Life and Adventures: A Short Essay on the Arbitrary Plotting of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia

October 10, 2019

In fiction, plot can be briefly defined as the bones of a story: the main series of events strung together by a chain of cause and effect; an interrelated sequence in which everything follows neatly from what came before. However, the problem and joy of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia is that she rarely strives for neatness. Despite presenting her works in the sentimental mode––framing them as grand stories of life and adventure––she offers no clear narrative threads to follow. Her protagonists move through a series of sequential but ultimately disconnected events, undermining expectations of a clear, continuous narrative. This essay argues that, by writing works defined by incoherence, Austen critiques the sentimental novels of her time, showing through exaggeration that all plots are arbitrary, and that narrative coherence is always imposed from the outside. This is best shown through three works of Juvenilia: ‘The Beautifull Cassandra,’ ‘The Adventures of Mr. Harley,’ and ‘Jack and Alice,’ all of which are defined by incoherence, ironically critiquing the sentimental human need for order.

One of Austen’s earliest stories, ‘The Beautifull Cassandra’ is notable for its arbitrary plot in that the entire story is a sequence of events with no clear relation to one another. In the first five succeeding chapters, Cassandra leaves her home to “make her Fortune,” yet avoids a young, eligible suitor; eats six ice-cream cones, which she refuses to pay for; and orders a coach to Hampstead and back for no discernable reason. Austen sets up a central conflict or want on the part of her heroine––the making of her fortune––yet the events depicted immediately after do not follow naturally from it, nor into each other. They are arbitrary in that they are insular anecdotes with no through-line between them and could be rearranged into any order without confusing the reader. This is significant in that Austen nevertheless characterises them as adventure, writing immediately afterward, in the eighth chapter: “THRO' many a street [Cassandra] then proceeded & met in none the least Adventure, till on turning a Corner of Bloomsbury Square...” The relative idleness of Cassandra in this quotation compared to the arbitrary nature of the preceding events suggests that she defines this adventure merely as a state of being where something is happening; to adventure is to act, regardless of what that action entails. This could be seen as an ironic, critical statement on Austen’s part, as she chooses to capitalize it––“Adventure”––as if speaking not of the word in its common usage, but of the named, sentimental concept it implies. Given its use in the text, Austen effectively characterises it as a retroactive label which can be applied to plot-points without any clear relation to one another. This is seen explicitly in the final chapter, when her heroine returns home and smiles to herself, whispering, “‘This is a day well spent.’” The line is humorous precisely because, by any reader’s estimation, Cassandra did nothing of coherence or consequence, yet she nevertheless engages in the same fallacy which Austen critiques; she imposes a retroactive narrative line––a romantic sentiment of adventure––onto sheer nonsense.

The fallacy of adventure is further seen in Austen’s short work, ‘The Adventures of Mr. Harley,’ as it is a story with no clear arc of any kind, in which practically nothing happens. In three short paragraphs totalling only one hundred and twenty-six words, Austen recounts that Mr. Harley endeavoured to please his parents by joining the Navy as a Chaplin; that he returned home six months later; and that he happened upon his wife, Emma (never before mentioned), on the stagecoach home. As with the story of Cassandra, these events follow sequentially from one another, but given the short length and relative time-compression of the narrative, there is very little for the reader to hold onto, and no discernible point to any of it; as soon as Mr. Harley’s forgotten wife enters the picture, providing some possible through-line, the story ends. These faults could be dismissed as the inadequacies of a young writer, which Austen was, if not for the title and framing of the story as “The Adventures of Mr. Harley … a short, but interesting Tale.” While the collected anecdotes of ‘Cassandra’ were at least amusing on their own, it is difficult to imagine anyone characterising the sparse and relatively mundane events of ‘Mr. Harley’ as “interesting,” or an adventure of any kind. As the author of both stories, Austen would have known this, and thus her labelling could be seen as deliberately ironic. By calling a story where nothing happens an adventure, she suggests that all works which frame themselves this way are essentially slapping a label on a series of arbitrary events to give the illusion of plot where there is none, to ascribe sensational meaning to the mundane. This is made even more clear from a metatextual, reader-response perspective in that the lack of context in Mr. Harley’s story draws the reader’s attention to what details Austen does include, which are almost all irrelevant. She writes, for example, that “Mr. Harley was one of many children,” and that on the stagecoach he saw “a man without a hat, another with two, [and] an old maid.” These are the details Austen provides in the absence of any explanation for Mr. Harley’s trip home, or the details of his marriage. As the adventure framing of the story once again implies a narrative through-line, the reader, having finished the tale, is forced into the same position as Cassandra: looking back on a collection of incoherent details in an attempt to string-together meaning.

Austen further textualizes the artificiality of adventure in her longer story, ‘Jack and Alice,’ which––while considerably more complex in its plot compared to those that came before it––still features characters that share Cassandra’s inclination to graft sentimentality onto life events. In the second chapter, for example, Alice, upon hearing of Lady Williams’ misfortunes in love, asks: “Will you favour me with your Life & Adventures?” The grandiose nature of this request is then deflated as Austen’s account of the Lady’s adventures digresses almost entirely into an argument over whether or not one can have too much “colour.” Alice expects sentimental adventure and is instead greeted with nonsense. This is interesting as it directly parallels the reader experience in the two stories previously discussed: Austen sets up expectations, and then deflates them with nonsensical plot details. With Alice, she once again positions the idea of narrative coherence as something desired and created from the outside, not stemming from the plot itself. This desire is made absolutely explicit when, in the fourth chapter, Alice and Lady Williams are confronted with “A lovely young Woman lying apparently in great pain.” In their normal movement through the story, they are presented with a random and completely arbitrary plot element, presented by Austen in the same arbitrary manner that life often presents the unexpected. As a result, her characters’ first thoughts are not to attend to her wounds, but to immediately ask for coherence: “Will you favour us with your Life & Adventures?” They desire a narrative, some way to piece this randomness into the story as they understand it, and do so tellingly by using the catch-all term “Adventures”: a request for, and definition of, sentimental plot coherence. Their expectations parallel the reader’s wants and expectations, as they have to hear the woman’s story for the story itself to continue.

Ultimately, this essay proves that Austen uses the term adventure in her Juvenilia as a way of eliciting audience expectations, invoking and subverting the sentimental desire to impose a narrative thread onto meaninglessness. The stories of Cassandra and Mr. Harley are so uneventful and nonsensical as to highlight through exaggeration the arbitrary nature of plot in general; and her characters Alice and Lady Williams, in invoking the language of adventure, textualize and parody the similar position of her readership. This is all significant in that it reframes the eccentricities of Austen’s early works not as the fumbles of a child experimenting with expectation and humor, but as a genuine literary statement worthy of study in itself––especially in the context of the sentimental literature which Austen’s entire career has long been considered a reaction to.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. “The Adventures of Mr. Harley.” Jane Austen's Juvenilia: Miscellaneous Scraps, Pemberly, 2010, https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/juviscrp.html#advmrharley.

Austen, Jane. “The Beautifull Cassandra.” Jane Austen's Juvenilia: Miscellaneous Scraps, 2011, Pemberly, https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/juviscrp.html#beaucassand.

Austen, Jane. “Jack & Alice.” Jane Austen's Juvenilia: Jack and Alice, Pemberly, 2011, https://pemberley.com/janeinfo/jackalic.html.