Re-release: Class and Gender in Thirties Movies

Men, like the poor, are stolid and reliable, while women, like the rich, are diverse and uncertain.

In four years we will mark the centenary of “The Jazz Singer”, the first talkie movie. That is as long a time as the century between the time of “Great Expectations” and when I graduated from college. That seems to me to be a very big difference. There should be a major celebration of the invention of the talkies, as important as great battles or other events so dedicated, because so much was ushered into our consciousnesses. Maybe the publication dates of great novels, those who always seemed to have been here once they were created, should also provide a new version of a saints calendar, also now forever once canonized. Oh, and how the talkies talked! The dialogue of Thirties films, often based on plays and novels, were crisp and witty and eloquent, characters saying what they had to say about themselves and other people and their situations, even including “The Grapes of Wrath”, where Henry Fonda makes clear enough what an Okie immigrant family off to California had to say for himself in his understated way. But that decade was so long ago, however vibrant they may still be, that the topics covered in them, across the genres of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, are very different from the ones seen today and so it takes some excavation so as to mine them.

The topics for the decade were the condition of women and the condition of the rich. In both cases, the conditions were problematic in that it wasn’t clear what women or the rich were like or what they should be like. Both of those kinds of people were murky and so difficult to understand. Ernst Lubitch, known for his scintillating touch, starts “Bluebeard’s Ninth Wife” with  whether Claudette Colbert is married or unmarried or a loose woman or not because she is buying the trousers of men’s pajamas. It turns out that she is buying it for her father and so that is respectable and so the romance can begin, Gary Cooper, not known for comedy, the usual and unproblematic man who is daring, decisive and stoic, just what a stereotypical man should be, just as he is in all his stereotypical roles all the way through “High Noon” and beyond, while Grace Kelly is surprising in that she appears ats the decisive decision maker at the end of that movie. Women are amazingly different from one another even if also attractive while male heroes like Fonda and Heston and the aforementioned Cooper are true to form even if also deficient rather than fulfilled, as happens in “The Wizard of Oz”, where the Tin Man is lacking a heart and the Scarecrow lacks a brain, and the cowardly Lion lacks courage. A true man has to gain all three attributes, while Dorothy and the other women and girls all have their own peculiar motives, Dorothy wanting just to go home, and all those witches, some good and some bad.

The same is true of the women in the melodramas of the Thirties that were regarded as “women movies” because they explored the varieties of what were women, ever fascinating and to men alluring even if subject to conversation as “only” about women’s concern. The queen of the sub-genre was Bette Davis who could be everything: an ugly duckling who becomes a therapist and a lover to a limited Paul Henried in “Now, Voyager”, a flibbertigibbet who becomes a heroine as she faces death in “Dark Victory'', men in these movies dutiful, like George Brett, never fully aware of what is going on in women’s secrets, as when he is killed in a duel in “Jezebel” because Bette Davis eggs him on about supposed slights and then she turns into a hero by taking Henry Fonda into a pest house during an epidemic, she more likely to manage through it if anybody could. Women could be anything, but men were the same old.

The same division between women as problematic as to what they are while men have problems, whether of enemies or existential issues while remaining true to their identity or just failing to accomplish it by being too soft or insufficiently suspicious or overtaken by lust, as happens in “Double Indemnity”, something Catholics understand as an overabundance of a natural thing, also applies to the rich, who are problematic in that they are opaque, not quite revealing what they are up to.  The young George Cukor’s movie “Holiday” enters a rich home to find out what those people are like. The girl to whom he is engaged but he knew little about her turns out to want him to become a banker, which he, Cary Grant, finds boring, himself a self made man through Harvard and a fancy law firm, and wants to try out new things, which is admirable for men, and so she tires of him, while her sister, Katherine Hepburn, perhaps at her most glamorous rather than overly angular, wants Grant to follow his whims, which is what a respectable and loving girl wants her man to happen, a lapse into conventionality unbecoming of Hepburn as the independent woman, but there being other fish to fry, and so the two at the end come to one another, as would be expected from the first moment the two stars meet with one another because, after all, they are the stars. The financial magnate of the family, on the other hand, is difficult to understand other than that he has connections but does not know why capitalist fetishism is a concept much less a fault, just trying to meet his potential son in law by offering his own connections and wealth, having disregarded his own son who drinks too much because he is so tied to the loathsome bank when he had wanted to be a musician. Woe is me to the children of the rich. They are all psychologically scarred and most of them would be better off without money, which is a fantasy that other than rich people in the audience might find as a compensation for not being rich.

Unlike most Thirties movies, which are long on talk and short on visuals, Cukor is alive with set decoration, leading to his visualization thirty years later of “My Fair Lady”, what with all those flowers. Here, in “Holiday”, Cukor contrasts the mansion with staircases and internal elevators and regal paintings and adornments, with the room Hepburn has set aside for herself as having a fire, comfortable sofas, bookcases and the piano and barbells her brother used before he gave up his childish ways. (Someone else, I suppose, stokes that fire. As Mel Brooks might say, “It's not bad being rich.”) Hepburn is comfortable rather than stuffy, and that seems all to be said of the difference between the rich and those not inclined to be rich, the father saying he does not understand what is happening to the world other than that it makes him uncomfortable. The rich are not greedy, just confused, a set on the way out if they could bother to notice. Maybe the title is called “Holiday” because viewers are on holiday visiting the rich but knowing the rich are dodos, those people making themselves rather than their employees miserable.Feel sorry for them. That is a kind of vacation.

On the other hand, the poor are not problematic, even if they are also tragic or flawed. To use the terms used by Civil Rights activists in the Sixties, when whites asked what Blacks wanted, the answer was that Blacks wanted to have what white people already had. Similarly, the poor in the Thirties, wanted the comforts of the rich, by hook or by crook. Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” wanted to become a powerful boss and his nerve, intelligence and diligence, all male traits, led that to him, even though he is machine gunned in the end, a classic tragedy about the wheel of life, ending with his remark “Is this the end of Rico?”, which sadly it is. The hero of “Scarface” also rises to the top and also is upended, even more unsettled by his unaware lust for his own sister. But that is aside from the rise and fall, all the way through to the Godfather trilogy, where he cannot free himself from crime and become, let us say, a Senator. His greatest betrayal is that of his wife, who aborts his child, because she does not want to live with this gangster family, and that is the only time that Michael Corleone rages rather than calculates, while his older brother Sonny is always raging, and so weaker as a man. The type of men runs through the movie decades.  

One of those so-called “screwball comedies” of the Thirties combines the two binaries of male and female and rich and poor. It is Gregory De Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carol Lombard. The magnate father is annoyed at the  spendthrift ways of his wife, who is a ninny, as well as his two daughters, one mean and vindictive and snooty while the other is ditzy, and supposed to have had a nervous breakdown in the past when in fact she was trying to escape from her madcap lives. The two daughters compete in a scavenger hunt, which means they are so mean spirited and callous and humiliating so as to recruit some poor person as well as a live goat to show himself to a society party to win points for having accumulated worthy objects that are useless. The mother has what is called a “protege”, which is an exiled Russian who amuses the family by walking around the living room like a gorilla to amuse the family, in return for which he gets canapes and the chance to play the piano. The idle rich are women who don’t know what to be or to do with themselves. 

Into their lot comes a bum who, it turns out (spoiler alert!) to be down on his luck because he was a Harvard graduate who had been spurned by a woman and thought of suicide but was impressed by the stoical men who endured their poverty and so he lived in a shanty near a refuse dump and is picked up for the scavenger hunt and then asks to serve as a butler for what shows itself to be a ditzy family. He too is the compassionate, articulate, well mannered and stoical and resourceful person who can lead the labile young girl out of her distress and she falls for him even though he is thought to be a bum, hardly likely given his bearing, while another bum just wants his reward for having been entered into the scavenger hunt. Poor men have dignity while rich girls are mean or atwitter.

I take note, again, of the set decoration and the costumes. The, at the time, well appointed kitchen has a refrigerator with a cylindrical portion on top of it which I take was the refrigeration unit, and is, of course, now antiquated. Technology marches on.. The women wear Thirties gowns that seem to me colorless and dowdy though no doubt glamorous at the time. Fashion also moves on. The dump where Godfrey is found is just off Sutton Place, which means, I infer, before the FDR Drive built in that area and doing away with the dumps and the bums. Infrastructure changes. The value of a movie made in a time will last as physical culture is available to be appreciated from another time for its atmosphere whatever the time’s only much more slowly changing social structure.

How different it is in the movies twenty years later. In the musical remake of “The Philadelphia Story”, with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, called “High Society”, only the just teen daughter acts haughty and weird, everyone else normal people. Another movie at the time, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” has Frederic March as the haggard advertising mogul who blames himself for having neglected his troubled daughter, je in despair about her rather than, in the Thirties, indulging her. Gregory Peck is the up and coming advertising executive, also forthright and stoic, who arranges to provide regular money to the child he had made when in Italy during the war when he finds out about their condition, and the wife supports him in his plan, something regarded as heroic. 

Skip another generation. The rich are like Michael Douglas in  “Wall Street”, from 2010, just greedy rather than people who can justify themselves, as investment bankers do, of making it possible for the economic market to work, and young women are physically exploited by rapacious men, as is clear in “The Handmaid's Saga”. Reese Witherspoon in the recent miniseries “The Morning Show” offers up many victims of rape because of men using their powerful positions, a version of the idea of a previous generation where  Andrea Dworkin saif that all sex is rape, just modified enough to be plausible, when what I think is that Jane Austen got the relation of the sexes and the rich and the poor just about right, however are the changes since then of costume and mores. Mr. Wickham, in “Pride and Prejudice”, is a cad, but he is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

A word should be said about the relation of fiction to reality. Should we trust to Thirties movies and those films that follow them about the reality of what is depicted there? After all, fiction, whether a novel or a movie, is made up. Its characters and plots are concocted even if films claim to be “based on a true story” because scriptwriters put in events and characters so as to make the films clearer to follow and so as to fill out a generic type.Its hard to make up settings, it is true, especially in science fiction, where even Kubrick’s “2001” is an extrapolation of how women and men would dress and how no one would smoke. So a reader is unlikely to trust fiction. People are distorted from what people really are and situations are abbreviated or just insufficiently imagined rather than an accurate depiction of reality.

But what is the alternative? Voting behavior measured through polling data may have said somewhat accurately from 1940 to about 1980 or so who would vote for whom, that moment past in that people came to hide their preferences by lying. And even the most innocuous question, such as whether you approve of the President, is ambiguous, in that it doesn’t make clear whether you approve his way as a person or approve of his policies. And much of history is to condense contemporary newspaper reporting with some documents added on. So what else is there to do but find the truth through fiction, especially when it comes to the temper of the times or the fads of the moment, like Hula Hoops and the war between the Communists and the ex-Communists that Whittiker Chambers regarded as the central debate and war of his time? 

I would suggest we follow Georg Simmel who thought that what was embedded inevitably in fiction was not the mores or the fashions or the technologies of a time, however much those artifacts are accurately recorded in film s of the past, but what Simmel regarded as the inevitable consequences of sociation, which means the qualities that emerge from people dealing with one another. Things like cooperation and conflict and hierarchy are everywhere the same down to the higher apes and I would suggest the same for friendship (as old as “Gilgamesh”), and courtship and political negotiation. Simmel modified only to mean that social structures may change, but only very gradually, even as those other things feel quite different from one generation to the next. Men and women haven’t changed since Samson and Delilah, even if Feminists say otherwise. So trust the Thirties movies as telling the truth.

Two Blockbusters

“Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” ain’t much.

I had been looking forward to seeing two blockbuster movies of the summer, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”, partly so that movies would bring large audiences back to the theaters where they belonged with wide screens and amplified sound and darkened auditoriums, which has always been the right way for a hundred years to see movies, now that covid was over. And the audiences came, the gross net of the two movies now close to two billion dollars. That's not chopped liver. But I was disappointed with both of them and it made me wonder why people liked them so much.

“Oppenheimer'' was at a disadvantage for me because I like stories that start at the beginning and move along until you get to the end, flashbacks only happening when it is necessary to bring up the past as a present juncture, as when Darcey tells about how Mr. Wickham had engaged with Darcey’s sister when he finally explained to Elizabeth why he so distrusted the cad. It struck me that “Oppenheimer'' was jumping around in time, especially in the beginning and so the film was choppy, without a narrative flow, and I thought difficult to understand unless you were already familiar with the details of the history as I was because the security  clearance hearing took place when I was in high school and had already learned the lore concerning the development of the A bomb. I was disabused when my daughter was able to follow the story even without having already learned its history. I thought that Roland Joffe’s “Little Boy and Fat Man”, the movie of 1989 that just concentrates on the essential and contained story of the Los Alamos project, was much superior to “Oppenheimer'', and Paul Newman had stolen the show as General Groves. Newman should have won an Oscar for one of his post-pretty boy roles.

The movie “Oppenheimer” was also sloppily edited. A critic said that two nude scenes were exploitative rather than liberating, as if those were the only two possibilities. The scenes showed intimacy and jealousy, which are certainly traits of sex. But the story was not elaborated as to whether Oppenheimer was a highly sexual creature rather than  that he had a young love he could not get over. Similarly, a moment when Kitty Oppenheimer lapses into child neglect to the point that her husband puts his child with another family for a while is not expanded to show that his wife was generally a poorly functioning person. Either expand it or drop it. 

The final judgment of Oppenheimer made by the movie, though it may not be the one the director Christopher Nolan wanted, was when the movie has President Truman say that Oppenheimer was a cry baby because, after all, the blood was on Truman”s own hands because he had dropped the bomb rather than on Oppenheimer’s, who just made it. Truman’s character always looms large in most comparisons and so Oppenheimer is presented as a wavering reed  rather than to be taken as a man plumbing a deep moral dilemma. The movie provides no comeback to the Truman remark.

A major failing of the movie to me was that it was not set in the proper historical context. Louis Strauss and J. Edgar Hoover were agents but not the impetus for the vendetta against Oppenheimer. This was the McCarthy era and the idea of Communism was enough to get people at bay. Remember the House Un American Activities Committee and the espionage trials and finally the Army McCarthy Hearings which brought the era to its end, Eisenhower sure that McCarthy would be overwhelmed by the military even if he had reused on the campaign  trail in 1952 to defend his mentor George Marshall for accusations that Marshall  was a disgrace to the uniform. Oppenheimer was just someone else who was abused for communist ties and had never betrayed his trust, though my high school history teacher thought it was naive to have thought that. I still want a movie that goes over McCarthy, whose paranoia and hate are reborn as Trump but without the ideology, even though the story was very well told by Richard Rovere’s book and by the Edward A Murrow telecast at the time.

I was even more disappointed with “Barbie” which I thought would analyze in a humorous way the plight of women so that I could defend the male point of view. But the movie was such a mishmosh of ideas that there is no way to take a purchase on it. I guess I was hoping for “Major Barbara” which I found very unsettling when I first read it as seeing munition makers as progressive. Or where, in “Pygmalion”, a poor flower girl can become the appearance of a princess, able to confront men as equals, through hard work and being exposed to men who treat her as a lady. Consequences are the result of causes. But causes are absent in “Barbie”. Instead, Barbie Land has an all woman Supreme Court. Does that mean society is equal because four of the current Supreme Court are women? What is the basis for inequality? All men do when Ken takes over Barbie Land is turn his home into a man cave rather than a girlie place. There is a speech whereby “mean” Barbie lists the degradations to which girls are subject. Women are supposed to look adoringly at men who sing while strumming their ukuleles. But men also fawn on women, complementing them on how pretty or accomplished they are, just to please them. Flattery is the stock in trade of courtship. What is the substance of male domination? It could be job discrimination or reproductive rights or the male threat of physical abuse. The movie never says. I wish the screenwriters for “Barbie'' had taken the time to straighten out its ideas rather than just look at the visuals so as to create a franchise set of pictures about Mattel. But they got what they wanted, which was sufficiently superficial so  that everybody could have a good time.

A female friend said that Barbie, the doll, was historically important because it showed women could be anything they wanted to be, which was not possible previously. I hardly think dolls are all that important even if they are invoked as such, as was the case when Kenneth Clarke said that black girls shunned black dolls (which was not true) and so showed a stigma about being black. It is similar to when people said that boys would be less violent if they didn’t have toy guns. Boys just took up twigs and called them guns. Gender is deeper than just toys. Now Barbies, which are just toys, are taken to make girls free to be what they want, as if that weren’t happening since Seneca Falls. And the availability of the pill at the same time when Barbie made its way seems to me to be a more powerful change in the relation of women to men.

A male friend of mine who reads literature carefully was taken by the “Barbie” point of view that women had engaged in self-discovery when, until recently, they had not. I couldn’t disagree more, which is the real nub of the issue. Men, I think, are traditionally supposed to be only one thing throughout the eons of history. They are solid, which means reliable, reasonable, stoical and moral and to be otherwise is to be a cad or over emotional, or a wuss, like Hamlet, or a reprobate. No exceptions to the approved type, whether in Homer or “Genesis”, and whether that type is admired or seen as limited. Macbeth and Othello are different but both are doomed for violating the male stereotype. Women, on the other hand, can be anything they want to be. Delilah is a lover and also a betrayer. Chaucer’s wife of Bath adopts her nature to the circumstances as she gets older. Elizabeth  Bennet is both ambitious as well as outspoken.

So why these two blockbusters for two inferior movies? A good answer is offered by Pauline Kael, the longtime New Yorker film critic, in commenting on “The Sound of Music”, a much inferior of the Rodgers and Hammerstein productions, thin on plot and a but ludicrous in plotting in that, as Kael observed, what if one of the children did not want to be a chorister? And yet “The Sound of Music” was, at the time, the tenth greatest movie gross of all time. Kael’s answer for the big attendance was merchandising rather than art. The title and tone had been pre sold by its history and advertising and so was what people were prompted to view. But I have a less cynical but more dourfull explanation, which is that people like poor efforts which do not work their plots out even though they also like some that do, like “Casablanca'' and “The Best Years of their Lives”. “Oppenheimer” treats the hero as anguished when he is driven because it is easier to think that way rather than to think of him as like Werner von Braun, who cared more about rockets than about politics. “Barbie” is fuzzy on ideas because Feminist ideas are fuzzy, cliches a substitute for reasoning. Being both artful and familiar to a movie’s level of meaning is very hard. I hope Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon" will turn the trick of showing the protagonist as both cruel and progressive and so memorable, providing a valuable insight into what great leaders can be.

Time in Literature

Fiction is only sometimes an attempt to present a straightforward presentation of a story from beginning to end, which is what we would be led to believe by Aristotle’s dictum that stories have beginnings, middles and ends. To the contrary, writers tell their stories by wandering around between what is presumably past, current and future, each with their own way of doing this, and that in part is what makes their storytelling into an art, something controlled by the artist, So a story may have a beginning, middle and an end, but the telling of it is in the hands of the storyteller. Let us consider some of the ways authors do this.

Homer is a master of bending his narrative as he sees fit. The story of the Odyssey which begins, if one were providing a straightforward chronology, with Odysseus leaving Troy, having his adventures, and then reaching Ithaca, in fact has layers and layers of overlap of plot that are remarkably concise, each with a purpose, even while Homer is getting on with his narrative. The starting point of the epic is when the gods get together and, Poseidon being out of town, decide to release Ullyses from his thralldom to Circe. But before getting on with that, Homer takes up many matters, past, coterminous and future. He refers in some detail to the matter of the House of Atreus, where Agistes kills Agamemnon, and Orestes kills Clytemnestra, which shows how badly things can go when the return of a warrior goes sour, and we are about to hear the story of how the return of Ulysses fares. We also learn a good deal about the blinding of the Cyclops, which set Poseidon against Ulysses, long before that story is itself elaborated, and so suggesting, in something of a preview, the basic conflict which led to Ulysses's troubles. And we learn of the message to Telemachus about his father’s return, which tells us that the climax of the story will be about that. The story has not been set from start to finish, in a linear matter, but in an allusive one, so that all of these events are held in the mind simultaneously, as if the reader were a kind of god himself. In bestowing this role on the reader, or in presuming it, this kind of storytelling that wanders about in time becomes a way to read and find meaning. So jumping about in time as a feature of writing becomes jumping about as a feature of reading. 

Not all great literature jumps about in time, even if the human mind does. Shakespeare is remarkable for telling his stories front to back, starting at the point he wants to jump into the story, and then telling it straightforwardly until its conclusion. “Hamlet” starts off with the Prince recently returned to Denmark and then takes it through various incidents until the plot, all played out, just has to be ended, as it is with a duel that no one really needed but which the frustration of the characters with one another demanded. “Macbeth” starts with clues to his ambition, and carries that out until he is cut down, which also comes sooner or later to such folk. Shakespeare is the master of the history, where time might seem one of the few things that can connect diverse events together, in “Henry VI” those including Joan of Arc and Jack Cade. Shakespeare makes up for fidelity to the way time works in a linear way by allowing characters to endlessly explain their own or one another’s motivations and through poetry that transcends the story and by the ironic juxtaposition of the characters. Shakespeare is thus to be compared, as he often is, to Racine, who abides by the Aristotelian unities by making references to actions that take place offstage or are remembered from the past, while Shakespeare is considered lax because he has as many scenes as he wants to tell his story, when in fact he is just abiding by a different discipline, which is to tell stories front to back.

Many of the books of the Old Testament, like “Genesis”, “Exodus” and “Samuel I and II”, also tell their stories from front to back, Noah hearing the voice of God, Moses left in the bulrushes, David as shepherd, war hero, soother of the king, and then guerilla and, later than that, king in his own right. Sometimes that means the stories will be very short and not so sweet because they are records of events, the motives left to inference. Abraham hears from God that he should sacrifice Isaac, takes him to the altar, and then is released from his obligation. The mystery of what has happened in the very briefly told story is debated for millennia and gives rise to the deepest of religious feelings. 

A master of jumbling up time, on the other hand, is Jane Austen. She begins the earliest of her completed novels, “Sense and Sensibility”, with a question of property, which is the opening for other of her novels including her last, “Persuasion”, to which she also brings her ruminations on the relationship between property, wealth, and courtship. In “Sense and Sensibility”, the Dashwoods have been kicked out of their elegant house because Mr. Dashwood had not found a way to leave any money to his second family and had relied on a deathbed promise by his son to make things comfortable for them. Then in a bit of comic dialogue stellar for its conciseness, the son’s wife talks him easily enough out of carrying out any commitments he has made, first by insisting they need far less and then nothing at all, a guilty conscience always finding excuses for what it is about to do. 

Austen also overlaps story lines. There is the romance of Marianne Dashwood with first John Willoughby and then with Colonel Brandon. There is also the romance of Elinor Dashwood with Edward Ferrars. The two stories are set off against one another in that Willoughby is exposed to be a cad while Edward Ferrars had never acted in an unethical way. All this rearrangement of plot is very different from meaning, which is what the plot points to, and in the case of “Sense and Sensibility”, that has to do with the Romantic consciousness, which is something that Jane Austen deplores, however much she is committed to the idea that, as in Shakespeare, a happy ending means that all the couples are matched up with the ones they are supposed to love. Marianne prefers Romantic poetry and the cottage that the Dashwoods are forced to move to is described as “romantic”, but the truth is, as Maryann finally comes to understand, true romance lives in deeds rather than in sentiments, in sense rather than in sensibility, and that matches the basically conservative or modest way in which Elinor conducted herself, keeping her feelings and pain to herself, while Marianne had made a spectacle of herself and acted as if she were the only girl in the world who had given her heart to someone and not have her affection returned. Such is life.

By the time Jane Austen reaches her third novel, “Pride and Prejudice”, she has rearranged the pieces on her chessboard to make the main plot line more clear. Darcy is initially disqualified from being a suitor by his arrogance just as Colonel Brandon had been disqualified by his age. And Darcy does come to the rescue, getting Wickham to marry Lydia, just as Colonel Brandon comes to Marianne’s rescue: defending her honor, finding her in a storm. The two sisters, in “Pride and Prejudice”, Elizabeth and Jane, also both find their soul mates. But other elements of “Pride and Prejudice” have been sorted out. The Willoughby character has been replaced by Wickham who goes after a different sister who is younger and more naive than Elizabeth while the possibility of an inferior marriage has been elicited through the view of Charlotte and Mr. Collins, clearly subsidiary characters. These having been isolated out, Austen can deal with how such complex outliers as Elizabeth and Darcy can overcome convention and reinvent their feelings despite the heavy weight of customary usages and prejudices that they both share. The couple are partly Beatrice and Benedict and partly Antony and Cleopatra, this time not representing two different empires but someone from the nation of men and someone from the nation of woman trying to understand one another. “Sense and Sensibility is not that complex. Its main outcome is that for circumstantial reasons on the part of Elinor, and more gradually by Marianne, they do find good matches for themselves, good because the lovers can understand one another, regardless of economic pressures. For Jane Austen, at that point, that is the freedom people have: to acknowledge a soulmate.

The key to Austen’s plots are often the revelation through a letter or a conversation concerning something that happened before the novel started. This may seem a simple device whereby to resolve her plots but in fact gives away something very central to the meaning of her novels: that what seems to be a set of events is in fact a revelation of something that had always existed even if it had been clouded or unknown. Austen is doing Ibsen before his time. A suggestion that this is the case is the novel that seems to be contrary to this pattern: “Mansfield Park”, where late in the novel Fanny Price does not act as she is supposed to, which is to be decisive so as to save the family that has taken her in and treated her as one of their own. Her failure to act is a revelation: this is what she has always been. What had seemed like the gangly demands of a young person trying to fit in, as when she demands a horse of her own, turns out to be her true character: stubborn, selfish, passive aggressive. So what the story has told us is nothing but what was always the case but it took the novel to get that across, to make us read it backwards in the light of what happened last. This is Chekov or Ibsenism before its time. The true action of the drama is what it reveals rather than what happens within it. The audience moves forward even if the story doesn’t very much do so.

Charles Dickens, the great successor to Jane Austen, is radically different from her. He is a front to back story teller who may introduce side characters marvelous for their quirkiness and also include subplots galore, but generally Dickens follows a life as the protagonist gets older, allowing for pauses and for stages of life that are jumped over. But, I think, his crowning achievement is “Great Expectations”, where he works contrary to what the genre of romantic fiction would impose on him: a foreshadowing, in early life, just as in the opening of the Odyssey, of what will happen later. The traumatic event and the consequences of having met Magwitch in the cemetery is treated by Pipas not being that, nor is the reader expected to catch on that Magwitch is his real benefactor. Rather, Pip thinks it is Mrs. Havisham, perhaps because her social class is so much more lofty than his own, and that therefore Estella, her ward, is the one destined to be his. That may be a pleasing illusion but it is destructive to think that a life has been laid out that will goo according to a plan known to the gods and to the reader clued in as to what will happen. “Great Expectations” is radical because it lays bare the use of reminiscence as a motive. It is anti-Romantic l in that nothing matters but the present. Pip has become a middle level bureaucrat thanks to John Wemmick, and so he shall remain, romantic dreams of Estella irrelevant to real life.

That analysis reminds us that it is correct to think of Freud as the last Romantic. Freud says there is always an underlying story which underlies the present story and which arises, outside of the time when it occurred, to haunt and shape the lives of people in their present. Time has no meaning in the world of psychological meanings. The past is a constant source of revelation which, when rediscovered, sheds light on and can change life from what it has seemed to be about in the interim since the traumatic event which never goes away. Freud and Dickens cannot coexist.