Despite the fact that both Jane Austen and Catherine Smith use the epistolary
style in their novels, I am taken aback by the different ways the forms came
across to me as a reader. While Austen seemed to use the style as a way to
create suspense and suspicion in the mind of the reader, Smith wrote
"Desmond" in a much more straightforward way. In "Lady
Susan," I was unsure of the sincerity of relationships and types of
connections between characters because of the way Austen chose to use the
epistolary form. As we discussed in class, the reader must constantly be questioning
the motives of the letter-writers and read very carefully to note the tone of
the letters. Charlotte Smith, on the other hand, was much clearer, in my
opinion, about how the characters felt toward one another. Perhaps Smith was
able to be clearer because the letters are primarily sent between close
confidants (Desmond and Bethel) whereas “Lady Susan” contains a wider range of correspondence.
I agree that Charlotte Smith's manner of writing was the more straightforward of the two but I enjoyed Austen's "Lady Susan" more because the relationships were more complicated. I found I liked having to puzzle through what the characters really thought of one another. I was particularly captivated while reading first what was revealed about Lady Susan through Mrs. Vernon's writings and then reading about Lady Susan's diabolical schemes in her letters to Mrs. Johnson. While "Desmond" is clearer I think this is a result of having a very narrow picture of the events, as the reader is only given a look into the minds of Desmond and Bethel. "Lady Susan" on the other hand offers a multitude of characters and illustrates their interpersonal relationships through letters depicting the same events through different perspectives. I thought that this aspect of "Lady Susan" made the novel all the more interesting, because I knew each character's motives.
ReplyDeleteI found that the epistolary form is one to be wary of when judging actuality from illusion, much like Professor Porter mentioned on the first day of class. Like you said, Austen forces the reader to wonder how each character really feels about the other. Her carefully crafted web of character involvement contains skepticism and mistrust between each family member. Lady Susan cannot exist in the a world such as Smith's "Desmond" because hidden agendas and ulterior motives cannot be communicated through only two points of view. I found that the access to multiple perspectives in Austen's "Lady Susan" gives the piece a dramatically different tone than Smith's "Desmond," despite the fact that both works are written in the epistolary form.
ReplyDeleteHaving read the final two volumes of Desmond, I found that Smith sustained the clarity of character emotions and judgements even as the number of letter writers and recipients expanded. Apart from sometimes wondering Mr. Bethel's motives, I felt that the characters remained exponentially more transparent than those in Austen's Lady Susan. Perhaps Smith retained this sense of transparency by having characters often write to the same recipients each time (Desmond to Mr. Bethel; Mrs. Verney to Miss Waverly). By keeping the correspondence more limited, Smith prevented one character from expressing two different viewpoints to two different recipients (as often happens in Lady Susan's letters to Mrs. Vernon and Mrs. Johnson).
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