A Jane Austen Education (14 page)

 

 

These were lessons to explore for a lifetime, but the first place I applied them was the classroom. Instead of thinking of a session as a kind of engineering problem—how to transfer a certain quantity of material from my head to my students’—I started to see it as an opportunity to incite them to discover the powers that were waiting, unborn, within them, and in doing so take both themselves and me by surprise. I went from feeling that a good class was one in which I had “gotten my points across” to regarding it as one in which I had learned something myself—not because my learning was the goal, but because if I had found out something new, it meant that I had given my students the freedom to think their way beyond me.

All of a sudden, teaching became a joyful experience. I arrived in the classroom with excitement and left it with exhilaration. The time in between, which now seemed as if it was never long enough, began to feel like a collaboration, even an adventure—like I was working a trapeze, and the best moments came when I let go of the bar, let go of my plan, and just flew through the air, confident that someone would be there on the other side to catch me. It was scary, but it was also really fun.

I began to like my students rather than resent them. They suddenly seemed really smart and interesting—because I was letting them be, instead of having to suppress their talents in order to maintain my fragile sense of intellectual authority. They seemed to start to like me, too, began to come to talk to me, even confide in me. Best of all, a few of them became my friends, in that special way that can happen between a student and a teacher—the way that had happened between me and that extraordinary person whom I felt so privileged to live next door to.

It turned out that I hadn’t made a mistake by wanting to become a professor, after all. It had just taken me a while to discover my potential. I had started to learn how to teach—but more importantly, after more than twenty years in school, I had finally learned how to learn.

That first year in Brooklyn, I sensed my life beginning to grow into a new shape. It was the first time I had had a place of my own, and I could almost feel my arms and legs getting longer with all the psychological space I had to move around in. I got a platform for my futon, bought a nice set of chairs at a stoop sale down the street, even picked up some plants and learned how to keep them alive. (When I asked the clerk at the garden store if my potting soil would go bad if I didn’t, you know, use it up right away, he said, “You wanna know if this
dirt
is going to get
stale
? I feel like I’m talking to my little brother!”) My English-muffin-pizza days were over. Instead, I picked up
The New Basics Cookbook
and started having people over for things like minty roasted potatoes and lemon-garlic-rosemary chicken. A few months in, I even acquired a cat—this was some serious responsibility now—a little gray thing who needed a home and who took to curling up beside me on my desk while I was working.

Living so far from Columbia, I began to see less of my graduate school friends. Instead, I gravitated toward a very different world. Another friend had become involved with a woman who’d been raised on the Upper East Side and gone to a fancy Manhattan private school. Her prep-school crowd was back in the city after college, dabbling in this or that and living the high life, and these were the people I started spending time around. It would have been hard not to. This was the upper crust, the world of Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitzgerald updated for the nineties: posh, polished young people who gave off a glow of glamour and sophistication that drew me like a moth. I was dazzled, I was seduced. It was an undreamed-of world of privilege, and I was grateful just to be able to watch.

There was the stunning department-store heiress who ran a chic East Village café and went out with a guy who talked about getting into film. There was the scion of a consumer-products fortune who had married his art-school girlfriend. There was the lovely, blue-eyed daughter of an Ivy League president. And there was one young woman who seemed to be richer than all the others put together—even they grumbled when she took us to a “little place around the corner” where the desserts started at twelve dollars—and who had picked up a tall, Dutch, model-beautiful boyfriend somewhere along the way.

I went to their openings and partied with them afterward in downtown lofts. I partook of artful brunches and elegant candlelit dinners at a town house in Cobble Hill. I was ushered into the large East Side apartment building where my friend’s girlfriend grew up, to discover that there were only two doors facing us when the elevator opened: one for her apartment and one for the other one. I spent weekends at her family’s summerhouse on Long Island, with four or five bedrooms and a swimming pool and a lawn that rolled down about three hundred feet to the sound.

Here it was, I thought, that fabulous, glamorous New York world that I had always sensed around me but had never known how to get to. The city is Oz when you grow up, as I had, in the Jersey suburbs, a shining mirage in the distance, and ten years of living there had never really changed that. I could walk the streets and hit the bars on a thousand college nights; I could eat black bean cakes in Chinatown, blini in Brighton Beach, and bowls of flaczki at Christine’s; I could discover the Kitchen, the Knitting Factory, and P.S. 122; but I could never shake the feeling that I was still just wandering somewhere out there in the cold. The real city, as I imagined it, the magic kingdom where beautiful people in shining clothes said clever things in darkened rooms, still lay there on the other side of the velvet ropes.

But now I felt like I’d been slipped a pass, even if it was strictly limited-access. My friend’s girlfriend befriended me—she turned out to be a tremendously magnetic personality, a great storyteller and reader of character—but the rest of them mostly ignored me. I could hardly blame them. I didn’t know how to dress, where to stand, how to order a drink or cross a room at a party. So I stayed on the edges, gazed at the women, and tried to pay for my keep with witty remarks. Yet still I hoped to find a place within the circle, if only by special dispensation. I would become the house intellectual, I imagined, prized for my ability to spice up a gathering with a dash of literary zest. The guys would respect me; the women would notice me. Eventually, one of them—it almost didn’t matter which—would find me intriguing enough to make me her boyfriend.

 

 

It wasn’t always easy, after one of those weekends or one of those nights, to go back to plugging away at my Austen chapter. It was the longest of long slogs, writing a dissertation, and I had still only barely begun, and I often wondered where it would finally get me, whether there would be a job out there at the end of it all. Sometimes I even lost patience with Austen herself—specifically, when I thought about
Mansfield Park.
I had read it a couple of times by then, and I still could not see anything to like about the book, or comprehend how she had ever written it. The novel seemed to pit itself against everything Austen believed in, everything that was delightful about
Emma
and
Pride and Prejudice
and
Northanger Abbey
—against wit and energy and curiosity. Its mood was dour, even bitter, its view of life crabbed and prudish.

Worst of all, it forced me to keep company with an exceptionally unappealing heroine. Fanny Price was a poor little girl who had been adopted into her rich uncle’s family at the age of ten. Terrified by the grandeur of her new surroundings at Mansfield Park and awed by a foursome of confident, attractive older cousins, Fanny developed into a meek, weak adolescent, frail in body and poor of spirit. She had nothing of Emma’s self-confidence, or Elizabeth’s sense of fun, or Catherine Morland’s openness to life, no capacity whatsoever for happiness or joy.

Her passivity may have been understandable given the circumstances, but it seemed to conceal something more like passive aggression. When her cousins and some friends decided to put on a play for their own amusement—exactly the kind of thing, by the way, that the Austens did all the time when Jane was growing up—Fanny refused to take part in so supposedly improper a scheme. But it wasn’t enough for her just to stay out of it. She couldn’t stand the idea that anyone else might be having a good time:

To which I felt like saying, “Too bad.” But self-pity was not enough for her. That was already her default mode, a “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just sit in the dark” kind of martyrdom. No, as she crept around watching the rehearsals, “Fanny believed herself to derive as much innocent enjoyment from the play as any of them.” “Innocent enjoyment”: the very note of defensive hypocrisy. She got pleasure from the play, and then she got some extra pleasure from condemning it.

Fanny was already eighteen by then, but she still seemed like a child, willfully stuck in the same place she had been when she’d first arrived at Mansfield Park. Indeed, the so-called East room, her own little domain on an upper floor, had once served as the family schoolroom, and it retained its childish furniture even now. “Innocent” was right. Fanny’s problem with the play, after all, a romance called
Lovers’ Vows
, was the covert opportunity it afforded her cousins and their friends for flirting with one another. Prim, proper, priggish, prudish, puritanical, Fanny simply couldn’t deal with the threat of adult sexuality. And to top it off, she didn’t even like to read novels. Too racy for her, no doubt, and certainly too frivolous.

On the other hand, no one else at Mansfield Park was any better, and most of them were a lot worse. Fanny, at least, had the virtues of her faults. If she was self-pitying, she was also self-sacrificing. If she was passive, she was also patient, generous, and uncomplaining. But the rest of the household was mainly different flavors of awful. Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny’s uncle, was a distant, overbearing patriarch whose presence sat on Mansfield like an oppressive weight. (Only his absence overseas made the thought of the play possible.) Lady Bertram, his indolent trophy wife—“a woman who spent her days in sitting, nicely dressed, on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework, . . . thinking more of her pug than her children”—was as lovely, energetic, and intelligent as an expensive throw pillow.

Maria and Julia, the Bertram daughters, were slick and spoiled. (“Their vanity was in such good order,” Austen told us, “that they seemed to be quite free from it.”) Tom, the older son, was an irresponsible playboy. And then there was Mrs. Norris, Lady Bertram’s sister, probably the most repulsive character in all of Austen: spiteful, miserly, and mean as dirt, a woman who reacted to the death of her husband “by considering that she could do very well without him” and who harried Fanny—“Remember, wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last”—like a wicked stepmother. But indeed the whole family treated the heroine like a glorified servant—that is, when they bothered to notice her at all.

 

 

The whole family but one. Edmund, the kind, attentive younger son, was an oasis of decency in a desert of selfishness. But even he was hard for me to take—as proper and priggish as Fanny herself, and in fact, as her mentor and adored older cousin, the one primarily responsible for making her that way. Nor was Edmund any less immune to the lures of hypocrisy. He, too, opposed the play—until he saw the chance to do a little flirting of his own. Not that he regarded it like that, of course. The cast was one short, and Edmund only took the unclaimed part to forestall the greater impropriety of having to give it to someone outside the family circle. It also just happened to involve playing opposite a young woman in whom by then he had developed a somewhat more than innocent interest.

For a new pair of young people had arrived upon the scene. Henry and Mary Crawford, whose half sister was the wife of the Mansfield clergyman, were everything, it seemed to me, that the novel had been needing, a gust of fresh air from beyond the musty confines of Mansfield Park. Henry was dashing and debonair, a sophisticate, a raconteur, a man of the world—cleverer than Tom, more confident than Edmund, and a lot more fun than either one. As for his “remarkably pretty” sister—healthy and high-spirited; witty, playful, and independent—she reminded me of no one so much as Elizabeth Bennet. “I am very strong,” Mary said, bouncing off a horse. “Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” She even came with an extra little dash of sauciness. Henry and Mary had been raised by their uncle, a high-ranking naval officer. “My home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals,” she quipped at one point; “Of
Rears,
and
Vices,
I saw enough”—a naughty pun on military ranks and the sexual reputation of the Royal Navy.

The Crawfords were independently wealthy, and their money gave them a freedom of spirit that was previously unknown to the heavy atmosphere of Mansfield Park. Their arrival jolted both the Bertram siblings and the novel itself awake. Walks, rides, outings, the play—suddenly it was all liveliness and movement. Of course, Fanny herself was appalled. These were not her kind of people, or her idea of how to pass the time (which tended to involve a lot of sitting). And when Mary and Edmund began to take a shine to one another—his steadiness of character attracting her almost against her will—the heroine was thrown into a panic of jealousy.

But if she stewed with secret spite, Mary treated her with a gentle consideration that seemed to flow from real goodwill. “I am not going to urge her,” Mrs. Norris barked in front of everyone when Fanny refused to participate in the play, “but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl; . . . very ungrateful, indeed, considering who and what she is”: