Novels and Education

When I heard that my proposed course on Jane Austen had been accepted for Expository Writing, I was thrilled. Austen is fun and the way her works remain popular presents fascinating questions for exploring contemporary culture and for thinking historically. And, of course, I love reading and teaching novels!

Novels play a significant role for students majoring or minoring in English literature. But the Expository Writing program is a general requirement; everyone takes it, or its equivalent. And classes need to to be not only interesting but widely valuable for a college student. Is it valuable to read novels? Does reading novels help you become a better writer? How useful is reading a novel going to be for, say a business major? Or a chemical engineer?

I struggle some with these questions every semester. But I remain convinced that these questions can all be answered with a firm YES. Interestingly, they are similar to the questions Austen herself asks in Northanger Abbey. In that novel Austen seems to suggest that the novel might play a role in the education of young people. When Catherine expresses astonishment at Isabella's deceptive character, Henry jests about her not having much experience: "Among all the great variety [of characters] that you have known and studied," he observes ironically (142). Perhaps, novels might teach their readers something about the "great variety" of characters in the world--and about those to avoid.

That probably sounds too simplistic--even if one considers how quiet and isolated life was before easy transportation and mass media. Catherine is innocent, but are we really meant to perceive her understanding as entirely limited when it comes to the obvious deceptions Isabella weaves through everyday conversation? Maybe.

But the "lessons" for the novel reader don't bear a one-to-one relationship to the lessons the characters within the novel learn. Particularly when those lesson apply, as in Austen's case, to social norms and modes of life long past. But maybe learning about that past is, in itself, important? Novels do not provide the facts of history; but, as Austen herself point out in Northanger Abbey, sometimes history needs the approach of the novel to keep it interesting. Eleanor finds the "embellishments" of historians to pleasurable and they seem to contribute to her understanding of the events (74). Reading the novels of the past can work to help us understand the ideas and the problems of the past on an individual level rather than from the perspective of the grand sweep of political and military history.

That deeper understanding of history may not be precisely pertinent to writing a business plan, or working out a chemical formula, but it does help make the reader a more generally educated person. I would argue further--although I don't have time right here--that reading novels gives one a larger vocabulary of words and ideas for understanding the world. And, while very few of those taking writing in college go on to be novelists, reading novels provides a deeper understanding of how language works and that produces better writing in all endeavors.

Fog and Castles

Northanger Abbey is often off-handedly called "Austen's satire on the gothic." That makes it sound so simple!

The more I read this novel, the more I find so many additional target of satire from the relatively small detail of "being denied" when calling upon someone to the larger issues of coercion among people who claim to have affection for one another.

Making fun of gothic conventions and gothic definitions of heroes and heroines is the obvious part of this novel. It is also the funny part--we laugh when Catherine finds a long lost manuscript that turns out to be a laundry list. But I don't find myself laughing when John and Isabella Thorpe physically hold her to prevent her from undoing John's rude canceling of her plans with the Tilney's. Surely this is plain cruelty.

Northanger Abbey, I think, challenges readers to figure out the distinctions between real and imaginary dangers.

Permission

Around the time the first draft of the first essay is due I start hearing questions that all start the same way: Can I . . . . ? The student then, almost inevitably, voices a "rule" about writing that he or she is worried about breaking: Can I use I? Can I use "you"? Can I use "we"? Can I use contractions? Can I use the word "because"?

The answers are: Yes, No, Yes, Yes YES!

Actually, the answers are all YES. I only make a tiny exception for "you" because it is difficult to use well and even more difficult to use it and maintain a sufficiently formal academic style.

I really hate these kinds of rules. Yes, of course, you (breaking the "you" rule here) have to abide by the basic grammatical conventions of standard English. But otherwise, there's an awful lot of ambiguity and flexibility in how we use language. Why put up obstacles to expressing meaningful ideas with all of these little rules?

More disturbingly, students frequently ask some variation of this: "Can I actually tell my reader what I'm trying to argue?" I know that some writing instructors come up with lists of rules and "Don't use the first person" or "Don't use contractions" might be on that list. But, "Don't tell your reader what you are up to"?!

Somehow, somewhere along the line, students get the sense that writing is about a set of tricks and isn't about trying to convey meaning to a reader. One the most literal level, I think students have been told to avoid "metacommentary"--saying what the essay is doing or arguing ( I will argue that . . . This essay will then look at . . . .). I fail to understand this rule given that most PUBLISHED academic essays use metacommentary extensively. If your ideas are complicated, giving your reader these concrete handhold really helps.

I also worry that this belief that writers have to disguise their ideas under fancy terms or convoluted sentence structures and follow a bunch of arbitrary rules means that beginning writers are afraid to fully engage in the messy work of drafting BEFORE editing. All of these rules can makes a writer stop and second guess every sentence before she has even worked out the main substance.

Stopping to take a breath and write "Okay, what I'm trying to say here is . . . ." can lead to great revelations. If you been taught to avoid using the first person or to avoid using metacommentary, you've been deprived of this tool. You can always go back and take the main idea and edit out the thinking. But do the thinking first!

So, whatever it is, if it helps YOU say what YOU want to say--yes, you can do that.

Bridget

Of the various adaptations and continuations of Pride and Prejudice we are reading in class this semester, I have to confess that I like Helen Fielding's  Bridget Jones's Diary most. I don't think this is simply because I remember the 90s in way that many students, most of whom were tiny babies when the novel was written, can't--although there is a certain nostalgia in my attraction. What I really like about Bridget Jones's Diary is that it is a riff on Austen, but it stands entirely on its own. It works as a novel without slavishly following the plot of Pride and Prejudice; in fact, many readers have to be told that it was inspired by the earlier novel. This same sort of relationship exists between Emma and Clueless, and, I think, is partly why Clueless has found so many fans. It holds its own as a self-contained film and finding out that there are parallels to an Austen novel only adds depth.

And then there is Bridget herself. What a complicated character--are we meant to laugh at her? Once that voice gets into your head it is so hard not to fall in love with her.

New media and Austen

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries vlog is smart and clever in many ways--characterization, modernization, adaptation of events and issues of class and economics to a United States's context. But it also comments intelligently on new media itself. Lydia, for example, participates it the gossip mill about whether Bing Lee's "harem" of women by texting and calling her network of friends (Lizzie Bennet Diaries, episode 4). In addition to the videos of main story, there is Lydia's blog, twitter exchanges, tumbler posts, and the main webpage with the cast bios and interviews. It is an entire media world of its own--maybe a bit like the mini-worlds Austen herself creates in her novels?

There's probably a lot more to say about how LBD participates in new media, but (with my head, as usual, in the world of the eighteenth-century), I'm interested in how the series picks up Austen's own concern with new media and its influence on it users. That is, Austen herself commented on what we can call one of the new media of her own time--the novel. She does this most pointedly in her novel Northanger Abbey, as we will see. While the series is certainly interested in this, bringing it explicitly into the story with Lizzie being a Mass Comm grad student and both Darcy and Mr. Collins owning a digital media companies, I'm not sure LBD is a forceful in its examination of new media as Austen was. I'll be interested to see what everyone thinks after we've read Northanger Abbey!