I managed to sit through most of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius the other night. I endured luvvies and minor academics and even Cherie Blair, all wide-eyed at the brilliance of their heroine. She was inevitably presented as edgy and funny and brave and ground-breaking and mould-breaking and ball-breaking and oozing girl power.
One of Austen’s prime targets is clumsy groupthink, which makes her pretty relevant to the age of social media
Equally predictably, no one mentioned the key to her writing’s power, to her authorial authority: her moral intensity. It’s the truth about her that’s universally unacknowledged. It is hard to talk about – we don’t like moralists nowadays, do we? We don’t like the idea that the creation of literature might have a moral or even a religious dimension – yuk! But it must be talked about. For her comedy and acuity of observation is not random, scattergun, unfocused. It has a logic. People deserve to be mocked without mercy for their selfishness and vanity, which must be analysed with a scalpel.
Austen does not draw attention to her moral agenda. For example, Emma Woodhouse is described on page one as ‘clever, handsome and rich’. The phrase has an air of completeness, as if that’s obviously all one could aspire to be, but it’s ironic. For Austen is testing the reader: have we noticed that we have not been told whether she is good? This is the whole point of the novel: to expand on that unstated question.
One of Austen’s prime targets is clumsy groupthink, which makes her pretty relevant to the age of social media. Another is the charming but morally toxic media performer – ditto. I was reminded of this last year, when I taught Pride and Prejudice to some fifteen-year-olds, who were a bit more Lydia than Lizzie.
At the first ball, groupthink decides that the rich newcomer, Mr Bingley, is utterly charming, and showers him with ‘likes’. And it decides the opposite of Mr Darcy. Everyone wants to signal his or her virtue by condemning him, making him a symbol of the heartless stuck-up aristocrat.
Our heroine Elizabeth fails to notice that she’s joining the groupthink. She sees herself as an especially acute critic of Darcy. This is repeated when Mr Wickham turns up. He is charming in a touchy-feely, cool-guy way. His frank, chatty charisma makes Elizabeth feel that any topic ‘might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker’. When he is finally exposed as a sexual predator, the town quickly redacts its recent adulation:
All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man, who, but three months before, had been almost an angel of light…Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world and everybody began to find out, that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.
The novel’s famous opening phrase, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged…’ turns out to be a half-veiled warning about the power of groupthink, especially when fused with the self-righteousness of youthful intelligence, so sure that it is thinking for itself. Suspect all orthodoxies, she says, and also the edgy critics of such orthodoxies. It seems that we still need her icy wisdom.
Comments