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Book review
Jane Austen and Narrative Authority

By Tara Ghoshal Wallace

Palgrave, Houndmills, 2001

Reviewed by Pamela Nutt

Who is telling the truth? This is a book about how Jane Austen’s fiction is to be read. Wallace argues that getting to the truth behind the narratives is not merely a task for the characters within the narrative. Rather, in Austen’s mixed narratives, it is primarily a task for the reader.

Readers familiar with Jane Austen’s novels know the importance of discerning the truth, particularly as the characters themselves learn truths about themselves and about others. We recognise that Northanger Abbey presents conflicting levels of fiction, Sense and Sensibility deals with painful struggles to recognise truth, Pride and Prejudice with lies too readily believed, Mansfield Park with hidden truths, Emma with deception and self-deception and Persuasion with liberating truth. Wallace’s critiques ask readers to question not only the characters and their perceptions of what is true, but also the narrative voice itself.

Wallace begins her argument with an examination of the fallible narrator of Lady Susan, whose main character is a woman ‘whose great skill is manipulating the world’s opinion as she struggles to control representation of both self and the world’. In the movement from epistolary form to third person narrative, Wallace believes that Austen does not introduce a voice which is to be any more trusted than the voice of the letter writer and that, in fact, ‘the narrator herself has been corrupted by her heroine.’ The reader, then, must become involved not merely in discerning what Austen says, but in testing out this narrative voice as well.

In discussing Northanger Abbey, Wallace uses the power that Henry Tilney has over Catherine’s thinking (‘Henry Tilney must know best’) to demonstrate the power that an authoritative narrator can exercise over an ‘insecure reader…(who is) eventually made captive to the narrator’s will’. But the triumph of the narrator does not guarantee truth. By identifying and dissecting the voices in Northanger Abbey, Wallace demonstrates the limitations of each – the sentimentality of Isabella Thorpe, the parodic discourse of Henry Tilney, the prosaic domesticity of the Morlands. Austen’s demand is quite openly that readers participate in the creation of the narrative.

In Sense and Sensibility also, where Elinor is generally seen as the voice to be trusted, Wallace argues that ‘there are so many clues about (Elinor’s) disappointments, her thwarted desire for influence, her anger at those who ignore or trivialise her pain, that the reader must interpret rather than accept her view of the world’. Thus the process of judging must be ‘open to critical scrutiny’. This scrutiny reveals for Wallace the struggle of female authoring ‘in a world that offers no solutions’. The narrative voice which is shown to produce right judgements is not necessarily free from prejudice.

Pride and Prejudice is examined by asking what it is that blocks access to the truth. Wallace examines the silences in this novel in an interesting way, demonstrating that ‘silences are never neutral’. Silences of contempt, discretion or affectionate consideration can all generate the wrong sort of narrative and can lead to false readings as much as speech does. Thus both characters and readers need to ‘puzzle out the truth from inconsistent data’. Whether the whole truth is discernible is problematic.

Mansfield Park represents, for Wallace a dystopian setting that is not set right by either authoritative or persuasive discourse. In fact, the novel represents the failure of such discourses. Neither exemplary behaviour nor argument can change those who resist change. How does this impact on the power of the narrative voice? Mary Crawford’s comment (‘I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see that they are often wrong.’) exemplifies for Wallace Austen’s pessimism about the power of right thinking and right saying to generate action. This is a problem for the narrator, not merely for the characters within the narrative.

Emma, Wallace argues, both privileges narrative authority and sometimes urges readers to resist, to read against the grain, to challenge any voice that claims to be authoritative. Emma, both a reader and narrator of fictions, is also a text to be read by other characters. In reading Emma, we find that even the most closely scrutinised text can be misinterpreted and ‘the inept reader’ will get it wrong. The undiscriminating belief of a narrative denies what is demanded of a reader: the power to speculate. Even Mr Knightley’s authority and judgements are queried on the basis of gender bias.

Persuasion also demands much of the reader, warning them to beware ‘excessive confidence’. Both the reader and Anne read confidently because of previous knowledge of ‘text’ – one knows Wentworth and the others know how to read an Austen text. Yet even Anne’s reading of Wentworth is faulty at times. How, then, can narrative be trusted to guide us through the complexities of text? Wallace sees Persuasion as moving towards the author’s ‘open engagement’ with the reader. Austen is presenting herself as an author who, like the reader, cannot know the world but as one who may speculate with authority.

The source of narrative authority has been shown to be complex. Wallace has argued with a clear understanding of contemporary literary theory and theorists (especially Reader Response theories). She engages with texts fully and in interesting ways and with critics over the last 50 years. The bibliography is extensive and the text makes reference to writers familiar to members of JASA, both as critics and individuals. I found the chapter on Emma the most clearly argued and that on Mansfield Park the most unsettling.

On an admittedly trivial level, I am intrigued by the claim on the back cover that ‘This book has been produced using the latest digital technology…’ Such up-to-date technology surely should not have printed a text in which lines of print sometimes diverge from the horizontal and individual words at times slant oddly.

The book is, however, an interesting addition to the debate about how Jane Austen’s novels are to be read and how the complexities of narrative authority are to be dealt with.

10 August 2002

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