Jane Austen: Defense against the Dark Arts?
Jane Austen’s Darkness by Julia Yost (Wiseblood Books, 2024)
Reviewed by Geoffrey Reiter
Jane Austen’s role in contemporary pop culture has solidified her reputation as the writer of an odd sort of fairy tale. Devoid of supernatural occurrences, populated by some of the more elevated social strata of Regency England, her novels, as we understand them, are fundamentally “fairy-tale-ish” insofar as they present happily-ever-after marriages for all our heroes and heroines, resolutions that we as readers can expect from the very start. They seem to be simplistic, feel-good fare.
Julia Yost seeks to subvert this interpretation in her little book Jane Austen’s Darkness. She announces her thesis early on in no uncertain terms:
In a novel with a marriage plot, we naturally expect to encounter a meritorious heroine whose nuptials will revise her fortunes in accord with our estimation of her. So powerful is our desire for this resolution, we find it where it is not. In Austen’s novels, merit is not, as a rule, rewarded. Romantic love is often costly; nor does it always coincide with acquisition of self-knowledge or accession to a deserved place in society. Even merit has its dark side, in the temptations of cynicism and misanthropy, which assail the morally intelligent person and turn pride from a virtue into a vice. Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness, and with one sparkling exception, it is an uncertain one. (2)
A Senior Editor at First Things with contributions to publications such as Compact and The New York Times, Yost casts a cold eye on Austen’s characters—heroes, heroines, and eccentric supporting cast alike. And she presents a compelling case for her interpretation, provided we take her interpretation as a deliberate counterbalancing of the existing Austen stereotypes.
Once Yost establishes her plan in a two-page introduction, she wastes no time in making her case. In the remainder of the book’s slim 72 pages, she analyzes each of Austen’s Big Six novels, along with a closing chapter on the unfinished Sanditon. The chapters and analyses vary in length, but each is devoted to looking at the ways in which the seemingly polite culture of early nineteenth-century England can serve as a mask—or perhaps as a coping mechanism—for human cruelty, wickedness, and vice, the reality of which, Yost maintains, Austen was keenly aware. The source Yost most frequently cites, her forebear in this misanthropic approach to Austen’s corpus, is psychologist D. W. Harding’s 1940 Scrutiny essay “Regulated Hatred.” Following Harding, Yost tends to read the novels as depicting networks of men and women who inhabit a civilized social sphere that exists to prevent depraved humans from collapsing into literal carnage. The system allows some deserving people to flourish, but success isn’t guaranteed, nor can one be certain that the wicked will receive their comeuppance.
Harding’s position is by now well known (if not universally accepted) in Austen scholarship, but Yost is aware that in our day—as in Austen’s day, and Harding’s—Austen’s audience is made up of readers who largely ignore such darknesses. Yet it is salubrious to have them pointed out. Even the casual reader at least knows enough to chuckle at the buffoonery of Austen’s most foolish characters (Mr. Collins, Rev. Elton, Walter Elliot) or to wince at the villainy of others (Wickham, Willoughby, Frank Churchill). The problem may be that the social environment of “regulated hatred” threatens to prevent us from recognizing just how bad they are. Yost’s reading explicitly examines some “detestable people” who “pass as ordinary, polite prestigious” and in the process allows us the tools to fill in the blanks better for others (5).
The same society that lets rogues and fools to dodge moral scorn may also lead us to find virtue where there is none. In detailing this tendency, Yost is particularly hard on the protagonists of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, and fans of these novels (especially their leading men) may take issue with the skewering those characters receive in this book. “The deficiencies of the men,” Yost contends, “make Sense and Sensibility a problem novel, one that leaves us uncertain how to feel about the fortunes it disburses at the close” (5). Mansfield Park, meanwhile, “concludes in a marriage we are not sure we can approve, between a heroine we are not sure we like and a hero who does not impress” (19). Our favorite romantic couples (the Knightleys and the Darcys) are in better shape according to Yost’s reading, but mostly because their elevated social status allows them to largely ignore the malice and stupidity of their neighbors. They themselves demonstrate character growth, but they are surrounded by unrepentant idiots—“the fools are not improvable” (62).
Though she interacts with several secondary sources, Yost quotes prodigiously from the novels themselves. She is a careful reader, so one cannot dismiss her points too quickly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the socioeconomic status of Austen’s characters is a frequent emphasis, because the regulated hatred of polite society allows many sins to go unremarked if certain sinners have the monetary or social capital to compensate for their sins. More surprising (and fascinating) is Yost’s canny examination of the role of health and hygiene in the novels. She adroitly notes the extent to which such thematic considerations are woven into many of the books. This leads to her closing chapter ruminating on Sanditon, whose eponymous location is a commercialized resort town and thus fruitfully amenable to Yost’s meditations on the ways in which obsession with physical health supplants spiritual well-being: “But the joke is on the hypochondriacs, in three ways. Endeavoring to avoid physical sickness, they contract a spiritual sickness; they imagine they can avoid death, which is the one thing that comes to all; and in death, they dread that which is not dreadful” (69). This transitions toward Yost’s closing thoughts in the book, which hint at a spiritual wisdom about our relationship to death that might lurk between the lines of Austen’s words—though one might wish she (Yost, and maybe Austen too?) had developed and articulated her conclusions more fully.
Jane Austen’s Darkness is about the length of a master’s thesis. Critics of this mode of writing often complain that its size is untenable—too long to be an article, too short to be a book. In this case, Jane Austen’s Darkness defies the criticism. The thoughtful lay reader of Austen (and even many critics) could find much of value in its pages, even as they race through the text. The length is also helpful given the subject matter. How many people would want to read a full-sized book that relentlessly presents the most misanthropic perspective on Austen’s characters and situations?
Given the number of societies, book clubs, films, and miniseries dedicated to her, Jane Austen’s popularity shows no signs of waning two hundred years since her death. Some may argue that her fans are (and may always have been) missing the point. Harding certainly thought so, claiming in Regulated Hatred that “her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked” (6). Yost doesn’t go this far, but she shares Harding’s notion that the general Austen audience is too quick to gloss over the novels’ dark corners, laughing and forgiving anything, so long as they get their desired “happily ever after.”
But perhaps Jane Austen’s published works are even more like fairy tales than we realize. When we speak of the “fairy tale ending,” we tend to forget that that ending is generally secured through pain, trial, and suffering, heroes and heroines navigating dark woods and terrifying dangers. Austen’s woods may be country estates or shallow resorts, while cads and shrews are her dragons and witches. Her popular readers are not wrong to appreciate the happy endings that Aunt Jane provides for them, but it is too easy to forget how bad the trials are. Jane Austen’s Darkness is not the authoritative word on its subject; but as a reminder of the hazards that attend the journey to joy, Yost’s book cannot be commended highly enough.
Geoffrey Reiter is Professor and Coordinator of Literature at Lancaster Bible College and associate editor at Christ and Pop Culture. He is the author of several academic articles on genre fiction and philosophy and has also written for Christianity Today online. An author of fantasy and weird horror, his poetry and fiction have appeared in The Mythic Circle, Star*Line, Spectral Realms, and Penumbra. His collection of weird horror, The Lime Kiln and Other Enchanted Spaces, has been published by Hippocampus Press.
