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Respecting Emotion: Austen’s Gratitude

1. Thanks and No thanks

“Alas! the gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning.”[1]

Take the predictable epigraph as my surrender to the insistent obtrusion of this familiar Wordsworthian platitude on every effort to begin this essay elsewhere. The final lines of “Simon Lee,” in which the speaker indulges in and confides his discomfort at receiving thanks so passionately disproportionate to the effort expended in his performance of a good deed, have always seemed disproportionately grave—and mocking of that disproportion. Mourning suffuses thoughtfulness with a peculiar excess of affect. What or who is the object of bereavement? What is to be grieved in the “gratitude of men”? A general condition of need that accepts charity instead of calls for justice? The debilities of age, illness, accident? What does that idle, factitious “alas!” add to the solemnity of the lines it introduces—metrical symmetry for sure, but also, for the proponent of a poetic diction consistent with ordinary language, a caution about the sentiment that follows.[2] “Alas!” is the sigh of a questionable disappointment. The aid proffered to Simon Lee—an effective “single blow” struck at the stubborn tangled roots of the tree with which the old man has been struggling—is an opportune act of fellowship: “One summer day I chanced to see/ This old man doing all he could” –to no avail. Chancing to see opens up a possibility; the sympathetic glance is turned to an exertion of good will. The severance of the tree roots--that finite act of aid--elicits a return that seems boundless, without end: “thanks and praises seemed to run/ So fast out of his heart, I thought/ They never would have done”). Alas, the gush of responsive gratitude reinstates a distance that the act of sympathetic recognition might have been imagined to traverse. I want to suggest that the speaker here projects onto Simon Lee a purely pathological form of pride, such as Kant describes in his Metaphysics of Morals. We typically “fear that by showing gratitude we take the inferior position of a dependent in relation to his protector, which is contrary to real self-esteem,” writes Kant—an anxiety arising from the misunderstanding of “duty to oneself” as the “duty of not needing and asking for others’ beneficence.”[3] “All men will feel shame at being beholden to the other,” Kant concedes, so that in “warding off poverty,” we ward off a “great temptation” to vice, ingratitude being among the “meanest and basest.”[4] And yet, the duty to preserve “moral integrity”—indirectly sustained by the health, strength, and prosperity a figure like Simon Lee lacks—is, as Kant well recognizes, terribly vulnerable to both “fortune” and the social “injustice” that creates inequalities of wealth.[5] If standing in need of the other’s beneficence does not, in itself, erode the grounds of dignity, then gratitude need not be taken as the sorry virtue of the degraded—at best the overcoming of shame, at worst the distressing face of shamelessness. So “Alas!”: thus the speaker grieves the dignity compromised by gratitude, and thus the poem succinctly exposes such grief as a kind of affectation.

Averted here, in the speaker’s mourning for the dignity lost in the outpouring of thanks, is the onus of the other’s gratitude. To accept or be honored by uninhibited thanks and praises is to be passively arrested at the moment when, and by the recognition that, there can be no other return for one’s good will. In putting it this way, I mean to restore a distinction that recent meditations on giving and receiving have rather stridently elided. In construing the gift as an interruption of the logic of exchange, an event that defies the dynamics of reciprocity and symmetry, Derrida (for example) is driven to claim not only that the return of a favor annuls the gift of a good deed, but also that gratitude itself returns the good turn. The one who receives “ought not owe,” writes Derrida, but nor ought he to own anything, for to acknowledge a gift is to give it back.[6] This analytic “aporia of the gift” is useful, I think, insofar as it alerts us to the ways in which all responses to the other can be seen as reciprocations, and correspondingly, how difficult it is to dwell on or in moments of intersubjective asymmetry. The isolated instance of thanks-giving is merely a “lapse of time” masking what Bourdieu describes as the “contradiction between the experienced… truth of the gift as an… unrequited act” and another truth—presumably beyond and truer than experience—that makes the moment a “stage in a relationship of exchange.”[7] Interruption, suspense, lapse, interval: all these terms divert attention away from the urgent immediacy and irrevocability of the moment when the other can do nothing but receive, and has nothing to give but thanks. There is no time like the present. Occasions of gratitude are evidently disturbances in the ethical drive toward reciprocity, sundering recognition of the other from respectful exchange, dispelling the illusion of mutuality as even a deferred prospect of giving in return.

What, then, would be the less grievous alternative to Simon Lee’s tearful thanks and praises? Perhaps not ingratitude, but begrudging thanks, as for a favor that has not been sought, or for something given which I (secretly) regard as my due, or for an aura of condescension in the act of giving (if I am the type to resent condescension). How readily, in such cases, does a perfunctory “thank you” find utterance, so habitual is the courtesy, so thoughtless is the civility—even when not heart-felt. We hardly notice the “thank yous” of everyday exchange, so readily and so automatically are the words offered, rarely burdened with the task of conveying warm appreciation. Bearing this in mind, I want to turn to an exceptional moment in Pride and Prejudice when Jane Austen asks us to imagine that the perfunctory “thank you” might be spontaneously withheld.

Elizabeth Bennet has been listening, with an “astonishment…beyond expression,” and with rising indignation, to Darcy’s unexpected declaration of love. At the first opportunity to respond, she says:

“In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation should be felt, and if I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you. But I cannot—I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly.”[8]

What then does Elizabeth say in not simply saying “thank you”? Her words insist on a vitalizing causal correspondence between “natural” feeling and “established modes” –a curious claim for this character. Although moments of discomposure have occasionally disrupted her fluent civility,[9] Elizabeth has been altogether too witty and too consistently engaged in sophisticated verbal play to hold so ingenuous a view of sincerity. If, on the occasion of this proposal, she would not have her thanks betoken a gratitude she does not feel, it is not because she holds a naive conviction that words ought to correspond to genuine sentiments.

In proposing sincerity as a license for incivility, Elizabeth’s words reciprocate the insulting candor of Darcy’s address (the “honest confession of the scruples” and “struggles” that she finds so “offending and insulting” in his proposal; “Was not this some excuse for incivility?” she retorts in response to Darcy’s wonder at “being rejected” with “so little endeavour at civility”). The piquancy of this symmetry between the protagonists at the height of their injurious misconstrual of one another and at the extremity of their affective divide might be taken for a subtle reassurance of the mutual likeness and suitability they will eventually discover—but only if we harbor the presupposition that the central love match of the novel must assume a symmetrical form, and take this equal exchange of injury as a prelude to the equal exchange of affections toward which the plot aims. It is a question whether we can suspend memory of, and desire for the familiar felicitous ending, but to read this scene without anticipating its narrative resolution is to find that the protagonists share only an ungracious and reckless heedlessness to the impact of undisguised feelings on the other—not the most promising of relational affinities.

But just as Elizabeth’s stated reasons for withholding thanks cannot plausibly be taken as a naive insistence that “established modes” should correspond to real feelings (this would have Elizabeth speaking out of character), so too they cannot be convincingly taken as a cleverly fitting rebuke of Darcy’s scrupulous but offensive honesty. To be sure, pauses in this dialogue are filled with affective and reactive echoes that impress likeness upon the characters—common, if not shared, feelings of rage, astonishment, incredulity, contempt; similar, if not mutual, struggles for composure and uncontrolled heightenings of color. But these responsive resemblances, the symmetrical sensibility to insult and injury passing between the characters, belong to the narration of the scene and can only be awkwardly transposed onto the dialogue they punctuate. To read Elizabeth’s withholding of thanks as a neatly appropriate return of Darcy’s offensive sincerity is to credit the words with too much deliberation, to elide their peculiarity as dialogue. The words are spontaneously uttered—hurled one wants to say—in the heat of the moment, in the grip of “resentment,” “anger” and “exasperation” (all Austen’s words). Given such emotional urgency, it is remarkable that Austen would have Elizabeth balk at uttering the automatic, thoughtless “thank you” that would be swiftly undone by the scathing rejection sure to follow: “Thank you, but…” Elizabeth’s reasons for being unable to say “thank you”—the reasons Austen gives her—cannot account for the strange implausibility of this speech. The words stand in the stead of a perfunctory “thank you” but do not explain the absence of what would be an entirely unremarkable preface to scornful refusal of the undesired compliment of Darcy’s attention.

It is worth recalling that in refusing Mr. Collins’ equally undesired proposal, Austen has Elizabeth repeatedly hew to the “established mode”: “Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline them” (73); “I thank you again and again for the honour of your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible” (74). The habitual civility hardly attenuates the uninhabited candor of her decisive rejection in this case. Collins’ obtuse construal of her refusal as “mere words of course” does beg the question of how we are to distinguish the earnest from the perfunctory. “I thank you again for the honor you have done me in your proposals” –these are “mere words of course”—“but to accept them is absolutely impossible”—sincere plain speech that can willfully but plausibly be taken as encouragement according to the “established custom” of first refusing the man one means to accept. “Established modes” of civility and “established customs” of converse between the sexes allow Collins to be perfectly heedless of Elizabeth as anyone more distinct than a young lady, a member of her sex, an elegant female. Elizabeth cannot in fact “speak plainer” than she does to him, but “being believed sincere” is evidently neither in her power, nor in the power of speeches whose jarring particularity can be so readily assimilated to familiar forms by the complacent, inattentive, or purely self-regarding auditor.

Respect—the elusive form of pride understood as a dignified consciousness of self-worth, secure from the petty injuries of amour-propre—is clearly at issue and at risk in this scene, as it is throughout the novel, especially and almost didactically, in the novel’s efforts to define the substance of “all real affection” between the sexes as a compound of “respect, esteem, and confidence” (155). Elizabeth’s specific complaint—that Collins fails to attend to her “as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart”—pleads for a highly generic form of consideration. To be heard “as a rational creature” (75)—among Austen’s most explicit allusions to Wollstonecraft’s defense of the rights of woman—is only to supercede and substitute the category of “elegant female” with an even more abstract category. Insofar as Kant (and arguably Wollstonecraft) identify reason as the intelligible, invariable core of personhood we are bound to reverence in one another, Elizabeth demands no less than that fundamental regard—but also no more. The plea is for a form of respect that has been historically and philosophically allied to justice, a call for recognition of equal claims to respect. But this turns out not to be the form of respect Austen binds to affection and imagines as driving one into active, intimate engagement with another.

If the exchange between Elizabeth and Collins is a comically extreme rendering of how little “mere words of course” can do to command the other’s respect, it is nevertheless also clear that the form of respect Austen binds to affection entails an appreciation for the other that dialogue can neither establish nor adequately evince. There is, in other words, an unutterable and indecorous excess to that form of respect Austen imagines as quickening into love. The romance between Elizabeth and Darcy ostensibly traces a steady development and awareness of mutual respect—but the constitution of that respect is oddly ruminative, largely divorced from the dynamics of conversational exchange, cultivated at a remove from the other, oddly detached from expectation, anticipation, or anxiety for return. And it transpires in moods of gratitude.

What Austen has Elizabeth so implausibly say in the stead of a mere “thank you” will I think come to make a queer kind of sense if we are willing to follow the question implicit in the conditional “if I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you” to its resolution in the moment when, desiring but not daring to hope for a new avowal, Elizabeth “can no longer help” offering thanks (238). It is in the space between the perfunctory thank you awkwardly withheld and the warm thanks repeatedly given that I propose to trace the unlikely, romantic affiliation of gratitude and respect in the novel.

2. A Kantian Romance?

The punctuated phases of Elizabeth’s change of heart and mind toward Darcy present disturbing challenges insofar as they seem to undermine, distort, and problematically qualify the titular proposition that Elizabeth’s prejudice yields to fair judgment of Darcy’s character. An abstract meritocratic logic determines and rewards the achievement of this enlightenment, softening the humiliating self-reproaches that attend the discovery of her “prepossession” and “ignorance.” Elizabeth deserves Darcy’s love when she recognizes that he deserves hers, and such recognition ostensibly involves the lucid, though mortifying realization of her misjudgment. (I will not address how we are invited to imagine Darcy as coming to deserve Elizabeth’s love except to recall what the novel offers as counterweight to the heroine’s ordeal: Darcy’s attestation that he has been “properly humbled,” his temperamental “pride and conceit” corrected in the effort “to please a woman worthy of being pleased,” 241) This notion of an intimate union of love, respect, and enlightened recognition of the other’s worth is so thickly embedded in the social, cultural, and material details that comprise Austen’s “realism” that it is, frankly, astonishing that it continues to elicit critical refutation. To summarize what are now-familiar objections to the romance of mutual esteem: Elizabeth falls in love with a house (“to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”); her developing regard for Darcy is really a submission to the lure of property, wealth and rank; she is ultimately as obliged to Darcy’s benefaction (his largely monetary intercession in the affair of Lydia’s elopement) as all those other subordinates “in his guardianship” at Pemberley. In short, Elizabeth takes her place beneath Darcy even as she ascends to marry him so that, as Mary Poovey has argued, the “vindication of Darcy as an ideal husband” necessarily entails a vindication of the “particular social order at whose pinnacle he stands.”[10] The equality and respect Elizabeth’s father insists on as Elizabeth’s necessary requisite for happiness in marriage is, as he also stipulates, paradoxically dependent on “look[ing] up” to her husband “as a superior” (246). Consequently, Elizabeth’s triumphant climactic resistance to Lady De Bourgh--her confident assertions of merit, equality, and autonomy of judgment--seems like a pyhrric rhetorical victory (“mere words of course”), incidental to the compromising capitulations to established social hierarchies that coincide with (and perhaps comprise the very substance of) the heroine’s developing love and esteem. In Claudia Johnson’s generous estimation of the political possibilities the novel ventures, the “insolence of rank and power [is] chastised, but never radically enough to make us doubt their prestige.” Thus the “worldly advantages that have not been allowed to bully Elizabeth into respect” (in the confrontation with Lady Catherine) are precisely those that “exalt her in the end” (as mistress of Pemberley).[11]

Current critical consensus tends to credit Austen and the novel for sustaining tensions between allegiance to received social forms—realism, say—and transformative, hypothetical, alternative modes of value, judgment and affiliation—romance, say, or perhaps romanticism.[12] The contending definitions of “pride” introduced early in the novel are symptomatic of such tensions. Elizabeth’s “I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine” (14), however lightly proffered, assertively places her on equal ground, existentially (and perhaps quixotically), with the “very fine young man” who (culturally, politically, economically: “family, fortune, every thing in his favor”) has an indubitable “right to be proud” (14). Two points of view evidently underlie these two, equally intelligible uses of the term “proud” in this early chapter of the novel. One abstracts the individual from “family, fortune, every thing” and thus allows that everyone has a “right to be proud,” and hence, equally, a value vulnerable to denigration. The other irrevocably situates the individual in a thick web of social and material determinations, including gender, and thus accedes to the fact that particular persons “should think highly of [themselves]” and hence will think less of others. There can be no dialectical resolution between these two points of view, only perspectival shifts from one position to the other, such as Kant imagines when he describes two ways of regarding ourselves as moral agents. On one view: we are free from determination by everything empirical, bound to one another by mutual respect and recognition of a common dignity, equal members of a kingdom of ends. On the other view: we are constituted by character, fortune, material needs, and proclivities of desire, unequal means to one another’s ends.[13]