"ESSENTIAL IRONY"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 756, 15 January 1954, Page 10

"ESSENTIAL IRONY"

JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS: A Study in Structure, by Andrew H. Wright; Chatto and Windus, English price 16/-. HIS book is by a young American scholar who mainly occupies himself with the ironic themes of Jane Austen's novels. He endeavours to show that ironic language is likely to be evidence of irony in a much deeper sense, and ‘quotes Kierkegaard, who said that "whoever has essential irony has it all day

long, not bound to any specific form, because it is infinite with him." This is interesting matter for speculation no doubt, but it seems to me unfortunate that Mr. Wright, tied to his thesis, should proceed to take an unsatisfactory view of Mansfield Park. In that novel he finds Jane Austen too much "engaged," and it is in her disengagement as an ironist that he finds "an objectivity which is not scientific, because not dis-

interested. it may be so, Dut I should have thought it quite impossible for anyone to write about Mansfield Park, without mentioning that the novel contains two of the most wonderfully comic passages that Jane Austen ever wrote: I mean the excursion to Sotherton, and the rehearsals (with "indefatigible rehearsers") for the amateur partormence of Lover’s Vows, Further, it seems to me very doubt ful. whether Fanny Price is quite the "simple didactic figure’ which Mr. Wright makes her out to be-particu-larly if we think of her in relation to the much more sophisticated Kate Croy. of Henry James’s The Wings of. the Dove. Kate’s motives in seeking money as a‘ Stable centre for her life are largely determined by her sense of the painful marriage situation of her sister: similarly, it might be argued, that Fanny’s faithfu] attachment to the dull Edmund is determined by her sense of her mother’s situation: at least she finds in Edmund the stability of character which her father lacks, and I suggest that it is this sense which is mainly tesponsible for her distrust of Henry Crawford, who she sees may eventually turn out to be a man resembling her father despite all his charm. In other words, her impulse towards playing safe somewhat mars the nobility of her severely-tried attachment. It is difficult to agree with the publisher that this book is for the ordinary (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) reader as wel] as the expert. It will unquestionably interest the expert, but the ordinary reader who is thinking of trying Jane Austen had better give it a

miss.

F.

S.