REGULATED HATRED: AN ASPECT OF THE WORK OF JANE AUSTEN'-- D. W. HARDING

REGULATED HATRED: AN ASPECT OF THE WORK OF JANE AUSTEN'

D. W. HARDING

[Summary and detailed analysis of the essay for students of Indian Universities] by Dr. S. Sreekumar

Summary of the essay

The popular impression of Jane Austen discourages many people from reading her works. Reading public considers her as the upholder of urbanity and as a refuge for sensitive people. Harding says that these conventional opinions about Austen are false. She is able to camouflage her dislike of the society and her books are read and enjoyed by the sort of people whom she disliked. Unexpected astringencies are surreptitiously introduced by the novelist into the works. Harding calls these astringencies ‘regulated  hatred”. Examples of regulated hatred are given from Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Emma. Even the caricatures of Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins we enjoy without realizing that Austen hated these characters. She saw Mr. Collins as a comic monster. The marriage of Collins and Charlotte was, for her, a sign of the degradation of contemporary society.

Austen was fascinated by the Cinderella theme but with the fairy godmother omitted. In Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice the theme is treated without any complication. The heroines in these novels are rewarded for their good sense. But in Mansfield Park the heroine is shown as a submissive character. Mansfield Park shows the heroine as priggish.

The Cinderella theme is modified in Emma. Emma's personality includes some of the tendencies and qualities that Austen most disliked. In Emma the progress is not towards vindication but towards self-enlightenment. In Persuasion, the novelist introduces the fairy god mother. But neither the heroines nor the fairy god mother is perfect in these novels. 

Analytical summary

The popular impression of Jane Austen

The reading public has a popular impression of the works of Jane Austen which they got from critics, books on history of literature, universities, literary journals etc. Harding says that this impression discourages many people from reading her works.

Nature of the impression

Austen is the upholder of urbanity [sophistication, culture, refinement, elegance]. She had provided a refuge for the sensitive people when this world becomes too much for them [echo of Wordsworth here]. This impression is summarized by Beatrice Kean Seymour in her 1937 book Jane Austen; a Study for a Portrait (biography). She writes, “In a society which has enthroned the machine-gun and carried it aloft even into the quiet heavens, there will always be men and women—Escapist or not, as you please—who will turn to her novels with an unending sense of relief and thankfulness”. Harding adds, “Gentlemen of an older generation than mine spoke of their intention of re-reading her (Auden) on their deathbeds”.

Opinions of Jane Austen

Austen’s creative world was extremely restricted. Within her limits, she was very successful in expressing the gentler virtues of a civilized social order. [Echoing Sir Walter Scott—see notes 1]. She lived at a time, when she could address the reading public as sympathetic equals. She could expose the unpleasant people [like Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice] to a public opinion that condemned them. She was a delicate satirist, revealing with inimitable lightness of touch the comic foibles and amiable weaknesses of the people among whom she lived.

Misleading opinions

Harding says that the opinions expressed above are misleading opinions though there are little bits of truth in them. But the total effect is false. Now Harding makes his point:  “...the wide currency of this false impression is an indication of Jane Austen's success in an essential part of her complex intention as a writer: her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked...”

Misreading Jane Austen

To enjoy her books without disturbing the conventional notion of Austen [urbanity, escapist etc.] one has to “slightly misread what she wrote at a number of scattered points”. Austen took care to make the misreading the easiest thing in the world. “Unexpected astringencies^* (what Harding calls ‘regulated hatred’) occur which the comfortable reader probably overlooks, or else passes by as slight imperfections, trifling errors of tone brought about by a faulty choice of words”. [^*Astringent taste is the taste of Indian gooseberry]

Harding gives examples for astringencies (regulated hatred) in Austen. He quotes from Northanger Abbey.

·        Here Henry Tilney writes a letter to Catherine scolding her for her doubts about his father.

·        Hilney is praising the English way of life throughout the letter. [“Remember that we are English, that we are Christians”, “our education”, “our laws”, social and literary intercourse “, “where roads and newspapers lay everything open...”] In the letter, Austen surreptitiously pushes in a phrase, “Where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies”. This phrase will go largely unnoticed by the reader. Even when noticed, he/she will gloss over it as a slight imperfection. Harding says that this is a surprising remark out of tune with the accepted idea of Austen.

·        Austen lived in a world of gossip. She slips in her views on people’s spying among Tilney’s eulogies of the age. She achieves two things. In such a speech from such a character the remark is unexpected and unbelievable with the result that it is quite unlikely to be taken in at all by many readers; it slips through their minds without creating a disturbance. It gets said, but with the minimum risk of upsetting people and without creating exaggerated bitterness.

Harding next takes up Persuasion to show ‘regulated hatred’. Miss Elliot’s disappointment at her failure to marry her cousin is described in ordinary satirical terms. Her cousin is a widower and she thinks that his first marriage was a disgrace. But as he had no children from that, it is not difficult to get over the disgrace. However, he had done worse things and his “kind friends” had informed her that he had spoken “most disrespectfully of them all. . .” Here we see that the target of satire is no more Miss Elliot but the “kind friends”, the public who is least bothered about spreading rumors. 

In Emma, Austen is in perfectly good terms with the public. But she says some curious things about the public which may go unnoticed in the general amiable tone of the descriptions. In one place, for example, the novelist speaks about Miss Bates. Miss Bates “enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married”. [A tacit remark that a woman gets respect only if she fulfils one of the above conditions. Interestingly intelligence is not mentioned at all] The reading public may chuckle over the satire. But speaking about her intellect, Austen comments that “she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect.” Harding comments, “Jane Austen was herself at this time ' neither young, handsome, rich, nor married,' and the passage perhaps hints at the functions which her unquestioned intellectual superiority may have had for her”[ that of frightening other people]

Any how, the eruption of fear and hatred into the relationships of everyday social life is something that the urbane admirer of Jane Austen finds distasteful. Moreover, this is not the tone of one who writes for the entertainment of her civilized friends. For the attentive reader, the idea of frightening others with intellectual superiority adds a new flavor to the ordinary satire in which the whole situation is clothed.

SATIRE ?

We have examined three novels—Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and Emma— for what Harding calls ‘regulated hatred’. We cannot use the term ‘satire’ to describe the situations examined above because Austen “has none of the underlying didactic intentions ordinarily attributed to the satirist”.

Austen’s object is not missionary. Her purpose was——

·         To keep on good terms with the associates of her everyday life. She needed their love and affection and she had a genuine respect for the ordered, decent civilization they supported.

·         But she was aware of their crudenesses and complacencies and believed that her real existence depended on resisting many of their values.

·         The novels gave her an outlet out of this dilemma. [see notes--2]

·         Her ambition in writing the novels was never to entertain the future generations of urbane gentlemen.

CARICATURE

One of the peculiarities of Austen’s age was its blindness to the implication of caricature. “She found people eager to laugh at faults they tolerated in themselves and their friends, so long as the faults were exaggerated and the laughter ' good-natured.” Satire was not a means of admonition but of self-preservation.  

Harding points out the example of Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice.  Mrs. Bennet,  is a richly comic character about whom we can feel superior, condescending and above all heartily amused and relaxed if we overlook Jane Austen's brief statement of her own attitude to her: ' She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.' This description suited many acquaintances of Austen and many others of the period. But the contemporary society and most complacent readers to the present day enjoy the funny side of the situations Mrs. Bennet's unpleasant nature creates. All of them forget that Austen detested her creation.

Caricature served Austen's purpose perfectly. Under her treatment one can never say where caricature leaves off and serious portraiture begins. The simplest comic effects are gained by bringing caricatures into direct contact with real people, as in Mr. Collins' visit to the Bennets and his proposal to Elizabeth. Mr. Collins is not mere caricature. He fits into the real world. He is real enough to Mrs. Bennet; and she is real enough to Elizabeth to create a situation of real misery for her when she refuses. The proposal scene is not only comic fantasy, but it is also, for Elizabeth, a fantastic nightmare in which economic and social institutions have such power over the values of personal relationships that the comic monster is nearly able to get her.

The Collins episode is significant in another way. Collins proposes to Charlotte and is accepted. Elizabeth can never quite become reconciled to the idea that her friend is the wife of a comic monster. Austen herself could never get reconciled to the fact that people she hated were tolerated, accepted, comfortably placed in the only human society she knew; they were, for her, “society's embarrassing unconscious comment on itself”.

A writer on Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jenkins, says that Charlotte's marriage can be explained solely by the impossibility of young women's earning their own living at that period. But Charlotte's complaisance goes deeper than that: it is shown as a considered indifference to personal relationships when they conflict with cruder advantages in the wider social world.

Elizabeth had always felt that Charlotte's opinion of matrimony was different from her own, but she never thought that Charlotte would sacrifice everything for worldly advantage. “We know too, at the biographical level, that Jane Austen herself, in a precisely similar situation to Charlotte's, spent a night of psychological crisis in deciding to revoke her acceptance of an ' advantageous ' proposal made the previous evening. And her letters to Fanny Knight show how deep her convictions went at this point”.

It is important to notice that Elizabeth makes no break with her friend on account of the marriage. We cannot avoid such friends from whom “one could neither escape materially nor be independent of psychologically”. The impossibility of being cut off from objectionable people is suggested more subtly in Emma also where an unwelcome Mrs. Elton had to be accommodated in a party, much to the chagrin of Emma. Harding comments: “This illustrates Jane Austen's typical dilemma: of being intensely critical of people to whom she also has strong emotional attachments”.

II

Cinderella theme

Austen was fascinated by the Cinderella theme (‘with the fairy godmother omitted’). The fairy godmother is left out because Austen could assert the importance of the heroine without any assistance from a human or ‘quasi-human helper’. Along with the Cinderella theme, she introduces another fairy tale theme of the princess brought up by unworthy parents “but never losing the delicate sensibilities which are an inborn part of her”. This latter theme appears in Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice.

It is the Cinderella theme that rewards most attention. “In Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice it is handled simply”. The heroine is isolated from those around her

·        by being more sensitive

·        because of finer moral insight or sounder judgment

·        Her marriage to the handsome prince at the end is a reward for being different and a consolation for the distresses endured by her because of her difference.

The heroines of these early novels are models of sound judgment and good feeling. Their values are sanctioned by good breeding and ‘a religious civilization’. None of the other characters in the novels represents the values more effectively than these heroines. They are never submissive to the other characters in the novels. The social world may have material power over them, enough to make them unhappy. But the social world did not mould them. Thus they are independent and isolated from the people around them.

Heroines of the later novels

However, Austen turns away from these early novels. The emphasis in the early novels was on the difference between the heroine and the people about her. But in the later novels, Austen admits “that even a heroine must owe a great deal of her character and values to the social world in which she had been molded”. Hence, the later heroines are not solitary in their excellence as the earlier heroines.

This sets the tone of Mansfield Park, the new novel. Here the heroine, Fanny Price, is faithful to conventional virtues, decorum, and sound religious feeling so much so that she becomes the least interesting of all heroines. Moreover, Fanny Price is submissive to the conventionally virtuous people of the story—— Sir Thomas and Edmund.   

In this novel Austen pays tribute to the virtuous fundamentals of her upbringing. She emphasizes the simpler and more obvious moral issues and allies herself with virtues that are easy to appreciate. The result is a distinct tendency to priggishness [exaggerated conformity of propriety] which is the inevitable consequence of an unsuccessful attempt at humility that the novel represents. It involves the recognition that heroines are not spontaneously generated but owe much to the established standards of their society. 

Mansfield Park enabled Austen to go to the extraordinary achievement of Emma. Here humility is combined with the earlier interest in people as they are. The underlying argument has a different trend. Austen continues with her observation that the heroine is derived from the people and conditions around her, but she now keeps clearly in mind the objectionable features of those people. Even a heroine is likely to assimilate many of the unpleasant possibilities of society. The heroine has not yet achieved perfection and is actually going to learn a number of serious lessons from some of the people she lives with.

When we consider the treatment of the two favorite themes of the earlier novels, we can see that the Cinderella theme is now relegated to the sub-heroine, Jane Fairfax. Its working out involves the discomfiture of the heroine, who in this respect is put into the position of one of the ugly sisters.

The associated theme of the child brought up in humble circumstances whose inborn nature fits her for better things is frankly parodied and deflated in the story of Harriet Smith, the illegitimate child whom Emma tries to turn into a snob. In the end, the girl is cheerfully married to a deserving farmer. 'Harriet's parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers.

Thus the structure of the narrative expresses a complete change in Austen's outlook on the heroine in relation to others. And the story no longer progresses towards her vindication or consolation; it consists in her gradual, humbling self-enlightenment. Emma's personality includes some of the tendencies and qualities that Austen most disliked:

·        Self complacency,(self-satisfaction)

·        malicious enjoyment in prying into embarrassing private affairs,

·         snobbery (arrogance), and

·        a weakness for meddling in other people's lives.

Instead of being attributed in exaggerated form to a character distanced into caricature, these qualities occur in subtle form in a character who has admirably fine standards. The Cinderella theme is not abandoned but inverted so that “we ought to regard Emma as a bold variant of the theme”.

In Persuasion Austen goes back to the Cinderella situation in its most direct and simple form, but develops a vitally important aspect of it that she had previously avoided. This is the significance for Cinderella of her idealized dead mother.

Austen puts her heroine in the Cinderella setting, heightening her need for affection. In Lady Russell she provides a godmother, not fairy but human. Austen then goes on to face the implications of such a relationship and there runs through the whole story a lament for seven years' loss of happiness owing to Anne's having yielded to her godmother's persuasion.

The novel opens with her being completely convinced of the wrongness of the advice she received, and yet strongly attached to Lady Russell still and unable to blame her. Her attitude is, and throughout the book remains, curiously unresolved. But for all that Anne repeatedly resists fresh advice from her godmother and is completely vindicated in the upshot.

At the end of the story, reverting to the old dilemma, she tells the lover whom she has now regained: ‘To me, she was in the place of a parent. I am not saying that she did not err in her service. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides and for myself.’In Persuasion Austen brings the idealized mother back to life and admits that she is no nearer to perfection than the mothers of sensitive children generally are.

Conclusion

Harding concludes the piece thus:

This attempt to suggest a different reading of Austen is not a balanced appraisal of her work. It is deliberately lop-sided, neglecting many points at which the established view seems adequate. I have tried to underline one or two features that readers miss. Those who turn to her not for relief and escape but as a formidable ally against things and people which were to her, and still are, hateful.

Significance of the essay in Austen Studies

D.W. Harding was a rare literary critic since he was a professor of Psychology in his academic career. Professor Knights called him the most ‘sanely subtle and subtly sane’ of his generation. The essay 'Regulated Hatred', altered the course of Austen criticism. It appeared in the March 1940 issue of the Cambridge quarterly Scrutiny, almost instantly changing the current of Austen criticism.

Jane Austen’s less ‘congenial tendencies’ were observed even by earlier commentators like Alice Meynell and Reginald Farrer. The former dubbed her a “mistress of derision “and the latter portrayed her as “the most merciless, though calmest, of iconoclasts”. Harding did not acknowledge any indebtedness to these earlier critics.  

Harding declared that Jane Austen’s novels are not escapist fiction.  According to Harding, Austen’s “books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked”. This was a landmark judgment in Jane Austen studies and it divided the admirers of Jane Austen into two groups—an elite who understood the author and the commoners who did not. Harding’s contention that Austen should not be read “with a sense of relief but with the zest with which you turn to a formidable ally who stands with you against the things you hate” has altered Austen studies for ever.

Where others perceived social and benevolent comedy in Jane Austen, Harding saw alarming realism. His essay, finally dismantled the “Dear Aunt Jane” facade popularized in the 1871 memoir by Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh.

NOTES

1.  Sir Walter Scott stated: “That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me”.

Jane Austen, herself, writes in a letter about “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour”

2.D. H. Lawrence—psycho-therapeutic function of creative writing—“One sheds one’s sickness in books”. Writing numbs pain like dull narcotics, says Tennyson.

3. Jane Austen wrote two letters to her sister Cassandra mentioning "Tom Lefroy", and some have suggested that it may have been he whom Austen had in mind when she invented the character of Mr. Darcy.  Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". For reasons that are not exactly clear, the ‘friendship’ between them ended abruptly.

Dr. S. Sreekumar