship between virtue and happiness unites Austen to the medieval romancers; in their stories, the virtuous heroes and heroines are rewarded with perfectly happy marriages and well-ordered kingdoms. They are, however, constant in their virtue and receive their happiness simply as a reward for that constancy. Emma and Mr. Knightley both grow into their virtue and their happiness. Their happiness depends on their virtuous growth. Mr. Knightley cannot be a good and happy husband until he learns the amiable chivalry of a lover. Emma cannot know that she loves Mr. Knightley and cannot not be his happy wife, until she realizes her imperfections, resolves to grow, and cultivates courtly submission. Accurate self-knowledge and the resolution to improve are important parts of happiness. By the end of the novel, Emma, chastened and humbled by her errors, knows herself more fully

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than she did before. That knowledge, attained through error and suffering, will contribute to her deeper happiness. In uniting virtue to happiness, Austen is more Aristotelian than Kantian: “Austen, unlike Kant, goes out of her way to show how virtue benefits the doer.”89 Emma’s growth in humility and charity benefits her; Mr. Knightley’s growth in amiability benefits him. Their virtue makes possible their love, which brings them both great pleasure. For Austen, the exercise of virtue is a pleasure; she “stresses the pleasures of virtue. Her heroes and heroines are distinguished from those around them by the cultivation that lets them find noble things pleasant.”90 As Aristotle writes, “[a]ctions in accord with virtue are pleasant by nature, so that they both please lovers of the fine and are pleasant in their own right.”91 Though Mr. Knightley suffers when he confronts Emma after she insults Miss Bates, ultimately his courage and kindness toward Emma benefit him because those attributes win her admiration and her love. His virtue allows him to love and to be loved deeply and truly. Ruderman writes, “[i]n general, Austen suggests that the capacity for real attachment and love is the highest pleasure of virtue.”92 Virtue makes the pleasure of true love possible. And true love makes virtuous treatment of the beloved possible. Mr. Knightley, as a man of virtue, is concerned for Emma’s moral growth, and the subsequent interest he takes in her leads him to fall in love with her. His virtue then helps him love her more truly than most as he courageously, though sometimes heavy-handedly, speaks truth to her. Emma loves Mr. Knightley when the novel begins, but her growth in virtue allows her to realize this and to love him with the humility of a lover. Thus, virtue, love, and happiness are, for Austen, inseparable. The Unhappiness of Mrs. Elton We see this inseparability when we compare Emma and Mrs. Elton—the lady who becomes knightly and the lady who remains insufferably elevated. Mrs. Elton’s lack of virtuous growth excludes her from deeper happiness. While the rest of the town approves the Emma-Knightley match, Mrs. Elton bemoans it: “upon the whole, there was no serious objection raised, except in one habitation, the vicarage.—There, the surprise was not softened by any satisfaction.”93 Mr. Elton only hopes that Emma’s pride is now satisfied and supposes Mr. Knightley was always her target, but Mrs. Elton pities Mr. Knightley at great length in a hilariously self-deluded passage of free indirect discourse: “There would be an end of all pleasant intercourse with him.—How happy he had been to come and dine with them whenever they asked him! But that would be all over now.—Poor fellow!—No more exploring parties to Donwell made for her.”94 Mrs. Elton incorrectly supposes that Mr. Knightley enjoyed dining with them and vainly imagines that the outing

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to Donwell was especially for her—Austen’s italics emphasize Mrs. Elton’s self-absorption. She still envisions herself as the particular recipient of courtly love. Both Emma and Mrs. Elton are distressed at losing Mr. Knightley’s company. Both make reference to Donwell; Mrs. Elton remembers the enjoyment Mr. Knightley had in dining with them, and Emma remembers how he came “in at all hours, as if ever willing to change his own home for their’s!”95 But Emma is suffering into virtue while Mrs. Elton remains imprisoned in selfignorance and vanity. Emma is profoundly distressed over the potential loss of the man she loves while Mrs. Elton is petulantly upset at the loss of pleasure. Mrs. Elton is not banished like Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park, but she remains fixed in her vanity and excluded from the happiness of the couple and the small band of true friends at the wedding ceremony. She does not attend, and she disapproves of what she hears: “Mrs. Elton . . . thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own.—‘Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!—Selina would stare when she heard of it.’”96 She remains confident of her own stylish superiority, shocked by the plainness of the ceremony, and unable to see the true joy of the couple. The adversative conjunction “but” separates her from the friends who truly love Emma and Mr. Knightley: “But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.”97 Mrs. Elton is geographically a member of Highbury, but she is not a member of the true community of true friends. Now, Mrs. Elton does not suffer agonizing torment. As Ruderman observes, “[w]rongdoers in . . . [Austen’s] novels are not punished but rather left to the natural consequences of their actions.”98 Mrs. Elton’s vanity, unaffected by a dawning self-knowledge as Emma’s is, naturally isolates her from the true happiness of the Knightleys. Because Mrs. Elton is not aware of her vanity or her isolation, she does not have the self-knowledge to realize how inferior her happiness is to the happiness of the Knightleys. But readers know. Though she is quite satisfied with her own opinions and her own situation, we do not desire them: “The happiness of Austen’s villains is not as desirable as the happiness of her heroes.”99 Emma and Mr. Knightley are far more attractive than Mr. and Mrs. Elton though they “are perfectly suited in fortune in that each does not have what he or she pretends to have . . . and in character—both have a ‘sort of parade’ in speech and action . . . that is small-minded.”100 According to Ruderman, both Mr. and Mrs. Elton pretend to greater gallantry and elegance than they truly have, and both make a tiring, petty display of their words and actions. They are a perfect match.

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I do not think we need imagine their “love” festering into domestic hatred as the years go by; rather, they will both continue to feed each other’s vanity, both enabling the vice of the other, blindly and foolishly self-satisfied. Their relationship, unlike Emma and Mr. Knightley’s, is not ennobling but degrading. Such degradation is punishment enough, and through the comparison of the couples, we see that it is ultimately better for our happiness to recognize our vices rather than continue in ignorant complacency. Such recognition makes virtuous growth possible, and virtuous growth makes genuine love possible. Marital and Social Eudaimonia Though Austen does insist on the necessity of virtue for happiness, she does not deny the importance of external goods to a flourishing life. Emma already possesses most of those goods at the beginning of the story; she has beauty, brains, and bounty. By the end, she has attained the internal good of virtue that will allow her to enjoy those external goods more completely. Together Mr. Knightley and Emma are blessed with wealth and social standing; they unite “some of the best blessings of existence.”101 Like Aristotle, Austen acknowledges the importance, though not the supremacy, of external goods to happiness. Of all the external goods, marriage seems to be the most important. Though Austen has unmarried characters like Miss Bates who are virtuous, loving, and happy, she makes marriage the central good of all of her happy endings: “Austen always shows the fullest happiness to consist in attachment to others. The choice of a husband is presented as the most important one a woman faces, not because every woman has a duty to marry . . . but because Jane Austen takes seriously ‘the blessing of domestic happiness, and pure attachment.’”102 Marriage, with its lifelong commitment, makes possible the loving attachment to another that best facilitates happiness and virtue. Austen sees love as essential for marriage, even for those marriages outside her novels. She tells her niece “not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection,”103 and in another letter, which I quoted in chapter 3, she tells her, “nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without love.”104 Marriage without love is misery; marriage with love is one of the highest goods of human existence. Austen’s high view of loving marriage mirrors Shakespeare, who directs the emotional intimacy of courtly love toward stable marriages. At the end of As You Like It, Hymen declares, “Wedding is great Juno’s crown, / O blessed bond of board and bed! / ’Tis Hymen peoples every town; / High wedlock then be honored.”105 Like Shakespeare, Austen draws on the tropes of courtly

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love, critiques those tropes while also having her highest lovers take on the best of those tropes—elevation and service—and ultimately has courtly love culminate in marriage. Despite her critiques, Austen believes that courtly love does offer real insights into the nature of love, and, as long as the roles of knight and lady are not prescribed to men and women, she sees it as essential for marital love. Austen’s elevation of marriage is a disappointment to feminists like Gilbert, Gubar, and Sullivan, who assume that “domestic life involves submission and diminishment for women.”106 Austen understands that marriage can diminish women, but believes that truly loving companionship enriches women. Delighting in Mr. Knightley’s love, Emma has grown in humility, but her vivacity has not diminished. When Mr. Knightley asks her to call him George, she playfully responds, “Impossible!—I never can call you any thing but ‘Mr. Knightley.’ I will not promise even to equal the elegant terseness of Mrs. Elton, by calling you Mr. K.”107 In Mr. Knightley, Emma secures, as uniquely and permanently her own, “the friend”108 who can offer her “cheerful . . . [and] rational society”109 more completely than anyone else in the novel. When Mrs. Weston learns of the Emma-Knightley engagement, she reflects, “It was all right, all open, all equal.”110 This equality, which exists despite Mr. Knightley’s greater maturity and wisdom, makes their marriage a blessing, not a diminishment. Emma’s personal maturation is essential to her happiness. But, as we see in her solitary thoughts before Mr. Knightley’s proposal, individual virtue and rational self-knowledge are necessary but insufficient for true happiness. Emma is actually diminished without Mr. Knightley, without his companionship. For Austen, happiness is found not in isolation, but in companionship. And not simply spousal companionship, for Austen gives us a vision of human flourishing in a loving marriage in the midst of the community that they lead and serve. According to Giffin, “Highbury . . . [is] a microcosm of a body politic (or commonwealth) that seeks to organize itself for the common good.”111 The marriage of Mr. Knightley and Emma actually furthers the common good. They are not king and queen, or even lord and lady, of Highbury, but they are the most socially prominent and powerful couple in “the large and populous village almost amounting to a town.”112 Giffin explains that “the gentry couple and the clergy couple are the two most predominant and influential social units that have the potential to affect an entire community for better or for worse in a period of great social and economic and moral change.”113 Thus, within their historical context, Emma and Mr. Knightley are on a similar level to the couples in a medieval romance, who have great power over their entire community: “the squire and the priest, supported by their wives, are the chief administrators of the Georgian equivalent of a system of social welfare.”114 As de facto lord and lady of Highbury, the

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Knightleys will attend to the welfare of the villagers, offering their carriage and food to those in need. In her novels, Austen affirms the importance of society for true human flourishing. Discussing the difference between Jane Austen and Mark Twain, Richard Poirier contends, “Huck’s recognition [of his cruelty to Jim while under the baleful influence of Tom Sawyer] cannot involve a choice, as can Emma’s, against some forms of social expression in favor of others; against the Frank Churchills, Mrs Eltons . . . of this world, and for the Mr Knightleys”115 because, for Twain, society is utterly corrupt: “Twain cannot imagine a society in which his hero has any choice, if he is to remain in society at all, but to be ‘of Tom Sawyer’s party.’”116 Austen, in contrast, can imagine a society in which Emma can be of Mr. Knightley’s party. For Twain, society is a threat to Huck’s moral freedom; for Austen, as Duckworth argues, Emma herself is a threat to society. He sees her insult on Box Hill as “an emblem of a vitiated society where selfishness is uncurbed”117 and “were it not for Knightley’s fidelity to his social duty and Emma’s ability soon after to realize the ‘evil’ of her words and wit and truly repent, the ultimate social vision of the novel would be bleak.”118 Emma’s superior social standing means that her selfishness can seriously damage Highbury’s small, close-knit society. She must learn to take seriously her responsibility as the leading lady of Highbury, not only for her own happiness, but also for the happiness of others. While Austen is keenly aware of social corruption, she believes that human beings are naturally social and most happy when living in and contributing to a healthy society. Indeed, the long denouement, in addition to showing Mr. Knightley as a lover and Emma as submissive and saucy, also gives Emma time to restore the relationships that constitute her society. She and Harriet are reconciled, and she even welcomes Robert Martin, whom she previously thought socially beneath her notice, as a friend: “as Emma became acquainted with Robert Martin, who was now introduced at Hartfield, she fully acknowledged in him all the appearance of sense and worth which could bid fairest for her little friend.”119 Forgiveness and reconciliation also take place between Emma and Jane Fairfax, and Emma and Frank Churchill. In their brief tête–à–tête, Jane tells Emma, “I long to make apologies, excuses, to urge something for myself. I feel it so very due.”120 After assuring Jane that she is far too scrupulous, Emma says, “Pray say no more. I feel that all the apologies should be on my side. Let us forgive each other at once.”121 Later, when Emma visits Randall’s, she and Frank converse at length. Emma has already forgiven him in writing, but he hopes for forgiveness in person. She assures him that she will make no retraction: “No indeed . . . not in the least. I am particularly glad to see and shake hands with you—and to give you joy in person.”122 By

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forgiving and being forgiven, Emma works to restore her society and bring happiness to others. As a couple, Emma and Mr. Knightley show their sociability through their concern for the happiness of those they love, particularly Emma’s father. Mr. Knightley’s sacrifice, his decision to live at Hartfield, enables them to do what is right by Emma’s father and makes all three happy. Emma never considers her duty to her father a troublesome burden; she takes pleasure in making him happy, and she is delighted by Mr. Knightley’s willingness to leave Donwell Abbey. Their love delights in and enables other loves. It is social and bountiful. Thus, Austen gives us a remarkably rich vision of eudaimonia at the end of Emma, a vision of a mutually loving, virtuous marriage that blesses the spouses and their loved ones. Like the small band of friends, we delight in “the perfect happiness of the union,”123 a union that rivals the perfect marriages of medieval romance. Through their marriage, Havelok and Goldeborw, the couple in the thirteenth-century Havelok, unite the realms of England and Denmark and produce fifteen children, “the sones were kings alle . . . / And the douhtres alle quenes.”124 We do not know how many children Emma and Mr. Knightley will have, but their union is socially fecund, binding their families and their society of Highbury into a blissful realm. NOTES 1. Marvin Mudrick, “Irony as Form: Emma,” in Jane Austen: Emma: A Casebook, ed. David Lodge (Nashville: Aurora Publishers, 1970), 128. 2. Mudrick, “Irony as Form,” 128. 3. Edward Brabourne, “Too Respectable to Be a Hero,” in Jane Austen: Emma: A Casebook, ed. David Lodge (Nashville: Aurora Publishers, 1970), 59–60. 4. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020), 154. 5. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 159. 6. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 159. 7. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 154. 8. “Havelok,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), line 87. 9. Michael Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 31. 10. Lionel Trilling, “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen,” in Jane Austen: Emma, ed. David Lodge, Casebook Series (London: Macmillan Press, 1993), 124. 11. Trilling, “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen,” 124. 12. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 528.

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13. Michele Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 326. 14. Gilbert Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, in Its Progress from Rudeness to Refinement: Or, Inquiries Concerning the History of Law, Government, and Manners (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1778), 67, https:​//​play​.google​.com​/books​/reader​?id​ =CrdRAAAAcAAJ​&pg​=GBS​.PA2​&hl​=en. 15. Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man,” 326. 16. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 103–4. 17. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 100–101. 18. Austen, Emma, 377. 19. “gallantry, n.” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press, https:​//​ www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/76249​?redirectedFrom​=gallantry. 20. Austen, Emma, 378. 21. Austen, Emma, 160–61. 22. Sarah Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 58. 23. Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy, 90. 24. Theresa Kenney, “‘And I am changed also’: Mr. Knightley’s Conversion to Amiability,” Persuasions 29 (2007): 114. 25. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 113. 26. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 113. 27. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 111. 28. Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy, 64. 29. Austen, Emma, 420. 30. Austen, Emma, 469. 31. Austen, Emma, 469. 32. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 119. 33. Austen, Emma, 472. 34. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 118. 35. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 101. 36. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 101. 37. Austen, Emma, 504. 38. Austen, Emma, 504. 39. Austen, Emma, 514. 40. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 119. 41. Austen, Emma, 3. 42. Sir Walter Scott, “Sir Walter Scott on Jane Austen,” in Famous Reviews, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London, 1914), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/cache​/epub​/11251​/ pg11251​-images​.html. 43. Austen, Emma, 3. 44. Elaine Bander, “Emma: The Pique of Perfection,” Persuasions 21 (1999): 155– 56. 45. Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion, 7.

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46. Adena Rosmarin, “‘Misreading’ Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History,” in Jane Austen: Emma, ed. David Lodge, Casebook Series, ed. A. E. Dyson (London: Macmillan Press, 1993), 214–15. 47. “disposition, n.” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press, https:​ //​www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/55123​?redirectedFrom​=disposition. 48. Austen, Emma, 3–4. 49. Austen, Emma, 3. 50. Austen, Emma, 528. 51. Austen, Emma, 100. 52. Austen, Emma, 404. 53. Austen, Emma, 76. 54. Austen, Emma, 400. 55. Austen, Emma, 465. 56. Bander, “Emma: The Pique of Perfection,” 159. 57. Austen, Emma, 401. 58. Albert Wilhelm, “Three Word Clusters in ‘Emma,’” Studies in the Novel 7, no. 1 (1975): 59. 59. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: A. Millar, 1752; Project Gutenberg, 2015), https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/50054​/50054​-h​/50054​-h​.htm, 48. 60. Austen, Emma, 404. 61. Austen, Emma, 407. 62. Austen, Emma, 408. 63. Austen, Emma, 409. 64. Austen, Emma, 409. 65. Austen, Emma, 409. 66. Austen, Emma, 410. 67. Austen, Emma, 149. 68. Bander, “Emma: The Pique of Perfection,” 159. 69. Austen, Emma, 453. 70. Austen, Emma, 505. 71. Austen, Emma, 506–7. 72. Austen, Emma, 507. 73. Austen, Emma, 469. 74. Austen, Emma, 518–19. 75. Austen, Emma, 522. 76. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 118. 77. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 160. 78. Patrick Fessenbecker, “Jane Austen on Love and Pedagogical Power,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 51, no. 4 (2011): 758. 79. Fessenbecker, “Jane Austen on Love,” 761. 80. Fessenbecker, “Jane Austen on Love,” 761. 81. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 111. 82. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1969), 28. 83. Kenney, “Mr. Knightley’s Conversion,” 111.

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84. Austen, Emma, 460. 85. Austen, Emma, 460. 86. Austen, Emma, 460–61. 87. Austen, Emma, 462. 88. Anne Ruderman, The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 5. 89. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 6. 90. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 6. 91. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 1099a 15. 92. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 7. 93. Austen, Emma, 511–12. 94. Austen, Emma, 512, emphasis in original. 95. Austen, Emma, 460. 96. Austen, Emma, 528. 97. Austen, Emma, 528. 98. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 8. 99. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 11. 100. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 32. 101. Austen, Emma, 3. 102. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 11–12. 103. Jane Austen, “Letter 109,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 292. 104. Jane Austen, “Letter 114,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 299. 105. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 5.4.139–42. 106. Ruderman, Pleasures of Virtue, 12. 107. Austen, Emma, 505. 108. Austen, Emma, 460. 109. Austen, Emma, 460. 110. Austen, Emma, 510. 111. Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion, 149. 112. Austen, Emma, 5. 113. Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion, 34. 114. Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion, 34. 115. Richard Poirier, “Emma and Huck Finn,” in Jane Austen: Emma, ed. David Lodge, Casebook Series, ed. A. E. Dyson (London: Macmillan Press, 1993), 79. 116. Poirier, “Emma and Huck Finn,” 78. 117. Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 176–77.

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118. Duckworth, Improvement of the Estate, 177. 119. Austen, Emma, 526. 120. Austen, Emma, 501. 121. Austen, Emma, 501. 122. Austen, Emma, 520. 123. Austen, Emma, 528. 124. “Havelok,” lines 2980, 2982.

Chapter 6

Providential Romance in Persuasion

Austen’s engagement with courtly love continues in her last complete work, Persuasion. In many ways, Persuasion is her most romantic novel, as the eternal devotion shared by Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth unironically fulfills many of the tropes of courtly love. Nevertheless, Austen continues her project of subversion, giving to Anne the role of brave knight and to Wentworth the role of imprisoned lady. After analyzing the novel’s representation of courtly love, I will explore its providential structure, a structure derived from medieval romance. My argument is not that Austen read Middle English romances and consciously adopted their structure, but that the providential structure of romance permeated the novelistic tradition and the broad reading that she did and shaped the narrative structure of her own stories. Thus, her works should be classified not simply as realistic novels but also as providential romances. COURTLY LOVE IN PERSUASION Early in Persuasion, after Anne and Wentworth are unexpectedly reunited because of the financial irresponsibility of her father, the gallant Captain renders his former lady a kind of chivalric service by delivering her from the assault of her young nephew, Little Walter, who “began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way, that busy as she was about Charles she could not shake him off. She spoke to him—ordered, intreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.”1 Walter is a persistent assailant, and Anne is clearly in need of rescue; she cannot save herself. Charles Hayter fails her when he rather lazily orders the child to leave his aunt alone, an ineffectual command of which he is later ashamed. Captain Wentworth, 125

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however, shows himself to be a true knight: “In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.”2 Though this is an ordinary, everyday act, no dragons slain or giants beheaded, it is revelatory of the superiority of Wentworth to Hayter; Anne’s former lover behaves with resolution and serves his lady, as a good knight should. Of course, at this point in the novel, she is not actually his lady because he has not forgiven her for breaking off the engagement; nevertheless, he shows her chivalric service just as Mr. Weston fetches an umbrella for Miss Taylor and Mr. Knightley asks Harriet to dance. However, the climactic act of service in the novel belongs, not to Wentworth, but to Anne. She does not rescue Louisa Musgrove from a giant or a troublesome nephew, but she does act calmly and confidently in the face of real danger. Anne has been serving all throughout the novel; when the party at Uppercross proposes dancing, “Anne offered her services [here piano-playing], as usual.”3 These services are not particularly chivalric as Anne is not serving her beloved, but rather striving to be a useful citizen in the social commonwealth that she finds herself in. Her actions in Lyme, however, do have a chivalric flavor. In a moment when a damsel is in distress and surrounded by three men, two of whom are naval captains, it is Anne who takes charge. While she is serving Louisa, she is also, and perhaps primarily, serving Wentworth, who is suddenly helpless: “‘Is there no one to help me?’ were the first words which burst from Captain Wentworth, in a tone of despair, and as if all his own strength were gone.”4 Anne, full of strength, responds immediately to his cry for help, ordering Captain Benwick and Charles Musgrove to assist her estranged lover. She cries out, “‘Go to him,’” four times before mentioning Louisa: “‘Rub her hands, rub her temples.’”5 The language here suggests that if Anne is not thinking exclusively of Wentworth’s need, she is at least especially concerned for him. She acts to help him. Once again, Austen complicates gender roles within the chivalric paradigm. The lady, so often distressed and powerless in this novel, comes to the knight’s rescue. Emma shows the chivalric submission and humility of the true knight; Anne shows the bravery of the true knight. She is the Mr. Knightley, faithfully constant to a man who has to realize his own weakness and grow in humility before he can approach the woman he loves. Austen’s willingness to grant Anne “masculine” strength contradicts the conduct books of her day. Fordyce informs women, “Let it be observed, that in your sex manly exercises are never graceful; that in them a tone and figure, as well as an air and deportment, of the masculine kind, are always forbidding; and that men of sensibility desire in every woman soft features, and a flowing voice, a form not

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robust, and demeanour delicate and gentle.”6 Anne does not speak in “a flowing voice,” nor is she “delicate and gentle”; instead she speaks clearly and commandingly. By reversing the gender roles in both Emma and Persuasion, Austen depicts women as complex beings, rather than fair ladies simplistically fixed in virtue or perpetually in need of chivalric service. Service is not the only dimension of courtly love that Austen explores in Persuasion. Courtly love famously, or perhaps notoriously, has a religious dimension. C. S. Lewis defines courtly love as “Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love.”7 In Chrétien de Troyes’ The Knight of the Cart (1176), Lancelot approaches the bed “of the queen, to whom he bows in adoration, for no holy relic inspires him with such faith.”8 Lancelot adores Guinevere as a medieval worshipper would have adored a relic, kneeling before her in an act of surrender. This adoration becomes more muted, less religiously provocative after the Middle Ages, but the Religion of Love lives on. Shakespeare’s Rosalind urges Phebe to love Silvius for “he worships you,”9 and Silvius informs his audience that love is “[a]ll adoration, duty, and observance.”10 The novel carries on the tradition. When Fielding first introduces Sophia in Tom Jones, his tone is worshipful, as exhorts the birds to sing to her: “you the feathered choristers of nature, whose sweet notes not even Handel can excel, tune your melodious throats to celebrate her appearance.”11 Wollstonecraft uses the language of the Religion of Love when she describes the lover who “does not utter a falsehood when he borrows the language of adoration. His imagination may raise the idol of his heart, unblamed, above humanity.”12 In Persuasion, Captain Wentworth confesses his surprise that Benwick is able so easily to replace one woman with another: “Fanny Harville was a very superior creature; and his attachment to her was indeed attachment. A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman!—He ought not—he does not.”13 Wentworth does not suggest that Benwick loved Fanny more than a religious relic, nor does any man in the novel fall to his knees by the bedside of his beloved in an act of worship. Nevertheless, “devotion of heart” has a religious connotation; there is an emotional intensity that, if not religious, is certainly reverential. The eternality of that devotion is another remnant of the courtly tradition. The Knight of La Tour Landry, writing to his daughters in his book The Book of the Knight of the Tower (1372), declares, “For never, with any distance, or with any time, can perfect love forget.”14 Wentworth believes that a man should not and in fact does not recover from an attachment to a superior woman, and he never forgets Anne, despite his anger and pride. And Anne, as I discussed in chapter 3, realizes her eternal devotion to Wentworth: “her affection would be his for ever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation.”15 While Austen makes fun of Marianne’s prejudice against second attachments, she presents

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Wentworth’s and Anne’s eternal devotion as praiseworthy, as proof of their superiority. Though Wentworth flirts with Louisa, he assures Anne that his affections have always belonged to her. He does what Benwick was unable to do, showing the eternal devotion of a true lover. Courteous speech, like service and devotion, is also central to courtly love. As Larry Benson explains, while “it is best if in the actual presence of his lady he [the courtly lover] is so filled with religious awe that he is rendered speechless or even, like Troilus nearing Criseyde’s bed, falls into a swoon, . . . [t]he rest of the time . . . he must be skilled in courtly talk.”16 Benson notes that in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1385), “Criseyde’s first question to Pandarus when she agrees to meet Troilus is ‘kan he speke wel of love?’”17 “Courtly love,” Benson explains, “is especially dependent on the forms of speech, since not only is every lover a poet, but the main characteristics of the courtly lover—his courtesy, humility, and religion of love—are expressed in speech. To be adept at ‘luf talk’ is therefore the first requirement of the courtly lover.”18 Courteous speech is central to the Arthurian legend. In Wace’s Roman De Brut (1155), “people came from many lands seeking praise and honor, some to hear his [Arthur’s] courteous speech, or to see his elegant court.”19 Much of the drama of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) rests on the sophisticated, delightful, and morally dangerous conversations between Gawain and Lady Bertilak; in their first conversation, she provocatively offers him her body to do with what he wills, an offer that he, because of his oath of fealty to her husband, cannot accept. But, because a knight must be courteous to ladies, Gawain cannot bluntly and rudely refuse her. He passes this moral test because of his courteous speech: “With fitting speech and fair / The good knight makes reply”20 and “[t]he two converse as friends.”21 Gawain’s careful courtesy transforms a sexually charged moment into a friendly chat. Austen’s novels are full of people talking about love, naturally men and women talking to each other about love, but also women talking to other women about love. Linda Bee notes that “Austen’s world turned on conversation.”22 After all, “[t]he society described in Austen’s novels is, as everybody knows, a leisured one. . . . These men and women spend their time not doing but talking,”23 frequently about love. We do not see many long conversations between Anne and Wentworth in Persuasion, but her conversation with Captain Harville at the White Hart is about love. It is even about what literature has to say about love, and it is this literary conversation about love that inspires Wentworth to propose. Anne expresses her appreciation for excellent conversation to Mr. Elliot. “My idea of good company,” she tells her cousin, “is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”24 Anne here is talking about conversation with friends, not conversation between lovers. But in marrying

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Wentworth she gains a partner who is clever, well-informed, and has a great deal of conversation. Certainly the importance of conversation in Austen is shaped by the conventions of contemporary society in which “[a]ll the women have servants to take care of the day-to-day domestic environment.”25 As Norman Page observes, “Where the members of a society, and especially its female members, are virtually without prescribed duties, . . . conversation takes on a significance that it can hardly afford to possess in a working community.”26 Nevertheless, that a story would feature men and women talking sophisticatedly about love is an expectation shaped by medieval romance and the importance that the genre places on conversation between lovers. That expectation, as with so many of the conventions of courtly love, was transmitted to Austen through Shakespeare. Comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It are full of characters verbally sorting through the ins and outs of love. In As You Like It, Rosalind proposes to Celia that they make love their sport, and in act 5, Silvius defines love with all the tropes of courtly love: sighs, tears, faith, service, adoration, humbleness.27 Elizabeth and Darcy’s conversation at the end of Pride and Prejudice about how they fell in love echoes Beatrice and Benedict’s conversation about their love in act 5 of Much Ado About Nothing. Austen participates in a long tradition of courtly lovers who not only love but also talk about their love. Just as she did in Emma, Austen thoughtfully critiques that tradition, particularly its treatment of women, in her final finished work. In Emma, she explored the temptations to pride presented by chivalric elevation; in Persuasion, she explores the way that chivalric elevation denies female rationality. Chivalry leads Captain Wentworth to a fussiness about delicate women on ships. Claudia Johnson observes, “With the haughtiness typical of him, Captain Wentworth announces his principled opposition to carrying women on board ships precisely on account of their delicacy. His objections, he explains, arise not from mean-spirited misogyny, but rather from high-minded chivalry.”28 But this “high-minded chivalry” is countered by Mrs. Croft, who accuses her brother of a “superfine, extraordinary sort of gallantry” and declares “I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.”29 Fine ladies, “brimful of sensibility, and teeming with capricious fancies,”30 require a perpetually tranquil sea. But rational creatures are capable of weathering the storms of life with patience and courage. As Johnson argues, Mrs. Croft “appears never to consider robustness and self-confidence an oxymoronic violation of her feminine nature, and she could bid farewell to the age of chivalry without worrying much about the future of the civilized world.”31 Anne herself shows such robustness. She does not need luxurious accommodations: “A bed on the floor in Louisa’s room would be sufficient for her.”32 The chivalric tradition,

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by always depicting women as refined creatures in need of service and care, misunderstands femininity. According to Wollstonecraft, while such elevation appears to elevate women, it actually demeans them: “I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority.”33 She declares, “So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude, to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two.”34 Wentworth does not explicitly declare men superior to delicate women, but Captain Harville does, arguing for the connection between women’s weaker bodies and their weaker emotional constancy. Chivalric elevation, by treating women as delicate ladies, can enable masculine superiority and deny feminine strength. Wentworth’s “superfine, extraordinary sort of gallantry,”35 derived from the medieval chivalric tradition, overlooks the truth that women are rational and virtuous creatures, capable of enduring rough seas. That Austen is aware of how traditions, including literary traditions, misrepresent women is seen in Anne’s conversation with Captain Harville about female constancy. Captain Harville tells Anne, “But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness.”36 Harville is not talking about female delicacy, but female fickleness. Women, he thinks, are less constant than men, more apt to forget the one they love. And he finds proof for his claim in literature. According to Wollstonecraft, men create female fickleness by declaring sensibility uniquely feminine, but then turn on their creation, protesting when that sensibility leads to inconstancy: “‘The power of the woman,’” says some author, ‘is her sensibility;’ and men not aware of the consequence, do all they can to make this power swallow up every other. . . . Yet, when the sensibility is thus increased at the expense of reason, and even the imagination, why do philosophical men complain of their fickleness?”37 Wollstonecraft finds it absurd that men complain of the very fickleness they themselves created. Anne’s response to Harville has something of Wollstonecraft in it as she points out that men have written the “songs and proverbs” that “all talk of woman’s fickleness.”38 Echoing the Wife of Bath, Anne declares, “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.”39 Wollstonecraft accuses men of creating female fickleness by presenting lively passion as a woman’s greatest appeal, and Austen accuses men of creating female

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fickleness through their literary hegemony. But in her own novels, Austen has the pen in her hand, and she can tell the story of women who are not the fine ladies of the chivalric tradition but rational creatures capable of courageous service and lifelong devotion. AUSTEN’S PROVIDENTIAL ROMANCE While the legacy of courtly love runs throughout Austen’s novels, the grand structure of medieval romance also informs her works, a structure shaped by the cosmic narrative of Christianity: “Romance, with its typical pattern of an opening disruption of a state of order, followed by a period of trial and suffering, even an encounter with death, yet with a final symbolic resurrection and better restoration, offers a secular equivalent” to the Christian story of the fall, the crucifixion, and the resurrection.40 We see this secular equivalent in the fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo, in which blissful order is disrupted by the Fairy King, who kidnaps the titular hero’s wife. A distraught Orfeo leaves his city and seeks the woods where he suffers as a wild man for ten years until his wife miraculously appears to him one day. In the end, the lovers are reunited and return triumphant to their kingdom, which they rule happily until their deaths. The novel, the descendant of the romance, maintained this narrative structure of disruption, suffering, resurrection, and restoration, even as it explicitly rejected the artificial and supernatural conventions of the romance. The “final symbolic resurrection and better restoration” that constitute such an important part of the romance and the novel cannot not be exclusively ascribed to the wisdom and courage of the hero or heroine. According to Cooper, “Christian Providence is seen to intervene most directly in the case of saints and penitents rather than heroes, but its workings are stressed in romance when they operate to preserve the innocent or the true ruler.”41 While not every romance emphasizes providential intervention, the characters live in a world in which gracious deliverance from suffering is possible. This providential cosmos is particularly clear in those romances that end happily. Sir Orfeo’s wife appears unexpectedly in the woods; her reappearance comes, not through any exertion of the hero, but as a miraculous, providential gift, which makes possible the reunion between husband and wife, and the return of the true king. In Emaré, the narrator explicitly ascribes the plot to providence. When the eponymous Emaré is set adrift at sea in a rudderless boat, the narrator says that she “was dryven ynto a lond, / Thorow the grace of Goddes sond, / That all thyng may fulfylle.”42 The land Emaré drifts to belongs to the King of Galys, whom she marries and to whom she bears a son; thus, her suffering leads to happiness. The romance is a providential genre, to the chagrin of some modern readers. But so too is the novel.

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Shakespeare and Providential Romance Before turning to Persuasion, I would like to consider Shakespeare, who serves as an intermediary step between the romance and the novel and whose influence on the novel should not be underestimated. As Edmund Bertram says, “we all talk Shakespeare.”43 Although Shakespeare reflects, in many ways, the classicism of the Renaissance, he has deep roots in the Middle Ages. “Shakespeare’s reading in Plautus and Ovid and Plutarch has been abundantly traced,” Cooper writes, “but he also knew, and assumed his audience knew, Guy of Warwick, The Squire of Low Degree, Sir Eglamour, Valentine and Orson, and Bevis of Hampton, and he made a full dramatization of Apollonius of Tyre.”44 Shakespeare’s familiarity with medieval romances was not a result of some antiquarian interest in the obscure past, for in his lifetime, the medieval romance dominated “Tudor England rather as novels dominated the nineteenth century.”45 Shakespeare and his audience would have had access to “narrative romances, many of them medieval ones available in cheap printed editions that came to form the bulk of early Tudor popular reading, the pulp fiction of the age. Some seventy medieval romances were still current after 1500, either in print or through retellings that kept their stories familiar.”46 Romances were also popular on the stage: “By the early years of the seventeenth century, the stories of Arthur, Tristram, Huon of Bordeaux, Guy of Warwick, Valentine and Orson and the Four Sons of Aymon had all been dramatized, no doubt because audiences, brought up on the same stories, could be guaranteed.”47 According to Cooper, “a play of Guy of Warwick that probably dates from the early 1590s contains a character from Stratford-upon-Avon named Sparrow, who has some claim to being a send-up of the upstart Shakespeare himself.”48 Shakespeare was surrounded by the literature of the Middle Ages. Throughout his whole career, Shakespeare’s comedies were more medieval than classical. While playwrights like Ben Jonson followed the classical theories of comedy as a satirical, corrective genre that included low, ridiculous figures, “[i]n opting for the romance version of comedy, Shakespeare was writing from deep within a vernacular tradition,” a tradition that tends to depict elevated characters who find ideal happiness in mutually loving marriages and who often establish political peace.49 The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale are strikingly different from Jonson’s city comedies. Scholars now classify those two plays as well as Cymbeline and Pericles as romances, but Cooper contends that even Shakespeare’s earlier comedies have romantic elements: “The modern use of the term ‘romance’ to describe Shakespeare’s last plays is an acknowledgement of its generic importance to him, but the First Folio’s use of the new dramatic term ‘comedies’ has tended to blur how far even his early comedies draw on romance patterns and models.”50 His

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romances, of course, are the most explicitly medieval: “like many narrative romances, [they] follow a pattern of atonement for sin, of repentance and a hard progress towards redemption.”51 They also follow the romantic conclusion of ideal happiness, facilitated by providential intervention. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes must atone for his sin for seventeen long years before the providential return of his daughter begins the restoration of his soul and his marriage. Of the four romances, The Tempest is the only one in which the word providence appears; thus, it is linguistically and structurally appropriate for my purposes. In the second scene of the play, Prospero reveals to Miranda the truth about their history—their position of power in Milan, the usurpation of his brother, their banishment in a small boat without oars, and their arrival at the island. He tells Miranda that he was brought to the island “[b]y providence divine.”52 Prospero was delivered from certain death, not by his own efforts, but by a power beyond his control. And now “[b]y accident most strange, bountiful Fortune / (Now my dear lady) hath mine enemies / Brought to this shore.”53 The adjective “bountiful” reveals Prospero’s recognition of the generosity of providence. But that bountiful providence leaves room for human agency, a paradox that is important for understanding both Shakespeare and Austen. Prospero declares, “I find my zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star, whose influence / If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes / Will ever after droop.”54 He must court the influence of the favorable star; he must take advantage of the accident that fortune has caused; he must exercise his own will in response to providence. Human effort and virtue still matter in the romantic world. In that world, the happy ending is the ultimate expression of providential care: “Where potentially tragic matter is finally resolved into happiness . . . the sense of endorsement by a larger providential scheme of things becomes increasingly important.”55 Providence endorses and intervenes on behalf of a happy ending, one that includes marriage, a common romantic ending. Certainly, Prospero has brought the young lovers together, pretending to be the senex iratus of New Comedy to complicate and strengthen their love, repeatedly warning Ferdinand to respect Miranda’s chastity, but he has been given the opportunity to do so by providence. Providence and Prospero’s art work together toward happiness. “Is she [Miranda] the goddess that hath severed us / And brought us thus together?” Alonso asks his son Ferdinand, during their miraculous reunion at the end of the play.56 Ferdinand corrects his father, “Sir, she is mortal; / But by immortal providence she’s mine.”57 Miranda is a gift of providence. Juno, a spirit disguised as a god, proffers a divine blessing to Ferdinand and Miranda during the masque in Act 4, offering “the sense of endorsement by a larger providential scheme”:58 “Honor, riches, marriage blessing, / Long continuance, and increasing, / Hourly joys be still upon

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you!”59 Ferdinand himself says, “I hope / For quiet days, fair issue, and long life, / With such love as ’tis now,”60 and as readers, we have every confidence that he and Miranda will have a peaceful, long life full of beautiful children, a life made possible by providence and by their own virtue. The happy ending facilitated by providence also includes the reunion of Ferdinand and Alonso, and the return of Prospero to his dukedom. The happy ending is domestic and political, yet another romantic trope. The play ends with a subdued Prospero declaring that his strength “is most faint”61 and asking his audience for prayer, a strikingly medieval conclusion. According to Cooper, “The commonest way to end a romance had been to invoke a blessing on the audience. Here Prospero . . . prays for the theatrical equivalent of salvation.”62 Even a prayer for the salvation of the author has medieval precedent. Havelok ends with the author asking his audience to pray for him: And forthi Ich wolde biseken you That haven herd the rim nu, That ilke of you, with gode wille, Saye a Pater Noster stille For him that haveth the rym maked, And ther-fore fele nihtes waked, That Jesu Crist his soule bringe Biforn his Fader at his endinge.63

The author invites the audience to respond to his story by calling attention to his own spiritual need; through prayer, the reader enters into a relationship with the author, who charmingly tells us that he has stayed up late making his rhyme. Prospero’s prayer is certainly more theologically and artistically nuanced; the audience is imaginatively as well as spiritually connected to the story and the character. Nevertheless, he presents both himself and his audience as in need of some kind of deliverance: “As you from crimes would pardoned be / Let your indulgence set me free.”64 Prospero has wielded great power throughout the play, but in the end he cannot liberate himself. The last word of the play is “free,” a theme that is important to Persuasion, as characters are liberated from folly and unhappiness by providence.65 Prospero here asks for the audience’s assistance rather than providence’s or Christ’s, but his audience is also in need of some kind of assistance because they have committed crimes as well. Thus, the whole of his request, while not directly addressed to God, places the story in a providential world in which human beings are in need of pardon and deliverance. The Tempest gives us a model of the providential romance, a story in which human affairs are governed, though not utterly determined, by a benevolent

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providence. Divine power and human agency both contribute to the happy ending, which includes a joyous marriage. In the end, even the most powerful characters are not liberated entirely through their own virtue. This model is one that Austen imitates as she writes her own providential romances. Providence in Persuasion In proposing providential romance as a genre for Austen’s novels, I do not mean to exclude other genres. Nor do I mean to claim that Austen is a romantic in an exclusively medieval sense. Ann Astell has shown, quite convincingly, that Anne Elliot’s emotional education is romantic in a Wordsworthian way, and Sarah Wootton argues that Wentworth has a Byronic temperament.66 Nonetheless, romance’s lineage extends beyond Lyrical Ballads and Childe Harold to the ladies and knights of the medieval world. Persuasion resembles a providential romance of the type that Helen Cooper magisterially describes and Shakespeare brilliantly constructs. Like so many characters in romance, Anne Elliot is displaced from her rightful place in society. Medieval romances are full of displaced rulers. Emaré is a queen driven out by her evil stepmother. Havelok is betrayed by his steward and at one point works as a servant. Sir Orfeo leaves his kingdom by choice, but he does spend ten years as a wild man in the woods, rather than serving as the rightful ruler. Both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale feature displaced heirs, Prospero by his brother and Perdita by her father. While Anne is not a usurped queen or a child condemned to death by her father, she is overlooked by Sir Walter and her eldest sister and put upon by her younger sister. She is the novelistic version of Cinderella. Anne is even excluded by those who mean her no intentional harm. The designated piano player at Uppercross, Anne “knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself,”67 and when Wentworth asks if Anne dances, he is told that “‘Oh! No, never; she has quite given up dancing. She had rather play.’”68 Anne does not have the importance in her family or in society that she deserves given her virtue and intelligence. Emaré, Havelok, Orfeo, Prospero, and Perdita eventually return to their thrones, dukedoms, and aristocratic standing. Austen toys with the idea of Anne doing so; by marrying Mr. Elliot she would become Lady Elliot and would be able to return to Kellynch Hall. But Austen resists this aristocratic ending, preferring to place Anne in the warm fraternity of the navy rather than the cold civility of the landed gentry. In the end, Anne finds not the kingdom, but the commonwealth, she deserves. She finds this commonwealth through providence. Anne and Wentworth, after enduring a period of loss and suffering, are eventually reunited through events beyond their control, and in the end find happiness in a providentially blessed marriage. That reunion begins when Admiral and Mrs. Croft rent

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Kellynch Hall, a decision that neither Anne nor Wentworth make. Suddenly, after an eight-year separation, Wentworth returns to Anne’s life. Of course, Wentworth does not miraculously appear in the woods as Orfeo’s wife does, accompanied by fairies; we are in the novelistic world after all. Sir Walter’s banal financial recklessness precipitates events. But of all the houses in all of England to rent, the Crofts happen to choose the house of the former lover of Mrs. Croft’s brother, just as the Italian noblemen happen to travel past Prospero’s isolated island. Certainly, this sudden reappearance after eight years does not result in immediate reunion. Wentworth is still angry with Anne, and she feels that she has changed so much. Nevertheless, it is part of the providential design “[t]hat all thyng may fulfylle.”69 The word providence appears in only two of the six major novels— Mansfield Park and Persuasion. After the falseness of the Crawfords has been revealed, Edmund Bertram tells Fanny Price, “We were all disposed to wonder, but it seems to have been the merciful appointment of Providence that the heart which knew no guile should not suffer.”70 Providence, according to Edmund, has protected guileless Fanny from heartbreak at the hands of Henry Crawford—that providential protection has come in the form of her heretofore unrequited and undeclared love for Edmund. As Mooneyham White observes, “While Fanny does not miss Henry’s attentions, Edmund is wrong that she has not suffered”;71 she has been jealous of Mary Crawford’s growing influence over the man she loves, and she has endured Sir Thomas’s disapproval of her indifference to Henry. Providence appears three times in Persuasion. The first is in Anne’s musing over the past, which I will address in more detail presently. The second instance comes from Captain Wentworth, who responds “sarcastically”72 to Mary Musgrove’s assertions that she would have known her cousin had he not been in mourning: “Putting all these very extraordinary circumstances together . . . we must consider it to be the arrangement of Providence, that you should not be introduced to your cousin.”73 The final instance is at the end of the novel, when the narrator describes Sir Walter’s grudging acceptance of Captain Wentworth: “He [Wentworth] was now esteemed quite worthy to address the daughter of a foolish, spendthrift baronet, who had not had principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which providence had placed him, and who could give his daughter at present but a small part of the share of ten thousand pounds which must be hers hereafter.”74 Here, the narrator shows the absurdity of Sir Walter’s snobbery toward a man who is far more financially successful than he is. Wentworth has twenty-five thousand pounds, and Sir Walter cannot even afford to give Anne the entirety of the ten thousand pounds owed her. The narrator also condemns Sir Walter’s poor stewardship. Providence had placed him in a financially blessed situation, but he did not have the individual virtue to maintain that situation. Providence

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provides, but does not ensure. The individual has moral responsibility, and Sir Walter fails; indeed, his failing bookends the novel, which begins with his vain perusal of the Baronetage. The first, and for our purposes, most important, reference to providence comes from the heroine herself, a reference I discussed at some length in chapter 3. Anne Elliot, reflecting on her past, endorses “early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity” and rejects “that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!—She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”75 In chapter 3, I argued that romance here is a virtue that combines love and trust; romance requires an open heart and a trust in the goodness of providence. The vice opposed to romance is “over-anxious caution” or “prudence.” In this moment, prudence is not a virtue that allows one to judge wisely but a vice that encourages distrust of God’s benevolence and the efficacy of human agency. This prudence, which Anne adopted at the advice of Lady Russell, smacks too much of worldly wisdom, the kind that leads Walter Elliot to argue that “[f]amily connections [namely with Lady Dalrymple] were always worth preserving” despite the lack of real affection.76 Lucy Steele, from Sense and Sensibility, also governs her life with this kind of prudence, which reduces relationships to their economic and social utility and is based on self-regard rather than “warm attachment.” Such prudence denies providence. Ann Astell sees a scriptural allusion in Anne’s reflections here: “The reference to trust in Providence, in a literary context saturated with the imagery of flowering and bloom, recalls the Sermon on the Mount and the scriptural discourse on the lilies of the field, thus providing an implicit counter-text to Lady Russell’s pattern of counsel.”77 In rejecting Wentworth, Anne forgot that God cares for the lilies of the field and fell prey to Lady Russell’s worldly caution, a caution driven by fearful anxiety rather than “cheerful confidence in futurity.” This prudence also insults exertion, distrusting man’s ability to act meaningfully. Perhaps then the virtue of romance also includes courage, the courage to respond to the opportunities providence provides. After all, trust in providence does not “insult exertion,” but rather enables it. As Prospero realizes, “I find my zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star, whose influence / If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes / Will ever after droop.”78 The star is auspicious, but he must court its influence. In learning romance, Anne has learned the value of courageous action, deep love, and divine provision. Neither Anne nor Austen is thinking of romance as a literary genre in this passage. Anne did not start reading Middle English romances after breaking off her engagement to Wentworth. But the virtue of romance that she learns is at the heart of the romantic literary genre, at least those that end happily. It is a genre governed by beneficent providence, a genre in which “cheerful confidence in futurity” is rewarded with perfect happiness, a genre that

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celebrates “warm attachment” and courageous “exertion.” Anne’s lesson in romance is the lesson that lies at the heart of the providential romances that shaped the narrative structures of Shakespeare’s plays and the novelistic tradition that followed him. Indeed, it is Anne’s version of romance rather than the romantic passion of the troubadours that Rougemont condemns in Love in the Western World that makes the happy ending possible. The passion Rougemont studies combines love and death, not love and happiness or the “cheerful confidence in futurity.” He writes, “Love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature.”79 It is very difficult to have a happy ending if love is connected to death. But “a fatal love” is not the only version of romance. Rougemont is wrong when he declares that “happy love has no history.”80 He overlooks the history of providential romances in which deep love finds true happiness in perfect marriages through the care of a good God. It is this history that Austen belongs to. She knows the danger of “fatal love,” of the self-indulgent agony of Benwick and Marianne, but rather than cynically or fearfully rejecting love, she celebrates a life-giving love made possible by virtuous exertion and trust in God. She inherits and enriches the history of happy love. Though she may not have read medieval romances, Austen knew the structure of providential romances and employed that structure in all her novels, including Persuasion. Anne as Romantic Heroine Within her providential romance, Anne Elliot grows, blossoms, perhaps even resurrects into the romantic heroine. At the beginning of the novel, Anne has learned to prize providence over prudence, but she must respond with continual virtue to the role she finds herself in. According to Astell, “Anne’s knowledge of romance does not stop short with a clear cognition of what might or could or should have been; it becomes an experiential knowledge, mediated through the emotions, which tests her moral maturity, her psychic stamina, to the utmost.”81 In part, her “experiential knowledge” of romance comes through patience and resignation, virtues common in providential romances and practiced in response to providence itself. The heroines of medieval romance resign themselves to and patiently endure suffering because they trust in providence. Emaré, through no fault of her own, is banished twice to the sea, first by her father, who is furious that she has refused his incestuous advances, and then, along with her infant son, by her mother-in-law, who vehemently hates her. She patiently endures her trials and after several years is joyfully reunited with her repentant father and her faithful husband in Rome, restored to her proper place in society and mother of a future emperor. Before obtaining her happy ending, Emaré must patiently resign herself to

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the protection of providence, courageously accepting undeserved suffering. Such virtuous resignation seems to have appealed to medieval readers, as the Emaré story was very popular in the Middle Ages. Chaucer’s “The Man of Law’s Tale” tells the same story, though his heroine is named Constance. Both Emaré and Constance heroically exercise patience and resignation in the face of immense suffering. In chapter 3, I spent some time exploring how Anne’s endurance and refusal to indulge in misery distinguishes her from Marianne Dashwood and Captain Benwick. But even though Anne is superior to her misguided counterparts, Austen shows that she does struggle: “Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man [Captain Benwick] whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.”82 Anne’s amusement and fear are endearing. She sees the humor inherent in preaching to a stranger, but also recognizes her own weakness. As readers, we are perhaps more generous to Anne than she is to herself; we continually see her exercising patience and resignation,83 but this moment of colored narration reveals that there is no self-righteousness in her and suggests that her virtue is not simply a matter of course. Anne teaches Captain Benwick, but as Astell writes, “Anne only instructs others in the process of instructing herself.”84 She must exert herself. But Anne does more than exert herself to patiently endure suffering or generously play the piano whenever asked. Rebecca Posusta contends that Anne “is the one character of all Austen’s creations who makes a clear and total physical, emotional and social transformation.”85 Indeed, her transformation, which precedes her marriage to Wentworth, is part of the happy ending that providence brings about. Providence seeks not only material flourishing but total rejuvenation, inner and outer. The autumnal atmosphere of Persuasion has been well noted, but Anne Elliot experiences a physical springtime in the midst of autumn—a seasonal blending that Austen seems to like; Emma experiences winter in the midst of summer. After her visit to Uppercross and Lyme, the narrator declares, “either Anne was so improved in plumpness and looks, or Lady Russell fancied her so; and Anne, in receiving her compliments on the occasion, had the amusement of connecting them with the silent admiration of her cousin, and of hoping that she was to be blessed with a second spring of youth and beauty.”86 There is narrative uncertainty in this moment—is Anne improved or is this simply Lady Russell’s perception?— but Mr. Elliot’s admiration of her beauty supports the reality of a second spring. Indeed, even her father “began to compliment her on her improved looks; he thought her “‘less thin in her person, in her cheeks; her skin, her complexion greatly improved—clearer, fresher.’”87 Anne is experiencing resurrection, a trope central to the romantic tradition. Anne’s resurrection

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is not simply because of Wentworth, but as Astell explains, Anne’s “second spring” has come about because she herself has learned “the value of an Anne Elliot”: “She who had felt herself ‘rejected as not good at all’ comes to know herself as someone ‘extremely useful.’ The gratitude of Benwick and the Musgroves, and Wentworth’s words of praise at Lyme, awaken in her ‘a second spring of youth and beauty.’”88 She matters, not just to Wentworth, but to the broader community. That mattering literally makes her more beautiful, as she transforms from faded spinster to blooming young woman, a transformation that is something of a novelistic reworking of Hermione’s dramatic transformation from statue to living woman in The Winter’s Tale. Physical location plays a role in Anne’s second spring. According to Posusta, “At Lyme Regis, Anne is far more open to the possibility of new experience because the town itself, open to the sea, lends itself to inspiration as ‘its old wonders and new improvements . . . are what the stranger’s eye will seek.’”89 The beauty of Lyme transforms: “Anne’s physical, emotional and psychological changes help her to realize that she has indeed been improved by the fine sea air, an outside and unfamiliar force.”90 Anne herself articulates her unique attachment to Lyme in response to Wentworth’s surprise that she would want to visit the sea town again: “We were only in anxiety and distress during the last two hours; and previously, there had been a great deal of enjoyment. So much novelty and beauty! I have travelled so little, that every fresh place would be interesting to me—but there is real beauty at Lyme.”91 Natural beauty is the backdrop to Anne’s blossoming in beauty. The “real beauty at Lyme” includes the sea, which Austen lovingly describes when Anne and her traveling companions “soon found themselves on the sea shore, and lingering only, as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea, who ever deserve to look on it at all.”92 A. Walton Litz sees “[t]his ‘poetic’ reliance on natural landscape” as something new in Austen’s novels and, while acknowledging that “[t]he sources of this new quality in Jane Austen’s fiction must have been complex,” he declares, “More than has been generally realized or acknowledged, she was influenced by the Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century.”93 Austen was likely influenced by the Romantic poetry of her own time, but she was also influenced by the romance of an older era. The sea, which Posusta calls “an outside and unfamiliar force,” is a romantic motif, often associated with providence, the ultimate “outside and unfamiliar force.” In The Tempest, fortune sends Prospero’s enemies to him on the sea, and the storm that he creates is his response to the provision of providence. In Emaré, the heroine is twice cast out to sea, on a boat with no oars or rudder. According to Helen Cooper, “The motif of the rudderless boat goes back beyond legend into myth.”94 In romance, this motif is used to show the role of providence in orchestrating the happy ending. As Cooper explains, “The happy ending of romance is one

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achieved against the odds, and the odds in this case [the case of being at sea in rudderless boat] are very high.”95 There is no actual shipwreck or rudderless boat in Persuasion; in fact, no one even goes on a boat despite Austen’s loving description of the sea and the focus on the navy. However, the language of the sea runs throughout the novel. “Your peace will not be shipwrecked as mine has,”96 Mrs. Smith reassures Anne when she thinks that the latter is set to marry Mr. Elliot. Shipwreck here is a metaphor for personal disaster. But living at sea, in a secure ship, is ideal. Mrs. Croft enthusiastically praises life at sea. In the world of romance, the sea is the backdrop to providential provision. To be out at sea, under providential care, exercising personal courage, and sharing living quarters with the person one loves most in this world is a fitting image for Austen’s vision of temporal happiness. Anne’s second spring, begun at the sea, gives her the courage to speak out; silent, neglected Anne becomes communicative, capable not simply of being persuaded but of persuading others. In the first days of their reunion at Uppercross, Anne avoided Wentworth, but in Bath, she speaks to him boldly: “as to the power of addressing him she felt all over courage if the opportunity occurred. Elizabeth had turned from him, Lady Russell overlooked him; her nerves were strengthened by these circumstances.”97 Anne speaks to Wentworth at the concert “in spite of the formidable father and sister in the background. Their being in the background was a support to Anne; she knew nothing of their looks, and felt equal to everything which she believed right to be done.”98 Elizabeth and Sir Walter are indeed formidable; they can chill a room just by entering it, and they have systematically overlooked Anne’s presence and opinion for most of her life. Nevertheless, Anne speaks out in spite of their lurking presence. In part, this boldness arises from her knowledge of Wentworth’s true feelings toward Louisa. But this is the same woman who previously devoted herself to the background role of nurse to injured children and piano player who no longer dances. Now she courageously speaks to the man she loves. And in her all-important conversation with Captain Harville, Anne confidently defends the constancy of women. As Linda Bree explains, “At the White Hart she is unexpectedly given the opportunity to articulate feelings she has never been able to share with anyone, and she takes courage, risks everything, and speaks.”99 This speaking out is particularly striking given Anne’s silence throughout the novel. John Wiltshire observes that Austen tends to present Anne’s voice “in indirect speech,”100 and that in her conversation with Captain Harville, “Jane Austen has found a way that gives her heroine the initiative, and gives her, finally, the heroine’s place. Anne is now at once the woman through whose consciousness the world is seen and organized, and the speaking subject of the text.”101 Anne is a linguistic heroine: “Her eloquence at last brings about the resolution of the romantic plot, and leads to the fulfillment of the hero and

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heroine’s desires.”102 Anne, whose life has been determined by the speech of others, particularly the speech of Lady Russell, is now able through her own speech to determine her own life. It is her speech that elicits Wentworth’s letter, not the other way round. In speaking out, she shows her own inner strength, an essential part of the happiness that she finds, and also gains the man she loves. Indeed, Astell goes so far as to say that Anne and Wentworth’s “marriage becomes an outward sign, a symbol, of the integrity that Anne has achieved within herself.”103 Inner strength, not simply marital bliss, is part of the providential cosmos that Anne lives in. Wentworth and Providence While Anne must learn her own strength, Wentworth must come to see his own weakness, decreasing as Anne increases. Bree observes, “the relative situations of the two are reversed by the fall and its aftermath. The whole set of circumstances that established Wentworth as the complacent centre of conversational attention is swept away by Louisa’s accident.”104 Wentworth can no longer enjoy the flattering attentions of attractive young women, and Anne becomes essential in her social circle: The position of authority she assumes here has nothing directly to do with the renewal of her romantic relationship with Wentworth, though the two are indirectly related. She has begun at last to find a distinctive voice, one that offers her for the first time a settled place in her social environment as a mature and confident individual in her own right, as one who is highly regarded by those around her.105

As Anne finds her distinctive voice, Wentworth learns the weakness of his own. Just as the powerful Prospero cannot deliver himself from the island nor the tormented Leontes deliver himself from his wifeless, childless state, the ambitious, accomplished Wentworth is unable to deliver himself from his own folly, from the wounded pride that keeps him from returning to Anne and the thoughtlessness that leads him to become entangled with Louisa Musgrove. He needs the gracious intervention of providence to deliver him. According to J. R. R. Tolkien, the happy ending depends on “a sudden and miraculous grace . . . [that] . . . does not deny the existence . . . of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance.”106 The happy ending for Anne and Wentworth depends on his sudden deliverance from Louisa. Though Captain Wentworth is a confident and bold young man, he cannot save himself. The man, whose success at sea has come from his own skill and daring, inadvertently finds himself “bound to” and “entangled”107 with Louisa; he is “not at liberty.”108 He tells Anne, “I was no

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longer at my own disposal. I was hers in honour if she wished it.”109 He can do nothing to save himself. While tragedy is too strong a word to describe Wentworth’s marriage to Louisa, Anne, alone and unloved (for she would surely refuse Mr. Elliot, as her love for Wentworth is eternal), living with her indifferent father and sister, is tragic. There is a real possibility of sorrow and failure. Even before Louisa’s engagement to Benwick, Wentworth experiences providential deliverance when he hears good news about Louisa’s condition from the doctor. His response is deeply moving: The tone, the look, with which “Thank God!” was uttered by Captain Wentworth, Anne was sure could never be forgotten by her; nor the sight of him afterwards, as he sat near a table, leaning over it with folded arms, and a face concealed, as if overpowered by the various feelings of his soul, and trying by prayer and reflection to calm them.110

Wentworth, who rescues Anne from her rambunctious nephew and has enjoyed the flattering attentions of the Musgrove sisters, is powerless to save Louisa from possible death; he can only express gratitude to a power outside of himself. Wentworth’s full deliverance comes when he is “released from Louisa by the astonishing and felicitous intelligence of her engagement to Benwick.”111 The verb “released” echoes his earlier language of bondage. It is also the same verb used to describe Wentworth’s intervention when Anne is physically trapped by her nephew. The confident man who released his former lady is now himself in need of being released. Anne herself uses similar language earlier when she hears of Louisa’s engagement to Captain Benwick and thinks of “Captain Wentworth unshackled and free.”112 The image of the shackle, with its connotations of prisoner and slave, points to the severity of Wentworth’s dilemma. He, the gallant knight, has found himself trapped in a dungeon, unable to employ any of his considerable bravery or intelligence to free himself. This imprisonment, this lack of liberty, is penance for his “attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of angry pride).”113 Wentworth must undergo a period of atonement for his sins; “his penance had become severe,”114 for he is no innocent sufferer, but a culpable man whose vices have enslaved him. For the sin of pursuing Louisa or rather for the “angry pride” that drove him to flirt with the Musgrove sisters, he undergoes the penance of being unable to disentangle himself from her as soon as he realizes her inferiority to Anne: “he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his

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way.”115 Perhaps he is also undergoing penance for not acting in response to providential provision. Anne is providentially thrown in his way, but he does not immediately try to regain her. He angrily disdains providence. This period of penance is romantic as “narrative romances . . . follow a pattern of atonement for sin, of repentance and a hard progress towards redemption.”116 This penance prepares Wentworth for his redemption. Wentworth is redeemed, is freed, not by his own effort, but by good news, in fact, “astonishing” news. According to the OED, astonish means “[t]o give a shock of wonder by the presentation of something unlooked for or unaccountable.”117 Astonishing wonder is a much stronger emotion than the mild curiosity that makes Admiral Croft exclaim, “I wonder where that boat [which he sees in a painting] was built!”118 The causes of wonder are varied; it can be a response to the unnerving, to the beautiful, or to the joyful; it is also an emotion with a medieval and Shakespearean legacy. The narrator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes Britain as a country of “war and wrack and wonder,”119 and Arthur’s court wonders at the Green Knight. In Sir Orfeo, wonder is often associated with fairies, who are unnerving and potentially dangerous. We see analogous wonder from Anne when she learns the truth about Mr. Elliot. The narrator describes “Anne’s astonished air, and exclamation of wonder” when Mrs. Smith cries out, “‘Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black!’”120 Anne is astonished by Mrs. Smith’s vehemence, but perhaps also by the accusation leveled against her cousin. Certainly, her experience of wonder here is not at all pleasant; she is not wondering at good news. Wonder can also be a response to that which is beautiful. Beholding Florizel and Perdita in disguise, Leontes cries out, “I lost a couple, that ’twixt heaven and earth / Might thus have stood begetting wonder as / You, gracious couple, do.”121 The two young people are bearers, perhaps even creators, of wonder, not because they, like the fairies, are uncanny and unnerving, but because they are beautiful. Leontes describes Perdita as “fair princess— goddess!”122 This type of wonder appears in Persuasion when the narrator describes the “old wonders” of the Cobb and tells us that the visitors “were by no means tired of wondering and admiring.”123 Wonder can be a response to joy. A gentleman of the Sicilian court describes to Autolycus the court’s response to the revelation of Perdita’s true identity: They looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow; but in the extremity of the one, it must needs be.124

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A mere beholder is unsure if those on stage are full of the wonder of joy or the wonder of sorrow, of salvation or apocalypse. Of course, the audience knows that joy reigns in the reunion between father and long-lost daughter. The intensity of the Shakespearean simile certainly surpasses Wentworth’s description of his experience. He does not feel as if the world has been saved or destroyed, though his world has been saved, but he does experience a moment of joyful wonder. This pattern of astonishing deliverance occurs in other Austen novels, including Sense and Sensibility. Edward Ferrars, like Wentworth, has become entangled with a woman inferior to the one he truly loves. Like Wentworth, Edward experiences astonishing deliverance: “when at last it burst on him in a letter from Lucy herself, he had been for some time, he believed, half stupified between the wonder, the horror, and the joy of such a deliverance.”125 Like Wentworth, Edward is unable to free himself and must rely on the intervention of providence. Like Wentworth, he receives the good news that the woman he expected to marry has chosen another man. Wonder and horror are here mingled with joy, and Edward is in a kind of stupor. But he does recover and eagerly makes his way to Barton Cottage. This astonishing deliverance also frees Wentworth to act. He tells Anne, “Now I could at least exert myself, I could do something.”126 Providential deliverance does not destroy heroic exertion, but actually enables it. After Sir Orfeo’s wife miraculously appears in woods, he resolves to follow her: “tide wat bitide, / Whiderso this levedis ride, / The selve way ichil streche - / Of liif no deth me no reche.”127 Orfeo follows his wife to fairy land, and through his music wins her freedom. Prospero also must take advantage of the blessings that providence grants him, working his magic in response to the sudden appearance of his enemies. Wentworth, active romantic hero that he is, sets off for Bath, where he finds that his lady still loves him. His story here echoes the association that Anne made much earlier between providence and exertion. Austen’s characters are not capable of extricating themselves from every difficulty, but they are also capable of great exertion in pursuit of that which they desire. Human beings are not rendered utterly passive in her providential cosmos. Wentworth is the romantic hero and exercises the same virtue of romance that Anne does when he learns to trust in providence and exert himself in response to providence’s gracious intervention. In his confession to Anne, Wentworth acknowledges that he lives in a providential cosmos: “I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards.”128 Indeed, Kathryn Davis reads his earlier allusion to providence in his response to Mary as dismissive: “His sarcasm suggests his conviction that Providence is not concerned with the personal affairs of men.”129 Wentworth has lived in a cosmos of perfect meritocracy, at least

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for himself, as every good thing he has, he has earned. Hard work, not the goodness of providence, leads to reward. And he has thrived in such a world. Yet, he has not won Anne through honorable toil; he could not even release himself from an unwanted romantic entanglement to a pleasant but unremarkable woman. At the end of the novel, he has come to accept the role of providence, just as Anne does at the beginning. He acknowledges that Anne is a blessing that he has not earned. “‘I must,’” he tells her, “‘learn to brook being happier than I deserve.’”130 Mary Ellen Bertolini notes that these “are the last he [Wentworth] speaks in this novel, and the final words any character speaks in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.”131 Such final words are fitting both for the character and for the novel. They are words that come from a providential cosmos of grace and blessing. Anne herself also sees her happiness as something given to her. She is so happy that she must calm herself with prayer: “An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of every thing dangerous in such high-wrought felicity; and she went to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the thankfulness of her enjoyment.”132 The language of “meditation, serious and grateful” has, like “serious reflection” a religious connotation. Anne retreats to her room to pray. In one of her own prayers, Austen asks, “Give us a thankful sense of the Blessings in which we live, of the many comforts of our lot; that we may not deserve to lose them by discontent or indifference.”133 Anne is in no danger of discontentment or indifference at this point in her life, but she is in need of serious and grateful meditation on “the Blessings in which” she lives. This pattern of providential deliverance also appears in Emma. Like Anne and Wentworth, and Elinor and Edward, Emma and Mr. Knightley are delivered through the workings of providence. Neither Emma nor Mr. Knightley are able to save themselves. Emma does not know that he loves her, and he will not confess his love, believing that she is attached to Frank. They must wait, and neither with much hope; Emma doubts that Mr. Knightley, who reproves her so justly, could love her, and Mr. Knightley, convinced that she loves Frank, flees to his brother’s house, attempting to leave his misery behind. Only the death of Mrs. Churchill and the subsequent revelation of Frank and Jane’s engagement bring him back to Hartfield and to Emma. And, in one of the great deus ex machinas of the comic tradition, the marriage itself is brought about sooner than expected because someone breaks into Mrs. Weston’s poultry house, thereby frightening Mr. Woodhouse and persuading him of the advantage of Mr. Knightley residing at Hartfield. The pattern of deliverance applies to all of her novels: Catherine and Henry are delivered by the sudden marriage of Eleanor, Elizabeth and Darcy are unexpectedly reunited because the Gardiners invite her to travel with them to the Lake District, and Fanny and Edmund are united after he is delivered from

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his attachment to Mary. In all her novels, the providential intervention gives the main couple “perfect happiness,” a happiness that their virtue allows them to truly possess.134 Narrative Judgment and the Happy Ending And the narrator resoundingly approves of that happiness. Despite her ironic playfulness and the subtlety of her free indirect discourse, Austen’s narrator at times resembles the narrator of a medieval romance more than the detached narrator of some schools of realism. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, the narrator has no business in the novel; he “has no right to make these absolute judgments” about his characters because “a novel is an action related from various points of view.”135 For Sartre then, a novel with a narrator who speaks with divine knowledge and judgment actually fails to be a novel. Of course, Sartre does not speak for all novelists; nevertheless, the idea of the novel as a polyphonic, anarchic genre shapes modern criticism. Jane Austen certainly has many voices in her novels, but she is not afraid to render judgment on her characters. At the end of Persuasion, the narrator asks, Who can be in doubt of what followed? When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth, and if such parties succeed, how should a Captain Wentworth and an Anne Elliot, with the advantage of maturity of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them, fail of bearing down every opposition?136

The humor and playfulness of this passage prevent sentimentality and naivety—this narrator knows how marriage works and understands the advantages of “independent fortune”—but Austen is not hesitant to make absolute judgments about the worth and happiness of her characters. The stubbornness of young people in marrying the person they want to marry is not the only moral of the story. That we should not take Austen too seriously here is suggested by the fact that we have seen that two young people can take it into their heads to marry, and in fact not marry; nineteen-year-old Anne did fail to bear down opposition. All throughout the ending, Austen renders judgment on her characters, as they receive their just rewards. Mrs. Smith, Anne, and Wentworth, as they deserve, all find great happiness: “Her [Mrs. Smith] spring of felicity was in the glow of her spirits, as her friend Anne’s was in the warmth of her heart. Anne was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in

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Captain Wentworth’s affection.”137 Proud and distant Elizabeth, disappointed by Mr. Elliot, remains alone and sterile. Unscrupulous Mr. Elliot may be manipulated into marrying the fortune-hunting Mrs. Clay. Both Elizabeth and Sir Walter are deprived of his flattering attentions. The vicious characters are not punished with tortuous death or banished from society—classic fates for villains in medieval romance. In Havelok, two treacherous stewards, compared to Judas throughout the romance, are violently punished—one is flayed alive and then dragged to the gallows tied to the tail of a dilapidated mare; the other is burned at the stake. Austen’s providential judgment does not go that far. However, while they are allowed to live and remain in society, the fates of Mr. Elliot, Miss Clay, Elizabeth, and Sir Walter are clearly inferior to the mutual affection between Anne and Wentworth. Their ending is the more attractive and desirable. Austen’s novels have many voices and many lovers, but she does not hesitate to hierarchically arrange those lovers. According to Theresa Kenney, “Austen often seems to encourage us to rank her couples.”138 She is unafraid to exercise the narrative judgment that Sartre so disdains. There are “those who barely tolerate each other like Mr. and Mrs. Bennet or Charlotte and Mr. Palmer near the bottom (the absolute nadir, an infernal circle occupied by the divorced Rushworths and the adulterous Admiral Crawford).”139 We could also put near the bottom couples who are blindly and complacently satisfied with their marriages but repulsive to the reader: Lydia and Wickham and Mr. and Mrs. Elton, whom I discussed in the previous chapter. At the zenith are “those who have companionate marriages . . . such as the Crofts and the Gardiners. The heroines’ marriages fall in that upper realm, with their blending of romance, esteem, and common love of what is right.”140 This ranking reveals to the reader what Austen thinks about virtuous people and happy marriages. By asking us to compare couples, she is training the reader’s judgment and desires for the superior over the inferior. We learn to see love from a providential perspective—a broad perspective that judges rightly. In her providential romances, Austen does not want merely to indulge an appetite for romance, but to teach her readers to desire the type of romance that providence endorses. She does so through contrast. We see more clearly and desire more deeply the perfect happiness between Emma and Mr. Knightley because we can compare their mutual submission and elevation to the blind self-satisfaction, the false courtliness, and the preening knight-errantry of the Eltons. We see more clearly the perfect happiness between Anne and Captain Wentworth because we can compare their eternal devotion and constancy to the changeableness of Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove or the selfishness of Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay. Austen’s “upper realm”141 marriages have romantic precedents. Havelok ends with a paean to the love between Havelok and his wife Goldeborw:

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So mikel love was hem bitwene That al the werd spak of hem two; He lovede hir and she him so That neyther owe mithe be Fro other, ne no joye se But if he were togidere bothe. Nevere yete no weren he wrothe For here love was ay newe Nevere yete wordes ne grewe Bitwene hem hwar of ne lathe Mithe rise ne no wrathe.142

Havelok and Goldeborw have an ideal marriage of mutual affection; the only cause of sorrow for them is separation. Likewise, Anne and Wentworth have no cause for acrimony or disappointment except for the possibility of another war. Havelok and Goldeborw are renowned throughout the world because of their love. Emma and Mr. Knightley are not world famous, but they do win the approval of their small village. Likewise, Anne’s friends heartily approve of her love for him: “His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that tenderness less.”143 Anne finds a perfectly happy marriage, but brave knight that she is, will have to continue to exercise fortitude in the face of her husband’s dangerous profession. The Novel as Displaced Romance I have no evidence that Jane Austen read Havelok or any of the other Middle English romances I have discussed in this work, but she didn’t need to in order to feel their effect. The novels she read, especially in their perfect happy endings, preserved and passed on the tropes of medieval romance. At the end of Tom Jones, the narrator declares, “To conclude, as there are not to be found a worthier man and woman than this couple, so neither can any be imagined more happy. They preserve the purest and tenderest affection for each other, an affection daily increased and confirmed by mutual endearments and mutual esteem.”144 Tom and Sophia have a marriage based on mutual love and respect. Like Havelok and Goldeborw and Anne and Wentworth, their relationship is marked by tenderness. It is also approved by and a blessing to the community: “And such is their condescension, their indulgence, and their beneficence to those below them, that there is not a neighbor, a tenant, or a servant, who doth not most gratefully bless the day when Mr. Jones was married to his Sophia.”145 Tom and Sophia show generosity to their social inferiors and in turn receive the gratitude of their neighbors, tenants, and servants. Like Emma and Knightley, they do not have a worldwide reputation;

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however, their marriage is honored by the small community around them. The happy ending is both personal and political, a trope that calls back the endings of romances in which the rightful rulers are restored and with that restoration bring happiness to the land. Although Fielding and Austen both see themselves as realistic novelists, their happy endings come from the romance tradition with its idealizing tendencies. To quote Frye again, “the novel was a realistic displacement of romance, and had few structural features peculiar to itself. Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and Tom Jones use much the same general structure as romance, but adapt that structure to a demand for greater conformity to ordinary experience.”146 I would add Jane Austen’s novels to Frye’s list. She is attentive to ordinary experience, but she preserves the structural traditions of providential romance. But while she preserves the structure, she rejects direct supernatural involvement in her plots. No divine being ever appears on stage in an Austen novel. In medieval romances, providence appears through miraculous apparitions, angelic messages, and dramatic rescues. Perhaps by replacing those supernatural machinations with an imprudent father, a convenient love affair, the death of a sick woman, and minor theft, Austen is advocating a new, godless realism. Perhaps she is borrowing the structure of romance in order to demolish its dependency on the divine—the novel as a romance that accepts the death of God. After all, Fielding explicitly rejects the supernatural beings of romance and replaces them with natural agents. He declares, “If he [Tom] doth not therefore find some natural means of fairly extricating himself from all his distresses, we will do no violence to the truth and dignity of history for his sake.”147 Fielding is writing a new kind of story, one that is more realistic because it does not feature monsters or goddesses. Yet, though the means are natural, the characters in Tom Jones, Persuasion, and Emma still must rely on events outside their own control; they cannot engineer the happy ending on their own. In her prayers, Austen asks that God “graciously preserve us.”148 Though God is not visible in her stories, she believes that “Thou art everywhere present”149 and she and her loved ones are “under Thine eye.”150 Austen believes in providence’s benevolent intervention. Greater naturalism does not necessarily imply a denial of the divine. Deliverance does not have to come through the spectacular or the marvelous; it can come through the everyday. Providence may stoop to poultry. NOTES 1. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 58.

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2. Austen, Persuasion, 58. 3. Austen, Persuasion, 52. 4. Austen, Persuasion, 79. 5. Austen, Persuasion, 79. 6. James Fordyce, “Sermon XIII: On Female Meekness,” in Sermons to Young Women (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1809), 113, https:​//​www​.google​.com​/books​/edition​/ Sermons​_to​_Young​_Women​/XyBIAAAAMAAJ​?hl​=en​&gbpv​=1. 7. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 2. 8. Chrétien de Troyes, “Lancelot, Or, The Knight of the Cart,” in Arthurian Romances, trans. D. D. R. Owen (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 247. 9. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 5.2.77. 10. Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” 5.2.91. 11. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 1749), 136. 12. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 101. 13. Austen, Persuasion, 129. 14. Geoffrey de La Tour Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower; Which He Made for the Instructions of His Daughters, trans. Alexander Vance (Dublin: Moffat and Co., 1868), 18, https:​//​books​.google​.com​.vc​/books​?id​=yI81AAAAMAAJ​ &printsec​=frontcover​#v​=onepage​&q​&f​=false. 15. Austen, Persuasion, 135. 16. Larry Benson, Courtly Love and Chivalry in the Later Middle Ages, 243, https:​ //​chaucer​.fas​.harvard​.edu​/pages​/courtly​-love​-and​-chivalry​-later​-middle​-ages. 17. Benson, Courtly Love and Chivalry, 243. 18. Benson, Courtly Love and Chivalry, 244. 19. Wace, “Wace: Roman De Brut,” in The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation, ed. James Wilhelm (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 107. 20. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, trans. Marie Borroff (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), 3.1261–62. 21. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” 3.1506. 22. Linda Bree, “Belonging to the Conversation in Persuasion,” in Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013), 288. 23. Bree, “Belonging to the Conversation,” 289. 24. Austen, Persuasion, 106. 25. Bree, “Belonging to the Conversation,” 289. 26. Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 25. 27. Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” 5.2.79–93. 28. Claudia Johnson, “The ‘Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day,’” in Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013), 264. 29. Austen, Persuasion, 50. 30. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 71. 31. Johnson, “‘Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day,’” 267.

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32. Austen, Persuasion, 82. 33. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 61. 34. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 61. 35. Austen, Persuasion, 50. 36. Austen, Persuasion, 165. 37. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 69. 38. Austen, Persuasion, 165. 39. Austen, Persuasion, 165. 40. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5. 41. Cooper, English Romance in Time, 110. 42. “Emaré,” in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), lines 331–33. 43. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 229. 44. Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 177. 45. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 172. 46. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 176. 47. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 176. 48. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 177. 49. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 176. 50. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 173. 51. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 171. 52. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 1.2.159. 53. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1.2.178–80. 54. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1.2.181–84. 55. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 171. 56. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 5.1.187–88. 57. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 5.1.188–89. 58. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 171. 59. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 4.1.107–9. 60. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 4.1.23–25. 61. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” Epilogue. 3. 62. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 195. 63. “Havelok,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), lines 2994–3001. 64. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” Epilogue. 19–20. 65. For an extended treatment of liberty in Persuasion, see Kathryn Davis, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2016). 66. “While he is mostly silent during the episode in Lyme, remaining ‘mute’ like Conrad at crucial moments in The Corsair (i. 142), the intensity of Wentworth’s

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feelings is even more compelling than Louisa’s lifeless form. Prior to these scenes, the narrative has focused on the heroine’s sensitive disposition, but her ‘age of emotion’ is more than matched by the hero’s Byronic ‘despair.’” Sarah Wootton, “The Byronic in Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice,” Modern Language Review 102, no. 1 (2007): 33, http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/20467150. 67. Austen, Persuasion, 34. 68. Austen, Persuasion, 52. 69. “Emaré,” line 333. 70. Austen, Mansfield Park, 309. 71. Laura Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 88. 72. Davis, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, 106. 73. Austen, Persuasion, 77. 74. Austen, Persuasion, 175. 75. Austen, Persuasion, 22. 76. Austen, Persuasion, 105. 77. Ann W. Astell, “Anne Elliot’s Education,” in Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013), 249. 78. Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” 1.2.181–84. 79. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 15. 80. Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 15. 81. Astell, “Anne Elliot’s Education,” 254. 82. Austen, Persuasion, 73. 83. Anne is not the only woman in the novel to exercise patience and resignation. Amanda Marie Kubic points out that Anne’s friend “Mrs. Smith sinks into poverty after the death of her husband and yet is still held up as a paragon of Christian hope and perseverance despite her material suffering.” Amanda Marie Kubic, “Aristotelian Ethical Ideas in the Novels of Jane Austen,” Persuasions On-Line 36, no. 1 (Winter 2015), https:​//​jasna​.org​/publications​-2​/persuasions​-online​/vol36no1​/kubic​/. 84. Astell, “Anne Elliot’s Education,” 250. 85. Rebecca Posusta, “Architecture of the Mind and Place in Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion,’” Critical Survey 26, no. 1 (2014): 89, https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/24712590. 86. Austen, Persuasion, 87. 87. Austen, Persuasion, 102. 88. Astell, “Anne Elliot’s Education,” 254. 89. Posusta, “Architecture of the Mind,” 86. 90. Posusta, “Architecture of the Mind,” 86. 91. Austen, Persuasion, 130. 92. Austen, Persuasion, 69. 93. A. Walton Litz, “New Landscapes,” in Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 231. 94. Cooper, English Romance, 108. 95. Cooper, English Romance, 110. 96. Austen, Persuasion, 138.

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97. Austen, Persuasion, 127. 98. Austen, Persuasion, 128. 99. Bree, “Belonging to the Conversation,” 298. 100. John Wiltshire, “Anne Elliot’s Consciousness,” in Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 316. 101. Wiltshire, “Anne Elliot’s Consciousness,” 318. 102. Wiltshire, “Anne Elliot’s Consciousness,” 318. 103. Astell, “Anne Elliot’s Education,” 255. 104. Bree, “Belonging to the Conversation,” 295. 105. Bree, “Belonging to the Conversation,” 296. 106. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974), 81. 107. Austen, Persuasion, 172. 108. Austen, Persuasion, 171. 109. Austen, Persuasion, 171. 110. Austen, Persuasion, 81. 111. Austen, Persuasion, 172. 112. Austen, Persuasion, 118. 113. Austen, Persuasion, 171. 114. Austen, Persuasion, 171. 115. Austen, Persuasion, 171. 116. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 171. 117. “astonish, v.” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press, https:​//​ www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/12168​?redirectedFrom​=astonish. 118. Austen, Persuasion, 119. 119. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” 1.16. 120. Austen, Persuasion, 140. 121. William Shakespeare, “The Winter’s Tale,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 5.1.131–33. 122. Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale,” 5.1.130. 123. Austen, Persuasion, 69. 124. Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale,” 5.2.13–18. 125. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Claudia Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 258. 126. Austen, Persuasion, 172. 127. “Sir Orfeo,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), lines 339–42. 128. Austen, Persuasion, 175. 129. Davis, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, 106. 130. Austen, Persuasion, 175. 131. Mary Ellen Bertolini, “The Grace to Deserve: Weighing Merit in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” Persuasions On-Line 39, no. 1 (Winter 2018), https:​//​jasna​.org​ /publications​-2​/persuasions​-online​/volume​-39​-no​-1​/the​-grace​-to​-deserve​-weighing​ -merit​-in​-jane​-austens​-persuasion.

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132. Austen, Persuasion, 173. 133. Jane Austen, The Prayers of Jane Austen (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2015), 19. 134. For another exploration of the role of providence in Austen’s novels, see pages 83–90 of Laura Mooneyham White’s Jane Austen’s Anglicanism. 135. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Francios Mauriac and Freedom,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 15. 136. Austen, Persuasion, 175. 137. Austen, Persuasion, 178. 138. Theresa Kenney, “A Tale of Two Captains: Whose Heart is Worth Having?”: Persuasions On-Line, 39, no. 1 (Winter 2018), https:​//​jasna​.org​/publications​ -2​/persuasions​-online​/volume​-39​-no​-1​/a​-tale​-of​-two​-captains​-whose​-heart​-is​-worth​ -having. 139. Kenney, “Tale of Two Captains.” 140. Kenney, “Tale of Two Captains.” 141. Kenney, “Tale of Two Captains.” 142. “Havelok,” lines 2967–77. 143. Austen, Persuasion, 178. 144. Fielding, Tom Jones, 801. 145. Fielding, Tom Jones, 801. 146. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 38–39. 147. Fielding, Tom Jones, 715. 148. Austen, Prayers of Jane Austen, 39. 149. Austen, Prayers of Jane Austen, 9. 150. Austen, Prayers of Jane Austen, 41.

Chapter 7

Austen’s Medieval Irony Marriage and Pasturage

THE PROBLEM OF IRONY In the preceding chapters, I have taken Austen’s vision of love and happiness seriously. She believes in romantic love and in happy endings, although not naively or simplistically. She transforms the conventional gender roles of courtly love in which men give and women receive service. Her women become knights and her men distressed damsels. For love to thrive, both knight and lady, man and woman, must submit to the other. Such submission makes possible the happy endings so beloved by readers. Those endings are rooted in Austen’s transformation of courtly love, in the necessity of virtue, and in the role of providence. She, like the medieval romancers before her, writes stories that participate in the grand Christian narrative. But my serious defense of Austen’s depiction of romantic love and happy endings has conveniently sidestepped her pervasive irony that obtrudes on her most romantic moments, often introducing a note of economic realism that seems to undercut the romance. Austen so frequently adopts an ironic stance that readers who come to her looking for a romantic high are often disappointed by her romantic reticence and even her romantic irreverence. Thus, any defense of her providential romances must confront her irony. After all, irony can have a destabilizing and destructive effect. Might her irony destroy her romance? Anne Elliot, as I have argued in chapters 3 and 6, learns the virtue of romance, a virtue that avoids the self-destructive passion of Marianne Dashwood and Captain Benwick and the calculating prudence of Mr. Elliot and Lucy Steele. But Anne, who values an affectionate heart, confidence in the future, and trust in providence and who is the recipient of the most passionately romantic declaration of love in Austen’s canon, is able to marry because her lover has more money than he had when they were first engaged. 157

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The eternally devoted couple, united by “maturity of mind” and “consciousness of right,” also depend on “one independent fortune between them” for romantic success.1 Maturity and moral conviction are unromantically and ironically juxtaposed with money. This irony seems to undermine the virtue of romance and smacks of worldly prudence. Austen regularly employs irony to deflate the intense passion between the hero and heroine. Consider the narrator’s startlingly unromantic description of the origin of Henry Tilney’s love for Catherine Morland: Though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity.2

Henry has none of Palamon’s “I noot wher she be womman or goddesse,”3 or Ferdinand’s “[t]he very instant that I saw you, did / My heart fly to your service.”4 He does not think Catherine a goddess or a fairy queen or even the most beautiful woman in the world when he first meets her in Bath; instead, he comes to care for her because she first cared for him. This is hardly the stuff of Lancelot and Guinevere. And what of Marianne Dashwood? “She,” so full of romantic conviction, “was born to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to another!”5 Marianne has none of Miranda’s “I might call him / a thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble.”6 Marianne feels, not the overwhelming love a romantic heroine ought to feel for her beloved, but the more tepid sentiments of esteem and friendship, and she accepts a man “who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat!”7 What lady in a medieval romance would accept a knight who needed a flannel waistcoat or marry a man for whom she felt only esteem and friendship? Wayne Booth brilliantly captures romantic deflation in Emma: Critics have often objected . . . to the presence of a persistent voice that could allow itself, at what conventionally should have been the moment of supreme passion, to undermine the conventional effects with the famous (or infamous) narrative intrusion: What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. And a lady always does.—She said enough to show there need not be despair—and to invite him to say more himself.

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And then, in a passage that is even more deflating, if what we are seeking is unalloyed, perfect happiness in an idealized union: Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material. What kind of talk is that, coming just at the moment of romantic climax?8

At the romantic climax of the novel, Austen calls Emma a lady, that elevated chivalric term, that object of knightly devotion, but she does not give her a passionate, flowery, effusive speech, and she calls attention to the secrecy that so often attends even the most intimate of relationships, ironically juxtaposing romantic openness with realistic secrecy at “the moment of supreme passion.” She ruthlessly denies our desire for a romantic climax. The romantic climax between Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram is also even more severely deflated. It happens entirely off-stage. The narrator declares, “I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.”9 Fanny spends most of the novel pining for Edmund, but Austen denies her readers “the moment of supreme passion.”10 According to D. W. Harding, “The last chapter [of Mansfield Park], which, with its suggestion of a fairy-tale winding up of the various threads of the story, is ironically perfunctory.”11 How strange that a fairy-tale ending would be “ironically perfunctory!” Even Anne Elliot’s eternal constancy comes in for a little ironic deflation. In a passage discussed in the previous chapter, the narrator tells us that “[p]rettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy, could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than Anne was sporting with from Camden-place to Westgate-buildings. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way.”12 I am honestly not quite sure how to interpret Austen’s tone here—how ironically deflating is this description of Anne’s musings?—but the very concision has a deflating effect, as do the participle “sporting” and the adverb “almost.” The specificity of distance from “Camden-place to Westgate-buildings” also has an ironic effect. “It” (I assume the antecedent here is Anne’s musings) “was almost” but not quite “enough” to purify and perfume Bath itself. The prettiest musings have their limit. Anne has experienced a second spring, but even she cannot bring that spring to Bath. Throughout the novel, the narrator has gently laughed at Anne’s tendency toward melancholic reverie, including her fondness for autumnal verse. Anne herself realizes her own Benwick-like tendency to indulge in gloomy poetry as she advises him to read more prose. It would

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not be too much of a stretch to believe that Austen is also making fun of her heroine’s enthusiasm for eternal constancy. While Austen believes in the providential romance that Anne learns, she is no champion of the indulgent emotion so often associated with romance in her own era, nor is she above an ironic swipe at her own heroine. Not only does Austen deny the reader certain romantic highs; she also ironizes happy endings by carefully supplying the particulars about the financial security and material conditions of her heroes and heroines. At the end of Mansfield Park, the narrator tells us that Fanny’s and Edmund’s domestic bliss is completed by “the acquisition of Mansfield living, by the death of Dr. Grant, [which] occurred just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income, and feel their distance from the paternal abode an inconvenience.”13 Mrs. Norris’s obsession with frugality is absurd, but the virtuous Fanny and Edmund are allowed pecuniary desires. Mary Crawford’s hope that Tom Bertram will die leaving Edmund as heir engenders moral condemnation, but Fanny and Edmund profit from Dr. Grant’s conveniently timed death. The difference, perhaps, is that Fanny and Edmund would never wish for his death as Mary does for Tom’s, but, nevertheless, Austen is realistic enough to recognize that death can be economically advantageous. In Sense and Sensibility, when Mrs. Jennings visits Elinor and Edward after their marriage, she discovers that “[t]hey had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows.”14 The coordinate conjunction comically establishes grammatical equality between marriage and farm animals, between the affairs of the heart and the concerns of practical domesticity. In chapter 1, I quoted Helen Cooper, who blames satire for the cultural decline of romance, noting that “Sir Hudibras made the happy discovery that the questing knight needs only one spur, since if one side of his horse goes faster the other is likely to keep up.”15 Practical economy can kill romance, yet Austen balances the two in a single sentence. In Northanger Abbey, Austen even calls attention to the conventionality of the happy ending itself, thereby creating emotional distance between the reader and the emotional thrill of that ending. The sly and confiding narrator of Northanger Abbey admits that “my readers . . . will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are hastening together to perfect felicity.”16 In this moment of dramatic irony, readers are reminded that we are reading a book, and we are reminded that books have conventional tropes, they have “tell-tales.” The unfolding of the plot, the revelation of motives and the union of true lovers, is complete in the happy ending. The happy ending comes as narrative time ends, and it is the end we have been anticipating, even hoping for. But, by calling our attention to the compression of the pages,

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Austen reminds us of the artificiality of the story. She does not give her readers unalloyed pleasure in romance, but self-consciously calls our attention to what she is doing. How are we to interpret Austen’s tendency to ironize romance? Edmond Reiss speculates that the “modern sense of irony may be the result of Western doubt—our sense of uncertainty and our ultimate pessimism about man’s possibilities, and, indeed, his very nature.”17 For some modern thinkers, “no theology or epistemology can contain” irony: “It dissolves—it ‘deconstructs’—every assertion of absolute truth.”18 Does Austen’s irony stem from doubt, uncertainty, and pessimism about man’s possibilities and nature? Does Austen dissolve and deconstruct the absolute truths of love and happiness? Certainly, Austen’s irony deconstructs. Let us return to the passage from Northanger Abbey. The narrator tells us that “[i]t is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity,” for the hero to fall in love with the heroine because she loved him first.19 This may be “a new circumstance in romance,” in that rarefied literary world in which men spontaneously fall in love with beautiful and virtuous women who never fall in love with them first, but, Austen implies, it is no new circumstance in actual life. The sentence is not a straightforward observation about changing literary or social conventions, but an ironic thrust at a view of love that Austen finds untrue to life. Nor is this a straightforward lament about the loss of a heroine’s dignity. Austen does not have some imaginary creature in mind whose dignity we as readers are supposed to be deeply invested in; instead, we are supposed to see Henry as a likable but ordinary young man who falls in love with a likable but ordinary young woman. Of course, this is all “dreadfully derogatory to an heroine’s dignity,” but really, that image of a heroine is a false construct, far removed from the love lives of ordinary men and women. The high ideals of romance are deconstructed under Austen’s ironic gaze. But how far does that irony extend? Does it throw doubt not only on romantic excess but also on the possibility of genuine love and happy marriage? Does Austen not give “unalloyed, perfect happiness” because she does not believe in such an impossible ideal?20 Perhaps she is at war with earnestness. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle reports Gorgias’s saying “that you should kill your opponents’ earnestness with jesting [of which irony is one form] and their jesting with earnestness.”21 Ironic jesting seems to kill earnestness. Is it that much of a stretch to conclude that the woman who ironically deconstructs romantic excess would also ironically deconstruct romantic love in its entirety? Perhaps Austen’s irony is proof of what D. W. Harding calls “regulated hatred”? Does she hate love and happiness as empty delusions? Is she not a source of “relief and escape [through romantic love and happy endings]

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but . . . a formidable ally against things and people which were to her, and still are, hateful”?22 Is there a bitterness to her work that I have naively overlooked? Or perhaps Austen’s irony is a sign of her elitism. According to Tony Slade, “the usual ironic situation [is] of a statement being made which one audience takes at its face value, and another (more sophisticated) audience at its ironic level.”23 Perhaps Austen’s providential romance is for the simple, naive reader, and her irony is for the sophisticated, knowing few who have been inducted into her secret society and have the strength to drink the cup of bitter disillusionment. As Harding points out, casual reading of Austen was a strong temptation for preceding generations: “It has . . . been possible for readers and critics . . . to discuss her work as if it offered no more than delicately entertaining studies of the surface of polite society and its trivial doings amidst the costumes and architecture of advertisers’ Regency.”24 Perhaps, in my defense of courtly love and happy endings, I have become one of those surface-level readers, diluting irony into more potable romance. DEFINITION OF IRONY Before addressing these concerns, we must be clear on definitions. What, after all, is irony? Esolen claims that “most writers on irony have defined it as speech that means something other than . . . what is literally said,”25 a definition that Esolen rejects as woefully insufficient. To be fair, irony does often mean something other than what is said; Austen is not actually shocked by any perceived insult to her heroine’s dignity when she describes the origins of Henry’s love for Catherine. Yet, irony goes beyond speech. Reiss proposes that “[i]nstead of thinking of irony as a superficial mark of the literature, as a matter of style or tone injected sporadically by the writer in the form of ambiguity, word play, and antithetical expressions, we might best realize that these features are actually the result of irony and are its verbal effects.”26 These are only verbal effects because irony is fundamentally about vision, about a way of beholding reality. Marvin Mudrick calls irony the “discoverer and explorer of incongruities.”27 For Mudrick, irony “consists in the discrimination between impulse and pretension, between being and seeming, between— in a social setting—man as he is and man as he aspires to be.”28 The ironic gaze is one alive to incongruity, “a high-lighted disjunction between planes of knowledge.”29 The planes can be higher and lower planes, say when the divine plane clashes with the human. The clashing planes can also be horizontal, when the knowledge of love found in Gothic romances clashes with the knowledge of love from experience.

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“Irony,” Esolen writes, “arises . . . from the ignorance of unseen or unexpected order (or, as it may happen, disorder).”30 That ignorance gives way to revelation: “irony reveals . . . order where randomness was expected, or complexity and subtlety where simplicity was expected.”31 It is worth emphasizing that irony can both reveal order where randomness was expected and randomness where order was expected. Irony can both destroy and disclose. Modern theories of irony tend to emphasize what Esolen calls “destructive” irony.32 My purpose here is not to determine which form of irony is better or worse, true or false, but rather to advocate for a more expansive definition. The problem is not destructive irony itself, but rather the conviction that it is the only kind of irony. As Esolen declares, “irony commonly is used to exalt rather than undermine. It can stun us with wonder and raise our eyes to behold a truth we had missed. All kinds of unsuspected truths, particularly those combined in paradoxes, await our attention.”33 Irony can reveal to us the emptiness of what we hold to be true, but it can also reveal a plentitude hitherto unsuspected. That plenitude may be, as Esolen contends, a paradox. Sometimes, of course, the paradox shades into contradiction as one plane of knowledge is shown to be false; there is the contradiction “between being and seeming,”34 and the revelation of the contradiction can have tragic consequences, as it often does in a Shakespearean tragedy. Or satiric consequences, when an author draws our attention to the contradiction between human behavior and moral standards. But sometimes the paradox is a genuine paradox, revealing planes that, despite appearances, are both true. MEDIEVAL IRONY It is this capacious view of irony that I wish to explore. Before considering Austen’s irony, I would like to turn to medieval literature to find evidence of such irony. After all, this book explores Austen’s medievalism. Might her irony, as well as her romance, also belong to that tradition? Some modern scholars view irony as antithetical to the Middle Ages. D. C. Muecke argues that because there was no conflict between God and nature or God and man in the Middle Ages, “it is not surprising that General Irony does not appear in modern Europe until the closed world of the Christian ideology loses its power to convince.”35 Muecke assumes that irony arises out of metaphysical conflict and the loosening of rigid ideology, out of uncertainty and instability. It is naive to say that there was no conflict between God and nature or God and man in the Middle Ages—one has only to read Boethius to realize how much medieval man struggled with the problem of evil. But even if we suppose a perfect harmony in Christianity, we should not assume

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that meant simplicity. The theology and philosophy of the Middle Ages were alive to paradox, and its literature was full of irony. Indeed, the literary irony comes from theological and philosophical paradox. Reiss goes so far as to state, “Medieval irony may be understood as a necessary consequence of the Christian world view of the Middle Ages.”36 Contra Muecke, Reiss declares that “[a]ssessments by modern critics that the Middle Ages represent a grand hiatus in the history of irony are largely inadequate and misleading.”37 In previous chapters, I have focused more on straightforward medieval romances that celebrate love and marriage, all ordained by benevolent providence. But the romantic tradition that Austen belongs to is also ironic, critical, and self-aware. Her irony, whether deconstructive or constructive, does not immediately exile her from the romantic community, but rather places her in the company of some of that community’s finest members, including the Gawain-poet and Chaucer. The Gawain-Poet’s Irony Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Edward R. Haymes calls “the finest anonymous romance in English,”38 is also one of the most sophisticated romances in Middle English. It is a romance that calls into question the values celebrated by romance. The author is aware of the narrative conventions appropriate to chivalric romance; he knows that knights go on journeys and fight battles, and he has Gawain face dragons, wolves, wild men, bulls, bears, boars, and giants—the typical antagonists of romance—in a few lines. What would take up most of the plot in a more conventional romance like Bevis of Southampton is here treated with surprising concision, in a manner that is, to borrow Harding’s language, “ironically perfunctory.”39 Instead of violent confrontations, the poet is more interested in the complexity of Christmas games. Gawain himself is not questioning romantic conventions. He is a perfect knight, devoted to his king, bravely facing the challenges of the Green Knight. The Pentangle on his shield is an image of courtly and Christian perfection, and the image of the Virgin Mary appears on the inside of his shield, another symbol of moral harmony as he fights earthly enemies under the auspices of the Queen of heaven. Part of the irony in this poem “lies in a stark clash between what a character thinks he knows and he really knows.”40 Gawain thinks he understands the harmonious perfection between the court and Christ, but the adventures he faces call that harmony into question. That questioning takes place primarily at Hautdesert, where Gawain meets Lord and Lady Bertilak. Gawain and the Lord agree to a game, an exchange of winnings. The Lord goes out to hunt, and Gawain stays in his bedroom in the castle, and, much to his surprise, is joined there by the lady. Esolen succinctly explains that, as Gawain seeks to refuse the lady while treating her

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gallantly and to remain faithful to Lord Bertilak without betraying his wife, “[h]e struggles . . . to reconcile his courtly code of honor with the law of God.”41 Gawain struggles to reconcile his courtly code of honor—courteous treatment of ladies—with the law of God—chastity—but he also struggles to reconcile competing claims within the courtly code itself; a knight’s devotion to his lord seems to conflict with courtesy to women. He cannot sleep with the lady and betray the lord, but he also cannot refuse the lady outright. He must be the perfect knight to both lady and lord, perfectly fulfilling the identity he projects to the world on his shield. The lady’s tests are explicitly tests of that identity. Is he really, she asks him, the Gawain she has heard so much about, the courteous lover? He is failing, in her estimation, to be a knight. Yet, a knight is not only a lover, but also an obedient servant to his lord. Though Gawain has just met Bertilak, he has already sworn fealty to him. The reader is left wondering which part of chivalry is more central—the knight’s duty to his lord or to his lady and if chivalry itself is ultimately compatible with Christianity if courtly love prevents a knight from simply fleeing sexual temptation. The irony of Gawain’s situation is potentially destructive, as it calls into question the certainties of the chivalric code. As I have noted, Gawain himself is not aware of the conflicting codes and troubling questions. Indeed, he manages to successfully navigate those tensions, treating the lady courteously without sleeping with her and remaining loyal to Lord Bertilak without rudely rejecting his wife. He remains a good knight while also maintaining Christian chastity. In the end, Gawain fails, not because of the complexities of chivalry, but because of a less conventionalized and more primitive desire to save his own life. All the elaborations of chivalry fall away as Gawain takes the girdle and betrays the fealty he owes to Bertilak for the chance to survive his deadly encounter with the Green Knight. The chivalric code that Gawain lives by demands perfection, a perfection that Gawain cannot live up to, not because he sees, with sophisticated self-awareness, through the tensions inherent in that code, nor because he is a great coward, but simply because he is a human being who does not want to die. Esolen argues, “Ironically, it is his acceptance of the girdle—an understandable and pardonable failing, given his fear of the terrible death approaching—that brings Gawain to harm however slight.”42 In trying to save himself from harm, Gawain exposes himself to harm, physical harm—the Green Knight gives him a slight nick for concealing the girdle—and, more importantly, moral harm—the Green Knight tells him that he lacked a little in loyalty. Avoiding harm leads to harm. For Gawain, the ironic revelation comes when he realizes his own imperfection during his moment of triumph. Gawain thinks he has managed to survive the Green Knight’s test by showing up at the Green Chapel and baring his neck to his enemy’s blade, only to realize that he failed the lady’s test. He

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is unaware of his own imperfection when he takes the girdle. His ignorance is so profound that he is able to go to confession after accepting the girdle and leave feeling clean and content, even though he continues to conceal the girdle from Lord Bertilak. When his guide to the Green Chapel urges him to run away and promises that he won’t tell anyone that Gawain has fled, Gawain ironically refuses to run away like a coward. The reader sees a knight declaring his bravery, unaware that he has already failed because he feared to lose his life. His ignorance is exposed at his moment of triumph, as the man so committed to his own perfection suddenly realizes that he has not maintained that perfection. Gawain is ignorant both of his own moral failings and of the “unseen . . . order”43 directing the plot. At the end of the poem, he learns that Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s sister, sent the Green Knight to Camelot to frighten Guinevere and test the court. Lord Bertilak discloses to Gawain the young knight’s internal disorder and the malicious order lurking behind the scenes. For Mudrick, irony “consists in the discrimination . . . between . . . man as he is and man as he aspires to be.”44 The Gawain-poet exposes the incongruity between what Gawain is and what he aspires to be. What he aspires to be is the perfect knight and Christian, a paragon of excellence. What he is is a man who wants to stay alive, like all other men. Through ironic revelation, the Gawain-poet destabilizes Gawain’s fixed ideals and insists that no man can ever live up to those ideals, or to any standard of perfection. How far does that destabilizing go? To the destabilizing of all ideals? Is the poet at war with earnestness? Or perhaps he is simply observing the disjunction between seeming and being with detached aloofness. Is irony the “neutral discoverer and explorer of incongruities”?45 According to Mudrick, irony “of itself . . . draws no conclusions.”46 Does the poet draw no conclusions from revealing the difference between “man as he is and man as he aspires to be”?47 Here I think we must turn to the laughter of the court at the end of the poem. That laughter, like so much in this poem, is ambiguous, but I am inclined to read it as charitable laughter, embracing Gawain’s humanity; the court does not reject Gawain for failing to live up to the standard of chivalric perfection, but instead they make the green girdle their own, taking it as a baldric to be worn by every knight of the Round Table. Their laughter is not simply neutral irony, but rather a model of the proper emotional response to man’s imperfection. The Gawain-poet responds, not with detachment or bitter cynicism, but with warm and compassionate laughter that embraces human faults. The girdle itself is a paradoxical symbol that reflects the paradox of human nature. While the court eagerly adopts the girdle “as a mark of the highest honor,” Gawain himself rather gloomily wears it as “a perpetual reminder of his weakness, his proneness to sin.”48 This double meaning is the paradox that irony reveals: man is honorable and weak, admirable and sinful. It is not clear, however, that Gawain himself has embraced this paradox. He is so full

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of self-loathing at the end that the reader is not sure what kind of hero he will become. Will he ever be able to share in the court’s charitable laughter? The poem ends, not with the rigid perfection of the shield or even the slippery elusiveness of the girdle, but with the twisted crown of thorns, a symbol that is, like the shield and the girdle, circular, though, because of the thorns, not rigidly geometrical like the pentangle.49 It is a symbol that reconciles divine love and human frailty, that, in the Christian tradition, enables broken and flawed humanity to obtain greatness. In a final ironic revelation, the reader is reminded of an order that transcends Morgan le Fay; the one “crowned with thorn” has the power to “[b]ring all men to His bliss!”50 Chaucerian Irony While Austen could not have read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was not published until more than twenty years after her death, she could, as I noted in chapter 2, have read Chaucer, one of the great ironists of the Middle Ages. And Chaucer’s ironizing of romance could have been transmitted to Austen from Shakespeare. Throughout the Tales, Chaucer plays the “game” of storytelling in all its forms, delighting in many genres and many storytellers who have many motives, and rarely telling a story straight, making it challenging for readers to determine whether any one story represents the author’s personal values. Chaucer’s artistry is kaleidoscopic: shift the focus, change the narrator, and a different image comes into view. He is constantly juxtaposing different planes of knowledge and constantly destabilizing and deconstructing. His ironic juxtaposition begins in the opening description of spring. April showers pierce the dryness of March, its wetness engenders flowers, the west wind inspires the growth of plants, and the birds make melody because “[s]o priketh hem Nature in hir corages.”51 Given the erotic imagery of the opening lines, a reader might expect that the human participation in all this erotic flowering would be, well, erotic. After all, spring is not only the season of natural fecundity, but also the season of love, at least according to the poets. To be fair, May is traditionally the month of love in the courtly love tradition—Palamon and Arcite see Emily walking in the garden in May. When Emily arises to honor May, the knight tells his audience that “[t]he sesoun priketh every gentil herte.”52 Nature “priketh” the heart in April; May “priketh every gentil herte.” At the beginning of The Knight of the Cart (c. 1171–1181), Chrétien de Troyes praises his patroness as “the lady who surpasses all others alive by as much as the warm wind that blows in May and April surpasses the other winds.”53 All this April/May pricking is tied to love. But Chaucer the poet focuses on man’s spiritual impulse, on the longing, not for the beloved, but for pilgrimage: “Than longen folk to goon

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on pilgrimages.”54 From the beginning of the Tales, Chaucer is an astute “discoverer and explorer of incongruities.”55 We have the seeming incongruity between the erotic flowering of nature and the spiritual flowering of the human heart. Yet this seeming incongruity is perhaps not so incongruous from a Christian perspective; there is something deeply fitting about spiritual awakening taking place in the season in which all of nature is awakening. But we only see the incongruity as congruous when we see the ultimate harmony between the natural and the spiritual. Of course, this spiritual impulse is somewhat destabilized by the descriptions of the pilgrims themselves, very few of whom seem motivated by deep religious impulse, including the religious figures. The fussy Prioress imitates the manners of court and wears a golden brooch “[o]n which ther was first write a crowned A, / And after Amor vincit omnia.”56 It seems unlikely that this Virgilian amor reveals the prioress’s commitment to Christian charity. The Monk loves to hunt and wears “of gold ywroght a ful curious pyn; / A love-knotte in the gretter ende ther was.”57 The Friar is troublingly familiar with women and has no time for the poor. The spiritual figures on this spiritual pilgrimage do not appear especially spiritual, and the love they are interested in is very earthly. They tend to be good at the performative side of religion—singing in church and reading Scripture—but fail to live as Christians. In the “General Prologue,” Chaucer is keenly aware of the differences between “man as he is and man as he aspires to be”;58 the Parson stands out as the only religious figure who is actually religious. The ironic juxtapositions established in the “General Prologue” continue throughout The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer even turns his irony on himself; when the Host asks the pilgrim Chaucer to tell a merry tale, the creator of the astonishingly varied stories in The Canterbury Tales has his inept stand-in declare, “For oother tale certes kan I noon / But of a rym I lerned longe agoon.”59 That rhyme is a romance, which the pilgrim situates within the broad romantic tradition: Men speken of romances of prys, Of Horn child and of Ypotys, Of Beves and sir Gy, Of sir Lybeux and Pleyndamour – But sir Thopas, he bereth the flour Of roial chivalry!60

This claim of Topas’s knightly superiority is of course absurd, but the lines reveal a knowledge of romance as the pilgrim Geoffrey name-drops some of the most famous heroes “of romances of prys”—including “Beves and sir Gy.” Chaucer the pilgrim, ironically enough, only knows this one tale,

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but Chaucer the poet knows many tales and many kinds of tales, including romance. Edward R. Haymes describes “Sir Topas” as “an expert parody on the diction, meter, and style of the tail-rhyme romance.”61 Topas is confronted by a giant, but pilgrim Chaucer is far more interested in describing the clothing that Topas wears, leather shoes and brown stockings, and the gingerbread that he eats than in depicting his confrontation with Olifaunt. Indeed, the Host interrupts him before any battle takes place, complaining about Chaucer’s “drasty speche”62 and exclaiming “Now swich a rym the devel I biteche!”63 The greatest English poet, until Shakespeare supplanted him, tells a story that is, in a word, crap. Esolen describes “Sir Topas” as “ironically and also appropriately, the silliest tale” in The Canterbury Tales.64 The irony here is that Chaucer, the author of the Tales, brilliant and inventive storyteller, presents himself as a bumbling reciter of a tale he has only heard. For what purpose? Is he a neutral observer of himself? Is he seeking to deconstruct himself? To deconstruct any stable sense of poetic self? Esolen sees Topas as “not just a clever joke” but as an expression of “[h]umility.”65 Chaucer’s irony is an expression of authorial humility. As Reiss states, “the medieval author may be regarded as necessarily an ironist because, on the one hand, he is imitating God in his works and because, on the other hand, he knows he cannot imitate God.”66 Chaucer as author is imitating God, and yet his imitations cannot come close to God’s original. The incongruity demands humility. Of course, Chaucer’s ironic romances are more than just personal humility. He repeatedly deconstructs the earnest love and perfect happy endings of the genre—starting with the first two tales. “The Knight’s Tale” shows us the courtly, aristocratic world of Theseus, Emily, and her ardent lovers, Palamon and Arcite. “The Miller’s Tale,” something of a revenge through narrative, shows us the middle-class world of John, Nicholas, Absolon, and Allison. “The Knight’s Tale” is full of romantic tropes—in May and at first sight, Palamon and Arcite fall in love with Emily, who is fairer than a lily. Their love is described as a wound. This love triangle is deeply earnest, and the tale ends with the conventional happy ending of romance, perfect wedded bliss between Palamon and Emily: “And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely, / And he hire serveth so gentilly / That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene / Of jalousie or any oother teene.”67 Emily loves Palamon tenderly, and he “serveth” her, that verb so central to courtly love. The Knight’s story of conventional courtly love and its subsequent happy ending wins the approval of his fellow pilgrims, especially the “gentils.”68 The refined genre of romance pleases the refined members of the audience. After the Knight’s stately and lengthy tale, the Miller bursts in, eager to “quite”69 the Knight. The Miller takes seriously Gorgias’s advice “that you

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should kill your opponents’ earnestness with jesting,”70 gleefully inverting the Knight’s staid aristocratic norms. While the beautiful and lily-like Emily wants to remain a virgin, Allison, compared to a weasel, a pear tree, sheep’s wool, ale, honey, apples, and a calf, clearly enjoys sex. Nicholas, Allison’s scholarly lover, also wants sex. Nicholas does not pine for Allison as Palamon and Arcite do for Emily; instead, he approaches Allison directly, “heeld hire harde by the haunchebones / And seyde, ‘Lemman, love me al atones, / Or I wol dyen, also God me save!’”71 It is ludicrous to imagine the passionate Palamon grabbing Emily’s thigh. The Miller exposes the pretensions of courtly love as a pretty mask for sexual desire. The parish clerk Absolon, golden-haired, well-dressed, fastidious, reveals the disembodiment of romance: “But sooth to seyn, he was somdeel squaymous / Of fartyng.”72 The earnest love celebrated in romance doesn’t leave much room for farting. At the end of the tale, the squeamish Absolon is justly punished when “with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers,”73 and Nicholas farts in his face. The prissy lover is inescapably confronted with bodily functions, just as the whole of “The Miller’s Tale” confronts “The Knight’s Tale”; the bawdy romp confronts the anemic romance. I am not here arguing that one story represents Chaucer’s true beliefs, but rather that the placement of the two tales calls the values of romance into question. Simply by reading “The Miller’s Tale,” the reader is asked to have some kind of ironic detachment toward the serious and elevated courtly values espoused by the Knight. The opening tales are an ironic juxtaposition between what courtly love aspires to and what human beings actually desire. “The Miller’s Tale” does not lament man’s inability to live up to the aspirations of courtly love; instead, there is something refreshing about the straightforward sex in contrast to the rarefied air of courtly love. There is something slightly ridiculous, or at least inadequate, about refined courtly love, about all those lovers who moan about being wounded, but never talk about sex. Romance, for Chaucer, does not exhaust the complexity of human experience. Chaucer does not necessarily ask us to reject romance or its ideals, but his ironic juxtaposition does reveal their competing values. The two opening tales present us with an ironic diptych. While the Knight is a fitting narrator for a romance, the Wife of Bath is less so. She is a middle-class woman who enjoys money and sex, and her lively, raunchy prologue describing marriages of manipulation and violence does not entirely prepare the reader for her tale, which ends with a blissful marriage, one that Palamon and Emily would easily recognize. After the knight in “The Wife’s Tale” gives the old hag “maistrie,”74 she gives him obedience, and this mutual exchange of submission leads to a perfect happy ending, full of the joy that is so typical at the end of a romance: “And thus they lyve unto hir lyves ende / In parfit joye.”75 But after ending her story with this lovely

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marriage, the Wife of Bath prays, “Jhesu Crist us sende / Housbondes meeke, yonge, and fressh abedde.”76 As I noted in the previous chapter, medieval romances traditionally end in prayer, though typically with more devout requests for heavenly bliss rather than for young, nubile lovers. The Wife of Bath, appropriately enough, does not play by the normal narrative rules. The ironic juxtaposition of perfect joy and good sex is abrupt; the Wife’s description of joy does not even take up an entire line, as the beginning of her prayer interrupts the tell-tale summary of the happy ending. After describing a marriage of mutual submission, the Wife prays that the lives of men “[t]hat noght wol be governed by hir wyves”77 will be shortened. After a brief foray into the world of romance, with its joyous, idealized marriages, the Wife of Bath, Allison herself, is back. Esther Quinn writes of this double ending, Her [the Wife of Bath’s] parting words, in the form of a mock prayer, establish the distance between the illusory world of Arthurian romance and the real world of strife, of actual relationships between men and women in fourteenth-century England. Chaucer thus has . . . two conclusions and by this device he both affirms the conventional happy ending and calls it into question. The happy resolution is both sustained and placed in an ironic perspective.78

The distance between the illusory world and the real world does not necessarily destroy all the ideals of the illusory world, but it does provide “an ironic perspective.” The happy ending of romance, with its Edenic union between men and women, is deeply desirable. Yet, the real world that Allison lives in often involves power struggles between married couples and the sexual fantasies of aging women for younger men. What are we to make of Chaucer’s pervasive irony? By juxtaposing the natural and the supernatural, religious hypocrisy and religious aspiration, does he reveal his deep pessimism about human nature? In ironizing romantic ideals—courtly love and happy endings—does he expose them as hollow, false illusions? Invited by the Host to tell the final tale, the Parson responds, I wol yow telle a myrie tale in prose To knytte up al this feeste and make an ende. And Jhesu, for his grace, wit me sende To shewe yow the wey, in this viage, Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage That highte Jerusalem celestial.79

The Parson’s “you” in line 49 is astonishingly inclusive. No pilgrim, however physically revolting or morally repugnant, is ever cast out of the

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company—neither the prissy Prioress nor the vile Pardoner, neither the hunting Monk nor the womanizing Friar, neither the refined Knight nor the bawdy Miller—and all are present here as the Parson prays for the understanding to show his audience the way to the heavenly Jerusalem. Chaucer juxtaposes the deeply flawed pilgrims and the elevated purpose of their pilgrimage, but that juxtaposition does not end in or stem from “ultimate pessimism about man’s possibilities, and . . . his very nature.”80 These motley pilgrims are all on a journey to the ultimate happy ending, not a marriage free of jealousy and full of joy, but paradisal bliss. Chaucer’s irony reveals the comic paradox of Christianity—that deeply flawed pilgrims are on a journey toward “Jerusalem celestial.” The Parson concludes his tale by describing, the endelees blisse of hevene, ther joye hath no contrarioustee of wo ne grevaunce; ther alle harmes been passed of this present lyf; ther as is the sikernesse fro the peyne of helle; ther as is the blisful compaignye that rejoysen hem everemo, everich of otheres joye; ther as the body of man, that whilom was foul and derk, is moore cleer than the sonne; ther as the body, that whilom was syk, freele, and fieble, and mortal, is inmortal, and so strong and so hool that ther may no thyng apeyren it; ther as ne is neither hunger, thurst, ne coold, but every soule replenyssed with the sighte of the parfit knowynge of God.81

The joy of the heavenly Jerusalem is perfect, marred by neither woe nor grievance, marked by perfect companionship with others and perfect knowledge of God. Much of the language of this passage resembles the happy ending of a romance—“joye,” “blisful,” “parfit”—though the Parson is describing the joy of saints beholding the Beatific Vision, rather than an earthly marriage. The values of romance are ironized, yet in the end they find fullest consummation in the romance of the Christian pilgrimage. In his Retractions, Chaucer prays, not that he will always have young lovers fresh in bed, but that he will join the saints in heaven on the day of judgment. Chaucer’s irony is not a universal dissolvent that destroys all “theology or epistemology—every assertion of absolute truth.”82 Indeed, his irony is made possible by his theology, by his conviction that flawed pilgrims can aspire to perfect joy. The Theology of Irony I would like to explore that theology in greater depth in order to see how it justifies irony. Some scholars see medieval theology as opposed to irony. To quote D. C. Muecke again, “with the denial by Christian theology of any radical conflict between man and nature . . . or between man and God . . . it is not surprising that General Irony does not appear” in the Middle Ages.83 Muecke

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assumes that irony arises from “radical conflict,” of which the Middle Ages, in his view, was free. But irony also discovers the conflict between “man as he is and man as he aspires to be,”84 and according to Pierre Manent, “the greatest disparity between words and actions is introduced by the Christian Word, which asks humans to love what they hate naturally—their enemies—and to hate what they love naturally—themselves. Christianity introduced an unprecedented disparity between what humans do and what they say.”85 Christianity makes radical demands on its followers, but those claims, by their very radicalness, are almost impossible to fulfill. Thus, Christianity shows man’s noble aspirations and his inability to live up to those aspirations, an insight that makes irony possible, perhaps even inevitable. Reiss makes the bold claim that “[m]edieval irony may be understood as a necessary consequence of the Christian world view of the Middle Ages.”86 So what is this Christian worldview? Manent notes Christianity’s extraordinary ethical expectations. There are other conflicts, or more precisely, disjuncts within Christianity that can produce irony. Esolen focuses on three theological sources of irony: “the providence that binds together the histories of men; the visionary strength of man when he responds to God with love; and the God who so loves man as to have created him, to reveal himself to him, to redeem him by taking on flesh, and to order his loves aright.”87 These Christian dogmas are the philosophical source of Christian irony. Why? Since irony arises from man’s ignorance of order, man’s ignorance of providential order is a rich source for irony. After all, that order may suddenly reveal itself, as Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “like shining from shook foil”;88 such revelation is possible because Christianity teaches that the providence that governs all things also loves. In this act of love, God “may knock loose the iron fetter forged by what we think we know and what we think we cannot know.”89 God’s providence, an order that transcends man’s knowledge, makes ironic disjunction possible. Man blindly stumbles along, unaware that providence lovingly governs all things. The second wellspring has to do with the Gospel’s radical inversions. Esolen writes, “the off-scourings of the world will enter the kingdom of God. It is the mighty who will have to sweat.”90 Human knowledge would suggest that the mighty, the excellent, and the virtuous will be the ones to enter the kingdom of heaven, but Christianity declares that it is easier for a man to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Chaucer’s poor Parson succeeds where his wealthier religious counterparts fail. Gawain must come to understand his own ordinary weakness before he can enter into paradisal bliss; his knightly courage and courtesy cannot save him.

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The third wellspring has to do with love: “Christian authors often show their lovers failing . . . to understand their own hearts . . . they think they love and do not; sometimes . . . they think they do not love, when they do. And sometimes, in the grace of God, when all hope has vanished, a hater may learn to love in truth.”91 Human beings do not understand love, and that lack of understanding, compared to God’s knowledge of love, is rich in ironic potential. Lear thinks he loves when he does not. Beatrice and Benedick think they hate when they actually love. Emma Woodhouse does not understand her own heart, blind to her love for Mr. Knightley. Chaucer’s religious figures, who are supposed to love God, are caught up in distracting and inappropriate human loves. God’s love for man is also a source of irony: “It is wholly inappropriate that we created beings, mere dust, and sinful dust at that, should be the center of anything, let alone the history of salvation. . . . We are most fittingly at the center of things precisely because we have no reason to be.”92 Man’s place in salvation history is both inappropriate and fitting. From the perspective of justice, fallen human beings do not deserve the center, but because they do not deserve the center, they most show the extravagant love of God. This paradox is seen in The Canterbury Tales where few of the pilgrims seem genuinely committed to the pilgrimage to Canterbury or worthy of spiritual healing, and yet all are somehow part of the Christian pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem. So much medieval irony arises from medieval anthropology. As Reiss states, “Medieval irony stemmed from man’s recognition of his place in the cosmos; it was not at all a challenge to God but rather an acceptance of man’s own inadequacy.”93 Man is inadequate, unable to understand providence or love and, because of his sin, undeserving of the love that providence shows. Man is also an ironic disjunct in his very nature because man is both body and soul. He is both enmeshed in the material world and capable of transcending mere materialism. If man is both body and soul, then he is rooted in the erotic desire of nature, but also aspires to the heavenly Jerusalem. He may be able to experience the depths of courtly love at times, but he is also a body that seeks sexual gratification. He can aspire to moral perfection, as Gawain does, but he also seeks to avoid death, like all other living organisms. But does not this ironic incongruity suggest a discordant cosmos? Edmond Reiss declares, “Although the ironic sense is frequently thought to arise from an awareness of the incompatibility of opposites, medieval irony is based on a sense of the real, or ultimate, compatibility of things, so that what seems opposed is more apparent than real.”94 Discord does not come from providence, but from man’s ignorance: “Since they recognized that all things exist in harmony, they were not really concerned about any lack of harmony or any apparent discordia. These are aberrations, not the norm, created only by those

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who cannot see with God’s ubiquitous eyes.”95 Reiss’s blithe optimism— “they were not really concerned”—does not do justice to medieval angst over disharmony. And yet, that disharmony does not point to some fundamental metaphysical disharmony: “the dilemmas and conundrums that mark life and medieval art are removed by the species aeternitatis.”96 Ironic disjunctions only appear irreconcilable because man cannot see with an eternal perspective. Apparent incongruity was not all aberrations caused by ignorant human beings, but also a result of the diversity of the created world, which, despite its differences, formed a whole. According to “Nicholas of Cusa, all things, however different, are linked together in a concordantia oppositorum.”97 In The Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy tells Boethius that opposites that would be in strife are held together by love: What governs earth and sea and sky is nothing less than love, Whose tight rein if ever slackened Would leave creation in chaos Of civil war’s utter ruin98

Love brings harmony to elements that would otherwise devolve into a cosmic civil war. According to Spenser, the four elements were originally at war: “Ayre hated earth and water hated fyre, / Till Loue relented their rebellious yre”99 and “did place them all in order and compell / To keepe themselues within their sundrie raines.”100 Reiss writes, “The notion of the concordantia oppositorum— . . . an essential part of nearly all medieval theology—stemmed from and relied on both a real delight in the diversity and multiplicity of creation and a sense of the need for this diversity.”101 The diversity of creation reflected the richness of God’s nature. In his Compendium, Thomas Aquinas writes, “Since the divine goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, on account of the distance that separates each creature from God, it had to be represented by many creatures, so that what is lacking to one might be supplied by another.”102 Dante’s Commedia is built on this principle of diversity. While Chaucer does not present us with some beautiful, Dantesque vision103 that unites diverse Christians together in a celestial rose, he does allow his diverse pilgrims to all travel the same road and all hear the Parson’s instructions on how to get to the heavenly Jerusalem. Apparent incongruity is part of a harmonious whole, even if that harmony is not apparent to ignorant man. This cosmos is a rich source of irony, though not the irony of pessimism and skepticism. In response to the conventional joining of irony and skepticism, Esolen declares, “it is rather skepticism that corrodes the possibilities for irony. I do not think that irony must lead

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to nihilism. If one examines the evidence of Christian literature, one might conclude quite the opposite: that the richest irony presupposes truth and order.”104 Irony may be “a highlighted disjunction between planes of knowledge,” but that disjunction does not necessarily imply contradiction between the planes.105 If irony comes from ignorance of order, then the ironic turn relies on the existence of that order, an order that brings congruity to incongruity, a providential order overseen by a God who loves sinful and mortal men. There is an irony of faith as well as an irony of doubt. Irony in romance may seek to corrode “stable supposition of truth,” but it does not always need to do so. Irony is the “discoverer and explorer of incongruities,”106 incongruities that may “stun us with wonder and raise our eyes to behold a truth we had missed,”107 the paradox of a harmonious cosmos. At least the medievals believed so. AUSTEN’S IRONIC ONTOLOGY In the introduction, I argued that Austen’s double ontological landscape resembled that of the medieval romancers. Like them, she believed in a providential order that benevolently governed the entire cosmos. I believe that she also shared their belief in a paradoxical cosmos that supplied ample irony for the alert Christian artist. Like the medievals, Austen saw the cosmos as hierarchically arranged, a great chain that extended up to God and down to minerals, each link connected to the one above and below it. Mooneyham White contends, “The deep embeddedness of the Great Chain of Being . . . in Austen’s views of language, social hierarchy, nature, and history underpins the worldview of all her fiction.”108 Austen ascribed to this medieval cosmos despite modern skepticism: Although “British freethinkers, pantheists and deists, Unitarians, ‘levelers,’ and other heterodox religious figures” doubted the Great Chain of Being, “people in Austen’s world . . . and Austen herself felt very little of these disruptions.”109 The Great Chain of Being is an example of striking continuity between Austen and the medieval world. The Great Chain is a harmonious whole, but that whole is not one composed of bland uniformity. There is diversity and plenitude, and harmonious disharmony. While “[c]oncordia discors” meant that “oppositions all have their order in God’s plan and fit a God-given harmony,”110 the divine plan and the divine harmony may not always be apparent to human beings, as Austen well knew. Thus, both seeming opposition and man’s ignorance of ultimate harmony were sources for irony. But what of evil? Is it not out of tune with the harmony of the cosmos? Is it not an incongruity that cannot be reconciled into the concord of the whole?

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Mooneyham White writes, “The undeniable and painful evidence of unreason in actual human history could also be explained by natural law, partly by the presumption that heavenly justice ultimately rights all earthly injustices (so the wicked only seem to prosper) and partly by the popular trope . . . of concordia discors.”111 The wicked may prosper in this life, but they will receive justice in the next. But even in this life, harmony can come from disharmony, opposites can be reconciled. Sir Walter’s failure to maintain his providentially appointed position in society becomes the means by which providence reunites Anne and Captain Wentworth. Wentworth’s deliverance from his relationship with Louisa comes from the inconstancy of Captain Benwick, who falls for another woman, despite his seeming constancy to Fanny Harville. His inconstancy allows Wentworth, despite his seeming inconstancy to Anne, to become the constant lover. Like the medievals, Austen also believed that man himself was a concordia discors, combining, as he did, the spiritual and the material: “Humankind’s position [in the Great Chain of Being] was particularly interesting, caught between angels and beasts.”112 Man has both the rationality of the angels and the animal impulses of the beast. He is both spiritual and material. He is a walking, breathing juxtaposition, therefore full of ironic potential. Austen also understood the ironic disjunct between God’s love and man’s fallenness. According to Mooneyham White, “The most important defining mark of Austen’s prayers . . . comes in her awareness of human fault, particularly her own, and the commensurate greatness of God’s mercy.”113 God shows mercy, even astonishing mercy by granting temporal happiness to those who do not totally deserve it. Austen’s characters, lovely as they are, must, to borrow Captain Wentworth’s language, “learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”114 Austen’s belief in an ordered but diverse cosmos and in man’s strange but significant place in that cosmos provides fertile ground for irony. That belief aligns her not only with the romance of the Middle Ages, but also with its irony. Irony in Austen’s Novels Metaphysics and theology are one thing; the actual use of irony is another. In what follows, I would like to explore the various ways that Austen employs irony. Certainly, not all of Austen’s irony arises from the revelation of cosmic order grounded in the Great Chain of Being and in concordia discors. Austen’s irony stems in part from disappointment in moral weakness. As Harding notes, “her work reveals, sometimes explicitly, sometimes more subtly, how little she supposed the greater part of her social world to live up to her standards of moral taste and cultivated intelligence.”115 Toward the end of

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Sense and Sensibility, the narrator tells us that “[t]he whole of Lucy’s behavior in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.”116 This is a classic example of irony, a statement that means something other than what is said. Austen is clearly not holding Lucy forth as a moral exemplar to be followed, despite describing her behavior as “a most encouraging instance.” Austen does not think the sacrifice of time and conscience a small one. Nevertheless, Lucy’s “unceasing attention to self-interest” does secure “every advantage of fortune,” as she wins the favor of Mrs. Ferrars through “respectful humility, assiduous attentions, and endless flatteries.”117 Austen ironically condemns Lucy and society by acknowledging the effectiveness of Lucy’s behavior. She is not simply disappointed by one woman’s ceaseless “attention to self-interest,” but also by a society that prefers a Lucy to an Elinor, a society that rewards worldly prudence rather than courageous romance. This ironic passage stems from Austen’s ironic vision, which sees the disjunct “between—in a social setting—man as he is and man as he aspires to be.”118 Or perhaps more precisely, man as he is and man as he should be. Self-interest should not trump time and conscience, and yet, in a society so focused on financial well-being, in a society that limits a woman’s success to a good marriage, self-interest does trump. Austen’s disappointed irony does not stem from a skepticism about moral order but rather depends on a stable moral order by which men and women can be judged. That disappointment may, at times, become regulated hatred. It is hard not to feel something akin to hatred as we listen to Fanny Dashwood persuade her husband to break his promise to his dying father and refuse to provide for his half-sisters. Austen does not explicitly condemn the pair, but their selfishness and cold-heartedness come through as they tell on themselves to readers who see more clearly. Austen’s irony conveys her outrage at the vices encouraged by society. But sometimes the problem is not the failure to live up to an order, but rather the order itself, or rather, our imaginative constructions of that order. Many authors in the Western Tradition warn us of this danger. Like Austen, Niccolò Machiavelli recognizes the incongruity between how men live and how they should live. He responds with the radical suggestion that the prince, his intended reader, reject what should be for what is: But since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how

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one lives to how one should that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.119

Machiavelli is not speaking about irony here, but he is noting the discrepancy between what man is and what man should be, the anthropological reality behind so many ironic statements. Machiavelli focuses on political discrepancy; men have imagined ideal republics and principalities, but those imaginings have never actually existed. Machiavelli concludes that the effectual truth is more useful than the imagined version. Look at what is, not at what could be, he tells the would-be prince. This is one response to the ironic perception of incongruity. The realm of the imagination does not actually exist and to hold onto it can lead to ruin. In some sense, Marianne Dashwood does this; she clings to an imagined construct of love and almost kills herself through fidelity to that construct. Marianne does not simply disapprove of second attachments: “she considers them impossible to exist.”120 Elinor wonders, “how she contrives it without reflecting on the character of her own father, who had himself two wives, I know not.”121 Marianne has somehow overlooked the evidence of her own family, her imagination blinding her to reality. Machiavelli urges the prince to abandon the construct and any attempt at a construct, and instead embrace what works. Elinor tells Colonel Brandon that “a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward to as her [Marianne’s] greatest possible advantage.”122 Like Machiavelli’s prince, Marianne must come to know how the world works, and her romanticism is not part of the working world. Lovers should remain forever faithful to their first love. This is her precept, her version of “imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.”123 She must come to understand that the human heart is capable of loving again and that Willoughby does not deserve the eternal allegiance she is prepared to give him. But this “better acquaintance with the world” is not a cynical acceptance of the impossibility of faithful love or the rejection of moral standards. There are other “shoulds” that Marianne is ignoring: social propriety, duty to her mother and sisters, duty to God. She confesses to Elinor, I saw in my own behaviour, since the beginning of our acquaintance with him last autumn, nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself, and want of kindness to others. I saw that my own feelings had prepared my sufferings, and that my want of fortitude under them had almost led me to the grave. My illness, I well knew, had been entirely brought on by myself by such negligence of my own health, as I had felt even at the time to be wrong. Had I died, it would have been self-destruction. I did not know my danger till the danger was removed;

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but with such feelings as these reflections gave me, I wonder at my recovery,— wonder that the very eagerness of my desire to live, to have time for atonement to my God, and to you all, did not kill me at once.124

Marianne has failed to be prudent, kind, and courageous, and she has nearly driven herself to suicide through her romantic notions. In the end, she realizes, not that she should have abandoned all precepts of how one ought to live, but rather that she was living by the wrong ones. Austen is more nuanced than Machiavelli. Like him, she sees the discrepancy between what is and what should be. She sees that “the what should be” may actually be destructive to “the what is.” Like Machiavelli, she understands that imaginative constructs may lead to ruin. But instead of simply embracing what is, she contends for a wiser “what should be.” The Marianne Dashwood brand of romance is dangerous and deserving of ironic deconstruction, but there is a deeper brand of romance that Austen does not ironically deconstruct. Austen does not reject the romance of mutual submission that finds fulfillment in happy endings. Her deeper brand of romance does have irony, but it is the irony that elevates through its revelation of a heretofore unsuspected order rather than the irony that dissolves stable norms. Wentworth’s deliverance is an excellent example. He dismissively invokes providence when he makes fun of Mary Musgrove’s astonishment that she did not recognize her cousin, while he himself is unaware of the benevolent providence working for his own good. As Mooneyham White observes, “Austen has played a providential role . . . for had the introduction Mary sought taken place, the incident that follows Mary’s complaint, Louisa’s fall, might not have occurred, and Louisa’s fall is key to the ultimate reunification of Anne and Wentworth.”125 The events of Wentworth’s life, even the failure to meet Mr. Elliot that Mary regrets, are ordered by providence, though Wentworth is ignorant of that order and only learns to see it clearly through the shock of Louisa’s engagement to Captain Benwick. That shock is an example of irony, of that “[c]oncordia discors . . . [which] implies that the reconciling of opposites is a sign of natural balance, that oppositions all have their order in God’s plan and fit a God-given harmony.”126 As I noted earlier in the chapter, Benwick’s inconstancy enables Wentworth’s constancy; opposites are reconciled in God’s plan. And yet, what of her deflation of romantic highs that seem to be part of this deeper romance? Henry and Catherine and Marianne, as I have already noted, deflate unrealistic romantic tropes, but are genuinely in love and happy at the end of their respective stories. What of Emma, who does not disclose the whole truth to Mr. Knightley because she will not betray Harriet? It is worth looking more closely at the narrator’s reflections at this moment: “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom

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can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.”127 There is some regret at the impossibility of complete frankness, conveyed in the repetition of “seldom,” and some sense that Emma is wrong to conceal the truth from her beloved. Yet, the condemnation is very gentle. Emma’s conduct is mistaken, but her feelings are not. Her secretiveness is simply not that big a deal. And it is temporary. After Emma learns of Harriet’s engagement to Robert Martin, she rejoices “that all necessity of concealment from Mr. Knightley would soon be over. The disguise, equivocation, mystery, so hateful to her to practise, might soon be over. She could now look forward to giving him that full and perfect confidence which her disposition was most ready to welcome as a duty.”128 The narrator tells us twice that Emma’s need to conceal will “soon be over,” a repetition that conveys her eager anticipation. The “seldom, very seldom” transforms into the “soon, soon” as perfect happiness includes “perfect confidence.” Thus, the ironic deflection of intimacy, intimacy juxtaposed to concealment, does not point to some permanent division between Emma and her beloved, but only a temporary barrier. We do not see the scene of complete frankness, but we anticipate that Emma and Mr. Knightley will have no more secrets between them. Of course, we are still denied a lengthy description of Emma’s response to Mr. Knightley’s declaration of love. And Fanny Price, who has no deep-seated disdain for second attachments, is not granted a tender scene in which Edmund begs for forgiveness and passionately declares his love. Austen does minimize moments of intense romantic passion. She is not at war with passion, but she does share the classical and medieval conviction that reason ought to govern human beings “and that reason, itself, made by God, is the central mode by which we can understand the purposes of the universe.”129 Her characters frequently govern their emotions through prayer and reflection. Anne observes Wentworth “overpowered by the various feelings of his soul, and trying by prayer and reflection to calm them.”130 This rational control is very different from the cold-heartedness of women like Fanny Dashwood, Lady Middleton, and Mrs. Ferrars. The sensible Elinor Dashwood “had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them.”131 Elinor knows how to love and how to feel, but she also knows how to govern herself, unlike Marianne, who must learn to do so. Austen is aware of literature’s emotional dangers, of its power to undo reason’s efforts to govern the soul. Anne Elliot tells Captain Benwick that “it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”132 Poetry,

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ironically, is not safe for its best readers, those capable of “strong feelings,” because it encourages their inclination to emotional indulgence. In Sanditon, Sir Edward enthusiastically describes to Charlotte his reading habits: “The novels which I approve are such as display human nature with grandeur; such as show her in the sublimities of intense feeling; such as exhibit the progress of strong passion from the first germ of incipient susceptibility to the utmost energies of reason half-dethroned.”133 This goes on for some time. Charlotte responds to his wordy effusions with ironic concision: “If I understand you aright . . . our taste in novels is not at all the same.”134 Sir Edward enjoys novels of “intense feeling” and “strong passion” that render “reason half-dethroned,” novels of sensibility, which Austen had mocked since she was a teenager. Like Benwick, Sir Edward reads for emotional indulgence. As an artist, Austen does not desire to tell stories that enable strong and intense feelings to overthrow reason. She does seek to educate her reader’s passion, as I will discuss in the next chapter, but she also wants to educate her reader’s reason. Her own novels are strikingly different from the novels Sir Edward enjoys or the poetry that Captain Benwick prefers; she does not encourage what she would see as a gluttonous indulgence of the passions that threatens to atrophy reason. So at times she does deny her readers “the sublimities of intense feeling.” But what of the economic realism that intrudes into the happy endings? Austen does follow the pattern of romance with her perfect marriages, and yet she tarnishes the purity of romance with practical matters. Like the Wife of Bath, she does not leave the reader to simply bask in the glow of romance unalloyed. She lacks the Wife’s frank sexuality, but she does remind us that young couples need space to live and pasturage for their cows. Does the practical destroy the romantic? Does ironic disjunction undermine earnest happiness? Austen’s practicality intrudes on her romance, but her romance at times ignores the practical. She routinely breezes over the awkward social difficulties that will result from most of the marriages she depicts. As Margie Burns points out, Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham are brothers-in-law, Catherine Morland and Frederick Tilney are related, and Anne Elliot, now Wentworth, will probably have to interact with her father’s heir, William Elliot, the man who wanted to marry her. Burns situates Austen’s implausible happy endings within an older tradition: “Outrageous comic wrap-ups are not new with Austen’s novels. Romping endings with a cavalier disregard for painful realism date back to Euripides—the Ion and the Helen—to say nothing of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Shakespeare.”135 Austen’s practicality seems to undercut her happy endings, but she also blithely downplays certain practical inconveniences, as do many comedic authors.

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What are we to make of her artistic incongruity, of her pairing of perfect happy endings with practical economics? Some readers complain that she is too practical, others that she is too idealistic. Why is her work full of seeming opposites? Why is it incongruous? In order to read her well, should we reject one opposite for the other? In The Company We Keep, Wayne Booth argues that we should enjoy both aspects of Austen, while giving ontological primacy to the practical and the realistic over the romantic. The declaration of perfect happiness at the end of Emma must be read with double vision that enjoys the happy ending but remembers the flawed world and characters Austen has created. Booth does not question the narrator’s declaration about perfect happiness, but suspects that the author is capitulating to the demands of conventional story-writing: “Austen was . . . led, by the inescapable need to make Emma into an effective novel, into conventional patterns of desire that she quite obviously did not herself embrace uncritically.”136 Unambiguous endings conventionally make for good stories; Austen wants to write a good story; therefore, she creates an unambiguous happy ending. She does not really believe that her characters can be as happy as she has made them, but she understands the power such happiness has over her readers. Romance sells. The truly perceptive reader will realize what Austen is doing and accept her ending with the appropriate skepticism, tempering enjoyment of the happiness by remembering how aware Austen is of human imperfection. Austen’s incongruity then arises from her savvy business sense. Such an argument must be considered at length. After all, Austen was no Catherine Morland, naive about the vice and folly of the world, expecting life to resemble sensational literature. Her novels are full of flawed characters and unhappy marriages. Her irony need not be totally destabilizing to all truth, but perhaps her romance is there simply because it makes for a good story. Has Austen given us providentially arranged happy endings that she does not fully endorse? Is she, a talented and self-conscious artist, simply using the most effective conventions she knows? She creates characters whose behavior she does not fully endorse; why not endings? I agree with Booth that we must approach Austen with a double vision, appreciating her happy endings but also tempering that appreciation with an awareness of imperfection and practicality. But I am not persuaded that this double vision is necessary simply because Austen is following literary conventions and the demands of the market. If Reiss is right that irony follows as a consequence of Christian theology, then Austen’s irony follows, at least in part, from her Christian theology, a theology that acknowledges incongruity. Christian irony juxtaposes man’s sinfulness with Scriptural demands to be perfect, man’s weakness with God’s love, man’s physicality with his spirituality. Sometimes the opposites clash in tragic ways, but ultimately

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the Christian believes that God will bring all to an ordered harmony. The Christian artist can represent that discordia concors without one opposition immediately falsifying the other, though perhaps the ultimate harmony is not fully revealed to characters or readers, but only hinted at as Chaucer does in “The Parson’s Tale.” For Austen, reality is capacious enough to include both the romantic and the practical. “They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows,”137 the narrator of Sense and Sensibility tells us. This sentence functions as a kind of synecdoche for Austen’s ability to combine ideal love and mundane practicality. The concern about pasturage for cows does not undermine Mrs. Jenning’s conclusion that “[s]he found in Elinor and her husband, as she really believed, one of the happiest couples in the world.”138 There is some irony that the judgment about their happiness comes from the meddlesome, gossipy, warmhearted Mrs. Jennings. The woman whom Marianne found so tiresome and vulgar, so insulting to the sublimity of Marianne’s version of true love, becomes the judge of marital bliss. Elinor and Edward’s superlative marital bliss does not negate their practical needs. They have not ascended into a heavenly city where they are free from the body. They are still on this earth. Anne and Wentworth will live a comfortable life because they have “one independent fortune between them.”139 Fanny and Edmund need more space, presumably for their growing family. Marianne loves a man who needs a flannel waistcoat. They are all rational creatures capable of deep love, and they are all embodied creatures in need of material provision. Austen does demand a double vision, but it goes beyond the double vision that Booth proposes—a vision that sees reality clearly but then offers romance to satisfy conventional and commercial demands. Austin is keenly aware of her readers’ expectations and of generic conventions, but her double vision has ontological heft. Austen is a defender of both good marriages and good pasturage. The realm of romance is the realm of the ideal—ideally virtuous and beautiful ladies, ideally brave knights, and ideally happy marriages. It is the realm of what man aspires to be though often fails to achieve. Though Austen is not writing exclusively in this genre, she draws deeply from it, from its ontology, not just its traditional tropes. If we do not see this, we will not understand her or her happy endings. Instead, we will ask with Henry James, how can “a serious story of manners . . . close with the factitious happiness of a fairy-tale?”140 But such a question reduces reality to ordinary social concerns and treats happiness as something false. It excludes the ideal, which, despite our modern skepticism, we are still drawn to. As Tauchert states, “We might not want to believe in the myth of romance she [Austen] represents, but that is what draws us to these narratives in the first place.”141 Austen’s romance

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belongs to the medieval tradition, a tradition that sincerely and seriously celebrates the happy ending. She is an artist of the ideal. But she knows that her happy couples and their happy marriages are rare. In a letter, she confides to her niece Fanny, “There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You & I should think perfection, where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the Brother of your particular friend, & belonging to your own County.”142 Austen knows that her ideal man—gracious, spirited, worthy, mannered, compassionate, intelligent, financially blessed—is a rare creature. While her heroes do not all have all these qualities, they are, for the most part, gracious, intelligent, and financially secure. Austen knows enough of the world and of human nature to understand how rare such men are. Yet, she does not join Machiavelli in dismissing the ideal, but instead she seeks to educate her readers on how to discern between true and false ideals. This idealism did not preclude pecuniary interest for herself. Austen was certainly motivated by a desire to sell her books, and her books themselves are grounded in economic realism. Indeed, Tauchert dubs Austen’s novels “realist-romances.”143 She is a social and economic realist, aware of the ways that social inequality and the need for money shape the lives of her characters. Such realism is not always a protest against systems of oppression. While Austen certainly does not approve of those who see marriage as purely a financial arrangement, as Charlotte Lucas and Lucy Steele do, she does recognize the importance of capital for a flourishing marriage. She shares Elinor Dashwood’s practical prudence in the matter of money—lovers cannot live on love alone. In this, her realism tempers her romance. Nevertheless, I do not believe that an interest in commercial success and economic security or an awareness of social injustice and human weakness means we should question the sincerity of her happy endings. The romance of her “realist-romances” is providential, a realm in which love, virtue, and happiness find expression in ideal marriages that are brought about by a benevolent God. It is the realm of Shakespeare’s later comedies and the realm of the chivalric romances of the later Middle Ages. When Austen gives her flawed heroines who live in a flawed society a happy ending, she is not betraying her principles; instead, she is artfully blending genres and celebrating the fundamental hopefulness that Christianity brings, both for this life and for the next.

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IRONIC ROMANCE I have argued that Austen writes providential romances, but the Christian view of providence makes possible both irony and romance. It supplies an order that is not completely known to man, an order that can be revealed at surprising moments and that benevolently works good for the virtuous. As I discussed in the previous chapter, providence’s interventions do not destroy human effort. Providential aid and heroic virtue are both possible, despite their seeming opposition. Providence is incongruously generous to fallen man, and man, that creation of providence, is an ironic incongruity himself— a soul that can contemplate divine truth and a body that needs to be clothed in waistcoats and supported by pasturage. Providence makes irony possible. Austen writes ironic providential romances. Through her irony, she is not destabilizing the ordered cosmos that she believes in. Rather, she is reflecting that order through her irony. Certainly, she does employ her irony as an attack against vice and social injustice, and the emotional excess and ontological folly of a superficial brand of romance. But her attacks rely on a stable order that individuals and society have failed to live up to. Her irony also reveals the paradoxes essential to providential Christianity, as flawed human beings find temporal happiness through a providence that does not enslave but actually liberates. That happiness includes perfectly happy marriages and plenty of pasturage for cows. “All novelists,” Flannery O’Connor declares, “are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.”144 The real may go beyond the currently-in-vogue conventions of literary realism or beyond a critic’s personal philosophy and theology. It may go beyond the ordinary and into the extraordinary. It may go beyond the imperfect to the ideal. It may include the juxtaposition of those seeming contraries that ultimately harmonize in divine providence. For Austen and for her medieval predecessors, the reaches of reality, of all that actually is rather than what is typically seen in society, are more capacious than modern materialism would permit. Her reality certainly includes selfish schemers like Lucy Steele, hapless fools like Mr. Collins, and heartless clerics like Mr. Elton. It includes unhappy marriages like that of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. It includes vague and ineffectual women like Lady Bertram. It also includes the financial woes of young, attractive women—and includes a clear-eyed acknowledgement that men and women cannot live on love alone. It includes waistcoats and pasturage for cows. But it also includes a conviction of the unity of virtue and happiness and of the gracious intervention of providence. She thanks God “for every other source of happiness which Thou hast bountifully bestowed on us.”145 Happiness for Austen is not

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an illusion, but a gift from God. Austen’s ontology includes both messy realism and idealistic romance. My purpose in this work is not to advocate for Austen’s ontological landscape over a modern secular landscape, but rather to encourage readers of Austen to enter into her ontological landscape, to enjoy her romantic structure and happy endings. Our responsibility as good readers is to concede, however briefly, to the ontological landscape of a story, to imaginatively submit to its rules, and perhaps, as a result, to have our own landscape transformed and enriched. I would like to end this chapter with one more example of irony, from a moment when the youthful Jane Austen ironized the temptation to moral gloominess about earthly happiness. In the scrap The Female Philosopher, the lovely Julia . . . [makes] most sensible reflections on the many changes in their situation which so long a period had occasioned, on the advantages of some, and the disadvantages of others. From this subject she made a short digression to the instability of human pleasures and the uncertainty of their duration, which led her to observe that all earthly Joys must be imperfect. She was proceeding to illustrate this doctrine by examples from the Lives of great Men when the Carriage came to the Door and the amiable Moralist with her Father and Sister was obliged to depart.146

This is another example of classic irony, of a statement that means something other than what it says. Austen is not trying to make a serious point about the imperfection of “earthly Joys,” though “the lovely Julia” is. Instead, she is mocking the fondness for moralizing, for philosophical pretension, for what she calls “Sentiments of Morality,” so prevalent in novels of sensibility.147 She is also making fun of the moralist’s fondness for dour pronouncements and moral cliches. Now, are moralists wrong to think that “all earthly Joys must be imperfect”? Austen’s religion teaches her that this life is imperfect and that complete happiness is only found in the next. Yet, her own work, while aware of the imperfection of all earthly joys, does not seek to impress this gloomy truth upon her readers. Instead, she strives to cultivate in her readers that “forbearance and patience . . . which, while it prepares us for the spiritual happiness of the life to come, will secure to us the best enjoyment of what this world can give,”148 and her vision of “the best enjoyment” comes, in part, from her deep engagement with the medieval legacy.

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NOTES 1. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 175. 2. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 168. 3. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Knight’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), line 1101. 4. Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 3.2.64–65. 5. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Claudia Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 268. 6. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1.2.418–20. 7. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 268. 8. Wayne Booth, “Emma, Emma, and the Question of Feminism,” Persuasions 5 (1983), https:​//​jasna​.org​/persuasions​/printed​/number5​/booth​.html. 9. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 319. 10. Booth, “Emma, Emma, and the Question of Feminism.” 11. D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” in Regulated Hatred and Other Essays, ed. Monica Lawlor (London: Athlone Press, 1998), 21. 12. Austen, Persuasion, 135. 13. Austen, Mansfield Park, 321. 14. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 265. 15. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 40. 16. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 172. 17. Edmond Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 2 (1981): 212, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2709317. 18. Anthony Esolen, The Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 14. 19. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 168. 20. Booth, “Emma, Emma, and the Question of Feminism.” 21. Aristotle, “Rhetoric,” in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2: 1419b5. 22. Harding, “Regulated Hatred,” 25. 23. Tony Slade, “Irony in the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Modern Language Review 64, no. 2 (1969): 241, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/3723432. 24. D. W. Harding, “Jane Austen and Moral Judgment,” in Regulated Hatred and Other Essays, ed. Monica Lawlor (London: Athlone Press, 1998), 70. 25. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 14. 26. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 212.

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27. Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 3. 28. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 29. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 19. 30. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 17. 31. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 15. 32. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 14. 33. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 14. 34. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 35. D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969), 70. 36. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 211. 37. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 211 38. Edward R. Haymes, “Chaucer and the English Romance Tradition,” South Atlantic Bulletin 37, no. 4 (1972): 36, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/3197364. 39. Harding, “Regulated Hatred,” 21. 40. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 15. 41. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 373. 42. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 375. 43. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 17. 44. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 45. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 46. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 47. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 48. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 376. 49. I am indebted to Matthew Brumit, who in conversation drew my attention to the symbolic significance of the movement from shield, to girdle, to crown of thorns. 50. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, trans. Marie Borroff (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), lines 2529–30. 51. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), line 11. 52. Chaucer, “Knight’s Tale,” line 1043. 53. Chrétien de Troyes, “Lancelot, or, The Knight of the Cart,” in Arthurian Romances, trans. D. D. R. Owen (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 185. 54. Chaucer, “General Prologue,” line 12. 55. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 56. Chaucer, “General Prologue,” lines 161–62. 57. Chaucer, “General Prologue,” lines 196–97. 58. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 59. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: Sir Topas,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 708–9. 60. Chaucer, “Sir Topas,” lines 897–902. 61. Haymes, “Chaucer and the English Romance Tradition,” 35. 62. Chaucer, “Sir Topas,” line 923. 63. Chaucer, “Sir Topas,” line 924. 64. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 368.

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65. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 368. 66. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 218. 67. Chaucer, “Knight’s Tale,” lines 3103–6. 68. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Miller’s Prologue,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), line 3113. 69. Chaucer, “Miller’s Prologue,” line 3127. 70. Aristotle, “Rhetoric,” 2: 1419b5. 71. Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Miller’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 3279–81. 72. Chaucer, “Miller’s Tale,” lines 3337–38. 73. Chaucer, “Miller’s Tale,” line 3734. 74. Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 1236. 75. Chaucer, “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” lines 1257–58. 76. Chaucer, “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” lines 1257–59. 77. Chaucer, “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” line 1262. 78. Esther Quinn, “Chaucer’s Arthurian Romance,” Chaucer Review 18, no. 3 (1984): 217, https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/25093882. 79. Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Parson’s Prologue,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 46–51. 80. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 212. 81. Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Parson’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 328. 82. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 14. 83. Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 70. 84. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 85. Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, trans. Marc LePain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 7. 86. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 211. 87. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 19. 88. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Tim Kendall, and Mary Jo Salter, 6th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), line 2. 89. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 29. 90. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 178. 91. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 255. 92. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 255. 93. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 213. 94. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 214. 95. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 212–13. 96. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 213. 97. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 214.

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98. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David B. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), book 2.8, p. 58. 99. Edmund Spenser, “An Hymne in Honour of Love,” in Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), lines 83–84, p. 587. 100. Spenser, “Hymne in Honour of Love,” lines 87–88, p. 587. 101. Reiss, “Medieval Irony,” 214. 102. Thomas Aquinas, “The Compendium,” trans. Cyril Vollert, in Opuscula I: Treatises, vol. 55 (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2018), book 1, chap. 102, p. 73. 103. I am indebted to Gregory Roper for his observations about the differences between Dante’s orderly vision and Chaucer’s motley pilgrimage, during a graduate class on Chaucer. 104. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, iii. 105. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 19. 106. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 107. Esolen, Ironies of Faith, 14. 108. Laura Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 76. 109. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 75. 110. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 83 111. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 82. 112. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 78. 113. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 72. 114. Austen, Persuasion, 175. 115. Harding, “Regulated Hatred,” 71. 116. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 266. 117. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 266. 118. Mudrick, Irony as Defense and Discovery, 3. 119. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 61. 120. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 43. 121. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 43. 122. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 43. 123. Machiavelli, The Prince, 61. 124. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 244–45. 125. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 90. 126. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 83. 127. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 470. 128. Austen, Emma, 519. 129. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 79. 130. Austen, Persuasion, 81. 131. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 8. 132. Austen, Persuasion, 73.

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133. Jane Austen, Sanditon, chap. 8, https:​//​gutenberg​.net​.au​/ebooks​/fr008641​ .html. 134. Austen, Sanditon, chap. 8. 135. Margie Burns, “Comic Resolution, Humorous Loose Ends in Austen’s Novels,” Persuasions 33 (2011): 243. 136. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 431. 137. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 265. 138. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 265. 139. Austen, Persuasion, 175. 140. Henry James, “The Novels of George Eliot,” in Views and Reviews (Boston: Ball Publishing Company, 1908; Project Gutenberg, 2011), https:​ //​ www​ .gutenberg​.org​/cache​/epub​/37424​/pg37424​-images​.html. 141. Ashley Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen: Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 8. 142. Jane Austen, “Letter 109,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 292. 143. Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen, 24. 144. Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in O’Connor: Collected Works, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 815. 145. Jane Austen, The Prayers of Jane Austen (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2015), 32. 146. Jane Austen, “The Female Philosopher,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 217. 147. Austen, “Female Philosopher,” 216. 148. Austen, Prayers of Jane Austen, 52.

Chapter 8

Joy and Happiness A Romantic Education

At the end of Sir Orfeo, the people of the city of Thrace rejoice in the return of their long-absent queen, Heurodis: And sethen, with great procession, Thai brought the Quen into the toun, With al maner of menstraci. Lord! ther was grete melody! For joie thai wepe with her eighe1

The mood at the end of the romance is one of celebratory joy, though accompanied by tears. Indeed, joy is one of the reigning emotions of many medieval romances. At the end of Havelok, “The feste of his coruning / Laste with gret joying”;2 at the end of Emaré, “Ther was a joyfull metynge / Of the Emperour and of the Kynge, / And also of Emaré.”3 Yvain and Gawain ends with the assurance that “so Sir Ywain and his wive / In joy and blis thai led thaire live.”4 In The Winter’s Tale, the reunion between Leontes and Polixenes, like that of the Thracians and their queen, causes joyful weeping: “There might you have beheld one / joy crown another, so and in such manner that it / seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their / joy waded in tears.”5 Romance is a joyful, albeit tearful, genre.6 That joy is often associated with a feast, an association that endures beyond medieval and Shakespearean romance. The epigraph to the final chapter of Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest comes from William Collins’s “Ode to the Passions”: Last came Joy’s ecstatic trial:— They would have thought who heard the strain, They saw in Tempe’s vale her native maids 193

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Amidst the festal sounding shades, To some unwearied minstrel dancing, While as his flying fingers kiss’d the strings, Love framed with mirth a gay fantastic round.7

While Collins is not writing a romance, he makes the traditional romantic association between joy and festivity, an association that Radcliffe appropriates for her romance. Collins does not describe an actual feast, but rather what those who heard the music of joy would imagine—maidens gaily dancing to a minstrel’s music. This vision of joy is, unsurprisingly for an eighteenth-century poet, classical, with the maids dancing in “Tempe’s vale.” The term “minstrel,” however, is medieval. According to the OED, until the end of the 1500s, minstrel meant “a person employed by a patron to provide entertainment by singing, playing music, storytelling, juggling,” but “[i]n later use . . . [came to mean] a singer or musician of the medieval period, esp. one who sings heroic or lyric poetry, providing musical accompaniment on a harp, lute, or other stringed instrument.”8 The classical maids are accompanied by a medieval musician. In the chapter that this epigraph introduces, Adeline, Theodore, and Arnaud la Luc return home to the la Luc family village and are greeted with joy and music: “When the younger part of the peasants heard the news of his [Arnaud’s] arrival, the general joy was such, that, led by the tabor and pipe, they danced before his carriage to the chateau, where they again welcomed him and his family with the enlivening strains of music.”9 This sounds remarkably like the end of Sir Orfeo as the people greet their king and queen “[w]ith al maner menstraci.”10 It is a fitting ending for a work with “romance” in the title. Austen also preserves the romantic tradition of joy in her ironic providential romances. When Emma learns about Harriet’s engagement, she is overjoyed because concern for Harriet was the one hindrance to her own joy: “The joy, the gratitude, the exquisite delight of her sensations may be imagined. The sole grievance and alloy thus removed in the prospect of Harriet’s welfare, she was really in danger of becoming too happy for security.”11 “Grievance” is a strong word that indicates the depth of Emma’s sorrow for Harriet; though she sends her friend to London, she is deeply distressed by the pain Harriet must feel. The OED defines “alloy,” in its figurative sense, as “an undesirable element which impairs or debases something good.”12 Now that Harriet has found happiness, Emma’s own happiness is no longer impaired or debased. She fully receives the good she loves and is able to respond with festive joy: “Her mind was in a state of flutter and wonder, which made it impossible for her to be collected. She was in dancing, singing, exclaiming spirits; and till she had moved about, and talked to herself, she could be fit for nothing rational.”13 The participles “dancing, singing, exclaiming” are

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expressions of joy and convey Emma’s delight in her friend’s happiness. She is not actually playing musical instruments in the street—too excessive for the restrained Austen, and anyway Emma was never very devoted to her piano—but her singing and exclaiming spirit resembles the procession of the Thracians in celebration of their queen’s return or the peasants dancing and playing instruments to welcome la Luc home. Emma’s joy is enriched by the joy of her friend; though she does not understand Harriet’s changeableness in love, she finds her engagement to Robert Martin “most joyful.”14 Emma has a superlative experience of a very medieval emotion. Joy appears throughout Austen’s canon. When Anne hears that Louisa and Captain Benwick are engaged, “[s]he had some feelings which she was ashamed to investigate. They were too much like joy, senseless joy!”15 The exclamation here brings us very close to Anne’s interior state. We are swept up in the joy of which she is ashamed. Despite her scruples, the reader’s sympathies are with Anne here; we side with her joy over her shame. Georgianna Darcy’s joy takes the form of a long, effusive letter: “The joy which Miss Darcy expressed on receiving similar information, was as sincere as her brother’s in sending it. Four sides of paper were insufficient to contain all her delight, and all her earnest desire of being loved by her sister.”16 When Marianne recovers, Elinor’s “joy . . . led to any thing rather than to gaiety. Marianne restored to life, health, friends, and to her doting mother, was an idea to fill her heart with sensations of exquisite comfort, and expand it in fervent gratitude;—but it led to no outward demonstrations of joy, no words, no smiles.”17 The depth of Elinor’s joy is shown by its imperceptibility. It is something very different from “gaiety.” Sense and Sensibility is full of joy. When Elinor learns that Edward is not married to Lucy, she “burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease.”18 Marianne also experiences joy that cannot be articulated and transcends mere cheerfulness: her “joy though sincere as her love for her sister, was of a kind to give her neither spirits nor language.”19 Edward Ferrars, we have seen, experiences joy when he is delivered from Lucy’s clutches. In Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas gives “joyful consent”20 to the marriage of Edmund and Fanny. Joy is not relegated to characters. The narrator of Northanger Abbey rejoices in the excellent marriage of Elinor Tilney: “My own joy on the occasion is very sincere. I know no one more entitled, by unpretending merit, or better prepared by habitual suffering, to receive and enjoy felicity.”21 The narrator’s joy is a response to the justice of Elinor’s happy ending; a virtuous woman who has lost her mother and has lived with such a difficult father deserves happiness. Joy, associated with tears and silence, is not simply cheerfulness. After all, neither Elinor nor Marianne is moved to gaiety or high spirits in their joy. To understand such joy, we must briefly turn to that august medieval authority,

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Thomas Aquinas. Dennis Quinn explains the Thomistic understanding of the relationship between love, desire, and joy: “love (here meaning the fundamental inclination of the appetites to what pleases or best suits the sensible well-being of the subject) arises first as a cognition of some good object not possessed; such a first inclination then leads to desire to possess the good; and joy results from the possession of the good.”22 In the sequence of emotions from love to joy, the subject first recognizes that there is a good, desires that good, and finally, joyfully, possesses it. The great Thomist, Josef Pieper, defines joy as “the response of a lover receiving what he loves.”23 In a story, joy arises from the character’s reception of that which she loves and desires, and her joy is all the greater because she has walked through the sorrow of losing or not yet possessing that good—Elinor feared for Marianne’s life and believed that Edward was lost to her, and that fear increases the joy she experiences when she learns that she has lost neither sister nor lover. The happy ending of a comedy is the joyful possession of that which was previously desired—the beloved, a family member restored to health and happiness, a peaceful realm, heavenly bliss. If the author has succeeded in directing our love and desire as readers, we also share in that joy, for we have come to love the characters and desire joyful possession for them. For Shakespeare, the divine also shares in that joy. In As You Like It, Hymen declares, “Then there is mirth in heaven / When earthly things made even / Atone together.”24 Austen never has the gods literally descend, but her providential cosmos suggests a God who wills joy for those under his care. The power to direct desire is characteristic of all stories. In The Company We Keep, Wayne Booth discusses the power of stories to shape our desires as readers; he sees “plot or form as active rhetoric—as the total patterning of the reader’s desires and satisfactions.”25 The plot of a story persuades us to desire those goods established by the story. The happy ending shapes our desire for happiness itself and for the happiness of the characters; we are persuaded, if the author is skillful and we are attentive and receptive readers, to see happiness, as the author has defined it, as desirable, and to wish that happiness for the characters and even for ourselves. When they do receive that happiness, our desire is satisfied as well, and we participate in their joy. As she directs our desire, Austen gives us an education in both the emotion of joy and the state of happiness. Jan Fergus speaks of Jane Austen’s “[e]motional didacticism”:26 “Austen educates her reader’s judgments and sympathies. She intends to instruct and to refine the emotions along with the perceptions and the moral sense.”27 Fergus is not thinking specifically of Austen’s happy endings, but her discussion of “emotional didacticism” applies to those endings, indeed to happy endings in general, not just Austen’s. The happy ending seeks to refine our emotions, to expand our capacity for joy. Though Austen is a more sophisticated and deliberate didact than many of the

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medieval romancers, their endings also encourage the reader to respond with joy. The more straightforward medieval romances—excluding Chaucer’s and the Gawain-poet’s—refine our emotions by holding up exemplary characters for admiration, brave knights and virtuous ladies who perfectly embody the ideals of their society. The success of their endings depends on our admiration for the characters, the ideals they embody, and the goods they receive. Romancers rely on our admiration for enduring goodness in order to elicit joy; joy, for them, is the proper emotional response to the virtuous receiving those goods that they love. It is this kind of joy that makes the Thracians in Sir Orfeo weep. Austen also wants her readers to rejoice in the happiness of the virtuous, but she famously eschews “pictures of perfection . . . [which] make me sick & wicked”28 and instead offers attractive but flawed characters who grow into their happiness. Fergus writes, “Although . . . [Austen] accepts the eighteenth-century doctrine that literature should educate the emotions and the judgment, she rejects most of the literary conventions associated with the doctrine . . . particularly the exemplary character.”29 Austen wants to educate the emotions and judgment, but she does not believe that creating a perfect heroine will do so: “Austen rejects perfect heroines because they create emotional and moral responses precisely the reverse of edifying.”30 Rather than desiring to imitate perfectly beautiful, moral, and accomplished heroines, we might be more inclined to hate them. Austen gives us morally complex heroes and heroines who grow into virtue, and, as a result of their growth are more attractive to readers. She gives us a heroine who is spoiled by chivalric elevation and must grow into knightly humility, and another heroine who grows from worldly prudence to providential romance and from meek, universal helpmeet to bold knight and alluring lady. Austen wants her readers to respond with the proper emotion to the proper object. For her, the emotions have moral heft. The happiness that Mr. Knightley and Emma obtain at the end, a happiness grounded in their shared growth in virtue and bound by their mutual, submissive love, is a happiness truly worthy of joy. The happiness of Anne and Wentworth, obtained after years of separation and marked by unceasing devotion and mutual tenderness, is also worthy of joy. We often hear characters in television shows assure each other that they deserve happiness. Sometimes this is persuasive, sometimes not, depending on how successfully the story has patterned our desires. Austen is a skillful rhetor, and we ought to respond with joy to the happiness her characters obtain. The happy ending encourages us to rejoice in the happiness of others. “Comedy,” Gene Fendt argues, “is the truing of desire and sympathy.”31 The happy ending is the truing of our desire for happiness and of our sympathy for others who possess it. The happy ending teaches us to desire happiness, as the

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author defines it, both for ourselves and for the characters, and to sympathize, to feel with, the characters who receive it, to rejoice in their good fortune. Of course, the happy ending is not uniquely didactic. Together the tragic ending and the comic ending teach us about the nature of happiness: “the target is happiness, art’s way to it is catharsis of the passions, and the purpose of art is to rouse us to love and strive toward, to fear the destruction of and pity mistakes about” happiness.32 The tragic ending teaches us to fear the destruction of and pity mistakes about happiness; the happy ending teaches us to love and strive for happiness, for ourselves and, through imaginative sympathy, for others. Adam Smith, who died when Austen was fourteen, grounds his entire ethical system on our ability to imaginatively sympathize with others. He realizes that that sympathy extends, not only to flesh and blood human beings, but to literary characters: “Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us, is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery is not more real than that with their happiness.”33 Note Smith’s association of “joy,” “deliverance,” and “romance.” As readers of tragedy, romances, and novels, we share in both the grief and the joy of characters we have come to love. If the author is able to persuade us to love his or her heroes and heroines, to rejoice and suffer with them, we then long for their happiness and are open to the author’s teachings on the nature of happiness. By persuading us to love Emma and Anne and long for their happiness, Austen persuades us to accept her definition of happiness, especially her definition of happy love. Emma and Anne, rational human beings and brave and humble knights, offer the reader a vision of happy love that is grounded in virtue, equal companionship, and mutual submission. Through her engagement with courtly love, Austen offers her readers a rich education in the kind of love that is most conducive to happiness, and through her engaging heroines with whom we sympathize, she awakens our longing for her kind of happiness. Courtly love and happiness are not utterly irreconcilable, but only if we see that the knight’s ability to grow and to courageously serve and worshipfully elevate his beloved does not belong exclusively to men. In the end then, the question about women and the question about happy endings, raised in the introduction to this work, are intimately related. By upending the gender norms of courtly love, Austen shows that a woman is capable, not just of being the static object of a man’s pursuit of happiness, but a dynamic agent, capable of growing into virtue and pursuing happiness herself. By granting her dynamic heroines perfectly happy marriages, she does not betray real women, but awakens her readers’ longing for marriages of equality, in which both husband and wife submit to and elevate each other. She is not saying that women do not suffer in society—she was keenly

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aware of that suffering from her own life—but she is saying that, in all situations including marriage, women should be seen not as fair ladies but as rational and potentially virtuous beings, and that relationships between men and women that acknowledge their shared excellence are profoundly attractive. For Austen, a happy ending depends, not on female submission, but on female heroism. In the midst of Austen’s ideal happy endings, we must remember her irony, which is also part of her romantic education in joy and happiness. Her ironic deflation of destructive romance, Rougemont’s “fatal love,”34 warns us away from a dangerous ideal, and her ironic deflection of romantic highs helps us cultivate reason as the monarch of our souls. Her moral irony reminds us of human failure, individual and societal, even as her heroes and heroines find perfect happiness. Her paradoxical irony, stemming from Christian truths, reminds us of God’s mercy despite man’s weakness, and of man himself as a concord of opposites, of body and soul. We rejoice that Anne and Wentworth have found loving and intelligent companionship in each other, but we also rejoice that they can live off the money he has earned during the war. Economic stability is a blessing for creatures who need material provision. Austen’s ironic providential romances give her readers a vision of happiness that embraces the paradoxes of human nature and a taste of joy that responds to the possession of both marriage and pasturage. Of course, some readers of Austen may still be skeptical of happy endings per se. After all, how many marriages are actually grounded in mutual submission and elevation? Aren’t there more Mr. Eltons than Mr. Knightleys, more Mr. Elliots than Captain Wentworths in the world? Who actually has the good luck to marry a partner whom they deeply admire who also happens to have an independent fortune? What human being actually has a happy life? We might have moments of good cheer, certainly, but they pass so quickly and are so infrequent. And who actually obtains a happy ending? Life is a perpetual series of endings and beginnings. Yet, for all that, we continue to desire the happy ending. As Tauchert declares, “we all really still want the same thing—even if only unconsciously. The desire for a happy ending is a universal.”35 Perhaps the human condition is a tragedy, and our deepest desire is for a good we can never possess. Perhaps the desire for happiness is a comforting delusion that we fall into when we cannot bear the sorrow or even the banality of this life. But, even if the happy ending is only an escapist delusion, “impulses such as day-dreaming, wish-fulfillment, nostalgia, indeed all forms of ‘escapism’ . . . are universal . . . and if the writer’s job is to describe the world as it is, including human feelings, then part of his job is done in presenting and justifying such states of mind.”36 Perhaps our dreams of happiness are futile, but the fact that we dream those dreams means something. All of human existence is open to an author, including our longing for

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a better existence than the one we have. Art shows us who we are, in all our glory, our pain, and our delusions. For some authors in some periods, this desire for happiness has been taken very seriously. In the classical and medieval tradition, happiness is the good that human beings desire above all others. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius writes, What all men want, although they seek it by different routes and through different activities, is to be happy. That is the summum bonum, the supreme good, the one that leaves room for no others, for if there were anything further to want it could not be the highest good. Something beyond it or outside it would remain to be desired. So happiness is necessarily that state that is perfect and that includes within it everything a man could want. Now, all men strive for this condition, although they do so by various means. The desire for happiness is inborn, instinctive in the minds of men. But they are led astray by false ideas of the good.37

For Boethius, happiness is the good toward which all men strive, and it is the highest good for it contains all other goods within itself; it is “that state that is perfect and that includes within it everything a man could want.” All men are searching for this state of perfection though they take different paths, some of which are false. For Austen, Mrs. Elton’s officious and obnoxious knight-errantry is a false path, whereas the knightliness of Emma and her lover is the truth path to happiness. Like Boethius, Austen sees happiness as man’s “one overall concern.” Alasdair MacIntyre famously declares her “the last great representative of the classical tradition of virtues,”38 a tradition that involves the intimate union of virtue and happiness and sees happiness as man’s greatest good, a happiness offered by and fulfilled in a good God. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith explicitly articulates this classical tradition which implicitly shapes Austen’s novels: The happiness of mankind . . . seems to have been the original purpose intended by the Author of nature, when he brought them into existence. No other end seems worthy of that supreme wisdom and divine benignity which we necessarily ascribe to him; and this opinion, which we are led to by the abstract consideration of his infinite perfections, is still more confirmed by the examination of the works of nature, which seem all intended to promote happiness.39

By embracing this classical vision, Austen “turns away from the competing catalogues of the virtues of the eighteenth century and restores a teleological perspective.”40 In both her art and her ethics, Austen belongs to an ethical tradition that extends beyond the eighteenth century into the classical and

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medieval past. According to that tradition, virtue has a teleological purpose— happiness, the highest good, “the original purpose intended by the Author of nature.” One is good, not merely to be good, but in order to be happy. And God created man to be happy. Virtue, to use a word Austen was very fond of, “secures” happiness. In the final chapter of Mansfield Park, the narrator assures us, “With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.”41 Fanny and Edmund’s virtue, their “true merit”—along with their love, fortune, and friends—secures their happiness. The language here echoes Austen’s prayer, which I have referred to throughout this work; she asks for “forbearance and patience . . . which, while it prepares us for the spiritual happiness of the life to come, will secure to us the best enjoyment of what this world can give.”42 For Austen, virtue, along with other external goods, secures happiness, and she affirms, even in her prayers, that happiness includes earthly enjoyment. Austen is not a grim ascetic who sees this life merely as a vale of tears to be endured for the sake of heavenly bliss. As a young writer, she ironized the moralist’s gloominess about temporal joys. She was capable of that irony because she recognized another Christian irony: man, made for eternal bliss, is nonetheless still an earthly creature in search of earthly happiness. In the grammar of her prayer, spiritual happiness comes in a clausal aside introduced by a subordinate conjunction, while the whole sentence culminates in “the best enjoyment of what this world can give.” For Austen, human beings need not wait until heaven to “strive to attain” that “highest of all goods.”43 In her country estates, parsonages, drawing rooms, and gardens, she places heroes and heroines who strive for happiness through virtue in a manner that authors like Aristotle and Boethius would recognize. I am not here interested in determining whether the tradition to which Austen belongs is correct or which paths to happiness are objectively true or whether happiness is possible in this life or even in the next. I certainly have much sympathy with Eva Brann’s declaration that “Jane Austen . . . knows what the angels know—that happiness is more worthy of note than unhappiness” and “she presupposes a sensible reader . . . one who knows enough of happiness to prefer it to other states.”44 Happiness, whatever it is and however we obtain it, is far preferable to unhappiness. But because this is a work on Austen and not a philosophical or theological treatise on happiness, I simply want to assert that the potential importance of happiness should check us from too quickly dismissing the happy ending. If happiness is the main concern of men and women and the good that contains all other goods or at least can be understood this way, should we not at least give attention to its presence in literature? If we all still long for a happy ending, despite modern skepticism, should we not take that longing seriously? And in doing so, might

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we be able to receive the gift of joy that the romantic genre offers? At the very least, as an act of readerly courtesy, dare I say gallantry, we should fully enter into the world of those authors, like Austen, who take the happy ending and happiness seriously. Of course, there are dangers in reading stories that end happily. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, we might become unable to accept the banality and ugliness of life if we only read romances in which beautiful people find perfect happiness. Or we might become so accustomed to happy endings that we see tragedy as needlessly depressing. The danger, however, does not belong to comedy alone. We might overindulge in melancholy and tragedy. Captain Benwick has made himself ill through his intemperate reading of melancholy poetry about thwarted love. As Booth writes, “Jane Austen . . . often shows that fiction can have powerful effects—for good or evil—on characters and societies. . . . she insists that the fictions we imbibe help make us who we are.”45 Even though Austen realizes that the power of stories to make us who we are can be dangerous, she rarely suggests that we simply stop reading certain kinds of books. Catherine Morland does not burn her copies of Radcliffe’s books; she simply learns how to read them less naively. Anne’s cure for Benwick is not to hurl his Byron into the sea, but to widen his reading to include moralists as well as poets. He has been reading too narrowly. Austen is less interested in banning books than in shaping how we read and expanding what we read. Here, I think we should take up her wise advice. We moderns, skeptical of idealism and deeply aware of social injustice, should not reject Austen’s ironic providential romances, but embrace them as part of a very catholic literary canon. We need not reject our tragedies and our bleak, forthright explorations of oppression, but we should include novels calculated to educate us in joy by furnishing our imaginations with lovable heroes and heroines whose virtue secures their happiness. NOTES 1. “Sir Orfeo,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), lines 587–91. 2. “Havelok,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), lines 2950–51. 3. “Emaré,” in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), lines 1021–23. 4. “Yvain and Gawain,” in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), lines 4023–24.

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5. William Shakespeare, “The Winter’s Tale,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 5. 2. 44–46. 6. Joy is also associated with the ultimate happy ending, paradisal bliss. The Parson describes “the endelees blisse of hevene, ther joye hath no contrarioustee of wo ne grevaunce . . . ther as is the blisful compaignye that rejoysen hem everemo, everich of otheres joye.” Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales: The Parson’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 2nd ed. (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 328. 7. Quoted in Ann Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest (London: J. Limbird, 1824; Project Gutenberg, 2021, chap. XXVI, https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/64701​/64701​ -h​/64701​-h​.htm). 8. “minstrel, n.” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press, https:​//​ www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/118957​?rskey​=gywI1F​&result​=1​&isAdvanced​=false. 9. Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, chap. XXVI. 10. “Sir Orfeo,” line 589. 11. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 518. 12. “alloy, n.” OED Online, September 2022, Oxford University Press, https:​//​www​ .oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/5477​?rskey​=v6AUVI​&result​=1​&isAdvanced​=false. 13. Austen, Emma, 518. 14. Austen, Emma, 526. 15. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 118. 16. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 262. 17. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Claudia Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 223. 18. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 254. 19. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 256. 20. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 320. 21. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 173. 22. Dennis Quinn, Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 13. 23. Josef Pieper, In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), 23. 24. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 5.4.106–8. 25. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 206. 26. Jan Fergus, Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983), 4.

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27. Fergus, Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel, 3. 28. Jane Austen, “Letter 155,” in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 350. 29. Fergus, Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel, 5. 30. Fergus, Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel, 5. 31. Gene Fendt, Love Song for the Life of the Mind: An Essay on the Purpose of Comedy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 149. 32. Fendt, Love Song, 177. 33. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 10. 34. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Pantheon, 1956) 15. 35. Ashley Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen: Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 165. 36. R. S. White, Let Wonder Seem Familiar: Endings in Shakespeare’s Romance Vision (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985), 19–20. 37. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David B. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), book 3.2, p. 61. 38. Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 243. 39. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 166. 40. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 240. 41. Austen, Mansfield Park, 321. 42. Jane Austen, The Prayers of Jane Austen (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2015), 52. 43. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 41. 44. Eva Brann, “The Perfection of Jane Austen,” Imaginative Conservative, July 30, 2018, https:​//​theimaginativeconservative​.org​/2022​/07​/perfection​-of​-jane​-austen​-eva​ -brann​.html​#:​​~:​text​=Jane​%20Austen​%20wrote​%20a​%20perfect​,an​%20invitation​ %20and​%20a​%20difficulty. 45. Wayne C. Booth, “Emma, Emma and the Question of Feminism,” Persuasions 5 (1983).

Conclusion

It might seem that I have wandered far from Austen’s concrete relationship with the Middle Ages in the last chapter. Let us conclude then with two poems from the Austen family, one written by Jane herself and the other by her older brother James. Jane Austen’s poem, “When Winchester Races,” was composed on July 15, 1817, three days before she died. I began this book with Austen’s youthful History of England, so it seems fitting to conclude with her last work. This poem, which Laura Mooneyham White calls “a rollicking satire,”1 has not garnered much critical attention, and her “relatives suppressed . . . her final literary production.”2 It is not a great poem, but it is surprisingly medieval. The speaker explains that when the races at Winchester were founded no one asked for “the leave of St Swithin / And that William of Wykham’s approval was faint.”3 The poem begins with moral failure through forgetfulness. In their pursuit of pleasure, the people of Winchester have not remembered their old Saint Swithin, bishop of Winchester Cathedral in the ninth century and the cathedral’s patron saint. They have also ignored the disapproval of William of Wykeham, founder of New College and bishop of Winchester in the fourteenth century. In her last days on earth, Jane Austen wrote a poem referencing two spiritual leaders who lived well before the Protestant Reformation. Austen did not convert to Catholicism on her deathbed, nor did she begin writing historical romances in the manner of Sir Walter Scott. Nevertheless, her final poem is strikingly medieval, including the dress of the people watching the races, who are “ermin’d.”4 Ermine is a particularly medieval fur. Bevis of Southhampton (c. 1324), one of the most popular and enduring Middle English romances, mentions “forers of ermin,”5 and in Guy of Warwick (c. 1300), an ermine—in one of the strangest moments in medieval romance—runs out of a character’s mouth while he is sleeping: “Than seighe he an ermine com of his mouthe.”6 It is striking that Austen chooses such a characteristically medieval fabric. In the midst of this secular entertainment and lavish dress, the neglected and dead Saint Swithin makes a sudden appearance, leaps to the roof of the cathedral, and becomes the voice of moral correction, denouncing those watching 205

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the races and cursing them with rain. This is a comic poem, but comedy with moral authority, and Austen grants that moral authority to a medieval saint. “The past,” Mooneyham White contends, “is right to be so displeased, because modern life has become confused, disordered, and irreligious,”7 and Austen’s “allegiance [is] to St. Swithin and the church, rather than with the ‘good people,’”8 clad in ermine. That past is emphatically medieval. The image of a saint from the ninth century rising up to curse frivolous lords and ladies is not one we normally associate with Austen, and a supernatural explanation for rain in July is more medieval than eighteenth-century Anglican. So too are the Catholic bishops she mentions. Nevertheless, this medieval poem comes from the Georgian Austen, the Austen of drawing rooms and balls, of carriages and turns-about-the-room. But she is also the Austen of abbeys, Gothic windows, gallant service, eternal devotion, knight-errantry, and ermine. Even Austen’s funeral had a medieval setting. Penned shortly after his sister’s death, James Austen’s “Venta! within thy sacred fane” describes Winchester Cathedral, setting for both Jane’s final work and her funeral, in medieval terms. He praises the cathedral’s “Gothic choir”9 and draws his reader’s attention to “Old Saxons Monarchs Coffins”10 and “Gothic tracery.”11 While James’s primary purpose is to praise a beloved sister, he cannot resist a little architectural history and aesthetic judgment. The Norman Cathedral, constructed in the eleventh century, was transformed into the Gothic style in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, a transformation of which James approves. He celebrates the “heavier [Norman] style effaced / Or the plain roof the fret work spread / And formed the Arch with lancet head.”12 This Gothic renovation becomes, for James, the standard of “beauty, Sense & worth,”13 never surpassed until “upon a Sister’s bier / Her Brothers drop the bitter tear.”14 He then goes on to praise Jane’s many excellent qualities, her intelligence, her ability to spot the ridiculous, her sisterly devotion, and even her physical appearance which he describes as “fair,” that word deeply associated with medieval romance and courtly love.15 Brother and sister share a fascination with the medieval world, though Jane far surpassed James in the depth and brilliance of her engagement with courtly love and romance. From the buildings she lived in and visited, to her juvenilia, to her major works, to her final days and beyond, Jane Austen was shaped and surrounded by the Middle Ages. To quote the narrator of Northanger Abbey, “my readers . . . will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are hastening together to perfect felicity.”16 While I make no claim to hasten my reader toward “perfect felicity,” I am hastening, in this compressed epilogue, to my final invitation to readers of Austen to embrace her “perfect felicity.” I hope that I have shown that Austen belongs to a literary tradition that invites

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the storyteller and reader, in a warm and hospitable “we,” to enjoy, if only for a moment, a taste of perfect happiness. Like the medieval romancers before her, she has the poet’s power to transcend nature whose “world is brazen” while “the poets only deliver a golden,”17 and, as Eva Brann notes, “she chooses, with golden rationality, to make it a happy world.”18 Though Austen’s happy world is certainly accessible in many ways to a modern audience, she is not straightforwardly modern, nor even simply a creature of the eighteenth century. The imaginative roots of her golden world run deep. So should those of her readers. NOTES 1. Laura Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 157. 2. Emily Auerbach, “Searching for Jane Austen: Restoring the ‘Fleas’ and ‘Bad Breath,’” Persuasion 27 (2005): 37. 3. Jane Austen, “Written at Winchester,” in The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family, ed. David Selwyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), lines 3–4. 4. Jane Austen, “Winchester,” lines 7–8. 5. “Bevis of Hampton,” in Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston, ed. Graham Drake, Eve Salisbury, and Ronald B. Herzman (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), line 3721, https:​//​d​.lib​.rochester​.edu​/teams​/text​/salisbury​-four​-romances​-of​-england​-bevis​-of​ -hampton. 6. Stanzaic Guy of Warwick, ed. Alison Wiggins (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), line 1936, https:​//​d​.lib​.rochester​.edu​/teams​/text​/wiggins​ -stanzaic​-guy​-of​-warwick. 7. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 3. 8. Mooneyham White, Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, 157. 9. James Austen, “Venta! within thy sacred fane,” in The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family, ed. David Selwyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), line 6. 10. James Austen, “Venta!” line 10. 11. James Austen, “Venta!” line 16. 12. James Austen, “Venta!” lines 18–20. 13. James Austen, “Venta!” line 22. 14. James Austen, “Venta!” lines 23–24. 15. James Austen, “Venta!” 26. 16. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 172. 17. Sir Phillip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons LTD, 1965), 100.

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18. Eva Brann, “The Perfection of Jane Austen,” Imaginative Conservative, July 30, 2018, https:​//​theimaginativeconservative​.org​/2022​/07​/perfection​-of​-jane​-austen​-eva​ -brann​.html​#:​​~:​text​=Jane​%20Austen​%20wrote​%20a​%20perfect​,an​%20invitation​ %20and​%20a​%20difficulty.

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Index

abbey, 16; “Abbeyland,” 36; Donwell Abbey, 36; Northanger Abbey, 14, 37; Reading Abbey, 35; Stoneleigh Abbey, 35 Austen, Jane: Emma, 4, 13, 14, 15, 17, 38, 52, 73, 78, 80, 83, 89, 93, 102, 103, 120, 127, 129, 146, 150; 158, 183; Evelyn, 35; Henry and Eliza, 58n87; Lesley Castle, 18n2, 35, 52; Love and Freindship, 36, 65, 66; Mansfield Park, 14, 36, 49, 61, 67, 116, 136, 159, 160, 195, 201; Northanger Abbey, 14, 36, 37, 64, 84, 160, 161, 195, 206; Persuasion, 4, 15, 16, 17, 38, 48, 49, 64, 65, 72, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 147, 150; Pride and Prejudice, 14, 68, 92n70, 129; Sense and Sensibility, 14, 36, 66, 68, 137, 145, 160, 178, 184, 195; “When Winchester Races,” 205–6 Austen, Henry, 10 Austen, James, 206 Austen-Leigh, James, 10 Addison, Joseph, 25–26 adventure, 4, 15, 26, 41, 42, 43, 44, 65, 77, 78, 80–81, 87, 164 adventurer, 41, 43

amiable, 94, 96, 98–99, 101, 114, 187 Ascham, Roger, 1, 24, 27, 45 Atwood, Margaret, 9, 10–11 Bander, Elaine, 103, 105 Bennet, Elizabeth, 6, 13, 37, 129, 146, Bennet, Lydia, 45, 92n70; and Mr. Wickham, 148 Bevis of Southampton, 132, 164, 205 Boethius, 71, 163, 175, 200, 201 Booth, Wayne, 158–59, 183, 196 Brann, Eva, 201, 207 Byron, Lord, 16, 48–49, 58n87, 202; Byronic, 135, 153n66 Capellanus, Andreas, 71 Catholicism, 1–2, 18n2, 24, 62, 205, Cervantes, Miguel de, 45; Don Quixote, 24, 83 Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales, 38, 168, 169, 174; “The Knight’s Tale,” 38, 49, 80, 84, 169, 170; “The Miller’s Tale,” 49, 169, 170; “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” 38; The Wife of Bath, 130, 170–71, 182; The Legend of Good Women, 77 chivalry, 23, 24, 26–31, 38, 48, 52, 77, 78, 80, 114, 129, 165, 168; 221

222

“romantick chivalry,” 40–41; romances of, 41; spirit of, 62, 82 civility, 98, 99, 135 Cohen, Michele, 28, 81, 96, 97 Collins, William, 193–94 comedy, 12, 15, 25, 39, 114, 132, 196, 197, 202, 206; Christian, 13; new, 4, 133 concordia discors, 177 constancy, 114, 148, 180; eternal, 70, 159–60; female, 46, 130; inconstancy, 130, 177, 180; of women, 141 Cooper, Helen, 24, 39, 70, 131, 132, 134, 135, 140, 160 courtly love, 60n123, 83–84, 88, 111, 116, 117–18, 125, 127–29, 131, 165, 167, 169–71, 174; conventions of, 15, 16, 129; critiques of, 16, 90; elevation of women in, 7, 16, 45–46; gender norms/roles of, 157, 198; and happiness, 198; and happy endings, 162; interpreter of, 103; lady of, 6, 95; language of, 16, 31, 36, 47, 78, 111; legacy of, 5, 131; redefinition of, 93; romance and, 84, 206; structure of, 105; terms of, 81; tradition of, 2, 5–6, 15, 54, 69, 77–79, 86, 96, 167; transformation of, 157; tropes of, 16, 38, 84, 125, 129; of the troubadours, 61 courtly lover, 89, 110, 128, 129 Croft, Admiral, 144 Croft, Mrs., 6, 129, 135, 136, 141 cult of sensibility, 61, 66, 67, 68 dark ages, 62 Dante Alighieri, 12, 13, 83, 175 damsel, 87, 126, 157 Dashwood, Marianne, 66, 67–70, 127, 158, 179–81, 195–96; and Captain Benwick, 72, 138, 139, 157; and Colonel Brandon, 13, 67, 160, 184

Index

Dashwood, Elinor, 36, 66, 67, 179, 181, 185; and Edward Ferrars, 146, 160, 184, 195, 196 Davis, Kathryn, 4, 75n54, 145, deliverance, 13, 15, 17, 131, 134, 142, 143, 145, 150, 177, 180, 198; providential, 143, 145, 146 Dobson, Susannah, 23–24, 27, 30, Doody, Margaret, 3, 46, 57n52, 75n50 education, 5, 14, 17, 82, 111, 130, 135, 198; in joy and happiness, 196, 199 Elliot, Anne, 11, 129, 135, 136; and Captain Benwick, 16, 48, 49, 181– 82, 202; and Captain Harville, 46, 130, 141; and Emma Woodhouse, 7, 198; and ironic deflation, 159–60; and joy, 195; and Mrs. Smith, 64, 153n83; as linguistic heroine, 141– 42; and romance, 69–72, 137–38, 157; as romantic heroine, 15, 138– 42; and service, 126–27; and Captain Wentworth, 15, 39, 125, 127, 128, 135, 136, 142–46, 147–49, 177, 180, 181, 184, 197, 199 Elton, Mr., 81, 88, 89, 95, 101, 107, 109, 112, 115, 186, 199; and Frank Churchill, 96, 97; gallantry, 84–86, 104, 105; and Harriet Smith, 108 Elton, Mrs.: knight-errantry, 52, 77, 87, 103, 200; and Emma Woodhouse, 88, 105, 115–16; and Mr. Elton, 148 Emaré, 8, 131, 140, 193; Emaré, 131, 135, 138–39 Emsley, Sarah, 87, 98, 99 Esolen, Anthony, 162–63, 164, 165, 169, 173, 175 fair, 15, 16, 38, 48, 51, 78, 95, 96, 128, 206; lady, 30, 32, 43, 45, 47, 52, 78, 86, 88–90, 99, 100, 103, 105, 127, 169, 199; maiden, 16, 79; princess, 96, 111, 144; sex, 31, 89 fatal love, 71, 138, 199 feminism, 6, 7

Index

Fendt, Gene, 197 Fessenbecker, Patrick, 111 Fielding, Henry, 4, 14, 16, 23, 43, 127, 150 Ford, Susan Allen, 4, 33–34n49 Fordyce, James, 89, 92n70, 97, 126 Frye, Northrup, 4, 150 gallantry, 29, 30, 31, 78, 79, 82, 88, 95, 105, 129, 130, 202; of Mr. Elton, 84–86, 104, 105, 116; of Mr. Knightley, 96–101, 104 gender, 5; roles, 7, 95, 111, 126, 127, 157; norms, 94, 198 gendered language, 6, 30 Gies, Frances, 24, 28 Giffin, Michael, 9, 103, 118 Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, 5, 7, 94, 95, 111, 112 Gilpin, William, 16, 36–37, 51, 52, 65 Gothic, 23, 24, 25, 29, 35, 40, 47, 52, 61, 72, 206; arch, 16, 36; architecture, 16, 28, 37, 54; manners, 6, 30, 97, 98, 99; novel, 2, 66, 83, 84; revival, 2, 29, 35; romance, 14, 16, 23, 30, 41, 47, 61, 62–65, 67, 162; romancer, 4, 30 Great Chain of Being, 176–77 Guy of Warwick, 42, 57n52, 132, 205 happiness, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 35, 44, 68, 69, 94, 95, 101, 102, 104, 107, 112, 116, 118, 119, 120, 131, 135, 142, 146, 147, 150, 182, 184, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200; and courtly love, 198; earthly, 187, 201; eternal, 11, 12; ideal, 132, 133; and joy, 199; temporal, 12, 141, 177, 186; and love, 2, 17, 69, 115, 138, 157, 161, 185; perfect, 16, 39, 81, 96, 104, 106, 116, 120, 137, 147, 148, 159, 161, 181, 183, 199, 202; spiritual, 12, 187, 201; and virtue, 7, 114–15, 117, 185, 200, 201, 202

223

happy ending, 5, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 44, 62, 93, 94, 117, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142, 150, 157, 171, 172, 180, 184, 185, 187, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202; conventionality of, 160; courtly love and, 162, 169, 171; economic realism and, 182; ideal, 199; joy and, 203n6; of medieval romance, 47, 70; of romance, 140, 169, 171, 172; perfect, 149, 169, 170, 183; perfectly, 8, 15; providentially arranged, 183 Harding, D. W., 159, 161, 162, 164, 177 Havelok, 8, 120, 134, 148, 193; Havelok, 95, 107, 135; and Goldeborw, 120, 148–49 Henry VIII, 14, 37 Hume, David, 16, 23, 24, 27, 28, 126, 127, 169, 178 humility, 5, 6, 94, 103, 114, 115, 118; of a lover, 109–112, 115; of the true knight, 126; knightly, 197 Hurd, Richard, 30–31, 41, 78, 80, 81; Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 78 ideal, 13, 25, 43, 49, 69, 77, 96, 132, 133, 141, 149, 161, 166, 170, 171, 179, 184, 185, 186, 197, 199 idealism, 25, 185, 202 idealistic, 68, 183, 187 irony: in Austen’s novels, 177–85; Chaucerian, 167–72; Christian, 173, 183, 201; definition of, 162–63; destructive, 157, 163, 165; medieval, 163–64, 174; and ontology, 176–77; paradoxical, 199; in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 164–67; theology of, 172–76 James, Henry, 4, 184 Johnson, Claudia, 16, 26, 129 Johnson, Samuel, 16, 61, 65; and Austen, 40–44 joy, 107, 113, 119, 133, 144, 149, 170, 193, 195, 202, 203n6; in/ of deliverance, 17, 142, 145, 198;

224

Index

earthly, 187; festive, 47, 194; and festivity, 194; and happiness, 196– 99; of the Heavenly Jerusalem, 172; perfect, 171, 172; sorrow turned to, 8, 112; temporal, 201; true, 116; the wonder of, 145 Kenney, Theresa, 99, 100, 102, 112, 148 Kermode, Frank, 3 knight-errantry, 15, 50, 52, 77, 78, 87, 148, 200, 206 Knight, Fanny, 69, 93, 185 The Knight of La Tour Landry, 127 Knightley, Mr., 5, 6, 15, 36, 78, 103, 105, 107, 108, 119, 174, 199; anger, 106; Anne Elliot as, 126; and Emma Woodhouse, 13, 39, 93–94, 96, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 146, 148, 149, 181, 197; concealment of truth from, 180–81; growth in, 115; and Harriet Smith, 54, 81–83, 126; as knight, 96–98; knight-errantry of, 87; learning gallantry, 99–102; and Mrs. Elton, 88; proposal, 66; rebuke, 107, 108, 109; rendering service, 95, 107, 110; suffering into happiness, 112–14; superiority, 110, 111, 112 Leithart, Peter, 9, 10, 13, 82 Lennox, Charlotte, 16, 44–46, 83, 106 liberty, 28, 63, 142, 143, 152n65 Lucas, Charlotte, 68, 69, 185 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 178–80, 185 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 12, 200 marital and social eudaimonia, 117–20 marriage, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 39, 67, 68, 69, 85, 93, 94, 107, 109, 132, 133, 135, 139, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150, 160, 164, 170, 171, 178, 195, 199; earthly marriage, 172; external good, 117–20; happy, 14, 15, 44, 93, 114, 148, 161, 184, 185, 186, 198; ideal, 13, 96, 149, 185; joyous, 135;

perfect, 120, 138, 182; unhappy, 18n2, 93, 183, 186; McMaster, Juliet, 40, 82, 84, 86 McKeon, Michael, 4 Middle Ages, 1–2, 16, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 36, 40, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 60n123, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 75n50, 87, 127, 132, 139, 163–64, 167, 172–73, 177, 185, 205, 206, Moler, Kenneth, 4, 66, 83 Moore, Roger, 2, 9, 14, 36, 51 More, Hannah, 67, 68 Morland, Catherine, 14, 35, 37, 38, 46, 47, 49, 64, 67, 83, 182, 183, 202; and Henry Tilney, 39, 146, 158, 162, 180 Mudrick, Marvin, 15, 93, 94, 162, 166 Muecke, D. C., 163–64, 172 novel, 2, 31, 35, 40, 55, 73, 75n50, 77, 78, 94, 127, 131, 147, 202; Austen’s, 4–8, 12–17, 29, 36, 39, 44, 47, 52, 58n87, 61, 69, 72, 86, 111, 114, 116, 117, 119, 128, 130, 131, 135, 138, 140, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155n134, 182, 183, 185, 200; The Castle of Otranto, 62; Charlotte Lennox’s, 44–46; as displaced romance, 149–50; female Quixote, 83; Gothic, 2, 66, 83, 84; Greek, 75n50; happy ending, 93, 94; historical, 28; iconoclastic, 3; of manners, 8, 27, 30; medieval phase, 4; as medieval romance, 95, 96; modern, 3, 43; Ann Radcliffe’s, 46, 74n15; realistic, 125, 150; romance and, 3, 131, 132; as romance, 150; romantic, 4, 68, 125; of sensibility, 66, 182, 187; sentimental, 66; Waverley, 49 novelistic tradition, 54, 78, 125, 138 O’Connor, Flannery, 186 ontological landscape, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 176, 187

Index

paradox, 133, 163, 164, 166, 172, 174, 176, 186, 199 picturesque, 16, 29, 47, 50, 51, 52, 65; and William Gilpin, 36–37 Price, Fanny, 13, 36, 61, 67; and Edmund Bertram, 13, 39, 136, 146, 159, 160, 181, 184, 195, 201; and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 16, 49, 52 pride, 5, 83, 115, 127, 129, 142, 143 providence, 7, 15, 17, 70, 133, 139, 155n134, 157, 173, 174, 177, 180; Austen’s understanding of, 11–14; benevolent, 11, 12, 134–35, 164, 180; Christian, 131; Christian view of, 186; in Persuasion, 135–38; over prudence, 138; and the sea, 16, 140– 41; trust in, 72, 75n54, 138, 145; Captain Wentworth and, 142–47 prudence, 6, 67, 72, 75n54; anxious, 69–70; calculating, 157; practical, 185; providence over, 72, 138; as vice, 137; worldly, 158, 178, 197 Radcliffe, Ann, 4, 16, 28, 46, 47, 61, 64, 74n15, 202; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 35, 46–47, 52; The Romance of the Forest, 14, 46, 47, 73, 78, 193–94; The Sicilian Romance, 46, 65 rational creatures, 6, 7, 97, 129, 131, 184 realism, 3, 4, 8, 25, 147, 150, 186, 187; economic, 157, 182, 185 Reiss, Edmond, 161, 162, 164, 169, 173, 174, 175, 183 Religion of Love, 127, 128 Renaissance, 3, 23, 24, 25, 27, 39, 40, 62, 86, 132 resurrection, 9, 13, 131, 139 romance, 11, 16, 25, 28, 29, 36, 40, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53, 58n87, 66, 68, 82, 87, 88, 89, 140, 144, 161, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 180, 182, 183, 184, 194, 198; ancient, 63, 64;

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Anglican, 4; Arthurian, 171; Austen’s providential, 131; chivalric, 16, 41, 77, 84, 95, 164, 185; chivalrykindled, 31; comedy of, 43; comic, 4; destructive, 199; gothic, 14, 16, 23, 30, 41, 47, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 162; heroic, 43; historical, 32, 72, 205; idle, 23; ironic, 169, 186–87; ironic providential, 194, 199, 202; ironizing of, 167; irony in, 176 medieval, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 52, 54, 55, 61, 62, 63, 68, 73, 78, 79, 80, 83, 94, 95, 96, 106, 118, 120, 125, 129, 131, 132, 135, 147, 148, 149, 150, 158, 164, 171, 193, 197, 205, 206; of the Middle Ages, 53, 177; Middle English, 42, 125, 137, 149, 205; modern, 63; novel and, 8, 43, 46; novel as, 150; old, 27, 61, 63; parody, 4; providential, 14, 16, 17, 39, 73, 125, 134, 135, 138, 148, 150, 157, 160, 162, 186, 197; realist-romance, 4, 185; and the sea, 141; serious, 72–73; Shakespeare’s, 39, 40, 132–35, 193; virtue, 69–72, 75n54, 137, 138, 145, 157, 158, 178 Romance of the Rose, 55 romancer, 4, 9, 197; Emma Woodhouse as, 79, 83; Gothic, 4, 30; medieval, 9, 14, 17, 54, 114, 157, 176, 197, 207 Roman de Brut, 128 Rougemont, Denis de, 71, 138, 199 Ruderman, Anne, 114, 115, 116 Sainte-Palaye, Jean Baptise de La Curen de, 23, 27–28, 31 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 147, 148 Scott, Walter, 2, 16, 28, 32, 49–55, 102, 205 service, 15, 77, 78, 79–83, 87, 95, 96, 99, 103, 111, 118, 128, 129, 131, 157, 158; chivalric, 54, 107, 125, 126, 127; gallant, 80, 81, 82, 206;

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Index

knightly, 110, 112; services, 31, 81; spurious, 82; true, 78 Shakespeare, William, 2, 14, 16, 38–40, 42, 78, 117, 127, 129, 135, 138, 163, 167, 169, 182, 185, 196; Henry VIII, 38; and providential romance, 132–34; Shakespearean, 14, 144, 145, 193; The Tempest, 39, 132, 133, 134, 135, 140; The Winter’s Tale, 4, 74n54, 132, 133, 135, 140, 193 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 41, 128, 144, 164, 167 Sir Orfeo, 8, 89, 131, 144, 193, 194, 197 Sir Orfeo, 107, 131, 135, 145; and Heurodis, 89, 107, 193 1662 Book of Common Prayer, 11 Smith, Adam, 17, 198, 200 Smith, Harriet, 54, 66, 73, 78, 84, 85, 87, 89, 101, 102, 110, 180, 195; Emma Woodhouse and, 89, 113, 119; engagement to Robert Martin, 181, 194; Frank Churchill and, 80; knighterrantry toward, 87; Mr. Elton and, 108; Mr. Knightley and, 83, 109, 126; portrait of, 97; as potential rival, 112; ready wit, 86; renders knightly service to, 110 service, 81–82 Spenser, Edmund, 23, 29, 50, 53, 75n50, 78, 175 Steele, Lucy, 137, 145, 157, 178, 185, 186, 195 submission, 5, 15, 77, 94, 96, 106, 109, 111, 112, 118, 157, 170; chivalric, 103, 111, 126; courtly, 114; female, 94, 199; humble, 100; mutual, 15, 94, 95, 111, 112, 148, 171, 180, 198, 199; worshipful, 110 Sweet, Rosemary, 29, 36 Tauchert, Ashley, 4, 8, 184, 185, 199 Thorpe, John, 35 Tolkien, J. R. R., 142 Trilling, Lionel, 95

troubadour, 29, 61, 69, 71–72, 79, 86, 138 Walpole, Horace, 2, 24, 28, 32, 35, 61, 62–65, 74n15; The Castle of Otranto, 2, 62 Warton, Thomas, 16, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, Watt, Ian, 3, 4 Wentworth, Captain, 70, 72, 125–42, 152–53n66, 180, 181; and Anne Elliot, 15, 39, 125, 128, 135, 142, 147, 148, 149, 177, 180, 184, 197, 199; and providence, 142–46 White, Laura Mooneyham, 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 136, 176, 177, 180, 205, 206 White, R. S., 39 Wife of Bath, 130, 170–71, 182 Winchester Cathedral, 205–6 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 6–7, 89, 92n70, 97–98, 101, 127, 130 wonder, 15, 25, 43, 44, 54, 136, 144–45, 163, 176, 180, 194; wonders, 42, 140, 144 Woodhouse, Emma, 5, 6, 15, 38, 48, 49, 66, 73, 77, 78, 113, 119, 139, 174; as authoress, 83–84; and Anne Elliot, 7, 198; Box Hill, 105–7; courtly elevation, 104–5; fair lady, 88–90; and Frank Churchill, 119; and Harriet Smith, 89, 180–81; humility, 109–12, 115, 118, 126; and Jane Fairfax, 119; joy, 194–95; knightliness of, 200; lady, 159; moral growth, 95–96, 115; moral maturation, 107–9; Mr. Elton, 84–86; Mrs. Elton and, 87–88, 115–17; Mr. Knightley and, 13, 36, 39, 93, 94, 96–102, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 146, 148, 149, 181, 197; princess paramount, 102–4; romancer, 79–83; chivalric submission, 126; as submissive, 119 Wordsworth, William, 16, 29, 135

About the Author

Dr. Tiffany Schubert is an assistant professor of trivium and humanities at Wyoming Catholic College. She received her PhD in literature from the University of Dallas. Her research interests include comedy, medieval romance, Jane Austen, and happy endings. She has published articles on Northanger Abbey, Emma, and the influence of the medieval poem Pearl on C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair.

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