Well, none of us would be safe from her clear, biting wit; and perhaps that is a good thing. Austen wrote to a young niece who was an aspiring writer, "To work on three or four families in a country town is just the thing..." and there is a very specific reason for her to say that, and it has to do with virtues and the nature of the small town.
In all of Austen's novels, various heroes and heroines must work through an moral education in the situation of the small town. I think of these venues as comparable to the small city-state of Athens in which Sophocles and Euripides produced 'ordering of the emotions,' The Republic of Plato, and the small kingdoms of Arthurian legend-cycles. In all of these, like Austen's English villages, virtue is best understood and worked out in something much smaller than the modern city, or God-help-us, the nation-state, or "God-help-us-more,' the so-called "Global Village." One can't really practice serious virtue via Facebook. If you think you are virtuous based on the number of comments you get on your clever posts, then you've got another thing comin' come Judgment Day.
You need to live in a small town to understand why. As Austen said via Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice after his negligent, vicious parenting has been made very public, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?'
Anyone who has lived in a small town perfectly understands this statement, but how many of us think that it has something to do with virtue, or a 'good' kind of gossip, if there is such a thing? We all drive around, visit Mr. D's, go to the Grand movie theater, try out the new Lander Bake Shop, poke holes in the ripe peaches at Safeway, get increasingly snobby about the increasing amount of Christmas lights each year, and do it as if no one notices us or talks about us. I suppose if we in Lander could sense via burning ears the amount of talk or speculation, or laughter, or genuine concern for ourselves in this small town, we'd none of us have ears left: just burnt-out holes. However, we all need to be known, and to know and to have to deal with each other in order to grow in virtue; in a small town, your ears aren't quite falling off, but they certainly get a hot wind of your behavior from time to time, and through others' eyes: a very valuable experience that is certainly harder to have in a city (or easier to escape, according to your wish to remain in the dark about yourself).
For example, if a landlord gets nasty with store owners and maneuvers to put their own choice business in where a store has been for ages, people hear about it and don't forget it; if a bank tries to intimidate a young couple with no money and sue them for something that isn't their fault, it gets around and someone will certainly call the bank. No one wants bullies, and in a small town, everyone knows who they are. If someone practices bad employment habits, it gets around--and stays around.
On the other hand, there are small-town models. Everyone knows the honest businessman who teaches CWC classes to help others be successful, and the ranchers who donate food in many humble and personal ways; the lady at the teller booth in the bank who makes your needs her own, and the friendly bagger's smile at Mr. D's who once graced the Mayor's Office.
If Jane Austen lived in Lander, or grew up here, she'd tell stories of young people growing into vicious or virtuous adults, and not in the shifting maze of unconnected car parks, malls, schools, playing fields, and churches of suburban life; rather she'd write her stories in a put-together puzzle, a microcosm world that a young person, especially, can see as a whole, and can see how the parts connect to that whole, a Main Street one can walk down easily (alas, not a English or European town square with a church presiding, but still a kind of center).
She would write about, probably, a homeschooled high schooler (she didn't like her school experience) or freshman college student who learns to navigate the dashing NOLS instructor or the WCC college man, or the son of a rooted, powerful ranching family. Instead of Ford's haberdashery, the place to be seen might be Main St. Books or Safeway, and instead of town hall balls, the young lady would have to learn courtship and friendship at the WCC swing dances.
Perhaps Austen would have gone in for a novel kind of catalogue of virtues: Cowboy Ethics. As CowboyEthics.org puts it:
"The iconic cowboy represents the best of America — the courage, optimism and plain hard work. Cowboys are heroic not just because they do a dangerous job, but also because they stand for something — the simple, basic values that lie at the heart of the cowboy way. Even though their way of life has changed over the last 150 years, cowboys still honor and live by their code. They are an abiding source of inspiration to do better and be better than we are."
And, from the same source, here is the basic code, or catalogue of virtues:
1) Live each day with courage.
2) Take pride in your work.
3) Always finish what you start.
4) Do what has to be done.
5) Be tough, but fair.
6) When you make a promise, keep it.
7) Ride for the brand.
8) Talk less and say more.
9) Remember that some things aren't for sale.
10) Know where to draw the line.
Our young heroine would have to learn courage, perhaps by just managing a winter, or building confidence on a horse. I, though not young, had something of this lesson the other day, when out with a Model of Cowboy Virtue on horseback.
"You want to ride Pavlova?" she asks me.
"I hate that horse, Patty, ever since she ran away with Marian and nearly got Sophie's throat cut out," I reply.
"Well, just give her a go."
"OK."
An hour later after much struggle with said hated horse:
"Patty, she's really trying to buck me off."
Said Model of Cowboy Courage says, laughing, "Oh, I just call those 'chicken hops'--she is just expressing her joy in life. You just need to build some confidence."
"You called that 'joie de vivre'?!"
Something about horses, about the relentless winter, the inexplicable lack of snowplowing in town, the temps below 0 F, the feeling of mandatory hibernation, and the constant, immovable mountain peaks, the absolute need for extra water supplies when going on any long road trip, and tiny cabin reminders, the remains in iron and wood of our pioneer forerunners, calls for a very basic courage. Every once in awhile, I still have that softy California reaction: "Why do people live here?" One transfers the lessons from learning to laugh while a horse is taking off with you (so as not to let it know you are nervous) to learning to laugh when a sickness lasts more than a year, in the face of the unknown (will the pain every go away?). Or death. Or marriage. Or a lifetime of exile. Or childbirth in a town where you wonder if the hospital is really trying to kill you or not.
Austen, like me, would have no idea what to do with #7 (Ride for the brand), unless that means a kind of communal virtue of honesty and teamwork, something Frank Churchill would do well to learn. He rode a lot, but not for any brand but his own, allowing him to think deception a necessary virtue. Miss Bates could do with a little lesson in #8(Talk less and say more), though I suspect this is a throw-back to the plethora of Scandinavian roots in the American Midwest and northern West. Scandinavians do make a virtue out of 'keeping things under the duvet'--but I am not so sure this is always a virtue. And being about 30 percent Scandinavian/Germanic, I know what I am talking about. Besides, what else would cowboys do around a campfire, 200 miles away from anything but sage brush and cows, who certainly exhibit this virtue? Charades?
We talk to each other, about each other. As Michael O'Brien once wrote to me:
"Communication is the ‘media’ of bearing truth in a damaged world in process of being restored to the Father through the sacrifice of the Son. The flow of all genuine communication should lead us to eternal communio in Paradise. Until we arrive there, all such communication is limited by human weakness, sin, subjectivity, immaturity, etc. Should we therefore banish all forms of speech between people?"
No. We not only provide good sport for our neighbors, we also learn about ourselves through communication with each other, about each other. Of course, slander happens regularly in a small town (lies that damage a reputation), as well as gossip (truths that damage another's reputation and are not necessary for the other person to hear); Austen deals with this, and I think it is simply too easy in a city to never face the ramifications of one's stray or vicious words--one can just move into another social group. In a small town, we can choose to put up serious facades and live in isolation, or we have to face ourselves.
There are all the Austen types in Lander. There's the well-to-do landowners, the intellects, the soldiers, the beauties and the homelies, the pert and the pretentious, the Emmas and the Miss Bates, the Mr. Martins and the Darcys--and one learns to navigate these types, as well as one's own vices and virtues, in the comprehensible world of the small town. Hopefully one is becoming more courageous and less prideful, more like Mr. Knightly or Jane Bennett (who has true candour--which is a true, real kindness that is yet honest and open), and less like Mrs. Elton or Wickham.
Candour, one of Austen's favorite virtues, is an especial feat in a small town. To be genuinely kind, to look for the good of others and yet not be a sugar Precious Moments doll with no truth is rare:
"I just don't want to be negative about anyone."
"Even if someone is a veritable ass or a bully or false?"
"Oh, no, I just need to be a nice Christian."
"Whatever."
Candour, like courage, and the other virtues, must be built on a true heart that is founded on charity and humility. It cannot be counterfeited because it is a window right into the heart, and most people can see right through the appearance of it: especially, maybe only, in a small town.
If Jane Austen lived in Lander, she'd exclaim, when she saw the mountains and the desert, "What are men compared with rocks and mountains!!"; she'd fall over at the sight of carriages without horses; then she'd recover, put pants on, glory in the knowledge that marriage isn't the only viable occupation for women who don't have much to offer in that department or interest in it (but like Austen, have much to offer elsewhere), and write great Westerns.
