Jane austen literary history

Main Page | 19th-C Literature | 19th-C Novelists | 19th-C Women | About LiteraryHistory.com

Public domain image of Jane Austen, from a drawing by her sister Cassandra.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) Literary criticism and analysis for the nineteenth-century English novelist Jane Austen.

Academic web sites and peer-reviewed journal articles. Links take you directly to articles.

Introduction | Biography | Northanger Abbey | Sense and Sensibility | Pride and Prejudice | Mansfield Park | Emma | Persuasion | Lady Susan | Jane Austen & Movies | Themes | Bibliographies

Introduction "Virtual Tour of Jane Austen's House in Chawton." If you can't get there, you can see photos of her house, exteriors and interiors, her writing table, a patchwork quilt made by her, and Austen family furnishings on the internet. Web site from Jane Austen's House Museum, Chawton, Hampshire, England.

"Hampshire, the Inspirational Home of Jane Austen." Biography, Jane Austen's homes, locations, and discussion of the film versions of her novels. Web site by the Hampshire County Council.

"A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy." Austen's manuscripts and letters in close-up detail. Exhibit from the Morgan Library and Museum.

"Jane Austen." Contains short entries on Victorian women authors, their typical themes, and the publishing environment. From the exhibit Women in the Literary Marketplace, by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University.

Clark, Robert. "Jane Austen." An introduction to Jane Austen, from a database that provides signed literary criticism by experts in their field, and is available to individuals for a reasonablypriced subscription. On Emma; On Persuasion Literary Encyclopedia 8 Jan. 2001. Eds. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott, Janet Todd [subscription service].

Selection from Introduction

Jane Austen's Writing: A Technical Perspective Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 1:57pm

While it is conjectured that Jane Austen wrote over 3,000 letters, only 160 have survived. Of these, the Morgan owns fifty-one—more than any other institution in the world. After examining this extensive resource, the conservators of the Morgan's Thaw Conservation Center were able to make several general observations regarding the materials used to produce handwritten manuscripts and letters in early nineteenth-century England.

Pens and Ink Austen's letters and manuscripts were all written in her own hand, using a quill pen periodically recharged with ink from an inkwell. The quill pen, most often made from goose feathers, was in common use during Austen's life (1775–1817); the steel-nibbed pen was not mass produced until the 1830's. Contrary to later nineteenth-century depictions of quill pens as full-length, elegantly curved feathers, the barbs—the soft "feathery" part—were usually removed either partially or entirely as they served no function and interfered with the action of writing. The character of lines written with a quill pen differs from those produced using a metal-nibbed pen. Because the quill is more flexible and responsive to slight changes of pressure and is also less abrasive when dragged across the paper surface, lines written with a quill appear less confined, frequently tapering off into elegant and graceful filigree as the fine nib separates and is starved of ink.

As for ink, Austen used the most commonly available ink of the nineteenth century—iron gall ink. It is composed of tannin (gallic acid), iron sulfate (known as vitriol in the nineteenth century), gum arabic, and water. Because it is indelible, it was used for official documents from the Middle Ages onward. The ink is easy to make, inexpensive, and can be transported as a powder and mixed whenever needed. When first applied to paper, the ink appears pale gray; as it is exposed to air, the ink darkens to a rich blue-black tone. Eventually, most iron gall ink changes to a brown color, as is evident in Austen's letters and manuscripts. Depending upon their original formulation, these inks can become increasingly acidic and eventually damage the paper. Many of Austen's letters in the exhibition remain in excellent condition and do not suffer from iron gall ink damage. However, some are composed of acidic ink and others show signs of frequent handling (tears, creases, and breaks along the original folds). All of the Austen manuscripts and letters were carefully examined and, if necessary, stabilized in preparation for A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy.

Papers Paper played a critical role in Austen's daily life, especially as a vehicle for written communication, as is obvious from her frequent references to letter writing and the eagerly awaited arrival of the postman. In her writings, one finds descriptions of paper that would be immediately recognized by her contemporaries as bearing significant meaning. For example, the small dimensions and smooth texture of stationary described in Pride and Prejudice immediately indicates that its sender was a woman: "The envelope contained a sheet of elegant, little, hotpressed paper, well-covered with a lady's fair, flowing hand . . . " Likewise, the appearance of a letter in Sense and Sensibility hints at its writer: "... its size, the elegance of the paper, the handwriting immediately gave her a suspicion." Austen's contemporary readers would immediately visualize the notebook that Harriet, in Emma, constructed by hand for her collection of riddles: "a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper." Sometimes, these descriptive terms in common parlance in the nineteenth century have lost their meaning for today's readers. For example, in Sense and Sensibility, when Mr. Willoughby purportedly kissed and then folded up a lock of

Marianne's hair in a piece of "white paper," Austen's contemporaries would not only have noted the paper's color, but also its high degree of refinement, which would have been in keeping with its precious contents.

Several of the letters on display in A Woman's Wit are "crossed" or "cross hatched," a common convention of the time if a writer ran out of writing space. Rather than use another piece of costly paper, Austen would turn the page sideways and continue writing at right angles. The resulting densely spaced writing is described in Emma as "checker-work". For example, Emma's aunt apologizes for Jane Fairfax's letter, which is "so short . . . only two pages you see, hardly two, and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half." Fine paper was a highly prized commodity in Austen's day. It was used not only for writing, but also manufactured specifically for artists and the burgeoning popularity of watercolors, as well as for young ladies' handiwork, described in Mansfield Park as "making artificial flowers or wasting gold paper."

Austen's letters were composed on both laid and wove papers and are all cream colored, thin, strong, and most likely composed of recycled cotton and linen rags. Because they are almost exclusively writing papers, when manufactured they are tub sized after drying with gelatin and hot pressed to produce a smooth, non-absorbent surface, ideal for receiving ink.

Austen's letters display an array of watermarks, indicating that she purchased papers produced by various English paper mills and distributed through local stationers. This is logical considering that Austen traveled only in England and corresponded with her family frequently from every locale she visited. At that time, England was an important source for high-quality paper, with many paper mills located in Kent.

Watermarks in Jane Austen's Papers A watermark is an image—often of a name, initials, or decorative motif—that can be detected as a negative image in paper when held up to light. Watermarks can be useful in dating documents, identifying sizes and intended functions of papers, identifying mill trademarks and locations, and determining the quality of a paper. The Morgan's Thaw Conservation Center uses a beta plate to record watermarks. This method uses a low-level radioactive source to penetrate the thin paper and produce a black and white negative—in physical form and appearance it operates very much like a medical x-ray. The beta plate produces an exact copy of the structure of the paper, showing all thick and thin areas as well as the watermark. In some of the beta radiographs seen here, the white spots are the wax seals used to close up the folded letters. The sealing wax, actually colophony resin, is too dense for the beta rays to penetrate.

Among the Austen watermarks recorded, there are numerous variations on the design of an elaborate shield surrounding a post-horn (the horn used by a postman to announce delivery). This style of watermark denoted the function of the paper—standardized according to a specific size and weight to be sent by mail. It is interesting to note that the watermark LVG 1803 seen on a letter dated 1804 (MA 2911.1) is a copy of a Dutch watermark, which was appropriated by many English papermakers to denote a high quality paper. The watermarks recorded on the Morgan's Austen letters can be linked to specific papermaking mills. These marks include: LVG 1803 (MA 2911.1)

Floyd & Co. Eynsford Mill, Kent (MA 977.2)

Gater 1815 - John

and William Gater, Up Mills, West End, South Stoneham, Hants (MA 977.6) Portal & Co 1797 - Laverstokes, Hants (MA 977.12) Cater & Co 1808 (wove paper) (MA 977.19) Ruse & Turners 1815 (wove paper) (MA 977.41); Ruse and Turners 1807 (laid) (MA 977.29) Upper Tovil Mill, Maidstone, Kent W. Turner & Son 1810 - William Turner, Chafford Mill, Penshurst, Kent. (MA 977. 35) John Hall 1814 Cotton Mill, Ringstead, Northamptonshire (MA 977.40) John Hayes, 1809 - John Hayes, Padsole Mill, Maidstone, Kent (MA 2911.3) J. Jellyman, 1814 - Joseph Jellyman, Wiltshire (MA 2911.6) The manuscript of Austen's Lady Susan is a fair copy in Austen's hand, almost free of corrections or revisions. There is no conclusive evidence for the date of composition, but Austen probably wrote Lady Susan in 1794–95. Few of the 158 papers of this manuscript are watermarked. One dated with the mark SHARP / 1805 is seen twice, suggesting that Austen transcribed her earlier draft (which does not survive) between 1805 and 1809, perhaps for possible publication or gift. The only other recorded watermark is a triple circle with an animal inside. The image depicts both the upper and lower halves of the watermark. However, they do not meet up with precision, indicating that the edges of each sheet of paper may have been trimmed. This fair copy was eventually given by Austen to her niece, Fanny Knight, who became Lady Knatchbull.

Glossary of terms Colophony Resin – Colophony, from its origin in Colophon, an ancient Ionic city, is now widely referred to as rosin. Rosin is a solid form of resin obtained from pines and some other plants, mostly conifers, produced by heating fresh liquid resin to vaporize the volatile liquid terpene components.

Fair copy – A copy of a document made after final correction.

Hot-pressed – A smooth-surfaced paper created by pressing a finished sheet of paper through hot cylinders.

Laid – Paper made on a screen with narrow horizontal bands (laid) and thicker vertical bands (chains) that produce a pattern of thick and thin lines when held up to the light.

Quarto – A quarto is made by folding a sheet of Royal-sized (20 x 25") paper into quarters. The resulting pages will thus measure approximately twelve by nine inches.

Tub-sized – The paper sheet was dipped in a tub or vat of hot sizing and then pressed and dried.

Watermark – Beginning in the thirteenth century, watermarks were made by affixing a thin wire, shaped into the desired form, to the wire mesh of the papermaking screen (mould). When the sheet of paper is formed, the watermarked area is thinner (less dense) than the rest of the sheet because the wires blocked the accumulation of fibrous pulp.

White paper – Papers made from the highest quality white rags, sometimes bleached during the papermaking process. White papers varied in quality from superfine, to fine and coarse.

Wove – Paper that exhibits a pattern of fine mesh when held up to the light.

Biography & Biographical Studies Austen-Leigh, Joan. "My Aunt, Jane Austen." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Ketcham, Carl H. "The Still Unknown Lover." Persuasions 11 (1989).

McDonald, Irene B. "The Chawton Years (1809-1817) - 'Only' Novels." Persuasions 22 (2001).

Parsons, Farnell. "A Note on a Jane Austen Connection with the Massachusetts Historical Society: Justice Story, Admiral Wormeley, and Admiral Francis Austen." Persuasions 23 (2002).

Tomalin, Claire. The first chapter of Jane Austen: A Biography (Viking 1997).

Walker, Linda Robinson. "Why was Jane Austen sent away to school at seven? An empirical look at a vexing question." Persuasions 26 (2005).

Selection from Biography and Biographical Studies Jane Austen A Biography

By Claire Tomalin Chapter One: 1775 The winter of 1775 was a hard one. On 11 November the naturalist Gilbert White saw that the trees around his Hampshire village of Selborne had lost almost all their leaves. "Trees begin to be naked," he wrote in his diary. Fifteen miles away, higher up in the Downs, in the village of Steventon, the rector's wife was expecting the birth of her seventh child from day to day as the last leaves fell. She was thirty-six and had been married for eleven years. Four sturdy little boys ran about the parsonage and the big garden at the back, with its yard and outhouses, rising to the fields and woodland beyond. The eldest, James, at ten already showed promise as a scholar, sharing his father's taste in books, and the only daughter, Cassy, kept her mother entertained with her constant chatter as she followed her round the house and out to visit the dairy and the chickens and ducks. Cassy would be three in January. Outside Mr. Austen's study the house was seldom entirely quiet.

The November days went by and the rains set in, keeping the boys indoors; by the end of the month it was dark in the house at three in the afternoon, and dinner had to be eaten very promptly if they were to do without candles. Still no baby appeared. December came, bringing an epidemic of colds and feverish complaints. There was a sharp frost, putting ice on the ponds, enough for the boys to go sliding; then, on the 16th, White noted, "Fog, sun, sweet day."

The 16th of December was the day of Jane Austen's birth. The month's delay in her arrival inspired her father to a small joke about how he and his wife had "in old age grown such bad reckoners"; he was forty-four. The child came in the evening, he said, without much warning.

There was no need for a doctor; it was rare to call one for something as routine as childbirth, and the nearest, in Basingstoke, was seven miles away over bad roads. In any case, "everything was soon happily over." They were pleased to have a second daughter, "a present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion. She is to be Jenny." George Austen's letter went on to talk of the prospects of a ploughing match in which he was interested, Kent against Hants for a rump of beef, weather permitting. A village rector in a remote country parish was as much a real farmer as a shepherd of souls.

The baby was immediately christened at home by her father, like all the Austen children. There would be a church ceremony later. And now winter set in in earnest. Mr. Austen's ploughing match could not take place, as snow fell steadily, thickly and persistently, drifting right up to the tops of the gates. Soon the lanes were filled and almost impassable. The poultry would not stir out of the hen house, and wild birds appeared at the kitchen door for crumbs. "Rugged, Siberian weather," wrote White, remarking that the snow formed romantic and grotesque shapes as it continued to fall and then freeze. Newborn lambs were frozen to the ground, and hares came into the gardens looking for food.

Inside the parsonage, Mrs. Austen lay upstairs in the four-poster, warmly bundled under her feather-beds, the baby in her cradle beside her, while someone else-very likely her sister-in-law Philadelphia Hancock-supervised the household, all the cleaning and cooking necessary where there were many small children, together with the extra washing for the newly delivered mother.

The maids stoked the fires and boiled coppers, and when she could the washerwoman made her way from the village and toiled for a day, although laundry froze before it dried and the house was full of airing sheets and baby things. Mr. Austen might read to the children after their three o'clock dinner, but boys like to run and slide up and down stairs, and there were no carpets to dull the noise. Mrs. Austen would not be expected to set foot on the floor for two weeks at least.

Neighbours could not easily call, except for a few robust gentlemen on horseback, bringing congratulatory messages and gifts from their wives. On Christmas Eve the children laid out the traditional holly branches on the window ledges, and on Christmas morning Mr. Austen, well booted and coated, set off up the hill to his tiny, unheated stone church, St. Nicholas, hoping the light would suffice to read the lesson and serve the sacrament to those farmers and villagers who turned out to hear him. The Digweed family could be relied on, long-term tenants of the old brick manor house next to the church; Hugh Digweed farmed most of the land around Steventon and acted as squire. Then back down the hill, through the snow and silence. There were not more than thirty families living in Steventon, the single row of cottages at some distance from the parsonage; and there was neither shop nor inn.

If Aunt Philadelphia was indeed in charge, it meant their cousin Betsy was also there: grave, dark, delicately pretty Betsy, who had been born in India, where her father was even now, and where Aunt Philadelphia sometimes talked of taking her back. Betsy was fourteen, almost grown up; older than any of the Steventon children, and infinitely more sophisticated in their eyes. She lived mostly in town, meaning London. There she had her own horse, something none of the Austen boys could yet boast, and when she was not riding she was more likely to travel about in her mother's carriage than on foot. She was learning French; she had performed in a play with some other children when she was only ten; she owned a harpsichord, and four strings of pearls, a present just arrived from her father. James, Edward and even precocious four-year-old Henry watched and listened to their cousin admiringly.

When the children were allowed into their mother's room, they saw that the new baby had a round face, fat cheeks and bright dark eyes. It was agreed that she looked most like Henry, who had been the longest and finest of all the babies so far, so it is safe to assume that Jane was also long and large. Mrs. Austen fed her daughter at the breast, as she had all her children. She would not dream of going outside the house for at least a month after the birth, whatever the weather.

The continuing Siberian winter did not encourage her, and when the thaw began, in February, there were floods, which still kept her in. So the baby enjoyed undivided attention, and three cosy months in the first-floor bedroom.

Then winter ended, Aunt Philadelphia and Betsy departed, and Mrs. Austen again took up her duties in the house, the dairy and the poultry yard. On 5 April, after a harsh, dark morning, the sun came out. Little Jane was well wrapped in shawls, her mother put on her pelisse and an extra shawl or two for herself, and the family processed up the lane to the church, with its great yew tree in the graveyard in which the key was kept, its ancient bells, and its two stone heads, one of

a man, one of a woman, carved on each side of the pointed arch through which you entered. This was her formal, public christening. Two of her godmothers, or "sponsors," were Janes, one a Kentish aunt of her father's, the other an Oxfordshire cousin of her mother's. It is unlikely they made the difficult journeys needed to be present for the occasion, or that her godfather, another clergyman married to another of Mrs. Austen's cousins and living in Surrey, was there; it was normal for their promises to be made for them at the ceremony. As it turned out, they none of them did anything for their god-daughter; but as evidence of the great connecting web of cousins, mostly clerical, spread over the southern counties, they are a significant part of Jane Austen's story.

It is not an easy story to investigate. She herself wrote no autobiographical notes, and if she kept any diaries they did not survive her. Her sister destroyed the bulk of the letters in her possession, a niece did the same for those preserved by one of her brothers, and only a handful more have turned up from other sources. There are 160 in all, and none from her childhood; the earliest known letter was written when she was twenty. The first biographical note, written in the aftermath of her death, consisted of a few pages only, and her brother Henry, who wrote it, explained that hers was "not by any means a life of event." Nothing more was published for another fifty years, when a memoir by her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh appeared. It confirmed Henry's view of her. "Of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course." The uneventful life of Jane Austen has been the generally accepted view. Compared with writers like Dickens or her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, the course of her life does seem to run exceedingly quietly and smoothly.

Jane Austen did not see her father beat her mother, and she was not sent to work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve; yet, if you stop to look closely at her childhood, it was not all quiet days at the parsonage. It was, in fact, full of events, of distress and even trauma, which left marks upon her as permanent as those of any blacking factory. That she was marked by them will become clear in the course of her story; and that she also overcame them and made them serve her purposes.

Mr. and Mrs. Austen must have hoped that this would be their last child. Her sister Jane Cooper had only two, and "has not been breeding since, so perhaps she has done," observed Mrs. Austen with interest in a letter to a sister-in-law; to have finished breeding safely was enviable. And then the Austens' financial situation was not good. George was heavily in debt, owing money on all sides, to Jane Cooper's husband among others. He had also borrowed from Mrs. Austen's brother, James Leigh-Perrot, and from his own sister Philadelphia Hancock, and, separately, from her husband. His annual income was small, around ÂŁ210 from the combined tithes of Steventon and the neighbouring village of Deane. The sales of his farm produce were an important supplement to this, but not enough to keep him solvent. Three years before Jane's birth he began to take in pupils; the parsonage, with its seven bedrooms and three attics, was big enough to be turned into a small school. At the same time he sold off the last of his small capital. Just before her christening he had to borrow another ÂŁ300, through the good offices of Philadelphia, from a London lawyer. His accounts show a perpetual juggling of debt repayments and new borrowings which must have made his wife extremely uneasy if she knew their full extent. The plain fact was that children cost money to launch into the world, and the Austens had enough with James, George, Edward, Henry, Cassandra, Francis and Jane. Separate bedrooms was the usual form of birth control; but the Austens did not adopt it, and there was one more Austen baby to come.

Mrs. Austen's system of child-rearing was an unusual one. She was a well-organized woman, and her practice was to give each baby a few months at the breast as a good start-we know from her own account that it was three months in the case of Cassandra-and then hand the child over to a woman in the village to be looked after for another year or eighteen months, until it was old enough to be easily managed at home. For Jane, this handing over is most likely to have followed her christening. A baby of fourteen weeks will be firmly attached to her mother, and to be transferred to a strange person and environment can only be a painful experience. The idea that this was an exile or an abandonment would not have occurred to Mrs. Austen; bonding between mother and child is a largely modern concept, and babies were handed about freely. It does not mean they did not suffer, both in going and in coming back. Cobbett deplored the practice, asking, "Who has not seen these banished children, when brought and put into the arms of their mother, screaming to get from them and stretching out their little hands to get back to the arms of the nurse?" Poor village mothers were naturally glad of the extra income brought by nursing children of the gentry; a country wet nurse could earn about two shillings and sixpence a week, and even a dry nurse would be helping her own family by taking on such work. Whether Mrs. Austen found a wet nurse ready for each of her children in the village, or whether she felt they could be spoon-fed after their first few months of breast-feeding, we do not know; but she did use the word "weaning" in the case of three-month-old Cassandra, which suggests the latter.

Whatever the system, there was something impersonal about it; the name of the nurse is never mentioned.

So the Austen babies were cared for in the village, fed, washed, encouraged to crawl in a cottage, taking their first steps there and learning their first words from their foster family. When they approached the age of reason and became socially acceptable, they were moved again, back to their original home. From the physical point of view the system worked very well. In an age when few families were spared the deaths of several children, the Austens did not lose a single one; in London at this time over half the children born died before they could reach the age of five, and although things were better in the country, the mortality rate was still alarmingly high.

The Austen children grew up, and grew up healthy.

All the same, you have to wonder what effect Mrs. Austen's treatment had on them. In Jane's case, the emotional distance between child and mother is obvious throughout her life; and not only between child and mother. The most striking aspect of Jane's adult letters is their defensiveness. They lack tenderness towards herself as much as towards others. You are aware of the inner creature, deeply responsive and alive, but mostly you are faced with the hard shell; and sometimes a claw is put out, and a sharp nip is given to whatever offends. They are the letters of someone who does not open her heart; and in the adult who avoids intimacy you sense the child who was uncertain where to expect love or to look for security, and armoured herself against rejection.

Mrs. Austen's system made for a tidier and more easily run parsonage, and she did not see herself as doing anything cruel or unusual. She believed, along with most other people, that infants required no more than to be kept reasonably clean, reasonably warm and well fed, until their intelligence showed itself in obvious form. One of her contemporaries, also mother of a large family, wrote that she would just as soon be a stepmother as a mother: "think of being quit of their plague while they are mere vegetables, and then become mere animals." The Austen parents

are said-by a grandson-to have visited the absent babies daily, at least whenever possible, and had them brought to the parsonage regularly, which may have encouraged their children to feel that they had two families and homes where they were loved. The system was certainly a good deal better than that of parents who placed their children too far away to visit, and became total strangers to them. "She sent him forth to be nursed by the robust wife of a neighbouring farmer, where, for the space of upwards of four years, he was honoured with no token from father or mother, save some casual messages, to know from time to time if the child was in health," was Henry Brooke's summary of his hero's infancy in The Fool of Quality, published in the late 1760s and recognized as a perfectly credible account.

One Austen child did not come home from his village nurse. This was the second, George, nearly ten years older than Jane; he suffered from fits and failed to develop normally. For Mrs. Austen, this was a sad repetition of her early experience with her brother Thomas. He was born when she was eight, just of an age to enjoy a baby brother; but when his backwardness was obvious, he was sent away to be cared for. George was destined for the same fate, although he was occasionally at the parsonage as a small boy. Since he was probably still in Steventon village in 1776, he may have been the first of Jane's siblings of whom she became aware. He could walk, and he was not a Down's Syndrome child, or he would not have lived so long, lacking modern medication. Because Jane knew deaf and dumb sign language as an adult— she mentioned talking "with my fingers" in a letter of 1808— it is thought he may have lacked language; it would not have stopped him joining in the village children's games.

"We have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or a wicked child," wrote his father of George, with touching Christian resignation. The Austens cared about goodness, but they also cared deeply about success; and their child-rearing system worked remarkably well, for all, with the partial exception of George, grew up tough, not given to self-pity and notable for their mutual affection and support. And even George lived to a ripe old age, cared for alongside his Uncle Thomas in another Hampshire village, Monk Sherborne; he is rarely mentioned, but survived his elder brother and his sister Jane, and was not forgotten by the others, who contributed to his upkeep.

On his death certificate in 1838 he is described as a "Gentleman."

In June 1776, before Jane was six months old, her parents did absent themselves from Steventon in order to make a visit to London. Neither two-year-old Frank nor three-year-old Cass had long been promoted from the village themselves, so they may have been sent to keep their baby sister company, happy enough to return to what had been their home, and the games of the long summer days with the small Bets, Bobs and Nans from the cottages. And if Cass now saw herself as a little mother to the baby, and the baby held out her arms to Cass, it was the first stage of a deep and lifelong bond between the sisters.

Mr. and Mrs. Austen were in London partly at least to visit his sister Philadelphia and niece Betsy. While they were with them word came from India of the death of Phila's husband, Tysoe Saul Hancock. He had in fact died months earlier, in November 1775, even before the birth of Jane, but news travelled slowly, letters from India taking six months or more. Mrs. Hancock was naturally afflicted to hear of her husband's end. Worse, it appeared that he died penniless: "all his effects will not more than clear his debts here," wrote Mr. Woodman, the lawyer who advised her, and the same man who had lent George Austen money. Sadly, Hancock was little George's

godfather, and now there was no hope that he would be able to contribute to the cost of his care; he had worried about the growing number of Austen children, and how the family would manage. The situation of his own wife and daughter was not, however, as bad as it appeared at first.

Three years earlier, Mr. Hancock's patron in India, the great Warren Hastings of the East India Company, on becoming Governor of Bengal, had made a gift to his god-daughter, Betsy Hancock, of ÂŁ5,000; and in 1775 he doubled the sum, making Betsy an heiress-not a great one, but with enough to ensure she would find a husband. The Hancocks were sworn to secrecy about the whole matter, but the two trustees for Betsy's fortune were the lawyer, Mr. WoodmanWarren Hastings's brother-in-law-and Mrs. Hancock's brother, George Austen, who was doubtless in London partly to carry out whatever duties his trusteeship demanded.

It turned out there was not much cause for concern about Philadelphia. Quite apart from her daughter's wealth, we can see from the bank account she opened a few months later that she received ÂŁ3,500 paid in by Woodman, and another sum of nearly ÂŁ5,000 in the form of a "bill on Ind. Co." The opening of the account is a sign of her independence as a well-to-do widow. Her late husband had advised her to do as much earlier, but she had not complied; now she chose a different bank from the one he recommended, and deposited her money with Messrs. Hoare & Co., her brother's bankers.

The Hancocks, mother and daughter, closely bonded as single parent and single child, were free to embark on living as they pleased; and although Philadelphia was fond of her brother, and Betsy of her uncle, they had no thought of burying themselves in the English countryside. Betsy, having lost a father she hardly remembered and come into a considerable fortune, announced she was no longer to be known as Betsy. From now on she would be called Eliza. No one thought of contradicting her wishes.

Eliza Hancock is a central figure in Jane Austen's life for many reasons. She was her first cousin, and they became warmly attached to one another. Although Eliza was the senior by fourteen years, both died relatively young, and Jane outlived her by only four years, bringing the span of their lives close together. The difference was that Eliza was always an exotic, a bird of bright plumage with a story that might have come from one of the romances Jane liked to mock. Eliza was a true Austen in her fluent pen and her enjoyment of acting, music and dancing, and she had a quick ear; in other ways she was markedly different from her Austen cousins. She was incautious in marrying, and could write frivolously of her feelings or lack of them; and yet she was always a most loving daughter, and became a tenderly attentive mother.

There are some unsolved questions in the lives of both Philadelphia Hancock and her daughter, the central one being Eliza's parentage, which will be considered later. For now, in the summer of 1776, George Austen was reassured about the situation in which they found themselves, and continued to repay the money he had borrowed from his sister at the same rate. He and his wife returned to Hampshire and life went on in its usual way. For him this meant supervising the work of the farm and sales of wheat, barley and hops; teaching his older boys; performing his pastoral duties of baptism, burial, Sunday services, and keeping a kindly eye on any parishioners in need or trouble. The one exceptional event of the winter happened three days before his little

daughter's first birthday, on Friday, 13 December, when, in common with every clergyman in the land, he held an extra service in Steventon church, reading out prayers against the American rebels. After which he walked down the hill to his cheerful home, whose atmosphere reminded one observer of "the liberal society, the simplicity, hospitality, & taste, which commonly prevail in different families among the delightful valleys of Switzerland."

Copyright Š 1997 Claire Tomalin Alfred A. Knopf, Inc

Northanger Abbey [pub. 1818] Benedict, Barbara. "Reading by the Book in Northanger Abbey." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Cummins, Nichola. "Northanger Abbey: Catherine Morland and the Vice of the 'Sympathetic Imagination.'" Deep South 1 (1995). On the importance of candor.

Gilbert, Deirdre E. "'Willy-Nilly' and Other Tales of Male-Tails: Rightful and Wrongful Laws of Landed Property in Northanger Abbey and Beyond." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Rogers, Henry N. "Of Course You Can Trust Me!": Jane Austen's Narrator in Northanger Abbey.

Persuasions 20 (1999).

Schaub, Melissa. "Irony and Political Education in Northanger Abbey." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. "The Invention of Civility in Northanger Abbey." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Selection from Northanger Abbey Literary Criticism

V.20, NO.1 (Summer 1999)

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

“Of Course You Can Trust Me!”: Jane Austen’s Narrator in Northanger Abbey HENRY ROGERS

Henry Rogers (email: rustyr@mail.uca.edu) is Professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas. He has written on James and Trollope, Thackeray, Defoe, Dickens, and most recently on Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell.

WHEN TEACHING NORTHANGER ABBEY in a seminar on Jane Austen recently, I asked for responses to the novel’s concluding, melodramatic section—Catherine’s sudden and inexplicable expulsion from the Abbey by General Tilney, her anguished journey home, her “rescue” by Henry Tilney, and the eventual explanation and resolution of these occurrences. A young woman answered, “It made me mad, and then it made me mad that it made me mad.” That is, she was first frustrated—“made mad”—by the deflating, anticlimactic explanation for General Tilney’s “monstrous” conduct. Her “mad” was compounded by the realization that, in this of all novels, she should have been so foolish as to anticipate any fulfillment of Gothic, romantic expectations, to expect anything other than the mundane, “realistic” explanation that she received. My student’s reaction so mirrored my own that such a shared response immediately suggested it was one deliberately elicited by Jane Austen, and that to discover how and why she accomplishes this might provide insight into this elusive novel. Indeed, what emerges from such an investigation of this response—its causes, effects, and implications—is an awareness that in a novel whose action and meaning are, as Katrin Ristkok Burlin has pointed out, concerned with the “theme of fiction” and based on various fictions (89), Jane Austen has placed one more, a fiction created specifically, uniquely for the reader—in part created by the reader. It is a fiction Austen writes, but doesn’t, an action she begins, but leaves us to finish, as she knows we will, in

the manner she knows we will. And it’s a setup. She knows it, we come to know it, and she makes us like it, learn from it, and so experience her fiction in a much richer way.

It is hardly surprising that Jane Austen’s narrator is central to this issue. As Alan McKillop has noted, she “interposes herself as in no other of her works” (56), and she presides over a novel that Rubinstein finds in its rhetorical complexity “quite without antecedent in British fiction” (434). From what Burlin calls her “astonishingly aggressive authorial ‘intrusion’” to defend the novel genre “to her noisy re-entrance at the end” (89), she is always, though at times less obtrusively, there—a persona adapted to various narrative functions and impressed upon the reader to guide his responses to herself and to the work she shapes.

The narrator’s roles in Northanger Abbey are varied. She is a parodist of Gothic and sentimental romance who creates and then defeats conventional fictional expectations. She is a brilliantly ironic, unfailingly witty satiric commentator on all persons and things deserving her scrutiny. She is also a “straight” narrative voice of reason and “sense” speaking directly and incisively to her audience. And if Austen’s control of her narrator is not flawless—the famous defense of the novel is at least partially supported by a soapbox—it is still masterful. The narrative voice is also one of amazing consistency. Throughout Northanger Abbey, the narrator assiduously cultivates a personal relationship with her reader; it follows that understanding that relationship is critical to our comprehension of Jane Austen’s handling of her readers—of us.

This narrator-reader relationship is begun immediately, and the first chapter illustrates a pattern typical in some important ways of the narrative method in Northanger Abbey. It begins with parody, which depends upon, in Mary Lascelles’s words, “a deliberately contrived antithesis between the worlds of actuality and illusion” (68). Austen’s brilliant sendups of Gothic and romance conventions—especially of Catherine as heroine—in the novel’s early sections are too well known to need reiterating here. But through her satire, the narrator establishes a rhetorical strategy that inevitably tends to distance her reader from Catherine, for to laugh at or through her is to perceive her with some degree of objectivity. At the same time the narrator pulls the reader into a closer relationship. She creates a sense of intimacy with her audience in the novel’s initial statement: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine” (13). She does not contemplate differences with her reader elsewhere, for her narration is pervaded by her confidence in his understanding, acquiescence to her views, and reliance upon her guidance. Such trust naturally inspires confidence in return, which is enhanced by the flattering awareness that the narrator assumes his knowledge, perception, and intelligence.

The reader, then, addressed by a narrator whose assumption of an intimate relationship creates just such a bond, responds with that narrator—always from at least a slight distance. As Lloyd Brown notes, the narrator’s views, and the reader’s, draw closer to Catherine’s, but they are never fully integrated (216). Narrator and confidant/reader always know more than Catherine, even after her most preposterous illusions are dispelled. Catherine is always good for a laugh, or smile, at least: “Such a strain of shallow artifice [Isabella’s last letter] could not impose even upon Catherine” (218). The reader is moved closer to her, cares about her—but, as John Odmark comments, can’t ever take her completely seriously (46-51).

Thus, in his relationship with the narrator and her story, the reader becomes confident, secure—even smug. Up to a certain point this complacency appears justified—but there’s the rub. Jane Austen takes him beyond that point. Blessed with “good natural parts,” having been schooled by parody, satire, and Catherine’s own education, the reader nonetheless falls into the trap triggered by General Tilney’s violent expulsion of Catherine from Northanger Abbey. Yet he doesn’t suddenly yearn for Gothic fulfillment because of obtuseness or stupidity—just the contrary. Austen counts on those very qualities of perception, imagination, and reason that should apparently prevent such a lapse. If the reader is stupid, it won’t work—her narrative strategy is defeated, her intentions imperfectly realized. So that response is artfully prepared for and evoked, and the intimate personal relationship with the narrator proves essential to the process.

There are several means by which the reader is “set up,” conditioned to respond as he does. Gothic and romance possibilities are repeatedly being raised and seemingly laughed out of existence, a process that simultaneously “cures” the reader of any predilection toward such illusions and leads him on. To even suggest such potentialities is imaginatively to render them part of reality—that is, as possibilities. And these suggested patterns of action and behavior are often completed, though not within the conventions of romance. Catherine, in fact, fills almost all the roles for which she is initially found unsuited. She does have adventures in strange places, she does find a lover, she is carried off in a carriage—not once but twice—she does, at last, become a heroine—and always, Gothic and romance conventions are displaced, exposed as illusory. If such displacement has significance for one of the novel’s major themes—the ambiguous, perhaps finally indeterminate boundary between illusion and reality—it also continues to suggest, however tentatively, the possibility of Gothic consummation. Indeed, even after most overt satire of fictional delusion is over, the narrator herself imagines potentially romantic situations not even conceived of by a girl steeped in Radcliffian lore. This becomes suggestive of another purpose besides the satiric—to keep the reader cognizant of Gothic convention and by implication its potential reality. And Henry Tilney’s extravagant sendup of Catherine and Eleanor’s confusion about “horrors from London” offers more specific evidence that the improbable may be actual. As Burlin indicates, Henry’s comments, which are specific references to the Gordon Riots (100), demonstrate concretely that what appears wildly imaginative and implausible may in fact be reality.

Thus the narrator manipulates the elements of her story—including her audience—to convince that audience that her fiction and real life are governed by the dictates of reason and probability. At the same time she conditions the reader to respond as though just the opposite were true—when she chooses he shall. The crucial feature in the conditioning process is of course General Tilney. The narrator takes great care that he remains the only Gothic element that is not undercut or explained away until late in the novel, and his moodiness, domestic tyranny, and oppressive presence are not inconsistent with Gothic convention. Catherine’s final Gothic throes at the Abbey do not lead to full illumination; while Henry’s chastisement so mortifies her that “Catherine was completely awakened” (199), it leaves his father essentially unrevealed. The grounds for the reader’s continued speculation are intact—amplified, in fact.

Following Catherine’s “awakening,” “The anxieties of common life began soon to succeed to the alarms of romance” (201). But what succeeds a fantasy murder is a very real seduction—Frederick Tilney runs away with Isabella, James Morland’s fiancée, and Catherine’s grief over her brother’s loss is real, not the product of self-delusion. The timing is exquisite; the line separating “common life” and “romance” grows more, not less, indefinite, and more suspicions concerning General Tilney are insinuated. Catherine’s naive remarks at times generate suggestive reactions from Henry and Eleanor: “‘Your father is so very liberal! He told me . . . he valued only money as it allowed him to promote the happiness of his children.’ The brother and sister looked at each other” (205). Such ironic restraint implies things beneath the surface, and the narrator is in this regard conspicuously silent. She seems to withhold nothing, but only General Tilney is deliberately kept so long ambiguous that the reader will, when the moment comes, create around the General a fiction as illusory as those he has learned to ridicule.

That moment comes, obviously, when General Tilney suddenly expels Catherine from Northanger Abbey. From then until Henry’s final explanation, events appear to fall perfectly into the patterns of Gothic romance. Catherine’s long night of genuine anguish, her solitary journey home, her days of suffering there, even her rescue by the noble Henry all fit comfortably into the conventional forms of fiction. All are real, not delusions, and the reader’s eagerness to make them the stuff of romance is heightened by melodramatic trappings. Catherine’s bed chamber “was again the scene of agitated spirits and unquiet slumbers,” and this time “Her anxiety had foundation in fact, her fears in probability” (227). Of course the reader succumbs.

The narrator’s ironic perspective is suspended only during this climactic sequence, and that is more than sufficient to spring the trap. Even within a fictional context clearly governed by reason and plausibility, the reader leaps to misinterpret General Tilney as soon as such conclusions seem, like Catherine’s suffering, grounded in probability. Those actions that now unfold match the new romantic fiction the reader is creating—only the final revelation of the General’s surely Gothic villainy is still to come. What Henry reveals, of course, is not an enigmatic figure of evil, but a petty, utterly selfish man motivated solely by very unromantic greed. His conduct is consistent with the role of Gothic villain the reader has constructed for

him, but it is also consistent with who he is. The General deserves some credit—his intentions are bad. He tries to be a Machiavelli, a Montoni, but he cannot; he can only be a “trivial” villain marked by the fatal flaw of being perfectly understandable.

Such a discovery creates the final stage in what Brown calls Austen’s “strategy of ironic anticlimax” (217). Now, however, implications are altered. Conventional forms are again parodied, and this time the reader no longer merely observes, but participates, for he created the fiction that was not. His response is new, for his judgment, not Catherine’s, has been at fault.

That it has been so is doubly frustrating, since novel and narrator have seemed to work unceasingly to prevent such delusion. Thus the reader himself experiences a disappointment, a letdown, rather than simply watching and perhaps laughing at it—he is “mad” both because he is let down and because he allowed himself to be so. And his perplexity is complicated because the nature and causes of his “error” remain difficult to determine. We have seen, I think, all these things—the responses, their sources, the controlling hand of the narrator. We can also see that their essential effect is to add another dimension to the reader’s inclusive experience of Northanger Abbey and so to its meanings as well.

Certainly the reader’s particular experience as would-be author of conventional unrealistic fiction illustrates that the dichotomy of what Brown calls “the worlds of actuality and illusion” is far from absolute (199). That relationship between illusion and reality is tenuous, sometimes uncertain, and it may change with each individual’s shifting balance of reason and imagination. Still, there is no doubt that it must be determined as nearly as possible. The underlying principles of the narrator’s perspective are stated explicitly in Henry’s admonition to Catherine: “‘Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you’” (197). But if reason should rule, imagination itself is not an illusion, it too is a part of reality. “Raised” imagination must be controlled and directed by reason and experience, but—Catherine’s mother is a prime example—no imagination is not good. As Henry states, then, maturity, knowledge, and self-awareness can lead toward a balance of reason and imagination with which one may best encounter the world. There are no final answers—as Rubinstein notes, all “tidy formulations” of human experience are inadequate (440). Indeed, Susan Morgan locates the subject of Austen’s fiction in “the problem of perception”(7), “the relation between the mind and its object”(5). In Northanger Abbey, the reader’s own would-be fiction exemplifies that problem. He, shaped by the narrator, is reasonable, perceptive, experienced—yet he does what he laughs at Catherine for doing. And that changes the nature of laughter in the novel, for to laugh at her is by implication to laugh at oneself, at the realization that, no more than Catherine, can the reader always judge aright, always know a constant truth in what Richard Patteson calls the “least epistemologically determinate of all Austen’s novels” (467). Such thematic issues, then, are given additional resonance and meaning by the reader’s creative—and created—misadventures in fiction.

But the narrator who arranged those matters makes certain that they—and all things in Northanger Abbey—retain the perspective she has chosen. Her presence is quieter and less intrusive during much of the story’s latter portions, but as soon as Catherine starts homeward from the Abbey, she again parodies romance convention, and her wit and humor become flashier, warning that the reader’s Gothic expectations will be disappointed. There develops a new element in the narrator-reader relationship now. As Claudia Johnson points out, “Austen draws attention to the artificiality . . .of her conclusion” (48). For the first time, she emphasizes that her story is a fiction—a more realistic, better kind of fiction than those she parodies, but a fiction nonetheless. Catherine may be a plausible rather than a romantic heroine, but she too comes from “the pen of the contriver.” Tara Ghoshal Wallace believes that “Austen in the last pages of Northanger Abbey issues an open invitation to the reader to resist her authorial control” (273), but Austen calls attention to the blatant artifice of her conclusion only after she has manipulated the reader into apparently taking over that control and creating a fiction that won’t work, that doesn’t in fact exist in the world of the novel. The ending’s artificiality actually reinforces the narrator’s dominance—in Frank Kearful’s view, making her “Prospero-like” (526), playfully controlling the illusion she has created. She refers to her narrative as “my fable”; her story has meaning, but it is not real, and those characters and events it contains should not be taken too seriously: “Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled” (252).

Thus as the narrator self-consciously reveals awareness of her creative role, she further distances herself and the reader not only, as before, from Catherine and the events of the story, but even from their actuality. And for the first time she emphasizes her own limitations as storyteller and guide. She cannot create reality or even make Catherine a different kind of heroine; indeed, she must call upon the reader for aid: “I leave it to my reader’s sagacity” (247).

Emphatically—and now ironically—she stresses the perception, judgment, even the creative power of the readers she has just deceived, readers “who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity” (250).

This previously unacknowledged sense of the narrator’s fallibility affects her relationship to the reader in several ways. Rather than inviting him to resist her control, it enables him to more fully understand the nature of the fictional enterprise they are both involved in. Her assumed narrative limitations tend to bind them more intimately than ever, placing them on a more even footing. It also lightens the seriousness of the reader’s imaginative folly, for if the guide upon whom he has depended is imperfect, so much less blamable are the errors of the guided. She is deliberately imperfect, of course, providing herself an “out” for having perfectly led the reader into that folly. Her powers are limited, too. If the reader errs, it isn’t her fault. It is, but it can’t be proven, she can’t be pinned down. And the inference is clear: all are in the same boat—narrator, reader, the characters in the story—attempting to balance reason and imagination, distinguish reality from illusion, and all are fallible. The narrator also makes evident that while such meanings are significant, they are not to become too important. Her story is only that after all, a fiction, an illusion created in part for instruction, but primarily for

fun. It may be learned from, but it must be laughed at. If the reader is led into becoming a part of the fiction instead of simply its observer, he can learn from and laugh at that, too. If a part of the narrator’s fun has been playing the reader for a bit of a fool, that is a small price to pay. Give credit where it is due. It is no easy task to make one an ass, and be thanked for it . . . by the ass.

Thus to understand that initial response to the conclusion of Northanger Abbey—being made mad, and then being mad because of being made mad—is to more fully discover the narrative intentions and artistry that created it. At first glance the narrator’s reversion to her earlier intrusive persona may appear awkward and inappropriate. Yet the brilliant artifice of the ending and its implications support Fleishman’s contention that it should not be judged by the “expectations of a consistent realist style” (35). Austen knew it would be; that becomes part of her point. She counts upon it, since she has created an essentially realistic fiction while she has satirically played upon the expected conventions of romance. She at last calls into question the limitations of that fiction and the values of reason and understanding it advocates. They are better, even best, but they are neither absolute nor fully attainable. The mastery of the narrator makes this a truth the reader knows, not because he has been told or seen it dramatized, but because he has experienced it.

That experiencing, being made a participant in the novel—an unwitting composer of part of it—is finally of most importance. The reader’s larger response to the novel is inevitably different because he has been seduced into active involvement with the work—not so much with its characters and events as with their creation. His response is therefore more complex and personal. The narrator-reader relationship cannot end as it began—the reader’s former complacency is impossible—but what has passed between them makes it richer and more resonant. They end nearer in experience and, therefore, in understanding.

Obviously, discerning more about the nature and achievement of Jane Austen’s narrative art does not resolve all critical questions about Northanger Abbey. It does reveal a consistency, a coherency of vision and intention that informs the narrative purpose, and it elicits sheer appreciation of such a narrator. Park Honan derogatorily calls her “a lithe and slithery eel of great energy,” who “often lacks an appropriate tone” (141). He makes the point even as he misses it. Only by being bound to and maneuvered by the “lithe and slithery eel” can a reader hope to discover what an “appropriate tone” might be within complex worlds of illusion and reality, imagination and reason, whether they are fictional or real—or both. And in regard to such matters, joined with that narrator in a final ironic but confident grasp of what she has been about, the reader can say, in the words of the eel, “I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern” (252).

Thus Northanger Abbey is, much in the narrative tradition of Fielding, Sterne, and later Thackeray, the work of a great artist at serious play, one whose narrator places the reader— places us—both in and out of the game, involving us in her world in ways that bring awareness of our own—as creators of a fiction that does not exist, as subjects of the fiction that does.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1969.

Brown, Lloyd. W. Bits of Ivory. Baton Rouge: LSUP, 1973.

Burlin, Katrin Ristkok. “‘The Pen of the Contriver’: The Four Fictions of Northanger Abbey.”

Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays. Ed. John Halperin. Cambridge: CUP, 1975. 89-111.

Fleishman, Avrom. Fiction and the Ways of Knowing. Austin: UTP, 1978.

Hardy, Barbara. A Reading of Jane Austen. New York: NYUP, 1976.

Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: Fawcett, 1987.

Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: UCP, 1988.

Kearful, Frank J. “Satire and the Form of the Novel: The Problem of Aesthetic Unity in Northanger Abbey.” ELH 32 (1965): 511-27.

Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. London: Oxford UP, 1939.

McKillop, Alan D. “Critical Realism in Northanger Abbey.” Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1963. 52-62.

Morgan, Susan. In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction. Chicago: UCP, 1980.

Odmark, John. An Understanding of Jane Austen’s Novels. Oxford: Basil, 1981.

Patteson, Richard F. “Truth, Certitude, and Stability in Jane Austen’s Fiction.” Philological Quarterly Fall (1981): 455-69.

Rubinstein, E. “Northanger Abbey: The Elder Morland and ‘John Homespun.’” Papers on Language and Literature 5 Fall (1969): 434-40.

Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. “Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody.” Studies in the Novel Fall (1988): 262-73.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Los Angeles: CUP, 1965.

Sense and Sensibility (1811) Chapman, Geoff. "Colonel Brandon: an Officer and a Gentleman in Sense and Sensibility."

Persuasions 21 (2000).

Dinkler, Michal Beth. "Speaking of Silence: Speech and Silence as a Subversive Means of Power in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Lerman, Rachel. "The Sense and Sensibility of Jane Austen." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Shubinsky, Diane. "Sense and Sensibility: An Eighteenth-Century Narrative." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Selection from Sense and Sensibility Literary Criticism

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

V.25, NO.1 (Winter 2004)

Speaking of Silence: Speech and Silence as a Subversive Means of Power in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility MICHAL BETH DINKLER

Michal Beth Dinkler (email: mdinkler@stanfordalumni.org) is Adjunct Professor of English at Salem State College.

Her Master’s Degree is in English from Stanford University. She is pursuing graduate studies at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and is Editorial Associate for the theological journal Priscilla Papers.

IN “A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN,” aVirginia Woolf contends that nineteenth-century society rejected women writers out of fear, which manifested itself in a conflict of values: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room” (557). Although Woolf sets up a direct dichotomy between “male” war and the “female” drawing-room, Jane Austen’s novels actually conflate such gender stereotypes by depicting the seemingly innocuous drawing room as a dangerous domestic battleground in itself. Without social or political power, Austen’s only weapon in the battle for influence was her profoundly persuasive tongue. Thus, Austen’s novels are preoccupied with the strategic play between spoken language and silence as a subversive means of power for the eighteenth-century woman.

Despite a proliferation of talk about Austen’s novels in recent years, the talk in her novels has remained sadly and ironically under-discussed. Scholars have commented on Austen’s discourse1, but only sparingly. Notably, Stovel and Gregg’s very helpful book The Talk in Jane Austen begins to remedy this strange neglect. In “Mrs. Elton and Other Verbal Aggressors,” Juliet McMaster calls female speech “veiled warfare” (76). In “‘Hands off my man!’ or ‘Don’t you wish you had one?’: Some Subtexts of Conversational Combat in Jane Austen,” Lesley Willis Smith touches on the “verbal duels” between Lucy Steele and Elinor Dashwood, among others (91). Still, although several chapters briefly discuss Sense and Sensibility (1811)2, none treats this discourse-centered novel thoroughly.

Marilyn Butler argues that because Austen first uses free indirect discourse in Sense and Sensibility, “[d]ialogue is far less important” here than in the other novels (190). Discussing Pride and Prejudice, Tony Tanner posits, “all the important transactions (and most of the unimportant or vexatious ones) take place through language” (130). Yet, the same is true of Sense and Sensibility, a novel with many “narrative lacunae” (Jones 78) that, I argue, can only be filled through dialogue. This article will focus on the ways the female characters in Sense and Sensibility use language—or the absence of it—to manipulate those around them, as well as Austen’s clear commentary on such manipulations of power.

Austen’s women turn to their only available weapons—those in their linguistic arsenal – to subvert the dominant hierarchy of power. Much has been made of the literary foil between the two sisters Elinor and Marianne, as well as the narrative symmetry, which the title clearly foretells. And yet, more is going on here than a contrived parallelism. By comparing Elinor to Marianne, both of whom we are meant to like, Austen implicitly comments on her society’s use of speech: she praises Elinor’s restraint and warns her readers of the prospective pitfalls of communicative combat. As such, Elinor becomes “the well-scoured channel through which [Austen’s] comment most readily flows” (Forster 149). Austen juxtaposes Elinor’s calculated use of speech and silence with Marianne’s indiscriminate loquacity in order to illustrate her admiration of linguistic moderation.

Repeatedly, the two are presented as foils who are both alike and unlike. Hiding her grief over Edward’s engagement to Lucy, Elinor claims, “‘Marianne, I have nothing to tell’” (170).

Marianne’s stinging response is: “‘Nor I . . . our situations then are alike. We have neither of us any thing to tell; you, because you communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing’” (170).

Elinor alludes to the depth of her feelings for Edward, saying, “‘Believe them to be stronger than I have declared’” (21). Marianne chastises Elinor for not sharing her genuine feelings, “‘Esteem him!’ . . . use those words again and I will leave the room this moment’” (21). Although she decries Elinor’s “use [of] those words,” Marianne perceives those words to be deficient because they are too few. The sisters are, as Marilyn Butler describes them, “professors of two opposing creeds” (189).

As the novel progresses, we are invited to witness the effects of the opposing extremes of Elinor’s and Marianne’s respective modes of communication. Marianne, the true Romantic, luxuriates in her own floridity, languishing in layer upon layer of love language and succumbing to morose and mournful melancholy. By contrast, Elinor’s speech is confined and refined.

Austen links command over one’s tongue with power, deeming Marianne, “without any power, because she [is] without any desire of command over herself” (82). Instead, Marianne speaks “inconsiderately what she really” feels, and consequently, “her own vexation at her want of thought [can]not be surpassed by” the surprise of her hearers (98).

Ironically, Elinor eventually can “no longer witness . . . in silence” Marianne’s “torrent of unresisted grief” (185). Stepping into her now-familiar parental role, she speaks up in order to enjoin Marianne to bear her grief in silence, as the reader knows she herself does. In fact, we see Marianne change profoundly over the course of the narrative; as she matures, she learns to hold her tongue.3 When Mrs. Jennings speaks of the painful subject of Edward’s affections in Elinor’s presence, Marianne’s reaction is “only a spasm in her throat” (265). For her, this is the height of discretion, and for the reader, this moment is the height of her transformation.

Through Marianne’s “extraordinary fate” of expressive maturation, this novel becomes a kind of linguistic Bildungsroman (378). Silence is linked directly with self-command, for Elinor in particular: “She was silent.—Elinor’s security sunk; but her self-command did not sink with it” (131). Austen favors Elinor’s self-possession: “her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them” (6). Elinor is venerated because, even when “mortified, shocked, and confounded,” she maintains “a composure of voice, under which was concealed an emotion and distress beyond anything she had ever felt before” (135). Just as Elinor suggests “the propriety of some self-command to Marianne,” Austen encourages the same self-discipline for her readers (53).

Although Austen admonishes her readers to be strategic in their use of language, she clearly despises linguistic manipulation. Significantly, the catalyst for the entire plot of Sense and Sensibility is a woman’s exploitation of language. As the book opens, Mr. John Dashwood promises his dying father that he will use his inheritance to help support his mother and sisters.

However, Mrs. John Dashwood’s machinations over this money ultimately provide the impetus for subsequent events in the novel. She first manipulates her husband by agreeing superficially with his assertions, beginning her sentences obligingly with, “‘Certainly,’” and “‘To be sure,’” and “‘That is very true’” (10). Then, she cunningly undercuts her purported agreement by inserting her own different viewpoint. By (mis)leading her husband to think that he is in control, she subtly redefines his interpretation of his father’s speech, until he concludes: “‘My father certainly could mean nothing more by his request to me than what you say’” (emphasis added,

12). Thus, solely by what she says, Mrs. John Dashwood thwarts the intentions of one man (her late father-in-law) by convincing another man (her husband) to withhold money from his widowed stepmother; without this money, our heroines must move into the small cottage at Barton Park, and the novel proceeds from there.

Darryl Jones asserts that Elinor actually is a manipulator in the same ilk as Mrs. John Dashwood; she is an “habitual liar” who acts “in a very similar fashion” to the underhanded Lucy Steele (73). However, a careful examination of the “conversational combat” between Elinor and Lucy supports the view that Austen does not equate the two women, but rather places them in stark contrast with one another (Smith 91). Austen makes no apologies for characterizing Lucy as manipulative and conniving. When first introduced, Lucy lords language over others by consistently amending “all her sister’s assertions” (126). When she dislikes the conversation, she uses her tongue as a rudder, deliberately “turn[ing] the discourse” by “admiring the house and the furniture” (124). She is constantly “engaging [Elinor] in conversation,” and her clever remarks are referred to as “powers,” albeit unassisted by education (127). As we will see, when contrasted with Lucy, the opportunistic rival, Elinor emerges the wise, virtuous victor.

We remember that Lucy’s unsolicited confession to Elinor of her secret engagement to Edward is purely strategic, and at a cursory glance, Lucy seems the verbal victor. Unwittingly, Elinor has stumbled upon a linguistic land mine. At first, she reacts in “silent amazement” and her astonishment is “too great for words” (130). Here, we find a significant reciprocity between disclosure and silence. Elinor perceives Lucy’s underlying motive that she “might be informed . . . of Lucy’s superior claims on Edward, and be taught to avoid him in future,” and she defers (142). Lucy’s “superior claim” upon Edward makes her superior in this social interaction.

Initially, Elinor forfeits to Lucy out of a sense of decorum; she becomes bound in more ways than one. Appropriately, Lucy’s claim—both literal and metaphorical—induces Elinor to remain silent, now not only about Lucy’s secret, but also about her own personal suffering.

Ironically, Elinor eventually gains the upper hand by using the very thing Lucy has demanded of her—silence. Rather than utilizing the spoken word as an offensive strategy to demand social supremacy, Elinor uses silence—the withholding of the spoken word—as a defensive strategy to maintain power. Just after confessing her secret, Lucy pauses dramatically, expecting Elinor to speak. Instead, “Elinor for a few moments remain[s] silent” (130). When, “Elinor ha[s] no answer to make,” Lucy asks, “‘Are you ill, Miss Dashwood? . . . you don’t speak’” (239). Clearly, Elinor’s silence has made Lucy ill at ease.

When the two meet again, Elinor takes control by being first to broach the subject (146).

During this exchange, Elinor is silent no less than six times, causing Lucy to become disconcerted and even more effusive. Whereas Lucy calculatingly “lay[s] a particular stress on [her] words,” referring underhandedly to Elinor’s lack of bias, Elinor thinks it is “wisest to make no answer” at all (150). This results in yet another pause, which Lucy cannot endure (149).

Indeed, throughout the novel, we find that Elinor uses the tactic of silence as a self-defense against Lucy’s manipulative speech. Whereas Lucy believes Elinor’s silence speaks to her own social victory, the reader discovers that Elinor’s lack of speech actually attests to her presence of mind.

One key retaliatory aspect of Elinor’s use of silence is her deliberate sense of timing. As the novel progresses, she shows Lucy that she, too, can play games with language, saying “‘Undoubtedly, if [the Ferrars] had known your engagement . . . nothing could be more flattering than their treatment of you;—but as that was not the case—’” (239). Here, Elinor deals a deadly counterstroke: she says only enough to insinuate her meaning, and then she stops speaking altogether. Although it is true that, on one level, silence distances two characters, on another level, the silence also forces them together because the listener must effectually “read between the lines” of what the speaker does not say. In this way, Elinor’s maneuver gives her the tactical advantage of requiring Lucy (as Austen requires the reader) to fill in the unspoken gap; through her silence, Elinor implicates Lucy in coming to the unflattering conclusion.

When Elinor does speak, she does so only cautiously and intentionally. When she finally responds to Lucy’s initial claim, she articulates herself “cautiously” and “with a calmness of manner” (130). If she wants to avoid a subject, she subtly speaks of another topic in order to shift the other person’s attention to her preferred focus. For example, when Mrs. Palmer asks about Willoughby and Marianne’s assumed marriage, Elinor responds purposefully with a non sequitur: “‘Mr. Brandon was very well I hope’” (115). Although silent regarding Mrs. Palmer’s specific question, she speaks of another topic in order to redirect the other woman’s attention. In this exchange, Elinor commands power by defining boundaries around the combat zones of conversational content and concomitantly refusing Mrs. Palmer access to the areas she stipulates are forbidden. Ironically, Elinor’s use of deflection here from Willoughby to Brandon mirrors the larger narrative deflection evident in Marianne’s shifting romantic interests. As Marianne matures, she discovers “the falsehood of her own opinions,” (378) and to her own surprise, falls in love with the man whose voice, in her earliest assessment, has “‘no expression’” (51). Thus, Elinor’s response to Mrs. Palmer also serves as ironic foreshadowing of subsequent events, fulfilling both literary and dialogic functions.

Austen’s distaste for linguistic extremes is exemplified powerfully through interlocutions of the minor characters, as well. At Mrs. Ferrars’s party, the conversation is “poverty-stricken” as the women “verbally posture and parade” (McMaster 86) their opinions, which they “repeat

. . . over and over again” (SS 234). Most people are too verbose, for, “Unlike people in general, [Mrs. Ferrars] proportioned [her words] to the number of her ideas . . . ” (232). Furthermore, Austen asserts that as is “much the case for the chief of their visitors,” John Dashwood “had not much to say for himself that was worth hearing, and his wife had still less” (233). Austen boldly lambastes her contemporaries for the utter excess of their tedious gossip.

People wax eloquent on inconsequential matters too often, as further satirized by Mr. and Mrs. Palmer’s comic relationship. Like Marianne, Mrs. Palmer does not control her superfluous speech. She speaks incessantly, and yet she laughs, “‘Mr. Palmer does not hear me!’” (107) and delightedly declares, “‘He never tells me anything!’” (110). One wonders if he could get a word in edgewise. Often, he outright ignores his wife, affording “her no answer” (108). Entering the room “without speaking a word,” Mr. Palmer “[takes] a newspaper from the table and continue[s] to read it as long as he sta[ys]” (106). One of the few times Mr. Palmer does talk, he rebukes his wife for her loquaciousness, saying, “‘Don’t palm all your abuses of language upon me’” (113). Here, Austen crafts a nice play on words; Mr. Palmer accuses his wife of being a palmer of her abuses of language because she exhibits no restraint.

Perhaps Austen’s most powerful commentary is her cautionary lesson that we must balance our self-expression. In this sense, the novel itself can be seen as a lesson in linguistic conduct. The verbal bullies (e.g., Mrs. John Dashwood and Lucy Steele) win some spoken battles, but in the end, Elinor’s balance of speech and silence gets her what she wants. As the balanced strategist, Elinor ultimately wins the war.

Interestingly, the mere act of writing novels in this time period is testimony to Austen’s personal empowerment through language. In a literary environment in which most women authors assumed male pseudonyms in order to get published, Austen’s maneuvers are similar to those of her female characters. By giving herself a voice, she exercises her own linguistic and expressive power.

Specifically, Austen uses irony to wield the power of language. Irony is a form of balanced speech and silence; the reader understands a deeper meaning behind language that a character does not grasp. One reason Austen’s works remain so widely read is that irony effectively empowers the reader. For example, at one point, Miss Steele declares, “‘I dare say Lucy’s beau is quite as modest and pretty behaved as Miss Dashwood’s’” (149). The reader knows Lucy’s and Miss Dashwood’s “beaus” are one and the same—Edward Ferrars—but Miss Steele remains ignorant of this. Austen privileges her reader through irony, creating a richer and deeper reading experience. The syntax itself directly mirrors the topic about which Austen writes—the subtle manipulation of power through speech and silence.

The following scene aptly illuminates our themes. Lucy, finding Elinor still in London, reminds her that she had intended to stay only a month, saying, “‘I am amazingly glad you did not keep to your word’” (217). Elinor understands Lucy, and uses “all her self-command to make it appear that she [does] not” (217). Several literary techniques are at play in this linguistic moment. First, we see Lucy using language to shame Elinor, a common “post-Enlightenment means of social control” (Hirsch 76). However, Elinor uses her defensive strategy of silence, maintaining the upper hand in the conversation. When Lucy “return[s], after a cessation of hostile hints, to the charge,” Elinor again answers her with silence, deciding she will “not humour her by farther opposition” (218). The result is just as Elinor intends: for once, “Lucy [is] silenced” (219).

Beyond the characters’ use of language in this passage, we see Austen’s own play with language, as well. The phrase “your word” is significant here for several reasons. Keeping one’s word is a prevalent theme throughout the novel. Lucy accuses Elinor of not keeping her word, when ironically, Elinor suffers precisely because she keeps her promise of secrecy to Lucy. Additionally, Elinor’s fidelity parallels Edward’s intention to keep his word and marry Lucy. The passage becomes even more deeply ironic when seen retrospectively—Lucy goes back on her word—engaged to Edward, she marries his brother instead. This, after she has unflinchingly attested to Edward’s commitment to her (147). Her language ultimately backfires and makes her look the fool. Austen’s masterful management of language in this scene is a microcosm of her strategic uses of speech and the implications of word choice in the novel as a whole.

As we have seen, in Sense and Sensibility Austen highlights human strengths and weaknesses through the use of speech and silence as a site for contesting power relations. And yet, Austen also wages her own linguistic battle for power through her critical commentary on the dangers of expressive excess, and the ultimate authority gained from balanced selfcommand. Austen advises her readers that only those with expressive balance will gain the upper hand, and only those with communicative composure will maintain their voice. As we learn from Elinor, in the domestic battleground of the drawing room, even those without the traditionally “male” artillery can win the war when they manage the weapons they have with greater cunning.

NOTES

1. For more on the term “discourse,” see Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978.

2. See especially Lesley Willis Smith’s, “‘Hands off my man!’ or ‘Don’t you wish you had one?’.”

3. Due to Marianne’s maturation and concomitant self-command, we cannot accept Tony Tanner’s assertion that Marianne’s marriage to Brandon is merely Austen’s means of “dispos[ing] of” her at the end of the novel (99). Rather, in the world of this narrative, Marianne’s choice reflects her growing wisdom and value for self-possession.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1986.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.

Forster, E.M. Abinger Harvest. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1936.

Hirsch, Gordon. “Shame, Pride, and Prejudice: Jane Austen’s Psychological Sophistication.”

Mosaic 25.1 (1992): 63-78.

Jones, Darryl. Critical Issues: Jane Austen. Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004.

Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. Oxford: OUP, 1966.

McMaster, Juliet. “Mrs. Elton and Other Verbal Aggressors.” The Talk in Jane Austen. Eds. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg. Alberta: U Alberta P, 2002. 73-90.

Smith, Lesley Willis. “‘Hands off my man!’ or ‘Don’t you wish you had one?’.” The Talk in Jane Austen. Eds. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg. Alberta: U Alberta P, 2002.

91-102.

Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 554-59.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) Bonaparte, Felicia. "Conjecturing possibilities: reading and misreading texts in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice." Studies in the Novel 37, 2 (Summer 2005) pp 141-161 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Casal, Elvira. "Laughing at Mr. Darcy: Wit and Sexuality in Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 22 (2001).

Deresiewicz, William. "Community and Cognition in Pride and Prejudice." ELH 64, 2 (Summer 1997) pp 503-35 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Ellwood, Gracia Fay. "How Not To Father: Mr. Bennet and Mary." Persuasions 22 (2001).

Fulford, Tim. "Sighing for a Soldier: Jane Austen and Military Pride and Prejudice." NineteenthCentury Literature 57, 2 (Sept. 2002) pp 153-78 [jstor preview/purchase].

Halliday, E.M. "Narrative Perspective in Pride and Prejudice." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15, 1 (June 1960) pp 65-71 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Halperin, John. "Inside Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Harmsel, Henrietta Ten. "The Villain-Hero in Pamela and Pride and Prejudice." Comparison with Samuel Richardson's 18th-century novel Pamela. College English 23, 2 (Nov. 1961) pp 104-8 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Hudson, Glenda A. "Sibling Love in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Kaplan, Laurie. "The Two Gentlemen of Derbyshire: Nature vs. Nurture." Persuasions 26 (2005).

Knuth, Deborah J. "Sisterhood and Friendship in Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Koppel, Gene. "Pride and Prejudice: Conservative or Liberal Novel - Or Both?" Persuasions 11 (1989).

Macpherson, Sandra. "Rent to Own; or, What's Entailed in Pride and Prejudice." On the legal and political specifics of "the most famous entail in literary history," that of the Bennet family.

Representations 82, 1 (Spring 2003) pp 1-23 [preview/purchase at jstor].

Margalit, Efrat. "On Pettiness and Petticoats: The Significance of the Petticoat in Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 23 (2002).

McAleer, John. "The Comedy of Social Distinctions in Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 11 (1989).

McCann, Charles J. "Setting and Character in Pride and Prejudice." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19, 1 (June 1964) pp 65-75 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Moler, Kenneth L. "Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen's 'Patrician Hero.'" Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 7, 3 (Summer 1967) pp 491-508 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Morgan, Susan. "Intelligence in Pride and Prejudice." Modern Philology 73, 1 (Aug. 1975) pp 54-68 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Morris, Ivor. "Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Moses, Carole. "Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Collins, and the Art of Misreading." Persuasions 23 (2002).

Newton, Judith Lowder. "Pride and Prejudice: Power, Fantasy, and Subversion in Jane Austen."

Feminist Studies 4, 1 (Feb. 1978) pp 27-42 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Redmond, Luanne Bethke. "Land, Law and Love." Persuasions 11 (1989). On entailment and property law in Pride and Prejudice.

Rytting, Jenny Rebecca. "Jane Austen Meets Carl Jung: Pride, Prejudice, and Personality Theory." Persuasions 22 (2001).

Salber, Cecilia. "'Excuse my interference': Meddling in Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Sherrod, Barbara. "Pride and Prejudice: A Classic Love Story." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Sherry, James. "Pride and Prejudice: The Limits of Society." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 19, 4 (Autumn 1979) pp 609-22 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Stoval, Bruce. "Secrets, Silence, and Surprise in Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. "Violet Hunt Rewrites Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Their Lives (1916)." On Austen's approach to the novel of manners. Persuasions 11 (1989).

Wilson, Jennifer Preston. "'One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it': The Development of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice." Notes Wilson, "The experience of reading Pride and Prejudice can become one of verisimilitude, a movement toward recognition of Darcy as a good man and abandonment of prejudice against him on the part of the reader that mirrors Elizabeth's own awakening. However, Austen does offer subtle signals of Darcy's development throughout her novel." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Wingard, Sara. "Reversal and Revelation: The Five Seasons in Pride and Prejudice." How Austen's use of the seasonal cycle as narrative framework links her to both the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. Persuasions 11 (1989).

Wootton, Sarah. "The Byronic in Jane Austen's Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice." The Modern Language Review 102, 1 (Jan. 2007) pp 26-39 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Selection from Pride and Prejudice Literary Criticism

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

V.22, NO.1 (Winter 2001)

Jane Austen meets Carl Jung: Pride, Prejudice, and Personality Theory JENNY REBECCA RYTTING

Jenny Rebecca Rytting (email: Jenny.Rebecca@asu.edu) studied Jane Austen for her Honors B.A. at Brigham Young University and children’s fantasy for her M.A. at Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia). She is now working on a Ph.D. in medieval literature at Arizona State University.

ALTHOUGH JANE AUSTEN AND THE SWISS PSYCHOLOGIST Carl Jung have little in common in terms of time, place, or subject matter, they do share one thing: they are both, like Elizabeth Bennet, “‘studier[s] of character’” (Pride and Prejudice 42). Jung’s theory of psychological type (which has been expanded and explained by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, authors of the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) can provide insight into why fictional characters think, feel, and act as they do. Jungian personality theory is particularly useful in explaining why Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy initially misunderstand one another, what they have to learn from one another, and why they are, after all, a perfect match.

Jung’s theory suggests that there are different but equally valid ways of interacting with the world, taking in information, and making decisions. Extraversion, an outward focus of energy, and introversion, an inward focus, are two ways of interacting with the world. Sensing, which concerns itself with facts and details, and intuition, which notices patterns and possibilities, are two ways of gathering information. The two methods of decision-making are

thinking, which uses criteria based on logic, and feeling, which uses criteria based on personal values. Finally, perceiving and judging are two ways of dealing with the interplay between taking in information and making decisions. Perceiving involves putting off decision-making in order to gather more information; judging involves suspending information-gathering in order to come to a conclusion. Every person uses all eight of these processes on a regular basis, but most people seem to prefer—that is, to be more comfortable with—one or the other of the processes in each pair, much as some people are right-handed and others left-handed. The combination of these preferences makes up what we call one’s psychological type.1

Although a large part of Pride and Prejudice revolves around the differences between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, in terms of psychological type they are really quite similar.

They share three out of four preferences—introversion, intuition, and judgment—differing only on the thinking-feeling dimension.

Mr. Darcy’s introversion is quite clear. After the Meryton ball, where his reserve is evident, Jane reports, “‘Miss Bingley told me . . . that he never speaks much unless among his intimate acquaintance. With them he is remarkably agreeable’” (19). Introverts tend to communicate best—and with most pleasure—with a small circle of close friends.2 Elizabeth’s introversion is not as obvious because she enjoys and feels comfortable in society, but a closer look finds her frequently in moments of internal reflection. She often escapes to a copse or lane to think things over, as when she reads the letters from Mr. Darcy and Mrs. Gardiner. In addition, her “love for solitary walks” (182), her friendly banter that often hides her true feelings, and her intimate conversations with Jane, to whom alone she reveals her deepest feelings, all bespeak a preference for introversion.

Elizabeth and Darcy also demonstrate a preference for intuition. Elizabeth’s characterstudying itself is an intuitive activity, for it involves fitting bits of conversation and behavior into a general pattern. Intuitive types also tend to enjoy hypothetical discussions, such as the consideration of whether it is better to follow a friend’s advice or to be guided by one’s own convictions that engages Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy during their stay at Netherfield. Mr. Bingley, a sensing type, quickly becomes impatient with the discussion and interrupts it.

In addition, Elizabeth and Darcy both prefer judging to perception. They soon know what they think of a given situation and, having thus determined, are not easily convinced otherwise. When Darcy determines to observe and interfere in Jane and Bingley’s relationship, he spends just one evening watching for signs of Jane’s affection before arriving at his verdict.

Similarly, while at Netherfield Elizabeth finds “what passed between Darcy and his companion [Miss Bingley]” to be “exactly in unison with her opinion of each” (47). That her observations

accord with her ideas presupposes that she has made a judgment. Although both she and Mr. Darcy use their judging functions regularly, their preferred methods of judging differ.

The best demonstration of Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s contrasting styles of judgment comes with their analysis of Mr. Bingley’s hypothetical behavior, should he decide to quit Netherfield but be asked by a friend to postpone his departure. Elizabeth asks Mr. Darcy whether he would consider “‘obstinacy in adhering to [his plan]’” a virtue (49), and the following conversation ensues:

“[Y]ou must remember, Miss Bennet, that the friend who is supposed to desire his return to the house, and the delay of the plan, has merely desired it, asked it without offering one argument in favour of its propriety.”

“To yield readily—easily—to the persuasion of a friend is no merit with you.”

“To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.”

“You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the influence of friendship and affection. A regard for the requester would often make one readily yield to a request, without waiting for arguments to reason one into it.” (50)

This is a classic dialogue between a thinking type and a feeling type, each defending his or her method of judging. It does not mean that Elizabeth always acts according to the wishes of her friends, without conviction, or that Darcy always acts according to his convictions, without regard to his friends, but it is clear that they each have one way of making decisions—Elizabeth through feeling and Darcy through thinking—that they prefer, defend, and best understand.3

An actual incident where their differences in judgment come into play concerns their reactions towards the relationship between Mr. Bingley and Jane, and in particular, Mr. Darcy’s role in separating them. Elizabeth judges what he has done according to Jane’s feelings, and rebukes him for “‘ruining, perhaps forever, the happiness of a most beloved sister’” (190).

Darcy is unmoved, still convinced of the better value of the logic that has guided his decisions.

In his letter to Elizabeth he further explains that he truly believed Jane to be indifferent “‘on impartial conviction’” (198)—a hallmark of a thinking type.

The methods of judgment, feeling and thinking, not only reflect the personalities of Elizabeth and Darcy, but they also showcase one of the main themes of the book, as capsulated in its title. Excessive reliance on logical analysis, especially one’s own analysis, can be considered a form of pride. Likewise, decisions based on the gut reactions of feeling, especially when stubbornly adhered to, bear a marked resemblance to prejudice. (Actually, Mr. Darcy’s “pride” and Elizabeth’s “prejudice” are very much akin to one another, and Isabel Myers’s definition of prejudice, “a pre-judgment impervious to perception” [70], could apply equally well to thinking types and feeling types.)

Elizabeth’s over-reliance on her feeling-judgment, her prejudice, leads her to evaluate Darcy before she really knows him. She dislikes him initially because she has overheard him criticize her. Having judged him, she stops using her perceptive function to learn more about him. When, at the Netherfield ball, Mr. Darcy asks Elizabeth to suspend her judgment of him, she replies, “‘if I do not take your likeness now, I may never have another opportunity’” (94).

She also rejects the information Jane has gathered—Mr. Bingley’s defense of his friend—and says, “‘[Y]ou must excuse my not being convinced by assurances only. . . . I shall venture still to think . . . as I did before’” (96). After reading Darcy’s letter, however, Elizabeth finally opens herself up to her intuitive perceptions. She remembers that he is “esteemed and valued” by his friends, that he speaks affectionately of his sister, and that she had never “seen any thing that spoke him to be unprincipled or unjust” (207) and cannot think of Darcy “without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” (208). “Blind” is precisely the word Isabel Myers uses to describe “judgment with no perception” (182).

Similarly, Darcy’s logical thinking-function originally argues against his love for Elizabeth. When he proposes the first time, he forthrightly details “his sense of her inferiority— of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination” (189). At this point, he is not really ready to love Elizabeth, for he does not consider her to be his equal. Before this relationship can work, his judgment, as well as his perception, must agree that Elizabeth is his choice—because of her worthiness, not despite her lack of it.

That his thinking-judgment does change is evident in his eventual acknowledgement that Elizabeth has taught him “‘a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous’” (369). In the course of this lesson, he has learned the true value of Elizabeth and the inconsequence of the other concerns that previously caused him such struggles. To marry Elizabeth is now both the intuitive and the logical wish of his heart.

Although psychologically speaking Mr. Darcy is not ready to marry Elizabeth when he first proposes, her refusal and his subsequent letter mark the turning point in the novel because these events open the way for their further type development and show each a glimpse of the other’s point of view. As the novel progresses, Darcy and Elizabeth begin to find a balance between their perceptive and judging functions. In addition, they learn from each other about

“the other way” to judge and come to appreciate the other’s strengths in type. Elizabeth, when reading Mr. Darcy’s letter, is especially distressed by his accusation of Wickham, “the more so, as she could bring no proof of its injustice” (205). Looking for proof implies logical thinking, and justice is something that thinking-types generally value highly. As Elizabeth comes to love Mr. Darcy, she gains a “respect created by the conviction of his valuable qualities” (265), qualities that undoubtedly include the “strength, presence of mind in crisis, steadiness” (Myers 131) that Isabel Myers attributes to thinkers. These qualities are especially evident in Darcy’s involvement with Lydia and Wickham, for which Elizabeth is particularly grateful.

Elizabeth’s feeling-oriented assessment of Darcy’s behavior and manners (clearly delineated in her refusal of his first proposal) at the same time leads him to re-evaluate himself, using more of her judging process. Once he and Elizabeth understand one another, he says, “‘you showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased’” (369). He has learned that looking at something by how it affects and pleases or displeases others can be a valuable indication of its worth. He also comes to appreciate Elizabeth for her feeling judgment. When she asks him to account for his love of her, he cites her “‘affectionate behaviour to Jane, while she was ill’” (380) as evidence of her goodness.

Elizabeth’s decision to walk the three miles to Netherfield in the mud in order to

Elizabeth recognizes how much she and Darcy have yet to learn from each other: “by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance” (312). They will not suddenly change places on the personality chart, however. As Richard McKeon says in his article “Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot,” “Elizabeth underwent a change of feeling as she freed herself of prejudices. Darcy underwent a change in his view of the spirit in which the letter was written” (515, italics mine).

Feeling is still natural to Elizabeth, and thinking to Mr. Darcy, but each has come to appreciate the other’s way of judging as valid and valuable and has learned that a balance of perception and judgment guards against falling into either pride or prejudice. Elizabeth and Darcy, having “‘settled between [them] already, that [they] are to be the happiest couple in the world’” (373), are well on their way.

NOTES

1. The eight preferences are often abbreviated with the following letters: introversion (I), extraversion (E), sensing (S), intuition (N), thinking (T), feeling (F), perception (P), and

judgment (J). Jungian psychological types are often written as combinations of these letters.

Thus Mr. Bingley is an ESFP, Mr. Darcy an INTJ, and Elizabeth an INFJ.

2. The effects of Darcy’s introversion are heightened because he is also shy, as demonstrated by Jocelyn Creigh Cass in her article, “An Amusing Study: Family Likenesses in Pride and Prejudice.” She notes the family resemblance between Mr. Darcy and his sister Georgiana, whom Elizabeth finds “exceedingly shy” (261), and cites Mr. Darcy’s discomfort and silence in social situations and his self-acknowledged role of spectator. Much of the evidence Cass uses to demonstrate Darcy’s shyness also indicates introversion, although they are not the same thing.

(Introversion denotes a preference for an internal orientation of energy; shyness is a difficulty in social situations.)

3. I should note here that Stephen Montgomery, in his Pygmalion Project series, identifies Elizabeth as having a preference for thinking, rather than feeling, which would make her psychological type identical to Darcy’s. However, I believe that what he identifies as Elizabeth’s “rationality” comes from her intelligence and her intuition, and that every instance that seems to suggest a thinking preference can be attributed to one or both of these things.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. R.W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1932.

Cass, Jocelyn Creigh. “An Amusing Study: Family Likenesses in Pride and Prejudice.”

Persuasions 9 (1987): 49-50.

McKeon, Richard. “Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot.” Critical Inquiry 5 (Spr. 1979): 511-27.

Montgomery, Stephen. The Pygmalion Project: Love and Coercion Among the Types. Vol. 2, The Guardian. Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, 1990.

Myers, Isabel Briggs. Gifts Differing. 1980. Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists, 1986.

Mansfield Park (1814) Burns, Melissa. "Jane Austen's Mansfield Park: Determining Authorial Intention." Persuasions 26 (2005).

Capitani, Diane. "Moral Neutrality in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park." Provides economic and political details about slavery in the West Indies, as context for Sir Thomas Bertram's Antigua plantation. Persuasions 23 (2002).

Davis, Gregson. "Jane Austen's Mansfield Park: the Antigua Connection." Provides historical, biographical and socio-economic contexts, illuminating the references to Antigua in Mansfield Park, includes historic map. From Antigua and Barbuda Country Conference, November 13-15, 2003.

Edmundson, Melissa. "A Space for Fanny: The Significance of Her Rooms in Mansfield Park."

Persuasions 23 (2002).

Ellwood, Gracia Fay. "'Such a Dead Silence:' Cultural Evil, Challenge, Deliberate Evil, and Metanoia in Mansfield Park." Persuasions 24 (2003).

Kondelik, Marlene. "From Mary Crawford to Kate Croy and Back Again: One Reader's Response to Mansfield Park." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Koppel, Gene. "Mansfield Park and Morgan's Passing: Jane Austen's and Anne Tyler's Problem Novels." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Muse, Sarah J. "The View and Patronage of Mansfield Park." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Palmer, Sally B. "Slipping the Leash: Lady Bertram's Lapdog." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Perkins, Moreland. "Mansfield Park and Austen's Reading on Slavery and Imperial Warfare."

Persuasions 26 (2005).

Sheehan, Colleen A. "To Govern the Winds: Dangerous Acquaintances at Mansfield Park."

Persuasions 25 (2004).

Selection from Mansfield Park Literary Criticism

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

V.26, NO.1 (Winter 2005)

Mansfield Park and Austen’s Reading on Slavery and Imperial Warfare MORELAND PERKINS

Moreland Perkins (email: moreland123@att.net) Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Maryland, has authored Sensing the World and Reshaping the Sexes in Sense and Sensibility. He would welcome a publisher for a now completed book manuscript, “Reconsidering the People in Mansfield Park.”

That Austen was profoundly shaped by the literature she read as a youth—that hers is an art that begins in imitation, parody, and creative adaptation—has been a matter of critical consensus and intensive scholarly investigation for as long as critics have been writing about her work. It is striking, then, how little thought has been given to what she read as an adult and how it shaped the very different kinds of novels she wrote as an adult.

William Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (3)

Part I. Mansfield Park and Austen’s Reading on Slavery

To be in the best position to judge the likelihood that Austen had slavery much in mind in writing Mansfield Park, one needs to have read a book published in 1808 by Thomas Clarkson that we have good reason to believe she read and admired: History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. How Austen’s imagination may have been affected by Clarkson’s book one cannot even try to imagine without reading at least parts of it. This we shall presently do. The chief purpose of Part I is to make portions of Clarkson’s book known. (A similar aim regarding a very different book that Austen admired motivates Part II.)

A secondary aim of making representative parts of Clarkson’s work accessible is to persuade my readers of his book’s potential relevance to the reading of Mansfield Park. To this end, I will first briefly develop several analogies between Clarkson’s report on British enslavement of Africans and Austen’s rendering of life at Mansfield Park. Next I notice analogies between harsh aspects of Fanny Price’s beginnings and a slave’s. Then readings from Clarkson’s narrative follow.1

Three analogies stand out. The most obvious one is this: as the master of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram has ultimate responsibility for years of humiliation and pain inflicted upon Fanny by her authorized overseer, Mrs. Norris, yet he does not fully understand or intend this evil. Now suppose we infer fictional likelihood from real-life probabilities in Austen’s time, as her contemporary readers might do. We will then imagine Sir Thomas also responsible for leaving his Antigua sugar plantations under the control of an overseer who will have inflicted more humiliation, pain, and probably even death upon plantation slaves than Sir Thomas would have allowed if he had had full cognizance of this brutality.

Here is a second analogy. The practice of slavery in British dominions had been sustained in part by actions of the British government that variously supported the capture, transportation, and enslavement of African men, women and children. This institutionalization of African slavery relied upon a vicious distinction between white and black persons which declared that the welfare of whites required and justified the eternally subordinated service of blacks in the interests exclusively of whites. There is analogy at Mansfield Park. Upon her arrival at Mansfield Park ten-year-old Fanny Price is classified as an inferior being by her aunt Norris, and made to understand that her role is service. Mrs. Norris is carrying out a malicious version of the project “‘of great delicacy’” that Sir Thomas had irresponsibly assigned to her in anticipation of Fanny’s arrival: she was to help insure that Fanny knew that her status in the household differed from his daughters’ (10-11). Early on, Sir Thomas’s two very young daughters implicate themselves in their aunt’s condemning Fanny to membership in an inferior human species by participating in exchanges like this one: “‘How strange!—Did you ever hear of anything so stupid?’” asks a cousin, and “‘But, aunt, she is really so very ignorant!’” To this

Mrs. Norris replies, “‘Very true, indeed, my dears, but you are blessed with wonderful memories, and your poor cousin has probably none at all’” (18-19).

A third analogy between Clarkson’s and Austen’s narratives breaks down into a threepart resemblance between the appraisals and explanations each book offers of actions it ascribes to representatives of Britain’s ruling orders.

First, there is analogy in institutionally shaped motivations. The British stake in the desecration of African humanity in Africa, on the high seas, and in the colonies expressed an imperial culture and political system that—until the success of the British people’s campaign against the slave trade—made material interest the decisive factor in determining national policy. So too, Mansfield Park’s intermittent but ongoing humiliation of Fanny Price throughout her first eight years at the Park, Tom Bertram’s huge expenditures on his own entertainment at the cost of the Mansfield Park rectorship for his younger brother, and Maria Bertram’s approved marriage to a wealthy Rushworth for whom she felt only contempt were analogously expressive of a family’s participation in a national culture of materialist values in which Sir Thomas, Lady Bertram, and her sister Mrs. Norris figured as sustaining and sustained agents. In the novel’s last chapter, Sir Thomas recalls his conduct when he had visited Sotherton, discovered the emptiness of Mr. Rushworth, and observed Maria’s coldness toward this young man to whom she was engaged. Now he knew that “he ought not to have allowed the marriage . . . that in so doing he had sacrificed the right to the expedient, and been governed by motives of selfishness and worldly wisdom” (461).

The second part of this complex analogy is a similarity in the explanations given in the two narratives for the moral failures of those who are represented as wielding power over others.

According to Clarkson’s narrative, member of Parliament William Wilberforce concluded in the following way a major speech in support of ending the slave trade:

Whatever [Parliament] might do [this session], the people of Great Britain, he was confident, would abolish the Slave Trade when, as would then soon happen, its injustices and cruelty should be fairly laid before them. It was a nest of serpents, which would never have existed but for the darkness in which they lay hid. The light of day would now be let in on them, and they would vanish from the sight.

(448)

An ignorant public is here treated as Britain’s ultimate ruler; yet the suggestion is implicit that this ignorance figured in Parliament’s default as well. In Austen’s novel, Maria’s fall made Sir Thomas recognize his great error in delegating so much supervisory power over his daughters to their Aunt Norris. He came to feel Mrs. Norris’s presence “as an hourly evil,” and he concluded that in raising his daughters, “Something must have been wanting within . . . He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting . . . ” (465; 463). In the failure of Britain’s real-life and fictional masters of others’ lives, each book gives credence to the idea that ignorance of an evil that is hidden from sight—ignorance of geographically distant brutality in the slave trade, ignorance of the absence of religious principles within the Bertram children— enabled the evil to continue.

The last element in this tripartite analogy between Clarkson’s and Austen’s representation of rulers is the bestowal of credit upon the real and the fictional wrongdoers for belatedly reforming themselves. The British government aided and protected the horrendous commerce in slaves. Nevertheless, after a campaign that extended over twenty years had at last persuaded a long-resistant British cabinet to lead parliament into outlawing the ghastly trade, one leader of this arduous effort, Thomas Clarkson, who held no office, celebrated the victory with a tribute in his book to leading members of the British government (and surprised this reader) by dedicating his long book to two prime ministers and ten cabinet members!

So too, Austen exhibited a close analogy with Clarkson (and also surprised this reader) when, three paragraphs from the end of her book, she found for the story a double moral in the meritorious conduct and reflection of Sir Thomas, master of Mansfield Park, who, though ultimately responsible both for Fanny’s years of humiliation and for his elder daughter’s tragic moral emptiness, could nonetheless find just satisfaction from his enabling aid to his Price nephews and nieces and from his tardy enlightenment about the reciprocating values of at least selective solidarity between England’s “higher” and “lower” orders. Although “the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters, was never to be entirely done away,” nevertheless:

In [Susan’s] usefulness, in Fanny’s excellence, in William’s continued good conduct, and rising fame, and in the general well-doing and success of the other members of the [Price] family, all assisting to advance each other, and doing credit to his countenance and aid, Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all, and acknowledge the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure. (463; 473)

If we are to think knowingly about slavery’s possible importance to Mansfield Park, we need also to hold concretely in mind fictional Fanny Price’s harsh start in life. Although Fanny’s troubled beginnings are fully presented to us in Austen’s novel, they are easily undervalued by readers. Because they become present for us only retrospectively, after we have already come to know Fanny as a young woman of substantial culture, we tend to read their visibility to us during Fanny’s teenage visit to her Portsmouth family as merely rendering a brief present travail for grown-up Fanny. In truth, her visit to the Price home provides for us a “flash back” into the start of Fanny’s life that shows some resemblance to a slave’s by creating in Fanny both a lasting diffidence and a “consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.”

We are told that although “Sir Thomas Bertram had interest,” the profession of his brother-in-law, Mr. Price, “a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections . . . was such as no interest could reach” (3-4). Receiving that report long before we encounter Mr. Price, we infer a social inferiority to Sir Thomas that our meeting him late in the novel makes certain. When Mr. Price comes into the darkened hallway of his house after Fanny and her brother William arrive, he does not at first see Fanny, who is now eighteen and hasn’t been home since she was ten. He enters directly into excited talk with his sailor son about William’s ship. William shifts his father’s attention from himself:

“But here is my sister, Sir, here is Fanny;” turning and leading her forward;—“it is so dark you do not see her.”

With an acknowledgement that he had quite forgot her, Mr. Price now received his daughter; and, having given her a cordial hug, and observed that she was grown into a woman, and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, seemed very much inclined to forget her again.

Fanny shrunk back to her seat, with feelings sadly pained by his language and his smell of spirits; and he talked on only to his son . . . (380).

After this opening, the novel renders for us little of her father’s behavior with Fanny. However, when she has been with him long enough to be sure of his attitude to her, she finds that he “scarcely ever noticed her, but to make her the object of a coarse joke” (389)!

What do we learn of Fanny’s early life with her father? “She had never been able to recal anything approaching to tenderness in his former treatment of herself. There had remained” in her memory of him, after her growth out of childhood during the years at Mansfield Park, “only a general impression of roughness and loudness.” We surmise that during Fanny’s first ten years

her father at home had been much as she finds him now. He was not interested in her; he “talked only of the dock-yard, the harbour, Spithead and the Motherbank; he swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross” (389).

Using her narrator’s words, Austen composes grown-up Fanny’s present judgment of her mother’s character thus: Fanny “might scruple to make use of the words, but she must and did feel that her mother was a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end . . . ” (390).

What of her mother’s feeling for Fanny? Fanny finds that her mother has “no affection towards herself; no curiosity to know her better, no desire of her friendship, and no inclination for her company.” Moreover, the present largely reproduces the past: “Her daughters never had been much to her. She was fond of her sons, especially of William, but Betsey [now “about five”] was the first of her girls whom she had ever much regarded” (389-90). The first!

For Fanny’s first ten years her father had been rough, loud, coarse, lewd, and uninterested in Fanny. Her mother had been a slattern who felt no affection for Fanny.

One can justly find it a puzzle that Austen should choose to create a heroine with so awful a start in life. Moreover, when Fanny’s Aunt Norris and her female cousins suspect newly arrived, ten-year-old Fanny of belonging to an inferior species of humanity, when she is submitted to years of tyranny and servitude under Mrs. Norris, some of it in Sir Thomas’s presence, it is not unreasonable to look for further evidence that the novel intends some analogy between Mansfield Park and the order of things on Sir Thomas’s slave-worked sugar plantation in Antigua. For external, indirect evidence—very indirect, indeed, yet in its own way powerful—my exhibit in this essay will be a sample of the book by Thomas Clarkson that Austen could not have read earlier than two or three years before beginning Mansfield Park.

Did Austen in fact come to the writing of her own book with slavery in mind? Perhaps we shall never be sure. However, concerning the slave trade we can feel confident that there is an experience she shared with the British public at large and another that she shared with readers of Thomas Clarkson’s book. During the period from 1811 to 1813 when Austen was writing Mansfield Park, the multitude of white persons in the British “sugar islands” who exercised absolute rule over a vaster multitude of black persons held there as slaves by perpetual armed terror were much in the public mind. The long-running, popular movement to end the British

trade in slaves—in which Austen’s favorite poet Cowper figured prominently and with which she could not have failed to be familiar—had reached a triumphant first conclusion when in 1807 Parliament at last banned this trade throughout the British empire. In the banning legislation, however, there were deficiencies in provision for enforcement that evoked continued public preoccupation with their nation’s not yet totally ended slave trade.

This public interest had been partly sustained by publication of an account of the campaign to end the trade. A year after the successful Parliamentary conclusion of the long civic effort to end it, Thomas Clarkson published an account of this movement that was partly a memoir of his own leading role in it. We conclude from one of her letters that Austen read Clarkson’s book with enthusiasm. While she was writing Mansfield Park, in a letter of 24 January 1813 to her sister Cassandra she associates this man of peace, Thomas Clarkson, with a man of war:

I am reading a Society-Octavo, an Essay on the Military Police [Policy] & Institutions of the British Empire, by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers, a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining. I am as much in love with the Author as I ever was with Clarkson . . .

If we will ourselves today read Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 history of the abolition of the slave trade, and if we then imagine Austen reading it soon after it came out, hence not long before she started Mansfield Park but when this emotionally wrenching subject of civic interest was still much alive in Britain, we shall find ourselves able to believe that Clarkson’s book would have made a terrific impact upon her imagination. Without reading Clarkson this impact is hard for us to believe in and impossible even partially to share. Today Clarkson is not easily accessible.

Sampling his work will bring our own present experience of his work into some alignment with a similar experience of Austen’s two centuries ago. We will then be in a position to understand how her reading Clarkson might have influenced her thinking about her next novel, Mansfield Park.

The reader will understand that in presenting quotations from Clarkson’s book on the fight to end the slave trade, I myself am not engaged in making an argument about the slave trade or about the struggle to end it. Indeed, in the course of offering these quotations I am making no argument at all. I am trying to bring into my reader’s experience a simulacrum of Jane Austen’s own experience in reading Thomas Clarkson’s book.

To be sure, I do hope that after reading these excerpts from Clarkson my readers will be sympathetic to the idea that Austen’s reading him may have influenced her thought of her next novel. But the case for that sympathy I intend to be found entirely in the excerpts themselves when taken together with my sometimes summarizing an omitted part of Clarkson’s narrative and occasionally suggesting likely reasons why Austen would be receptive to his account.

Thomas Clarkson came upon the anti-slavery movement by accident. In his last year at Oxford he entered a contest for the Latin dissertation prize, hoping to repeat a first-prize victory of the year before. His aspiring to the prize was independent of the assigned topic. Translated, the topic turned out to be: “Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?” He knew nothing of the subject, but he got hold of Anthony Benezet’s Historical Account of Guinea.

Clarkson writes (and Austen reads):

Furnished then in this manner, I began my work. But no person can tell the severe trial which the writing of it proved to me. I had expected pleasure from the invention of the arguments, from the arrangement of them, from the putting of them together, and from the thought in the interim that I was engaged in an innocent contest for literary honour. But all my pleasure was damped by the facts which were now continually before me. It was but one gloomy subject from morning to night. In the day-time I was uneasy. In the night I had little rest. I sometimes never closed my eye-lids for grief. It became now not as much a trial for academical reputation, as for the production of a work, which might be useful to injured Africa. And keeping this idea in my mind ever after the perusal of Benezet, I always slept with a candle in my room, that I might rise out of my bed and put down such thoughts as might occur to me in the night, if I judged them valuable, conceiving that no arguments of any moment should be lost in so great a cause. Having at length finished this painful task, I sent my Essay to the vicechancellor, and soon afterwards found myself honoured as before with the first prize. (137-38)

Jane Austen could remember as a girl the “innocent contest for literary honor”” in which she had successfully engaged within her family circle. In much later years when visiting her wealthy brother’s family at Godmersham, sometimes Austen “would “sit quietly . . . beside the fire in the library” engaged with her needlework, and then she “would suddenly burst out laughing, jump up and run across the room to a table where pens and paper were lying, write something down, and then come back to the fire and go on quietly working as before” (Family Record 184). We can understand how Thomas Clarkson’s recital of his collegiate transition from intellectual exercise to passionate commitment might hold her eager interest.

Clarkson writes that on the way to London after a public reading of his essay at Oxford,

[T]he subject of it almost wholly engrossed my attention. I became at times very seriously affected while upon the road. I stopped my horse occasionally, and dismounted and walked. I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true. The more, however, I reflected upon them, the more I gave them credit. Coming in sight of Wades Mill, in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.

Agitated in this manner, I reached home. This was in the summer of 1785. (138)

Because Clarkson did in fact undertake at a young age to “see these calamities to their end,” this scene too would be persuasive to a reader who knew something of the man’s later achievements.

Also, there would have been something fascinating for so morally motivated and religiously committed a woman of genius as Austen was to witness in this author’s memoir his male freedom and power of public action tied so directly to serious meditation and inspiration. The novelist-like detail with which Clarkson recaptured his intensely felt ride home after graduating from Oxford could hardly fail to hold Austen to his text.

Clarkson reports that his Oxford essay came to the attention of an informal organization of persons—many of them Quakers—who had formed a small group committed to working against the slave trade. He did not know of their existence, but they heard of his Latin essay, read it, contacted him, introduced themselves to him, informed him of the work they had done and were doing, and invited him to join them. He was so excited to discover such a group, that he promised them to devote himself to the cause. Then he realized he might have overstepped the bounds of good sense:

The next morning, when I awoke, one of the first things that struck me was, that I had given a pledge to the company the day before that I would devote myself to the cause of the oppressed Africans. I became a little uneasy at this. I questioned whether I had considered matters sufficiently to be able to go so far with propriety. (146)

He went through all the objections to his moving forward with the cause, and examined both the obstacles and the helps he knew of. The objection that gave him the most trouble was this one:

That I had been designed for the church; that I had already advanced as far as deacon’s orders in it; that my prospects there on account of my connexions were then brilliant, that, by appearing to desert my profession my family would be dissatisfied, if not unhappy . . . the sacrifice of my prospects staggered me . . . I had ambition. I had a thirst after worldly interest and honours, and I could not extinguish it at once. I was more than two hours in solitude under this painful conflict. . . . I felt certain that if ever the matter were to be taken up, there could be no hope of success, except it should be taken up by some one who would make it an object for the business of his life. I thought too that a man’s life might not be more than adequate to the accomplishment of the end. But I knew of no one who could devote such a portion of time to it . . . and the question was, whether I was prepared to make the sacrifice. In favour of the undertaking, I urged to myself, that never was any cause, which had been taken up by man in any country or in any age, so great and important; that never was there one in which so much misery was heard to cry for redress; that never was there one in which so much good could be done; never one in which the duty of Christian charity could be so extensively exercised; never one more worthy of the devotion of a whole life towards it; and that if a man thought properly, he ought to rejoice to have been called into it, if he were only permitted to become an instrument in forwarding it in any part of its progress . . . At length I yielded, not because I saw any reasonable prospect of success in my new undertaking (for all cool-headed and cool-hearted men would have pronounced against it), but in obedience, I believe, to a higher Power. (147-48)

One can believe that Austen could have reacted to this passage (already knowing of the campaign that ensued) rather as she would make Henry Crawford, in one of his moods, react to the stories of young William Price, back from six years service in the wartime Navy “describing any of the imminent hazards, or terrific scenes, which such a period, at sea, must supply,” with their implied “glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance”: Austen would write that Crawford’s “heart was warmed, his fancy fired, and . . . he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself . . . with so much self-respect and happy ardour . . . ” (236)! One imagines her finding in herself a similar response while reading of Thomas Clarkson, just out of Oxford, entering his different kind of field “of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance.”

The committee for effecting abolition of the slave trade decided to publish and distribute an English translation of Clarkson’s prize Latin essay; asked him to visit various persons of influence, including members of Parliament to discuss his findings with them; and authorized him to undertake trips to Lancaster, Bristol, and Liverpool to gather information that could be used when, as they trusted, a Parliamentary inquiry eventually would be started into the slave trade.

Before setting out on his expeditions from London to other cities, Clarkson reports that he was asked to visit William Wilberforce, member of Parliament, to ask him whether he would take on the burden of calling for a Parliamentary inquiry into the slave trade. The group Clarkson was working with was unwilling to go forward in a more formal way without assurance that their cause would be adopted by someone as persuasive and respected in Parliament as William Wilberforce, who was also a personal friend of Prime Minister William Pitt. So broaching the subject with Wilberforce could be understood to be a moment of crisis in the movement’s birth. Clarkson was asked to do this job, as being by now master of many elements of the subject, and as already having had much useful conversation on it with Wilberforce.

Clarkson reports that he agreed to try to engage Wilberforce. One understands how the writer who would soon create a Fanny Price who would pause before a drawing room door hoping “for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied her” (177) might respond to Clarkson’s account of this venture:

In consequence of the promise I had made, I went to Mr. Wilberforce. But when I saw him, I seemed unable to inform him of the object of my visit.

Whether this inability arose from a sudden fear that his answer might not be favourable, or from a fear that I might possibly involve him in a long and arduous contest upon this subject, or whether it arose from an awful sense of the importance of the mission, as it related to the happiness of hundreds of thousands then alive, and of millions unborn, I cannot say. But I had a feeling within me for which I could not account, and which seemed to hinder me from proceeding; and I actually went away without informing him of my errand. (160)

Clarkson’s anti-slave-trade group found another way to get Wilberforce’s consent, and with it in hand they sent Clarkson forth on the first of many trips criss-crossing England, on which he would over the years cover tens of thousands of miles. As the movement gained momentum and renown, knowledgeable witnesses in centers of the slave trade such as Liverpool and Bristol became harder to get because of the risk of losing their jobs. Nevertheless he writes:

I began now to think that the day was not long enough for me to labour in.

I regretted often the approach of night, which suspended my work, and I often welcomed that of the morning, which restored me to it. When I felt myself weary, I became refreshed by the thought of what I was doing; when disconsolate, I was comforted by it. (193)

Clarkson made the acquaintance of a ship’s surgeon who had made four trips on slave ships to Africa. He got invaluable information from him. But would he testify in public?

I was fearful lest, when I should put the question to him, his future plan of life . . . would prevent him from giving his testimony, and I delayed asking him for many days . . . [W]hen I thought I was . . . probably in some little estimation, with him, I ventured to open my wishes on this subject. He answered me . . . that he had left the trade upon principle, and that he would state all he knew concerning it, either publicly or privately, and at any time . . . This answer produced such an effect upon me, after all my former disappointments, that I felt it all over my frame. It operated like a sudden shock, which often disables the impressed person for a time. So the joy I felt rendered me quite useless, as to business, for the remainder of the day. (210-11)

The author who created the vivid post-crisis relief of Elinor Dashwood attending Marianne in her illness could find Clarkson’s account both convincing and endearing.

Liverpool was a major center of the slave trade. Thomas Clarkson became well known there during an extended visit involving intensive investigations among seamen:

The temper of many of the interested people of Liverpool had now become still more irritable, and their hostility more apparent than before. I received anonymous letters, entreating me to leave it, or I should otherwise never leave it alive. The only effect which this advice had upon me, was to make me more vigilant when I went out at night. I never stirred out at this time without Mr. Falconbridge [the former slave-ship surgeon]; and he never accompanied me without being well armed. Of this, however, I knew nothing until we had left the place. (240)

Clarkson went on in his working travels, and in Manchester he discovered, first that he himself was already known, and second that his cause was gaining publicity and that petitions were being sent in to Parliament:

The news, as it astonished, so it almost overpowered me with joy. I rejoiced in it, because it was a proof of the general good disposition of my countrymen; because it showed me that the cause was such as needed only to be known, to be patronized; and because the manifestation of this spirit seemed to me to be an earnest, that success would ultimately follow. (243)

I think it believable that Clarkson’s uplifting success with his fellow citizens would be in Austen’s mind in her 2 September 1814 letter to her friend Martha Lloyd when she reports dire predictions from London about the war with America (our “War of 1812”) but affirms, “I place my hope of better things on a claim to the protection of Heaven as a Religious Nation, a Nation inspite of much Evil improving in Religion . . . ”

Now Clarkson was called upon in Manchester by local supporters, “understanding that I had been educated as a clergyman,” to preach on the next day, Sunday, on the subject of the Slave Trade. “I found myself embarrassed at their request. Foreseeing . . . that this cause might demand my attention to it for the greatest part of my life, I had given up all thoughts of my profession. I had hitherto but seldom exercised it.” He was not confident that giving the sermon was either a right thing for him to do or one he could execute with credit. But his new associates “would not hear of a refusal, and I was obliged to give my consent, though I was not reconciled to the measure.” The author-shortly-to-be of the discussion between Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram of how sermons should be given (and the appraising auditor of two brothers’ sermons) could hardly help finding herself much interested in this account of Thomas Clarkson’s experience:

When I went into the church it was so full that I could scarcely get to my place . . . I was surprised, also, to find a great crowd of black people standing around the pulpit . . . The text that I took, as the best to be found in such a hurry, was the following:—“Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

I took an opportunity of showing, from these words, that Moses, [was] endeavoring to promote among the children of Israel a tender disposition towards those unfortunate strangers who had come under their dominion . . . For they could not have forgotten that the Egyptians “had made them serve with rigour; that they had made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field; and that all the service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour.” The argument, therefore, of Moses was simply this:—“Ye knew well, when you were strangers in Egypt, the nature of

your own feelings. Were you not made miserable by your debased situation there? But if so, you must be sensible that the stranger, who has the same heart, or the same feelings with yourselves, must experience similar suffering, if treated in a similar way. I charge you, then, knowing this, to stand clear of the crime of his oppression.” (244-45)

So far as we know, Austen never wrote in this vein, but things she did write within and outside of her novels—not least about the situation in England of dependent unmarried women like herself—make one believe that this sample of a sermon could find resonance in her response to it.

Jane Austen will have viewed a fold-out drawing of a cross-section of a slave ship with Africans schematically pictured packed into a narrow space, which Thomas Clarkson and his associates had drawn by looking at ships’ plans and calculating the space assigned to Africans, the latter’s exact number ascertained by checking ships’ documents—a number the reader was invited to verify by counting the depicted individuals! This picture alone would convert to the abolition cause virtually any reader not hardened by a vested interest in the slave trade.

In this book that Austen so admired, Clarkson reproduced some of the most painfully telling arguments given in Parliament for abolition of the slave trade. Quoted at greatest length were the words of abolition’s leader in Parliament, William Wilberforce. Also reported were those of the famous Charles James Fox, and of the most powerful friend of Wilberforce, prime Minister William Pitt, who in 1792 finally concluded at six in the morning the lengthy speech that preceded passage in the House of Commons of a resolution to abolish the slave trade. In fact, this did not end the debate, since the Commons had to renew the resolution the following year and the House of Lords had to agree, which neither did—nor the following year, nor the following; and so on. The effective bill to end the slave trade was at last passed some fifteen years later, on March 24, 1807, and was signed by the king on March 27, 1807, some twenty years or so after Wilberforce had agreed with Clarkson’s associates to help in Parliament with the effort to end this enormously profitable trade.

Transcripts of those 1792 speeches of the Parliamentarians were the chief concluding documents of rhetorical power presented in Clarkson’s book. I offer a sample from a relatively early speech by William Wilberforce summarizing some of the evidence that had been presented to Parliamentary and royal committees of inquiry. The full speech occupies twenty pages in the book that Austen read. Thomas Clarkson reports Wilberforce speaking as follows:

Captain Wilson and Captain Hills, of His Majesty’s navy, and Mr. Dalrymple, of the land service, had concurred in stating, that in the country contiguous to the river Senegal, when slave-ships arrived there, armed parties were regularly sent out in the evening, who scoured the country, and brought in their prey. The wretched victims were to be seen in the morning bound back to back in the huts on the shore, whence they were conveyed, tied hand and foot, to the slave-ships . . . Individuals were kidnapped whilst in their fields and gardens.

There was a universal feeling of distrust and apprehension there. The natives never went any distance from homes without arms; and when Captain Wilson asked them the reason of it, they pointed to a slave-ship then lying within sight.

(428-29)

However, Wilberforce points out that staying close to home was of no avail:

An agent was sent to establish a settlement in the country, and to send to the ships such slaves as he might obtain. The orders he received from his captain were, that “he was to encourage the chieftains by brandy and gunpowder to go to war, to make slaves.” This he did. The African chieftains, in turn, performed their part. The neighboring villages were surrounded and set on fire in the night.

The inhabitants were seized when making their escape; and being brought to the agent, were by him forwarded to his principal on the coast. (429)

For those English men and women who thought of themselves as constituting the nation—and Austen’s family were among them—here was evil of proportions unimagined by many of them, and for which the men directly and the women indirectly had responsibility through their representatives in Parliament, since it was within the power of this body to stop it.

Wilberforce moved on from slave acquisition in Africa to the brutalities upon the high seas. Here he listed again what he had already cited in an earlier speech about the miseries of the Middle Passage:

The same suffering from a state of suffocation, by being crowded together; the same eating by compulsion; the same despair; the same insanity; and all the other abominations which characterized the trade. New instances however had occurred, where these wretched men had resolved on death to terminate their woes. Some had . . . thrown themselves into the sea; and more than one, when in

the act of drowning, were seen to wave their hands in triumph, “exulting” (to use the words of an eye-witness) “that they had escaped.” (433)

Early on, a central pillar of the defense of the slave trade had been the claim that the natives of Africa were (at best) of an inferior race of humans whose thoughts, attitudes, dispositions, and feelings should not be supposed analogous to our own. Much evidence had been presented that had conclusively repudiated this proposition. Clarkson continues reporting Wilberforce’s speech:

But upon whom did the cruelties . . . arising out of the prosecution of this barbarous traffic, fall? Upon a people with feeling and intellect like ourselves.

One witness had spoken of the acuteness of their understandings; another, of the extent of their memories; a third, of their genius for commerce; a fourth of their proficiency in manufactures at home . . . The argument that they were an inferior species had been proved false. (434)

Turning to the condition of the slaves on the islands, Wilberforce remarks that it might be that the worst treatment of slaves on the sugar plantations was, in part, because of the “the nonresidence of the planters. Sir George Yonge, and many others, had said, they had seen slaves treated in a manner which their owners would have resented if they had known it. Mr. Orde spoke in the strongest terms of the misconduct of the managers” (437).

Fictional Sir Thomas Bertram is, of course, Austen’s conception of an absentee planter whose plantation manager may have been brutal with slaves.

Moved by the same mercy for my readers that shortened William Wilberforce’s evidence, I repeat only one of the particular horrors Thomas Clarkson reproduced and we must believe that Jane Austen read. Local legislators in the Caribbean sugar-islands who wanted to block abolition of the slave trade offered to pass new local laws to lessen suffering of slaves by regulating their treatment. Wilberforce asks:

How could any laws . . . be effectual, whilst the evidence of Negroes was in no case admitted against White men? What was the answer from Grenada?

Did it not state, “that they who were capable of cruelty, would in general be artful enough to prevent any but slaves from being witnesses of the fact?” (444)

In Barbados the law stated that no master could give more than thirty-nine lashes to a slave at one time. Here was the effect, Wilberforce reports:

A wretch in Barbados had chained a Negro girl to the floor, and flogged her till she was nearly expiring. Captain Cook and Major Fitch, hearing her cries, broke open the door and found her. The wretch retreated from their resentment, but cried out exultingly, “that he had only given her thirty-nine lashes (the number limited by law) at any one time; and that he had inflicted this number three times since the beginning of the night,” adding, “that he would prosecute them for breaking open his door; and that he would flog her to death . . . if he pleased; and that he would give her the fourth thirty-nine before morning.” (445)

Most readers of Austen today have not been in a position to imagine her reading this record.

Those who have joined me in sampling Clarkson—and in calling to mind analogies with her next work of imagination, Mansfield Park—can understand how this reading might have affected her thought of that novel.

Part II. Mansfield Park and Austen’s Reading on Imperial Warfare

That generations of Britain’s rulers, with the people’s implied consent, had incurred direct responsibility for “much Evil” in supporting the capture, transportation, and enslavement of millions of Africans did not mean to Austen that either the nation or its rulers were evil. On the contrary, as she implied in her 2 September 1814 letter to her friend Martha Lloyd that acknowledged “much evil” in Britain’s actions, Thomas Clarkson’s book gave her reason to believe that both the leaders of the nation and the nation as a whole were, as she remarked of Britain in that letter, “improving in religion”: Britain’s outlawing the slave trade demonstrated that at long last it showed a national will for righteousness and a capacity radically to reshape regulation of its trade out of respect for the humanity of devastated Africa. Encouraged by her nation’s dramatic moral progress in treatment of the slave trade, Austen could strongly believe Britain capable of honorable dominion over lands (allegedly) needed for its own prosperity—and (allegedly) needed for its safety too, as she might be helped to believe when reading a book by Charles Pasley: Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire. Pasley’s book could invigorate her belief in the warfare on behalf of imperial interests in which her

beloved naval-officer brothers Frank and Charles had sometimes been actively engaged. Let me return to Austen’s 24 January 1813 letter—written to her sister Cassandra when Austen was composing Mansfield Park—and extend the quotation already given sufficiently to complete her expressed appreciation of Charles Pasley:

I am reading a Society-Octavo, an Essay on the Military Police [Policy] & Institutions of the British Empire, by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers, a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining. I am as much in love with the Author as I ever was with Clarkson . . . The first soldier I ever sighed for; but he does write with extraordinary force and spirit.

Pasley’s book made the case for a necessary connection between the expansion of Britain’s widespread colonial dominions, on the one hand, and success in the long defensive war against France, on the other. A short excursion into Captain Charles Pasley’s way of characterizing the new, martial Britain for which he argued will bring us close to a vicarious military experience Jane Austen enjoyed that is otherwise unavailable to us. Critically more important, our reading portions of what Austen herself read in Pasley’s book can help us appreciate a political dimension of Mansfield Park that the book she admired by Thomas Clarkson on the slave trade cannot suggest.

In her novel Austen implicitly affirms the legitimacy of Sir Thomas Bertram’’s rule despite its moral failure’s accounting for irreparable evil. Consistently with her belief in the moral acceptability of the current leadership of the nation, she means to give Sir Thomas credit for seeing the enormity of his failings, and for achieving some success in undertaking to reform himself. So we find her, through her narrator, saying of Sir Thomas’s failure to make Fanny’s childhood less unhappy that “it had been an error of judgment only”; and after affirming that “the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters, was never to be entirely done away,” she composes the unpredictable tribute Sir Thomas gets from the story’s narrator a mere three paragraphs from the very end of the novel, a tribute reported earlier but that bears repeating in part:

In [Susan’s] usefulness, in Fanny’s excellence, in William’s continued good conduct, and rising fame, and in the general well-doing and success of the other members of the family, all assisting to advance each other, and doing credit to his countenance and aid, Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all. (463; 473)

This mixture of mitigation for Sir Thomas’s failings and praise for his reform is analogous to Clarkson’s account in his book of William Wilberforce’s attributing to ignorance of slavery’s horrors Britain’s acquiescence in the atrocities perpetrated on Africans in pursuit of profits, and Clarkson’s dedicating his book to a group of government Cabinet members despite the long resistance of the government (Pitt importantly excepted) to the public campaign to end the slave trade that Clarkson had helped lead. Almost at the end of her book, Austen makes out Sir Thomas also to be “inspite of much evil” perfecting the legitimacy of his rule at home and abroad by “improving in Religion.”

Reading a sample of Charles Pasley’s attempted proof of the necessity for making Britain’s army as mighty and its disposition as “martial” as the Royal Navy’s may help undergird with a political basis our appreciation of Austen’s creative loyalty to Sir Thomas as the empire’s representative in her novel.

The circumstances that Austen’s favorite soldier, Captain Pasley, perceives as compelling him to exhort Britain to become a martial nation on land as it is already on sea are roughly these: land war against Napoleon has so far been unsuccessful both as fought by Britain and by those she has helped with money subsidies. If Napoleon’s domination of the European continent is allowed to continue to consolidate and expand, then fairly simple political-military arithmetic— which he works out for his readers—tells Pasley that eventually French sea power will exceed Britain’s. Then, if Britain’s military policy remains as it has been in recent times, Britain will inevitably succumb to Napoleon’s ambition. The long-term logic of the international situation, writes Pasley, is this: either Britain conquers Napoleon’s France or France conquers Britain.

Moreover, this generalization gets support from present and past military experience worldwide.

Wherever comparably powerful nations coexist in a competitive atmosphere, each must permanently keep increasing its power, and therefore its empire, in an effort, at best, to scare off attack by the other, or, at worst, to defeat it in any unavoidable combat. Therefore, from the aggressive defense required of Britain by Napoleon’s continental domination, Charles Pasley derives an argument for offensive warfare that entails expansion of British imperial rule.

Captain Pasley’s chief immediate task is concretely to spell out for his readers what it would mean for Britain to become what it has refused in recent times to be: a warlike— specifically a military—nation, as distinguished from a merely naval power, which an insular, mercantile nation always becomes if it can, and which Britain already is:

Ambition . . . by which I mean the wish to extend the power and dominion of a nation, is only criminal, when it passes the limits of necessity; but before it passes these limits, it is a virtue, and the want of it a most pernicious defect, both in the character of a people and of its rulers . . . The time is arrived, or is rapidly approaching in which . . . like other great nations, which have preceded us on the theatre of the universe, we must become a warlike people by land as well as by sea; . . . we must . . . conquer upon both elements, or in all probability we shall, on both, be conquered. (114-15)

Pasley takes care to show that he believes that Britain’s constitution is a prime source of the nation’s preeminence in imperial reach. He shows, too, his appreciation of the importance, in defining Great Britain’s military potential, of its unique blending of the commercial and the landed interests among its ruling orders, a blend that Austen has taken care to build into the circumstances of Sir Thomas Bertram, Baronet, who is master of both a colonial business enterprise and (partly supported by that enterprise) an English county estate from which he takes his seat in Parliament:

What has raised Great Britain to a rank, amongst the nations, so much higher than other states originally of greater resources: What is it, that has preserved her existence, whilst the nations around her have been destroyed by France? Let us speak with proper veneration and gratitude of the constitution with which Divine Providence has blessed us; the superior excellence of which over a more popular form of government, has been allowed even by the citizens of other free states. The British constitution alone has been the source of our grandeur; that alone has preserved our independence. (456)

Pasley offers a partially economic interpretation of this constitution:

From the very nature of things, in a free country, commercial merit will always be at the head of the mercantile body. Integrity forms the very soul of commerce; perseverance, and even entreprise, are essential to it; qualities all highly congenial to the military character. In Great Britain, the hereditary nobility and gentry, composing the landed interest, by their weight in the state and personal respectability, form, at all times, a useful and a necessary check upon the mercantile body . . . Hence the merchants of this country, probably out of generous emulation, have displayed a munificence and a liberality of mind, which it is in vain to look for in those of other commercial states . . .

However, the men of business whose enterprise so often motivates imperial expansion—yet who for business reasons often prefer the predictability of peace to the chaos and taxes of war—must not be allowed to forget the military foundation of their success:

[W]e must take care . . . not to allow the supposed interests of our merchants to divert us from carrying on war with vigour: that can never be in their real interest; for by the sabre and the bayonet, and by these alone, we may establish a free market wherever we please; opening an outlet for our wares as wide as the coasts of the whole world . . . (472-73)

As Austen would have known, it is by the sabre and bayonet—and by naval guns—that Britain has sustained both its access to the massive capture in Africa of persons to be enslaved, and its possession of the sugar islands where the slaves labor—including on Antigua, the imagined site of Sir Thomas’s sugar plantation.

At one of several places in his book, Captain—later to be General—Pasley articulates “the true principles of martial policy”:

The history of mankind has proved that war is an inevitable evil. The justice of going to war, for a necessary object, has never for a moment been disputed in any age or country, except by a few fanatics. War should not be lightly entered into, nor should any warlike entreprise be rashly undertaken: but when once undertaken, those who have drawn the sword should never give way to despair, on account of difficulties or dangers, foreseen or unforeseen. The art of war is the art of surmounting difficulties, and of setting danger at defiance; and the only test of great statesmen, and of skillful generals, is, the being able with smaller means to surmount greater difficulties than those of some rival nation.

(231)

In reading Pasley today, Austen’s characterization of his writing as showing “extraordinary force and spirit” will time and again strike us as on the mark, and also as interesting for the insight it gives us into the content of her enthusiasm. Here is another example of Pasley’s “extraordinary force and spirit”:

Till we shall send forth our armies to fight the enemy on the banks of the Ebro, the Elbe, or the Loire, with as much confidence as we believe we should feel in fighting upon those of the Thames; till we plant the British flag on the mountains of Sicily, on the Appennines, or on the plains of Champagne, with the same undaunted hearts, with which we now display it on the ocean, or on some beggarly rock that is encircled by its waves; till we come forward in the face of the universe, with a view to the applause of the present and of future ages, and, throwing the gauntlet to our adversary, boldly challenge him to meet us hand to hand in any part of the known world; it is my opinion that we shall see all the efforts of our armies . . . terminate, as they have lately done, either in disappointment or disgrace . . . From the want of this daring spirit in our national councils and policy, all our failures, all our disasters by land have arisen. (118-19)

Charles Pasley was personally a courageous fighter who, by the time he wrote his book, had been twice-wounded in a single battle. However, in the passage just quoted he has not yet as a writer quite scaled his literary peak of martial fervor. Perhaps in what follows he does:

The business of an army is to destroy the enemies of its country; nor can it ever be justified in yielding any point, with a view to saving itself . . . It is better for a nation to risk every thing than to give up an object in war; better for an army, a corps, or detachment to perish, than by capitulation, or otherwise, to abandon, without resistance, any country, position, or garrison, which it was sent to occupy or defend against an enemy, however superior in numbers or resources . . . If . . . we apply the same energy to our military, with which we have conducted our naval affairs, we shall become the most warlike nation, by land, as we are by sea, that every existed. (526; 524; 529)

Reading these words, Austen was reading “the only soldier I ever sighed for.� One can sometimes doubt that even her most scholarly readers live much with the idea of her spirit resonating sympathetically to these words during the days in which she was writing Mansfield Park.

Pasley calls for honorable conduct in war, one point of contact in his book with a salient motive in Thomas Clarkson’s narrative:

I have generally recommended a system of conquest . . . but in using the word conquest, it was very far from my meaning, that we should treat the people of other countries as conquered nations. Where they have good laws, and are contented with them, let them enjoy them . . . Where they have bad ones, let us improve their condition, by granting them the same happy security of person and property, which we ourselves enjoy, retaining only the necessary supremacy in their political and military affairs. The ambition of Great Britain, were we to conquer on these principles, would be a blessing to mankind . . . (526-27)

Pasley’s long book is full of details of the military significance of various colonial policies, of wars and battles and national characters and policies in the modern and even classical past and in the present; and it is full of the comparative strengths and qualities of national armies and navies past and present, and of the effects of different political constitutions. Therefore it is misleading to say the passages I have quoted are representative of the entire book. They are, however, representative of his discussions of current—and his proposals for future—British military policy, as historian Asa Briggs’s brief reference to the book as a “fiery criticism” of British military policy implies (161,n.1).

Clarkson and Pasley were both drawing upon the experience of their early manhood in exhibiting for their readers massive details—in one book of humanitarian campaigns, in another of wars—each man working in a mercilessly harsh world: Clarkson worked for British national morality without loss of empire (as he understood that), Pasley strove for British martial imperialism without loss of honor (as he understood this). Austen read these details with interest and entered with enthusiasm into the humanitarian political project of one author and into the imperialistic military project of the other. I take it that whereas Thomas Clarkson’s book inspired her empathic imagination, Charles Pasley’s invigorated her imperialistic sympathies.

Yet each also contributed to the passion more native to the other, for the success of Clarkson’s reforming project reassured her about the justice of Pasley’s imperial ambition, and the charisma of Pasley’s zeal helped her to empathize with the strenuously challenging life of England’s sometimes ruthless rulers. Fictionally, Sir Thomas Bertram is one of these rulers of both domestic and foreign dominions. The sources within the author from which sprang both the legitimacy of Sir Thomas’s rule despite its evil aspects and the redemption of his character are, perhaps, the same as those from which sprang Austen’s capacity to read with enthusiasm—even with affection—the two authors we have sampled, one celebrating both the virtues of vigorous martial energy and the unique fitness of British dominion over foreign peoples, the other exhibiting “much evil” in Britain’s support of the institution of slavery, and yet showing the high morality of Britain’s action in legislating an end to its own prosperous trade in slaves.

NOTE

1. Taking some account of connections between Sir Thomas’s ownership of slaves in Antigua and life at Mansfield Park is by now common among critics. The first author I have read who gives them serious consideration is Avrom Fleishman in his 1967 book, A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (37-40). Among other treatments of the theme, the following are of interest: Edward Said, “Jane Austen and Empire” (1989); Moira Ferguson, “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender” (1991); Maaja A. Stewart, “The Shadow Behind the Country House: West Indian Slavery and Female Virtue in Mansfield Park” (1993); Joseph Lew, “‘That Abominable Traffic’: Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery” (1994); Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture and Imperialism” (2000); John Wiltshire, “Decolonising Mansfield Park” (2003).

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1934. _____. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1995.

Austen-Leigh, William and Austen-Leigh, Richard Arthur. Jane Austen: A Family Record.

1913. Rev. Deirdre Le Faye. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1989.

Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement. London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1959.

Clarkson, Thomas. History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. 1808. Ed. John W. Parker. A New Edition, with Prefatory Remarks on the Subsequent Abolition of Slavery. London: John W. Parker, 1839.

Deresiewicz, William. Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. New York: Columbia UP, 2004.

Ferguson, Moira. “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender.” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 1-2, 118-39.

Fleishman, Avrom. A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. Originally published: Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1967.

Fraiman, Susan. “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture and Imperialism.” Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees. Ed. Deirdre Lynch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

206-23.

Lew, Joseph. “‘That Abominable Traffic’: Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery.”

History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. Athens and London: U Georgia P, 1994. 271-300.

Pasley, Charles W. Essay on The Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire.

November, 1810. 4th ed., 1812. Re-issued (with author given as Major-General Sir C. W. Pasley), London: John Weale, 1847.

Said, Edward. “Jane Austen and Empire.” In Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Terry Eagleton. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1989. 150-64. Also, with some new matter, in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism.

New York: Knopf, 1993. 80-97.

Stewart, Maaja A. “The Shadow behind the Country House: West Indian Slavery and Female Virtue in Mansfield Park.” Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen’s Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts. Ed. Maaja A. Stewart. Athens and London: U Georgia P, 1993.

Tuite, Clara. “Domestic Retrenchment and Imperial Expansion: The Property Plots of Mansfield Park.” The Postcolonial Jane Austen. Ed. You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.

London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Wiltshire, John. “Decolonising Mansfield Park.” Essays in Criticism 50 (October 2003). 30321.

Emma (1815) Anderson, Kathleen. "Fathers and Lovers: The Gender Dynamics of Relational Influence in Emma." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Craig, Sheryl Bonar. "The Value of a Good Income: Money in Emma." Persuasions 22 (2001).

Duckworth, W. "Reading Emma: Comic Irony, the Follies of Janeites, and Hermeneutic Mastery." Persuasions 24 (2003).

Fry, Paul H. "Georgic Comedy: The Fictive Territory of Jane Austen's Emma." Studies in the Novel 11, 2 (Summer 1979) pp 129-46 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Galperin, W., ed. "Re-reading Box Hill: reading the practice of reading everyday life." Six articles on the Box Hill scene in Emma. "Unanswerable Gallantry and Thick-Headed Nonsense"

by Michael Gamer. "Part of my aim is simply to show its complexity of signification, particularly the degree to which Austen frustrates even the most fundamental acts of interpretation and upsets rudimentary correspondences between signifiers and apparent signifieds." "Box Hill and the Limits of Realism," by George Levine. "Perhaps the most difficult thing for a modern reader of Emma to do is to take it straight, to accept Mr. Knightley as the moral authority the story seems to make him." "Social Theory at Box Hill: Acts of Union," by Deidre Lynch, who sees the scene as an acting out of several contradictory imperatives of nationhood and British identity. "Leaving Box Hill: Emma and Theatricality," by Adam Potkey, who traces Austen's stated preferences for Cowper and Johnson in pursuing issues of theatricality and display, to an ultimately deconstructive result. "Saying What One Thinks: Emma at Box Hill," by W. Walling, who considers the problem of anachronism, especially as it relates to views that either praise Austen's progressivism or bemoan her cultural limitations. "Boxing Emma; or the Reader's Dilemma at the Box Hill Games," by Susan J. Wolfson, who offers a close reading of the episode and its ramification in Emma. Wolfson contends it demonstrates that the character of Miss Bates is essential to a shifting idea of community in the novel. Romantic Circles (2001).

Grossman, Jonathan H. "The Labor of the Leisured in Emma: Class, Manners, and Austen."

Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, 2 (Sept. 1999) pp 143-64 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Huggins, Cynthia E., ed. "The Victorian Governess: A Bibliography." A list of recommended books and articles on the governess in Victorian society and Victorian novels. At the Victorian Web. Jackson, Karin. "The Dilemma of Emma: Moral, Ethical, and Spiritual Values." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Juhasz, Suzanne. "Reading Austen Writing Emma." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Kramp, Michael. "The woman, the woman, the gypsies, and England: Harriet Smith's national role" [Emma]. College Literature 31, 1 (Winter 2004) pp 147-68 [muse, extract].

Kuwahara, Kuldip Kaur. "Jane Austen's Emma and Empire: A Postcolonial View." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Lee, Marti D. "Aristos or Aristocracy? Alliances in Emma." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Moore, E. Margaret. "Emma and Miss Bates: Early Experiences of Separation and the Theme of Dependency in Jane Austen's Novels" [psychological and biographical approach]. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 9, 4 (Autumn 1969) pp 573-85 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Morgan, Susan J. "Emma Woodhouse and the Charms of Imagination." Studies in the Novel 7, 1 (Spring 1975) pp 33-48 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Morris. Ivor. "The Enigma of Harriet Smith." Persuasions 26 (2005).

Morse, Joann Ryan. "The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth: Shakespearean Comedy in Emma." Prof. Morse compares Austen's comedy in Emma to that of Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Persuasions 26 (2005).

Murray, James Gregory. "Measure and Balance in Jane Austen's Emma." College English 16, 3 (Dec. 1954) pp 160-66 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Nardin, Jane. "Charity in Emma." Studies in the Novel 7, 1 (Spring 1975) pp 61-72 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Pickrel, Paul. "Emma as Sequel." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40, 2 (Sept. 1985) pp 135-53 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Rogers, Susan. "Emma at Box Hill: A Very Questionable Day of Pleasure." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Stewart, Maaja A. "The Fools in Austen's Emma." Nineteenth-Century Literature 41, 1 (June 1986) pp 72-86 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Thaden, Barbara Z. "Figure and Ground: The Receding Heroine in Jane Austen's Emma" [Emma as a type of heroine]. South Atlantic Review 55, 1 (Jan. 1990) pp 42067 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

White, Laura Mooneyham. "Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in Austen's Emma." Papers on Language and Literature 44, 3 (Summer 2008) [questia sub ser].

Selection from Emma Literary Criticism

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

V.22, NO.1 (Winter 2001)

“The Value of a Good Income”: Money in Emma SHERYL BONAR CRAIG

Sheryl Bonar Craig (email: scraig@ucmo.edu) is an English Instructor at Central Missouri State University. She has published several journal articles on the English Novel, and she has published a short article, “My Kingdom for a Horse,” on the website of the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England.

ALTHOUGH JANE AUSTEN’S HEROINES ARE GENERALLY “handsome” and “clever,” only Miss Emma Woodhouse has the advantage of being “rich,” and this addition makes all the difference in Miss Woodhouse as a character and in Emma as a book. All of Austen’s novels are stories of young women growing up, learning about themselves and about other people through trial and error. One of the painful facts of life they must deal with is how financial insecurity leaves women easy prey to their greedy, shallow, and callous friends and acquaintances. Edward Copeland, in “Money,” notes that “the shadow of the single woman without money, Charlotte Lucas syndrome, continues to haunt her works to the end” (145-46), but perhaps the most difficult lesson for Austen’s characters is acknowledging their own weaknesses and limitations.

In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood have to learn the importance of mastering their emotions and the dangers of not doing so. Elizabeth Bennet finds she cannot trust her “first impressions,” Austen’s original, working title for the book Pride and Prejudice.

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, realizes her true worth, and Persuasion’s Anne Elliot is shown that sometimes people are given second chances. To both her disappointment and relief, Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland discovers the world is not a gothic novel, and Emma’s Miss Woodhouse learns that her wealth has blinded her. Early in the book, Emma declares that

“‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’” (81), but, as she comes to realize, neither do they comprehend the other’s pain.

The pampered child of a doting, wealthy father, Emma Woodhouse is spared the both large and small financial worries that haunt the other inhabitants of Highbury. “With very little to distress or vex her” (5), Emma blunders through the novel, misjudging the motives and best interests of one character after another. Assuming everyone else acts as she would act and is motivated by what would motivate her, Emma eventually learns that money, not love, may be driving them. Emma repeatedly finds that she has erred because she failed to consider the limitations of another person’s pocketbook, and Mr. Knightley always has insight, and perhaps irritatingly so, because he first considers the character’s degree of poverty and then judges what a person in financial difficulty is likely to do. Mr. Knightley is always one step ahead of Emma because he, like Mr. Elton, “‘knows the value of a good income’” (66).

In the world beyond the confines of the covers of Emma, the wealthy Miss Woodhouse was also the perfect and timely foil for the struggling Austen household and for the impoverished English countryside. On 21 January 1814, Jane Austen began working on what she fondly referred to in her letters as “my Emma” (11 December 1815, ? December 1815), and Emma was finished on 29 March 1815 (Tomalin 241). This was after the death of Austen’s father when she was living in reduced circumstances with her sister Cassandra and their widowed mother in a modest house, Chawton Cottage, on her brother’s rural estate. The three women had a combined income of a little less than £500 a year, the exact sum the Dashwood women have to live on in Sense and Sensibility. In “Money,” Copeland has calculated what this would mean in terms of lifestyle: no carriage, no horses, and perhaps three servants (135-36). At Chawton Cottage, Mrs. Austen employed a cook, a man-servant, and a house-maid. To economize, the Austen household baked their own bread and washed their laundry at home (Lefroy 54). Consequently, Jane Austen’s Chawton letters, like Miss Bates’s chatter, are full of references to trivial expenses and petty cash. Claudia Johnson reminds us that Jane Austen was delighted with the relatively meager income from her publications (121). The Austen women had to mind their shillings and pence, but, compared to the majority of people in rural England at the time, the Austens were to be envied. Although there were fortunes to be made, primarily in trade, and busy merchants in bustling markets could accrue wealth in a relatively short time, financially, the country was a shambles, and rural areas bore the brunt of the depression.

W. H. Auden mused in his poem on Jane Austen that her books “Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society” (299), and, in Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, historian Oliver MacDonagh considers Emma to be an accurate reflection of the Regency world (143), a world in the throes of economic chaos. Between 1790 and 1814, wholesale prices doubled (Ashton 90), a particularly distressing occurrence to household budgets based on fixed yearly incomes, such as the Austen family’s. At the same time, taxes soared; for

example, the window tax on houses quadrupled (Murray 87), and, even without the increase, taxes in general were outrageous. Not only were people taxed on land, houses, and income, taxes were affixed to obvious luxury items such as horses, carriages, and silk and to less ostentatious non-necessities such as male servants and dogs. Middle-class items—glass, hats, newspapers, coffee, sugar, paper, and playing cards—were taxed. Neither could the poor escape the tax burden as taxes were levied on the most common and mundane items, such as candles, beer, malt, bricks, stone, salt, tea, soap, and coal (Pool 87-88). Perversely, wages for agricultural laborers plummeted from around 15 shillings a week to 6, slightly more than one-third of their former pay. A series of bad harvests and a 60% drop in agricultural prices preceded the passing of the Corn Law in 1815, but it was too little, too late for hundreds of bankrupt farmers and their employees (Murray 84-86). Fay Weldon reminds us this was also the time of enclosure: “The rural population saw its common land vanishing as farmers and landowners claimed it for their own, and enclosed it with hedges, and was powerless to prevent it, and grew hungrier and hungrier” (92-93). In 1816, as Emma was being distributed, conditions were so bad that food riots broke out in Sussex and Yorkshire. The desperation of the rural poor probably explains the presence of begging gypsies and poultry thieves in Emma. Many banks were forced to close, including the bank managed by Jane Austen’s brother Henry.

Given the abysmal economic depression that gripped England, it may seem a strange time for Austen to create a wealthy heroine. Emma’s money sets her in stark contrast not only to Austen’s other heroines, but also to every other character in her own book, and a reader may wonder why Austen chose to create such an affluent heroine after having had such success with a series of poor ones, but Emma’s substantial resources are absolutely vital to the plot. In Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity, Roger Gard has noted that “Emma is faced with choices. It is a commonplace about the book (in relation especially to Jane Austen’s other heroines) that she is exceptionally well placed to make them” (173).

At the 1999 Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, George Butte declared that of all of Jane Austen’s novels, Emma “is the least challenging for the landed gentry” (“Debate” 5), and Julia Prewitt Brown, in “Civilization and the Contentment of Emma,” reminds us that “critics have pointed out that no one works in Emma” (105), but nothing could be further from the truth. Of all of Austen’s writing, Emma is most consciously aware of how money is won and lost, of the efforts people make to procure it, and of the sacrifices they must endure when they are unable to obtain it. The wealthy characters in Austen’s other novels idle away their days while the money pours in, ten or twenty thousand pounds a year or more, with no apparent effort on their parts. Even the origins of their wealth are usually shrouded in mystery. For example, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bingley is occupied in shopping for an estate; the reader can only assume his family is recently wealthy since he doesn’t already possess one, but we are left to speculate on the source of their money; their origins in the north of England and their house in London may be clues. Mr. Darcy’s rural estate, Pemberley, represents old money made on the land, but, just like Elizabeth Bennet’s own father, he has no title and no occupation. Though still a relatively young man with unmarried children, Sir William Lucas is

retired and busies himself in giving balls in a rather desperate effort to unload his daughters on any willing members of the local gentry. Unable to apply himself to any respectable employment (even the military fails to repress him), libertine George Wickham makes a full time occupation out of seduction and extortion. Elizabeth’s uncle Phillips, the attorney, is occasionally referred to, but his actual presence is not required, and her uncle Gardiner, the businessman, puts in his appearances while vacationing. The only working man to be observed in the book is the odious clergyman Mr. Collins, a virtual slave to his patroness, but his toadying days are numbered; he has every expectation of outliving Mr. Bennet and then retiring to Longbourn. Indeed, one would hardly be surprised to find him taking Mr. Bennet’s pulse in eager anticipation of imminent unemployment. By contrast, there are no aristocrats in Emma, no Lady Catherine, not even a Sir William. As Prewitt Brown has noted, “even the Churchills are just inflated gentry” (98). Instead, Emma is filled with characters who work, or have worked, or are about to begin working, or who suffer because they are unemployed or unemployable. As actor Jeremy Northam, who played Mr. Knightley to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma, observed, “After I read the book I realized these people are not as wealthy as you think they are” (Tyler 173).

Somewhat strapped for ready cash, Mr. Knightley is a local magistrate and constantly occupied in managing his rural estate (100), as, given the state of agriculture at the time, he should have been. Improving his fields and concerned for the welfare of his farm laborers and the local people in general, he reveals himself to be an able gentleman farmer. His brother, Mr. John Knightley, is “rising in his profession” as a busy London attorney (92). Mr. Weston is a retired merchant (16), and his wife had been supporting herself as a governess. “Jane Fairfax had yet her bread to earn” (165), but she was raised to be a governess (164), and Mrs. Elton does everything within her power to see that she becomes one. Mr. Elton supports himself as a clergyman, and Robert Martin is an industrious farmer. Mrs. Goddard runs a bustling boarding school, and Mr. Perry earns his living as a long-suffering apothecary who is compelled to pay frequent house calls on a wealthy hypochondriac, Mr. Woodhouse.

Mr. Knightley and the other inhabitants of Highbury might well be cutting corners and saving money where they could, but, because of her privileged position, Emma Woodhouse has led a charmed life and remains ignorant of their struggles. On the first page of the novel, Austen tells us Emma’s only real faults are selfishness and egotism: “the power of having rather too much her own way, and disposition to think a little too well of herself” (5). Throughout the book, Emma displays her father’s flaw of “never being able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself” (8); Emma repeatedly blunders because she assumes everyone else must share her view of things. If left unchecked, these tendencies could grow, become entrenched, and leave Emma a fussy, demanding old lady, not unlike her father. The perceptive and ever vigilant Mr. Knightley, however, makes it his business to see that this doesn’t happen, and the result is our story.

Emma begins with the advantageous marriage of Emma’s governess, Miss Taylor. Miss Taylor’s alliance to Mr. Weston, a man of “easy fortune” (6), dramatically elevates her both socially and economically from the role of former destitute governess, now dependent hanger-on at Hartfield, to mistress of her own home with “every domestic comfort” and “a carriage of her own” (19). After sixteen years as a governess, Miss Taylor “had lived long enough to know how fortunate she might well be thought” (18). Fully aware of “‘how much the marriage is to Miss Taylor’s advantage’” (11), Mr. Knightley appreciates the precarious position of a governess living in a childless home with a quirky and elderly employer and his very willful, grown daughter; he acknowledges that Miss Taylor was obliged to placate both her employer and his daughter in order to keep a roof over her head (10). Emma and Mr. Woodhouse are less enthusiastic about Miss Taylor’s becoming Mrs. Weston, as they see the marriage as a loss to themselves. Although Emma takes credit for having made the match in the first place (11), she considers Miss Taylor’s marriage to be “a gentle sorrow” (6), and she finds herself “divided between tears and smiles” (11). Only Mr. Woodhouse exceeds her in his selfishness by being utterly baffled at Miss Taylor’s decision to leave Hartfield, “‘a grievous business!’” (93).

Cinderella-like, Miss Taylor is saved from a state of poverty and dependence that neither Mr. Woodhouse nor his daughter seems to fully appreciate.

Emma’s first major blunder involves her assessment of Harriet Smith, whom Mr. Knightley describes as “‘the natural daughter of nobody knows whom, with probably no settled provision at all’” (61). Because she is wealthy Mr. Woodhouse’s daughter, Emma has always been free from worry, and she assumes a similar and carefree existence for Harriet; she declares Harriet’s father to be “‘a gentleman of fortune’” (62), but Emma proves to be wrong. Harriet’s father turns out to be “a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance” (481), but she is by no means assured a continuing income. In Women Writing About Money, Copeland refers to this as Emma’s “self-willed blindness to Harriet Smith’s realistic chances in the scramble” (109). As Mr. Knightley realizes, poor Harriet’s position is extremely vulnerable.

Although she has been well provided for to date—her allowance is so generous that she pays someone else to sew her clothes (178)—Harriet’s being openly acknowledged throughout Highbury as “the natural daughter of somebody” points out her financial insecurity (22). The very fact that not even Harriet knows the identity of her benefactor should be worrying; who knew where the money came from or how financially secure or insecure the source might be?

Harriet’s allowance could be reduced due to financial reversals or cut off entirely on a whim.

Even given a steady resolve, Harriet’s benefactor could be elderly or infirm, and what would be her fate if he were to die? Illegitimacy not only bore a social stigma but also gave a child no legal rights; Harriet could not prove paternity nor sue for any inheritance. Other relatives may not even be aware of her existence or, if they were, they have not acknowledged her. Let Sense and Sensibility’s Fanny Dashwood serve as a warning to us all; even legitimate siblings could be legally disinherited or neglected. Given her situation, Harriet Smith has been a very fortunate young woman even to be a “‘parlour-boarder at a common school’” (61), but her continued well being is by no means assured.

Were she to lose her regular income, Harriet would have virtually nothing to fall back on, not even a means for supporting herself, as Mr. Knightley seems to have considered: “‘She has been taught nothing useful’” (61). With no money of her own and no job skills, Harriet “‘is pretty and good tempered and that is all’” (61), and, despite Emma’s protestations to the contrary, there’s very little money to be made in that. To her advantage or to her detriment, Harriet seems blissfully unaware of her vulnerability. “So easily pleased—so little discerning” (180), Harriet occupies herself with frivolities: “the only mental provision she was making for the evening of life, was the collecting and transcribing all the riddles of every sort that she could meet with” (69). Harriet lacks the social connections, refinement, and talents most people, even Mrs. Elton, would require in a governess; for instance, she cannot play the piano (229), nor speak foreign languages (232), as Jane Fairfax can. In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Elton’s contempt for Harriet might be a good indication of how she was likely to be treated as a governess if she were so fortunate as to find such a position. Should Harriet’s mysterious benefactor cease to provide for her, she had the options of marrying with rapidity or of being reduced to domestic service, perhaps as a parlor maid or nursery maid, but Harriet’s precarious finances never seem to occur to Emma who does everything in her power to influence Harriet to reject the marriage proposal of Robert Martin, a man to whom Harriet is already favorably inclined. Unfortunately for Harriet, she accepts Emma’s advice without questioning her friend’s judgment. She would have done better to have listened to Mr. John Knightley: “‘Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does’” (293).

Emma’s decided distaste for Robert Martin as a potential spouse for Harriet is grounded in Emma’s assessment of his occupation as a farmer, which Emma seems to find particularly odious: “‘with all his sense and all his merit Mr. Martin is nothing more’” (62). Mr. Martin rents “a large farm from Mr. Knightley” (23), has a flock of sheep, is making a considerable profit on their wool, and owns eight cows (28). He presumably pays Mrs. Goddard for his sisters’ educations, employs household help for his mother, including “‘an upper maid’” (27), and has at least one employee for farm labor, a shepherd who supports a family of his own on the wages Robert Martin pays (28). The Martins can afford to shop where they will, and thus, according to Harriet, they “‘always dealt at Ford’s,’” where Frank Churchill buys gloves and Emma and Harriet purchase cloth for a gown, “the shop first in size and fashion” (178).

Although he shows every indication of being hardworking and prosperous, even proving his financial security to Mr. Knightley’s satisfaction (59), Emma continues to insist that he is beneath Harriet, a notion which Mr. Knightley declares to be “‘errant nonsense’” (64). Emma turns his prosperity into an evil by declaring him to be dull, “‘thinking of nothing but profit and loss’” (33), “‘too full of the market’” (34), but after Harriet’s disappointment with Mr. Elton, Emma seems to reassess Mr. Martin when she surveys his farm from the vantage point of Donwell Abbey. Mr. Martin’s home and surrounding property silently declare his bounty; “with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, its spreading flocks, orchard in blossom and light column of smoke ascending” (360), his home reveals present comfort and every promise of a bright future. Because it is “the middle of June” (353), the smoke from the chimney suggests bustling kitchen activity rather than a cold hearth devoid of food. In the end,

of course, an enlightened Emma is forced to acknowledge Harriet fortunate in becoming Mrs. Robert Martin of Abbey Mill Farm, a secure member of a respectable family at last: “‘I think Harriet is doing extremely well’” (473).

Given his occupation, one must be inclined to forgive Emma for mistaking Mr. Elton for a compassionate, sensitive, caring man, one who would presumably value Harriet’s gentleness, meekness, and humility, but all the tell-tale clues were there to expose his true inclination, if not lust, for money. Emma’s initial mistake in Mr. Elton is her assumption that he is wealthier than he appears: “Emma imagined a very sufficient income” and “independent property” (35), but in reality Mr. Elton needs additional money in order to live the lifestyle to which he aspires. Emma notices that the vicarage is “an old and not very good house” (83), and, before his marriage, Mr. Elton had no carriage and perhaps no horse as he had to be picked up by Emma and her brotherin-law in Mr. John Knightley’s carriage in order to attend the Westons’ Christmas party. Mr. Elton seldom passes up the invitations of his parishioners to a free meal and even reveals his gluttony when he lists the variety of dishes he enjoyed consuming at the Coles’ (89). Looking for an easy way to supplement, if not double or triple, his income, Mr. Elton is a man on the make, one, as Mr. Knightley puts it, “‘not at all likely to make an imprudent match’” (66). Mr. Knightley tells Emma that their parson is a fortune hunter (66), and, for the first time, Emma is forced to acknowledge, if only to herself, that Mr. Knightley could well be right: “Mr. Elton might not be of an imprudent, inconsiderate disposition as to money-matters” (67). Mr. Elton may have taken pains to hide his mercenary motives from Emma, but, however unaware, she is indeed being courted by him, a fact that is readily apparent to Mr. John Knightley (111-12), and gossiped about by Mrs. Cole (176). Mr. Elton’s carriage ride proposal to Emma settles the point: “He only wanted to aggrandize and enrich himself” with her £30,000 (135). Emma is then able to predict “he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten” (135), and his subsequent hasty engagement four weeks later to Miss Augusta Hawkins, daughter “of a Bristol-merchant, of course” (183), proves her correct at last, but clever Miss Woodhouse must grudgingly admit that the Knightley brothers were there ahead of her: “There was no denying that those brothers had penetration” (135).

For all of her faulty judgments and missteps, Emma is shrewd enough to see through the pompous, arrogant, and thoroughly obnoxious Mrs. Elton, in spite of Augusta’s Herculean efforts to appear to be socially acceptable. It is interesting to note that Mr. Elton originally believed Augusta to possess a fortune of £20,000 (66), but, after they are married, all Highbury knows her to have only £10,000, “or thereabouts” (181). One wonders, who could have misled and exaggerated her fortune so outrageously to Mr. Elton? Perhaps this is an example of Austenian justice, for in a letter to her niece Caroline, Austen said that once a character had proved to be a “good for nothing,” he “should not escape unpunished” (288).

In Augusta Elton, Austen created a character who is the worst of a human type, one who has superfluous income and is determined that everyone she meets shall be made aware of the fact. While acknowledging she is “‘careless of expense’” (283), Mrs. Elton gloats over the extravagance of her gowns and jewelry (302, 324), proudly announces that they routinely have enough food left over from their dinners to feed several additional people (283), and brags that they employ so many male servants that she doesn’t have enough work for them to do nor can she remember all of their names (295). But she is at her most annoying when she finds fault with the lifestyles of those around her, such as reminding Jane Fairfax, and all other parties assembled, that the Bates ladies employ only one servant, “‘so much as Patty has to do!’” (296).

Mrs. Elton declares herself to be “shocked at the want of two drawing rooms, at the poor attempt at rout-cakes, (which may well be further stabs at the Bates household), and there being no ice in the Highbury card parties” (290). Emma seems most annoyed by Mrs. Elton’s insistence on putting herself forward: “‘Must I go first? I really am ashamed of always leading the way’” (298), as though anyone else would be given the opportunity. Because of “‘all her airs of pert pretension and under-bred finery,’” Emma declares her to be a “‘little upstart’” (279), and it does seem that Mrs. Elton has acquired capital without the benefit of learning a few social graces.

Mrs. Elton’s status as nouveau riche reveals itself at least partly in her obsession with carriages, both her own and those of her sister, Mrs. Suckling of Maple Grove, who owns two (183): “‘They will have their barouche-landau, of course. . . . They would hardly come in their chaise’” (274). A carriage was an expensive luxury, one that Mr. Knightley had largely given up, “keeping no horses, having little spare money” (213), and, much to Mrs. Perry’s distress, remaining beyond the means of Mr. Perry (344). Mrs. Elton’s complete lack of consideration for others leads her to speculate on the rustic pleasure of traveling to Box Hill in a donkey cart, the early-nineteenth-century’s version of a sub-compact car, the mode of transportation Jane Austen, her mother, and Cassandra owned at Chawton Cottage (Lefroy 55).

Donkeys eat less than horses, get good gas mileage, are hearty, disease resistant, and can bear more weight for their size than a horse; donkeys are well-made, dependable, considerably cheaper to purchase, and are therefore affordable. A “deluxe donkey” could be purchased for roughly one-tenth the price of a carriage horse (Pool 143). One distinct disadvantage, which donkey carts also share with small, modern cars, is that they are limited in the number of passengers they can accommodate. Any more than two adults results in cramped quarters for the passengers and heavy pulling for the donkey. While the Eltons already own two horses and a new carriage for Augusta to brag about—“‘I believe we drive faster than anybody’” (321)—Mrs. Elton doesn’t have the means of her sister at Maple Grove and cannot afford a second carriage and four horses (283-84, 306). The Eltons have no spare horse, and, when one of their carriage horses goes lame, they are temporarily without transportation (353). It is perhaps this inconvenience that leads Mrs. Elton to consider a donkey cart, or maybe it is just the knowledge that the Coles have both horses and a donkey (233, 356). But for all of the economy involved in owning a donkey cart, which may have been no financial impediment for Miss Woodhouse, Mr. Knightley, the Westons, and Frank Churchill, this would place the expedition to Box Hill

completely beyond the limited means of Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax. As it is, they are already dependent on their friends for transportation and are in no position to complain when Mrs. Elton forgets to pick them up, as promised (320, 322).

Because of her intimate friendship with her own governess, one might assume that Emma would have more understanding of and compassion for the impoverished Jane Fairfax, but this is not the case. The mild-mannered Miss Taylor was well loved, and this accounts for the fact that even though Emma no longer needed a governess, Miss Taylor stayed on at Hartfield, although still entirely dependent on the benevolence and good will of the Woodhouses. Jane Fairfax is offered a similar situation with Colonel and Mrs. Campbell, but she declines. The Campbells are willing to provide a home for Jane “as long as they lived” (165), but what would happen to her when they died? Presumably, Mrs. Dixon would be willing to take her in, but Miss Fairfax would only be trading one dependence for another. Unlike Harriet Smith, Jane has considered her future: “‘who can have thought of it as I have done?’” (299). Everyone else admires Jane Fairfax for her beauty, intellect, and talents, and no one but Emma finds fault with her. Indeed, Jane Fairfax served as Miss Campbell’s companion, and her status as a member of the Campbell household had been entirely dependent on her affability. As a woman who lives on the good will of those around her, Jane Fairfax must be agreeable, and she cannot afford to make enemies. As Fay Weldon reminds us, “Women survived, in Jane Austen’s day, by pleasing and charming if they were in the middle classes” (36). Emma’s sister Isabella suggests that Miss Fairfax might come to Hartfield: “‘She would be such a delightful companion for Emma’” (104), but Emma is not disposed to think well of Jane Fairfax. Emma’s primary objection to Jane is based on her reserve. While Emma criticizes Miss Bates for being “‘so satisfied—so smiling’” (85), she is at least equally annoyed by Jane Fairfax for her “‘apparent indifference whether she pleased or not’” (166). Mr. Knightley believes Miss Fairfax’s behavior “‘has its foundation in diffidence’” (171), that Jane is reserved because she doesn’t feel herself to be Emma’s equal, but perhaps Miss Fairfax has perceived Emma’s contempt for her aunt, Emma’s jealousy of Jane herself, or both, and is thus even less inclined to humble herself before Miss Woodhouse.

In not befriending Miss Fairfax, Emma does her the gross disservice of leaving her to Mrs. Elton, a circumstance that Mr. Knightley and Mrs. Weston chide her for, leaving Emma “conscious stricken about Jane Fairfax” (291), as well she might be. Augusta Elton seems determined to remind Jane Fairfax, and anyone else within the range of her voice, of Miss Fairfax’s lowly status as a governess. Even in her fantasy of an ideal situation for Miss Fairfax, Mrs. Elton is reminding Jane of her misfortune: “‘name your own terms, have as many rooms as you like, and mix in the family as much as you chose’” (301). Translation: You’re in it for the money, you’ll live in someone else’s house, and they may condescend to treat you as an equal, at times. In the midst of praising her for her talents, leave it to Mrs. Elton to remind Jane Fairfax of her deficiency, “‘even without the harp’” (301). In an attempt to dazzle Jane with the splendors in store for her as governess to Mrs. Bragge, cousin of Mr. Suckling of Maple Grove, Mrs. Elton makes reference to “‘wax candles in the schoolroom! You may imagine how desirable!’” (300).

Augusta Elton is reminding Jane, and everyone else assembled, that a wax candle was a luxury

item to a governess. A year’s worth of wax candles for a middle class house cost around £25 (Murray 79), the equivalent of the modern electric bill. Presumably, in her status as a member of the household’s staff, the governess would normally be given cheap or homemade tallow candles rendered from scraps of fat which, as burning fat, would both smoke and stink. It is small wonder then that in the course of this conversation Jane Fairfax alludes to the slave trade and speculates that “‘as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies’” (300-01).

Emma is repeatedly baffled by Jane’s silent tolerance of Mrs. Elton’s insults, slights, and impertinence, but given the fact that Mrs. Elton invites Jane and her family to dinner and is one of the benefactors of her aunt and grandmother, she may well fear alienating Mrs. Elton for their sakes; indeed, it would be self-indulgent to do so.

Jane Fairfax’s consideration for her grandmother and aunt is, no doubt, her most endearing trait, and her thoughtfulness repeatedly reveals itself in her efforts to spare them further expense. When Jane arrives, she brings presents of new caps and workbags, highly visible, practical items yet within Jane’s limited means, but she displays more sympathy and compassion when she sacrifices dearly for them, in the only ways she can. Knowing herself to be yet another mouth to feed, with Spartan self-denial, Jane eats as little as possible from their table. Although Jane seems to feast well enough when they are invited to someone else’s house for dinner, or at least her portions draw neither notice nor comment, Miss Bates is concerned about “‘how little bread and butter she ate for breakfast and how small a slice of mutton for dinner’” (168). Jane’s aunt and grandmother worry that she “‘eats nothing’” (237). Both times when she is clearly unwell, Jane does everything she can to discourage Miss Bates from calling in Mr. Perry (162, 389). No doubt Miss Fairfax considers the costs, as her aunt has done, additional expenses they both know Mrs. Bates’s income can ill afford. Emma correctly assesses Jane Fairfax’s stay in Highbury as “‘a life of privation and penance’” (217).

When presented with a handsome, charming, and wealthy companion who sings, dances, and seems inclined to flatter, surely the natural inclination is to enjoy the situation and ask no questions, and this is Emma’s response to the appearance of the dashing Frank Churchill. Based on what he knows of Frank Churchill—“‘We hear of him forever at some watering-place or other’” (146)—Mr. Knightley judges him sight unseen and pronounces him to be “‘above his connections, and to care very little for any thing but his own pleasure’” (145). Annoyed by his seemingly hasty judgment, Emma jumps to Frank’s defense and dismisses Mr. Knightley’s opinion: “‘You are the worst judge in the world of the difficulties of dependence’” (146). It doesn’t seem to occur to Emma that her criticism of Mr. Knightley would at least equally apply to herself. Having grown up in the lap of luxury, as Emma has, Frank Churchill seems to be no better at understanding the less fortunate. Frank considers Mr. Elton’s house to be adequate: “He could not believe it a bad house” (204), but Mrs. Weston reminds Frank that, being wealthy, “he could be no judge of the privations” (204). Not having given the matter much thought, Frank, like Emma, assumes comfortable circumstances for those around him.

Frank Churchill appears to be generous, if not careless, with his money; he sends Jane the mysterious and expensive Broadwood pianoforte from London (215), but he seems to give the purchase little more thought than he gives to the pair of gloves he spontaneously buys at Ford’s shop in Highbury (200). Though procured with an evident desire to please, the piano seems an impractical, exaggerated gesture when one considers the pressing financial concerns of the Bates household and the austerity in which they live. Surely such “a very elegant looking instrument” would be out of place in the tiny parlor among the faded and worn furniture of the Bateses’ better days (214-15), perhaps even serving as a reminder of how far they had sunk. Mr. Knightley comments that the gift of the piano may have given no more pleasure than it caused pain (446).

The thoughtful Mrs. Dixon seems to have done much better by sending Mrs. Bates a “‘large new shawl’” (322), something practical to help keep the old lady warm.

Considering his casual attitude, Emma assumes Frank to be indifferent about money, but he soon sets her right: “‘I sick of prosperity and indulgence!—You are quite mistaken’” (365). It is, in fact, Frank’s calculated pursuit of a sizable inheritance that causes Jane Fairfax so much pain. Although Frank gives every indication of being a master of manipulation, he is apparently unable to cajole Mrs. Churchill into the idea of allowing him to choose his own wife, or perhaps he is unwilling to run the risk of possibly alienating her by trying. Acutely conscious of his own financial status and dependency, Frank seems entirely oblivious to anyone else’s concerns.

Perhaps Frank Churchill’s most self-revealing remark is his drawing attention to Jane’s hair: “‘Miss Fairfax has done her hair in so odd a way’” (222). Emma has a maid to curl her hair (134), as does Mrs. Elton (324), but Miss Bates lets it slip that Jane, no longer afforded the privileges of living with the wealthy Campbells, is reduced to arranging her hair as best she can (323). The Bateses’ adaptable Patty may be adept at cleaning (178), cooking (237), and answering the door (239), but apparently she is not up to the challenge of arranging a lady’s hair, or perhaps she’s just too tired. Were he thoughtful, considerate, and compassionate, surely Frank Churchill would not have used evidence of Jane Fairfax’s poverty to ridicule her, and this is Frank’s equivalent to Emma’s Box Hill faux pas at Miss Bates’s expense. Frank Churchill shares Emma’s fault in thinking too much of himself to the detriment of those around him, and he blames his shortcomings on his wealth: “‘It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble’” (437).

Given her inclination to chatter and Emma’s desire to be the center of attention, it comes as no surprise that Emma finds Miss Bates to be tiresome company. Granted, they have so little in common. As a woman of very limited means, it is not surprising that much of Miss Bates’s conversation involves thanking her generous neighbors or giving them credit for their benevolence, the gift of some pork, a supply of apples, the free use of the vicarage pew, or the loan of a carriage, but when one considers Miss Bates’s comments, there appears to be an element of obsession in her stream of thanks (172-74), or what Emma refers to as “‘her dreadful

gratitude’” (380), as though she fears offending someone by forgetting to acknowledge her gift or favor: “‘Do not think us ungrateful, Miss Woodhouse’” (379). In their more humble ways, Highbury’s shopkeepers like Mrs. Wallis, Mrs. Ford, and John Saunders are also benefactors of Mrs. and Miss Bates (236), and thus they are assured of a ready welcome in the Bateses’ humble parlor (155). Indeed, supplying the poverty-stricken Bates household seems to be a communal effort, and one does have to wonder what Miss Bates, her mother, and the overworked Patty would have to eat should the bounty of the countryside cease to flow in.

Even given the general good will, Mrs. Bates, Miss Bates, and Jane Fairfax are occasionally overlooked or slighted. When the Coles have a dinner party, Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax are not invited until later in the evening, after the food has been eaten and cleared away (214). They seem routinely to be the last persons added and the first to be omitted from Highbury’s guest lists (20). Although Emma treats them to a “plentiful dinner” with “large slices of cake and full glasses of wine” (213), there was always the possibility of being offered the austere gruel Mr. Woodhouse favors. It must have been very frustrating to them to survey the bounty of Mr. Woodhouse’s table but only be offered “‘very small’” eggs, “‘a very little bit’” of apple tart, or “‘a small half glass’” of wine (24-25). It seems particularly distressing to Miss Bates when, due to Mr. Woodhouse’s fear of under-cooked asparagus, her mother was offered and then denied her anticipated dinner (329), the best meal Mrs. Bates was likely to get that day or for many days, certainly not until invited to dine with her affluent friends again. It comes as little surprise that “‘she was rather disappointed’” (329), and who knew when she would next be forced into “unwilling self-denial” (213), and there is plenty of that already in the Bates household as their meager breakfasts of bread and butter indicate (168).

A great talker upon little matters” (21), Miss Bates is most pitiable when one considers the frequency with which she mentions small expenses, trifles that would never concern her more affluent friends, such as paying the doctor’s bills (162, 389), providing her mother with a second pair of glasses (236), salvaging an old petticoat (225), employing a chimney sweep (236), or cross writing in a letter to save on postage (157). Indeed, these expenses seem to weigh on her mind and present themselves in Freudian slips. Miss Bates scrimps and saves wherever she can and is constantly alert to any small extravagance. She considers coffee and asparagus to be luxury items, is surprised to have soup as a side dish, and is amazed to see a profusion of candles in use or a large fire in the fireplace (323, 329). Mr. Knightley chides Emma for “not contributing what she ought to the stock of their scanty comforts” (155). Their income must be limited indeed; based on the presence of their versatile and lone maid, Patty, Copeland estimates the Bateses’ income at around one hundred pounds a year (“Money” 135). Miss Bates is even impressed by the relatively meager salary being offered to Jane Fairfax as a governess (382), and, as Mr. Knightley is aware, when Mrs. Bates, already “a very old lady” (21), dies, Miss Bates may have even less: “‘She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more’” (375), yet Miss Bates seems determined never to complain and always to appear happy.

For all her privation, Miss Bates is not indifferent to the suffering of others; she worries about “‘Poor old John,’” her father’s clerk who now lives on “‘relief from the parish’” (383).

Although Mr. Perry doesn’t charge Mrs. and Miss Bates for his house calls, Miss Bates is concerned and possibly feels guilty about this as “‘[h]e has a wife and family to maintain’” (162), and he is not yet able to afford a carriage. Unable to return dinner invitations, Mrs. Bates and her daughter serve their guests tea and cake (156), probably the best culinary offerings their limited means could normally afford. According to Daniel Pool, by the early 1800s, tea was a staple of the English diet for the affluent and for the poverty stricken, “a hot item to liven up the otherwise cold meals of the poor” (208), but humble people rarely had coffee, and this is the case with Miss Bates (323). When in possession of a quantity of pork, a gift from Emma and Mr. Woodhouse, Miss Bates is already considering inviting Mrs. Goddard in to share in their bounty (177), just as she invites her friends in to enjoy the apples she has received from Mr. Knightley (238). Admirably, Miss Bates never complains about her lot in life: “‘Nobody was ever so fortunate as herself’” (223). Given all that she must already suffer, Emma’s cruel remark to Miss Bates at Box Hill is the intolerable incident that angers Mr. Knightley into confronting her, and it is this challenge which finally forces Emma to acknowledge her own folly and to grow as a human being.

Although Emma calls Miss Bates “‘silly’” early in the book (85) and Frank Churchill considers her ridiculous—“‘She is a woman that one may, that one must laugh at’” (260)—both could have avoided much embarrassment, pain, and trouble had they valued Miss Bates more and actually listened to what she was saying. In Jane Austen and Her Art, Mary Lascelles asserts that Miss Bates is actually the wisest and most clear-sighted character in the book, and Lascelles quotes Miss Bates to prove her point: “‘What is before me, I see,’ Miss Bates says— and it is more than any other character in the story can say, for all the more intelligent people (even to Mr. Knightley himself) are peering through mists of prejudice; and if I wanted to know what happened in Highbury on any particular day I should go to Miss Bates” (145-46). Indeed, there is much practical wisdom, genuine concern, and touching kindness peppered throughout her humble flow of eager-to-please conversation. Miss Bates certainly understands a great truth Emma has yet to learn when she says “‘one never does form a just idea of any body beforehand.

One takes up a notion, and runs away with it’” (176).

From the beginning of the book, Miss Emma Woodhouse is well aware of the grinding poverty of the obviously poor. She considers “what the poor must suffer in winter” (155), and she does what she can to help those crippled by poverty, as she demonstrates when she and Harriet visit the sick cottager (86), but by the end of Emma she is also aware of the privations and struggles of the lower middle class, the working poor. At last, she is able to sympathize with Jane Fairfax and to be kind to Miss Bates. Emma acknowledges Harriet’s limitations and her own detrimental influence on Harriet and wisely distances herself from her all too impressionable friend. Emma learns to appreciate the contributions of farmers like Robert

Martin and Mr. Knightley’s able assistant, William Larkins. She recognizes the cold calculation that motivates Mr. Elton and the selfishness and egotism of the idle Frank Churchill, a mirror image of her unreformed self. When Emma confesses her mistakes to Mr. Knightley as “‘a series of strange blunders’” (331), the reader feels assured these are errors she will not be repeating. Emma learns to value the kindness, wisdom, and insight of the Knightley brothers and to question her own, but Miss Woodhouse is never such a simpleton as to eschew her wealth. In fact, by the end of the novel, Emma Woodhouse Knightley is richer than ever, but money itself has never been her problem. According to the Bible, “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10); according to George Bernard Shaw, “Lack of money is the root of all evil” (680), but in Jane Austen’s Emma, the evil lies in not appreciating the difference it makes in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.

WORKS CITED

Ashton, T.S. The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830. New York: Oxford UP, 1969.

Auden, Wystan Hugh. “Letter to Lord Byron.” Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2. Ed. B. C. Southam. London: Routledge, 1987.

Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1988. _____. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre LeFaye. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1995.

Brown, Julia Prewitt. “Civilization and the Contentment of Emma.” Modern Critical Views: Jane Austen. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 87-108.

Copeland, Edward. “Money.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: CUP, 1997. _____. Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England 1790-1820. Cambridge: CUP, 1996.

“A Debate to Remember.” JASNA News 15.3 (Win. 1999): 5.

Gard, Roger. Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.

Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987.

Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. Chicago: CUP, 1990.

Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. London: Athlone, 1939.

Lefroy, Helen. Jane Austen. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1997.

MacDonagh, Oliver. Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Murray, Venetia. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England. New York: Viking, 1998.

Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. New York: Touchstone, 1993.

Shaw, George Bernard. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Ed. Emily Morison Beck. Boston: Little, 1980.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Tyler, Natalie. The Friendly Jane Austen. New York: Viking, 1999.

Weldon, Fay. Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. New York: Carroll, 1996.

Persuasion (1818) Cohen, Monica F. "Persuading the Navy home: Austen and married women's professional property." Cohen contends that "Persuasion, by telling the story of how the navy is domesticated in the post-Napoleonic years, also tells the story of how domesticity is professionalized."

NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 29, 3 (Spring 1996) pp 346-66 [jstor preview/purchase].

Jones, Susan E. "Thread-cases, Pin-cushions, and Card-racks: Women's Work in the City in Jane Austen's Persuasion." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Kaplan, Laurie. "Sir Walter Elliot's Looking-Glasses, Mary Musgrove's Sofa, and Anne Elliot's Chair: Exteriority/Interiority, Intimacy/Society." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Macomber, Lenore. "A New View of Jane Austen's Persuasion." Persuasions 24 (2003).

Morris, Ivor. "Persuasion's Unwritten Story." Persuasions 23 (2002).

Yee, Nancy. "Friendship in Persuasion: The Equality Factor." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Young, Kay. "Feeling embodied: consciousness, Persuasion, and Jane Austen." Narrative 11, 1 (Jan. 2003) pp 78-92 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Selection from Persuasion Literary Criticism

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

V.25, NO.1 (Winter 2004)

Sir Walter Elliot’s Looking-Glass, Mary Musgrove’s Sofa, and Anne Elliot’s Chair: Exteriority/Interiority, Intimacy/Society LAURIE KAPLAN

Laurie Kaplan (email: lkaplan@goucher.edu) is a Professor of English at Goucher College.

This paper was presented at the 2004 JASNA conference in Los Angeles. Recent publications include essays on Mary Borden and Helen Zenna Smith, and on British India between the wars. She is Editor of Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line.

I sing the SOFA. William Cowper, Book I, The Task

They were actually on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily made room for him; —they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

MY TOPIC FOCUSES ON “THE PRECIOUS ROOMS AND FURNITURE” that create the intimate as well as the social spaces of Anne Elliot’s world (47). I am not alone in my interest in furniture, for William Cowper (1731-1800), the poet declared by Henry Austen to be Jane Austen’s favorite “moral” writer “in verse” (7), also had something to say on the topic. I want to start out by questioning Henry Austen’s pronouncement regarding his sister’s opinion about Cowper, a poet my students find virtually unreadable today. I wonder whether we accept Henry’s dictum here without probing too deeply into the why or the wherefore. Is Henry voicing the reality of Jane Austen’s preference, or is he perhaps projecting his own idea about the “correct” poets and writers to link with his sister’s authorial name?

In her letters Jane Austen alluded to and quoted (very infrequently) from Cowper. For example, in a letter dated 25 November 1798 Jane tells Cassandra that the family is about to purchase Cowper’s works, and then, three weeks later, on 18 December, she relates how “My father reads Cowper to us in the evening, to which I listen when I can.” On 8 February 1807, writing from Southampton, Jane Austen asserts, “I could not do without a Syringa, for the sake of Cowper’s Line.” It seems a bit odd to me that, Henry Austen’s pronouncement notwithstanding, these lines are the main references to Cowper in Jane Austen’s letters. Her favorite poet, yet these are the only references? I must quote from or allude to my favorite writer at least three times a day.

In the novels as well, Jane Austen alludes to and quotes from Cowper’s poetry. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne, like Willoughby, is drawn to his works (47). In Emma, Mr. Knightley quotes from “The Winter Evening,” Book IV of Cowper’s long poem The Task.1 In Mansfield Park, Fanny quotes twice from Cowper’s poetry—most famously, of course, when, shocked by Mr. Rushworth’s radical plans for improving Sotherton, she murmurs: “‘Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited’” (56).2 This line is also from The Task (Book I). But do these lines support Henry’s claim that Cowper as Jane Austen’s favorite moral writer in verse?

Marianne and Fanny, like the poet himself, are melancholic, even rather depressive (Fanny) or manic (Marianne), so perhaps they find solace in Cowper’s calm observations about nature, rural scenes, home, and the world.

In his mania and melancholia, Cowper sometimes found himself at a loss for a theme.

This was the case in the summer of 1783, when Cowper and Mrs. Mary Unwin (his landlady, walking companion, and soul mate)3 and Anna, Lady Austen4 (no relation to Jane Austen)—two ladies to whom he was emotionally attached—were sitting around reading poetry together. (This literary ménage a trois suggests a scene in one of Austen’s novels; there are always, it seems, too many ladies.) Not for the first time was Lady Austen trying to interest Cowper in developing some new metrical devices. She suggested that he drop the rhymed couplet form he had used

quite successfully in his early work—a form associated with the last generation of poets; she wanted him to attempt blank verse, that is, a more conversational unrhymed iambic pentameter form. Surprisingly, Cowper could not imagine what kind of a subject he could turn into blank verse. He implored Lady Austen to give him a topic—and she did. “Go home and write about anything,” Lady Austen told him (in so many words), “Go home and write about a sofa.” With just the idea of the sofa, then, to stimulate his poetic muse, Cowper took on “the task” Lady Austen set for him; Book I of The Task is “The Sofa.”5 Isn’t it fitting, then, that Fanny Price, ever at the beck-and-call of her sofa-bound Aunt Bertram, quotes from this section of the poem?

“I sing the SOFA,” reads Cowper’s cheery first line of The Task: A Poem in Six Books (published 1785), “I who lately sang/Truth, Hope, and Charity . . .” To propose to “sing the SOFA” strikes me as humorous in the extreme, and I like to imagine a very young Jane Austen responding with a good guffaw when she read that pseudo-classical invocation. What follows in the first part of the poem is a kind of pious comedy, for in The Task, the poet ambles along contentedly from a contemplation of the SOFA to a history of furniture to an assessment of the condition of man to an appreciation of Nature; indeed, it is as if Cowper tries to comment on the whole of the meaning of life in 5000 lines of rambling, technically simple blank verse. The Task, which was proclaimed a masterpiece in its day, focuses on realistic, everyday life. From upholstery fabric Cowper moves to the “rural sounds” and “rural sights,” “hedgerow beauties,” “ten thousand warblers,” those “fallen avenues,” a sheepfold, a cottage—those certitudes of country life that reverberate in Jane Austen’s work. Cowper’s step-by-step consideration of every idea that occurs to him has the quality of a meditation (not unlike Wordsworth’s Excursion, or Tintern Abbey, or Intimations of Immortality). We have learned to value The Task for Cowper’s philosophical reflections on Nature and on man, for what Marilyn Butler calls his “Christian, ethical preference for the simple life” (110). But Jane Austen must have been attracted as well to Cowper’s particularity of style, to his absurd—but acute—observations on the concrete realities of daily life.

I like to think that the absurdity of “I sing the SOFA” echoes throughout Jane Austen’s works.6 In Persuasion, especially, Jane Austen has a bit of fun with furniture—with sofas and chairs and looking-glasses. Admiral and Mrs. Croft are cited as the best kind of tenants for Kellynch-hall because the admiral “was a married man, and without children; the very state to be wished for. A house was never taken good care of, Mr. Shepherd observed, without a lady: he did not know, whether furniture might not be in danger of suffering as much where there was no lady, as where there were many children. A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world” (22). Anne grieves for the “beloved home made over to others; all the precious rooms and furniture . . .” (47). Furniture, it seems, propels the plot of this novel forward. Had it not been for Mary Musgrove’s sofa, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth might never had made their match.

In The Task, Cowper begins his chronicle with the concept of the evolution and development of furniture. He describes chairs and moves smoothly, if slowly, to “the accomplished sofa” as the end point of creation. “Time was,” Cowper reminds us, when we all sat around on rocks or “gravelly bank[s]”:

Joint-stools were then created; on three legs Upborne they stood. a massy slab, in fashion square or round. . . .

At length a generation more refined Improved the simple plan, made three legs four, Gave them a twisted vermicular, And o’er the seat, with plenteous wadding stuffed, Induced a splendid cover green and blue, Yellow and red, of tapestry richly wrought And woven close, or needlework sublime.

There might ye see the peony spread wide, The full-blown rose, the shepherd and his lass, Lapdog and lambkin with black staring eyes, And parrots with twin cherries in their beak.

Jane Austen MUST have found it hilarious to contemplate sitting upon lapdog, lambkin, peony, shepherd, and parrots. If I find it impossible to read these lines of Cowper’s poem without laughing, I assume that Jane Austen appreciated the way he described the extraordinary details of the sofa—the “plenteous wadding stuffed.” Perhaps Jane Austen was just as attracted to the humorous quotidian specificity of The Task as she was to the pastoral ideas and morals Cowper expressed?

I have attached this long preamble for you because my subject, like Cowper’s, is the sofa—well, not only the sofa, but also the chairs and the looking-glasses that feature in complex and subtle ways in Persuasion7 In this novel, Jane Austen uses furniture and household furnishings—the interior worlds of houses—to establish the characters’ social interactions and to comment on such abstract qualities as vanity, independence, dignity, pride, comfort, social importance, self-importance, and taste. Austen even points out to the reader the ways tiny rooms, such as those the Harvilles have adapted for their crowded living space, can be fitted up with furniture and be made cozy or snug, or the ways a grand space like the drawing room at Camden-place, with its card tables and aristocrats, can remain frigidly impersonal.

Throughout Persuasion, pieces of furniture and other domestic items become associated in the reader’s mind with characters—Sir Walter is forever linked with his looking-glasses, Mary with her sofa, Mrs. Musgrove and her “fat sighings” with a sofa, and Anne with sofas and with chairs. I could extend this idea and say that Elizabeth is matched with her card tables, Lady Russell with the curtains she espies in Bath, and William Elliot with an elegant little chiming clock (144). By the end of the novel, Captain Wentworth is perhaps more intricately linked with a chair at a small table at the White Hart than he is with his great prize-taking ship. The furniture—that is, the stage dressing—supports the theatricality of the interior scenes. Austen sets up miniature dramas—intensely personal scenes (Gay 158)—that embody striking impressions of intimacy. The text carries “liberal stage directions regarding characters’ movements towards and away from each other” (Gay 162), and the dramatic quality of each scene is emphasized by the way the characters move toward and away from the chairs and sofas.

Jane Austen gets the most dramatic effects from the seemingly random placement of people on the most mundane pieces of furniture and from the exaggerated self-display of characters demanding the attention of others.

Like Cowper, Jane Austen obviously loved the idea of as well as the verbal resonance of the word “sofa.” “Sofa” (sopha8) is an unusual word with Italian, French, Portuguese, and Arabic derivations—a word associated more readily with travelers like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu than with Jane Austen. It is significant, therefore, that Austen did not use the word “couch” or “settee”9 (Cowper does refer to a “settee” in The Task); she specifically chose the more poetically resonant and allusive “sofa,”10 a word used by Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey, by George Crabbe (another of Jane Austen’s favorite poets) in his Tales, and by Samuel Richardson in Sir Charles Grandison (OED). The sofa, that is, “‘a couch for reclining,’ une espece de lit de repos á la maniére des Turcs,’” derived “from a ‘part of the floor in Eastern countries raised a foot or two, [which is] covered with rich carpets and cushions’” (Jourdain 77;

OED). The sofa emerges as “an article of high fashion before and during the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” In an 1808 book on Household Furniture, George Smith asserts that the sofa is “an article admirable in almost every room” (qtd. in English Furniture 78). Ackermann’s Repository for the year 1809 points out that “[t]he sofa is recommended ‘when tired and fatigued with study, writing and reading’” (qtd. in English Furniture 78). For Austen’s characters, the sofa is a concrete reality of life in the big house, but it is also part of set scene, and as such, the sofa becomes a focal point for revelations.

During Jane Austen’s lifetime, there was renewed interest not only in improving the estate but in the art and craft of furniture-making. As Susan Watkins points out, “the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century comprised an era of unparalleled creativity and beauty in furniture, pottery and interior design, no less than in architecture, landscape, art and music” (88). Watkins postulates that “the spread of an informed appreciation of aesthetic achievement from the wealthy elite to the middle classes resulted in a more generalized awareness of design . . . [and] may be one reason why Jane Austen did not find it necessary to fill up her readers’ senses with visual details.” Instead of slowing down her narrative with detailed descriptions of rooms and furniture, Austen references furniture and furnishing details in a most dramatic or theatrical way: to set the scene for commentary on character and society, manners and morals, as well as to create scenes of heightened tension, sensibility, comedy, and drama. When Fanny is introduced to the family at Mansfield Park, for example, her Aunt Bertram invites her to “sit on the sofa with herself and pug” (13). Austen is succinct; Cowper, on the other hand, would have described the sofa’s fabric in detail—was Aunt Bertram reclining on tapestry or on “needlework sublime”? What was depicted on the fabric: “the peony spread wide” or “parrots with twin cherries in their beaks”?

Persuasion begins with the concept of retrenchment, with economizing, but what could Sir Walter give up? his lifestyle? his looking-glasses? his sofas and chairs? Anne is called upon to “mak[e] a duplicate of the catalogue of [Sir Walter’s] books and pictures” (38), a task revealing her competency and sense of order while also suggesting her father’s lack of responsibility in caring for a collection that had been compiled by his ancestors. Thus, Anne preserves a record of the contents of the house. With the “duplicate” completed, Sir Walter and his eldest daughter, psychologically a mirror-image of himself, can abscond to Bath, leaving the care of the tenants, the preservation of the furniture, and the improvement of the estate to his agent.

The looking-glass, one of the most iconic symbols in all of Austen’s novels, is deceptively easy to interpret as Sir Walter’s symbol, but it is worth noting that throughout history mirrors have been regarded as “prized possessions” of the very wealthy elite class (Cescinsky 190). Silvered glass had been introduced in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the cost of manufacturing large sheets of silvered glass—so much the fashion in the

Regency—was “prohibitively expensive.” Historians of furniture point out that “to possess a ‘looking-glass’ implied wealth; to own a large pier-glass indicated great means, indeed.” Since Kellynch-hall has not one but multiple looking-glasses, the implication is that the Elliots’ wealth has plummeted considerably under the bad stewardship of Sir Walter.

Austen rarely uses the words “mirror” or “looking-glass” in her works, so we pay special attention to the image when it shows up in Persuasion. As Sir Walter’s symbol, the lookingglass defines the narcissism of the man—a father who is so self-absorbed that he cannot see to the needs of his children or to the upkeep of the estate. What is reflected back to the man is a vision hermetically sealed off from truth—the same vision that he gleans from the pages of the Baronetage. In both the book and the mirror, Sir Walter sees a very fine man whose heritage and bearing give him the pride of place. As Sir Walter looks at himself, never pausing for selfreflection, he sees, I think, a youngish, handsome, slim, elegant man, but the reader sees the reality: a Sir Walter that is perhaps adding half a stone, losing a few hairs, needing a little muscle tone. What glitters back at him is a case study in self-obsession. As Claudia Johnson points out, “self-importance is a birthright, a benefit conferred upon [the Elliots] by their social position. Sir Walter believes he is somebody to the ‘nobody’ of virtually everybody else” (158), and the mirror confirms this idea. Even in Bath, when Mary and Charles Musgrove arrive at Camdenplace, they understand “the absolute necessity of . . . following the others to admire mirrors and china . . .” (219)—to admire, that is, the exterior trappings of the patriarch’s elegance.

References to Sir Walter’s looking-glasses abound again when Anne returns to Kellynchhall to visit the Crofts—the tenants. The great comedy of this scene arises from the combination of Anne’s nervous tension about her return “home” and Admiral Croft’s chatty admission that he has removed Sir Walter’s large looking-glasses from the dressing-room: “‘—Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord! there was no getting away from oneself,’” he blurts out to Anne (12728). “‘I should think, Miss Elliot’ (looking with serious reflection) ‘I should think he must be rather a dressy man for his time of life.’” A “‘little shaving glass’”—which he finds a great improvement—suffices for the Admiral.11 In a few short lines, Austen has captured the essence of meritocracy: she shows how the simplicity of the new men of action has replaced the sham elegance of the landed gentry. But it is also interesting to note the way the men here comment on the appearances of other men. Before he meets Admiral Croft, his potential tenant, Sir Walter comments that the man must have a face “‘about as orange as the cuffs and capes of my livery’” (22); when Admiral Croft does agree to take Kellynch-hall, Sir Walter finds that the Admiral is “the best-looking sailor he had ever met with,” although he could use an appointment with the baronet’s own hairdresser (32). But it is Sir Walter who is out of place in Bath. The “dressy” men—that is, the Regency fops—are redundant in the political and social landscape of 1814.

Persuasion is a very physical book, and the men and women in Somerset, in Lyme Regis, and in Bath are obsessed with their own bodies and with the physical appearance of others. If in

Pride and Prejudice the Bingley sisters should be faulted for calling attention to Elizabeth’s dirty petticoat and her “ancles,” in Persuasion Sir Walter, Elizabeth, Admiral Croft, and even Captain Wentworth pass comments on the bodies and looks of others. Sir Walter comments that Admiral Baldwin is “‘the most deplorable looking personage you can imagine, his face the colour of mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree, all lines and wrinkles, nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder at top’” (20). Sir Walter is “continually making severe remarks upon” Mrs. Clay’s “projecting tooth,” “clumsy wrist,” and freckles (34); he comments on Mary’s “red nose” (142); he says at the end of the book that Captain Wentworth is “‘A well-looking man . . . a very well-looking man’” (188). Lady Dalrymple agrees that Wentworth is “‘[a] very fine young man indeed!’” By the time of her card party, even Elizabeth “understand[s] the importance of a man of such an air and appearance” as Captain Wentworth’s (226).

But perhaps the most egregious comment about physical looks is Captain Wentworth’s, as reported by Mary to Anne, about Anne herself: Mary tells her sister; “‘he said, “You were so altered he should not have known you again”’” (60). Anne knows that, in the eight years since last they met, she has lost her looks, and that compared to Louisa and Henrietta she lacks the youthful bloom. His words wound and mortify Anne, and his comments reverberate in her mind. If Darcy’s flippant rejection of Elizabeth’s beauty at the Meryton ball could spur her into action, Captain Wentworth’s words fill up the messy space of youth and years and absence.

After Mary’s revelation, Anne thinks she knows what Captain Wentworth really thinks. It is this comment that Captain Wentworth forgets, of course, at the end of the novel, when he assures Anne that to his eye she could never alter (243).

The flesh-and-blood physicality of the book is underscored by the way Jane Austen brings men and women into close proximity in the interior spaces of Kellynch-hall, Uppercross Cottage, and the Great House; in the inn and at the Harvilles’ house in Lyme; and in the drawing room of Camden-place, the bed-sit of Mrs. Smith’s room in Laura-place, and the Musgroves’ chaotic apartment at the White Hart. Austen establishes intimate, claustrophobic, and sensually charged spaces where characters are close enough to scrutinize each other and even to touch one another. In the confines of rooms, they dine, dance, flirt, and converse; there is “music, singing, talking, laughing, all that was most agreeable” (58); there is gossip about bodies and beauty and physical appearances. With only inches between their bodies, the characters sit in the Musgroves’ and the Crofts’ and the Harvilles’ chairs; they sit together upon sofas; and they sit together at crowded tables. Austen’s psychological realism extends to the tensions produced by this physical proximity—think of Anne’s agony as she is fixed in her seat at the piano watching the Musgrove girls capture Wentworth’s attentions, or the heightened sexual tension when Wentworth sits between Anne and Henrietta during the lurching, knee-knocking carriage ride across country from Lyme to Uppercross. The result of this intimacy is a sexually and psychologically charged drama—a serious comedy.12

The placement of furniture yields proximity. Austen’s dramatic situations are simply constructed and yet so revealing of intimacies and understandings. When a displaced Anne arrives at Uppercross Cottage, she finds Mary alone in the house, “unwell and out of spirits,” and “lying on the faded sofa of the pretty little drawing-room, the once elegant furniture of which had been gradually growing shabby, under the influence of four summers and two children” (37). Mary Musgrove should take the cue from Cowper; she should acknowledge the importance of the sofa, the piece of furniture that provides symbolic resonance in her house. Like Lady Bertram, Mary is eternally attached to the idea of the sofa: the reclining position suggests her ennui, her lack of energy, her pseudo-invalidism, her dissatisfaction with her lot in life; the faded and shabby appearance of the “once elegant furniture” corresponds with her idea of herself and her life. But we witness here the first of the “talking cures” that are effected by one character’s sympathetic listening to and consideration of another. Anne says to Mary, “‘You know I always cure you when I come.’” Anne talks with her sister; she lets Mary talk all she wants; and Anne listens and rejoins with conversational tidbits that help calm Mary’s sense of grievance. Anne’s physical proximity and her attention to her sister’s mindless chatter has worked psychological magic: Mary “could soon sit upright on the sofa, and began to hope she might be able to leave it by dinner-time. Then, forgetting to think of it, she was at the other end of the room, beautifying a nosegay; then, she ate cold meat; and then she was well enough to propose a little walk” (39).

The short, choppy clauses here mimic the action. From lying down on the sofa, to sitting upright, to dining, to walking to the Musgroves’ Great House, Mary has undergone a physical and mental rejuvenation. Austen’s pre-Freudian insight into the concept of the “talking-cure” sets this scene apart as one of the funniest—and perhaps one of the saddest—in the novel.

At the Great House, Mrs. Musgrove’s sofa sets the scene for one of the most uncomfortably comic scenes of the novel—uncomfortable because of the topic of conversation, comic because of the way Austen places three people on the same sofa—a perfect mis en scène for farce because the arrangement is all wrong. The dramatic and comedic tension is heightened by the fact that for the first time in eight years Anne and Wentworth “were actually on the same sofa . . . they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove” (68). The narrator plays a large role in this scene, commenting in a rather jocular voice that Mrs. Musgrove is “no insignificant barrier indeed.” Bharat Tandon, in Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation, says that “[t]he whole scene with the sofa explores how a pair of supposedly former lovers might react to being close to each other with only someone like Mrs. Musgrove in the way; it tells simple truths about bodies as well as deriving complex effects from them” (236). I would go further and say that these complex effects include moments of intense sensibility as well as a pantomime of misery and barely controlled emotions. Mrs. Musgrove blocks from Wentworth’s view “the agitations of Anne’s slender form, and pensive face” (68). The word “agitations” is problematic here: do we attribute those agitations to Anne’s heightened emotional reaction to being so close to Captain Wentworth? or is Anne laughing to herself over the absurdity of this sofa scene?

Captain Wentworth, the narrator reminds the reader, “should be allowed some credit for the selfcommand with which he attended to [Mrs. Musgrove’s] fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for.” Is Anne mustering her own self-command as she hears Mrs. Musgrove’s “fat sighings”? Many critics have puzzled over Austen’s use of the expression “fat sighings,” an unusually harsh adjective-noun pairing that rather cruelly calls attention to Mrs.

Musgrove’s bulk as well as to her exaggerated sensibility as she remembers a son she would ordinarily, perhaps, like to forget.

This section of the novel represents Jane Austen’s comic rhapsodies upon the theme of the sofa, but the subtext is disturbing. Austen has created in this sofa tableau a pantomime that challenges interpretations. In a scene that reverberates with sexual and psychological tensions, we “hear” only Mrs. Musgrove’s part of the conversation; we “see” Mrs. Musgrove’s “comfortable substantial size,” the agitations of Anne’s body, and the “momentary expression,” the “quick glance,” and the “curl of [Wentworth’s] handsome mouth” (67-68). In his facial expressions, Anne recognizes Captain Wentworth’s true feelings about the worthless young troublemaker, but she also sees the way his “sympathy and natural grace . . . [his] kindest consideration, for all that was real and unabsurd in the parent’s feelings” surfaces as he sits with Mrs. Musgrove on the sofa. By placing these three characters—two lovers and a fat lady—close together on the sofa, Austen complicates the form and content. These three stock characters of comedy perform a pantomime that negates sentimentality and underscores realism. The pantomimic gestures undercut the serious content of Mrs. Musgrove’s monologue. Neither Austen nor Anne is sentimental here. The final effect of this sofa scene projects a kind of reconciliation—a talking cure for Mrs. Musgrove, and perhaps for Anne and Wentworth as well.

Persuasion is not a gentle book. If instances of injustice, carelessness, and unkindness mark the everyday interactions of human beings, so it is with almost every intimate scene in the book—not excepting those scenes featuring Anne and Captain Wentworth. In a final coup de grace to sentimentality, the narrator provides an aphoristic conclusion: “A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain,—which taste cannot tolerate,—which ridicule will seize.” Complexity of emotions seems to be Austen’s artistic aim.

Mrs. Musgrove’s sofa provides the setting for Anne’s first close encounter with Captain Wentworth, but we come back to Mary Musgrove’s sofa for a scene of particularly startling intimacy and melodrama. It is impossible to read Persuasion without noticing the sexual tension in Captain Wentworth’s striding into “the drawing-room at the Cottage, where were only herself and the little invalid Charles, who was lying on the sofa” (78); we see Wentworth “rescu[ing]” Anne from the onslaught of her boisterous nephew Walter. The perfectly composed scene is notable for its dramatic tension—for physical movement and masculine presence on the one hand, and for Romantic femininity on the other. The tension in the room is unbearably intimate; the scene is calculatedly theatrical and pantomimic: as soon as they see one another, Wentworth heads for the window, Anne for the sofa, where she kneels down to take care of her patient.

Austen breaks the tension by the entry of the ineffective Charles Hayter, followed closely by the younger Musgrove child (Walter), who “went straight to the sofa to see what was going on, . . .

and as his aunt would not let him teaze his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off” (80).

It is a domestic pantomime, but the subtext is frighteningly Gothic in its implications: Anne is at the mercy of a little male tyrant, an aggressor who bends down her head and wraps his “little sturdy hands” around her neck. Her “release” comes at the hands of Captain Wentworth, who has to pry those sturdy little hands loose from her neck. Even today, jaded as we are by sexually explicit scenes in graphic movies, we can recognize the erotic effect as well as the melodrama of this scene. Note that I am using “erotic” in its classical sense: “erotic” as “amatory”—expressive of love or desire (not pornographic). Captain Wentworth hovers over Anne, and he must touch her to effect this release. Penny Gay points out that this scene is unique in Austen’s fiction: “in writing so explicitly of Anne’s bodily sensations, and her inability to separate her physical feelings from her emotional and intellectual response, Austen is drawing on a character/audience relationship that is most commonly to be found in the drama. In short, as audience to this moment we are voyeurs of sexual intimacy” (158).

The intimacy of this sofa scene generates physical and emotional reactions in Anne.

Memory and desire, incredulity and gratitude descend upon her. The narrator tells us that she is speechless, that she retreats into “solitude and reflection” to deal with the emotions that this act has occasioned, that she is overcome. The physical nature of this scene is unmistakable. As Penny Gay notes, “We witness taboo-breaking physical contact . . . ” (158).13

The placement of the furniture reinforces dramatic possibilities for character interactions.

In chapter after chapter, furniture forces intimate connections, and these connections are bolstered by Austen’s use of parallel scenes with sofas and with chairs. When Anne Elliot is not tending to Mary or her nephew Walter, to Mrs. Musgrove, or to Mrs. Smith, she seats herself at the edge of the social group. At the Musgroves’ Great House in Chapter VIII, for example, Anne sits at the piano playing for the dancers and watching Wentworth flirt. The dancing over, Anne leaves the piano-forte; when she returns “[u]nintentionally” to that part of the room, she finds that Captain Wentworth has taken her accustomed seat: “he saw her, and, instantly rising, said, with studied politeness, ‘I beg your pardon, madam, this is your seat;’ and though she immediately drew back with a decided negative, he was not to be induced to sit down again” (72). What is going on here? Captain Wentworth has invaded Anne’s traditional place. By sitting in her seat at the piano, is he trying to understand her psychic space? By refusing to sit down again, is he rejecting her? Is he rejecting the part she has had to play during all the years of his absence? Although he is all “cold politeness” and “ceremonious grace,” the reader intuits the intimate nature of this kind of musical chairs.

Perhaps the reader would pass more quickly over Wentworth’s sitting in Anne’s chair if it were not for the very theatrical “duplicate” scene in the crowded room at the White Hart that resolves the misunderstandings and reconnects Anne and Wentworth. In the Regency period,

chairs were scattered throughout a room and could be moved to suit the sitter’s activities; work tables proliferated; the look of busy-ness and industry permeated the clutter. In a single room, like this one taken by the Musgroves, small pieces of furniture could be moved about so that individuals could read, write, converse, teach children, or sew while still remaining part of a social group. This is the kind of chaotic interior space Anne walks into—at one end of the room Mrs. Musgrove and Mrs. Croft are having a serious chin-wag about engagements and weddings; someplace in the “distance” Captain Wentworth sits at “a separate table” writing letters; and Anne, thinking about Mrs. Smith’s revelations and “deep in the happiness of such misery, or the misery of such happiness . . . ” (229), sits alone in a chair near a window. She is once again seated at the periphery, but she can overhear everything.

When Captain Harville invites Anne to stand with him at the window “at the other end of the room from where the two ladies were sitting,” she “rouse[s] herself” (231) to go to him.

Showing precisely how the characters have shifted positions in the crowded room, Jane Austen brings her characters closer and closer together. At this point, Anne, “though nearer to Captain Wentworth’s table, [was] not very near”;14 and yet, when Captain Wentworth drops his pen, she “was startled at finding him nearer than she had supposed” (233). Near, nearer, and nearer yet: this melodramatic pas de deux is intricately choreographed, to the extent that the scene, which we know to be romantic, is also highly comedic. In a very funny pantomime, Captain Wentworth, the prize-taking officer, eavesdrops on conversations, drops his pen, “forgets” his gloves, and practically forces his letter on Anne. In response to Wentworth’s silent entreaty to read the letter he had left for her, Anne melodramatically “sink[s] into the chair which he had occupied, succeeding to the very spot where he had leaned and written” (237).

This is an intimate, physical tableau, full of sexual tension, and the symmetry of action is a special feature of Austen’s plotting. At the Musgroves’ party Captain Wentworth sat himself in Anne’s seat at the piano; at the White Hart Anne sinks into Captain Wentworth’s chair at the writing desk. The silence of the scene, the rapid action, and the overtly pantomimic gestures create a small comedy of manners. Through dramatic plotting, Austen has assured that the reader will feel the nervous tension. Beneath the action, which is somewhat akin to musical chairs, the scene reverberates with love and desire. Jane Austen understood the theatrical potential—the comedy, the shock, the extremes of sensibility—of having characters physically exchange places, especially when the characters involved are a man and a woman.

Perhaps on our first reading of Persuasion we miss another instance of extraordinary intimacy as places are exchanged. Consider this scene: into the claustrophobic confinement of their home, a house with “rooms so small as none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating so many” (98), the Harvilles find a room for Louisa to recuperate after her fall. Despite the “ingenious contrivances and nice arrangements of Captain Harville,” the living space in Lyme is confined enough to astonish Anne. Where could they possibly find

space for a young woman who is an invalid?: “Captain Benwick must give up his room to them, and get a bed elsewhere . . . ” (113). In this small house, where it is a fact of life that physical proximity yields intimacy, Louisa sleeps in Captain Benwick’s bed.

E.M. Forster, a great fan of Jane Austen, developed the erotic potential of changing places into the magnificently comic opening of A Room with a View. Bemoaning their viewless rooms and desiring more than they had been given, Charlotte and Lucy become “a little peevish” (4). When Mr. Emerson offers his own and his son’s rooms to the women, a shocked Charlotte rejects the change—the implied intimacy. Even Lucy intuits that there is some kind of subtext, that the change deals “not with rooms and views, but with—well, with something quite different, whose existence she had not realized before” (6). The subtext suggests something “indelicate” in occupying the men’s space—sleeping in their beds, so to speak. Priggish Charlotte attempts to protect naive Lucy from the implications of intimacy: “I have taken the largest room. . . . I happen to know that it belongs to the young man, and I was sure your mother would not like it” (14-15). By comparison, Jane Austen’s world was much more attuned to the physical nature of beds and bedrooms.

Chairs, looking-glasses, sofas, beds—I am not providing here a symbolic reading of all the furniture in Persuasion; as Mrs. Swann says in Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, “sometimes a vine is only a vine” (68). In Persuasion, I think, a sofa is simply a sofa and a chair is simply a chair.15 But I have focused on the furniture in this book because Jane Austen reflects the preoccupations of the Regency world while creating scenes that provide highly dramatic confrontations and psychological insights. Austen’s sofa and chair vignettes in Persuasion create spatially confining interior scenes of excessive sensibility. Austen did not just decorate the text with Regency artifacts; she set the scene and, as Cowper would say, she “sang the sofa.”

One final note about the sofa: In a postscript to his “Biographical Notice of the Author,” Henry Austen includes extracts from letters Jane Austen wrote only a few weeks before her death. In what may be Jane Austen’s last extant letter (written “?Wednesday 28/Thursday 29 May 1817”), Jane Austen tells her correspondent, “I live chiefly on the sofa, but am allowed to walk from one room to the other. I have been out once in a sedan-chair, and am to repeat it, and be promoted to a wheel-chair as the weather serves” (9). I cite this letter, with its reference to the sofa and the chairs that define the invalid’s space, to show that even in her personal correspondence Jane Austen was keen to set the scene. There is a certain irony in her tone, even in this very sad letter, for to “live chiefly on the sofa” after having Mary Musgrove engaged in the same activity must have struck Jane Austen as absurd, humorous, and terrifying.

Cowper, Sterne, Richardson, Austen, Forster—the sofa has a history as well as a future in literature. I think it is significant, too, that Virginia Woolf settles the frail Clarissa Dalloway on a sofa for her nap on the afternoon of her party. But on this day, Clarissa cannot rest; “lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt,” Clarissa lets her mind wander over the events of her youth, to the point that she questions “in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life?” (121-22). Like Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf has set a scene depicting an interior, intimate space; you might say that the sofa has led Mrs. Dalloway to a meditation on the meaning of life.

What was Jane Austen musing about as she began to live chiefly on her sofa?

NOTES

1. Mr. Knightley “could not help remembering what he had seen; nor could he avoid observations which, unless it were like Cowper and his fire at twilight,

‘Myself creating what I saw,’

brought him yet stronger suspicion of there being a something of private liking, of private understanding even, between Frank Churchill and Jane” (344).

2. Fanny also quotes from Cowper’s Tirocinium: or, A review of Schools”: “With what intense desire she wants her home” (431).

3. Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, a widow, had planned to marry, but another bout of madness for Cowper prevented their marriage.

4. Some reference books give the name as Austin.

5. Cowper felt strongly enough about the scene with Lady Austen that gave rise to his meditation to append a brief explanatory note to the text of The Task:

[The history of the following production is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the SOFA for a subject. He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth, at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a volume.]

6. In the juvenilia, for example, in “Letter the 4th:Laura to Marianne” in Love and Freindship, Jane Austen may have been alluding laughingly to Cowper’s preference for the simple life.

Laura tells Marianne that she has been warned: “‘Beware of the insipid Vanities and idle Dissipations of the Metropolis of England; Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath & of the Stinking fish of Southampton’” (78-79). “‘Alas!,’” Laura exclaims, “‘What probability is there of my ever tasting the Dissipations of London, the Luxuries of Bath or the stinking Fish of Southampton? I who am doomed to waste my Days of Youth & Beauty in an humble Cottage in the Vale of Uske.’” And in Persuasion, Jane Austen alerts her readers to the vanities and dissipations of life—rural life, in the case of the estate of Kellynch-hall, and city life in Bath.

7. Bharat Tandon in Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation finds that “it is one of Cowper’s finest achievements to chart the means by which rural tranquility and retirement can be their own undoing. The paradox of leisure is on which The Task never conclusively resolves, a creative worry which it bequeaths to Mansfield Park, that novel which holds it in amused respect. Like Cowper before her, Austen registers the duplicity of leisured life through the refusal of objects and places to maintain comfortably stable meanings . . . ”(207).

8. The OED lists alternate spellings for the word “sofa”: sofa; sophee; sophy; sofy. Does Jane Austen include a pun in her naming of Captain Wentworth’s sister?

9. In terms of social history, “sofas and settees are two distinctive articles of furniture”: the settee, an “extension of the chair and part of a suite of chairs,” seems to be a particularly formal piece of drawing room furniture.

10. Note that the OED includes the following reference from Jane Austen’s correspondence: “There will then be the Window-Curtains, sofa-cover, & and a carpet to be altered” (8-9 February 1807). This is the same letter that includes the reference to Cowper’s Syringa.

11. The Crofts’ opinion on this great looking-glass is uncannily Victorian: one of the first tasks in the Victorian renovation of a great estate was to remove and dismantle the overpowering looking-glasses that reflected the rooms back at them. (Harewood House brochure)

12. The term “serious comedy” has been used by a variety of critics. See, for example, W.D. Harding, “Introduction,” Persuasion by Jane Austen, New York: Penguin Books, 1965.

13. Penny Gay also explores the “quasi-sexual nature” of the carriage scene, which occurs shortly after the drawing-room scene with the children. Perceiving Anne’s fatigue, Wentworth “hands” Anne into his sister’s carriage. “Anne’s thought processes,” Gay says, “move swiftly from an almost shocked registration of the quasi-sexual nature of Wentworth’s act to an attempt consciously to rationalize and thus censor the event” (159).

14. At the concert in Bath, Anne feels that Wentworth “could not have come nearer to her if he would; she was so surrounded and shut in” (188). She resettles herself in a seat at the end of the bench so that she is “within reach of a passer-by” (189). He comes close enough to talk with her; “he even looked down towards the bench, as if he saw a place on it well worth occupying . . .”

(190), but Anne’s attention is intercepted by Mr. Elliot. From his reaction to Mr. Elliot’s attentions, Anne discovers Wentworth’s jealousy.

15. Bharat Tandon says that “The shifting emotional and ethical resonances of sofas in The Task find echoes in Austen’s own sense of the unpredictable importance of the objects in her domestic worlds” (206). Tandon points out that “Austen challenges her readers to recognize both the psychological suggestiveness of inhabited space, and those instances where a door may simply be a door” (207).

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Austen, Henry. “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1986 Austen, Jane. The Letters of Jane Austen. Ed. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1995. _____. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1986.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Cescinsky, Herbert. English Furniture from Gothic to Sheraton. 3rd ed. New York: Bonanza Books, n.d.

Cowper, William. The Task. In The Poems of William Cowper. Ed. J.D. Baird and C. Ryscamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-95.

Forster, E.M. A Room with a View. 1923; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Gay, Penny. Jane Austen and the Theatre. Cambridge: CUP, 2002.

Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1990.

Jourdain, Margaret and F. Rose. English Furniture: The Georgian Period (1750-1830).

London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1953.

Stoppard, Tom. Indian Ink. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Tandon, Bharat. Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation. London: Anthem Press, 2003.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Watkins, Susan. Jane Austen’s Town and Country Style. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.

Woolf, Virginia. <="" i="">. 1925; Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

Lady Susan Ford, Susan Allen. "'No business with politics': Writing the Sentimental Heroine in Desmond and Lady Susan." Persuasions 26 (2005) [and Charlotte Smith's epistolary novel Desmond].

Soya, Michiko. "Lady Susan: A Game of Capturing the Last Word from Lady Susan to Jane Austen, and Then..." Persuasions 24 (2003).

Selection from Lady Susan Literary Criticism

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

V.26, NO.1 (Winter 2005)

“No business with politics”: Writing the Sentimental Heroine in Desmond and Lady Susan SUSAN ALLEN FORD

Susan Allen Ford (email: sford@deltastate.edu) is Professor of English and Writing Center Coordinator at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She has published essays on Jane Austen and her contemporaries, detective fiction, and the Gothic. She is a Life Member of JASNA.

TO MANY READERS, Lady Susan seems strangely unconnected to Austen’s other fiction.

Much of the difficulty of accounting for its being centers on the extravagance of the title character. She is “an isolated, an alarming creation, from another fictional universe” (Drabble xiv), “the most wicked of all [Austen’s] characters” (Roberts 129), “a cruising shark in her social goldfish pond” (Butler, Jane Austen 122), “polished, cynical and ruthless” (Bradbrook 122), even a sociopath (Anderson). The challenge of establishing a connection to the rest of Austen’s fictional progeny sends readers back to other fictional or literary models, forward to Mansfield Park, out to the Austen family and neighborhood networks. Lady Susan is variously related to the figure of the Merry (and lecherous) Widow from Restoration drama and Henry Fielding’s novels (Levine), Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace (LeRoy Smith 54), Choderlos de Laclos’s Marquise de Merteuil (Bradbrook, Roberts), or her own smooth schemer Mary Crawford.

Some look to the biography for sources. One suggestion is Mrs. Craven, a local villainess who locked up her daughters (e.g., Nokes 152). Another suggestion for Lady Susan’s

original is Austen’s cousin, Eliza de Feuillide. Most recently (and very convincingly) Jon Spence has argued for the importance of Eliza to Austen’s early fiction, seeing Lady Susan as the “culmination” (79) of the history of both Henry Austen’s and Jane’s relationship with their fascinating cousin, a history worked out in the pages of the Juvenilia and The Loiterer. Lady Susan, written during the period when Eliza’s husband was guillotined—an event which freed her to re-marry, Spence argues—“is a wish-fulfillment fantasy in two senses: it shows the young man undeceived by the wicked Lady Susan; but it also insists that the author was never taken in

by Eliza” (80).

If the novel’s heroine seems foreign to Jane Austen’s fiction, its epistolary form seems almost equally uncharacteristic. Yet by the time the nineteen-year-old Jane Austen sat down to write Lady Susan, she had already experimented with, while parodying, a range of narrative forms and tactics: with third-person sentimental narratives punctuated by songs and an epitaph (Jack and Alice) or broken by embedded letters (Evelyn); with a female picaresque in twelve chapters (The Beautifull Cassandra); with comic drama (The Visit, The Mystery); with discursive non-fiction prose (The History of England); even with a bathetic “Ode to Pity”; and with a number of epistolary narratives (including Amelia Webster, The Three Sisters, Love and Freindship, Lesley Castle). She had also begun and then abandoned a more serious and narratively complex novel about a young girl’s entrance into the world, Catherine, or the Bower.

With Lady Susan, however, she returned to the epistolary mode, a strategy she also seems to have employed for First Impressions and Elinor and Marianne.

After this early and extended experimentation with telling a story through letters, Austen gave up the strategy for other narrative tactics. It’s helpful, however, to think about those early trials in the context of the fiction of the period in which she was writing—the 1790s—and of the fictional models available to her. Charlotte Smith’s epistolary novel Desmond, available the year before Austen composed Lady Susan, offers a helpful perspective from which to consider Jane Austen’s early interests and the direction of her development. Published in the summer of 1792, during what Marilyn Butler has called “the annus mirabilis of eighteenth-century radicalism” (Introductory Essay 7), Desmond represents Charlotte Smith’s entry into the pamphlet wars that swirled in the early years of the French Revolution. Composed of letters dated from June 9, 1790, to February 6, 1792, its subject is the politics of the French Revolution in both England and France. Most specifically, Desmond is a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published November 1, 1790, which critiques “this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, . . . this monstrous tragi-comic scene” (92) in France, contrasts it to the “manly, moral, regulated liberty” (89) of Britain, and warns of the infection of revolutionary fervor that may ensue. Smith’s novel is structured around two pairs of correspondents: the young Lionel Desmond and his former guardian Erasmus Bethel; the unhappily married Geraldine Verney and her younger sister Fanny Waverly. Much of the novel consists of polemic and reportage, as Desmond and Bethel argue out the issues of revolution and reaction. But the main plot casts oppression in gendered terms, following Geraldine’s marriage to the dissolute Verney, the abuse she suffers, and Desmond’s virtuous love for her.

There is no evidence that Jane Austen read Desmond, which was controversial enough, even before the Revolution degenerated into the Terror, to be rejected by her publisher, Cadell and Davies (who would later famously refuse First Impressions). Certainly, however, Austen knew Charlotte Smith’s work. Much of the playfulness of the Juvenilia takes its energy from the sentimental conventions within which Smith writes. Twice Austen explicitly refers to Charlotte Smith’s earlier novels. In her History of England, the Duke of Somerset, “on the whole of a very amiable Character, & somewhat of a favourite with me,” is compared to the anti-hero of Emmeline: he is “by no means . . . equal to those first of Men Robert Earl of Essex, Delamere, or Gilpin” (143). Inverting the authority of Smith’s judgment of the unstable Delamere, the young author of this History subsequently compares Essex, that “unfortunate young Man” to “that equally unfortunate one Frederic Delamere. The simile may be carried still farther, & Elizabeth the torment of Essex may be compared to the Emmeline of Delamere” (146). In Catherine, or the Bower, Charlotte Smith’s fiction becomes a measure of characters’ thoughtfulness and intelligence. Kitty begins to improve her acquaintance with Miss Stanley by speaking of “Books universally read and Admired” (198-99), in particular of “Mrs Smith’s Novels,” which Miss Stanley, anticipating Isabella Thorpe, describes as “the sweetest things in the world.” In contrast to the vapidities of her friend, Kitty’s praise of the “very interesting” story of Ethelinde and the “Beautiful” descriptions of Grasmere is measured and specific (199). Smith’s fiction here functions as an indicator of Kitty’s taste and judgment. It’s perhaps significant that, when the conversation turns to politics as Smith’s own fiction does, Kitty’s aunt, like one of the antiJacobin polemicists of the 1790s, claims that “the whole race of Mankind were degenerating, . . . [that] Everything . . . was going to rack and ruin, all order was destroyed over the face of the World” (200).

I will not prove that Lady Susan is a revision of or even a direct response to Charlotte Smith’s Desmond. But Lady Susan did take shape within a particular context. Examining that context, approaching Jane Austen as a reader of Smith and as someone living, reading, and writing through the upheavals of the 1790s might help us measure Lady Susan’s qualities more accurately. In Desmond’s preface, Charlotte Smith challenges the notion that “women . . . have no business with politics” (45). Not only are “fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, or friends engaged” in the tumultuous world of the 1790s, she contends, but it is a world in which women are “subject to . . . mental degradation” (45). Smith’s novel not only depicts with great specificity the political arguments surrounding the French Revolution in both England and provincial France, but it also uses that backdrop as a means of investigating another political issue: the condition of women. Smith’s critique of the forces confining women is not limited to their economic and political implications; she examines the very novelistic conventions of sentimentality within which she writes. In Desmond’s two heroines, Geraldine Verney and her sister Fanny Waverly, Charlotte Smith scrutinizes the figures of the sentimental heroine and of the woman who chafes against that definition. The novel’s letters show the difficulty of negotiating both of those positions. While Lady Susan does not explicitly mention the revolutionary politics of the period in which it was written, politics nonetheless come to be defined as “women’s business” as Austen explores the business and politics of the personal.

Like Smith, Austen is interested in the economic and social conditions to which women are subject. Austen, however, through the letters of Catherine Vernon, Lady Susan, and even Mrs. Johnson exploits, explores, explodes the image of the sentimental heroine. For both Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen, the epistolary convention is crucial to their fictional aims.

That epistolary convention had, in fact, a political dimension, particularly during the early part of the 1790s. Edmund Burke cast as a letter his entry into the pamphlet war that spurred Smith to respond: the Reflections had, he said, its “origin in a correspondence between the author and a very young gentleman at Paris” (84). The letter form offered him a kind of liberty: “Indulging myself in the freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to throw out my thoughts, and express my feelings, just as they arise in my mind, with very little attention to formal method” (92). Burke here claims the freedom—the indulgence—of sentimental discourse, of political argument directed by feeling. In fact, Burke’s use of the epistolary mode was part of a larger exploitation of the political dimensions of the letter. Mary Favret has pointed out that the letter gained a real political valence between 1789 and 1830. “[T]he French monarchy’s lettre de cachet, the hidden letter of absolute law, became a symbol of tyranny, in contrast to the ‘open letter,’ symbol of representative government . . . ” (9). In England, the letter was politicized particularly through the agency of corresponding societies whose commitment to friendship and solidarity was “based on egalitarian principles and on correspondence itself” (28). For reformist and pro-revolutionary groups, “the letter was an open, democratic form, predicated on a belief in negotiation between disparate and multitudinous voices” (33).

When Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen, then, in the midst of the revolutionary upheavals of the first half of the decade, undertake epistolary narratives, they enter into a generic discourse with political implications. In Smith’s novel, the letter is a vehicle of political discussion that meets Burke with his own weapon if on a somewhat different ground. But despite her opening dismissal of the claim that women have no business with politics, she also provides a layer of insulation: most of the political argument comes from the male characters. Geraldine’s response to the French Revolution is less polemical, operating through sympathetic identification rather than argument. Geraldine recognizes the oppressions of monarchy by comparing them with her own situation: “If I get among the wildest collection of those people whose ferocity arises not from their present liberty, but their recent bondage, is it possible to suppose that they will injure me, who am myself a miserable slave, returning with trembling and reluctant steps, to put on the most dreadful of all fetters?” (303-04). But if Geraldine and her sister Fanny are largely silent on the politics of the revolution in France, they do have plenty to say about the constitution of the family and their condition as women within it.

Indeed, Burke’s Reflections (centrally for Smith) represents the British nation as a family and employs the landed estate as metaphor for its constitution: it is “an entailed inheritance

derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; . . . an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right” (119). Mary Wollstonecraft’s connection of family and nation in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—“A man has been termed a microcosm; and every family might also be called a state” 177—is a further articulation of a trope explored by many of the novels of the 1790s, including Charlotte Smith’s. Geraldine describes her father as “a very Turk in principle, [who] hardly allowed women any pretensions to souls, or thought them worth more care than he bestowed on his horses, which were to look sleek, and do their paces well” (327); she describes herself bitterly as “property” (333) and as “slave” (303) to her husband. That consciousness, however, fails to mitigate her oppression. Rebuking her sister, she holds up family unity as the ideal. “Where families are divided among themselves—I mean, where the father or mother disagree with the children, or the brothers and sisters with each other, there is something very wrong among them all” (191). Geraldine valorizes duty, the very mechanism of her oppression, at all costs, leaving Desmond longing for a revolution: “My hope is, that the proposal [of her husband and mother] . . . that she should leave her children, will rouse that proper spirit of resistance against usurped and abused authority” (292). Although that hope is unfulfilled—Geraldine remains the embodiment of duty to family—Smith’s providential design simultaneously frees Geraldine for remarriage and reforms the family. “Geraldine will bear my name—will be the directress of my family—will be my friend—my mistress—my wife!” (414), Desmond tells Bethel. Despite the possessive pronouns, Desmond looks forward to a companionate marriage and outward to a larger, non-hierarchical family group defined by “that tender confidence of mutual affection” (414).

Unlike those of Desmond, the politics of Lady Susan are neither national nor international in character. Nevertheless, the language of 1790s political discussion—particularly as it invokes the family—infiltrates the novel. Sir Reginald speaks of his son’s responsibilities as “the representative of an ancient Family” (260), a phrase that might be drawn from Burke. Sir Reginald’s authority is benevolently defined—“I do not wish to work on your Fears, but on your Sense & Affection” (261)—but characterized by weakness: age, “increasing Infirmities” (261), limited legal power to affect his son’s behavior. Lady Susan defines herself in opposition to the authority represented by Sir Reginald and Mr. Johnson. She anticipates the death of both men: “[A] state of dependance on the caprice of Sir Reginald, will not suit the freedom of my spirit” (299); “in happier times,” she assures Mrs. Johnson, “when your situation is as independant as mine, [our friendship] will unite us again in the same Intimacy as ever” (307). Lady Susan, however, also aligns herself with a hierarchical model of the family and its authority. She cites the “delicacy of [her] feelings, which could not endure that my Husband’s Dignity should be lessened by his younger brother’s having possession of the Family Estate” (249). She initially claims a refusal to “force Frederica into a marriage from which her heart revolted” (253) but then resolves to quash the “little rebellious heart & indelicate feelings” of her daughter (282) and “subdu[e] an insolent spirit” (254), the “proud spirit” (292) of Reginald. Reginald himself picks up this language, telling his sister, “you must make it your business to see justice done” to Frederica (284). As Favret points out, “Lady Susan may not be the radical agent, the vaguely French villainess many readers assume” (140).

Lady Susan is, however, expert at exploiting cultural fears of family division, even as she effects those divisions. While separating Reginald from his family, she positions herself on the side of the forces that would preserve family bonds: “I make it my particular request that I may not in any way be instrumental in separating a family so affectionately attached to each other” (293); “[w]ith feelings so poignant as mine, the conviction of having divided the son from his Parents, would make me, even with you, the most miserable of Beings” (300). The severing of her relationship with Reginald is also figured in terms of the family politic. In an uncharacteristically open moment of asperity, she terms it “this act of filial Obedience” (306), emphasizing his dependent state. To Reginald, the revelation of Lady Susan’s illicit relationship with Manwaring is matched by her crime against the “family you robbed of it’s [sic] Peace” (305). Unlike Charlotte Smith’s egalitarian renovation of the family at the end of Desmond, Jane Austen’s comic conclusion restores the Vernon family to its original definition, with the hope of expanding it to include Frederica. But such an incorporation is contingent on “such time as Reginald De Courcy could be talked, flattered & finessed into an affection for her—which, allowing leisure for the conquest of his attachment to her Mother, for his abjuring all future attachments and detesting the Sex, might be reasonably looked for in the course of a Twelvemonth” (313). Through the formality of Reginald’s family name and the reminder of the tangled family relationships involved in this probable transfer of affections, Austen deftly underscores the upheavals in the family politic.

The central figure in the 1790s plot depicting the threats to the family is the sentimental heroine, who embodies either the dangers of parental tyranny or seductive attractions of liberty.

The characters in both Desmond and Lady Susan are readers of sentimental fiction, very familiar with conventions of plot laid out for them and the definition of womanhood to which the heroines must conform. Desmond links himself to Rousseau’s hero St. Preux, comparing that character’s feelings for Julie to his own for Geraldine (252); Bethel describes Desmond—who not only haunts with a pocket telescope Geraldine’s rural retreat but “linger[s] . . . in tortures” (298) for news of her—as “an English Werter, . . . far gone in his species of insanity” (299).

Mrs. Waverly proscribes Fanny’s reading of contemporary novels, which “convey the poison of bad example in the soft semblance of refined sentiment” (215), while Geraldine “cannot imagine that novel reading can, as has been alleged, corrupt the imagination, or enervate the heart” (223).

Indeed, Geraldine seems to discount the precedents of fiction: she argues that the character of a “modern Lovelace . . . does not exist now” (242) and attempts to defuse Desmond’s fears that she will be “carr[ied] to Paris without her own consent” by the Duc de Romagnecourt by ironically casting him as “a French Sir Hargrave Pollexfen” (272). But the threats she faces are real (if less effective than Lovelace’s maneuverings), and she begins to see connections between herself and Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Biddulph: “Perhaps there is a little similarity in our destinies” (334). Those similarities might include an unflinching adherence to duty and obedience that seems to provide an unhappy model for Geraldine.

While Lady Susan is also a reader of sentimental fiction, her skepticism is much more consistent than Geraldine’s. She scoffs at her daughter’s behavior, which seems to be conditioned by the novels she has read in the long hours spent in her closet: Frederica “is busy in pursueing the plan of Romance begun at Langford. She is actually falling in love with Reginald De Courcy. To disobey her Mother by refusing an unexceptionable offer is not enough; her affections must likewise be given without her Mother’s approbation” (274). Susan’s description of Frederica as “this ill-used Girl, this Heroine in distress!” (290) is designed to deflate the significance of her daughter’s rebellion. It also aligns Lady Susan with Smith’s Mrs. Waverly and those moralists who see novel reading as peculiarly dangerous to the young.

Although Geraldine and Lady Susan both question the relevance of novels to their lives, the sentimental conventions do exert a powerful hold over both. In particular, the figure of the sentimental heroine defines and confines the ways these characters are perceived and perceive or present themselves. In his Reflections, Burke famously (or infamously) presented the episode of the penetration of Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber by the bloodthirsty mob as a sentimental narrative of beauty in distress. “A band of cruel ruffians and assassins . . . rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked . . . to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment” (164). For Burke, she is a woman “made for suffering,” characterized by “serene patience,” “piety,” “courage,” “the dignity of a Roman matron” (169). In Desmond, Charlotte Smith first counters Burke’s sentimentalizing vision of Marie Antoinette with the narrative of a starving French widow and mother begging for her family, “a thin, pale figure” whose tale highlights parental tyranny, antiFrench prejudice, and the violation of bonds of loyalty and protection (82-85). The figures of Geraldine and Fanny, however, offer a more developed version of the sentimental heroine.

Through her management of the narration, Smith underscores the notion that the sentimental heroine is a constructed being. Geraldine is presented in volume 1 only through Desmond’s eyes, and throughout the novel, the power of his voyeurism is emphasized: he writes about her, gazes at her through a telescope, lurks in her vicinity disguised as a monk, dreams of her.

Desmond’s visions of Geraldine reflect Burke’s notion that “[b]eauty in distress is much the most affecting form of beauty” (Philosophical Enquiry 110), and for both Desmond and Bethel, Geraldine’s maternity is key to this distress. Desmond dreams of a Geraldine deserted by her husband, “exposed to the fury of the contending elements, . . . in all the agonies of maternal apprehension” (131). The dying Geraldine “resemble[s] a beautiful statue of Niobe, . . . which I had admired at Lyons.” This image is succeeded by another: “I saw her extended, pale, and apparently dying on the bed . . . with the least of the children, a very young infant dead in her arms” (131). That dream of her death is followed by a similar view of the actual woman.

“Geraldine was extended on an old-fashioned cane sopha . . . and with her right arm she clasped the youngest of her children, who appeared to my terrified imagination to be dying, as its head reposed on her bosom, while her tears fell slowly on the little pallid face” (269). In London, Bethel sees her “so pale, so languid, so changed from the lovely blooming Geraldine of four

years since, that I beheld her with extreme concern.—Yet . . . this charming woman, in the pride of early beauty, never appeared to me so interesting, so truly lovely . . . ” (169).

Geraldine sees herself in these terms, the suffering heroine with a plot that belongs to sentimental fiction: “Why did I flatter myself . . . that the numberless distresses which have lately surrounded me, would either bring with them that calm resignation which should teach me to bear, or that total debility of mind that should make me forget to feel, all their poignancy?—Is it that I set out in life with too great a share of sensibility? Or is it my lot to be particularly wretched?” (159). Both the resignation she strives for and its failures are defined in terms of her maternity: she exerts herself “rather because it is my duty to try to live than because I wish to live—rather for the sake of my poor children than my own” (188); “there are moments when I most sincerely wish that I and my babies were all dead together” (220).

Fanny’s lot is perhaps more unhappy. At the beginning she is dismissed as “[t]his little wild girl” (164), self-possessed and “naturally satirical” (165). “[H]ow can I help being satirical,” she protests, “against those who will not let me be sentimental?” (216). Although Fanny Waverly’s wit and anger both look forward to Austen’s own heroines and threaten the sentimental definition of femininity, Smith’s novel charts her reformation. Her range of feeling, experience, and expression is increasingly limited while the plot gives her little to do. Fanny’s gratitude to Desmond and her “agonizing grief” (301) on Geraldine’s behalf make her “interesting” (176) to Bethel and Desmond; the account of her courtship by and marriage to Desmond’s friend Montfleuri is presented only from his perspective. She is effectively silenced as she is fit to the sentimental plot.

Lady Susan, as much a reader of sentimental fiction as Smith’s characters, understands and exploits the power of the sentimental heroine and sentimental maternity. Catherine Vernon describes “this dangerous creature” (250) as “delicately fair, with fine grey eyes & dark eyelashes” with “an uncommon union of Symmetry, Brilliancy and Grace” and an “address . . . gentle, frank & even affectionate” (251). Reginald, despite his initial skepticism, praises and defends Lady Susan’s “solid affection for her Child” though “because she has not the blind & weak partiality of most Mothers, she is accused of wanting Maternal Tenderness” (265).

With more penetration, Catherine Vernon objects to Susan’s “pathetic representation,” “so ostentatious & artful a display” (270) of maternal distress.

But just as Austen allows Lady Susan a greater share in her own narrative representation than Smith allows to Geraldine (indeed Susan defines and re-defines herself before others have the opportunity to define her), she also exposes her heroine’s efforts to control that image. Lady Susan’s initial plans include attention to the Vernons’ “dear little children” (243): “I mean to win

my Sister in law’s heart through her Children; I know all their names already, & am going to attach myself with the greatest sensibility to one in particular, a young Frederic, whom I take on my lap & sigh over for his dear Uncle’s sake” (250). Her reflection on her plans to marry her daughter to Sir James Martin cloaks the aim of economic incentive in the language of feeling. “I have been called an unkind Mother,” she tells her friend Mrs. Johnson, “but it was the sacred impulse of maternal affection, it was the advantage of my Daughter that led me on” (245). In heightened language that suggests an absolute horror of maternal tyranny she seeks to control the public face of the situation: “Can you possibly suppose,” she challenges Catherine Vernon, “that it was my object to make my own child miserable, & that I had forbidden her speaking to you . . . from a fear of your interrupting the Diabolical scheme? Do you think me destitute of every honest, every natural feeling? Am I capable of consigning her to everlasting Misery, whose welfare it is my first Earthly Duty to promote?” (289).

Whereas Geraldine and Fanny are restricted by the conventions of sentiment, Lady Susan’s presentation of herself as sentimental heroine attempts to clear a space for unfettered action. In order to deter Reginald’s arrival in town, she invokes her helplessness before the power of feeling and attempts to align Reginald’s action with rational interests, the preservation of decorum: “We have been hurried on by our feelings to a degree of Precipitance which ill accords with the claims of our Friends, or the opinion of the World. We have been unguarded in forming this hasty Engagement. . . . [T]he influence of reason is often acknowledged too late by those who feel like me” (300). But the language of the sentimental epistle is dangerous, the distance between authorial intention and readerly reception, as Eagleton has suggested, difficult to navigate: “My Letter, which was intended to keep him longer in the Country, has hastened him to Town” (301-02). The narrative control wielded by the sentimental heroine is ultimately limited to the power of passivity.

Finally, Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen discover in their experimentation with epistolarity a form that both defines and threatens the borders between private and social spaces as well as the understanding that letters should facilitate. In the historical world inhabited by Jane Austen, as Deborah Kaplan has shown, letters are distinctly social in nature, defining communities. We’re accustomed to thinking about letters, however, at least as they appear in fiction, as private documents, uniting one writer in an intimate relationship with one reader Epistolary fiction—Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Clarissa, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse—privileges the relationship of the confidante, where the outpourings of the individual voice, the secrets of the self, are exchanged. As Patricia Meyer Spacks argues, the epistolary novel in the eighteenth century becomes a female form that “clarif[ies] women’s claim to dominion over the realm of emotion” as it “suggest[s] how feeling can substitute for action to generate its own kind of plot” (70). But these spaces for the expression of feeling are not as private as they seem. Terry Eagleton, writing about Clarissa, points out that correspondence of any kind is by its nature political: “To ‘correspond’ is to implicate a set of political questions: Who may write to whom, under what conditions? Which parts may be cited to another, and which must be suppressed? Who has the authority to edit, censor, mediate, commentate?” (50).

James How connects the public nature of any letter sent through the mail to its institutional authorization: the Post Office “sets up and then advertises the existence of impersonal spaces, which are continually there, and into which you can send your letters once they are written” (4).

But these spaces, he claims, are not exactly private: “They are common spaces other people are also always using, and in which there is a sense for the letter writers and readers . . . that their letters are jostling and bumping up against multitudes of other letters sent by a variety of different and unfamiliar people” (4). And, Eagleton suggests, there’s always the possibility of a gap between intention and destination: “[l]etters, the most intimate sign of the subject, are . . . [liable to be] exploited for ends unforeseen by their authors. Writing and reading are always in some sense illicit intercourse—not only because they may be expressly forbidden, but because there is always the possibility of a fatal slip between intention and interpretation, emission and reception” (50).

The unreliability endemic to correspondence in a world that’s simultaneously chaotic and authoritarian is matched by the very instabilities of language. The letter’s existence as a missive in search of an audience complicates its identity as an expression of an authentic individual voice. Eagleton reminds us that “[t]he other to whom the letter is addressed is included within it, an absent recipient present within each phrase. As speech-for-another, the letter must reckon that recipient’s likely response to its every gesture” (52). The epistolary mode, then, blurring the divide between private and public, offers insight and secrecy that are revealed to be more and less than they seem.

Both Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen call attention in these novels to the limits of the reliability of the letter in actually effecting correspondence between individuals. For Smith’s correspondents, believing in the sentimental convention that feeling and expression should coincide, the mutuality of truth and honesty dictates the transaction. Bethel is the trusted friend and mentor to Desmond; Fanny is Geraldine’s sister, her “second self” (326). Nonetheless, there are gaps in the intimacy of their correspondence: Bethel writes repeatedly, wondering why Desmond has concealed his whereabouts; a letter’s origin can be (and is) concealed, its honesty rendered partial. Geraldine, despite her love for her sister, behaves as a censor, imploring Fanny to “check [her] vivacity” (189) and chastising Fanny’s angry criticism of the brutality of Geraldine’s husband (188-89) and her mother’s indifferent tyranny to her daughters; Fanny’s transgressive speech and writing break the silence that Geraldine’s sense of duty imposes. The result is increased isolation for both heroines.

In Lady Susan, honesty is not a necessary element of correspondence. The novel’s first letter to her “dear Brother” is a display of Lady Susan’s “eloquence,” her ability to frame her own advantage as feeling: “I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profitting by your kind invitation when we last parted . . . ” (243). Though she rhetorically bows to Mr. Vernon’s “power,” what really matters is that she is “determined” to visit (244). Susan’s second letter, to

her friend Mrs. Johnson, with its natural, conversational directness, immediately punctures her conventional professions of family affection: “Charles Vernon is my aversion, & I am afraid of his wife” (246). The bulk of the novel’s correspondence, however, reflects the straightforwardness of this second letter: Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson, Catherine Vernon and her mother share an intimacy and unity of purpose that allows for directness. That directness can have its dangers or limitations, as when Catherine’s letter describing Reginald’s involvement with Susan finds its way into the hands of the weakened patriarch whom they would protect.

Susan’s letter alerting Mrs. Johnson to Reginald’s visit is frustrated by the absence from home of its addressee. Deceptions can be easily practiced, illicit letters conveyed. Though in a neighborhood of voluntary spies, Lady Susan’s bare assertion that Manwaring’s letters come from his wife is enough to convince, and even the milky Frederica manages a letter to Reginald.

Further, letters can often reveal a level of unreliability that has less to do with the honesty of the writers than with their inability to read or predict their circumstances.

Letters, then, are as liable to convey misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and mistakes between correspondents as they are to convey legible or transparent truths. That effect is magnified at the level of narrative legibility where readers attempt to decipher authorial intent.

The epistolary mode is essentially a democratic form in which authorial control of the narrative is ceded to the readers, who are provided with the material out of which to connect bits of evidence and construct judgment. The dangers of such a strategy became apparent early on to Samuel Richardson, who found himself compelled to add chiding footnotes to instruct wayward readers in the proper attitude toward his hero-villain, Lovelace.

The epistolary fictions of both Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen evidence this kind of intentional obscurity. In Desmond, the absence of an authorial voice vexes critical attempts to assess Smith’s attitude toward her heroines. Throughout the novel, Geraldine defines herself as a martyr to duty, obeying a dissolute husband who commands her to travel with her children to a war-torn country. Does Smith create in Geraldine, as Chris Jones suggests, “a parody heroine, carrying conventional behaviour to a ludicrous extreme, while at the same time engaging in activities which subvert traditional standards” (74)? Or does Smith, as Eleanor Wikborg argues, “problematize[] the ideal of female submission” while paradoxically “transforming women’s enforced surrender to male power into an erotic fantasy of validation” (526)? Geraldine’s final letter, written before Verney’s death frees her, affirms this submission: “I have much to suffer with him and for him” (406). The novel’s conclusion effectively silences the heroines: the final three letters recounting the courtship of Geraldine and Fanny are written to Bethel by Desmond and Montfleuri; even the women’s voices are overwhelmed in the sudden imposition of the courtship plot. Judith Stanton, writing about Smith’s personal letters, argues that “[i]dealistically she believed in a code of honor and a cult of sensibility even after they failed her” (19).

Desmond’s ambiguities, then, seem to reflect the intersection of ideal systems and experience realized in both fiction and in fact.

The epistolary form Jane Austen chooses for Lady Susan leads to similar ambiguities, vexing judgment of both the heroine herself and the novel’s conclusion. Does the novel condemn Susan in favor of the more socially and generically acceptable models of Catherine Vernon and Frederica? Warren Roberts suggests that the centrality of “scandal and the moral subversion of society” is “interesting [to Austen] precisely because it was wicked” (129). Lady Susan provides an opportunity of voicing that fascination. William Galperin argues that “[a]lthough it is virtually impossible to regard the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon as a role model for a presumably female readership, it is just as impossible to perceive the cultural order, which seeks to contain and to thwart her, in a more positive light” (121). Indeed, as Galperin points out, the difficulties of judgment are related to generic form: “this novella— composed of letters that have apparently been retrieved by an editor—chronicles a period in Lady Susan’s life demarcated by the death of her previous (and older) husband and by the acquisition of a new husband. . . . Marriage is a conspiracy now. And its purpose . . . is to remove women to a place where they are inaudible, invisible, and where their only agency is in serving the landed and patriarchal interests in which they are presumably subordinate and . . . continually vulnerable” (122-23). As in Desmond, the female voices that have defined this novel are silenced by generic demands: “This Correspondence, by a meeting between some of the Parties & a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post office Revenue, be continued longer” (311). The voice of the heroine is replaced, Galperin notes, by that of a misogynistic editor with a “Fieldingesque mode of authority” (123).

But what does the replacement of epistolary negotiation by narrative authority mean?

Susan Sniader Lanser suggests that Austen felt an actual “impatience with the (now waning) letter novel” (67-68). Most explanations (such as that of A. Walton Litz, who sees Austen as “frightened” [n.p.] by the possibilities of narrative authority she’d begun to test in Catherine) rest on the problem of narrative control. Mary Poovey argues that Lady Susan’s “artful power” is “[s]o compelling and so complete . . . that the only way Austen can effectively censure her is to impose punishment by narrative fiat. Predictably, this entails disrupting the epistolary narrative and ridiculing not just the correspondents but the morally anarchic epistolary form itself” (178).

Susan Pepper Robbins declares that the conclusion embodies “clear moral judgments. The narrative voice has indeed become a source of order and value” (223). But Favret’s view seems more convincing: here “epistolary art is in league with social consensus and parental authority.

Rather than managing the letter into a parody of anarchy, Austen begins to see it in a more threatening aspect, as a paradigm of law” (144-45).

Indeed, it’s the narrative voice that begins to seem anarchic with its multivalent ironies.

Catherine Vernon’s asserted affection for Frederica is undercut by the pragmatics of correspondence: she “cease[s] writing minutely or often” (311) to her niece when she suspects that Frederica writes under surveillance. Mr. Vernon, who, the narrator reminds us, “live[s] only to do whatever he was desired” (311), keeps his subordinate role. Frederica remains a cipher to be read one way by her aunt, another by her mother: “the same restrained Manners, the same timid Look in the presence of her Mother . . . assured her Aunt of her situation’s being

uncomfortable” (311) while Lady Susan “acknowledg[es] in grateful delight that Frederica was now growing every day more & more what a Parent could desire” (312). Reginald might be “talked, flattered, & finessed into an affection for her . . . in the course of a Twelvemonth”—a longer time than might be expected since his “feelings were no less lasting than lively” (313).

Even the heroine’s fate is ironically inconclusive: whether to class either marriage to the wealthy and foolish Sir James or estrangement from the Vernons as reward or punishment is impossible.

The narrator, indeed, cedes authority: “I do not see how [her happiness] can ever be ascertained. . . . The World must judge from Probability” (313).

What appears as anarchy in the third-person Conclusion to Lady Susan is converted in the following decades into a style in which a character’s self-revelation and the narrative comment can be simultaneous, multiplying while controlling ironies. A simple story—a single plot, a household of characters who perform but don’t develop—gives way to a pattern of intersecting plots involving three or four families in a country village, all of whom, as E. M. Forster has it, are “round, or capable of rotundity” (74). In Lady Susan, the young Jane Austen exploits a form in such a way that she both adopts its conventions and challenges them. This novel deftly evokes the familial and social—even the linguistic—tumult of the decade, but ultimately Austen discovers an eloquence all her own.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Beatrice. “The Unmasking of Lady Susan.” Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan. Ed. J. David Grey. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989. 193-203.

Austen, Jane. Minor Works. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Vol. 6 of The Works of Jane Austen.

Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757. Ed. J. T. Boulton. London: Routledge; New York: Columbia UP, 1958. _____. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. 1968.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Butler, Marilyn. Introductory Essay. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy.

Ed. Marilyn Butler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 1-17.

_____. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. 1975. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.

Drabble, Margaret. Foreword. Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan. Ed. J. David Grey. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989. xiii-xiv.

Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

Favret, Mary. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. New York: Harcourt, 1955.

Galperin, William H. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

How, James. Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.

Jones, Chris. “Radical Sensibility in the 1790s.” Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism. Ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest. New York: Routledge, 1993.

68-82.

Kaplan, Deborah. “Representing Two Cultures: Jane Austen’s Letters.” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock.

Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. 211-29.

Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Levine, Jay Arnold. “Lady Susan: Jane Austen’s Character of the Merry Widow.” Studies in English Literature 1.4 (Fall 1961): 23-34.

Litz, A. Walton. Preface. Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. New York: Garland, 1989. n.p.

Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Farrar, 1997.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Robbins, Susan Pepper. “Jane Austen’s Epistolary Fiction.” Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan. Ed. J. David Grey. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989. 21524.

Roberts, Warren. Jane Austen and the French Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s, 1979.

Smith, Charlotte. Desmond. Ed. Antje Blank and Janet Todd. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001.

Smith, LeRoy W. Jane Austen and the Drama of Woman. New York: St. Martin’s, 1983.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “Female Resources: Epistles, Plot, and Power.” Writing the Female Voice: Essays in Epistolarity. Ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989. 63-76.

Spence, Jon. Becoming Jane Austen: A Life. London: Hambledon, 2003.

Stanton, Judith. “Charlotte Smith and ‘Mr. Monstroso’: An Eighteenth-Century Marriage in Life and Fiction.” Women’s Writing 7 (2000): 7-22.

Wikborg, Eleanor. “Political Discourse versus Sentimental Romance: Ideology and Genre in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond.” English Studies 6 (1997): 522-31.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Ed. Carol Poston. 2nd ed.

New York: Norton, 1988.

Jane Austen and Movies "Award-Winning Love." Well-known authors discuss Jane Austen's books and their film versions, with Elizabeth Farnsworth, Carol Shields, Cynthia Heimel, and Roger Rosenblatt.

Transcript of a PBS News Hour broadcast, 14 Feb. 1996.

Francus, Marilyn. "Austen at the Movies." A review of Jane Austen in Hollywood. In The Eighteenth Century 41, 2 (Summer 2000) pp 160-68 [free at jstor].

Gottlieb, Sidney. "Persuasion and cinematic approaches to Jane Austen." Literature/Film Quarterly 30, 2 (Jan. 2002) [questia sub ser].

Groenendyk, Kathi. "Modernizing Mansfield Park: Patricia Rozema's Spin on Jane Austen."

Persuasions 25 (2004).

Moody, Ellen. Jane Austen on Film, a discussion of film versions of the novels. Prof. Moody's academic web site.

Parrill, Sue. "Metaphors of Control: Physicality in Emma and Clueless." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Robards, Brooks. "The Janeite Lens." Reviews Jane Austen on Screen by Gina MacDonald. The Women's Review of Books 21, 7 (April 2004) p 14 [free at jstor].

Sadoff, Dianne F. "Marketing Jane Austen at the Megaplex." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 43, 1 (Spring 2010) pp 83-92 [summary].

Salber, Cecilia. "Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy: Art Imitating Art.. Imitating Art." Persuasions 22 (2001).

Turan, Kenneth. "Pride and Prejudice: An Informal History of the Motion Picture." On the 1940 movie version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Persuasions 11 (1989).

Selection from Jane Austen and Movies

PERSUASIONS ON-LINE

V.22, NO.1 (Winter 2001)

Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy: Art Imitating Art . . . Imitating Art CECILIA SALBER

Cecilia Salber (email: csalber@kbcc.cuny.edu) is an Assistant Professor in the Robert J. Kibbee Library, Kingsborough Community College of The City University of New York.

Prior to joining Kingsborough in 1996, she was for many years an Assistant Editor and Senior Reference Librarian at Newsweek.

DEVOTEES OF JANE AUSTEN’S FICTION might understandably express little interest in contemporary novels dealing with the urban singles scene of the late twentieth century. A sensibility that revels in the long ago world of country dancing, chaste heroines, and polite courtships in delightful villages might well be put off by today’s typically sexually promiscuous heroines. Yet in her two recent bestsellers chronicling the adventures of a single modern thirtysomething Londoner, British author Helen Fielding appeals to both sensibilities. In Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Fielding presents a thoroughly modern heroine who is surprisingly reminiscent of, and at times as endearing as, Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot. What’s more, Fielding provides a glossy and humorous prism through which Austen’s themes are refracted.

Fielding sees the connection between Austen’s youth-oriented culture and its attendant problems of finding suitable mates and Bridget Jones’s contemporary singles scene. An astute observer of today’s mating rituals, Fielding is straightforward in connecting her novels to

Austen’s: “I shamelessly stole the plot from Pride and Prejudice for the first book. I thought it had been very well market-researched over a number of centuries and she probably wouldn’t mind” (“News Review”). As for the sequel, she says, “I borrowed quite a bit from Persuasion for this book too, there’s a Benwick character and persuasion is one of the themes; Anne Wentworth was persuaded out of a relationship by her elders. Bridget is persuaded out of a relationship by—ironically enough—too many self-help books about how to improve your relations” (“News Review”).

Even without Fielding’s admission that she does not suffer from the anxiety of influence, Austen fans would immediately recognize the parallels between plot episodes and characterizations. In her first diary entry, Bridget writes of her encounter with a Mr. Mark Darcy at Una and Geoffrey Alconbury’s New Year’s Day Turkey Curry Buffet: “It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party” (Diary 9, 12). According to Bridget’s mother, Mr. Darcy is “‘one of those top-notch barristers. Masses of money’” (9). And though it is near the close of the twentieth century, “in manner of” (to use one of Bridget’s favorite phrases) Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Jones is desperately trying to get her daughter married. Mr. Darcy, available, rich, successful, the son of old friends, is her number one target. As part of her matchmaking strategy, Mrs. Jones has been planning to have Bridget and Mark meet at this very Turkey Curry Buffet, a contemporary analogue to the Meryton assembly. Alas, by Bridget’s frank, humorous, and accurate estimation, the result is a “day of horror” (9). Her first impressions? “Mark Darcy. . . . Yuk. . . . [C]learly odd” (11, 13).

Fielding’s deliberate weaving of the plots, characters, and themes of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion into her own novels is hardly unique. The movie Clueless did much the same with Austen’s Emma. Art imitating art. But Fielding cleverly raises the ante, working at a more self-consciously intertextual level: art imitating art imitating art. For example, she portrays Bridget and her friends Jude and Sharon as obsessed with the BBC’s 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice. Bridget writes:

Just nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice. Hard to believe there are so many cars out on the roads. Shouldn’t they be at home getting ready? Love the nation being so addicted. The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. . . . They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. (215)

And just after the broadcast, she writes,

Jude just called and we spent twenty minutes growling, “Fawaw, that Mr. Darcy.” I love the way he talks, sort of as if he can’t be bothered. Ding-dong!

Then we had a long discussion about the comparative merits of Mr. Darcy and Mark Darcy, both agreeing that Mr. Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder but that being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked.

(215)

The difficulty in separating the real, that is, the Austenian prototype, from the imagined appears again when Bridget confronts the real life affair between the Pride and Prejudice costars Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle:

I stumbled upon a photograph in the Standard of Darcy and Elizabeth, hideous, dressed as modern-day luvvies, draped all over each other in a meadow: she with blond Sloane hair, and linen trouser suit, he in striped polo neck and leather jacket with a rather unconvincing moustache. Apparently they are already sleeping together. That is absolutely disgusting. Feel disoriented and worried, for surely Mr. Darcy would never do anything so vain and frivolous as to be an actor and yet Mr. Darcy is an actor. Hmmm. All v. confusing. (216)

Several times in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, when reality is getting them down, Bridget, Jude, and Sharon pop the Pride and Prejudice video into the VCR to drool over Mr. Darcy emerging from the lake at Pemberley, dripping wet in a sexy white shirt (35, 90-91). The fixation culminates with Bridget landing a freelance assignment (she is a broadcast journalist) to interview none other than Mr. Firth. To prepare, she watches the video of this diving scene fifteen times (125). The resultant interview is hilarious since Bridget, absurdly, cannot get beyond the sexy dripping white shirt (135-43).

Adding yet another self-referential layer to the intertextual complexity, Fielding and company have hired Colin Firth to play the role of Mark Darcy in next year’s film of Bridget Jones’s Diary (Mcdaid). One can only wonder if the parodies and intertextual jokes will end there. In a film of the sequel, will Mr. Firth be called upon to play himself in the interview, as well as the Mark Darcy character?

While both of Fielding’s novels were bestsellers around the world, the response has not all been favorable. Feminists have complained that Bridget “isn’t a very impressive role model” (“News Revies”). One can easily see their point. Like Elizabeth Bennet, Bridget has a lively mind, but some critics might characterize her as “scatterbrained.” She and her fellow “Singleton” (as opposed to “Smug Married”) girlfriends are consumed with finding suitable men. Their careers and paychecks cannot compensate for their loneliness and fear of “dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian” (Diary 18). If in Pride and Prejudice Charlotte and Elizabeth debate the judiciousness of a woman’s showing or concealing her affection for a man (21-22), in Bridget Jones’s Diary Bridget and her anxious girlfriends desperately scour magazines and self-help books for the key to the male psyche. Periodically, they convene emergency summit meetings to engage in heavy duty “feminist ranting” about “commitment phobic” men (Diary 17,107-09). These decidedly unfeminist get-togethers invariably turn into junk food orgies accompanied by prodigious amounts of wine.

Bridget’s frustrated friend Sharon says, “we women are only vulnerable because we are a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in love and relying on our own economic power” (18). But two hundred years before, Elizabeth Bennet was just as adamant in her refusal to compromise, though she lacked the economic power. In her famous remarks on Charlotte’s decision to marry Mr. Collins, Elizabeth is emphatically pioneering: “‘the woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking. You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavor to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security for happiness’” (PP 135-36).

Responding to the inevitable criticism that attaches itself to a work that interfaces with a masterpiece of fiction, Fielding argues that she has written “about all the secret anxieties that— apparently—lots of women have but don’t like to admit to. It was very interesting going to readings all over the world and talking to—say very whizzy businesswomen in New York—who whispered over the signing table that they related to Bridget” (“News Review”). Fielding, like Austen, is an observer with a very satirical eye.

Would Austen relate to Bridget? Austen would probably be appalled by the immaturity, lewdness, and general lack of self-control exhibited by Bridget and her friends, but it is not farfetched to imagine this kind of character in one of Austen’s novels. Lydia Bennet, for example, would fit right in with Bridget’s group of women who are desperate to be married. And Austen would probably appreciate Fielding’s astute characterizations, if not her language.

Shrewd, biting, and at times hilarious, the language of Bridget’s diaries conveys the frankness and urgency that separates our time from Austen’s. Bridget keeps a record of her

vices—alcohol and tobacco consumption, weight gained—and expresses herself in a peculiar vernacular of abbreviations, missing articles and pronouns, and slightly warped syntax. The effect gives Bridget—and her words—a reality that a more carefully cadenced text would not.

In Bridget Jones’s Diary, for example, Mark Darcy predictably finds himself in a position to rectify a scandalous affair of the utmost embarrassment to Bridget. “He started to pace around the room,” Bridget writes, “firing questions like a top barrister. . . . [I]t was pretty damn sexy, I can tell you” (238-39). Her reaction is modern and visceral. In contrast, Elizabeth Bennet’s reaction to precisely the same circumstance is summarized demurely by a narrator who tells us that “never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved him, as now, when all love must be in vain” (PP 278).

In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget and Mark gradually transform into Persuasion’s Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, lovers who find their relationship strained by misunderstandings, miscommunication, and outside interference. Here again, we find the contrast in the blunt, inelegant first-person narration: “[I]f we love someone it’s pretty hard to get them out of our system when they bugger off,” Bridget remarks “ruefully” (Edge 233).

Bridget echoes Anne Elliot’s sentiments, though not exactly her manner: ‘“We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves ’” (P 232).

By maintaining Bridget’s voice throughout, the diary format allows readers to judge the characters and their predicaments for themselves. The omniscient narrator of Austen’s novels is replaced by an unreliable, solipsistic voice that creates its own sense of reality and coherence.

As readers, we have the opportunity to accept or dismiss Bridget’s subjective assessments and point of view, but we also respond to the humor of the first-person narration of a self-absorbed young singleton as she begins to get to know herself.

Few readers will see Fielding’s books as great literature. The “excursion” to Thailand in the sequel is a bit over the top, for instance. Yet, while the Bridget Jones books may not be read two hundred years hence, they do provide us with recognizable portraits of Austen’s women as modern singletons relating to “fin-de-millennium males” (Edge 286). They show the tenuous position of women who accept the fact that they must be married to achieve social acceptance.

As an observer of contemporary mores, Fielding shows how the problems of a socially mobile youth culture have not really changed in two hundred years. Finding mates in a world where single women outnumber available men is just as important for Bridget’s coterie as it was for Elizabeth Bennet’s sisters, friends, and acquaintances.

The Bridget Jones novels are essentially palimpsests upon which both Fielding’s texts and Austen’s co-exist. Their ultimate value may lie in the insights they provide into Austen’s work. By “modernizing” Austen, Fielding not only honors her model, but also validates her perceptions in a new century.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 19331969.

Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. New York: Viking, 1998. _____. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. New York: Viking, 2000.

Mcdaid, Carol. “There's no Escaping Mr. Darcy. . . .” The Independent 9 June 2000: 11.

“News Review: Are You Bridget Jones?” Daily Telegraph 20 Nov. 1999: 20.

Themes Ascarelli, Miriam. "A Feminist Connection: Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Auerbach, Emily. "'A barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven': Did Mark Twain really hate Jane Austen?" Virginia Quarterly Review Winter 1999, pp 109-20.

Benson, Mary Margaret. "Mothers, Substitute Mothers, and Daughters in the Novels of Jane Austen." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Bray, Joe. "The source of 'dramatized consciousness': Richardson, Austen, and stylistic influence" [and novelist Samuel Richardson]. Style 35, 1 (Spring 2001) [questia sub ser].

Butler, Marilyn; and Irvin Ehrenpreis. "Jane Austen's Politics." A brief, sharp exchange on whether Jane Austen wrote politically conservative novels. NY Review of Books 5 April, 1979.

Cohen, Paula Marantz. "Jane Austen's rejection of Rousseau: A novelistic and feminist initiation." Papers on Language and Literature 30, 3 (Summer 1994) [questia sub ser].

DeForest, Mary; and Eric Johnson. "Computing Latinate Word Usage in Jane Austen's Novels."

A description of a computer aided study developed to identify the use of Latinate language by characters in Jane Austen. Computers and Text (2000).

Despotopoulou, Anna. "Fanny's gaze and the construction of feminine space in Mansfield Park."

The Modern Language Review 99, 3 (July 2004) pp 569-83 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Emsley, Sarah. "Laughing at Our Neighbors: Jane Austen and the Problem of Charity."

Persuasions 26 (2005).

Enhoffer, Tina. "Chances Are: The Role of Fortune in Jane Austen's Novels." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Graham, Jean. "Austen and the Advantage of Height." Persuasions 20 (1999).

Graham, Peter W. "Born to Diverge: An Evolutionary Perspective on Sibling Personality Development in Austen's Novels." Persuasions 25 (2004).

Graves, David Andrew. "Vocabulary Profiles of Letters and Novels of Jane Austen and her Contemporaries." Persuasions 26 (2005).

Griffin, Michael. "Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian Society."

Persuasions 23 (2002).

Gross, Gloria. "Mentoring Jane Austen: Reflections on 'My Dear Dr. Johnson.'" About author Samuel Johnson's influence on Jane Austen. Persuasions 11 (1989).

Hansen, Serana. "Rhetorical Dynamics in Jane Austen's Treatment of Marriage Proposals."

Persuasions 21 (2000).

Hinnant, Charles H. "Jane Austen's 'wild imagination': romance and the courtship plot in the six canonical novels." Narrative 14, 3 (Oct. 2006) pp 294-310 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Khaleque, M. Abdul. "Jane Austen's Idea of a Home." Persuasions 26 (2005).

Lenckos, Elisabeth. "Inventing elegant letters, or, why don't Austen's lovers write more often?"

Persuasions 26 (2005).

Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. U of California P, 1992. California Digital Library. A complete, book-length critical study. Litvak contends that private experience in Austen "is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities."

May, Leila S. "Jane Austen's 'schemes of sisterly happiness.'" Philological Quarterly 2002 [highbeam sub ser].

McCawley, Dwight. "Assertion and Aggression in the Novels of Jane Austen." McCawley makes use of the distinction between assertion and aggression from popular books on "assertiveness training" to discuss Austen's characters. Persuasions 11 (1989).

McGuinness, Frank. "Jane Austen in Ireland, 1845." Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies 37, 2 (Autumn/Winter 2007) pp 291-301 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

McMaster, Juliet and Victoria Kortes-Papp. "Teaching Austen by Editing: From the Juvenilia to Emma." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Michie, Elsie B. "Austen's powers: Engaging with Adam Smith in debates about wealth and virtue" [economist Adam Smith]. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 34, 1 (Autumn 2000) pp 5-27 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Miller, Christopher R. "Jane Austen's aesthetics and ethics of surprise." Narrative 13, 3 (Oct. 2005) pp 238-60 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Morini, Massimiliano. "Who evaluates whom and what in Jane Austen's novels?" Style 41, 4 (Winter2007) [questia sub ser].

Moody, Ellen. "Jane Austen and Time: a study of her use of the almanac." Includes "A Calendar For Sense and Sensibility," and another detailed study of the calendars in Austen's novels. Prof.

Moody's academic web site.

Morgan, Susan. "Adoring the Girl Next Door: Geography in Austen." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Nelles, William. "Omniscience for atheists: or, "Omniscience for atheists: or, Jane Austen's infallible narrator." Comparing the narrator to God. Narrative 14, 2 (May 2006) [muse, extract].

Nixon, Cheryl L. and Louise Penner. "Writing by the Book: Jane Austen's Heroines and the Art and Form of the Letter." Persuasions 26 (2005).

Parker, Keiko. "Illustrating Jane Austen." Persuasions 11 (1989).

Powley, Tammy. "The Creation of Rhetorical Conversation." Persuasions 24 (2003).

Pritchard, W.H. "What's Been Happening to Jane Austen?" Hudson Review 57, 2 (Summer 2004) 303-10 [free at jstor, click "Preview" or "Read Online"].

Rohrbach, Emily. "Austen's later subjects." Studies in English Literature 44, 4 (Autumn 2004) pp 737-52 [muse, preview].

Rowlinson, Hugh. "The Contribution of Count Rumford to Domestic Life in Jane Austen's Time." Persuasions 23 (2002).

Thompson, Allison. "The Felicities of Rapid Motion: Jane Austen in the Ballroom." Persuasions 21 (2000).

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. "Jane Austen's Family of Fiction: From Henry and Eliza to Darcy and Eliza." Persuasions 22 (2001).

Zunshine, Lisa. "Why Jane Austen was different, and why we may need cognitive science to see it." Style 41, 3 (Fall 2007).

Selection from Themes The Infection of Acting

1. The Infection of Acting Theatricals and Theatricality in Mansfield Park

Though Mansfield Park seems the least inclusive or dialectical of Jane Austen’s novels, it has failed to produce the critical unanimity that so unambiguous a work ought to permit.[1] Despite repeated attempts to lay the groundwork for scholarly consensus,[2] this ostensibly nonironic novel continues to elicit incompatible commentaries. Paradoxically, its very dogmatism is what makes for disagreement: the question of why Austen, in championing the priggish Fanny Price, should appear to dishonor her own artistic verve, may be answered, it seems, in more than one way. Recent critics are divided between those for whom Mansfield Park is an emphatically antiJacobin, staunchly Christian work, and those who find in it a disguised yet all the more potent version of the feminist or anti-authoritarian message that other Austen novels develop less obliquely.[3] From this discord, one is tempted to conclude that the novel’s dogma is somehow shakier than it ought to be. This chapter seeks not to determine once and for all whether the presiding genius of Mansfield Park is Edmund Burke or Mary Wollstonecraft, but to examine the central instability within the novel itself, the instability that renders such determination impossible. I will argue that the novel is neither unequivocally conservative nor unequivocally progressive, but rather that it is governed by a conservatism so riddled with internal contradictions as to trouble the authoritarian temperament more radically than would the dialectical leniency of, say, Pride and Prejudice or Emma. To argue as much, however, will also mean showing the tenacity of that conservatism, qualifying any interpretation too eager to claim Mansfield Park as a document of humanistic amplitude.[4] One recent call for a synthesis in Austen criticism asks us to imagine a “structure large enough to accommodate an affirmative text with a subversive subtext.”[5]Mansfield Park reveals how precarious such a structure must, by definition, be. In a novel that abounds in talk of structures— of their erection, their improvement, and their dismantlement—the most problematic structure is the makeshift “theater” set up in the billiard-room of Mansfield Park. This structure literalizes a somewhat more abstract “structure”—the episode of the theatricals, the textual locus on which so much critical attention has centered. As Jonas Barish has pointed out, “the theatricals come charged with a mysterious iniquity that challenges explanation.”[6] The “crux of the book,”[7] the theatrical episode disturbs us because we cannot see why Austen should have been so disturbed by an art form whose energies seem so similar to her own. Yet one might also say that it disturbs us even more insistently precisely because it is the crux of the book—because, that is, it has the power to become more than just a local structure, to spread perplexingly throughout the novel, just as the “theater” at Mansfield Park soon extends from the billiard-room, encompassing, of all places, Sir Thomas’s study. The episode, which occupies the last third of the first volume, is abruptly terminated by his return from Antigua: he wastes no time in eradicating all traces of the theatricals, not only ordering the sets to be torn down but going so far as to burn every copy of

Lover’s Vows, the play chosen for private performance. Despite this aggressive attempt at effacement, however, and despite the destruction of the theater as place, theatricality as topic turns out to pervade the novel. In this movement from a literal structure to a more metaphorical one, we witness a process of refinement, of increasingly subtle infiltration. After describing Sir Thomas’s swift campaign of destruction, Austen informs us, slyly, that at least one remnant of the episode has escaped his ravages: Mrs. Norris has appropriated the curtain, surreptitiously removing it to her cottage, “where she happened to be particularly in want of green baize.”[8] This appropriation and transformation might stand for that adaptability which allows the theater to survive and flourish in a less conspicuous form, reaching into the most unlikely recesses of the text.

Yet if this shift from theater to theatricality suggests the triumphant expansion of a “subversive subtext,” we need to specify just what theatricality entails. As we will see, the political implications of theatricality in Mansfield Park are ineluctably ambiguous. Critics have tended to associate it with the most attractively self-dramatizing characters in the novel, Mary and Henry Crawford, thereby construing it in terms of metropolitan glamor and decadence. Theatricality has a less glittering side, however, and this variant turns out to be surprisingly consistent with the authoritarianism represented, in different ways, by Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, Fanny, and Edmund. Wavering between affirmative and subversive poles, the generalized, ubiquitous structure of theatricality begins to expose their relationship as one not of opposition but of almost systematic interdependence. An all-embracing theatricality would seem to threaten the very foundations of a novel whose heroine epitomizes what Tony Tanner calls “immobility,”[9] yet theatricality is in fact capable of such wide diffusion only because it has certain features that not merely conform to but even enable the novel’s overriding conservatism. The question, in other words, is not so much “What motivated Austen’s anti-theatricalism?” as “What motivated her to create the impression of anti-theatricalism?” Alien enough to give her pause yet not so alien as to resist the uses to which Austen puts it, theatricality in Mansfield Park affords the spectacle of a distinct overdetermination.

But what in the nature of theatricality allows supposedly rival ideologies to converge upon it?

When Fanny Price and Henry Crawford offer their respective descriptions of the theatricals, we note the similarity of their language as much as the difference between their tones. Here is Fanny’s view of the rehearsals: So far from being all satisfied and all enjoying, she found every body requiring something they had not, and giving occasion of discontent to the others.—Every body had a part either too long or too short;—nobody would attend as they ought, nobody would remember on which side they were to come in—nobody but the complainer would observe any directions.

Henry recalls the same experience with nostalgic relish:

“It is as a dream, a pleasant dream!” he exclaimed, breaking forth again after a few minutes musing. “I shall always look back on our theatricals with exquisite pleasure. There was such an interest, such an animation, such a spirit diffused! Every body felt it. We were all alive. There was enjoyment, hope, solicitude, bustle, for every hour of the day. Always some little objection, some little doubt, some little anxiety to be got over. I never was happier.”

Though one response suggests the bemused omniscience of detachment while the other evokes the giddiness of absolute involvement, both Fanny and Henry characterize the theatricals in terms of “discontent” or “anxiety.” As Ruth Bernard Yeazell has written, theatricality provokes an “anxiety of boundary-confusion” that “is everywhere felt” in Mansfield Park.[10] Yet for Fanny and Henry the theater is not just an object of anxiety but the very site of anxiety, a site that crosses its own boundaries to figure the anxiety of the novel as a whole. For Mansfield Park, however much it may favor repose, is, as Yeazell notes, certainly one of the most anxious novels ever written.[11] Anxiety may be the condition of all narratives, but here, in its generality as “a spirit diffused,” it seems especially acute. Indeed, Fanny’s composure is merely superficial, a defensive fiction: Austen tells us that, during the rehearsals, “her mind had never been farther from peace” (p. 180), that she is agitated by “many uncomfortable, anxious, apprehensive feelings” (p. 186), that she observes the preparations in a baffled state of “longing and dreading” (p. 187). Fanny is anxious about the theater precisely because she knows that it is less a structure toward which one can locate a safely external position than the fluctuating space in which all positions find their tenuous footing. A Henry Crawford may thrive within this milieu while a Fanny Price may inhabit it more unhappily, but neither the libertine nor the evangelical moralist can choose to function outside of it. In Mansfield Park, the theater, or the theatricality by virtue of which it disperses itself and colonizes the rest of the novel, becomes virtually synonymous with the inescapable context of all social existence and all political postures. Resembling Henry Crawford in abhorring “any thing like a permanence of abode” (p. 74), theatricality turns up where one least expects it—even in the innermost meditations of the self-effacing Fanny. Discussions of the theatricals have not stressed sufficiently their privateness: Mansfield Park is about the incursion of public values upon private experience, about the theatricality of everyday life, in which to say, with Fanny, “No, indeed, I cannot act” (p. 168), is already to perform, whether one wants to or not.

Like Fanny’s anti-theatricalism, then, Austen’s begins to emerge as a futile protest against the theatrical imperative—futile in large part because it is disingenuous, given the extent to which the political order of Mansfield Park depends upon a certain theatricality. Actual theaters may be circumscribed places that one can have demolished, but in its most generalized form theatricality, like Flaubert’s divine artist, is present everywhere though visible nowhere. If this invisibility induces paranoia in the Tory mind, it also makes possible a more efficient policing of the social practices by which authority sustains itself. Austen, moreover, is not alone in recording this ambiguity. Mansfield Park, which was published in 1814, figures in a broader cultural discourse about theatricality, a discourse shaped by authors whose differences appear even more irreconcilable than those between Fanny Price and Henry Crawford. Like Fanny and Henry, however, these real-life conservatives and progressives exhibit a striking kinship when they engage the problem of theatricality, which seems to inspire not only a number of tellingly recurrent images but also a certain rhetorical oscillation in writings otherwise divided along lines of political allegiance. By looking briefly at a few of these writings, we may arrive at a more precise sense of what theatricality meant in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, of how it tended to comprehend those who would comprehend it, and of how Austen’s novel both reproduces and illuminates this predicament.

•

•

•

Our first two authors are evangelical ideologues whose wariness vis-à-vis the theater almost goes without saying. But here, as in Mansfield Park, the concern is less with the theater as an institution than with the possibility that the theater might have overstepped its institutional limits and invaded private life, establishing in private theatricals the symbol of an irreversible contamination. Indeed, in its recourse to metaphors of infection, Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797) anticipates Austen’s insight into the theater’s refusal to stay within bounds. Gisborne identifies the ills of the modern stage, warning, “He knows little of human nature, who thinks that the youthful mind will be secured from the infecting influence of a vicious character, adorned with polished manners, wit, fortitude, and generosity, by a frigid moral, delivered at the conclusion, or to be deduced from the events of the drama.”[12] Gisborne’s slightly disorienting syntax already indicates an uncertainty characteristic of contemporary discussions of theatricality, for it is not at first clear whether the vicious character will infect the youthful mind because such a mind is adorned with polished manners and the like, or whether it will infect that mind even though it is so adorned. On closer inspection, it turns out that Gisborne intends the former; in theatrical discourse as a whole, the polish that would serve as an antidote to poison often becomes indistinguishable from the poison itself. Metaphors of infection lead almost irresistibly to metaphors of seduction. As Tom Bertram, trying to justify the theatrical scheme to his father, says, the “infection” of acting “spread as those things always spread you know” (p. 200). But Gisborne’s language, somewhat less vague than Tom’s, suggests that “those things always spread” because the poison may beguile us into mistaking it for the cure.[13] Austen, after all, refers to acting not only as an “infection” but also as a “charm” (p. 154), and what “spreads” is nothing other than a play about seduction.

Gisborne uncovers the logic of this mixed metaphor when he explains why young women are particularly susceptible to the enchantments of playacting: A propensity to imitation is natural to the human mind, and is attended with various effects highly favourable to human happiness.…This propensity shows itself with especial strength in the female sex. Providence, designing from the beginning that the manner of life to be adopted by women should in many respects ultimately depend, not so much on their own deliberate choice, as on the interest and convenience of the parent, of the husband, or of some other connection, has implanted in them a remarkable tendency to conform to the wishes and examples of those for whom they feel a warmth of regard, and even of all those with whom they are in familiar habits of intercourse.…As the mind, in obeying the impulse of this principle, no less than in following any other of its native or acquired tendencies, is capable of being ensnared into errors and excesses; the season of youth, the season when the principle itself is in its greatest strength, and when it has yet derived few lessons from reflection and experience, is the time when error and excesses are most to be apprehended.[14] Young women are even more liable to corruption than young men, since the very thing that keeps them healthy—their unusually strong “propensity to imitation”—can easily make them ill. Acting, whose essence is imitation, seduces by diminishing the distance between negative and positive terms— between poison and cure, sickness and health. Properly controlled, of course, the latent theatricality of the female sex, “implanted” in women by “Providence,” can have a salutary effect, ensuring that they will “conform to the wishes and examples” of their (male) superiors. Yet at what point does the very act

of “obeying” turn into its opposite, with the result that these no longer merely latent actresses are “ensnared into errors and excesses”? What is required, obviously, is a vigilant patrolling of the border between “good” acting and “bad” acting. Acting, however, in addition to blurring the lines between sickness and health, or between poison and cure, frustrates the attempt to define—let alone to patrol— the border between the safely domestic and the menacingly foreign, between the private and the public, between the inside and the outside. For no sooner has Gisborne asserted that Providence has implanted the “principle” of imitation in the female sex than he appears unsure whether this principle is “native or acquired.” It may seem uncharitable to read vacillation into what is perhaps nothing more than a pseudophilosophical aside, yet this minor rhetorical fluttering hints at the boundary-confusion that becomes a leitmotif of the literature on theatricality.

We encounter this theme again in another tract directed at saving young women from themselves. In Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hannah More animadverts more harshly than Gisborne on the theatricalization of private life. Where Gisborne sees theatricality as a merely potential danger—as the aggravation of otherwise healthy “tendencies”—More describes it as a disease in its advanced stages, at least “among women of rank and fortune”: “If the life of a young lady, formerly, too much resembled the life of a confectioner, it now too much resembles that of an actress; the morning is all rehearsal, and the evening is all performance.”[15] More blames this vitiating penetration of the public into the private on a more specific form of crosscultural trespass: the “modern apostles of infidelity and immorality,” among whom she must number Elizabeth Inchbald, the translator and adapter of August von Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows, have strengthened their attacks on female virtue by enlisting the subversive services of German literature. Yet what might strike others as grounds for clemency invites More’s sharpest censure: “In many of these translations, certain stronger passages, which, though well received in Germany, would have excited disgust in England, are wholly omitted, in order that the mind may be more certainly, though more slowly, prepared for the full effect of the same poison to be administered in a stronger degree at another period.”[16] In the preface to her translation of Lovers’ Vows, Inchbald defends her omissions and modifications by appealing to her own theatrical savvy, to her sense of what will play in Germany but not in England.[17] According to More, however, such changes are designed precisely to undermine rather than recognize the differences between the two nationalities. As in so much right-wing literature of the period, the poison of theatricality is inseparable from the poison of foreignness—specifically, of the revolutionary doctrines threatening to spread to England from the continent.[18] Theatricality destroys the body politic by destroying that body’s immune system, which, like all such systems, consists in the ability to distinguish between the native and the foreign, between self and other. The most insidious translation is that which seems so reassuringly familiar as to prevent us from identifying and repelling the alien substance. Here, the poison owes its seductive power not to its polished exterior but to its deceptive folksiness: the Unheimliche, or unsettling, masquerades as the Heimliche, or cozy. Interestingly, one of the ways in which Jane Austen signals the gravity of the theatrical infection is by having Edmund say of the Grants, through whom Mary and Henry Crawford were introduced into the Bertram family circle, “They seem to belong to us—they seem to be part of ourselves” (p. 211). If even the normally watchful Edmund has trouble distinguishing between insiders and outsiders, then the immune system of Mansfield Park has clearly broken down.

Against such calamities, More counsels a renewed alertness. But if her tone seems particularly melodramatic—apparent improvements in the translation serve in fact to poison the mind “more certainly, though more slowly”—then some of this straining to equate less with more and better with worse may indicate that she herself has become a victim of what she would contain. For her rhetoric of suspicion rests upon a logic of paradox, whereby quantitative differences disappear and everything ends up as its opposite. Is not this inability to differentiate one of the primary symptoms of the theatrical disease? Indeed, even as More rails against the tendency of upperclass young women to resemble actresses, her own prose draws heavily on theatrical metaphors, referring repeatedly, for example, to the duties that a young Christian woman must “perform.” It is worth noting that, earlier in her career, More had been a playwright, a friend and ardent admirer of Garrick, and a member in good standing of the London theatrical community; regardless of her present sympathies, her writing bears the marks of this past.[19] Yet where Gisborne might distinguish between moral and immoral performance, More’s new militancy excludes this possibility, as if to cover the traces of its own infection. Once again, the attempt to situate oneself outside the anxious world of playacting merely produces more anxiety, more evidence of one’s inextricable implication in that world.

Gisborne seems more inclined to acknowledge what More prefers to repress—namely, that all social experience presupposes some degree of theatricality. But, as we have seen, to acknowledge the contagion is not to escape its effects: in its own, admittedly milder, discrepancies, Gisborne’s language joins More’s in illustrating the plight of an authoritarianism compelled to come into contact with forces it would rather regulate or pronounce upon from a distance. The awkward position of these two evangelical conduct-book writers recalls that of Edmund Bertram, who, in order to halt the spread of the theatricals, has to plunge into their midst, playing the highly compromising role of Mary Crawford’s lover in the Mansfield production of Kotzebue’s play. Yet if Gisborne and More exemplify the difficulties of a certain conservatism in coping with theatricality, we would expect a liberal and more sophisticated writer to approach the subject with something like urbane equanimity. This attitude does in fact characterize William Hazlitt’s essay, “On Actors and Acting” (1817), a shrewd and lively rejoinder to the enemies of the stage. Oddly enough, though, Hazlitt’s defense shows some of the same instabilities that we have noticed in the language of the detractors.

Where Gisborne and More accuse the theater—or at least the theater in its present form—of encouraging immorality, Hazlitt recommends it as the “best teacher of morals” because the “truest and most intelligible picture of life.” Matters become more complicated, however, when he proceeds to explain how theatrical mimesis effects this moral education: “It points out the selfish and depraved to our detestation; the amiable and generous to our admiration; and if it clothes the more seductive vices with the borrowed graces of wit and fancy, even these graces operate as a diversion to the coarser poison of experience and bad example, and often prevent or carry off the infection by inoculating the mind with a certain taste and elegance.”[20] As in the previous texts, seduction and infection seem to invoke each other almost automatically, but here their relationship is more intricate. If, for Hazlitt, polish is not the poison but indeed the antidote, these “borrowed graces of wit and fancy” participate in what looks like a homeopathic program.

For, as Gisborne and More would remind us, wit and fancy, or the “taste and elegance” with which they “inoculate” the mind, may become seductive vices in their own right. Hazlitt appears to share this view, insofar as he contrasts the theatrical graces with the “coarser poison” of vices

not wearing this borrowed “clothing.”

Yet the mixed metaphor itself may signal a deeper trouble. Though Hazlitt began by affirming the morally instructive properties of mimesis, the process he is now describing has to do neither with mimesis nor with instruction, but with a kind of seduction of the mind itself. Adorning rather than imitating reality, wit and fancy “prevent or carry off the infection” of the mind by seductive vices by seducing it toward other, less coarse ones. Not only is the mind seduced: it is also reduced, demoted to the role of a passive object that can only submit to being “diverted” toward the lesser of two evils. By way of arguing for the salutary influence of the theater, Hazlitt resorts to the somewhat disconcerting image of the playgoer as patient, and in so doing comes surprisingly close to Gisborne’s ideology of social control, with its notion of latent theatricality as the basis of female “conformity.” Of course Hazlitt’s politics permit him to speak in less sinister terms: when he says of actors, “The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves,”[21] he celebrates the freedom of the “improvised self,”[22] the Protean exuberance of a Henry Crawford. Alongside this overall humanism, however, Hazlitt’s apparent endorsement of theatricality as a means of manipulation becomes all the more significant, for it testifies to the readiness with which theatrical forms lend themselves to disciplinary purposes.[23] Perhaps the congestion of Hazlitt’s language symptomatizes uneasiness in the face of inconsistency, or perhaps the clutter was designed as a “diversion,” at once an alternative to and a distraction from this inconsistency. In either case, though, Hazlitt’s unstable rhetoric reveals yet another peculiarity of the theatrical discourse to which Mansfield Park contributes. Where Gisborne and More worried that the theater might encroach upon everyday life, Hazlitt’s tergiversations point to the difficulty of keeping everyday life from encroaching upon the theater.

It is not that Hazlitt rejects representation: as we have seen, he bases—or tries to base—his defense of the theater on a plea for its mimetic value. Yet in order to sustain one’s view of the theater as an “epitome, a bettered likeness of the world,”[24] one has to bar from this idealized enclosure the more cynical calculations that too often prevail in everyday life; such cynicism may accord with pragmatic schemes of social regulation, but it hardly becomes a large-spirited humanism. The theater can be a bettered likeness of the world only by remaining free from ideological complicities with that world, complicities that would jeopardize its ability to imitate and to instruct. In explaining how the theater operates as a guardian against moral infection, however, Hazlitt opens it to just this kind of ideological infection. Moreover, if the theater starts to look a little more like the world, the world starts to look a little more like the theater; as the different poisons play upon the mind, it becomes hard to tell where reality ends and art begins.

•

•

•

Together, Gisborne, More, and Hazlitt delineate the landscape of dis-ease in which Mansfield Park takes place. To situate the novel in this context, though, is not necessarily to arrive at a clearer understanding of what Jane Austen really thought about the theater. Much of the criticism of Mansfield Park tries to solve the mystery of the author’s intention, but the point of the preceding survey is that theatricality wreaks havoc on intentions. Whether they stand on the left or on the right, authors who set out to elucidate the problem soon find themselves baffled by unexpected complexities. Hazlitt undertakes to offer a liberal paean to actors and acting, and yet

cannot help being pulled in the direction of authoritarianism. Contrary to our assumptions about the lawlessness of theatricality, the subject seems to impose an almost inexorable rightward drift.[25] Yet, contrary to what we might assume about drifts to the right, the texts of our evangelical authors betray a remarkable restlessness. Calling for an attentive monitoring of the theatrical impulse, Gisborne succeeds in showing why such monitoring may be impracticable.

More, for her part, continues the sermon against theatricality as the enemy within, unwittingly providing evidence of the lengths to which a discourse will go in concealing the signs of its own occupation. As a novel about theatricality, Mansfield Park dramatizes both the conservative appropriation of theatrical forms and the way these forms endanger the very interests that appropriate them, threatening to turn the captors into captives.

Just how does conservatism appropriate theatricality? Following Hazlitt, we might see a certain homeopathic logic at work in the novel. The patriarchal authority who “keeps every body in their places” (p. 182), Sir Thomas embodies a cunningly manipulative authority, one that will not hesitate, for example, to exile Fanny to Portsmouth in the name of a “medicinal project upon [her] understanding, which he must consider as at present diseased” (p. 363). Though the theatrical scheme suggests a flouting of his authority, since it is conceived and begun during his absence and in spite of the likelihood of his disapproval, the theatricals may function quite differently, as a kind of medicinal project upon Mansfield Park itself, which a conscientious authority must also consider as diseased. For even before the Crawfords arrive, Mansfield Park suffers from an overdose of theatricality. Indeed, the regime in question seems more like a parody of authority than like authority in the strict sense. Sir Thomas has delegated too much power to the officious Mrs. Norris, who, with her “love of directing” (p. 45), views the household as a showcase for her own talents of management and domestic economy. Small wonder that she becomes such an energetic sponsor and supervisor of the theatricals. She has already assisted in the education, or miseducation, of Sir Thomas’s daughters, Maria and Julia, who typify the sort of “accomplished” young women about whom Hannah More complains: The Miss Bertrams were now fully established among the belles of the neighbourhood; and as they joined to beauty and brilliant acquirements, a manner naturally easy, and carefully formed to general civility and obligingness, they possessed its favour as well as its admiration. Their vanity was in such good order, that they seemed to be quite free from it, and gave themselves no airs; while the praises attending such behaviour, secured, and brought round by their aunt, served to strengthen them in believing they had no faults.

Actresses in everything but the title, Maria and Julia manifest their illness by concealing it. Just as, for Mrs. More, the poison of sub versive ideas works most effectively when introduced under a familiar disguise, so the height of vanity is to “seem quite free from it,” and the perfection of theatrical artifice is an apparent artlessness.

Given this state of affairs, why not attempt to cure like with like, “treating” theatricality itself with doses of more theatricality?[26] Obviously, Sir Thomas has nothing to do with the theatrical scheme. I am not intimating that he masterminds and controls it in some implausibly subterranean way. Yet, as the major authority within the book, he may well represent the authority behind the book—namely, Jane Austen herself. As he states at the outset, it is his duty to “authorize” (p. 47) various practices and relationships at Mansfield Park, and this

responsibility echoes a more fundamental author-izing.[27] Perhaps Austen not only authors but also authorizes the theatrical episode, working out in terms of narrative structure a medicinal project or experiment upon the diseased body politic of Mansfield Park and, by extension, of the English gentry as a whole.[28] The injection of the Crawfords—and, to a lesser extent, of Mr. Yates—would serve to shock the system of Mansfield Park into protecting itself against such intruders. The infection that they bring would have the theatricals as its most alarming symptom, but this attack would culminate in a return to health. Indeed, the episode does seem to have some of the desired effect, for it ends with the banishment of Yates, the retreat of the Crawfords, and the departure of Maria and Julia, and initiates both the rise of Fanny and the fall of Mrs. Norris.

The only trouble with this scheme is that it scants the considerable distance between the end of the theatrical episode and the end of the novel itself: two whole volumes stand between the ostensible purgation and the complete recovery of Mansfield Park from the evils that have plagued it. However daring the homeopathic experiment, the disease lingers. For the Crawfords are only temporarily repelled by Sir Thomas’s displeasure; their exclusion, in fact, lasts for a mere two chapters. Moreover, it is immediately after this drastic attempt at cleansing that Edmund makes his remark about how the Grants, half-sister and half-brother-in-law of the Crawfords, “seem to be part of ourselves.”[29] And instead of taking steps to resolve this familial identity crisis, Sir Thomas actually exacerbates it, trying to maneuver Fanny into marrying Henry Crawford. Sir Thomas does not seem to recognize the Crawfords as the real “daemon[s] of the piece” (p. 435), as the chief perpetrators of the “bustle and confusion of acting” (p. 205).

Like Maria and Julia, whose vanity is so advanced that it conceals itself, Mary and Henry are such adroit actors that they know how to dissemble their theatrical busy-ness. As a result, they are soon readmitted, while the less skillful Mr. Yates, who “bustles” more discernibly, is cast out. Of course, Yates is not merely a scapegoat, since it was he, after all, who carried the infection of acting from Ecclesford to Mansfield in the first place. But this very sanctioning of a covert theatricality at the expense of an overt one inheres in the deeper logic of the narrative: the theatricals serve not as a homeopathic cure—although Austen might want us to view them as one—but as a “diversion,” as Hazlitt would say, from the subtler and more comprehensive theatricality that persists long after Sir Thomas has reclaimed his study.

Jane Austen diverts our attention from this theatricality so that we may not notice how indispensable a role it plays in the rehabilitation of Mansfield Park. The reason that the Crawfords, who, through metonymic slippage, “seem to belong to us,” and the bustling Mrs. Norris, who “seemed a part of” Sir Thomas (p. 450), are not expelled until the end of the novel is not that it takes so long to eliminate theatricality, but that theatricality requires this much time to, as it were, take effect. By the end of the novel, these characters have done their work so well— have “implanted” theatricality so firmly—that they themselves no longer need to remain at Mansfield: they have not so much overstayed their welcome as outlived their usefulness. A sort of sideshow, the homeopathic experiment fails because it was never intended to succeed.

Theatricality inhabits Mansfield Park before, during, and after the theatrical episode. Are there differences, though, between the theatricality of the Miss Bertrams and the theatricality of the Crawfords, or between the theatricality of the Crawfords and the theatricality of Fanny? We may begin to answer this question by suggesting that, where Fanny’s cousins embody a dangerously centrifugal sociability, Fanny installs a steadfast and almost inaccessible inwardness at the other

end of the narrative continuum. Mary and Henry Crawford do not so much stand between these two extremes as upset the very dichotomy on which this model is predicated. Mary, for example, is the subject of numerous tortured conversations between Fanny and Edmund, in which they struggle to decide whether her apparent irreverence indicates some profound flaw in her nature or merely the unfortunate effect of the company she keeps. We can understand Fanny and Edmund’s perplexity: on the one hand, Mary displays what looks like genuine warmth and affection for others; on the other hand, Austen often emphasizes the enormous amount of technique that underlies this display, as when, at Fanny’s coming-out party, Mary takes great pains to tell everyone what (she thinks) he or she wants to hear. In her artful artlessness, she puts even Maria and Julia to shame, seducing not only Edmund but many a suspicious, if not cantankerous, critic as well.[30] Yet her brother is an even better actor, in whom play and seriousness are inseparably intertwined. Thus Fanny, whose mind tolerates only either/or distinctions, is at a loss to interpret his amorous behavior toward her: How could she have excited serious attachment in a man, who had seen so many, and been admired by so many, and flirted with so many, infinitely her superiors—who seemed so little open to serious impressions, even where pains had been taken to please him—who thought so slightly, so carelessly, so unfeelingly on all such points—who was every thing to every body, and seemed to find no one essential to him?…Every thing might be possible rather than serious attachment or serious approbation of it toward her. She had quite convinced herself of this before Sir Thomas and Mr. Crawford joined them. The difficulty was in maintaining the conviction quite so absolutely after Mr. Crawford was in the room; for once or twice a look seemed forced on her which she did not know how to class among the common meaning; in any other man at least, she would have said that it meant something very earnest, very pointed. But she still tried to believe it no more than what he might often have expressed towards her cousins or fifty other women.

An inveterate player of roles—a man who is “every thing to every body”—Henry seems incapable of meaning what he says. How could such semiotic promiscuity coexist with the “seriousness” that Fanny keeps invoking? And yet Crawford presents the anomaly of one who not only combines role-playing with sincerity but reveals sincerity as an effect of role-playing.

Fanny is bewildered by Crawford because she assumes that, if one is not serious, then one must be acting, manipulating conventions rather than speaking from the heart.[31] Austen’s style indirect libre, however, discloses more than Fanny’s consciousness can contain: words and deeds that one can “class among the common meaning” or insert into a conventional slot are not those that lack sincerity but those that convey it. Though he seems to personify an illicit deviation from the norm of seriousness into the no-man’s-land of artifice and conventionality, Henry in fact exposes seriousness as a product of artifice and conventionality. He is the exception that infects the rule.

What is infectious in Henry, moreover, is not the unmanageable indeterminacy that Fanny sees in him, but something surprisingly close to the ideals of hierarchy and propriety that we associate with a character like Sir Thomas. For although Henry enters the novel trailing clouds of undecidability—as befits one whom Leo Bersani calls an “ontological floater”[32]—the aim of the

authoritarian appropriation of theatricality is to demystify it, to shift its focus from glamorous excess to a more pedestrian trading in certain codified procedures. Where before there was the prospect of reckless, infinite self-invention, now we find an almost mechanical shuffling and reshuffling of a limited repertory of tricks of the trade. Once the more or less spectacular attack of the theatricals has subsided, the novel can address itself to the task of domesticating the theatrical Crawfords—not, as More would have it, in order more certainly, though more slowly, to subvert Mansfield Park, but in order to rob them of their subversive power. By the end of the novel, potentially subversive impulses—which Austen groups under the heading of the “itch for acting” (p. 147)—will have been converted into props of authority.

The conquest of the Crawfords is a crucial intermediate phase in the ideological conflict enacted in the novel. For if Mary and Henry emblematize at first the anarchy of the unbounded self, they magnify the objectionable theatricality of Maria and Julia, who, as Sir Thomas finally admits, “had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers” (p. 448). The triumph of Fanny at the end of the novel symbolizes the triumph of governance over a selfhood run wild, but the demystification of Mary and Henry marks the turning point in that war. And though Fanny is appalled by the way the Crawfords reduce sincerity to a convention, she herself represents the consummation of that process. Of course, we have identified artful artlessness as the most distinctive trait of the Bertram sisters, yet their theatricality is too dispersive, too outerdirected, to comply with the novel’s centripetal ethos. The burden of the middle section of the novel is to stage the theatricalization of the self in such a way that theatricality virtually disappears into that inner space, submerged in the form of rigorously inculcated habits of mind and modes of response. Mansfield Park, that is, attempts to move backward from Gisborne’s theatrical young women, “ensnared into errors and excesses,” to the latent actresses whose “propensity to imitation,” carefully shaped and supervised, becomes the very guarantee of their virtuous “conformity.” Lending themselves to a demonstration of how the theatrical self may be redefined, the Crawfords enable this corrective movement from the theatrically extroverted Maria and Julia to the theatrically introverted Fanny.

When Henry reads aloud from Shakespeare, for example, Fanny’s involuntary absorption in the performance signifies more than just the transitory power of actor over spectator. An important lesson is being impressed upon her mind: In Mr. Crawford’s reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with.

The King, the Queen; Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always light, at will, on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity or pride, or tenderness or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty.—It was truly dramatic.—His acting had first taught Fanny what pleasure a play might give, and his reading brought all his acting before her again; nay, perhaps with greater enjoyment, for it came unexpectedly, and with no such drawback as she had been used to suffer in seeing him on stage with Miss Bertram.

Up until now, reading, for Fanny, has represented an escape from the public exposure implicit in acting. Whenever the eroticism of the rehearsals impinges too painfully upon her claustral sensibility, Fanny withdraws into the chill of her fireless room, where her books offer the solace

of silent and purely spiritual intercourse.[33] It is not surprising that at her greatest crisis during the theatrical episode—the point at which she nearly capitulates to the company’s request that she read the part of the Cottager’s wife—Fanny can think only of returning to her room. She has, of course, been helping the others learn their lines by reading opposite them, but what is disturbing about this request is that it makes reading look all too much like a form of acting. It is one thing to rehearse with individual actors, quite another to read aloud as a member, however temporary, of the entire cast. Reading aloud points to an infection of reading proper by the very values it ought to exclude. Fanny’s desire to maintain a polarity between reading and acting manifests itself throughout the novel, since any kind of heightened attention in the rooms below—any compulsion to look at and to be looked at—merely reinstates the theatrical threat on a less obvious level. Yet Henry’s reading aloud once again undermines her cherished opposition: as Lady Bertram says, “It was really like being at a play” (p. 336). “His reading [brings] all his acting before [Fanny] again,” revealing the didactic purposiveness of both pursuits. For where, before, her retreats to the converted schoolroom that is her own apartment were a way of “shrinking again into herself” (p. 335), as if in flight from the free play of wandering libido, now she realizes that Henry’s “acting taught…what pleasure a play might give.”

His acting teaches her a more essential lesson as well—that the act of shrinking into oneself, of cultivating inwardness, has certain inevitable histrionic implications. All along, in eschewing acting, Fanny has in fact been playing a role, albeit “sincerely.” As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out, “Fanny silently plays the role of the angel by refusing to play.”[34] From Henry’s performance, she learns not the necessity of acting but the impossibility of not acting.

Many critics have cited Henry’s remarks about the inability of most preachers to deliver an impressive sermon as a sure sign of his moral turpitude: he is actually a “bad reader” (and thus a bad person), the argument runs, because he is “not concerned with belief, only with applause or admiration.”[35] This sort of reasoning, however, may tell us more about the conduciveness of Austen’s novels to moral position-taking than about the ideological ironies that generate their moralism.[36] For Henry’s preoccupation with the “rules and trick” (p. 338) of preaching merely foregrounds the obsessive and omnipresent conventionality upon which the moral system of the entire novel depends. Whatever taint we may detect in Henry’s tendency to see theatricality in everything—even in the religious vocation that is the novel’s purported theme—turns out to color the authoritarian vision of Mansfield Park as a whole, especially as that vision is entrusted to Sir Thomas.

Indeed, if Henry’s cynicism—or, what is even worse, his conflation of cynicism and conviction—offends our moral good taste, Sir Thomas’s medicinal projects should strike us as equally exploitive. If they do not, it is only because the novel has succeeded in concealing its indebtedness to what it pretends to disown. One almost senses a collusion between Henry and Sir Thomas, for while the former would seduce Fanny into marriage, the latter expends considerable energy in encouraging this seduction. Any difference between the two male characters lies in Austen’s presentation of their strategies. In the case of Henry, she chooses to italicize, literally, his conscious use of rhetorical convention. When, for example, he tells Fanny that he has had William promoted to second lieutenant, he “used such strong expressions, was so abounding in the deepest interest, in twofold motives, in views and wishes more than could be told, that Fanny could not have remained insensible of his drift” (p. 304; Austen’s emphasis). In the case of Sir Thomas, Austen adopts a coy tone in order to cast a somewhat more benign light on the same

manipulativeness. At the end of Fanny’s party, when Sir Thomas orders her, in the presence of Crawford, to go to bed—“ ‘Advise’ was his word, but it was the advice of absolute power” (p.

285)—Austen comments tellingly on the devices whereby patriarchal authority perpetuates itself: “In thus sending her away, Sir Thomas perhaps might not be thinking merely of her health. It might occur to him, that Mr. Crawford had been sitting by her long enough, or he might mean to recommend her as a wife by shewing her persuadableness” (p. 286).

Readers of Austen’s last complete novel know what an ominous ring the word “persuasion” can acquire. In “shewing her persuadableness,” Sir Thomas puts Fanny on stage, exhibiting her just as Henry exhibits himself, deploying theatrical technique as craftily as his younger collaborator.

In fact, he may be even shrewder, since he is manipulating both actress (Fanny) and audience (Henry). Displaying Fanny in the role of the obedient young woman, Sir Thomas in effect concocts, for Henry’s benefit, a preview of and invitation to the marriage he seeks to bring about.

With his keen sense of timing—he judges that “Mr. Crawford had been sitting by [Fanny] long enough”—and his eye for the symbolically resonant detail, Sir Thomas is the novel’s preeminent juggler of theatrical conventions. Fanny’s dramatic exit is merely the finale to an entire evening of skillfully directed moves, one that began with her “practising her steps about the drawingroom” (p. 278), looking perhaps more like one of Hannah More’s amateur actresses than like one of Gisborne’s demure mimics. The ball in her honor, conceived and staged by her uncle, constitutes her official entrance into society, the moment at which the ugly duckling steps into the spotlight to discover herself a swan. It is thus a thoroughly theatrical event, but instead of receiving the stigma that one might think it merits, it functions both as a pivotal point in the heroine’s development and as a validation of the “absolute power” by which that development has been supervised: Sir Thomas “was pleased with himself for having supplied every thing else [but Fanny’s beauty];—education and manners she owed to him” (p. 282).

Fanny, however, does not seem fully to appreciate the extent of her debt to Sir Thomas, for she of course rebels against his plan for her to marry Crawford, leading many commentators to propose that she is perhaps not so docile after all. Admittedly, her secret yet unwavering devotion to her cousin Edmund, in spite of her suitor’s relentless blandishments and her uncle’s merciless charge of ingratitude (p. 319; Austen’s emphasis), seems to adumbrate a rejection of theatrical management and a brave defense of the inviolate self. But we would do well to consider the long-range effects, as well as the immediate consequences, of this recalcitrance.

Fanny’s insubordination precipitates the medicinal project according to which Sir Thomas dispatches her to the petit bourgeois chaos of Portsmouth, where she learns to esteem rather than disdain the theatricality of the Mansfield Park regime. After only a week amid the filth and anarchy of the parental abode, where “Nobody was in their right place, nothing was done as it ought to be” (p. 381), she longs for the scrupulous decorum of her uncle’s home, where his insistently watchful authority “keeps every body in their place.” If Fanny showed a regrettable tendency to disobey theatrically organized power, her exile serves as a valuable reminder of the virtues of such theatricality. Sir Thomas’s project upon her diseased understanding is a success, not because Fanny relinquishes her claim to an unassailable self, but because she realizes that that very integrity is possible only on the intensely supervised stage of Mansfield Park.

Ultimately, that is, she acknowledges her debt to Sir Thomas, and to the elegant conventionality for which, and by which, he stands:

Her eagerness, her impatience, her longings to be with them, were such as to bring a line or two of Cowper’s Tirocinium for ever before her. “With what intense desire she wants her home,” was continually on her tongue, as the truest description of a yearning which she could not suppose any school-boy’s bosom to feel more keenly.

The citational mode of Fanny’s yearning is itself a token of the experiment’s success. It demonstrates that Austen’s most inward heroine is also, as many readers have observed, her most bookishly formulaic.[37] Whenever she feels the urge to dive deep into her innermost self, Fanny comes up with a handy touchstone, usually borrowed from Cowper. She is most herself when she is quoting someone else.[38]

It might be objected that theatricality is not the same thing as conventionality, that, although Fanny may think in clichés, she does not therefore acquiesce to the theatrical imperative. Yet the contention of this chapter is that, in the case of Mansfield Park, theatricality is in fact identified with conventionality to such a degree that the two terms eventually become synonymous. That theatricality-as-conventionality replaces theatricality-as-subversion reveals itself most vividly in the shift from metaphors of infection and of seduction to metaphors of debt and repayment. By the end of the novel, an omniscient authority has placed this world sufficiently under its control so that it may be said to own its subjects just as a conventional utterance or gesture owns a fixed and stable meaning. In marrying Edmund instead of Henry Crawford, Fanny indeed helps Sir Thomas to consolidate his empire and to protect his property from dispersion at the hands of outsiders. In keeping the family circle closed, she affirms repetition over difference, and legitimates Sir Thomas’s patriarchal program: “Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all” (p. 456). At last, after the disappointments arising from the “grievous mismanagement” (p. 448) of his own daughters, he sees in Fanny a handsome return on his investment: “Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted. His charitable kindness had been rearing a prime comfort for himself. His liberality had a rich repayment” (p. 456). “Prizing” in Fanny “more and more the sterling good of principle” (p. 455), Sir Thomas prizes as well the sterling good of principal.

Indeed, in the final chapter of the novel one has the impression that its protagonist is less Fanny than Sir Thomas himself, or the “governing body” that he represents.[39] Fanny and Edmund live happily ever after, but they do so in order to repay the authority that created them. As we have said, Sir Thomas may be viewed as an agent of Jane Austen, insofar as both appear to endorse the fortification of a conservative social order. Just here, however, where this order seems to have prevailed over the forces of subversion, authority starts to look oddly vulnerable. We would not be the first to notice a rather mechanical quality to this last chapter, which Austen begins with a perfunctory remark about her “impatien[ce] to restore every body…to tolerable comfort” (p. 446), and which she punctuates with other disquieting glimpses of the novelist ostentatiously in a hurry to tie up loose ends. When did Edmund transfer his love from Mary Crawford to Fanny?: “exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier” (p. 454). What became of the prodigal older son, Tom?: “He became what he ought to be” (p. 447). Austen takes greater trouble to describe the fates of Maria and Julia, the Crawfords, and Mrs. Norris, but her own somewhat noisy interventions are all too reminiscent of this last character’s theatrical bustle. No sooner has Sir Thomas expelled his demonic counterpart— whose “anxiety for every body’s comfort” (p. 196) mocks his own need to keep everybody in

“their place”—than Mrs. Norris returns in the form of the anxious, “impatient,” comfort-oriented author herself. Not only does Mrs. Norris parody the authority of Sir Thomas; as Gilbert and Gubar have written, she is a “parodic surrogate for the author, a suitable double whose manipulations match those of Aunt Jane.”[40] In the embarrassing moment when the ordinarily discreet Jane Austen advances to the proscenium to ring down the curtain on the final scene of her drama, we witness something like a return of the repressed.

The lesson of Mansfield Park, it seems, is that subversive theatricality can only be repressed, temporarily neutralized by a concerted effort of demystification. This process can occur, however, precisely because theatricality is not a single, unitary phenomenon but an already selfdivided set of practices capable of serving both reactionary and subversive causes. If it can serve both, it can betray both, offering at best a precarious purchase on whatever interpretation of reality it has been recruited to promote. Mansfield Park has been praised as a psychological study that uncovers the impurity of even the most admirable motives, yet it also performs a political analysis, yielding insight into the necessary inconsistency of any ideological position that appropriates theatricality for its own purposes. A final reference should illustrate this point.

When Edmund decides that duty compels him to give up his censorious stance and join in the theatricals, he tries to persuade Fanny, and himself, that this about-face produces only the “appearance of…inconsistency” (p. 175; Austen’s emphasis). He explains that, if he does not play the romantic lead opposite Mary Crawford, someone from outside the immediate circle will.

Thus he must act so that he “can be the means of restraining the publicity of the business, of limiting the exhibition, of concentrating our folly” (p. 176). And, of course, his folly is concentrated, not only in the sense of being circumscribed but also in the sense of being intensified. For in becoming an accomplice to the theatrical scheme, Edmund loses some of his status as moral paragon, incurring the disapproval of both Fanny and his father. He may genuinely wish to “limit the exhibition,” but he may also wish to exhibit his desire for and to Mary Crawford. Acting (the word itself is suggestive)[41] in what he imagines is his father’s interest, he manages at the same time to accommodate certain designs of his own, designs that may be at odds with the preservation of law and order. In Edmund’s inconsistent behavior, authority nearly subverts itself. Faced with this emergency, Jane Austen summons Sir Thomas back to Mansfield Park—so that authority may attempt, yet again, to include what could disrupt it.

Notes

1. Lionel Trilling (Sincerity and Authenticity [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971], pp.

75–80) opposes the “dialectical mode” of Austen’s other novels to the “categorical” mode of Mansfield Park. [BACK] 2. See, for example, Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970) and Joel C. Weinsheimer, “Mansfield Park: Three Problems,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (1974): 185–205. [BACK] 3. For examples of the former view, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 219–49, and Gary Kelly, Reading Aloud in “Mansfield Park”Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982): 29–49. For examples of the latter view,

see Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983), pp. 93–120, and David Monaghan, Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 93–114. [BACK] 4. In other words, this chapter attempts a kind of balancing act between two influential styles of novel-reading, the first associated with certain versions of feminism and deconstruction, the second emerging from the writings of Michel Foucault. If I have tried to maintain a sense of the subversive implications of theatricality without underestimating the capacity of authority to domesticate forces that might overturn it, I have also sought to suggest power’s genius for selfpreservation without promoting the monolithic view of power that often characterizes discussions of the nineteenth-century novel as a disciplinary practice. [BACK] 5. David Monaghan, “Introduction: Jane Austen as a Social Novelist,” in Jane Austen in a Social Context, ed. Monaghan (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 7. [BACK] 6. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), p. 301. [BACK] 7. Sybil Rosenfeld, “Jane Austen and Private Theatricals,” Essays and Studies 15 (1962): 40.

[BACK] 8. Mansfield Park, ed. Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 210. Subsequent references to the novel will be to this edition, and will be included parenthetically in the text.

[BACK] 9. Introduction, Mansfield Park, ed. Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 8.

[BACK] 10. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “The Boundaries of Mansfield Park,” Representations 7 (Summer 1984): 137. [BACK] 11. It is remarkable how frequently the word “anxious” and its various derivatives appear in the text. I suspect that a concordance of Austen’s works would show that Mansfield Park draws more heavily than any of the other novels on the vocabulary of anxiety. [BACK] 12. Thomas Gisborne, Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1797), pp. 171–72. [BACK] 13. For a discussion of the identity of poison and cure, see Jacques Derrida’s remarks on the word pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61–181. [BACK] 14. Gisborne, Enquiry, pp. 115–17. [BACK] 15. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799), 1:115. [BACK]

16. More, ibid., 1:42. [BACK] 17. See Elizabeth Inchbald, Preface and Remarks, Lovers’ Vows: Altered from the German of Kotzebue (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), pp. 3–9. [BACK] 18. The xenophobia of the age appears not only in the political journalism of periodicals like The Anti-Jacobin and the Porcupine and Anti-Gallican Monitor, both of which published negative reviews of Lovers’ Vows, but also in the literary theory of Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), with its denunciation of “sickly and stupid German tragedies,” which satisfy a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 735. [BACK] 19. For a discussion of More’s career in the theater, see Mary Gwladys Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 25–40. [BACK] 20. “On Actors and Acting,” in Hazlitt, Essays, ed. Rosalind Vallance and John Hampden (London: Folio Society, 1964), p. 23. [BACK] 21. Hazlitt, ibid., p. 22. [BACK] 22. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 76. [BACK] 23. It is perhaps more than anecdotally interesting that in 1815—the year after Mansfield Park appeared—Hazlitt himself published a less than enthusiastic review of Lovers’ Vows. “The whole of this play,” he wrote, “which is of German origin, carries the romantic in sentiment and story to the extreme verge of decency as well as probability” (A View of the English Stage; or, A Series of Dramatic Criticisms, ed. W. Spencer Jackson [London: George Bell and Sons, 1906], p.

113). [BACK] 24. Hazlitt, “On Actors,” p. 22. [BACK] 25. In a single issue of the moderately liberal periodical The Theatrical Inquisitor 2 (May 1813), we find yet another illustration of this point. An anonymous article entitled “On the Origin and Progress of Theatrical Amusements in England” describes how the theater “became the source of an amusement classical and elegant at the same time that it was in the highest degree improving and attractive” (206). Only a few pages later, another anonymous piece fulminates about the dangers of masquerades: “a masquerade is the school of elegant instruction in all the mysteries of wantonness” (214). Admittedly, the masquerade is a minor and specialized form of theater, not a synonym for the theater in general. But the recurrence of the word “elegant” in a sardonic rather than an honorific register points to the problematic nature of the vaccine Hazlitt prescribes, and to a widespread early-nineteenth-century ambivalence about theatricality, even (or especially) among those in the protheatrical camp. [BACK] 26. It is perhaps significant that the first major discoveries in homeopathic medicine took place in the late eighteenth century. [BACK]

27. For a discussion of the relationship between authorship and authority as viewed by women writers, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp.

3–99. [BACK] 28. For a reading of the theatrical episode along these lines, see Fleishman, A Reading, pp. 24– 29. [BACK] 29. In “Three Problems,” Weinsheimer comments: “The Crawfords are not some extrinsic evil that ascends from London to violate the pure children of Mansfield; rather, the Crawfords’ appeal is based on tendencies latent in Edmund and in the whole Bertram family” (p. 203).

[BACK] 30. Marvin Mudrick, for example, defends Mary Crawford as the wronged would-be heroine of the novel, even though she is in many ways similar to Emma Woodhouse, for whom he has a distinct dislike. See Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 155–80. [BACK] 31. Some of the novel’s best readers follow Fanny in endorsing the dichotomy of theatricality and sincerity, according to which Henry Crawford can only fall into the first category. For Tony Tanner (Introduction, Mansfield Park, p. 21), “he is really amusing himself by playing at being the honest devoted suitor. He is acting, albeit unconsciously.” And while Kenneth L. Moler (Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968], p. 143) thinks that Henry is “consciously playing the role of the reformed rake, as he has played other roles in the past,” he and Tanner are in essential agreement when it comes to indicting Henry for representing “the external, the superficial, [and] the social” rather than “more solid and substantial values” (p. 127). One of the central claims of this chapter is that these “values” are inherently implicated in “the external, the superficial [and] the social.” For some suggestive remarks about antitheatricalism as a reaction to the inescapability of “the social,” see Barish, Prejudice, p. 349. [BACK] 32. Bersani, A Future, p. 76. [BACK] 33. One of the most common criticisms of private theatricals was that they permitted an “unrestrained familiarity with persons of the opposite sex” (Gisborne, Enquiry, p. 184). [BACK] 34. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, p. 166. [BACK] 35. Kelly, “Reading Aloud,” p. 39. [BACK] 36. For discussions of the ways in which Mansfield Park resists the demand for moral certainty, see D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 21–22 and 55–57, and Martin Price, Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 65–89. [BACK]

37. See Kenneth L. Moler, “The Two Voices of Fanny Price,” in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 172–79. [BACK] 38. In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, pp. 245–49, Marilyn Butler locates the “failure” (p.

249) of Mansfield Park in the undue weight given to Fanny’s consciousness, especially in the second half of the novel: “In the anti-Jacobin novel consciousness must be treated critically, lest it inadvertently lets in the enemy, subjectivism. Jane Austen has put much ingenuity into having her cake and eating it, but she has not succeeded” (p. 248). Yet by ignoring the conventional frame Austen has placed around Fanny’s consciousness, Butler misses the subtlety and scope of the novel’s strategy of appropriation. [BACK] 39. The term comes from Joseph M. Duffy, “Moral Integrity and Moral Anarchy in Mansfield Park,” ELH 23 (1956): 75. [BACK] 40. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman p. 171. [BACK] 41. For a discussion of the theatricality implicit in the very notion of an act, see Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 65–66. [BACK]

Scholarly Journals & Bibliographies Persuasions, the Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, published its first full-text online edition in 1999. Indexed here through Vol. 26 (2005); more recent articles are available at the JASNA web site.

Women's Writing, an international scholarly journal focusing on women's writing up to the end of the long nineteenth century. A sample copy is available.

"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Feminist Bibliography" (2003). Ed. Misty G. Anderson.

"Jane Austen Works and Studies 2004." 2003. 2002. 2001. 1999. Ed. Barry Roth. Persuasions.

Selection from Scholarly Journals and Bibliographies

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Feminist Bibliography: Some Selections Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. NY: Oxford UP, 1986.

Backscheider, Paula. An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Critical Studies of Women and Literature, 1660-1800. NY: Garland, 1977.

Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms: WomenĂ­s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Bhattacharya, Nandini. Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in EighteenthCentury British Writing on India. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1998.

Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1993.

Bowers, Toni. The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680-1760. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Campbell, Jill. Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in FieldingĂ­s Plays and Novels.

Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. NY and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

Cotton, Nancy. Women Playwrights in England 1363-1750. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980.

Doody, Margaret A. "Gender, Literature, and Gendering Literature in the Restoration." The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740. Ed. Steven Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998 Folger Collective on Early Women Critics. Women Critics 1660-1820, An Anthology.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Franceschina, John. Homosexualities in the English Theatre: From Lyly to Wilde. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1997.

Gallagher, Catharine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994.

Gill, Pat. Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners.

Athens: U. Georgia P., 1994.

Hill, Bridget. Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Hitchcock, Tim. English Sexualities, 1700-1800. NY: St. Martin's P, 1997.

Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790ís, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995.

Keller, Eve. "Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendishís Critique of Experimental Science."

ELH vol. 64 no. 2, Summer 1997.

Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Womenís Poetry in Britain, 17391796. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Langbauer, Laurie. Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Markley, Robert. "íBe impudent, be saucy, forward, tousing, and leudí: The Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behnís Tory Comedies." Cultural Readins of Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theater, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, Athens: U. of Georgia P., 1995.

McFarlane, Cameron. The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660-1750. NY: Columbia UP, 1997.

Moore, Lisa. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Newton, Judith Lowder. Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860. Athens: U. of Georgia P, 1981.

Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.

Pearson, Jacqueline. The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 16421737. New York: Havester Wheatsheaf, 1988.

Perry, Ruth. "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England."

Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991).

Raftery, Deirdre. Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600-1900. Dublin, Four Courts P, 1997.

Rainbolt, Martha. "Their Ancient Claim: Sappho and Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Women's Poetry." The Seventeenth Century 11(1997): 111-34.

Rosenthal, Laura J. Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.

Runge, Laura. Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660-1790. Cambridge: Canbridge UP, 1997.

Salvaggio, Ruth. Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988 Schochet, Gordon J. Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England. NY: Basic Books, 1975.

Schofield, Mary Anne and Cecilia Macheski. Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660-1820. Athens: Ohio UP, 1991.

Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Spender, Dale. Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen.

London: Pandora, 1986.

Staves, Susan. Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1990.

Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. Harper and Row, 1977.

_____. Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England, 1660-1753. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Trumbach, Randolph. The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. NY: Academic P, 1978.

Yeazell, Ruth. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.

Revised: 12/29/2013 12:15:33 1998-2013 by LiteraryHistory.com