I am attending an afternoon tea with friends in Brunswick, Maryland, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth withs scones, cucumber sandwiches, and pastries. We are surrounded by dozens of other “Janeites,” as Austen fans call themselves, many of whom are decked out in Regency garb: long column gowns, gloves, and bonnets. They appear, however, to have left their corsets at home, as did I: I intend to leave plenty of room for those yummy pastries.
The event is just one of hundreds of Jane Austen balls, tours, festivals, exhibitions, lectures, and teas taking place around the globe this year. Undoubtedly, dozens of book clubs will devote the year to reading, or rereading, Austen’s six splendid novels. They will binge-watch the many Austen films while nibbling dainties made from recipes in the Dining with Jane Austen cookbook, published by the Chawton House Museum in Hampshire, England. Thousands more will visit the museum, where Jane spent the last eight years of her life living happily with her mother and sister Cassandra.
While Janeites worldwide enjoy Austen’s books, many are unfamiliar with the fact that she was a devout Christian whose faith deeply influenced her novels.
Why do so few readers realize this? It’s because most secular Austen biographers — who evidently take pride in their prejudice — ignore her beliefs, apparently viewing the Christian faith of this clever, amusing writer as an embarrassment. Others, presumably, simply weren’t paying attention.
Of Course She Was Christian
But Austen’s piety really should not come as a surprise. She was, after all, the daughter and granddaughter of Anglican rectors, the sister of two clergymen, and the cousin of four more. The Austen family prayed every morning and evening, sometimes using prayers Austen wrote herself, and read through the Bible every year.
Michael Giffen, author of Jane Austen’s Religious Imagination, writes that literary critics who consider Austen a secular writer are forgetting that she lived during a time when state and church were still in organic unity; attempting to separate her writings into distinct secular and religious spheres is impossible.
Austen embraced the Christian teaching that all humans live under the curse of the Fall and are in need of salvation. As well, Giffin adds, we must locate “any religious interpretation of her novels within the well-known dialectic of neoclassicism and romanticism, and the different emphasis each movement places on reason and feeling.” Her novels “are about reordering the disordered personality, family, society, and church; and for Austen, this reordering depends on finding the right balance between neoclassical reason (sense) and romantic feeling (sensibility).” Austen’s novels represent “the hermeneutics of the neoclassical Enlightenment with its commitment to reason, nature, and Christian humanism.”
In each, Austen explores the fallen condition of humanity and how her characters can, through the use of reason, participate not only in their own salvation, but also the salvation of their communities. Austen reflects on the fallen nature of humanity in both scriptural and neoclassical terms, Griffin notes.
Sense or Sensibility?
Each of Austen’s heroines has an affinity with either reason or feeling. In each novel, she reveals what happens when her characters focus too strongly on one or the other.
Neoclassical thinkers of Austen’s day pointed to what happens when people put too strong a focus on being guided by feeling, as did many artists, musicians, intellectuals, and authors of the Georgian era, who enthusiastically followed the romantic lifestyle: social ills such as promiscuity, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and disease, which injured individuals, families, homes, and communities.
Austen illustrates this truth through (among other characters) Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who impulsively throws aside reason and the rules of Georgian society to run off with the feckless Mr. Wickam, who has no intention of marrying her. In so doing, Lydia lowers the esteem in which the neighborhood held the Bennet family, risking her sisters’ chances of marrying well, and —- having married a worthless man —- is forced to rely on her sisters’ generosity to survive.
At the other extreme, in Sense and Sensibility, Fanny Dashwood can’t wait to throw her husband’s bereaved family out of their home without a thought for their feelings and welfare. After all, Fanny reasons, the house now belongs to them. Fanny also reasons that the Dashwood family doesn’t actually need financial help (although John Dashwood has promised his dying father he will provide it).
Austen exposes how destructive this “reasonable” attitude is to the Dashwood sisters and their mother. In behaving as they do, John and Fanny violate biblical commands to honor one’s parents and care for the widow and the orphan.
Out Of or In Control
The contrast between reason and feeling is most clearly revealed in Sense and Sensibility. The older sister, Elinor Dashwood, is thoughtful, sensible, and self-controlled; she represents the reason and Christian humanism of Neoclassicism (although her too-rational approach to life lacks an appropriate balance between reason and feeling). The younger sister, Marianne, is impulsive, unguarded, and emotional; she represents Romanticism.
Marianne — typical of Romantic thinkers — is impatient with the rules of society. Upon meeting a young man named John Willoughby, she takes an immediate liking to him and sees no reason to hide her feelings, which swiftly turn from liking to passionate love.
Marianne allows Willoughby to escort her through the house he expects to inherit from his aunt — a deeply inappropriate action, given that his aunt was absent and no such visit should have taken place without engagement to be married. Marianne convinces herself that she and Willoughby have an understanding tantamount to an engagement, and behaves accordingly, to Elinor’s great distress.
And then, disaster strikes. Willoughby’s aunt abruptly disinherits him after learning he has seduced another young woman who also put feeling above reason with devastating consequences: an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
Willoughby immediately abandons Marianne in favor of an heiress. Marianne indulges in an explosion of grief, almost “screaming with agony,” as Austen puts it, selfishly bringing great distress upon her family. Her uninhibited wallowing leads to a serious illness, which almost costs Marianne her life.
In contrast, Elinor knows when it is appropriate to conceal her feelings, as she must do on several occasions. Like Marianne, Elinor also is abandoned by her lover, Edward Farrars, who has been secretly engaged to another woman for four years. Elinor’s feelings of heartbreak are as strong as Marianne’s, but she does not inflict them on her family.
Dr. Peter Leithart observes in Miniatures and Morals that “Elinor’s sense is revealed here as a specifically Christian virtue; she does not subordinate her passions, in Stoic fashion, to her reason. Rather, she governs her passions so that she can do her duty.”
In the end, Marianne realizes the falseness of her opinions and determines to begin balancing her feelings with reason. As she tells Elinor, “I saw in my own behaviour … nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself and want of kindness to others. I saw that my own feelings had prepared my sufferings and my want of fortitude under them had almost led me to the grave.”
Marianne is glad she survived so she would “have time for atonement to my God and to you all.” And when thoughts of Willoughby crop up, she will check those memories “by religion, by reason, and by constant employment.”
Austen rewards Marianne with Colonel Brandan, a neighbor who has long adored her. Elinor’s goodness is also rewarded: Once the honorable Edward is free of the avaricious Lucy Steele, who breaks their engagement in order to marry Edward’s wealthy brother, he proposes to Elinor. Elinor — who expresses appropriate feeling at this point — bursts into tears of joy.
In Sense and Sensibility, Austen is telling us that we reach true maturity when we learn to appropriately balance reason and feeling. As Giffen notes, the novel opens with a description of human fallenness -— Mr. Dashwood’s death, the actions of his avaricious son and daughter-in-law, and the unfortunate effects of primogeniture — and ends with a description of human redemption. Each sister, as she matures, achieves a balance between reason and feeling.
As we read Austen’s six novels -— or any other novels, for that matter — we would do well to consider what philosophies are influencing us today, for good or ill.
Anne Morse is a member of the Maryland chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America.
