I was sitting on my friend’s bed, looking on as she tried out different laughs in the mirror. At the age of thirteen, the scene felt at once unsettling but natural; I’d always thought of laughter as a reflex action. We learn to laugh long before we know what a joke is or have ever been tickled, a smile is a reflex in the literal sense: it appears as if by contagion in reaction to the smiling face of another. But adolescence made me doubt my reflexes, my instincts and habits. It was like moving to a hostile country; one that involved razors, bras, and deodorants.
It was at that period in my life when I discovered Jane Austen. My literature teachers set me the task of reading Milan Kundera, Ray Bradbury, Herman Hesse, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and Jaime Sabines, and I’d see off those texts as quickly as possible to return to my own books (and, I have to confess, Dawson’s Creek on TV). During adolescence, the route map of my reading was more or less the following: from fairy tales, I cycled to J.K. Rowling, and from there straight on to Ursula K. Le Guin, taking a right turn to Agatha Christie, then left into Clarice Lispector, reverse to Italo Calvino, a diagonal to Emily Brönte via Angela Carter until reaching Rosario Castellanos and Juan Rulfo, then a U-turn to Edith Wharton, continuing to Oscar Wilde, passing Inés Arredondo at the traffic circle and exiting at Alexandre Dumas, with a right turn into Virginia Woolf and back-pedaling to Jane Austen. That voracious chaos shows a clear preference for Anglophone women. The reasons for that preference are varied and, in the main, gothic, but among them is the fact that women had a much clearer and more established presence in the Anglophone tradition than in the mustachioed canon offered by my teacher José de la O and his ilk (things have changed slightly or even a great deal since then, or so I like to believe).
Adolescence was a tortuous educational experience for me. I had to learn how to dress, how to flirt, kiss, dance, laugh, and every moment of it was hell, even when I was enjoying myself. Pride and PrejudiceFootnote1 soon became my favorite book. Austen’s poor heroines were attempting to navigate a world that, at the turn of the eighteenth century, was governed by norms considerably stricter and more complex than those that ruled mine. They were ensnared in absurd attempts to pretend indifference while also appearing animated, to discuss and defend their arguments without loss of elegance, to denounce an abusive man without being thought indiscreet. The novel wasn’t a manual of etiquette, quite the reverse; it showed the possible pitfalls of the mix of convention, resolve, emotion, and morality. The first lesson I learned from Austen was that everything I was suffering at that time had a funny side. And knowing that something can be laughed at is an aid to surviving it.
I read Pride and Prejudice again at college, in a class on nineteenth century literature. My companions complained that the novel was just a tale of rich, gossipy women who thought of nothing but whom to marry. For those classmates, Jane Austen’s work was kitsch, superficial, vain, little better than a soap opera or a celebrity article in Hello! They thought the emphasis on marriage and happy endings made it conservative—apparently now, fifteen years later, many women still share that view.
What did Jane Austen’s world have to do with ours? they protested. The first-world problems of those young women in their diaphanous muslin dresses—lack of formal education, being barred from inheriting directly from their parents, and, in terms of those prospective husbands, having to make a choice between what might be described as the best of employers or the least awful of jailors—at no point included the war on drugs, pollution, or any of the other tragedies besetting Mexico and the rest of the world whichever way we turned. I agreed. But for me, reading Pride and Prejudice was a form of escape, and it never occurred to me that there was anything so bad in that. Escaping into other minds, other times, other concerns has always seemed one of the richest possibilities offered by literature. As Tolkien said, there is a difference between the escape of the prisoner and the flight of the deserter.
But naturally, reading Austen was never only a window onto other perspectives. Hardly any good book is. Good books, like those windows, also have mirror-like qualities. However far we are from our own worlds, we can suddenly, given the right lighting, be confronted by our own reflection. Nowadays there seems to be a particular predilection for mirrors. People are always saying that they want to be able to “identify” with fictional characters, see their own experiences portrayed in them, feel themselves represented; I’m not criticizing this, it is an understandable desire that should be respected, although if literature is nothing more than that, I swear I throw in the towel. But given that tendency, I found it hard to account for the fact that this book is so popular two centuries after its original publication. And no, I don’t think this is due to the marriage and the happy ending, or at least not only due to them (although, to be honest, I don’t know where we picked up such an aversion to happy endings or why we forgive them in Shakespeare but not in Austen). After giving the matter much thought, I came up with the following theory.
Virginia Woolf says, “all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room.”Footnote2 Thanks to that “attentive curiosity”Footnote3—in Austen’s words—and that in-depth study of character, of personality, Austen’s humor, as it relates to human contradictions and defects, still makes us laugh today, from here to China (apparently Pride and Prejudice is particularly popular in South Korea, Brazil, and Nigeria).
Austen’s books are a careful observation of something that goes beyond historical and cultural contingency (although, obviously, deeply affected by both). Something that exceeds the hair powder, the wigs, and the balls is central to that historical transcendence. I’ve spent some time trying to find a less antiquated and questionable way of referring to what is called human nature, but I have yet to find it, so, deepest apologies: I’m going to call that something human nature.
At one point in the novel, the handsome, affable Bingley says to the protagonist, “I did not know before … that you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.” To which Lizzie replies, “Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage.” Darcy then remarks that the countryside can offer her little variety for such study, which she counters with, “But people themselves alter so much that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.”Footnote4
The third time I read Austen was in a reading group, toward the end of my college degree, where we tackled her complete works. The group was composed of myself, two female, and three male friends who met once a month to comment on and discuss Austen, alternating between our homes in the Chapultepec, Ecatepec, Mixcoac, Del Valle, and Narvarte neighborhoods of Mexico City. At that time, I was going through a period of storms in my love life and indecision about my future career. I was falling in and out of love with someone different on a daily basis. Whenever I discovered that my partner had been two-timing me, I’d be indignant but then immediately do the same to him. On that third reading, it seemed to me that Pride was a book about metamorphoses. The characters could be divided into two main categories: the ones who changed and the ones who didn’t; the remediables and the irremediables.
It was Darcy’s influence that made Lizzie more prudent and Lizzie who, in turn, made him less arrogant. The book also addresses the transformation of the gaze: after Darcy comments that Lizzie has no grace, is not even pretty, the paragraph goes on to say, “But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.”Footnote5 How often the same thing had happened to me! And, in counterpoint, a handsome and agreeable man like Wickham becomes awful when he shows his true colors—that latter situation had happened to me even more often. Lizzie’s evaluation of Wickham’s behavior—her evaluation of her own—was completely altered, needed to be rewritten in the light of his deceit.
I read all those things in Austen and everything that in my real life seemed so tragic, in her books made me laugh.
I’ve just finished reading Pride and Prejudice for the fifth time (my post partum memory is like a sieve and I can remember nothing at all of the fourth). To date, it’s the novel I’ve read most often, and each time I like it more. I turn to it and its author as to a refuge or a trusted antidepressant.
In my last reading, I was struck by a phrase near the end of the novel. Elizabeth—that character whom the author said she adored; in a letter to her sister, dated January 29, 1813, she wrote, “I must confess that I think her as delightful a character as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know …” but “I do not write for such dull Elves.”Footnote6—is engaged to marry Mr. Darcy. By that time, he had relaxed his outlook considerably but Lizzie, longing to tease him about his manipulation of his friend Bingley, reprimands herself: “She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at and it was rather too early to begin.” That phrase left me thinking (laughing and then thinking) that the novel could be read as a treatise on laughter.
In the novel, it is said that anything can be a motive for laughter: “The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and the best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.”Footnote7 Jane Austen’s laughter is as democratic as death: she laughs at the rich (the insufferable Lady Catherine de Bourgh) and the poor (the Lucases, the Phillips, and even the Bennets themselves; all poor in comparison with the other characters), at the nerdy readers (Lizzie’s sister, Mary) and those who are ignorant, like Lydia, her frivolous younger sister with her head firmly in the clouds. She laughs at women (at their vanity, their hats; I’ve always found English women’s hats incomprehensible) and men, like the inept Mr. Collins, who can’t understand that no means no. A great many of her most feminist ideas are expressed as jokes: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them,” says Margaret Atwood somewhere or other. Laughter in Pride and Prejudice is a sport, a common pastime in villages, as Lizzie’s father says, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”Footnote8
At a certain point in the book, Lizzie outlines the morality underlying her sense of humor, “I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.”Footnote9 The underlying ethic of laughter in the novel is complex. There is a portrait of the indolent laugh, like that of Mr. Bennet, who, rather than educate his daughters, makes fun of them—the poor man soon repents this. The cruel barbs that Mr. Darcy aims at Lizzie and are then returned with a vengeance by her are in large measure to blame for a misunderstanding that makes them both miserable. A certain form of laughter yields before circumstance, as does Elizabeth’s when she sees her younger sisters wallowing in a vanity fair and tries to laugh at them but finds that “all sense of pleasure was lost in shame.”Footnote10 But laughter can also be instructive: it can teach a lesson or disarm arrogance. And it can be a form of communion, amusement, or consolation. And then there is the laughter directed at oneself, not in self-ridicule but in humility. For Jane Austen, humor is also a literary strategy that forms a contrast to unhappiness and in doing so highlights it. We learn to laugh, after all: to laugh at ourselves, and to make others laugh.
Jane Austen’s laughter has been my school too. I’ve consciously and unconsciously sought ways to imitate her tone, to explore the many incarnations of her smile: from her sarcastic mockery (in one of her letters, Austen relates the story of a neighbor who miscarried after receiving a shock and supposes that “she happened unawares to look at her husband.”Footnote11) to her sad smiles—that, in Persuasion, for example, break my heart. I know that I have failed, I’ve written several sad books that I wanted to be funny. I’ve put my all into learning this lesson: that there’s a cruel, absurd world out there at which we can laugh and a laugh—however brief—can also change that world.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jazmina Barrera
Jazmina Barrera (Mexico City, 1988) is the author of Foreign Body / Cuerpo extraño (2013), Cuaderno de faros (2019; On Lighthouses, 2020), Linea nigra (2020; Linea Nigra, 2022), and the novel Punto de cruz (2021; Cross-Stitch, 2023). She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope.
Christina MacSweeney
Christina MacSweeney has translated works by Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez, and Elvira Navarro. Her translation of Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-Stitch is forthcoming in 2023.
Notes
1 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin Classics, 2014).
2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Grafton Books, 1977), 64.
3 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 257.
4 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 42-3.
5 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 24.
6 Jane Austen, The Letters of Jane Austen (New York: Little Brown, 1908), 182.
7 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 56.
8 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 343-4.
9 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 56.
10 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 221.
11 Austen, The Letters, 30.