Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> She is her class, writ horribly large, and
> expressing itself at its lonely, narrow, unseeing, vicious worst.
>
> Would that be a fair thing to say?
>
Yes, but only after about 200 pages of providing context. If you start off here the novel will go flat and you will miss out on the secret (partly but only partly a secret to Austen herself) that The Park _at its best_ is poisonous. But even that is way too clumsy a point of departure. You are smashing crucial historical & literary distinctions by being so eager to "get the main point."
Perhaps the problem is that critics simply cant conceive of a work by a provincial woman being so densely structured. In general I agree with that presbyterian parson northrop frye that a lust to judge, to evaluate, is a barrier to literary understanding. But there is a handful of writers who you will misconstrue in elementary ways by failing to presuppose their weight or magnitude -- I would list Austen, Burns, Pope, Rochester, and Jonson as a non- dramatic poet. And also Lenin incidentally, but we will leave that for another day. Austen was a provincial parson's daughter (clever, clever Jane. Pat her on the head and smile); Pope was a little (4'8" or so) runt of a hunchback who cluttered up his poems with proper names; Burns was a backwater prole: how wonderful to see that dog walking on its hind legs; Rochester was a dissolute lord who scribbled dirty verses; Jonson the poet inhabited the same body as a great comic dramatist and shared the same city as WS & JD. See them all as the giants that they were and whole new worlds open up. And you stop making stupid assumptions about how easy it is to sum them up in some patronising catch-phrase.
A srange & wondrous group of people were born in the 1770s -- ricardo, austen, wordsworth, hegel, beethoven. Try to get them in a single focus.
Hint: what is poisonous about that social order was its frustration of the mutual dependency that makes us human. Austen, a bourgeois moralist, exhibits the utopianism implicit in all bourgeois thought. But one of the features that unites this generation of the '70s is that for them TINA was an honest position & hence holding it was no barrier to seeing clearly their world. Marx noted this explicitly in the case of ricardo but it holds for the others. This is what makes intelligible & acceptable hegel's allegiance to the prussian state, austen's presentation at the end of MP of a happily reconstituted mansfield park (place, not book). Contrast the deep bad faith (the stench of apologetics) to Dickens's presentation of mr jarndyce & mrs. pardiggle in BH, of Betty Higden in OMF. I love both books, having taught & reread BH until I have it nearly memorized, but they share in the uncleanness of most or all of bourgeois literature since it became necessary for those authors to maintain an eternal vigilence against acknowledging the historicity of the capitalist order and of the core character in bourgeois culture, the abstract individual with his/her endless hunger for the divine/beastly status of isolated independence (or 'non-dependency'). It would be intriguing to do an extended comparison of betty higden & isabel archer.
Carrol
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity ........................................
Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
(Canto LXXXI)
I was right there in Boston the night that they died
(W. Guthrie)