The Religious Dimension of Jane Austen's Novels (review)

Abstract

350 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Gene Koppel. The Religious Dimension of Jane Austen's Novels. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. xi + 141pp. US$39.95. This book represents a valiant and successful attempt to bring moral judgments expressed in Jane Austen's novels into relation with religious doctrine in her time and ours. For the last forty or so years, since the critics hoisted her on to the high horse of exemplary ethical discernment, she has been racing o'er the downs so free, never being asked to take a doctrinal hedge or to look back at other writers labouring through rather stickier country than her well-tended uplands. Gene Koppel, no less appreciative than the commentators who have found throughout the novels revelations in ironic second thoughts and gospels in marriage alliances, is speaking up for the mainstream testimony of Christian theology. His discussion is not exactly breath-taking, but it is welcome and pleasantly written; he is recalling a spiritual context that Austen herself might have regarded as appropriate, though not necessarily essential, for a reading of her novels. Koppel finds religious doctrine even in the most unbridled outbursts of rightthinking heroines. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, resenting both Mr Bingley's apparent desertion of her sister Jane and Charlotte Lucas's rapid acceptance of Mr Collins's marriage proposal immediately after she rejected him herself, flies off the handle in telling Jane of her bitter scorn for the prospective bridegroom: "... a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking" (vol. II, chap. 1). True enough, though in due course Elizabeth will sprinkle a pinch of Christian charity into her dealings with Charlotte. Not so Gene Koppel. ... Charlotte Lucas is completely and for all time shut out from every possibility of love and honesty in the central relationship of her life. Further, since in Jane Austen's fiction human character is always in process, what could be in store for Charlotte other than continued deterioration? ... [her] understanding becomes "darkened," [her] heart "hardened," to use two common biblical words describing men and women who have cut themselves off from everything in life which indicates the fulfilling presence of God. (P- 15) Poor Charlotte! If this is the novel's religious dimension, it looks like the religion of the Pharisees. Elizabeth, for her part, goes to stay with Charlotte, now Mrs Collins, and in departing "was eager with her thanks and assurances of happiness. She had spent six weeks with great enjoyment ..." (vol. II, chap. 15). The moral groove that Koppel has become fixed in is the idea that Mr Collins's "constant sacrifice of his religious values to his worldly advantage is wrong" (p. 14). Who would want to disagree? But the Vicar of Bray for one, and perhaps Charlotte for another, thought that in the Church of England a certain plasticity might sometimes accommodate religious values to estimable worldly advantage. REVIEWS 351 The case for placing Jane Austen in the latitudinarian tradition of Bishop Sherlock, Samuel Johnson, and Lawrence Sterne (chap. 2) is persuasive; the case for a modern religious interpretation (chap. 3) goes through more difficult arguments—derived from the insights of Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Leslie Dewart, and others—but the effort is certainly rewarding. These theological comparisons might be said to place Jane Austen in the category that William James in his Varieties ofReligious Experience calls "the once-born," people who share the "religion of healthy-mindedness," the kind, non-metaphysical, somewhat complacent faith of those who find the character of God in romantic and harmonious nature. Gene Koppel does not neglect one of the moral imbroglios of mid-twentiethcentury Austen criticism: how to assess Emma's rudeness to Miss Bates and Mr Knightley's subsequent rebuke. He avoids discussing, however, certain central moral and religious issues of Jane Austen's day, for instance: how to judge the operation of the slave trade and the Game Laws. In recent years some awkward questions have been asked about political issues in the subtexts of novels regarded...