The Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century rightly pointed out that her novels exclusively follow the Cinderella plot: A young woman falls in love with a man of superior social standing and has to wait for him to make the first declaration of love—to be followed, even more excruciatingly, by the hoped-for offer of marriage. Moreover, in true Cinderella style, every novel ends happily, for the offer is both made and accepted. But that more-than-obvious fact only highlights the essential poverty of the Formalist observation. For although Austen can be legitimately claimed as the formal forerunner of the vulgar romance fiction now clogging whole sections of the world’s bookstores, her own novels far transcend the very genre she is supposed to have inaugurated—and precisely because of the moral vision that came from her upbringing and which has now, it would seem, all but disappeared in the wake of Sitcom World.
She could manage that neat trick of transposing the Cinderella plot into six undoubted masterpieces because her chosen marriage theme gave her the perfect background for analyzing character and investing her stories with remarkable drama. How could it be otherwise, given the almost absolute necessity for a woman in Regency England to find a suitable mate and the consequences that befell her if she made a bad choice? And what with the stylized rituals of behavior that governed society at the time, how could a marriageable young woman assay gold from dross? How might she distinguish reality from appearance, or authenticity from artifice, when society ran on the machinery of artifice to begin with? Operating inside these constraints, Austen’s talents allowed her to analyze the complexity of human behavior, the subtle variations of motivation, and the difficulty of judging true character from false in a world of deceptive appearances. For an unmarried woman could easily be led into a disastrous marriage based on her poor reading of a young man’s character—which itself would mean a ruined life for her, although rarely for him. In other words, Austen took Plato’s insight—that politics will lead to disaster unless it can distinguish truth from its simulacrum—and domesticated it. And is that not an artist’s chief claim on the attentions of future generations: to teach us how to distinguish the true from the deceptively true?
Nor is Austen concerned merely with the personal fulfillment of the domestic hearth, for behind almost all her plots lurks the question of property, to which a young woman’s propriety was also indissolubly linked (that fascinating etymological link between the two words property and propriety gets its ultimate elucidation in her novels).
Interview with Park Honan.
Over at AustenBlog:
Supporting cast for Northanger Abbey 2007 confirmed (updated with links and photos)
Bit of MANSFIELD PARK 2007 casting news
“Sense and Sensibility” patterns will be available from Simplicity
I don't sew. But the designs at Simplicity look modest and good.
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