Style of the Traditional Regency Era

The elusive effervescent style of the Regency is a combination of many things: the use of the subtle humor, droll characterizations; precise language with the extensive vocabulary of the well-educated; authentic details, such as correct clothing, furniture, social clubs; small-scale drama, such as family conflicts and social dilemmas. Vulgar characters and vulgar manners can appear only if they are part of a certain person's characterization. Vulgarity and lack of manners are never allowed in the hero, heroine, or any of the "good guys" among their family and friends.

If done correctly, all these elements add up to a magical effervescence, a glorious depiction of a time gone by when men were noble, ladies were charming, and honor was an important word. No one of the above-for example, getting the details right-will suffice by itself. The whole picture of the Regency world depends on getting the "feel" of the era correct, not just the details. Painting on a broad canvas, if you will, rather than getting the correct manufacturer of the silver epergne on the dining table.

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Austen's Style

I. Austen's struggle to become a writer illustrates how difficult this task was. Her first attempts at fiction followed convention by being epistolary novels but there was clearly something in them - probably a robustness of tone, a predisposition to irony - that did not meet with the approval of publishers. Her early works remained unpublished and it was only after fifteen years of new starts and wholesale revisions that her work reached the public in a condensed burst. Her first novel to be published was "Sense and Sensibility" in 1811; her last - although written more than twenty years earlier - was the posthumous Northanger Abbey in 1818. In all these works the conventional guise of a first-person narrator was abandoned in favour of narration by an impersonal and ironic author whose style is completely without precedent.

II. The impersonality of the opening of Austen's novels comes in strong and weak forms: three of the novels written before "Emma" begin less abruptly by offering the reader a context for a story. "Sense and Sensibility" begins "The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park .. where for many years they had lived in so respectable a manner, as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance". "Mansfield Park" begins "About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park". In each of these cases the author introduces the reader to the biographical and historical context in which her story will unfold. "Northanger Abbey" similarly eases the reader in, adding a fine self-consciousness about how fictitious roles inform social life, "No one who had seen Catherine Moreland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine".

III. These impersonal openings already indicated the cool ironic potential of the new narrative voice, but "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice" offered something more. "Pride and Prejudice" begins with a radical affront to readerly comfort: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife". This stark generalisation, spoken by no one, confronts the reader with such abstract sense that one might ask whether one was embarking on a novel or a philosophical essay. The sentence places the reader in a situation that becomes more problematic as, further down the first page, one discovers that the "truth universally acknowledged" may not be endorsed by the author. The sentence in effect insinuates various orders of doubt between reader, the narrated experience and the narrative authority.

IV. Austen's discovery of the ironic potentials of impersonal narration is one of the chief reasons for her fame. The distinguished literary historian Ian Watt put it like this: Austen's novels have "authenticity without diffuseness or trickery, wisdom of social comment without a garrulous essayist, and a sense of the social order which is not achieved at the expense of the individuality and autonomy of the characters. [Her] analyses of her characters and their states of mind, and her ironical juxtapositions of motive and situation do not seem to come from an intrusive author but rather from some august and impersonal spirit of social and psychological understanding."

V. The style of writing which Austen invents is in effect a new kind of discourse known as the free indirect style, a way of representing speech and thought which blurs the distinction between reported or indirect speech, a character's subjective thoughts, narrative fact and the author's opinions. In the nineteenth century this was to become the typical mode of fictional narration and, even if writers today use it less, it remains a basic mode of narrative discourse. Indeed, one could say that the free indirect style is one of the fundamental ways in which modern consciousness represents its experience.

VI. The particular achievement of the free indirect style is that it enables both a representation of subjectivity and a representation of objectivity, a paradoxical achievement which we call realism. Realism -- philosophical, moral or literary -- implies the ability to see clearly the relationship between self and society. It is an evaluative procedure in which one understands the nature of the subjective self and how that self is perceived by others. Realism in this sense becomes the ground in which nineteenth-century fiction will develop, but also the philosophical and ideological ground of liberal democracies, concerned as they are with the balances to be struck between individual and social needs. Austen's writing contributes directly to the growth of the liberal world-view by representing the individual as an autonomous moral agency that is susceptible to the guiding hand of authority, and this political and philosophical contribution is intimately bound up with the techniques of the free indirect style.

VII. The fascination of Austen's writing lies in its ironic shifts of perspective from one moment to the next. Reading and re-reading Austen never enables her thought to be unbound, or more accurately pinned down. With Austen we realise that linguistic meaning is both precise and fluid, capable of singular multiplicity and multiple singularity. For the sake of comfort and convention we tend to make sense simple, but reading Austen reminds us that the construction of readerly sense depends upon choosing between a great range of meanings which the text opens up. The decision to read it this way rather than that only succeeds in creating a tension between the reading adopted and the other readings which refuse to be silenced.

VIII. The pleasure of irony suffuses all Austen's novels. What is specific to "Emma" is that the opposition between an objective, authoritative consciousness and a subjective, deluded consciousness is both the subject of novelistic action (in Emma's own failures to understand) and a condition produced in the reader by the ambiguity of the book's narration. The form is identical with its content. And in both form and content the opposition is revealed as a function of gender.

IX. The characters' values are those of Austen's social class: the Tory, Anglican gentry who had lived comfortably for several centuries in their rural rectories and manors but who were sensing the winds of change signalled by the arrival of such nouveaux riches as Mrs Elton. Country estates are always the best indicators in Austen's work of both social position and real values, the exquisite taste of Pemberley teaching Elizabeth Bennet to see Darcy's real virtues in "Pride and Prejudice", and Mr Rushton's modish re-fashioning of Sotherton indicating his frivolous and unsound character in "Mansfield Park".

X. i) In recent years Austen's political position has attracted considerable attention from feminist critics anxious to claim Austen's support. Marilyn Butler inadvertently contributed to the debate by arguing, in a book published just before feminist theory began to predominate in literary criticism, that when read in full awareness of the political and literary context, Austen could be seen as a clear exponent of a Tory ideology which is deeply opposed to contemporary demands for social reform, especially those advanced by Mary Wollstonecraft and seen by contemporaries as linked to the 'Jacobite' radicals who thought Britain should follow the example of revolutionaries in contemporary France. In developing this view Butler even proposed that Elizabeth Bennet might have been interesting to her conservative author because she represented in an almost acceptable form an emancipatory thrust which she found generally unacceptable.

ii) In a rather different contemporary argument, two prominent American feminists, Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar, pointed out that although Austen apparently endorses a conservatism inimical to women's real political interests, she shows women struggling to gain power and autonomy and positively appreciates those who succeed. Gilbert's and Gubar's interpretation depended upon choosing to ignore the antipathy -- or at the very least the nervousness -- provoked by such characters as Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park but their work did draw attention to the way Austen's fascination with dynamic characters makes her ostensible values uncertain. Later critics have continued to explore this ground. Mary Poovey argued that Austen inscribes herself in the limiting position of 'the proper lady' in order to gain a degree of authority with which she can interrogate the values of her social world; Rachel Brownstein and Karen Newman argued that Austen takes up the polished epigrammatic and ironic style of approved eighteenth-century men, and then displays its inability adequately to describe the world. In these different accounts there is not really a consensus, but there is a rough general agreement that Austen's intention is not manifestly feminist in our modern sense of the term. While she is a vigorous defender of women hers is a Tory ideology resistant to contemporary demands for social reform, including early feminist positions such as those of Mary Wollstonecraft.