Jane Austen at play: Self-consciousness, beginnings, endings

It is because Jane Austen takes her art seriously that she can play. A self-conscious novelist, she delights in playing with reality and illusion, and the conventions of fiction-making. Her ironic perspective on individual consciousness and social interaction explains a lively interest in the comedy of manners. Irony underlines the paradox between her self-consciousness as an artist and her impersonality and control of aesthetic distance.;Austen treats art as an expression of what her contemporary, Schiller, termed the "Spieltrieb" or "play drive." Schiller's argument for the need of the "play drive" to unite the "form drive" (associated with man's rational nature) with the "sense drive" (associated with man's sensuous nature) to express the ideal aesthetic experience, provides a useful framework for my study of Austen's playfulness.;She seems to make the ironic suggestion that life can be most fully experienced through art. I have focussed on Austen's self-consciousness, and the beginnings and endings of her six completed novels, to illustrate this. Each novel begins and ends with a journey and triumphantly celebrates a "happy ending." The heroines and heroes are growing, developing characters who, in achieving balance and harmony within themselves and in their relationship, learn to play.;In Persuasion, her last completed novel, Austen challenges her readers with a different kind of "happy ending." The hero and heroine leave the security and stability of life on land for the vast, threatening sea. They provide definitions of freedom and beauty.;Austen creates aesthetically satisfying works of art and reaches a point of perfect equilibrium to play with an ideal world. Yet her ideal world is clearly rooted in the finite world with its limitless possibilities. Her fiction enriches and enlarges our perception of the significance of play; it liberates those who fully respond to her art.