"There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me."
"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
This, from a letter to her sister Cassandra, is Jane Austen's mentality: the appraisal of people as the central business of life, conducted with a coolness that is half joke and half confession. The popular image of the gentle Aunt Jane, the sweet spinster of the Hampshire parsonage, was a posthumous family production, and the surviving letters complicate it considerably. The real Austen (1775-1817) was a fairly critical evaluator: of characters, of motives, of marriages, of the exact degree of a neighbor's vulgarity, delivered to her sister in private with an uncanny precision. Her own family's memorial notice conceded, tactfully, that she was "rather reserved to strangers so as to have been by some accused of haughtiness of manner," while insisting that "in the company of those she loved the native benevolence of her heart" was "forcibly displayed." Both halves may very well be true, since this characterization — armed and judging toward the outside, but warm and devoted inside a small fiercely held circle — is fairly typical of ESI.
Strip away the comedy and every Austen novel is an apparatus for the moral evaluation of persons. The plots are sequences of judgments, and the heroine should learn to read character correctly. The recurring "villain" is diagnostic: Wickham, Willoughby, Henry Crawford, William Elliot — the charming man whom the heroine (and reader) must learn to see through. No novelist has been so devoted to the exposure of the "persuasive insincere". Austen clearly thought that most people read others' character badly, and that reading it well is the most valuable skill a person can possess. Marianne Dashwood nearly dies of trusting charm; Elinor, who evaluates, survives. It's not for nothing that ESI, in Talanov's statistics, is one of the leads for the "compared to me, most others don't know anything about human psychology" question, along with EIE, SEE and IEE (the first two are certainly not plausible typings for Austen, on the latter, see below).
The circle of Austen's novels was, by choice, tiny — "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on," she advised her novel-writing niece. She had access, through her naval brothers and her emigree cousin, to war, revolution, and empire; the Napoleonic Wars rage entirely offstage in her fiction, receiving a brief mention at most. Her subject was the world she could verify: the families she knew, the marriage market of the minor gentry, with pretty much no grand ideological entanglements. All this is very "descending" (aka Te-Fi "axis"), really, she is one of the most "descending" authors I know. And for a writer whose subject is courtship, Austen is surprisingly cold-eyed about what marriage was. "Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor — which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony," she wrote, and the novels never let the reader forget the figures — Darcy's ten thousand a year, the entail hanging over the Bennet girls, Charlotte Lucas marrying the fool Mr. Collins with open eyes because at twenty-seven a plain woman takes what's offered to her. Austen neither rages against this system, ILE/"democratic EIE" style, nor romanticizes past it; she prices it, accurately, and then asks what integrity is possible inside it. The unions that receive her blessing are those built upon character and affection; those that earn her contempt are those built upon superficiality or greed or vanity — but she recognizes the money concerns as legitimate, regardless.
What must be added to the ESI base, and what gives Austen's comedy its flavor, is a certain warmth of feeling. Jonathan Swift (ILI) is what satire looks like in a heavy key: corrosive irony, a total verdict on the Yahoos we all are. Austen's satire is much more light and sympathetic. The one moment in the novels where mockery even slightly crossed into cruelty was staged as a moral event: Emma's joke at poor Miss Bates's expense on Box Hill is the ethical climax of the book, and Knightley's "badly done, indeed" is the author's own voice. And it shows in the novels' structure, which believes in moral growth: Elizabeth, Darcy, Marianne, Emma all genuinely learn and improve, and the heroines Austen most protects — Fanny Price, Anne Elliot — are quiet figures of Fi-ish conscience. Between the IEE and the ILI modes of satire (two most satirical types of the socion), she leans IEE. Plus while her Ne doesn't seem to be particularly strong or valued, she shows few signs of anti-Ne, either.
Still, despite the Delta NF traits, I don't see her as a Delta NF. The notorious line to Cassandra — "Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child... owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband" — is not within an EII's range. Even a negativistic EII complains in the key of wounded disappointment; this is harshness in a protected private message, the armed side of the ESI making itself known to only the beloved sister who knows. The kindness of Austen was genuine, but particular, reserved for those loved and worthy.
She always place heroines in a structurally similar situation – that of being the under-positioned observer standing at the margin of the room – Fanny the poor relation, Anne the forgotten woman, Elizabeth with the disgraceful relatives and without any wealth – that of having power only to judge the character of others. Emma Woodhouse is the single exception: "handsome, clever, and rich," socially marginalized in no way whatsoever, the undisputed first lady of Highbury. Emma is, distinctly, an SEE: her characteristic activity is managing other people's relationships as an exercise of social power — the matchmaking is confident dominion dressed as benevolence — and she is supremely confident in her command of the social field while being wrong about nearly every deeper current in it. Austen announced the experiment herself: "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." The remark rewards attention. The one book in which she leaves her own vantage point, she travels to the adjacent "mirror relation" seat and then teaches it to see people properly, with Knightley (not as detailed a characterization, but possibly ESI himself), the embodiment of severe accurate judgment, administering the lessons. He's the only character who reads everyone correctly from the start — sees through Frank Churchill's charm before any evidence ("a very weak young man... his letters disgust me" is the ESI allergy to the plausible charmer, the same instinct that drives the whole Austen villain-detection apparatus, even if Frank isn't really a villain, despite the intriguing theory that he poisoned his domestic tyrant aunt). LSE is also plausible for him (ESI and LSE are the closest semi-duals), but the novel uses him as a judge more than a manager.
"I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
In this phrase, you can see Talanov-Qi style "separation of independence". The gentle Aunt Jane of family legend never existed; neither did the cold anatomist some moderns prefer. The woman who did exist was rarer than either: a judge with perfect pitch and a kind streak, who knew precisely what people were worth, forgave the fools, exposed the charmers, and was bitter about it only to her sister.
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