C. S. Lewis and Plain Jane
One always suspected that the bluff and hearty C. S. Lewis would delight in the works of Jane Austen. Her down-to-earth common sense connected with his enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures as well as his dislike of cant, hypocrisy and humbug of all kinds. Given a time machine to transport someone from the early nineteenth century to 1950s Oxford, C. S. Lewis would no doubt have been quite happy to welcome Plain Jane Austen to the Bird and Baby to spar with the Inklings. It was, therefore, a pleasure to discover an essay by Lewis that somehow had not found its way to my bookshelves: “A Note on Jane Austen” in Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper.
Lewis begins the essay by quoting four passages from Austen. In the first from Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland comes to self-knowledge—facing her foolishness and resolving to behave better in the future. The second quotation is Marianne Dashwood’s bitter self-realization in Sense and Sensibility. The third—from Pride and Prejudice—is Elizabeth Bennet’s brutal enlightenment at the true nature of the scoundrel Wickham, and the final quote from Emma concerns Emma’s sudden self-knowledge as she realizes how badly she has behaved concerning her friend Harriet.
Lewis points out that each of the four novels turns on the disillusionment of the heroine, or in more positive terms, her enlightenment. In each case, the heroine undergoes the transformation of true repentance. The Authorized Version of the Prodigal Son story says that in the pig pen the son “came to himself”. This profound conversion is at the heart of all great literature and René Girard was convinced that it had also to extend to the novelist himself: “So the career of the great novelist is dependent upon a conversion, and even if it is not made completely explicit, there are symbolic allusions to it at the end of the novel. These allusions are at least implicitly religious.”
Lewis sees this in Austen. Although her own religion was kept beneath the polite facade of English society, Lewis sniffs out the religious language she uses especially in the scene of Marianne Dashwood’s disillusionment and enlightenment.
The vocabulary of the passage strikes a note unfamiliar in Jane Austen’s style. It makes explicit, for once, the religious background of the author’s ethical position. Hence such theological or nearly theological words as penitence, amendment, self destruction, my God . . .
This disillusionment and enlightenment leads to clarity of thought and vision. It is captured in what Lewis recognizes as the “hardness or at least the firmness” of Austen’s thought. He notes her use of abstract nouns: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blamable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. “These are the concepts”, he writes, “by which Jane Austen grasps the world.”
Where is the feminine genius in all of this? It is in the fact that the novels are comedies. Jane Austen deals with serious themes lightly. She observes the foolish vanity of her characters with a wry smile and the kind of sharp but gentle satirical wit that is feminine through and through. A man writing satire is likely to be sarcastic, overbearing and cruel. He may deal with such serious themes with a heavy hand, a wordy exposition or a philosophical speech. A woman dismisses such ponderous sermonizing and scores points with the sly comment, the withering witticism and the observation that is damning with faint praise.
In Jane Austen the satire is never vain or silly, but astringent because of the disillusionment and enlightenment at the heart of her heroines’ story. In this respect Austen is reflected in the stories of Flannery O’Connor who sees the world through the same clear lens of honesty and hard-bitten truth. What Lewis says about Austen could therefore be well spoken about O’Connor:
The hard core of morality and even religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible . . . . [U]nless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work.
The humor in Jane Austen is linked therefore with humility. Her heroines come to themselves and see the world as it truly is, thereby shedding light on their own pride and prejudice and on the pride and prejudice of those around them. As that light shines, we also see things as they are. Our own vanity and egotistical deceptions are also brought into the light of day and, if we are graced with even a smidgen of self-awareness, we stop and laugh at the irony that we are as flawed and foolish as the fictional characters in the novel we’ve been reading, and in that laughter there is also light.
