In my last post, I made the argument that fiction teaches empathy more effectively than genres like memoir, at least as it’s currently practiced by writers who see confessions of hard-luck or hard-living as a ticket onto Oprah’s couch and the New York Times best-seller list. But I’ve been thinking about that claim over the last week, and I find myself wondering if it’s really true. Is the novel a social form or an expression of an individual consciousness?
Obviously, the answer to that question depends on the novel. But I’m thinking here of that great observer of social forms, Jane Austen. It’s always seemed to me that one of the most seductive qualities of her novels is that they allow any reader to identify with a character of sense and discernment like Elizabeth Bennett, even if we may actually be closer to Lydia or Mr. Collins in personality. But Austen does this at the expense of her secondary characters: she solicits no empathy for a character like Mr. Collins, using the discrepancy between his failures of tact and self-awareness and Elizabeth Bennett’s highly tuned social perceptions to solicit our identification with her heroine. Reading Pride and Prejudice, we give ourselves credit for sharing Elizabeth’s wit and social judgment, even if we occasionally sense that those judgments may be hasty or cruel, and we congratulate ourselves at our superiority to a fool like Mr. Collins.
I actually find Mr. Collins interesting, partly ??? I suspect ??? out of nervous recognition of how little separates a pompous cleric of Austen’s day from a modern English professor, but also because he’s the novel’s great misreader of manners and men. Mr. Collins actually shares the close attention to social forms that characterizes the novel’s romantic leads ??? Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy — but he misreads every situation out of a combination of class anxiety and weakness of character, which leads him to cultivate an obsequious manner as he tries to claim social status through proximity to his patroness, Lady Catherine De Bourgh. In this respect, he becomes the novel’s nightmare image of social clumsiness and failed masculinity. He’s a pathetic little toad of a man (at least that’s how he’s played in all the recent films, although Austen describes him as “a tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty”), but he seems happily oblivious to this fact as he suns himself in the reflected glory of Lady Catherine’s wealth and rank
But here’s my problem with Mr. Collins: he’s both a social type and a stock character, one in a long line of sycophantic, moralizing, and self-aggrandizing servants that stretches back at least as far as Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I find that comparison to Malvolio illuminating: both are failed suitors, emasculated by their prissy manners and the way they embrace their status as servants. Yet, in Malvolio we see more than that: Shakespeare gives him one of the great comic scenes in the history of theater ??? a scene so central to the play that it was occasionally referred to as “The Comedy of Malvolio” during the centuries that followed ??? and then a strange and painful humiliation that solicits our sympathy for the poor fool. By contrast, Mr. Collins gains no gravity or self-knowledge; he is simply social furniture, doomed — like all Austen’s comic secondary characters ??? to repeat his endless flatteries of Lady Catherine while his cousin comes to her meeting of minds with Mr. Darcy and marries into the upper class.
Admittedly, Austen’s soliciting of her reader’s identification with Elizabeth was a radical gesture in its day. She doesn’t simply endow a woman with enviable wit and sense; she makes a woman’s consciousness the center point of her world. We occupy her point of view with the same intensity that we occupy Hamlet’s, and for male readers, used to viewing female characters as social furniture, that already constitutes a substantial empathy (and humility) lesson. But the same could be said about Viola in Twelfth Night, and Austen’s singular focus drains the complexity out of the novel’s secondary characters. Mr. Collins may be odious, and he commits the unforgiveable sin of declaring that he never reads novels, but I confess that I want more.
Here’s what Austen gives us:
Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society; the greatest part of his life having been spent under the guidance of an illiterate and miserly father; and though he belonged to one of the universities, he had merely kept the necessary terms, without forming at it any useful acquaintance. The subjection in which his father had brought him up had given him originally great humility of manner; but it was now a good deal counteracted by the self-conceit of a weak head, living in retirement, and the consequential feelings of early and unexpected prosperity. A fortunate chance had recommended him to Lady Catherine de Bourgh when the living of Hunsford was vacant; and the respect which he felt for her high rank, and his veneration for her as his patroness, mingling with a very good opinion of himself, of his authority as a clergyman, and his right as a rector, made him altogether a mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility.
The paradoxical terms in which Austen establishes his character ??? “pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility” ??? suggest a complexity that Mr. Collins rarely reveals, as does the fact that his original subjection by his illiterate and miserly father originally gave him “great humility of manner.” We can sense here the kind of divided nature that leads to a character like Malvolio, full of ambition and class anger that burns just beneath the surface of his servility. But once this character is set, Mr. Collins simply acts it out, apparently untroubled by any touch of that original humility or subjection. Personally, I find that too simple. Unattractive, socially awkward men aren’t blind to their own failures; they’re obsessed by them, but helpless to do anything about them. If a reader were in a generous mood, s/he might conclude that Mr. Collins’ clumsy social gestures have a compensatory quality about them: he tries to embody virtues, social graces, and class traits that he knows he lacks, but he can only see himself reflected in the eyes of women who view him with disgust or contempt. And since we only see him through Elizabeth’s eyes, he has no room to grow, achieve painful self-awareness, or reveal the flawed humanity he works so hard to hide.
Darcy also sees himself reflected in Elizabeth’s contempt, but the resulting recognition of his own character flaws offers us a glimpse of what fiction can do by forcing us to see our own lives through other eyes:
What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.
Mr. Collins doesn’t read novels, so he isn’t capable of this self-awareness, which might be why Darcy wins Elizabeth’s love and Mr. Collins doesn’t. (Although, let’s face it, wealth helps. Elizabeth’s change of heart begins when she sees Mr. Darcy’s estate at Pemberley: “at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”) But if achieving this painful self-awareness is the novel’s test of character, I can’t help feeling that it’s both too hard on Mr. Collins and too easy on its reader. By allowing us to identify so completely with Elizabeth, it spares us having to recognize our own flaws and so denies us the humility lesson we need to achieve the self-awareness that defines Darcy as worthy of love.
I don’t mean to be rough on Austen here. My point is broader, and I think more controversial: drama, which speaks only through its characters, may be better suited to soliciting our empathy than the novel, which finally works best not as a social form but as an expression of an individual consciousness as it responds to social pressures. I still believe that fictions ??? acts of imagination ??? are better training in the habit of empathy than the self-serving narratives that constitute so many modern memoirs, but it may be that the novel is too focused in its expression of an individual consciousness to grant its secondary characters the same complexity that we see in drama. The modernist device of shifting perspective has allowed novelists to let secondary characters to speak for themselves. But we might think of this as an act of resistance to the form’s original singularity of consciousness and voice, shattering the mirror into a perspective glass that reflects the complexity of our social lives. In a sense, the novels that result are more dramatic in structure, as they are often more cinematic in form.
But since humility is the highest of virtues in Austen’s novel (after, perhaps, great wealth and good taste), I’d be a fool not to end on a humble note, if only to pretend that I’m no Mr. Collins. So am I being too narrow in my assumptions about the novel? Can you think of secondary characters who rise to an unexpected level of complexity? If so, then I await your correction in the comments below.
By you, I’ll be properly humbled.