The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [95]
We also see in Tom Jones how the novel was able to present the events leading up to this final emergence into the light as a more gradual process, taking place over a long period of time, corresponding more nearly to the processes of growth and development in human life. Fifty years later came another major step in the evolution of Comedy into a plot for the novel. Here, in an episode almost unique in the history of Comedy, we are given a rare glimpse of this plot - for all its overtones of artifice - springing directly from the circumstances of `real life, showing how closely it could express the inmost patterns of an author's own psychology.
Jane Austen: comedy as real life
In the 1790s a young girl in her late 'teens began writing novels in a Hampshire rectory. The sixth of seven children, most of whom were already married, Jane Austen had reached an age where her thoughts about the future were dominated by the possibility of her own marriage, and one of the most striking things about her novels is the way they reflected her personal situation. Quite apart from the fact that, as a woman, she centred her versions of the plot on a heroine rather than a hero, critics have noted how deeply she projected aspects of her own personality into her heroines. And at the very time when she was preoccupied with speculation as to how her own life might unfold, through a fog of uncertainty, to that central goal of finding her right `other half', she was drawn to the plot which most naturally expresses this pattern.
Qualifying the impression of a plaster saint long fostered by her family after her early death (loved, as it was put on her tombstone, for `the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper'), Jane Austen could be an ironical, often prickly and outspoken lady, with a tart tongue and shrewd eye for the pretensions and shortcomings of others. In her first completed novel, Pride and Prejudice, we see many of these characteristics, not least in her `active, strong-minded heroine Elizabeth Bennett; and the essence of the story is the long gradual transformation which allows Elizabeth to come to terms with the rich, nobly-born hero Darcy, perhaps the most romantically conceived of all the versions of the ideal man she herself might have hoped to marry. At first Elizabeth considers Darcy to be insufferably proud and remote. But then her own pride is humbled by her folly in being taken in by the weak, unscrupulous Wickham. Step by step she softens towards Darcy, and we see him gradually proving himself in her eyes, as he shows himself beneath his aloof exterior to be both manly and generous-hearted: until finally both can `recognise' and reveal their love.
What we see here is a story completely shaped by the underlying form of Comedy, but in a new kind of treatment where the conventions about misunderstandings, disguises, failure to recognise identity and `dark' figures getting caught out are no longer presented in the terms of the old stage devices, but rather more subtly, in terms of the gradual revelation of people's true character from behind first mistaken impressions, and the discovery of true feelings, in a way which corresponds more to our experience of life.
In the other two of Jane Austen's early trilogy of mature novels, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, we again see two heroines working their way through all sorts of misunderstandings and love-tangles towards