Read Online A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz - Free Book Online Page B

that wasn’t the whole story. If I only needed to make mistakes, growing up would have been easy. I made mistakes all the time. In fact, I tended to make the same mistakes over and over again, just like Elizabeth. Making mistakes, I learned, was only the first step. Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Lydia, loud, wild, and brazen, made flagrant mistakes all the time, too—yawning in people’s faces, wasting money on trifles, shamelessly flirting with the young officers—and she was clearly never going to grow up. Elizabeth’s mother’s entire life was one long series of embarrassments, blunders, and miscalculations, including the whole way she raised her daughters and went about finding them husbands, yet she remained the same anxious, foolish, self-centered person that she’d always been.
    It wasn’t even enough, Austen showed me, to have your mistakes pointed out to you. Our brains are very good at figuring out what to say when people call us out on something that we’ve done. We scurry around like beavers, shoring up the walls of our self-esteem. Who, me? No, you must be wrong. That’s not what I meant. Was it really such a big deal? It was an accident. It’ll never happen again. That was the first time, I swear. Mistake? What mistake?
    Austen’s heroines, I discovered that summer, had their mistakes pointed out to them over and over again, only it never did them any good. They didn’t grow up until something terrible finally happened. When maturity came to them, it came through suffering: through loss, through pain, above all, through humiliation. They did something really awful—not just stupid, but unjust and hurtful—and they did it right out in the open, in front of the very person whose opinion they cared about more than anyone else’s. Emma insulted Miss Bates in the most callous fashion. Elizabeth leveled a whole series of mistaken accusations. And then someone forced them to see, in a way that they could not deny, just how very badly they had acted.
    These were not easy scenes to read. They were almost as painful for me as they were for the heroines themselves. I grieved for these young women, because they were, at the moment of their humiliation, so very, very exposed. At first, all that most of them could do was burst into tears. Elizabeth was luckier. She learned the truth by letter, so at least she could be alone with her feelings. But the revelation of her many errors, when she finally did let it in, was no less crushing. She had been wrong about Jane, she had been wrong about her family, she had been wrong about everything. “Blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd”: that wasn’t just an intellectual judgment; it was a feeling that burned to the core. “How humiliating is this discovery!” she exclaimed to herself, “Yet, how just a humiliation!” And it was then, and only then, that she made her climactic discovery: “Till this moment I never knew myself.”
    In drama, this is known as the moment of recognition. Oedipus discovers his horrible crime. King Lear understands how terribly he has wronged his youngest daughter. Fortunately, the errors that Elizabeth made were neither so dire nor so final. Pride and Prejudice was a comedy, after all, not a tragedy, as stories about young people, who have time to correct their mistakes, usually are. But at that moment, after she had come to her awful knowledge, a tragedy was exactly what it looked as if the novel might become. Elizabeth not only saw how badly she had acted, she realized what it had cost her. A great happiness had been within her grasp, she now understood, and pride and prejudice had made her fling it away.
    None of us, I knew, would ever wish this on ourselves, let alone on our children. But if we are lucky, Austen was telling me, it will happen nonetheless. Because my father was wrong: you can’t learn from other people’s mistakes; you can only learn from your own. Austen was making her beloved Elizabeth miserable because she knew