Austen’s Skull

4,208 words

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are willing to analyse the physiognomy of others, then the nature of your own face and skull must be put to the test. In the case of Jane Austen, it should be no different, especially since she can be counted as perhaps one of the most insightful Social Darwinists to have existed before the birth of Charles Darwin, and Darwin was himself an avid reader of Jane Austen’s novels whilst researching On the Origin of Species.

Yet when talking about Austen from a physiognomic perspective, whether modern or vintage, it is necessary because of the scant visual evidence of how she looked to consider the accounts of her appearance provided by those closest to her. Bear in mind, the Jane Austen portrait that appears on the British £10 note has been criticised for being a sexed-up rendition of Cassandra Austen’s famous rough sketch of Jane, which in its own right received the anger and disdain of the author’s niece Anna Austen, for being ‘so hideously unlike’ her favourite aunt. Thankfully, by the time Anna was recording her memoirs as an old woman, her own description of Austen proves to be more illuminating:

The Figure tall and slight, but not drooping; well balanced, as was proved by her quick firm step -Her complexion of that rather rare sort which seems the peculiar property of light brunettes -A mottled skin, not fair, but perfectly clear and healthy in hue; the fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match, and the rather small but well-shaped nose. One hardly understands how with all these advantages she could yet fail of being a decently handsome woman.

If that twist of the knife was insufficient to draw your sympathy for such an almost pretty writer, then this jab from Henry Austen, her brother, ought to do the trick: “Her features were separately good.” Together, we imagine, they did not produce a complete package, and even though Henry goes on to exclaim how “the assemblage [of her features] produced an unrivalled expression of that cheerfulness, sensibility, and benevolence, which were her real characteristics”, it is perhaps not without the idea of their segmentation; “the rather small but well-shaped nose” retaining the cheerfulness, “the bright hazel eyes” promoting the sensibility, and the “perfectly clear and healthy [skin]” signifying benevolence. On this note, it seems a related issue that both of these descriptions of the author are more detailed than those she provides for any of her own characters, almost as if the issue of her own facial discomposure made the task of detailing the features and faults of others too hard to bear.

Edmund Burke, who, let us be reminded, coined the phrase “pride and prejudice” in his Reflections, and whom Austen can be expected to have read, did not put any such stock in physiognomic hesitancy. In his renowned A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, he makes it his business to study the human face as a conduit for the amiableness of the soul:

The Physiognomy has a considerable share in beauty, especially in that of our own species. The manners give a certain determination to the countenance, which being observed to correspond pretty regularly with them, is capable of joining the effect of certain agreeable qualities of the mind to those of the body. So that to form a finished human beauty, and to give it its full influence, the face must be expressive of such gentle and amiable qualities, as correspond with the softness, smoothness, and delicacy of the outward form.

This is a paragraph that would be embraced equally by readers of Richard Lynn as well perhaps by the organisers of any Hollywood costume department, the face of the actor and what it can’t help but signify largely determining the particular frills, gowns, and flowers used to elucidate the character they are playing. Which begs the question: are all the images we have from films of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet and Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby pulled out of thin air? Are our ideas of what Austen’s characters look like the consequence of Californian smoke and mirrors, if, as I have claimed, Austen does not really detail how these people appear in her novels?

John Mullan has this to say on the issue of Austen’s faces:

When Jane Bennet becomes engaged to Mr Bingley [in Pride and Prejudice] her mother exclaims, with embarrassing glee and yet also honesty, ‘I was sure you could not be beautiful for nothing!’ There is the sense confessed quietly throughout Austen’s narrative that looks are hugely important (thus those words used so frequently about characters when we first meet them: handsome, pretty, gentlemanlike, elegant.’ Austen herself is too honest not to mention a character’s looks when he or she is introduced to us. And yet there is often the sense for the reader that looks are difficult to catch, elusive, unspecifiable.

An example of the unspecifiability of looks can perhaps be found, once more, in Pride and Prejudice: Mr Darcy is initially unimpressed with Elizabeth Bennet, regarding her as the appendage of a loud, brash, country family from within the friendship circle that he deliberately cultivates based on intelligence. “But,” Austen writes, “no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.” This is a description that selects for intellect. Elizabeth’s mind is written on her face and largely due to the sharpness and depth of her eyes, Darcy can tell this. Seeing as the eyes can and have been regarded as an extension of the brain in modern neuroscience, we can be sure that Darcy’s improved opinion of his prospective partner is not simply due to the eternal male preference for big eyes, revealed perversely in the figure of the anime girl, and chemically in the then contemporaneously employed belladona atropa, or deadly nightshade: a poison sprinkled by women on their pupils to make them dilate and enlarge. Ungenerously, we might call this the Regency equivalent of becoming an anime girl.

And yet, leaving that aside, Darcy’s active employment of physiognomy to select a partner based on intelligence, and to do so correctly, as he does, shows John Mullan to be ignoring or worse yet suppressing something true about what Austen writes. From my perspective, it is obvious that when Austen provides minimalist descriptions of her characters she is not doing a Tristram Shandy, and simply allowing us to paint them as close to our wives and as far from our mistresses as would make us feel most comfortable. Instead, we come away from her works with strong impressions of how her characters appear, because the kind of descriptions she produces are all the data we need to evaluate where someone sits in the intellectual and ultimately sexual hierarchy.

In the superbly named book How to Judge People By What They Look Like, Edward Dutton establishes that the General Factor of Personality, a higher-order factor causing lower-order personality traits to show consistent correlations in a socially desirable direction, is positively associated with attractiveness as well as intelligence. As a realist writer, Austen does not attempt to conceal the ancient truth that the good, the true, and the beautiful are more frequently discovered in the same people than her asymmetrical and ugly critics would like her to suppose. Barring a few exceptions, which we will get to, the most attractive characters in her novels are simultaneously the most pro-social and intelligent.

In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne is slightly more attractive than Elinor, but both are above the psychopathic Lucy Steele, who is herself above the ogre-like Mrs. Ferrars. In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney is the most attractive character, followed perhaps by his sister Eleanor, and then the heroine Catherine Morland, before the detestable Thorpes are condescended to. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy is initially ever so slightly mogged by Mr. Wickham before knocking him down a peg due to his superior wits, and Elizabeth Bennet outranks all her silly sisters in beauty apart from Jane, who is, of course, simultaneously the nicest.

Austen gives us most of these impressions of sexual-intellectual ranking with the same deftness with which she immediately establishes Emma Woodhouse to be the queen bee of Highbury in the first sentence of Emma:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Unifying “some of the best blessings of existence”, and outmatching her less intelligent friend Harriet Smith in terms of beauty, intellect, and conversation, Emma spends the first volume of the novel deceiving herself that the charming Mr. Elton is more attracted to her idiotic associate than he is to herself. This is primarily because she sees herself as so above him, she does not believe he will attempt to breach the gulf that obviously separates them. And yet breach it he does, attempting to kiss Emma, and saying: ‘But, miss Smith, indeed!—Oh! Miss Woodhouse! Who can think of Miss Smith, when Miss Woodhouse is near!’ On Emma proceeding to try and reason him into liking the pretty and yet dull Miss Smith over and above herself, Mr. Elton produces one of the funniest and most cruelly Darwinian paragraphs in English literature:

‘Never, madam,’ cried he, affronted in his turn: ‘never, I assure you. I think seriously of Miss Smith!—Miss Smith is a very good sort of girl; and I should be happy to see her respectably settled. I wish her extremely well: and, no doubt, there are men who might not object to—Every body has their level: but as for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance, as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith!’

Having had her peace and comfort disturbed by the advances of this very ambitious male inferior, Emma enters the second volume of her novel to find her peace and comfort disturbed by news of a potential female superior. This is Jane Fairfax, who for most of the story Emma regards as her main competitor, both in terms of attractiveness and intellect, and for good reason. Apparently speaking about Harriet, but really choosing a victor in the struggle between Jane and Emma, Mrs. John Knightley reports, “[O]nly Jane Fairfax one knows to be so very accomplished and superior!—and exactly Emma’s age.” Emma’s hitherto unrealised feelings for Mrs. John Knightley’s son, George Knightley, are imperilled by the superiority of Jane Fairfax before she even notices they have developed.

Unlike Mr. Darcy, who recognises, on second glance, that Elizabeth Bennet has very intelligent eyes, it takes Emma Woodhouse to suffer the inferiorities of Mr. Elton’s flirtations, followed by the realisation that Frank Churchill has already been taken by the aforementioned Jane Fairfax, before she realises that the only suitable man for her is her old tutor, who up until this moment she has treated like a brother. Whilst not as aesthetically appealing as Emma Woodhouse, Mr. Knightley, Austen is keen to tell us,

in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them: and though this was not particularly agreeable to Emma herself, she knew it would be so much less so to her father, that she would not have him really suspect such a circumstance as her not being thought perfect by every body.

Whilst being fifteen years or so older than Emma, Mr. Knightley’s enduring attractiveness in the story is the obvious consequence of his charm and intelligence rather than anything as superficial as his wealth acquired over the years.

On this issue, it is clear that Austen is abhorred by the idea of marrying someone for money rather than love, by love meaning something like the joy provided by someone’s conversation, which is itself tied to the resources of their intellect. The most egregious example of a mercenary marriage in her novels is that of Caroline Lucas to the shambling, but wealthy, Mr. Collins, who cannot help but introduce the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, wherever he happens to go. Given recent trends in literary criticism, it is perhaps unsurprising that in the actually real book So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer has argued that “eight characters in [the novel] are either autistic or suffer from Asperger’s.” But if it “is not pride but subtle autism that is the major reason for Darcy’s frequent silences, [and] awkward behaviour at social events”, according to Bottomer, then I advise that we diagnose Mr. Collins with super-duper autism to secure some perspective on the matter of degree.

Austen is no more kind in her less scientific study of him:

Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society; the greatest part of his life having been spent under the guidance of an illiterate and miserly father; and though he belonged to one of the universities, he had merely kept the necessary terms, without forming at it any useful acquaintance.

Notably, this analysis of his nature comes after Austen’s decision to have him produce a copy of James Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Women at the Bennet’s dinner table, and lecture them all about the conduct of desirable females. In short, Austen evokes nature, not any sort of education, as the best dimension for explaining what exactly is wrong with him, a preference that she always gives as, by and large, a disbeliever in social formation. With her, we might say, it is 80 per cent Nature, hence invoking Collins’ illiterate father, and 20 per cent nurture. This has led her to make statements on certain neurodivergent characters that some have considered cruel.

Austen’s genius for either dehumanising characters she dislikes or just accurately portraying people on the outer reaches of humanity has caused Lionel Trilling to come up with the phrase “vegetable people” to describe the intellectual and aesthetic underclass that haunt the basins of her work. Marriage to one of these by the less attractive but still partly intelligent Caroline is, for Austen, the equivalent of selling out your genes for material luxury; several feminist accounts of Pride and Prejudice are haunted by the fact that Caroline is pregnant by the end of it, although not for the reasons they suppose.

Anyone who doubts that Austen would have applied a dysgenic vocabulary to such human sexual pairings were she born a generation later, does not know the author. They would do well to read the letter she wrote to her sister which mentions the miscarriage of a woman, the face of whose husband happened to displease Jane: “Mrs Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright.—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.” More miraculous than this is perhaps the next sentence, which utterly abandons the previous topic like it was nothing: “—There has been a great deal of rain here for this last fortnight, much more than in Kent; and indeed we found the roads all the way from Staines most disgracefully dirty.”

Other than this emblematic letter, another moment that perhaps best captures how severely Austen judged people based on their appearances can be found in one of her reviews of local parties as one of the more attractive attendees:

There were very few Beauties, and such as there were, were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck.—The two Miss Coxes were there; I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago;–the other is refined into a nice, composed looking girl like Catherine Bigg.

As a sensitive woman who would doubtless be a reader of the Human Phenotypes website if she ever got the chance, Austen is a sure candidate for the writer who best portrays what we now call the “ick” impulse in her own or any century. If the former remarks might be considered excessive, the latter, from the novel Persuasion, only seem restrained by the fact she is writing about a fictional character rather than a real person. The ick in question, which from my experience is not unique to Austen, is an absolutely genocidal hatred for men with the name Richard, and if he is an ugly, undesirable moron on top of that, then it would be highly appropriate for him to be thrown into any nearby war or incinerator just to get rid of him as efficiently as possible. In response to Mrs. Musgrove remembering the death of her son Richard in the navy, “looking over his letters and things”, Austen’s narrator decides to interrupt the flow of the narrative to tell us exactly who this sailor was and what we should think of him.

The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.

He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him ‘poor Richard,’ been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead.

Contextualised as proto-Darwinian, this passage is perhaps argument enough in its own right to show that Austen indeed possessed some radical attitudes, or to use a more descriptive noun, appetites. But these were neither egalitarian, nor democratic, nor reliant, as some of her contemporaries’ were, on the idea of a mental blank slate on which everything and anything could be projected for the betterment of the subject. In her work, those who are not on the verge of being perfect, never will be. And the state you are born in approximates the one you will occupy. As a separate matter, in alluding to the issue of perfection, especially male perfection, I am brought, before I conclude, to an unresolved problem in Austen’s work that frequently risks the hazard of becoming un-Christian. This is the issue of the rake.

The prototype for the desirable male polygamist, Charles Adams, appears in Austen’s juvenilia, with a face so beautiful that only eagles can bear to look into it. Yet this overwhelming non-monogamous partner can be traced throughout Austen’s mature work. In Sense and Sensibility, this is the extremely attractive John Willoughby, whose love interest is Marianne, but who causes her sister Elinor and indeed her mother Mrs. Dashwood to fall speechless before him:

Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at [Marianne and Willoughby’s] entrance; and while the eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration which equally sprang from his appearance, he apologised for his intrusion, by relating its cause, in a manner so frank and so graceful, that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression.

In the other novels, Willoughby’s descendants all risk displacing the monogamous, dependable hero in the books they occupy. In Mansfield Park, it is Henry Crawford versus Edmund Bertram; in Pride and Prejudice, it is Mr. Wickham versus Mr. Darcy; in Emma, it is Mr. Knightley versus Frank Churchill; and in Persuasion Austen produces her most compelling rake in the form of Mr. William Elliot. Lady Russell, the confidante of our heroine Anne Elliot, observes on properly meeting him for the first time:

His manners were an immediate recommendation; and on conversing with him she found the solid so fully supporting the superficial, that she was at first, as she told Anne, almost ready to exclaim, “Can this be Mr Elliot?” and could not seriously picture to herself a more agreeable or estimable man. Everything united in him; good understanding, correct opinions, knowledge of the world, and a warm heart. He had strong feelings of family attachment and family honour, without pride or weakness; he lived with the liberality of a man of fortune, without display; he judged for himself in everything essential, without defying public opinion in any point of worldly decorum.

These are intelligent, highly effective, and beautiful men who use the r-type reproductive strategy; for them, it is rate, not time; it is smartly managed appearance over commitment. Naturally, they leave behind them a trail of pregnant and sometimes very clever women before meeting their most recent potential paramours, Austen’s heroines. Their enormous generations are not accepted by the monogamous state, and yet in almost every case, and novel, Austen tries to re-accommodate these men after their true nature is discovered and the leading lady is saved the embarrassment of being deserted. Mr. Wickham marries Elizabeth’s flirtatious sister Lydia; Willoughby is promised an undisclosed happy end; Mr. Elliot tactically makes Mrs. Clay his mistress in order to prevent her from marrying Sir Walter Elliot and displacing him as heir to Kellynch Hall. It is only Henry Crawford whose reputation is jeopardised for his committing adultery with Maria Rushworth, and still he does not receive the deferred punishment of “instant annihilation” from Austen’s judge of Hell as does his female partner. To be direct, something funny is going on here, something that resists even Mary Harrington’s recent consideration that Jane Austen was the originator of Big Romance, which due to the alienation of labour from the home, attempted to sell women just about any high quality man based on the idea that he might choose her for her personality.

Austen chooses people based on their personalities based on their faces. If she is a theologian, she is a materialist; and metaphysical love is the kind of thing that Mr. Collins would speak about. At the end of her life, she dedicated her second last letter to the servant as well as writer Anne Sharp, proclaiming, due to the potent impression that Anne left on her mistress Lady Pilkington, “It is the Influence of Strength over Weakness indeed.—Galigaï de Concini for ever & ever.” This was the name of the wife of the regent of France who was put on trial by King Louis XIII for supposedly using witchcraft to control his mother Queen Marie de Medicis. The quotation, “It is the Influence of Strength over Weakness indeed” comes from Voltaire’s Universal History, and refers to Galigaï’s courageous response to the suggestion of the rigged court in front of her that she explain her witchcraft. Her answer was simple: “My witchcraft was the superiority, which people of sense have over weak minds.”

Voltaire continues: While “some of the judges had understanding and justice enough not to condemn her to death”, the others “passed sentence at the same time on the husband already deceased, and on the wife, as persons convicted of sorcery, of judaism, and of misdemeanours. The marshal’s lady was burnt, and Luines the royal minion had the confiscated estate.”

This Nietzschean credo of strong over weak forms a dark stream that flows long and deep underneath Jane Austen’s work. It is, as Mike Maxwell might suggest, indicative of Austen’s sensitivity to a pre-axial, or merely pre-early modern civilisational norm. To quote the man himself,

In the world of polygamy, the husband and the hookup are the same. It is an important part of male self-image that each man believes he would clean up in this world. In a world of monogamy though, the partner and the hookup diverge. In terms of reproduction women tend to prefer stable, generous, and by necessity somewhat less exciting and dominant men.

Even if Austen selects such stable, and less dominant men for her heroines by the ends of her novels, does she do so out of a sincere belief in their superiority? We must ask this because Austen seems always to leave room for the heroine to fantasise about being with the male polygamist in the place of her final monogamous partner. As a counterargument, one might suggest that Austen was a believing Christian and would not have allowed herself to fall into such anti-monogamous temptations. Furthermore, at the end of the day, isn’t a committed, monogamous man better than his physically and often intellectually supreme rivals?

No.