User:Simmaren/Sandbox/Jane Austen

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Contents 1 Literary style 1.1 Parody and burlesque 1.2 Irony 1.3 Free indirect speech 1.4 Conversation and language 1.5 Realism 1.6 "Little bits of ivory" 2 Themes 2.1 Morality 2.2 Women 2.3 Property and class 2.4 Politics 2.5 Individual and society 3 Footnotes

[edit] Literary style

Austen did not directly influence very many writers stylistically (Page, 190); perhaps Eliot's "ironic comedy" and "character-revelation" (Page, 192) as well as E. M. Forster's "realistic and self-revealing dialogue and ironic comment" (193), but drawing a direct line of descent is difficult (Page, 193).

[edit] Parody and burlesque

Austen's juvenile writings are parodies and burlesques of various popular eighteenth-cenutry genres, particularly the sentimental novel. Her interest in comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of eighteenth-century novelist Frances Burney,^[1] continued less overtly throughout her professional career.^[2] Austen's burlesque involved mocking imitation and was defined by its exaggerated, displaced emphasis.^[3] For example, in Northanger Abbey, she ridiculed plot improbabilities and the rigid conventions of the Gothic novel.^[4] However, Austen does not categorically reject the gothic. As Claudia Johnson argues, "Austen may dismiss 'alarms' concerning stock gothic machinery—storms, cabinets, curtains, manuscripts—with blithe amusement, but alarms concerning the central gothic figure, the tyrannical father [General Tilney], she concludes, are commensurate to the threat they actually pose."^[5] Austen used parody and burlesque not only for comedic effect, but also, according to feminist critics, to reveal how both sentimental and gothic novels were warping women's lives as they attempted to live out the fantasies found in them.^[6] As Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain in their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, Austen makes fun of "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents".^[7]

[edit] Irony

Irony is one of Austen's most noted literary techniques;^[8] she contrasts the plain meaning of a statement with the comic undermining of its authority in order to create ironic disjunctions. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." The sentence is clear, but the plot of the novel contradicts it: it is women without fortunes who need husbands.^[9] However, not only sentences themselves are ironic; the structure of entire works can embody this kind of disjunction. As Jan Fergus explains, "the major structural device in Pride and Prejudice is the creation of ironies within the novel's action which, like parallels and contrasts, challenge the reader's attention and judgment throughout, and in the end also engage his feelings."^[10] Austen's irony illuminates the foibles of individual characters and her society. In her later novels in particular, she turns her irony "against the errors of law, manners and customs, in failing to recognize women as the accountable beings they are, or ought to be".^[11]

[edit] Free indirect speech

Austen is most renowned for her development of free indirect speech, a technique pioneered by eighteenth-century novelists Henry Fielding and Frances Burney.^[12] In free indirect speech, the thoughts and speech of the characters mix with that of the narrator. Austen employs it to provide summaries of conversations or to compress, dramatically or ironically, a character's speech and thoughts.^[13] In her mature novels, such as Sense and Sensibility, she experimented with different forms of indirect speech:

Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?^[14]

As Page explains, "the first sentence is straight narrative, in the 'voice' of the author; the third sentence is normal indirect speech; but the second and fourth are what is usually described as free indirect speech."^[15] In these sentences, Austen represents the inner thoughts of her character and creates the illusion that the reader is entering the character's mind.^[16] She often employs indirect speech when she places a character in the background. However, Page writes that "for Jane Austen...the supreme virtue of free indirect speech...[is] that it offers the possibility of achieving something of the vividness of speech without the appearance for a moment of a total silencing of the authorial voice."^[17]

[edit] Conversation and language

Compared to other early nineteenth-century novels, Austen's have little narrative or scenic description—they contain much more dialogue, whether spoken between characters, written as free indirect speech, or represented through letters.^[18] In Pride and Prejudice, which began as an epistolary novel, letters play a decisive role in Elizabeth's education.^[19] The opening chapters of the novel, with their theatrical tone, reveal Austen's debt to drama.^[20] Austen's conversations contain many short sentences, question and answer sets, and rapid exchanges between characters, most memorable perhaps in the witty repartee between Elizabeth and Darcy.^[21]

Austen grants each of her characters a distinctive and subtlety-constructed voice: they are carefully distinguished by their speech. For example, Admiral Croft is marked by his naval slang in Persuasion and Mr. Woodhouse is marked by his hypochondriacal language in Emma.^[22] However, it is the misuse of language that most distinguishes a character. As Page explains, in Sense and Sensibility, for example, the inability of characters such as Lucy Steele to use language precisely or properly is a mark of their "moral confusion".^[23] This technique is a hallmark of Austen's presentation of characters such as Mary Crawford in Mansfield park and Mrs. Elton in Emma.^[24]

[edit] Realism

The extent to which Austen's novels are realistic is hotly debated. The lack of physical descriptions in her novels lends an air of unreality to them. As Page notes, in Austen novels there is a "conspicuous absence of words referring to physical perception, the world of shape and colour and sensuous response" and a "recurrence of a relatively small number of frequently-used words, mainly epithets and abstract nouns indicating personal qualities—qualities, that is, of character and temperament rather than outward appearance."^[25] This allows readers to feel as if they know the characters "intimately as a mind".^[26] "Austen creates an illusion of realism in her texts, partly through readerly identification with the characters and partly through rounded characters, who have a history and a memory."^[27]

At the time Austen was writing, the historical novels of Walter Scott and early realist novels of Maria Edgeworth had already initiated the realist tradition.^[28] Austen's novels were sometimes seen at the time as part of the new genre. For example, Emma was celebrated as description of the "everyday" and the "common".^[29] However, as William Galperin has argued, Austen could not have participated in nineteenth-century realism—the realism with which she later became associated—because it had yet been fully defined. Austen's novels were part of the beginning stages of outlining realism.^[30] Therefore instead of seeing Austen as a realist writer, he sees her as a picturesque writer on the cusp of realism. Her attention to detail, probability, and oppositionality, lead him to call her the "historian of the everyday".^[31]

[edit] "Little bits of ivory"

Jane Austen famously wrote to her nephew James Edward Austen to distinguish her work from his "strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow." His work would not fit on "the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour."^[32] Austen novels have often been characterized as "country house novels" or as "comedies of manners", however they also have important fairy tale elements to them. Pride and Prejudice follows the traditional Cinderella plot while "Persuasion rewrites the Cinderella narrative, as it shifts the fairy tale's emphasis from the heroine's transformation into a beauty to the prince's second look at her face."^[33]

Austen's novels can easily be situated within the eighteenth-century novel tradition. Austen, like the rest of her family, was a great novel reader. Her letters contain many allusions to contemporary fiction, often to such small details as to show that she was thoroughly familiar with, and retained, what she read. Austen read and reread novels, even minor ones. "It is to novel reading that Austen brings her energies, her discrimination, her really serious judgment."^[34] She read widely within the genre, including many works considered mediocre both then and now, but tended to emphasize domestic fiction by women writers, and her own novels contain many references to these works. For example, the phrase "pride and prejudice" comes from Burney's Cecilia, and the Wickham subplot in Pride and Prejudice is a parody of Tom Jones.^[35]

Austen's early works are often structured around a pair of characters. For examples, Sense and Sensibility is a didactic novel based on the contrast between the beliefs and conduct of two heroines, a novel format that was particularly fashionable in the 1790s.^[36] Because circulating libraries often used catalogues that only listed a novel's name, Austen chose titles that would have resonance for her readers; abstract comparisons like "sense and sensibility" were part of a moralistic tradition and eponymous heroine names were part of a new romantic novel tradition.^[37] Elinor, representing "sense", and Marianne, representing "sensibility", articulate a contrast "between two modes of perception", according to Butler.^[38] "Marianne's way is subjective, intuitive, implying confidence in the natural goodness of human nature when untrammelled by convention. Her view is corrected by the more cautious orthodoxy of Elinor, who mistrusts her own desires, and requires even her reason to seek the support of objective evidence."^[39]

• Conduct book heroines

• Austen's novel are part of a longer tradition of fiction that emphasizes marriage and conduct (e.g. Burney); this separates her work from authors like Richardson and Heywood (Armstrong, 134).
• Although part of the conduct book tradition, Austen's novels question some of its assumption. Harriet, for example, is the self-educated woman who constructed her own identity, but she is not the heroine and the novel questions the extent to which such self-formation is possible (Armstrong, 144).
• Austen is reacting against conduct book writers such as Hannah More, John Gregory and Hester Chapone (Gilbert and Gubar, 116).

• Educative genres (conduct book and bildungsroman) - heroines' morals improve - their emotions are educated

• "This moral imagination, or power of imaginative sympathy, is something which the heroines of Jane Austen must acquire; to have it is to see clearly, and without it no education is possible." (Devlin, 30)
• Catherine Morland "has a great deal to learn. She must reject fiction for fact and invention for reflection; and it is her affectionate heart, her capacity to love, which will make it possible for her to do this. Without this ability to love it seems that no moral growth is possible. General Tilney (like Sir Walter Elliot) cannot love, and remains blind to moral worth" (Devlin, 43)
• "All Jane Austen's novels, and many of her minor works, unfinished pieces and juvenilia, are about education. It is the imprudencies and education of her heroines that chiefly interest us . . . Education, for the heroines, is a process through which they come to see clearly themselves and their conduct, and by this new vision of insight become better people." (Devlin, 1)
• In each case the heroine learns the truth about the young man and is saved from the possibility of unhappiness. But in each case she is saved not because she learns the truth, but because of the steadying power, the sharpening of perception which love for someone else gives her, and the standard of comparison which this other man (the hero) provides." (Devlin, 33) EX: Elizabeth, Wickham, Darcy; Emma, Frank, Knightley
• As with other Austen heroines, Elizabeth goes through a process of error, recognition of error, and remorse and determination to do better in the future. The classic example: She comes to understand that she was mistaken about Wickham.In examining her own mental processes, she realizes that she has never been objective about him. She never attempted to check Wickham's story against objective evidence. She understands that apart from her stubbornly maintained feelings of antipathy for Darcy, she has no objective reason to dislike or reject him. "She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. 'How despicably have I acted!' she cried.—'I, who have prided myself on my discernment!...Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either was concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.'"[quoted on Butler, 208]

[edit] Themes

[edit] Morality

Morality, characterized by manners, duty to society, and religious seriousness, is a central theme of Austen's works. Austen uses words such as "duty" and "manners" consistently throughout her fiction as a signifier of her ethical system. Manners for Austen are not just etiquette, but also a signpost for a moral code.^[40] According to one important interpretation, Austen can be considered a "conservative Christian moralist"^[41] whose view of society was "ultimately founded in religious principle".^[42] In Austen's works, amorality is often signified by characters'—Wickham, Mary Crawford, Mr. Elliot—focus on economic considerations.^[43] While the connection between amorality and economic considerations is fairly clear, the relationship between personal appearance and moral worth, which was common in eighteenth-century novels, is more ambiguous in Austen's work.

Moral improvement in Austen's works is not only for the characters but also for the readers. Her novels are intended to "instruct and to refine the emotions along with the perceptions and the moral sense".^[44] Believing in a complex moral conscience rather than an innate moral sense, Austen felt that it was necessary to inculcate readers with proper virtues by portraying morally ambiguous characters from which they could learn. Although she and Johnson shared a similar sense of morality, Johnson argued that only black-and-white characters could instill virtue inn readers.^[45]

• Elinor's spiritual father is Samuel Johnson, in whose measured, stilted prose she often speaks. (W. goes on to draw an analogy between Elinor and the character of Imlac in Johnson's Rasselas.) (Wiltshire, Body, pp. 26-27)
• "Critics have noticed that Fanny Price and Anne Elliot are both reliant on Johnson for their moral thinking." (Grundy, "Jane Austen and literary traditions", Companion, 200)
• "Another kind of opposition between Johnson and Cowper implicitly underlies Sense and Sensibility: between Elinor's Johnsonian attempts to combat grief and depression through mental activity, and Marianne's Cowperesque savouring of melancholy. Fanny Price unites Johnson and Cowper, sense and sensibility." (Grundy, "Jane Austen and literary traditions", Companion, 199)
• "While so many of her characters thus admire Cowper, their narrator is consistently Johnsonian." (Grundy, "Jane Austen and literary traditions", Companion, 199)
• In 1939 Canon Harold Anson argued that Austen's novels are religious not because they contain religious controversy or 'a strong ecclesiastical motif' . . . but because they show 'the underlying principles upon which men live their lives and by which they judge the characters of others'. This has become the dominant view of those critics who find Austen to be a religious novelist. Some critics have even argued that her portrayal of clergymen was intended to promote greater spirituality and social responsibility in the church." (Kelly, "Religion and politics", Companion, 155)
• "She is singular among novelists of her age in her refusal to admit references to the Bible, or to biblical characters, scenes or stories." (Doody, "Reading", p. 348)
• "Although she accepts the eighteenth-century doctrine that literature should educate the emotions and the judgment, she rejects most of the literary conventions associated with the doctrine, and particularly the exemplary character." (Fergus, Didactic, 5)
• This chapter provides a comparison between Burney's Cecilia and Austen's P&P: there are structural similarities in the plot, the author's attitude towards the heroine, similar types of irony, and similar juxtapositions of manner for comic effect. (Fergus, Didactic, 62-72) - Like Austen, "Burney is interested in the emotions which make moral action difficult and in the moral principles which complicate emotions." (Fergus, Didactic, 70)

[edit] Women

• Austen clearly believed that whatever the moral position, adultery was bad for women. She was exasperated by the public adulation for Admiral Nelson: "If young women admire heroes whatever the heroes do, women are belittled. And the female who is cast as . . . mindless adorer loses whatever little initiative there is available to women in society." She "hated the Prince Regent for humiliating his wife with a false charge of adultery, and she kept her animus against betrayers of women and women who let themselves be used."^[46]

• Image of confinement

• Women in Austen's novels "must acquiesce in their own confinement, no matter how stifling" because "they are too vulnerable in the world at large" (Gilbert and Gubar, 108). Austen's heroines are literally confined in the novels (EX: Fanny in her small house and the Dashwood sisters in their small house); "confinement" is not a metaphor for Austen, but a reality (Gilbert and Gubar, 124). In Northanger Abbey, she argues that women are "imprisoned more effectively by miseducation than by walls and and more by financial dependency . . . than by any verbal oath or warning" (Gilbert and Gubar, 135).
• Anne's statement in P: "We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual ocupation and change soon weaken impressions." - Next to this Edgeworth writes, in her copy of P, "That it does" (Johnson, 160).

• Female desire

• As modern readers, we fail to appreciate just how radical a character Elizabeth was; Johnson describes her "outrageous unconventionality which . . . constantly verges not merely on impertinence but on impropriety." (Johnson, 75)

• The eroticism of the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy also marks P&P as a more progressive novel. Conservative novelists failed to discuss the physical reactions of their characters in the detail Austen does (Johnson, 90).

• Feminism (Johnson and Kirkham)

• Butler distinguishes herself from (and criticizes) Margaret Kirkham (Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction). In Butler's view, Kirkham is as interested in "context" as Butler, but limits her view of context to the feminist controversy of the period 1788-1810. Kirkham sees Austen as the exponent in fiction of the "Enlightenment feminism" of which Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft were the principal figures. Butler rejects the idea that a single feminism during this period embraced both Wollstonecraft and Austen, "though I do believe in the existence of different ideologies in which perceptions of the nature and role of women played an important part...." Butler feels that Jane Rendall (The Origins of Modern Feminism) presents a more complete and (therefore more satisfactory) description of "Enlightenment feminism" that includes Maria Edgeworth but (properly, in Butler's view) not Jane Austen. One reason for rejecting the limitations of Kirkham's narrow view is the existence of "a Tory women's tradition, which must also be thought of as proto-feminist, for it was conscious that women were treated as an inferior class in a man's world." Jane Austen is properly viewed as a member of this group. [Butler, pp. xxii-xxiii]
• Austen recognizes that the literary world is dominated by men and their stories. EX: In Northanger Abbey, Catherine complains that history "tells [her] nothing that does nto either vex or weary [her]. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome" (Austen). Her parody of Goldsmiths' History of England is "authored" by "a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian" (Austen) (Gilbert and Gubar, 133). In such statements, Austen suggests that history is a masculine fiction and of little importance to women (Gilbert and Gubar, 134).
• Emma is the figure of the female artist; she composes stories for people's lives - blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality (Johnson, 134-36).

• Emma is a powerful heroine - she controls her home, her marriage choice, her community and her money (124); the novel explores the use Emma makes of her power (Johnson, 125).

• Austen's novels "are the culmination of a line of development in thought and fiction which goes back to the start of the eighteenth century, and which deserves to be called feminist since it was concerned with establishing the moral equality of men and women and the proper status of individual women as accountable beings" (Kirkham, 3)

• "Austen, whose feminism immunised her pretty thoroughly against Romanticism, has little time for those who are too good or great to make equal marriages. Her heroines do not adore or worship their husbands, though they respect and love them. They are not, especially in the later novels, allowed to get married at all until the heroes have provided convincing evidence of appreciating their qualities of mind, and of accepting their power of rational judgement, as well as their good hearts." (Kirkham, 31)

• "As a feminist moralist, Jane Austen is in agreement with Wollstonecraft on so many points that it seems unlikely she had not read Vindication and approved of much of it, but there is no doubt either that she admired Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and regarded them as her teachers. Burney and Edgeworth had, in her view, demonstrated that women had those 'powers of mind' which Wollstonecraft claimed as belonging to the second, as well as the first, sex." (Kirkham, 34)
• "The received biography informs us about Jane Austen's family and domestic life, but leaves out a great deal that matters to the development of the novelist. The published letters are but a small selection of all those written, and have been subjected to a good deal of censorship. Our accepted portrait of the novelist is too often treated as though it were a fuller and more accurate likeness than it really is. In particular, the idea that Jane Austen was reluctant to publish and that the years she spent in Bath were unimportant need questioning, for there is reason to think that her failure to become a publishing author was connected with the Feminist Controversy; that she was well aware of this; and that the change in style and manner between the early and late novels came about partly as a response to the difficulties she encountered." (Kirkham, 59-60)

• Precarious economic situation

• "in all her novels Austen examines the female powerlessness that underlies monetary pressure to marry, the injustice of inheritance laws, the ignorance of women denied formal education, the psychological vulnerability of the heiress or widow, the exploited dependency of the spinster, the boredom of the lady provided with no vocation" (Gilbert and Gubar, 136)

[edit] Property and class

• City vs. country
• Class and social status

• Austen is keenly aware of the problems caused by primogeniture and other legal bindings to money and land. EX: entail in PP (McMaster, "Class")
• "Austen's best sympathies rest with the professional class" (McMaster, "Class", Companion, 120); EX: Catherine, Elinor, Fanny marry clergymen
• "The navy . . . is the profession Austen favours next after the clergy." (McMaster, "Class", Companion, 121) EX: Persuasion; This is over and above the army, which is not represented very positively (121-22). EX: Wickham, Captain Tilney
• "The quality of humanity is to be judged by moral and humane standards, Austen suggests, not by social status; but like her own temporary snobs, Darcy and Emma, she pays full attention to their social status first." (McMaster, "Class", Companion, 125; see also 129) EX: Gardiners

• Property

• "Throughout Jane Austen's fiction, estates function not only as the settings of action but as indexes to the character and social responsibility of their owners." [gives examples from P & P, Emma and Persuasion] (p. 38-39) Landscape improvements also appear as an issue in all of the novels, but in MP they become a recurring motif and "suggest an attitude to the process of social change that is central to all her fiction." (p. 39) Duckworth moves to a discussion of the noted landscape designer Humphrey Repton, and observes that "she [Austen] is less occupied with the aesthetic merits of different styles of landscape than with the negative social implications of a particular mode of 'improvement.'" (p. 41-42) "Reptonian" improvements, especially in the less capable hands of his followers, tended to be radical, to be non-contextual, to cut the "improved" estate off from its surrounding community, and, of course to be extravagant and wasteful. (Duckworth, pp. 40-46) - Duckworth sees this as Burkean

[edit] Politics

• Tory feminism/Enlightenment feminism/Tory conservative

• It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Austen's novels were viewed as political. "Some critics argue that to mock politics is to disparage the importance of the 'masculine' public and political sphere in relation to the 'feminine' domestic and local sphere. Others argue that ignoring politics casts doubt on the knowability or reality of the public and political sphere in contrast to the domestic sphere." (Kelly, "Religion and politics", Companion, 155)
• Political themes: the French Revolution, imperialism, capitalism, Regency politics, sensibility (Kelly, "Religion and politics", Companion, 156)
• There is no agreement on Austen's political views. "Some see her as a political 'conservative' because she seems to defend the established social order. Others see her as sympathetic to 'radical' politics that challenged the established order, especially in the form of patriarchy . . . some critics see Austen's novels as neither conservative nor subversive, but complex, criticizing aspects of the social order but supporting stability and an open class hierarchy." (Kelly, "Religion and politics", Companion, 156)
• "Austen's stress upon her heroines' subordinate role in a family, upon their dutifulness, meditativeness, self-abnegation, and self-control, were codes shared with other conservative writers, especially women moralists such as Jane West and Mary Brunton. The acquiescent heroine challenges the hero or heroine of novels of the 1790s by reformists such as Bage, Godwin, Holcraft, Hays, and Wollstonecraft, who insist on thinking independently and speaking out." [Butler, pp. xv-xvi]
• One measure of a progressive or a conservative writer is "whether the plot, broadly, suggests a victim suffering at the hands of society [progressive], or a misguided individual rebelling against it. Butler argues [pp. 165-167] that the latter describes all of Austen's novels. Butler divides Austen's work into two parts: plots involving a "Heroine who is Right" and a spokesman for conservative orthodoxy, and plots involving a "Heroine who is Wrong."
• S&S: "[T]he issue between the two contrasted sisters is presented according to the view of the nature-nurture dichotomy usually adopted by conservatives. The contrast, as always, is between two modes of perception. On the one hand, Marianne's way is subjective, intuitive, implying confidence in the natural goodness of human nature when untrammelled by convention. Her view is corrected by the more cautious orthodoxy of Elinor, who mistrusts her own desires, and requires even her reason to seek the support of objective evidence." [Butler, p. 188]
• Elinor advocates a doctrine of civility in opposition to Marianne's individualism. This is a characteristically anti-jacobin theme. [Butler, p. 188]
• MP: The Crawfords represent yet another kind of "citified" education: sophisticated, worldly, "modern," cynical, materialistic, self-gratifying, essentially amoral. The early part of the novel presents a triple contrast among the cynical Crawfords, the selfish Bertram girls, and Christian Fanny. "Whatever the topic of dialogue, the moral landscape of the various characters is what receives attention." In the early dialog, three key topics recur that are typical of anti-jacobin novels of the 1790s: Nature, religion and marriage. [Butler, pp. 222-224] "The action of the novel is so entirely bound up with the value-systems of the various characters that they are always to a greater or lesser extent illustrating, acting out, their beliefs." [Butler, p. 227]
• Jane Austen is not primarily a "naturalist" [realist] writer. She is capable of great objectivity in her writing, but it is in the service of a campaign against subjectivity. Her portrayal of the psychology of her heroines is limited. "The rational mind and the conscience are given an ascendancy over irrational kinds of experience that no more seemed true to life in Jane Austen's day than it does now. Here, especially, she is a polemicist offering an ideal program, and not a realist....She chooses to omit the sensuous, the irrational, the involuntary types of mental experience because, although she cannot deny their existence, she disapproves of them." [Butler, pp. 294-295]
• In this chapter Johnson explains in broad terms how Austen indebted to the political novels of the 1790s. According to Johnson, Austen is neither a reformist nor a reactionary author, but one skeptical of the paternalistic ruling order and she uses subtle novelistic techniques drawn from other writers of the 1790s to articulate this viewpoint. (Chapter 1)
• "Of all of Austen's novels, Sense and Sensibility is the most attuned to progressive social criticism. . . . the novel as a whole assails the dominant ideology of its time for privileging the greedy, mean-spirited, and pedestrian. Sense and Sensibility is not, as it is often assumed to be, a dramatized conduct book patly favoring female prudence over female impetuosity, as if those qualities could be discussed apart from the larger world of politics." (49-50) - S&S questions the codes of conduct laid out in conduct books (Johnson, 50)

• S&S questions primogeniture and the arbitrariness of property inheritance; the Dashwood sisters are disinherited for arbitrary reasons that do not connect to Burkean principles of tradition (the old Mr. Dashwood likes the little baby Henry) (Johnson, 51-52).
• S&S also questions the ideology of charity that existed during the eighteenth century. John Dashwood expresses this sentimental charity quite clearly when he is deciding how much money to give his cousins, but rather than demonstrate generosity, he exhibits rapaciousness. (Johnson, 52-53)
• S&S is a novel of "matriarchs"; it shows the power, both good and bad, of women rather than of men (Johnson, 70).
• general statement: "Among the least doctrinaire of all her contemporaries, Austen from the outset took on the material which political controversy endowed with such importance, without inviting or aggravating partisan impulses. During a time when all social criticism, particularly that which aimed at the institution of the family in general and the place of women in particular, came to be associated with the radical cause, Austen defended and enlarged a progressive middle ground that had been eaten away by the polarizing polemics born in the 1790s." (Johnson, 166)

• MP and colonialism

• "The perfect example of what I mean is to be found in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, in which Thomas Bertram's slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously necessary to the poise and the beauty of Mansfield Park, a place described in moral and aesthetic terms well before the scramble for Africa, or before the age of empire officially began." (Said, 59)
• "Austen . . . in Mansfield Park sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence to a mere half dozen passing references to Antigua." (Said, 59)
• "And part of such an idea was the relationship between 'home' and 'abroad.' Thus England was surveyed, evaluated, made known, whereas 'abroad' was only referred to or shown briefly without the kind of presence or immediacy lavished on London, the countryside, or northern industrial centers such as Manchester or Birmingham." (Said, 72)
• "Mansfield Park (1814) is a eurocentric, post-abolition narrative that intertwines with a critique of gender relations and posits a world of humanitarian interactions between slave-owners and slaves." (Ferguson, 118)
• "European women visibly signify the most egregiously and invisibly repressed of the text--African-Caribbeans themselves. They mark silent African-Caribbean rebels as well as their own disenfranchisement, class and gender victimization." (Ferguson, 118)
• "Power relations within the community of Mansfield Park reenact the refashion plantocratic paradigms; those who work for Sir Thomas and his entourage both at home and abroad are locked into hierarchical and abusive patterns of behaviour, though under widely different circumstances." (121) EX: Mrs. Norris, perhaps named after the proslavery agitator John Norris whom Austen would have been aware of through reading Clarkson, is the overseer of MP (121); Sir Thomas is the "master" of Fanny and her removal from Portsmouth is told in terms like that of the slave narrative (122); Fanny must decides whose "chain" (necklace) to accept for the dance - she assimilates (123); Fanny's refusal to marry Henry Crawford demonstrates her rebellion, on the other hand, and Sir Bertram's language in describing her rebellion is similar to that which is used to describe slave rebellions (Ferguson, 124).
• "Mansfield" is echoing the Mansfield decision, which was believed to have outlawed slavery in Britain (Ferguson, 130).
• "Said's opinion that Austen is culpably indifferent to slavery in Antigua depends on a repeated but questionable assertion: that Mansfield Park epitomizes moral order and right human relations" (Fraiman, "Jane Austen and Edward Said", Janeites, 209) - Fraiman sees Austen critiquing MP: The novel is "an inquiry into Mansfield's corruption that challenges the ethical basis for its authority both at home and, by implication, overseas." (211) - Edmund and Fanny live at Thornton Lacy, not MP, at the end, suggesting "Austen's wish to register, even at the end, some disdain for what Mansfield represents" (211)
• For Fraiman, the main dynamic of the book is the tug of war between Sir Thomas and Fanny, therefore the novel questions the place and morality of the landowner that Said thinks Austen is endorsing (Fraiman, "Jane Austen and Edward Said", Janeites, 212).
• Fraiman's reading of the slavery lines: "My view . . . is that Austen deliberately invokes the dumbness of Mansfield Park concerning its own barbarity precisely because she means to rebuke it. The barbarity she has in mind is not literal slavery in the West Indies but a paternal practice she depicts as possibly analogous to it: Sir Thomas's bid (successful in Maria's case if not in Fanny's) to put female flesh on the auction block in exchange for male status." (Fraiman, "Jane Austen and Edward Said", Janeites, 212)
• The chapter also critiques Said's blindness towards the role of women and feminism in imperialism. Fraiman argues that Austen's position as a dispossessed woman gave her an outsider's view of Britain and its empire. She sees anti-imperialist elements in Austen's criticism of provinciality and narrowness of vision (Fraiman, "Jane Austen and Edward Said", Janeites, 214-17).

[edit] Individual and society

• People must integrate their self into society

• Duckworth places himself in opposition to the line of "subversive" critics that began with Reginald Ferrars and continued with D. W. Harding, Marvin Mudrick and their successors, who argue that "Jane Austen undermines the social values she seems to affirm, that she can discover personal equilibrium in a society she detests only through the secret ironies of her art...." Duckworth argues that (1) in the face of the danger of "degradation," Austen's heroines react positively "to support and maintain an inherited structure of values and behavior", displaying tacitly (or in the case of Fanny Price more or less explicitly) a sort of Christian stoicism, (2) Austen portrays the dangers as well as the value of individualism, and (3) Austen's heroines emerge from isolation and despair to be reinstated into society. [Duckworth, pp. 5-9]
• As with S & S, "Pride and Prejudice moves from an initial condition of potential social fragmentation to a resolution in which the grounds of society are reconstituted as the principal characters come together in marriage." As before, Austen observes the widespread economic motivation in human conduct, but introduces a new theme, that of the existence of separations, between classes (e.g., Darcy and the Gardiners) and between minds (e.g., Mr. and Mrs. Bennett). (p. 116) The crucial question underlying this novel: in light of these separations, how are people to come together? The answer lies in the education of both hero (Darcy) and heroine (Elizabeth Bennett), who must learn to value each other's separate outlooks and social positions and make the necessary concessions. (Duckworth, p. 117)
• "In Sense and Sensibility, the reader is presented with two modes of regulating feeling. Elinor governs the expression of her feelings according to social conventions, Marianne according to literary conventions. Austen dramatizes throughout the novel the consequences in conduct and feeling of each mode. She shows that conventional, polite behaviour which dictates the control of feeling is based on a truer perception of the nature of emotions than are the conventions of sensibility: social conventions permit and assist emotions like grief to become attenuated by natural processes, while the doctrines of sensibility undermine or falsify real feeling by seeking to perpetuate or increase it. In Sense and Sensibility, social conventions are an advantage to the self, assisting and supporting the fulfilment of personality, because at their best they codify careful, responsive and responsible consideration for the feelings of other people. . . . Real feeling, she declares, brings together private and public experience, or one's relations with oneself and with others. Real feeling goes deeper than manners and morals and conduct; it supplies the foundation upon which they should be constructed. Real feeling defines and fulfils personality; without it, the self is deformed and deadened." (Fergus, Didactic, 51)

• G&G: Women have split self from society

• G&G argue that Austen's heroines all find a way to accommodate themselves to masculine power; often this means sacrificing creativity and imagination. Women, in Austen, develop a double consciousness: self and society are split. - "she dramatizes how and why female survival depends on gaining male approval and protection" (154). Austen's heroines consistently search for a replacement father figure, since their own are deficient (ex: Elizabeth, Emma) (Gilbert and Gubar, 154). - However, Austen also uses her heroine's silence, submission and passivity to gain them power; they get what they want in the end (Gilbert and Gubar, 163).
• Mansfield Park is the most potent example of a woman's self being forced to fragment (Gilbert and Gubar, 163).

[edit] Footnotes