#alison g. sulloway
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“...The commonplace critical opinion of Pride and Prejudice is that Elizabeth has to reconsider her willfully obtuse "prejudice" against Darcy's legitimate "pride," in himself and in his legitimate public humiliation of her. Only readers of eighteenth-century periodicals and of Austen's novels would know that Darcy's inexcusable rudeness to her is similar to the rudeness of The Spectator wits to Mary Astell and of Emma Woodhouse to Miss Bates. Darcy appears to assume that a woman freely thinking in public does not deserve a gentle and loving proposal. Elizabeth does take pride in her judgments of people, and in Darcy's case she was initially profoundly just. It has always seemed to me that Austenian studies persistently offer some very peculiar special pleading on this man's behalf.
Darcy's training has been as deficient in the school of the heart as Catherine Morland's has been in the school of the mind. For all his great privileges, including an extensive library from which he has failed to learn good manners, he refuses to adapt himself rationally and pleasantly to the various social circles to which his rank and his sex introduce him. He lacks social kindness. His type stalk their way not only through the feminist literature of the time, but through the novels of Burney and Edgeworth as well. Elizabeth Bennet's conduct and her speech patterns are supposed to indicate to alert readers that she has resorted to reading, observation, and experience, as well as the Enlightenment feminist imperative to think for herself. She has even had to teach herself "to think on serious subjects," which is a code word for "religious subjects," although as a woman, her creator could not say so (PP, 283).
The disgraceful marriage of her parents and her repugnance for contemporary dictates about male dominance as she saw it practiced all around her were in conflict with her own ideas of theological and social justice. Darcy's rudeness to her neighbors and to herself offended her understanding of a Christian gentlemen's manners. Elizabeth's conduct-book reading would have warned her not to aspire to Darcy. The men warned women against the sin of social ambition, and the feminists warned them that the Darcys have "tutors and masters in abundance. But all for the head, and none for the heart... . By being taught" to consider themselves only "as heirs to a great fortune," they "lost" that "delicacy of the moral feeling" without which the earth's privileged creatures predictably refuse to recognize the social claims of lesser mortals. The "consciousness of .. . elevated rank, and splendid fortune" ought not to "give birth to pride" in one's birth-privileges and to prejudice against those born without them, but all too often it does (Hamilton, Letters to the Daughter of a Nobleman, I, 164, 165,169, 109-110).
Elizabeth has had to teach herself the curriculum of both the head and the heart, since her parents refuse to do so. Her observations on the state of affairs between the sexes have been very depressing. Her father had married a stupid woman because he thought too little of women to hope that he might find an intelligent one. He mocks his daughters as "silly girls" throughout the novel, and locks himself in his library, but his books have taught him neither patience with his lot nor kindness to his daughters, whom he has left without any dowries. Elizabeth's neighbor, Sir William Lucas, is genial compared with her misogynist father, but he prefers to go to the expense of playing the village squire rather than providing for his daughters. His delight in his oldest daughter's outrageous marriage is sad commentary on his care as a father. Elizabeth's first and second marriage proposals from two different men both strip her of self-respect.
She has watched her sister Jane suffer from a flirtatious suitor, who casually takes advantage of the fact that Jane is all heart and no head. The marriage of Charlotte Lucas to Collins is another shock to Elizabeth's sense of the "melancholy disproportion" between the sexes, which is as sharp as her creator's. Elizabeth's first refusal of Darcy is the product of experience and, as he later handsomely admits, of his public rejection of her and his officious meddling in her sister's love affair. But Elizabeth does demonstrate one failure of understanding. Because Darcy and Collins have both treated her as though she deserved no respect, she assumes that charming young George Wickham is trustworthy about facts because he exerts himself to be very attentive to her for self-serving reasons. Wickham tells her one truth that the whole village already knows: Darcy may be an aristocrat but he does not behave like a Christian gentleman when he is bored, and Elizabeth therefore assumes that Wickham, a truth-teller about one subject, is reliable on all subjects.
Because Wickham is tender toward Elizabeth, she assumes that he has integrity— which he does not. Because Darcy is crassly arrogant, she wrongly assumes that he lacks integrity in family matters. Once he has taken the trouble to show her that he can be as gracious to her and her relatives as a squire should be, she can accept that a man may be a social disaster in public and a caring benefactor to all his dependents in private. Elizabeth's healing of her pathologically shy sister-in-law is one of those marvelous moments when Austen combines irony with tender and reconciliatory feelings: Georgiana Darcy has been her brother's ward for a decade, and his patriarchal style has badly damaged her.
His new understanding that kind manners make the gentleman and brother, as mere rank, money, and fraternal authority never can, now extends to his sister, whom he graciously consigns to Elizabeth's bracing love, until the "attachment" of the two women becomes "exactly what Darcy," in his new generosity, "had hoped to see." For her part, Georgiana now learns a new understanding about men and women: "Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband, which a brother will not always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself' (PP, 387— 388).
…Those few contemporaries of Austen who were familiar with all three types of conduct-book literature would recognize the satire of Emma as a battle of the conduct books. In a rarely perceptive essay called "Reading Characters: Self, Society and Text in Emma" Joseph Litvak describes this novel "as a contest between Emma and Knightley" or "between two equally compelling interpretations of the self—especially the female self—and society." While candidly admitting that "Emma is frequently 'wrong,' " as indeed she is wrong, fully as wrong as Darcy, Litvak claims that "she is 'right' to question the absoluteness with which Knightley" pronounces "the distinction between them... Patriarchal criticism of Emma, of course, takes Knightley's side," in which his "right" seeks to correct her "wrong."
Litvak is one of the few students of Austen's fiction who insists that readers must "give Emma some respect and construe the conflict" partly as a difference in two distinct perspectives, the male and the female. Many of the dialogues and some crucial authorial comments in Emma address the problem of Emma's education, and implicitly, the education of gentlewomen. Emma's governess was beautifully trained to teach her pupil the feminine understanding of the heart, but she fails dismally because she is sadly deficient in human, or mental understanding, and so she can do nothing to ease the "intellectual solitude" from which Emma suffers (E, 7). Emma is often quite prescient about what is wrong with her education: when she is to be left as nursery governess to her nieces and nephews, her sister charges her to love them and her brother-in-law insists that she discipline them.
She replies that she can satisfy both charges, since "happiness must preclude false indulgence and physic" (Ε, 311). As a governess, she will not separate the heart (maternal indulgence), from the head, or "physic," that is to say, from cool medicinal treatment when necessary. Readers who enjoy demolishing Emma should look again at a charming scene where she is cuddling an eight-month-old niece, who is "happy to be danced about in her aunt's arms," and all the while, Knightley is giving her one of his scolding sessions, which always contain great justice to his own position, and almost none to hers (Ε, 98). Austen's analysis of Emma's "intellectual solitude" may well have emerged partly from her favorite, Thomas Gisborne.
While bemoaning the "general contempt" under which women labored, Gisborne nonetheless laid the blame for many women's "mental indolence" upon the women themselves: "disappointed at not perceiving a way open by which they, like their brothers, may distinguish themselves and arise to eminence; they are occasionally heard to declare.. . that the sphere in which women are destined to move is so humble and so limited as neither to require nor to reward assiduity" (Gisborne, Duties of the Female Sex, 10-11). Emma's incapacity for "steady reading.. . industry and patience," and a preference for "fancy" rather than "understanding," for which Knightley condemns her (Ε, 37), are all symptoms of her restless mind, which has never been rewarded for the "assiduity" it does possess.
She is about to make a sketch of Harriet Smith and she "produced the portfolio containing her various attempts at portraits, for not one of them had ever been finished, that they might decide together on the best size for Harriet." The rest of this authorial description contains a quiet, sad rebuke for a system that had produced this creative apathy in a woman of Emma's quirky brilliance: "her many beginnings were displayed. Miniature, half lengths, whole lengths, pencil, crayon, and watercolours bad all been tried in turn" (E, 44; emphasis mine). Any instructor of troubled youth, particularly troubled women, will recognize this symptom. The contrast between Emma, who is without rigorous and kind instruction, and Jane Fairfax, who "had received every advantage of discipline and culture," is deliberate. Jane lived "with right-minded and well-informed people"; "her heart" and her "understanding," and even "every lighter talent had been done full justice to."
No wonder these two women are suspicious of each other. Emma had been trained to be a surrogate wife and free nurse-companion to her father. Jane had deliberately been offered the best education possible for a woman, precisely because her feminine poverty forced her to undergo the classical fate of the governess. Now, with "the fortitude of a noviciate," Jane steels herself "to complete the sacrifice and retire from all the pleasure of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope," and to abandon herself "to penance and mortification for ever" (Ε, 165). There are four spinsters in this novel, whose education—or lack of it—defines them. Intellectually polished Jane is frantic about her future; the impoverished and untutored Miss Bates, a poor clergyman's fatherless daughter, has none, and Harriet's education has left her as ignorant and as vulnerable as her illegitimacy.
Emma has had no companion who could "meet her in conversation, rational or playful" (Ε, 7). But there is something very grim about the fact that the three women whose minds had been neglected were trapped at home, whereas the one woman who had been well trained, is now facing exile. There is something even grimmer that Emma and Jane, the two most intelligent women characters, should both be placed "en Penitence." Emma's struggles with the deliberately created split between her head and her heart often leave her morally exhausted with humility and a profound desire to "repress imagination all the rest of her life" (Ε, 142).
Emma's crimes of the heart, her jealousy of Jane's fully developed talents, her self-serving association with Harriet Smith, and her cruelty to Miss Bates have been so thoroughly canvassed that they have obliterated the intellectual poverty and the other social deformities that have engendered such outrageous behavior. Readers need to consider carefully the plight of a woman such as Emma, who watches over an agoraphobic father so carefully that she can barely leave the house, who grieves for the loss of her governess, even while she rejoices that Miss Taylor has found security in marriage, and whose strong maternal streak has been as thoroughly exploited as her mind has been neglected.
Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, is twenty-seven when the novel opens. She is an interesting model of the sadder and less indignant of the moderate feminists such as Wakefield, Reeve, or Austen's favorite, Hamilton, rather than a fictional version of the warrior woman represented by Wollstonecraft and Hays. Her age makes her predicament more poignant and more potentially fatal than the predicament of other Austenian heroines: "She had been forced into prudence in her youth"; now she shares with other intelligent reading heroines of Austen, Burney, and Edgeworth the capacity to muse over her experiences and to make some independent judgments. She "had learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning" (P, 30).
That suggestive verb, "forced," and the quietly ominous phrase, "unnatural beginning," describe the difficulties of all Austen's heroines as they begin their perilous journey toward their socially prescribed destiny. As the novel opens, Anne is musing over the eight years of "suffering" that had followed her anguished refusal of the intelligent and witty naval lieutenant, Frederick Wentworth, at her godmother's behest. Anne thinks not only of "the misery of parting" and of the lonely years with a hostile sister and father, during which she had "hardly anybody to love," a fate she shares with all the heroines, but she is also considering the causes and effects of a renewed crisis of the heart (P, 28, 26).
Even as she prepares herself to face an angry Frederick's return, she is able to separate her mature response—that she need not have refused Frederick as matters turned out—from the received wisdom of her original acquiescence, firmly dictated by all the male conduct-book literature—that subservience to older and presumably wiser heads was appropriate at the time. Anne Elliot has the elegant speech patterns of Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Eleanor Tilney, the charming young woman who will eventually become Catherine Morland's sister-in-law and her female instructor in human understanding. With the exception of Emma, they all try to use their intelligence to instruct defenseless people of either sex in the art of self-protection, as though the role of instructor eased their own "intellectual solitude."
Anne becomes the bereaved Captain Benwick's tutor in his recovery from grief, in which she has had almost a decade of practice. Like the ideal governesses and tutors, from Astell and Locke to the moderate feminists, Anne's principal tools are "the persuasion" of interest and sympathy under the control of judgment, and exact advice about specific bad habits. In this case, Benwick has collapsed into the dangerous practice of nourishing grief rather than working through it. Anne "had the hope of being of real use to him in some suggestions as to the duty and benefit of struggling against affliction... and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely." She recommended "a larger allowance of prose in his daily study," such as "memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts and the strongest examples of moral and religious endurance."
Anne sounds like Elizabeth Hamilton, whose most pervasive prescription for suffering women was prayer, endurance, and the consolation of bracing literature. Anne may have been properly solemn with Captain Benwick; as a sensitive woman, she knows from experience that it would be the height of crudeness to laugh at suffering or to brush it off. She comforts him and advises him because she is "emboldened" to teach the arts of self healing, "feeling in herself the right of seniority of mind" and of suffering, since he has been in mourning for his dead fiancee for less than a year. But as she says to herself, "he has not, perhaps, a more sorrowing heart than I have. I cannot believe his prospects so blighted forever. He is younger than I am; younger in feeling, if not in fact; younger as a man. He will rally again, and be happy with another" (Ρ, 100-101, 97).
Anne knows herself very well, although she cannot conquer the unhealthy habit of public diffidence that the early death of her mother and her father's irritable hostility have taught her. Yet she can legitimately lay claim to the province both of the mind and of the heart. Her own "submissive spirit" and her "patience" in the feminine school of adversity have not prevented her from acquiring a "strong understanding" of books and people, which she knows from sad experience can "supply resolution." But she admits that she lacks "that elasticity of mind" with which to repair the internal damage done to her by her father and sister. In some ways, Anne does less than justice to herself and her own gentle humor, which in itself had almost been able "to counterbalance every other want" (P, 154). She is constantly amused to find other people "caught" in the "too common idea of spirit and gentleness being incompatible with each other," an archetype as dangerous as the assumption that separates women's minds and hearts.
As to whether "a persuadable temper" in a woman improves a man's happiness more than "a very resolute character," she ironically asks herself whether "it might not now strike" Frederick "that, like all other qualities of the mind," female resolution, and even male, "should have its proportions and limits" (P, 172, 116). Even after Frederick's profound apologies to Anne that he had not earlier "learnt to distinguish between" her "steadiness of principle," and Louisa Musgrove's "obstinacy of self-will" or between "the resolution of a collected mind" and the needless "darings" of an undisciplined heart, Anne will not exploit his newly learned generosity. If she should wish to redirect the reigns of her marriage to Frederick, she will simply copy Sophia Croft's tactfully persuasive habits with her own commanding naval husband. Frederick's new-born respect for Anne's "perfect excellence of mind" will allow her to do so, because she is artless in the delicacy of her human understanding. Her mind is even more acute than her modesty will admit to herself; in fact, it is almost as "excellent" as Frederick, in the second flush of love, thinks it is (Ρ, 242).”
- Alison G. Sulloway, “The Eve Principle and the Schooling for the Penitent Heart.” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
#pride and prejudice#emma#persuasion#jane austen#regency#jane austen and the province of womanhood#alison g. sulloway
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12th December: Mr. Knightley visits again
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Read: Vol. 1, ch. 9; p. 44 (“Mr. Knightley might quarrel with her” through to “the general appearances of the next few days”).
Context
Mr. Knightley visits Hartfield again, acting grave after his and Emma’s quarrel. Emma does not question her plans.
We know that this takes place “longer than usual,” perhaps a few days, since Mr. Knightley had last visited (vol. 1, ch. 9; p. 44).
Readings and Interpretations
Wilful Actors
The description of Knightley’s “grave looks” in this section put me in mind of Alison Sulloway’s allegation that he “sit[s] in punitive silence” after all of his quarrels with Emma (p. 327). See also Leroy Smith:
[Knightley’s] attitude towards Emma initially is that of a patriarchal male parent: Emma is a child-woman to him. He is thirty-seven and she is twenty. He will not recognise that the passing years have reduced the gap between their understandings. He regards her judgement as under the power of fancy and whim rather than guided by reason. He has no fault to find with her person and acquits her of personal vanity, but he says that she is spoiled, and he bestows grave looks on her when he is displeased (p. 148).
Regarding Emma, I am interested by the parallel between perception and desire implied by the phrase “her plans and proceedings were more and more justified, and endeared to her by the general appearances of the next few days” (vol. 1, ch. 9; p. 44; emphasis mine).
Discussion Questions
What do you think of Mr. Knightley’s and Emma’s behavior on this occasion? What does this behavior say about each character’s view of themself and of each other?
Bibliography
Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.
Smith, LeRoy W. Jane Austen and the Drama of Woman. London: Macmillan (1983).
Sulloway, Alison G. “Emma Woodhouse and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” The Wordsworth Circle 7.4 (Autumn 1976), pp. 320–32. DOI: 10.1086/TWC24041892.
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“Austen's fiction and her correspondence from her earliest writing days ironically reflects the restricted province in which her sex had placed her. The hitherto unrecognized savagery of her juvenilia, the plight of her heroines and the varied responses of each one to conduct book wisdom, clerical or lay, patriarchal or radical or moderate feminist, all indicate how much Austen had absorbed "the woman question." For example, Fanny Price was probably based on severely diffident and vulnerable neighbors such as the pathologically shy Miss Seymore who apparently lived in permanent "Penitence." Catherine Morland satisfied readers who thought that ignorance is charming in women, and as a daughter, she would have especially pleased Lord Halifax and Dr. Gregory. She and Marianne Dashwood exemplify that intellectual distortion that afflicted women without any formal education.
They both exaggerate feelings and avoid sustained thinking or serious reading, for fear, no doubt, of the philosophism that conduct-book males from Halifax through the pre-Victorian Duff had warned them about without recommending the obvious remedy. Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot, and Elinor Dashwood all think for themselves; and approval or disapproval from readers, then and now, usually depends on the individual reader's sexual politics. Just as clerical preachers to women differed from their lay counterparts in this or that argument for male dominion and in the rhetoric that advanced their arguments, so Austen's clerical advisors to women, such as Mr. Collins, Mr. Elton, and Edmund Bertram, differ in their euphemistic conduct-book rhetoric, but not in their purposes, from two of Austen's secular heroes, Frederick Wentworth and Mr. Knightley. These two men both exploit the crisp, clear, and authoritative style of Halifax and Gregory, and they also base their arguments upon lay considerations rather than the primary consideration of the divine plan, from which source, to be sure, their assumptions of male superiority originated.
It is an intelligent critical commonplace that the young clergyman, Henry Tilney, does not sound like an ordained Anglican priest, and these critics who are quite unaware of the eighteenth-century war of the conduct books nonetheless unconsciously respond to something uncharacteristic of Austen's typical priests—and therefore of the historical conduct-book clergy—in Tilney's didactic speech. When he is not ironically imitating the anti-female satire of the Augustan wits, he instructs Catherine Morland as though he were a member of the Inns of Court, rather than a rector of a parish. His role is to induce readers to laugh at Catherine's Gothic sensibilities, and thus he is free of the unctuous pastoral metaphors so comfortable to most of Austen's fictional priests. Yet Henry in turn is an authorial target, for his creator understands as he does not that Catherine's fantasies are the predictable outcome of a society that devalues her and leaves her uneducated.
Nor is he troubled because he "consider[s] a certain degree of weakness, both of mind and body, as friendly to female grace" (Edgeworth, "Letter Upon the Birth of a Daughter," 34). As his creator slyly remarks, although to most men, "imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms," he is "too reasonable and too well informed . . . to desire any thing [nc] more in woman than ignorance" (NA, 111). Austen's judiciousness prevented her from creating heroines who exemplify the conduct-book "pictures of perfection," nor were her heroes, except for Darcy through Volumes I and II, quite as obsessed with their masculine privileges and as indifferent to the humiliations they inflicted upon the heroines as the heroes of Burney and Edgeworth. Austen's satirical techniques are particularly useful in preserving her judiciousness: they function as ricochets, or as boomerangs, in which her satirical characters themselves become the targets of their targets or, fully as often, of the understated authorial voice.
For instance, when Knightley satirizes the clergyman, Mr. Elton, as a man who cannot speak to women without nauseating euphemisms, Austen and her heroine approve. But Knightley himself denied all the evidences of Emma's predicament almost as resolutely as Elton; surrounded as he was with impoverished, exploited, or lonely women, most of them scantily educated spinsters, he could see no generic connections between Emma's case and theirs—that she has been as exploited in other ways to become what she is as they have been to become what they are. Yet his analysis of Emma's moral offenses is legitimate, his syntax on the whole is sensible, and he possesses the reassuring attractions of a squire's authority, which commands most readers' respect, despite his ponderous didactic methods with Emma, and, in many cases, because of them.
But Emma's mockery of his heavy male authority possesses a moral resonance that is rarely recognized as the revolt of an outsider who has been placated with some of the insiders' comforts and securities, without their autonomy of mind or movement. Readers often offer Frederick Wentworth the same forbearance as they offer Knightley, and for the same reason. He is fundamentally a very decent man, and his pride in his talents and achievements is quite legitimate. But because he is free of Anne Elliot's feminine constraints, he has the free person's typical blindness toward other people's fetters, and his proud assumption that he has a right to her prevents him from fighting for her. In fact, he eventually takes his revenge upon her in an ugly way, reminiscent of Henry Crawford. He flirts publicly with two women in front of Anne, thus discomforting three women whose code of feminine decorum prevents them from challenging his duplicity.
Readers do well to feel comfortable when they respond to the appeals of these two heroes, as long as they do not confuse their responses with absolute acceptance of the way the heroes treat women. Frederick Wentworth and Mr. Knightley do both possess a rueful wit with which they are almost never credited, and especially when they admit their own blindness about the heroines. Both of them fully accept their professional responsibilities; and as Alistair Duckworth has pointed out, Knightley's respect for his land is associated with his feudal courtesies toward others (The Improvement of the Estate). Austen's own affectionate respect for responsible laymen is one of her most judicious kindnesses toward the male sex. There are two exceptions to Austen's monitoring of her heroes' rhetoric by profession—lay or clerical—that may seem odd, at first. Edward Ferrars, who is eventually ordained, avoids unctuous rhetoric with women, whereas Colonel Brandon, the layman, does not.
Their relative male empowerment during their young manhood was the same, for they were both treated like younger sons, which Brandon was and Edward was not, and both suffered from tyrannical parents. But Edward had not yet emerged into the authority of manhood, with its assumptions of possessive and didactic privileges over women, whereas Colonel Brandon's military service in the colonies had already prepared him for unquestioned authority over disempowered peoples, unobtrusively as he would wish to administer it. Edward, the clergyman in the making, sounds more like an Augustan wit in an uncommonly relaxed and genial mood, in those rare moments when he smiles and lightly teases the attitudinizing Marianne. Brandon, the layman, does not share Edward's occasional Johnsonian wit and pith. He has chosen to establish his masculine authority with rhetoric far closer to Fordyce than is common in Austen's secular males.
The Augustan wits in their misogynist moods were feminist targets as often as the male conduct books, and mocking Pope's mockery of women was one of the feminists' favorite didactic weapons. But they hardly ever mention Swift's poetry, and perhaps for that reason there are no "bantering" allusions to it in Austen's fiction. Swift's slightly condescending attitude toward Stella would not have appealed to her ideal of robust conversational exchange between the sexes. And a woman who found The Spectator vulgar and insulting to women would have been disgusted with Swift's excretory poems and his Phillises, Corinnas, and Chloes, drowsy in their moist nakedness, not quite harlots and not quite grunting sows. Austen must have been quite as aware as Swift that "Celia shits!" But she would have encountered no literature that would have suggested so grave a suspension of anatomical probability as to preach that women only create such a "sinking Ooze" as part of their postlapsarian punishment.
Austen's respect for Pope is distinctly guarded. One of her objections must have been his shallow, vain women, his goddesses of spleen and boredom, and his description of them as typifying generic womanhood. She was as capable as he of creating ugly creatures, but her irony is almost always forgiving, or at least understanding. One of the most admirable traits is her habit of explaining the origins of ugly behavior, both in its private and public causes, so that the blame falls upon faulty parentage and hostile social conditions as often as it does on her ugly characters. Pope must have seemed to Austen to lack this Christian and Enlightenment charity toward the fallible human species; above all, to Austen, a member of "an injured body" of people, daily conscious of those injuries, both petty and grave, Pope must have seemed to lack charity toward women (Ν A, 37).
There are two ironic references to Pope in Sense and Sensibility. Elinor Dashwood, the oldest of three penniless young women, combines both the "affectionate heart" so dear to traditional moralists, and the analytical "understanding" that feminist literature of both persuasions stressed as imperative for women's survival. Elinor ironically congratulates Marianne, the second sister, because Marianne's suitor pretends, as a seductive ploy, to feel exactly as she does about literature. He values "the beauties" of Cowper and Scott, and he has reassured Marianne that he admires "Pope no more than is proper" (SS, 47). Another ironic scene in Sense and Sensibility reduces Pope's The Rape of the Lock and all its mocking neoclassical apparatus, to Willoughby's squalid attempt to soften Marianne for seduction.
This version of the rape of a lock is reported through the eyes of Marianne's gaping thirteen year-old sister, who describes how Willoughby waited until there were no adults in the room and then "cut off a long lock of [Marianne's] hair, for it was all tumbled down her back; and he kissed it. .. and put it in his pocket-book" (SS, 60). The oblique contrast between Marianne, a genuinely tender if foolish and solipsistic virgin of seventeen, and Pope's painted Belinda, who knows all the arts of avoiding actual seduction while enjoying its preludes, cannot be accidental. Belinda's "two locks, which graceful hung behind," did so, "to the Destruction of Mankind," whereas Marianne's "long lock," which "tumbled down her back," did so only to her own near destruction. In Pope's mock epic, Belinda's locks are "hairy Sprindges," which "conspir'd" to "insnare Man's Imperial Race."
Yet Pope's epic leaves matters open as to which sex was the more ensnared by the other: Th' Adventrous Baron the bright Locks admir'd, He saw, he wish'd, and to the Prize aspir'd By Force to ravish, or by Fraud betray. But Marianne is not at all conscious that she is sexually appealing, although she finds Willoughby so. Austen, who knew the difference between a heartless flirt and a sexually naive young woman in love for the first time, creates in Willoughby the conduct-book warning first to be found in Gregory and Halifax and later in all the feminist writing: Marianne was lucky to have mere fraud practiced on her, as her friends later remind her. Willoughby was summoned elsewhere, and he left the Dashwoods suddenly without explanation, before he could try "Force" or "Fraud" on a young woman he did not intend to marry.
Elinor's mild irony at Pope's expense implicitly includes Willoughby, whom she already distrusts. Austen was too professional a novelist to ignore the examples of witty syntax that the Augustan wits supplied her. Her own infectious pleasure in Pride and Prejudice, especially the "epigrammatism of the general style," indicates that she acknowledged her male predecessors in the arts of satire (Letters, 300). She adopted their skills with epigrammatical irony, their aphoristic barbs and wise sayings, their zeugmas and syllepses, their balanced cadences, and above all, their gusty pleasure in verbal virtuosities. Her earliest juvenilia called Volume the First is Austen's own version of "A Modest Proposal"; it contains an astonishing demonstration of deliberately unredeemed satire. Here is an example of Austen's syntax when she was twelve.
A duke whose wife has died, "mourned her loss with unshaken constancy for the next fortnight." He then "gratified the ambitions of Caroline Simpson by raising her to the rank of a Duchess." Caroline's sister Sukey, equally ambitious but anxious to achieve her goals through her own efforts, including unmaidenly violence, "was likewise shortly after elevated in a manner she .. . deserved. She was speedily raised to the Gallows" (MW, 28-29). Austen's juvenilia contains one verbal felicity after the other. There is Lady Williams, "in whom every virtue met. She was a widow with a handsome Jointure & the remains of a handsome face." There is "cruel Charles," who "wound[s] the hearts & legs of all the fair" young women for whom he sets steel traps. And there is "the worthless Louisa," who left her husband, "her Child & reputation .. in company with Danvers and dishonour" (MW, 13, 22, 110).
There is a delightfully ebullient moment when Austen, already the author of two novels, and now at work upon a third, writes to Cassandra: "In a few hours, you will be transported to Many down & then for Candour & Comfort & Coffee & Cribbage." And there is an unforgettable "Adm. Stanhope," who was "a gentlemanlike Man, but then his legs are too short, & his tail too long" (,Letters, 302, 129). What a fine rehearsal this verbal dexterity is for that alliterative moment in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet is leaving Charlotte Lucas, who has disgraced herself by marrying Mr. Collins. Elizabeth is musing to herself about "Poor Charlotte!" and how "melancholy" it was for Charlotte's friends "to leave her to such society" as her husband's: "But she had chosen it with her eyes open; and. . . she did not seem to ask for companions. Her home, her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry... had not yet lost their charms" (PP, 216; emphasis mine).
Elizabeth's sorrow for her friend Charlotte's marital debacle is as genuine as her capacity to refuse to think in cant. Her own bleak future, trapped at home with two outrageous parents and three silly sisters, still seems preferable to marriage with either of the two condescending suitors who had just proposed to her. But Charlotte had been driven to marry for just those motives of feminine desperation against which Halifax, Gregory, and Edgeworth had warned single women, and Austen had warned her niece, Fanny. Austen's juvenilia is both violent and mournful in ways that anticipate her mature fiction. She learned to modify the violence so that it is almost unrecognizable in her novels, but in "Volume the First" there are numerous descriptions of executions, amputations, female starvation, suicides, and attempted and successful murders of all kinds: matricide, fratricide, sororicide, and the attempted infanticide of an unwelcome new born girl, who takes her revenge far more violently than indulging in some "bantering."
She grows up to raise and command an army with which she slaughters her enemies. In "Volume the Second" and "Volume the Third," there is increased sadness and more open explorations of the themes first discussed by the radical and the moderate feminists. There are scenes of feminine deprivation, such as the abandonment of hungry and threadbare spinsters while male relatives dump their children on the trapped women, and amuse themselves spending the women's marriage portions. While one or another male relative "is fluttering about the streets of London," young and indifferent to the welfare of his abandoned wife and child, or "gay, dissipated, and Thoughtless at the age of 57," the women "continue secluded from mankind in [their] old and Mouldering Castle," often obsessed with food, clothing, and loneliness (MW, 111).
In "Volume The Third," the theme of women as outsiders, vulnerable to every contingency of malice, neglect, or mere custom, is more pronounced. Two young women, marriageable but impoverished orphans, are in "great distress" because they "had been reduced to a state of absolute dependence on some relatives, who though very opulent and very nearly connected with them, had with difficulty been prevailed on to contribute anything towards their Support." The solution of the eldest was one with which Austen was familiar, since her father's dowerless sister was forced to go to India to find a husband. This is Austen's fictional version of the same sad solution, written thirty-five years after her aunt's desperate emigration. Already at sixteen, Austen was subliminally aware of what happened to dowerless spinsters. Her fictional spinster "had been necessitated to embrace the only possibility that was offered her, of a Maintenance."
This polite sale of herself to an elderly and bad-tempered man was "so opposite to all her ideas of Propriety, so contrary to her Wishes, so repugnant to her feelings, that she would almost have preferred Servitude... had Choice been allowed her." For Mary, another and younger dowerless sister, "There was not indeed that hopelessness of sorrow.. . she was not yet married and could yet look forward to a change in her circumstances." But this unfinished story called "Catherine" leaves Mary still abandoned to the charms of a companion's post, and both hopeless and "depressed" (MW, 194-195). Achievements of Austen's magnitude are always something of a mystery, and in Austen's case, the mystery is even greater than it is for her male colleagues. How did she learn to temper her hyperbolically witty yet bleak child's vision, which could imagine only a world of sycophants and of hostile, competing groups?
Where did she learn that buoyancy that she attributes to one of her minor women characters, "that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from Nature alone"? The quietly witty but depressed Anne Elliot asks herself these questions about Mrs. Smith, an ill and penniless widow, betrayed by her husband and now abandoned by society in a back street of Bath. Anne compares Mrs. Smith's buoyant courage, which allows this utterly bereft woman "moments only of languor and depression," to her own permanent state of grieving with far less provocation, she thinks. "A submissive spirit might be patient, a strong understanding would supply resolution, but here was something more... . It was the choicest gift from heaven," and, Anne muses, "by a merciful appointment, it seems designed to counterbalance almost every other want" (Ρ, 154).
If we assume that there are portions of Austen's own hidden self in all heroines, whether transcended or not, we need to examine some of the subversive attitudes of these heroines. We need to watch the way Austen absorbed many feminist theories and transmuted them into the less contentious, more discreet, and sometimes more light-hearted medium of fiction, even while she retained an abiding contempt for those "meaner considerations" that Locke had identified in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Her favorite women novelists taught her that women could take as one of their most obvious fictional preoccupations the subject of Priscilla Wakefield's Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, and all the "meaner considerations" upon which traditional wisdom about women was so often based, and find themselves not only a publisher but a public.”
- Alison G. Sulloway, ““Pride” and “Prejudice” and the Compensatory Equation.” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
#history#regency#jane austen#sense and sensibility#gender#jane austen and the province of womanhood#pride and prejudice#emma#alison g. sulloway
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“It is a critical commonplace that Austen ignored the American, French and feminine rebellions during which she lived. But her very irony, so often praised but so seldom scrutinized for what it reveals, is itself an acknowledgment of social upheaval. Austen's fiction imitates Wollstonecraft's polemics in that it dared to turn "the woman question" into "the man and woman question," and to imply in fiction what Wollstonecraft overtly explained: that to dismiss the evolutionary needs of "one half the human race" was dangerous for the whole race. There is a profound responsive connection between Austen's satire and the satire of Pope, Swift, and the periodical essayists when they indulged in the national sport of chastising women. As the eighteenth century progressed, the successes of Burney, Edgeworth, Radcliffe, and a whole new tribe of Gothic novelists created even greater fears of women's insubordination, more masculine sermons and satires of the Polwhele kind, and ever more woman writers, until, according to some recent literary historians, more women were publishing novels than men.
It is not accidental that Polwhele's diatribe was published in the 1790s, in the middle of the feminist upheaval, just when Austen was beginning the early drafts of her mature fiction. Polwhele himself deplored the astonishing numbers of publishing women, and he condemned their "smile of complacency" and their "glow of self congratulation," which could not hide these shameless public examples of "comparative imbecility" ("The Unsex'd Females," 16). What else in Austen but an abiding fear of such vicious public rejection can explain the worlds of pain behind such fictional moments as her descriptions of Miss Bates, a woman like her contemporary self, "neither young, handsome, rich nor married"? What constant humiliations, encountered either through reading or personal experience, must have become translated into Austen's grimly ironic comment that Miss Bates had "no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect" (E, 21)?
It is no wonder, then, that all during Austen's life, "to become an author," particularly an ironist whose principle topic was that of the moderate feminist, Priscilla Wakefield, the author of Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, "was itself a feminist act.'” Nor is it any wonder that one of Austen's many identifying voices, as she attempted to make a place for herself in a society that had no place for her, should have been the utterances of an exasperated satirist for whom the world, as she was officially ordered to see it, often made no sense. But for all the difficulties Austen encountered as a writer, her family's cheerful eclecticism about what young women could read and write clearly counterbalanced the prevailing hostility to women writers, in a way that might have been less likely had she been born to working class parents. Nevertheless, she was poor all her life, and thus unable to provide herself with the dowry that would have doubled her chances of marrying.
Her post-Enlightenment predicament was therefore simultaneously more frustrating, and less so, than that of women born into higher or lower classes. As a writer, she had been granted the very best kind of education then permitted to women, but as a spinster, her feminine humiliations were doubled. One of the results of the new compensatory equation, he for his new rights and she for a redoubled training in her duties to him, was a renewed hostility toward spinsters. There was an obsessive restatement of the doctrine that for women "a dignified marriage" followed by the birth of sons was the only "grand promotion of which they are capable," according to the post-Wollstonecraftian clergyman, John Bennett. And Austen, that laughing, dancing, sociable, gently teasing young woman who loved to exchange badinage with young men and who had been trained at an early age to relieve her mother of domestic management, had cheerfully assumed that she would marry (Bennett, 107).
Any easy route to "the grand promotion" was barred to her because her father had neglected to provide a dowry for his daughters, and neither his disposition of funds nor his domestic inclinations permitted him to arrange a season in London for her. She was poignantly aware of the extent to which feminine poverty or provincial isolation were women's issues that frequently made marriage almost impossible for them. In her letters to her niece Fanny Knight, she cautioned the flighty Fanny against expecting perfection in a suitor. After describing the "one in a Thousand" ideal male, "the Creature" in whom "Grace and Spirit are united to Worth," and "where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding," Austen warned Fanny that such a "person may not come" her "way, or if he does," he may not be able to afford to marry her, or live close enough to her to be able to court her.
If Fanny had a delicate sense of ethics about marriage, finding a husband would present an even more difficult task: "Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection.... and nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without love . . . to one, and preferring another." Yet the sad fact was that "single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favor of Matrimony." Austen's valediction to one of these letters is sad indeed: "Think of all this Fanny" (sic; Letters, 409- 410, 483). Had Austen been born to the aristocracy or to wealthy landowners, instead of to the minor gentry, or had her family provided her with a patron, she would have been sent to London to find a suitor, as Catherine Morland was sent to Bath with wealthy neighbors. On the other hand, if she had been born of yeoman stock, she might have been allowed to provide her own dowry: she might have raised chickens or tended cows, and the funds from the sale of eggs and the milk would partly have been hers to save toward her marriage.
If she had been a shopkeeper's daughter, she might have been permitted to accrue a modest dowry by selling goods, printing bills, or keeping the books, and all this useful work, so frequently advocated by both the radical and the moderate women who wrote conduct books for their own sex, would have taken place while she learned the archetypal feminine lessons of social utility under her parents' eyes. To be sure, Austen's sister Cassandra did succeed in becoming engaged. But even here, custom intervened and prevented the outcome for which Cassandra longed. Austen and her sister, who were each given £20 a year during their lifetime, were hampered in providing for their own marriages not only by their father's slender means and their mother's small dowry but also by the assumption that although a man should support his sons through his own talents and initiative, yet it was not right to "provide for daughters by dividing an estate" (SS, n. to p. 4).
Cassandra's suitor, Thomas Fowle, a third son of an Anglican clergyman, who had just recently been ordained himself, was also the inadvertent victim of custom. Apparently primogeniture functioned even in modest clerical circles. Fowle's eldest brother was the incumbent of several livings, whereas he was forced to accept a year-long appointment as a regimental chaplain in the West Indies. Just before he was scheduled to return, having made enough money on which to marry until his titled kinsman could find him a rector's living, he died of yellow fever. The whole sad ending of Cassandra's hopes that she was about to achieve her own "grand promotion" was made even sadder by Lord Craven's shocked comment that had he known his cousin Thomas was engaged to be married, he would never have proposed this money-making journey to so dangerous a part of the world. If Austen had not been a "young female scribbler," her own case would have been as sad as her sister's.
But her father was neither a prude nor a misogynist. He considered that active wit contributed to domestic felicity and to the development of all the children's talents, including even those of the two young girls. Austen's family obviously refused to impose the most rigid female constraints upon her, and her family's delighted approval of her scribbling propensities was almost a miracle for a post-Enlightenment Tory family. Even the refusal of Austen's father to provide a dowry for her was a paradoxical blessing. Her spinsterhood spared her a husband's customary disapproval of writing wives as well as the sheer exhaustion of constant pregnancies. It is frightening to think that she might have suffered the same fate as her sisters-in-law and half-a-dozen neighbors, who died in childbirth. Although "the one grand promotion of which she was capable" had been denied her, and although she was traditionally bidden almost everywhere except at home to bury the one great talent that is death to hide, she ignored all taboos, ancient and recent, and quietly wrote and improved her mature fiction for almost a quarter of a century.
Nonetheless, as a daughter of the age of satire who had been practicing satirical fiction since she was twelve (MW, 1), her counter-satire itself announces that she resented the insults to which spinsters were increasingly subjected during the eighteenth century. Her "dear Dr. Johnson" (Letters, 181) enjoyed his wit at impoverished spinsters' expense as much as the next man: "When a man sees one of the inferior creatures perched upon a tree, or basking in the sunshine, without any apparent endeavor or pursuit, he often asks himself, or his companion, 'on what that animal can be supposed to be thinking?' " The Augustan wits' frequent association of women with animals might now have alerted Austen that her dear Dr. Johnson was about to enjoy himself at women's expense: To every act a subject is required. He that thinks must think about something. But tell me, ye that pierce deepest into nature, ye that take the widest surveys of life, inform me, kind shades of Malabranche and of Locke, what that something can be, which excites and continues thought in maiden aunts with small fortunes; in younger brothers that live upon annuities; in traders retired from business; in soldiers absent from their regiments, or in widows that have no children. (Idler, No. 24)
In The Rambler No. 112, Johnson described typical celibates as "morose, fretful, and captious, tenacious of their own practices and maxims, soon offended by contradiction or negligence," since they have lived too long "without the necessity of consulting any inclination but their own." Spinsters, he thought, were peculiarly likely to be distempered by a "peevishness" that is "generally the vice of narrow minds." For when "female minds are imbittered [we] by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendence of domestic trifles." Mockery of spinsters constituted one of the satirical staples of the periodical essayists. Social "Fawners," says the contributor to Spectator 305, "are forced to strain and relax the Muscles of their Faces," while distinguishing between "a Spinster in a coloured Scarf and a Hand Maid in a Straw Hat," whereas those who wish to behave according to acceptable custom simply "use the same Roughness to both."
Yet the spinster's proverbial neglect of her appearance was also a handy satirical weapon against women. In Tatler 210, one of the beleaguered sisterhood of single women claimed that her own sex giggles over her future disgrace in the hereafter, which is to be even more humiliating than her disgrace on earth. She will be placed in a Dantean circle of hell, where she will be an ape leading bands of other female apes. The Spectator was the most offensive of all the periodicals because it was so obsessed with the varieties of methods, types, and topics by which it could humiliate women as an entire sex. Every type and condition of woman—old or young, married or single, rich or poor, gentle or plebian, plain or pretty, husband-seeking or passively waiting, intelligent or even scholarly, or illiterate and frivolous—would soon find herself as a figure of ridicule.
One is reminded of Anne Elliot's sad comment to Captain Harville: "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything" (Ρ, 234). The most frequent periodical advice that contributors offered to bored and lonely women was to employ their hours rationally and improve their minds by "the long-neglected Art of Needlework," adorning their clothes with imitation "Fruits and Flowers," and applying "themselves rather to Tapestry than Rhime" or solid reading. Of course, persistent reading of The Spectator was considered beneficial to women, since its contributors were obviously women's most trustworthy friends {Spectator, 10, 265, 296, 271, 366, 242). But the prevalent opinion of Spectator contributors was that "The Lump" of the female sex are "thoughtless creatures," yet any attempt of "these lovely pieces of human nature" to improve their minds by serious reading brought another scornful essay from the friends of women (Spectator, 4, 53).
Over a half-century later, Austen offered a mocking request to another member of "the fair sex," as women were invariably called when they were not enduring ridicule, by demanding that Cassandra should advise her about the latest styles in hats: "I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers growing out of the head than fruit. What do you think on that subject?" (Letters, 67). Austen's letters bear painful witness to the frequent occasions as an impoverished spinster, when she was "the proper sport"—in Emma Woodhouse's scornful terms—of healthier, richer, and more socially acceptable neighbors and relatives, and when she feared to go into company because her clothes were so shabby and she had been "an ape-leader" for so many years. Austen's ironic heroine, Emma Woodhouse, dismisses impoverished spinsters with an acerbity worthy of an Augustan wit at his most rancorous: "Never mind, Harriet," she says, "I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptuous to a generous public! a single woman, with very little income, must be a ridiculous disagreeable, old maid!"
These comments and those to follow represent some of Austen's most convoluted satire, during which she simultaneously fires off shafts at several cliches, some self-mocking, some satirizing others, and some occasionally conflicting with others. For instance, Emma's comment that "a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper" of single women performs two functions: it recalls the easy Johnsonian assumption that celibacy demeans women more than men, and it also may well have functioned as a warning to Emma's creator. Austen loved to exploit the literary device of the court fool or the villain who tells a variety of unpleasant truths that conventional people would rather not hear. Emma is ungenerously indulging herself in the national sport of spinster-baiting, partly to distance herself from economically and socially deprived spinsters such as Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith, Miss Bates, and the little crowd of lonely female hangers-on who keep Mr. Woodhouse amused.
But Emma is a ruthless truth-teller: she has identified poverty and social humiliation as a feminist issue, as it was for her creator, but not for her. After Emma's provocative speech about the mistreatment of spinsters, Harriet Smith begs Emma to find a husband in order to escape just the threat of gratuitous insults typified by The Spectator: "You will be an old maid! and that is so dreadful!" wails Harriet, in response to Emma's insistence—which several Austenian heroines stress—that many women refuse the unattractive role of pining spinster, which the periodical essayist had assigned to them (Ε, 85). Miss Bates, one of the objects of Emma's scornful rejection, is indeed a ridiculous old maid, and from an ironic truth-teller's perspective, cruel though it may be, she is the proper sport of both the heroine and her author. Miss Bates's life and her social expectations are as empty as her sycophantic chatter, and as exasperating.
The attentions heaped upon her are painfully patronizing, and she serves as a grim example of what happened to women who were mortified by forlorn social and economic conditions, and who had been permitted no training or education for the opportunities a single life afforded. Austen is suggesting in her covert way that Emma, whose unchanneled active mind created fictions at other people's expense, and Miss Bates, whose passive mind was intellectually and imaginatively empty, might both have been happier if they had dared to take to the pen. It is not accidental that Emma, which features a heroine's discussion of the plight of spinsters—and indeed, of women—should also feature four trapped spinsters of various social and economic condition. Emma, the most fortunate as to money and social position, is bored and restless because the few amusements, which her hypochondriacal father will allow her are "contrived" for her, "rather as she is 'a woman' than as she is a reasonable creature," and they are indeed "more adapted to the Sex, then to the Species," as the contributor to Spectator 10 remarks.
And Knightley, for all his genuine kindness to her and to everybody, is himself guilty of a masculine conflict of interest, because he wants her to read only those unsubversive texts that will fit her to survive in hermetic Highbury where he rules, rather than trouble herself with those problematical feminist ideas that exemplify where her mind is going. The other three spinsters, Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax, and Hetty Bates, are all feminine allegories of abandoned or scantily supported spinsters who must somehow survive with pitiful support. Austen's disparaging comments on The Spectator and her preoccupation with the predicament of spinsters exemplifies again her capacity to encapsulate "the woman question" from a woman writer's perspective. In Northanger Abbey, she accuses this periodical of publishing essays "in which either the matter or the manner" is bound to "disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no favourable idea of the age that could endure it."”
- Alison G. Sulloway, ““Pride” and “Prejudice” and the Compensatory Equation.” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
#jane austen#history#regency#emma#gender#marriage#alison g. sulloway#jane austen and the province of womanhood
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“...None of the conduct-book conservatives thought to forbid a woman writer to say anything about nature—that is, to paint nature with her pen and her imagination, if she should have the audacity to write for publication in the first place. She ought not to gush over nature, as Marianne Dashwood does, and as Austen does not. But Austen knew that when a young woman lavishes affection over nature, however discreetly, as Fanny Price lavishes affection over the great panoply of the stars, and does so in Edmund Bertram's presence, she may continue to do so, as long as this topic meets with the man's approval, since to praise nature discreetly is to indicate to a lover that a woman understands her utterly subordinate place in it. For a woman to praise nature is thus a very discreet form of courtship.
Gardens symbolized women in multiple conflicting ways. The neat rows of obedient vegetation represented women as the compliant creature over whom the man had total authority, in whom he planted his seed, yet who paradoxically planted seeds in his gardens, in patient and modest prelapsarian fashion. Yet the orthodox writers emphasized her nourishment of these seeds, not the planting of them, just as she nourished him and his heirs indoors. But most symbolically to the thoroughly orthodox man, she represented a Ceres figure—a creature whose mind and body, like the minds and bodies of all similar animal or vegetable kinds, moved at slow, predictable rates, depending largely upon the husband's tillage or his pastoral care of her; and eventually, in the fullness of time, his child in her womb—usually described as a son—emerged.
We have difficulty understanding Mrs. Bennet's muffled anguish, which she displays only as inchoate feminine hysteria, unless we realize the crime she has committed. With Mr. Bennet's tillage, they had both intended her to produce a son. Her very crop—five daughters—was imperfect, and her peevish temper symbolizes how worthless she feels. The extended pastoral implications here are both sardonic and tragic. The garden thus represented orthodox ideas of women's four functions: to be an incubator for the heir; to be ornamental and beautiful, as flowers are; and to make herself so without knowing she was making herself so, in case nature had not performed that nourishing function for her; to be as passive and receptive as flowers are; and to be as domestically useful as vegetables are.
…Austen treats gardens both mockingly and seriously, and the pastoral world as places both of feminine privacy and of crises in the young woman's life: women could sometimes command privacy in gardens, as they could not usually do indoors, and they sometimes found males there, either predators or well-wishers, and therefore they came to know themselves in the male world in ways that were not always possible indoors. For Austen, gardens also symbolized an androgynous space, halfway between the man's absolute freedom to travel all over England at will, and the woman's small, restricted, domestic boundaries. But first Austen had to disabuse herself and her readers of the bizarre sexual equations between the noun gardens and the nouns female, sin, temptation, dependency, debilitation, idiocy, and stain or dirt, for if gardens symbolized the original place of sin, woman was sin itself.
…To suggest that Austen's Darcy, as the "preserver" of Pemberley, is a genuine green-world lover, may seem at first to compound the difficulties inherent in the implausibly double-natured character of Darcy, the haughty masculine snob, and Darcy, the benevolent feudal squire, stereotypically redeemed by a good woman's love. Darcy is a product of the female imagination as it responds to its predicament in the easiest subconscious way it knows how—through wish-fulfillment. He anticipates not only Charlotte Bronte's Rochester, no matter how vehemently Bronte would have denied that fact, but also the heroes of the Harlequin Romances, which sell in the millions yearly. This tall, rich, handsome aristocrat is also what every man envies; he stalks through the land, legally beholden to nobody—he is an orphan and he has therefore already stepped into "Dead men's Shoes" (Letters, 18), as Pemberley's Henry V.
Abroad, he acknowledges no social superiors and he submits to no constraints of courtesy or charity. His intellectual and social judgments are fallible, because he is too consumed with himself to judge reliably about others or for others, even assuming that he has the right to judge for others in the first place. Darcy appeals to women because the fantasy of taming the male beast who is brutal or indifferent to woman's dignity is as old a fantasy as it is in vulnerable, dependent children, whose dreams and fantasies of psychic wounds miraculously healed, parents reconciled, and paradise otherwise regained, are now acknowledged archetypes. How, then, does Austen make this impossible man palatable, and even aesthetically, or symbolically at least, believable to those who struggle along with the unredeemable Darcys every day of their lives?
The answer is that he is really more comfortable outdoors, with horse and hounds, with rod and gun through brightest Pemberley, and with taxes and tenants, and in his free moments from administering the estate, he is much happier in his library than he is in the confines of female provinces, such as ballrooms and the drawing rooms, with their predictable shallow mothers and daughters on the prowl to ensnare him into a disastrous marriage. On his own estate he is legally and socially lord of all he surveys, and these series of reassuring patriarchal surroundings all allow him to function there as a sensible, responsible, serious, benevolent despot of the Hobbsian kind, who will engage Elizabeth's affectionate humor, as well as her ardent respect.
The Pemberley scenes, which have transfixed generations of critics, accomplish Austen's aesthetic and ethical miracles, even though they perilously skirt stereotypes, and they do so triumphantly. Austen's alchemy is primarily mythical and symbolic. First, she invokes the spacious beauties of Pemberley, both the internal and external, which are to be her heroine's vastly extended spatial and mental provinces in the future, and then she deftly connects them not only with the present owner's inherited and authoritative male role, but she also invokes his pastoral forbearance, in both senses of the reverberative adjective pastoral. He is the proverbial biblical "good steward," a good father, or a good shepherd or secular pastor to his inheritance under his care. And as his housekeeper implies, he is as good a secular shepherd to his tenants, his servants, and his surrogate-daughter, who is really his sister, the terrified young woman "en Penitence," Georgiana Darcy.
He is even singularly generous where Georgiana Darcy is concerned, for he knows that his treatment of her has been heavy-handed, especially since their father left him as her guardian. He welcomes the partnership of Elizabeth, who will be to Georgiana, indoors and out, a careful mentor of Georgiana's fullest possible autonomous development. Austen's secondary magical techniques are rhetorical, even grammatical, as well as symbolical and mythical. For as Elizabeth moves about Pemberley, looking at the fine scenes and vistas from the spacious interior as well as from the almost limitless plantations, and as she acknowledges with longing what she now supposes she has lost, Austen's indirectly authorial voice—half hers and half Elizabeth's, which extols Pemberley's domestic beauties and its woods, fields, hills, valleys, pastures, and trout streams—moves from the mere positive grammatical degree, in which beautiful scenes and their accompanying fine ethical values appear merely very beautiful indeed, and then later to the comparative degree, where they appear even more beautiful yet.
But about the owner of this earthly paradise, only the superlative degree will do: he is the finest landlord imaginable. First, every disposition of the ground was good; and she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered on its bands, and the winding of the valley as far as she could trace it, with delight. As they passed into the other rooms, these objects were taking different positions; but from every window there were beauties to be seen. The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of their proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with the admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendor, and more of real elegance, than the furniture of Rösings. Darcy's housekeeper speaks of him in the superlative; "He is the best landlord, and the best master... that ever lived. Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves."
Readers' minds will inevitably contrast this patriarchal paragon with John Dashwood, the reckless hacker of his father's fine timber, or Tom Bertram, the prodigal son, wasting his father's substance on England's racecourses, or Sir Walter Elliot, who thinks only of the social prestige that his estate bestows upon him, and not what he owes to it and to its dependent female residents. When Elizabeth has had her fill of all these domestic and pastoral beauties, "they walked across the lawn towards the river," and she "turned back to look again; her uncle and aunt stopped also, and while the former was conjecturing as to the date of the building, the owner of it himself suddenly came forward from the road, which led behind it to the stables" (PP, 246, 249, 251).
This abrupt arrival of "the owner himself" might well suggest something of the providential about it. In any case, there is something profoundly moving in the fact that Elizabeth has courageously allowed herself to spend time mourning what she supposed herself to have lost; she does so now without any sycophantic gratitude to Darcy, merely a frank and honest acknowledgment of the serious and important role she could have played as Pemberley's mistress. Elizabeth's mourning is fully as much ethical as economic and aesthetic. Expanded ethical and functional opportunities would indeed, she assumes, have been hers. Instead of having to pander to a contemptuous father and a neurotic mother, she would have been offered an administrative post worthy of her conscience and her talents.
But because she is willing to go through a painful process, which in modern psychology is beginning to be known as "the work of mourning," and to endure the final pain of her last look at her lost paradise, she gains it. The owner returns, and paradise may yet be hers. After Darcy has spoken most courteously to her and to her beloved aunt and uncle, despite his embarrassment, and after he has engaged them for visits the next day, Elizabeth and the Gardiners tactfully leave "the present owner" to his magnificent estate. But now it is not merely beautiful in every way to Elizabeth; it is even more beautiful than she had previously thought, since shock has quickened her perceptions: "They had now entered a beautiful walk by the side of the water, and every step was bringing forward a nobler fall of ground, or finer reach of the woods to which they were approaching; but it was some time before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it" (PP, 253; emphasis mine).
Elizabeth's mind is only intermittently upon these beauties so glowingly described in this monologue, half hers and half authorial. The other half of Elizabeth's mind yearns to know exactly what spot inside Pemberley its owner now graces. This scene represents one of those rare moments in Austen's fiction when a woman is actually observed standing outside, in her exile, debarred now from entering a privileged house of beauty and plenty, and condemned, she supposes, to return to a house of resentful parents and three shallow, bad-tempered sisters. Austen's scenic recognition of women's double jeopardy, incarceration or exile, is more likely to occur in scenes where women watch the men from garden plots or from windows, while these emancipated creatures come and go on foot or on horseback, upon their own freely chosen pursuits.
Austen's subtle grammatical distinctions between the positive degree—"large, handsome stone building" flanked by the "natural beauty of the setting"—and the superlative degree, with it sensation of a crescendo at its height, as the housekeeper describes the master of all these beauties in the superlative degree—"the best landlord, the finest master"—and then the falling sense of tumescence, in the mere comparative degree of exterior beauties, as in "a nobler fall of ground or a finer reach of woods," all suggest the symbolic postcoital tristesse that Elizabeth is now enduring. Austen's skillful management of grammatical forms symbolizing emotions that she was not allowed to express or even to know about as an unmarried woman, should have prevented all critical stereotypes about the sexless Miss Austen. There is another fine pastoral scene, or rather two of them, when Elizabeth and Darcy achieve the reconciliation of lovers that is comparable to no other.
Darcy, now free of all his false pride and prejudices, and Elizabeth now quickly freeing herself of the prickly defensiveness into which his insults have driven her, wander together over and beyond the boundaries of Longbourn plantation, having no idea how far they have gone or how long they have been out together. During both these scenes, Darcy does penance in a manner customarily thought necessary only for the female sex: As a child I was taught what was right, but left to follow right conduct in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who though good in themselves … allowed, encouraged, even taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared to my own. (PP, 369)
Darcy's monologue to Elizabeth, which goes on for one whole page, contains many phrases by which feminists had earlier made their charges against the male sex: "spoilt," "selfish," "overbearing," "taught to think meanly of [women's] sense and worth compared to [their] own" are accusations that could be found in almost any radical or moderate feminist tract. Elizabeth then comforts Darcy by reminding him that the "conduct of neither, if strictly examined, will be irreproachable," as indeed, hers has not been according either to contemporary or to modern orthodoxies about proper conduct in women. She is now too tactful to remind him that he had earlier provided her with endless "provocations" and that she had "some excuse for incivility if [she] was uncivil" (PP, 191).
Now she acknowledges her mistake about Wickham, but she will not grovel even before the man she has won, and even as she earlier had groveled in private, according to orthodox dictates about the immense and life-long gratitude that a woman in love owed to the man who had stooped to make her his wife. Now the lovers' reconciliation is complete; and Elizabeth can lighten Darcy's profound sense of guilt with gentle wit—but not at his expense. They now wander on together, discussing the best ways to smooth over the relations between their adversarial families. As Austen said in another connection with another pair of reconciling lovers, most of us know where we are and what time it is during the passing hours, "yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it had been made at least twenty times over" (SS, 364).”
- Alison G. Sulloway, “Reconciliation in the Province of the Garden.” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
#jane austen#regency#pride and prejudice#alison g. sulloway#jane austen and the province of womanhood
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“...It is important to remember that Darcy committed his primary crimes of the heart on dance floors. He originally damns himself in the eyes of any right-thinking dancer, including his creator, by his loud refusal to dance with anybody. When the chance is offered him, he surveys the dancers while remarking that it would be "insupportable to dance" at "such an assembly as this," and particularly since "there is not another woman in the room, whom it would not be a punishment to stand up with." When Bingley points out that Elizabeth is without a partner, Darcy remarks "coldly": "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me and I am in no humour.. . to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men" (PP, 11-12).
Darcy commits another social atrocity with one particularly cruel and insensitive comment. At a small dance that Sir William Lucas has convened, Sir William remarks, fatuously to be sure, "What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy!—There is nothing like dancing after all.—I consider it as one of the refinements of polished societies." Darcy answers his host with an observation as contemptuous of the indigenous populations that England's colonial ventures were just beginning to exploit, as his first proposal is to Elizabeth: "Certainly, Sir—and it has the advantage also of being in vogue among the less polished societies of the world.—Every savage can dance" (PP, 25).
With the exception of Anne Elliot, all the heroines either meet their lovers at balls or their creator provides them with a crucial scene at a ball. Catherine Morland first learns to feel anxious and ashamed of herself in the presence of the mocking Henry Tilney when he begins his assaults upon her ignorance while they are dancing. Henry's conduct is very artful in stimulating her distress over her gauche comments. And moreover, she fits the stereotype of the conduct-book female who falls in love with a man long before he declares himself, and so she feels even more self-hatred when she faces Henry's condemnations at Northanger Abbey. Henry's teasing imitation of courtship, during their first dance and thereafter, is calculated in every way to inflame her vulnerable heart without necessitating any overt commitment on his part.
Marianne Dashwood also feels appropriate sexual guilt and shame, after Willoughby had flirted with her on and off the ballroom floor; but there again, her guilt is excessive. Her agonized admissions that Elinor was right about Willoughby, the seducer, would have been enough. To blame herself so thoroughly that she falls sick and almost loses her life, suggests how symbolically lethal much of the advice given to women could be, especially when women's dancing passions were aroused. Even Elinor feels an unusual twinge of feminine guilt and shame, after Willoughby had visited the Dashwood sisters at Cleveland, because she finds in him some of the seductive attraction that had almost caused Marianne's death.
Tom Bertram, the extravagant and irresponsible heir in Mansfield Park, satirically describes a bizarre metamorphosis between two equally extreme feminine stereotypes: girl larvae in the nursery, quiescent, humble, socially ignorant, and their appearance as butterflies the next season. This conversation takes place when Mary Crawford casually asks whether Fanny Price "is out or not out." In one case, Tom wittily described a nursery child who behaved before her debut as Fanny is now behaving; but the next season this suddenly dazzling creature conducted herself like an experienced prom-trotter. In another case, Tom complained, a young girl still in the nursery already behaved as though she had experienced her come-out, and she was dressed like a debutante.
Mary Crawford and Tom and Edmund Bertram all engage in lively condemnations of some consequences of the "come-out." In this scene, Mary continues to inquire whether Miss Price is in or out: "Does she go to balls? does she dine out every where, as well as at my sister's?" When Edmund replies that as far as he knows, Fanny has never been to a ball, Mary replies tartly: "Oh! then the point is clear. Miss Price is not out" (MP, 48-51). Edmund does not say that his foster-sister has never dined out anywhere before, let alone "every where." The mercantile function of the dance is most pronounced and most ugly in Mansfield Park. When Sir Thomas Bertram gave a ball in honor of Fanny's visiting brother, she was shocked to be told "that she was to lead the way and open the ball."
To make matters worse, "Miss Price had not been brought up to the trade of coming out; and had she known in what light this ball was, in general, considered respecting her, it would very much have lessened her comfort" (MP, 275, 267). Sir Thomas is a patriarchal tyrant who has planned to use his ballroom as though it were a breeding pen by marrying her to the rake Henry Crawford. It is significant that Austen's last two novels create almost no chances for her heroines to feel even the "glorious anxieties of motion" that she describes in her earlier novels when she herself was younger and celebrating her first dancing seasons. Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot are trapped at home by fathers who are altogether indifferent to their dancing and mating desires, a crime of the heart that was especially pernicious in a society where marriage and motherhood were woman's only socially sanctioned roles.
When Emma finally does wring permission from her father to attend her first country dance, she sees the public consequences of her self-serving conduct toward Harriet Smith. The Eltons superciliously snub this harmless illegitimate young woman, who is attending her own first ball, and whose feelings of sexual nakedness are at their most painful. At another ball, Emma colludes with the irresponsible Frank Churchill to humiliate Jane Fairfax. She has learned to handle the courtesies of the dance little better than Fitzwilliam Darcy, in some ways her male counterpart. In Persuasion, Austen's last novel, the dance plays an even less important role that it had in Emma. Anne Elliot's sense of sexual guilt and shame are relatively muted, first because she thinks that her dancing days are over, just as her creator's were, and then because she has lived so long with two comic monsters that her feelings are under careful control.
But it is not surprising that some residual erotic embarrassment should be aroused in her when she sits in a corner providing music for the spontaneous dancers at Uppercross, especially since Frederick Wentworth is among them. Frederick is playing two sisters against each other, and whenever Anne thinks how much and how genuinely she and he had loved each other, she feels hot with an almost penitential shame for both of them. Elizabeth Elliot, on the other hand, is escorted to one London season after the other by her father, so that she will be seen by someone with a title and an estate at least approximating her father's. Anne is not considered worthy of the expense that her introduction to London society would entail. At the age of twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is still not officially out, whereas her sister Elizabeth, who is a mere two years older, has been going to balls for more than a decade (Ρ, 7).
Parents who refused their daughters the initiation of a debut, as Mr. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, and Sir Walter Elliot were guilty of doing, were, in Austen's judicious moral lexicon, just as chargeable with parental malfeasance as parents who rushed their daughters into premature public exposure, as Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Dashwood did, with disastrous results. But nowhere is Austen's treatment of the dance, as emblematic of her characters' social morality, more skillful than in her art of context. Two of her heroes, Darcy and Knightley, are reluctant dancers. When Darcy is asked to dance, so as to relieve a partnerless woman's embarrassment, he will not injure his own dignity by doing so.
But when Knightley sees that Harriet Smith is without a partner, he steps forward to honor her, without any show of boredom in his mission of rescue. Emma teases him because he dislikes dancing, but as his creator's name for him suggests, both in irony and in great respect, he is a gentleman, with all the obtuseness to rebellious and therefore indelicate forms of suffering such as Emma's, which this breed of man so often displays. But he also demonstrates the fundamental kindness toward those whom social policy allows him to recompense as his inferiors, which so often characterizes members of the gentry.”
- Alison G. Sulloway, “Dancing and Marriage: The Province of the Ballroom.” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
#cw: racism#alison g. sulloway#jane austen and the province of womanhood#jane austen#pride and prejudice#emma#sense and sensibility#mansfield park#regency
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“Just as Elizabeth Bennet once remarked with teasing affection to her sister Jane that a young courting man ought to be "handsome . . . if he possibly can" (PP, 14), so Elizabeth's creator might have said that a satirical woman novelist should be born to intelligent parents as irreverent about most pseudo-pieties as her own father and mother, "if she possibly can." The Austen children were all encouraged to develop talents to amuse the family circle, and among Austen's scribbling, sketching, and painting siblings, her own wildly hyperbolic juvenilia may not have seemed as savage as it actually was. Far from complaining about her modest proposals, which attacked not only every sort of patriarchal abuse but the very principles of patriarchy itself, her family was delighted when she began to amuse the world of Steventon and St. John's College with her bleak imitations of Augustan satire.
When Austen was born, her father accepted the birth of a second daughter with none of the apparent contempt that Edgeworth's fictional misogynist displayed to the fictional father. Austen's own experienced father thanked "God" that his wife had once again been spared the horrors and the dangers of childbirth, and was now "pure well of it," and he prophetically consigned the baby "Jenny" to her sister as "a plaything," and to her older brother Henry as the male tutor frequently assigned to baby girls at birth to teach them their subordinate place in the universe (LL, 22). In a large family, then and now, a potential woman writer should arrange to be born near the end of the sibling row, if she can, so that she will not be prematurely forced into the role of "free nurse or a kind of mobile upper servant," as one parent or well-to-do Austen brother or another expected of the unmarried sisters throughout their lives. Readers owe Austen's correspondence with Cassandra to this customary exploitation of spinsters, since one sister or the other, usually Cassandra, was so often functioning as free housekeeper in some brother's house.
Mr. Austen's most important gift to the one genius among his children was his choice of his genial, intelligent, and affectionate son Henry as her male mentor. James, the eldest son, despised his second wife and his two daughters. Edward, the next brother, was no scholar and no reader, and he was already adopted by rich relatives in need of a male heir, before Austen was out of the schoolroom. Witty, charming, and self-indulgent Henry was the perfect choice as a male definer of women's limitations; he was as indulgent with her as with himself. If it had not been for Henry, there might well have been no Sense and Sensibility "By a Lady," nor the other five published novels that followed it. After Mr. Austen's death, Henry successfully took over his heretical father's attempts to publish his daughter's fiction, since women rarely conducted their own business. It is no wonder that Austen loved Henry dearly, despite his usual indifference to his sisters' needs in most other respects.
Austen's correspondence and the family biographies all stress how serviceably the Austens' talents for family living spread from themselves to relatives in shock or trouble. A cousin lost a husband to the guillotine; she found refuge at Steventon. A relative's daughter lost her father just before her marriage. She was brought to the rectory to be soothed and to be married from there shortly afterward. A sickly young ward of Mr. Austen's was nursed by Mrs. Austen, who grieved when he died. James's wife died leaving a two-year-old daughter, who lived and played with her two older girl cousins for several years until her father remarried and reluctantly summoned her home, perhaps initiating her scribbling aunt's life-long preoccupation with the double theme of women's vulnerability to summary exile or prolonged incarceration. A brother's ailing wife died and he came to his sisters for consolation. Edward's prolific wife died after her eleventh child was born. Both unmarried sisters then took their turn soothing the shocks and meeting the needs of a dozen or more family members.
For weeks after the death of her sister-in-law in child-birth, Austen begged to have two of the boys sent to her for consolation. When they finally arrived, Austen's reception of her two small motherless nephews is one of the most touching revelations of her deeply affectionate heart and her confident intelligence. She knew her Ecclesiastes and she knew that with children, and especially with grieving children, as with everybody else, uncritical love has its seasons; she also knew that judgment and gentle discipline have their seasons too. She comforted these motherless nephews with her effective combination of maternal tenderness and bracing care—a healthy crispness toward children then considered impossible or unfashionable in women. Of one of the newly motherless Austen-Knight girls, Austen wrote: "Your account of Lizzy is very interesting. Poor child! One must hope the impression will be strong, and yet one's heart aches for a dejected mind of eight years old" (Letters, 221).
There speaks the writer for whom even the most wracking grief is "very interesting"; and there also speaks the loving aunt, and the Christian, conscious of suffering as a vale of soul-making. Austen's description of her grieving nephews' visit indicates how thoroughly acquainted she herself was with grief, and how tactfully she could minister to it. First she looked and listened: "George sobbed aloud, Edward's tears do not flow as easily." Then she consulted another spinster whose sex assigned her to the care of small children: "Miss Lloyd, who is a more impartial judge than I can be, is exceedingly pleased with them." Above all, she consulted her own extensive experience with her brothers' small children: "They behave extremely well. .. showing as much feeling as one wishes to see"—but not too much—and "speaking of their father with the liveliest affection."
And then, after looking, listening, consulting, and calling upon experience, she devised a splendid program designed to begin her nephews' healing process without denying them the need for mourning. She was interested that George was equally unabashed on board a river ferry, "skipping" and "flying about from one side to the other," as he was in his grief, while Edward, the heir to his father's estate, could neither weep nor play with as much spontaneous abandonment (Letters, 225-227). Soon Austen got the boys outdoors to play "bilboacatch, at which George is indefatigable, spillikins, paper ships," and then she urged them indoors again for a change of pace, so that they could play "riddles, conundrums, and cards," while from a window they could be archetypally soothed, "watching the flow and ebb of the river," and stretch their muscles and ease their grief "with now and then a stroll out," so that altogether Austen reported that all these activities "keep us well employed."
But if there is a time for grief, there is a time for light-hearted play: "In the evening we had the Psalms and Lessons, and a sermon at home, to which they were very attentive; but you will not expect to hear that they did not return to conundrums the moment it was over. .. . While I write now, George is most industriously making and naming paper ships, at which he afterwards shoots with horse-chestnuts, brought from Steventon on purpose; and Edward equally intent over the 'Lake of Killarney,' twisting himself about in one of the great chairs" (Letters, 227-229). A few days before the boys left for home, their aunt achieved a trip for them upstream on the river: "it proved so pleasant and so much to the satisfaction of all that.. . we agreed to be rowed up the river; both the boys rowed a great part of the way, and their questions and remarks, as well as their enjoyment, were very amusing. George's enquiries were endless, and his eagerness in everything reminds me of his Uncle Henry" (Letters, 228).
Austen's own artless "eagerness in everything" to do with warmhearted, attractively brought up children appears at its finest in Pride and Prejudice: "As they drove to Mr. Gardiner's door, Jane was at a drawing room window waiting their arrival.. .. On the stairs were a troop of little boys and girls, whose eagerness for their cousin's appearance would not allow them to wait in the drawing-room, and whose shyness, as they had not seen her for a twelvemonth, prevented their coming lower. All was joy and kindness." Once again the Gardiner children became symbols of domestic equality between the parents, and therefore of family felicity and of sensible parental discipline: "The little Gardiners, attracted by the sight of a chaise, were standing on the steps of the house, as they entered the paddock; and when the carriage drove up to the door, the joyful surprise that lighted up their faces, and displayed itself over their whole bodies, in variety of capes and frisks, was the first pleasing earnest of their welcome" (PP, 152, 286).
Elizabeth Bennet witnessed both these delightful family scenes, which Austen has placed with infinite craft between scenes where two young men have betrayed two of the Bennet daughters, one with and one without the daughter's active collusion. In the first scene, where "all was joy and kindness," the principled but duped Jane Bennet was visiting the Gardiners and trying to recover from the shock of Charles Bingley's casual courting and equally casual disappearance. In the second scene describing the Gardiner children's appealing capers and frolics, Elizabeth and the Gardiner parents have just discovered George Wickham's perfidy in his elopement with the unprincipled Lydia Bennet. The shocking disjunction between loving couples with happy children and irresponsible courtships is no accident.
Post-Enlightenment parents were particularly confused between Pauline injunctions; the feminists stressed that "we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of the other," and that in Christ, "there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female." The male conduct-book writers, on the other hand, emphasized St. Paul's patriarchal corollary: that "as we have many members in one body.. . all members have not the same office." Wollstonecraft described the customary acceptance of Paul's modification as purely opportunistic, based on a male principle of female "utility" shaped always by male "convenience" (Vindication, 51). For all Mr. Austen's reputation for kindness, he was spending his funds and training his boys for "the widely differing professions and employments into which private advantage and public good require that men be distributed" (Gisborne, Duties of the Female Sex, 2), whereas from their earliest childhood, the two Austen sisters were taught that they "had not the same office" as their brothers, nor the same needs, and that they therefore did not require the same resources.
Elizabeth Bennet once remarked that well-to-do men enjoyed "great pleasure in the power of choice" (PP, 183), a luxury that almost no women could command. And Eleanor Tilney's sad comment to Catherine Morland— "you must have been long enough in this house to see that I am but a nominal mistress of it, that my real power is nothing—" is true of all Austen's heroines and all her chaste yet witty minor women characters (NA, 225). Throughout her life, in all matters to do with education, funds, travels, books, pen and paper, clothing, or any other personal property, Austen and her sister were severely deprived compared with their brothers. But despite the clear bitterness that these deprivations bred in both Austen's fiction and her correspondence, all her writing displays the spontaneous wit and affection that she poured into her own family. She performed the same chaste yet witting and even passionate service for her fictive heroines and heroes, struggling to mature under very harsh and artificial assumptions about marriage and gender distinctions.
One of her most admirable traits, both as a novelist and as a member of a close-knit family, was her refusal to demand too much of fallible and suffering humanity, and an equally discerning refusal to demand too little. She wrote of a despondent Henry: "I hope he comes to you in good health, and in spirits as good as a first return to Godmersham can allow. With his nephews he will force himself to be cheerful, till he really is so" {Letters, 244). From Enlightenment sources she had clearly learned that responsible habits and desires can produce responsible conduct fully as much as innate talents and temperament—a desperately necessary acknowledgment for a member of a sex often considered intellectually and morally defective from birth. A brilliant girl-child in training to become a satirist ought to be born to a witty mother, "if she possibly can," a rare feat among the daughters and granddaughters of Anglican clergymen, which Austen managed to accomplish.
Her great uncle on her mother's side was Theophilus Leigh, Master of Balliol, whose reputation for slightly irreverent wit "and agreeable conversation extended beyond the bounds of the university" (Memoir, 6). This great-uncle was certainly one founder of the Austenian school of wits, who served as inadvertent tutor to his niece, Cassandra Leigh; and her fiction-writing daughter matriculated in the same school. Whatever outrageously self-important received opinions amused Austen were also likely to amuse her mother, in her daughter's fiction and elsewhere. The "strong common sense," the "lively imagination," and the "epigrammatic force and point," in Mrs. Austen's "writing and conversation" were legendary, even before her daughter became famous. When she was dying and in pain, she remarked to a great nephew, "Ah, my dear, you find me just where you left me—on the sofa. I sometimes think that God Almighty must have forgotten me, but I dare say He will come for me in his own good time" (Memoir, 11-12).
Nonetheless, all family accounts suggest that Mrs. Austen was jealous of her precocious daughter. Austen's increasingly irritated comments about her mother imply that she suffered keenly from the covert maternal jealousy that mothers are often taught to inflict upon their most intelligent daughters. This daughter was usurping the male privilege of writing—with the father's tacit encouragement, too—which he would hardly have sanctioned in his wife. There was apparently no gross abuse, but all the evidence suggests that as Austen matured and began to publish, she did not receive the critical yet unresentful support in her feminine ghetto that writers need. There is a sting in Austen's life-long comments that she has commanded her mother to get well or stay well, and that she fully expects her mother to follow her commands, so that she can finish a chapter, make a dearly desired visit, or allow herself some badly needed respite.”
- Alison G. Sulloway, “The Author’s Province.” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
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“...Although one must regard some of the family biographies of this famous member with measured skepticism, since the male biographers tend to stress how much they or their fathers taught this genius, and the female biographers stress how much she taught them, yet one can agree, on the whole, with Austen's nephew, the memoirist. Austen's "early years were bright and happy, living as she did with indulgent parents, in a cheerful home, not without agreeable variety of society" (Memoir, 44). Eliza de Feuillide is the most reliable biographical source, in one way, because she did not know that her cousin was to become famous, when she wrote those cheerful letters validating the Austen members' habit of taking pleasure in each other and creating amusements for each other. Eliza's records are also validated by the sunny ebullience that illuminates much of Austen's fiction, despite many of its dark and painful origins.
Like Austen's own Catherine Morland, there were often times when she was so "soothed," so "surrounded, so caressed, she was even happy! In the joyfulness of family love everything for a short time was subdued" (NA, 233). The trouble arose as one older brother after the other left for university or naval schooling. Mr. Austen merely did what he thought was customary for a man of his social rank and limited income. When sons were plentiful and funds were scarce, daughters were neglected. But by supplying his daughters with a hospitable home, he may have hoped to attract enough young men to his cheerful rectory to provide eventual husbands for them, with hardly any extra expense or effort on his part. He had simply ignored what all the feminists could have told him, that rich men's sons do not marry poor men's daughters, and poor men's sons cannot afford to do so.
According to R. W. Chapman's last calculations, Austen began her first juvenile efforts in 1787 (MW, 1); and according to Jane Aiken Hodge's precise documentations of dates and family bills, Austen came home from boarding school in 1787. She apparently began her scribbling just after she had finished her few years of formal schooling and had been brought back to the rectory, and just as it was being rapidly emptied of its boys. In fact, she and Cassandra had been sent away in the first place, because their bedroom was needed by a series of boy boarders whom Mr. Austen prepared for the universities (Only a Novel, 20-21). The persistence and the severity with which Austen exploited the Augustan parallel yet adversarial rhetorical structures and motifs, even as a twelve-year-old girl, indicate how clear it already was to her that when HE goes out into the world, she must come home to save money for HIS schooling, but that she cannot come home until HE leaves home. This child's breezy mockery of various assaults upon young women is a classical demonstration of the way dreams, childlike fantasies, and fiction often present metaphoric and symbolic conditions quite literally.
In Austen's mature fiction, three married women, Mrs. Tilney, Mrs. Woodhouse, and Lady Elliot, were yoked to a tyrant, a hypochondriac predator, and a solipsistic snob, and Austen implies that these women's early deaths symbolized almost a blessed relief, as though the confinement and the finality of the grave were scarcely worse than the confinement and the finality of marriage to such men. If confinement by tyrannical or selfish keepers was grim, desertion by men or by patriarchal systems was even worse: What was a young woman to do after "she was turned out of doors by her inhuman Benefactors"? The ambivalence in the oxymoron is revealing. The answer is to steal, and if necessary, to kill. But this young female criminal's earliest introduction to abandonment took place on the day of her birth: her mother had left her in a field to die, "dreading" the father's "just resentment at her not proving the Boy [he] wished" (MW, 34, 39).
During the crucial year of 1787, James, Frank, and Edward left home for good, and Austen's beloved Henry was about to leave for Oxford (LL, 46-49; Letters, Index I, Item IV). The shock of returning home because four boys were going out into the world seemed to have established Austen's life-long fictional occupation with feminine poverty, feminine incarceration, and feminine exile and abandonment. It also initiated her into the grim knowledge that even in the kindest families, women's lives were never schools for intellectual and professional opportunities, but on the contrary, they were schools for patience and resignation, just as the male conduct books had described as proper and agreeable for women. Austen took some deliciously zany revenge on absent brothers. No matter how shrunken was Mr. Austen's court of its male courtiers, there was this ridiculous child, not weeping for lost brothers, as she might well have longed to do, but mocking customs inimical to girlchildren, as though she had been licensed as a young female court-fool.
It is ä striking fact that all Austen's satirical juvenilia and almost all the fragments she left unfinished at her death bear the unmistakable marks of some psychic blows, some as yet unresolved traumatic experience or series of experiences, which her satire resolutely kept at bay. Familial and sexual violence of all sorts is coolly accomplished and gloatingly contemplated. Theft, adultery, and excessive drinking are equally coolly appraised as characteristic modes of family life. And even as Austen matured, family hostilities are far more common in these fragments than warmth or generosity; cruelty to the disempowered, which therefore renders them even more vulnerable, occurs as an accepted social fact. One is also struck by the hopelessness in many of Austen's mature fragments. In The Watsons, one impoverished daughter says to the other: "You know we must marry... my father cannot provide for us, & it is very bad to grow old & be poor & laughed at." Their brother Robert, "carelessly kind, as became a prosperous Man & a brother," does all the talking, since he does not care to "let his attention be yielded to the less national, & [less] important demands of the Women" (MW, 317, 349, 356).
Lady Susan's daughter is a mere cypher, crushed by a monstrous mother and a system that has evolved no machinery for rescuing her. But one might wonder which is the greater victim, an impoverished and predatory widow who has no home, or her daughter who has no willpower. D. W. Harding's description of Austen's comic monsters and the nightmares that her heroines endure is even more prominent in her fragments and her juvenilia than in her six mature novels. By the time she was sixteen, she had already learned how to treat women's limited choices without comic hyperbole. Such phrases as "hopelessness of sorrow," "tho' all were her relations, she had no friends," "her separation from her sister," and "she usually wrote in depressed spirits" all suggest far more than a taste for fictional sorrow. This grief is pervasive, and it is personal (MW, 195). These grieving women are early Austenian examples of female exile; but there are just as many early and unfinished examples of female incarceration in the women's quarters of an estate.
Annis Pratt calls the feminine ghetto a "tarnished enclosure," within which women lacked "the basic element of authenticity," the liberty "to come and go" as men did, and "the right to make decisions about one's own time, work, and other activities." Priscilla Wakefield described the same predicament from personal experience: "Feminine action is contracted by numberless difficulties, that are no impediments of masculine exertion" (Present Condition of the Female Sex, 9). Knightley's comment that "there is nobody hereabouts to attach [Emma]; and she goes so seldom from home" (Ε, 41), anticipates Lady Russell's internal monologue about Anne Elliot's isolation: "Anne had been too little from home, too little seen. Her spirits were not high. A larger society would improve them" (Ρ, 15).
Mary Hays harshly summed up this feminine deprivation as systematic and ubiquitous: In matters of great and important concern, women are generally soon taught to understand, that they ought to have, and can claim to have, no weight whatever. They then naturally think that the lesser ones, mere family matters, of ornament or fashion, may be left to them; but even here they are mistaken and misinformed; for their share in the management of home, and domestic concerns, lies entirely at the mercy of husbands, who except they are more than human, will rather be guided their own caprice, than by the exact rules of equity. Since "the wife is acknowledged to be, even in domestic concerns, the upper servant of her husband only.. . the iron hand of authority lies desperately heavy, in even the trifles of life" (Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, 87-88).
Austen had apparently never experienced "the iron hand of authority" which Hays describes as a common feminine fate. But as a young woman who had barely reached her majority, Austen did indeed suffer from the exasperating knowledge that she "ought to have, and can claim to have, no weight whatsoever." Enforced incarceration or enforced exile was always a personal problem for her. She was neither summarily expelled from one estate nor kept a virtual prisoner in one, according to the fate of Fanny Price, Catherine Morland, the Dashwood sisters, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot. But all her adult life she suffered shifts of residence—from Steventon to Bath to Southampton to Chawton, or to the bedside of a sick relative. These shifts were always initiated for someone else's benefit, and they gave "no weight whatever" to Austen's own health, her publishing deadlines, or a rare visit already planned to some friends who loved her for her own sake.
Austen's rueful jokes at her helplessness began early and continued throughout her life. She enjoyed writing to her sister, her nieces, or her friends that she had intended to mount the box herself and direct the horses to carry her to them, since they, too, were as helpless about coming to see her as she was to go to them, but, as she frequently bemoaned, some malign fate intervened or was sure to intervene. Once she wrote Cassandra four letters over a period of a month, complaining that one after the other of her five brothers refused to fetch her home after there was no more need of her services where she was, and where she had clearly worn out her welcome. She jokingly compared herself to Frances Burney's Camilla Tyrold, whose irresponsible brother and heir to the family goods had locked his sisters in a summer house for hours by running off with the ladder, which was the only method of entrance or exit.
Austen was particularly exasperated with her brother Frank, who would neither sanction her return by stagecoach nor come for her himself. After applying once or twice again to all her brothers, including her host, the rich Edward, Austen wrote in satirical exasperation: "My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter... unless he wishes me to walk the Hospitals, Enter at the Temple, or mount Guard at St. James." Her final comment about her eventual return was ironically despairing: "the time of its taking place is so very uncertain that I should be waiting for Dead-men's Shoes" (Letters, 9-18). In Austen's threat to become a physician, a barrister, or a member of the household cavalry, there are some quietly bitter allusions to what HE can do and she cannot. And her ominous reference to "Dead-men's Shoes" suggests how enormous the strain must have been to subdue constant anger and frustration over constant indifference to her needs.
Austen's yearly allowance of £20 partially explains why she joked so often about forbidden male professions that would have eased her constant niggling anxieties about money. Her correspondence is filled with ironic remarks about what profession she or some other woman had adopted or should adopt: the "science" of music, "the study of Medecine" (sic), of the navy, the law, or English history, "The Civil & Military—Religion—Constitution—Learning & Learned Men—Arts and Science—Commerce, Coins & Shipping—& Manners." She ironically included those whom she considered history's martyrs, such as Mary, Queen of Scots, or a witch who was burned at the stake. Nor did she ignore women's primary disenfranchisement upon which all the others rested: she even cracked a joke about voting for a candidate who was seeking a constituency so that he could stand for Parliament (Letters, 50, 40, 89, 233).
Austen's father died in 1805, and soon Austen began to dwell on legacies and particularly on those who received them and those who did not—namely, herself, her sister, and her widowed mother. Various relatives and prominent people already reasonably wealthy were inheriting even more funds than they needed to function most comfortably, whereas the Austen widow and the spinsters were counting not pounds, as they estimated the cost of food, clothing, pens, writing paper, tips, and presents to tenants and the extended family, but pence; and saving not yards, but inches of fabrics for refurbishing shoddy dresses, underslips, caps, and bonnets. Austen wrote with her particular brand of tart yet wistful irony: "Indeed, I do not know where we are to get our Legacy—but we will keep a sharp look-out" (Letters, 207; Hodge, Only a Novel, 99). "The rich," she once said mockingly to Cassandra, "are always respectable," as the poor are not (Letters, 195).
Austen's open contempt for her brother James and his wife, Mary, at least in her letters, does not make pleasant reading, but the sources of her grief and anger against them are even more unpleasant. Their worst offense to this affectionate aunt was that they treated their daughters with all the varieties of hostility and contempt that Fanny Price's two families inflicted on her. And their indifference to the plight of James's mother and sisters is contemptible. They flaunted their new carriage and pair, their trips, and their plentiful servants, while the little band of women who were now classified with "the genteel poor," scrimped and hoped for tips and presents from wealthy relatives. Mary complained of everybody's housekeeping except her own, and James infuriated his fiction-writing sister by visiting the three women whenever he became bored with his wife, and by behaving in a boorish fashion, slamming doors, and demanding instant service as a male right.
James must have been a rather unpleasant man even as a young curate. When Mr. Austen relinquished his ecclesiastical living in favor of James and then retired to Bath, James coolly bargained for all the household goods at Steventon, for the books, pictures, and silverware, in exactly the same cheap and contemptuous way as did the John Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility. The cruelest "melancholy disproportion" of all was that Austen's precious piano and her equally precious books, which she had been able to purchase out of her annual allowance of £20, all had to be sold, not only to finance her father's retirement in the city of Bath, which she hated, but even more bitter, to help James's acquisition of the Steventon living from which she was now being expelled.
Austen wrote Cassandra with understandable rancor that even Mr. Austen's tractable and sweet-going little mare had now deserted him, to trot over and pay permanent court to the crown prince of the Steventon rectory, before Mr. Austen and his family of women had even removed to Bath. Yet James had but recently "bought a new horse; & Mary [had] got a new maid." The pictures, the flatware, and other household goods went to James, while Mr. Austen was frantically "doing all in his power to increase his Income by raising his Tythes" (Letters, 75, 101-103, 126). When Austen remarked, "The whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expense of another" (Letters, 133), she was expressing the very economic underpinnings of Sense and Sensibility, especially the monstrous chapter where John and Fanny Dashwood defraud his mother and three penniless sisters of the funds and goods which his father—and theirs—had designated for them.
…Austen's grief over the hazards that women suffered in childbirth was centered most painfully upon her novel-writing niece, Anna, one of the despised daughters of James and his wife. Austen was obviously distressed not only that Anna had endured three painful pregnancies within three years of marriage—"Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty—" as indeed she was, but that this niece had been her writing colleague, whose husband actually offered "encouragement & approbation" for her work, which for women used to disparagement, "must be quite 'beyond everything.' " This was the niece who was "but now coming to the heart & beauty" of her writing, when she married and began the frightening process of bearing seven children almost yearly (Letters, 488, 401, 404). Twenty years earlier, Austen had worried about a recent pair of maternal deaths: "Mrs. Coulthard and Anne.. . are both dead and both in childbirth. We have not regaled [the pregnant] Mary with this news" (,Letters, 29).
…These commonplace renunciations found their way into Austen's fiction: there is an ironic yet sad little vignette in Nortbanger Abbey, when Catherine Morland is at last home and grieving over General Tilney's betrayal and her loss of Henry. Her mother scolds her for her manifestations of shock and mourning, "still perfectly unsuspicious" of its cause, "which, for the parents of a young lady" who has been visiting a young man for several weeks, "was odd enough!" Mrs. Morland insists not only that Catherine read a male conduct book called "The Mirror," but that she accept her responsibilities for sewing her brother's neckties: "I do not know how poor Richard's cravats would be done, if he had no friend but you" (NA, 235, 240-241). Austen had early perfected several techniques to keep despair at bay. For instance, even as a young marriageable woman, she had adopted the whimsical habit of pretending that she and Cassandra could plan their lives as their brothers did, and even control the elements.
She would thank Cassandra most profoundly for ordering such good weather, scolded her for not choosing more handsome and charming partners to dance with than those with whom her sister had reported herself to have been afflicted, begged Cassandra to enjoy the next dance and to arrange a dance for her—from a distance of several counties— and other imaginary assumptions of an autonomous will. She also informed Cassandra that some trifle, such as an unexpected letter or a good pudding at dinner or the successful hemming of an old shabby gown had sent her into "the utmost pinnacle of human felicity," or into "utter unimaginable human joy," which Cassandra was to take with all the salt she chose. One of Austen's most charming techniques for disrupting depression was her habit of personification. She loved to tell Cassandra that various household goods, such as furniture, scarves, gowns, or silverware missed her, loved her, and sent her their most respectful duty.
She enjoyed informing her nieces and nephews that the farm animals often spoke of them and longed to see them. The saddest example of personification occurred when she wrote to her niece Caroline, who loved her dearly and whose memoir described a woman with great affection and respect for children. Caroline was a daughter of the selfish pair, James and Mary. Austen was then clearly very ill, but she wrote with the playfulness that was designed both to express her sadness and her longing to see Caroline, and to hide these feelings if Caroline could neither accept them nor arrange to visit her aunt—which she was unable to do until just before Austen left for medical care in Winchester: "The Piano Forte often talks of you—in various keys, tunes, & expressions . . . but be it Lessons or Country Dances, Sonata or Waltz, you are really it's constant Theme. I wish you cd come and see us, as easily as Edward can."
…In the last months of Austen's illness, her correspondence began to express those exaggerated attitudes of feminine gratitude, which the male conduct-book literature considered only seemly in women, and which to me, at least, are infinitely painful to read. If she were to live longer, she says, she could never be as well-cared for as she is now; she is grateful for kindnesses immeasurably beyond her deserts; her family is so kind to take her illness as seriously as they do; she is so ashamed to be such a nuisance, and so on. Yet even now, her ironic novelist's courage did not desert her. Any novelist who could earlier laugh in a private correspondence at a dancing woman who looked like "a queer animal with a white neck" or another who "appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, & fat neck," or who could find vast amusement at the naked cupids on one of the ceilings in a girls' boarding school, could never altogether lose the healing gift of laughter.
With typical Austenian whimsy, which functioned both to appease others and to comfort herself, she described her rides on a tractable donkey, when she could no longer walk, and the violent discoloration of her skin, as though she had temporarily donned a pantomime costume to amuse the children (Letters, 120, 91). Such a spirit, which quietly arranged its own entrances not only into the woman's province of the heart, but into the community of the "Mind," with all its "lovely display of what Imagination does," is indomitable. Austen's sweet sentence praising her niece Anna, her young novelist colleague—"You are but now coming to the heart & beauty of your book"—is one of those artlessly generous Austenian moments that resonate so courageously throughout her correspondence, and with even greater sonority throughout her mature fiction (Letters, 478-479, 401). Austen had more than a little in common with her probing and questioning heroine, Elizabeth Bennet.”
- Alison G. Sulloway, “The Author’s Province.” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
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“The essays of the moderate feminists, Priscilla Wakefield, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane West, Clara Reeve and Maria Edgeworth, regressed in ways that were critical for Austen's fiction; she praised some of them and paraphrased them all. Astell and the 1790s radicals had hoped to be agents for systematic changes in law, theology, education, and social and economic practices affecting women. The moderates believed that women were mired in patriarchal systems incapable of change, and that therefore only heroic and piecemeal efforts on their own behalf could help them. The moderates tended to shift their targeted readers from both sexes to women alone. Both sets of feminists tried "to account for and excuse the tyranny of man," but the moderates did so with less confidence than the radicals. Between their essays and those of the radicals many male conduct-book writers had emerged, whose main function was to act as policemen to aspiring feminists.
The prefaces to the moderates' essays were full of appeasing comments: they did not intend to step out of their province; they did not dispute men's superior strength nor the biblical strictures against women in authority; they did not intend to cause domestic and national upheavals; and so forth. But they vehemently disagreed with men who claimed that they would be departing from "the necessary duties" and the "proper manners, graces, and accomplishments of [their] sex," whenever they attempted to "arrange, abstract, pursue," or "diversify in a long train of ideas," since God had not granted them the brains for these achievements (Bennett, Female Education, 88, 7). And yet, to publish at all, they now felt they needed to adopt that rhetoric of "Meekness," conventionally considered sexually "alluring" and in any case, a "duty... incumbent upon all women" (Duff, Character of Women, 256). Just as alert readers have been aware of the muffled despair in Austen, the loyal Anglican churchwoman, which sometimes erupts in satire, so did religious loyalties frequently muffle the voices of the moderates, which sometimes erupt into acerbic irony.
Jane West imitated the male habit of associating women with animals by comparing men to predatory wolves, vultures, peacocks, jackasses, and braying donkeys, simultaneously playing the role of domestic emperor and spoiled baby. Austen's ridiculously self-important and self-indulgent suitors and husbands, her spoiled heirs, indifferent to their sisters' welfare, and her callous fathers of Mr. Bennet's stamp, who mocked his daughters while he enjoyed their miseries, emerge out of this school of feminine satire, no matter what else her own satire addresses. The moderates thought no more highly of marriage than their radical predecessors. Jane West offered the bleak advice that "in the married state, women should never expect too much, nor feel to keenly," and this fact "can never be too deeply impressed on the ardent mind of youth," particularly of that sex whose hearts were said to be most properly at the permanent service of the other sex.
"'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,' "and marriage is one long deferred hope: it is "John Bull's . . . prison house!" Throughout life, women "scarcely know the exercise of free will"; they cannot dispose "of their time or their fortunes," nor can they chose their "pleasures," their "friends," or even "the spot on earth where they would reside" (Letters to a Young Lady, III, 97, 130; II, 366, 372). Elizabeth Hamilton, a favorite with Austen, described the painful discipline required of wives: "All the decorums of life, all the graces which constitute the charm of polished manners, are the offspring of restraint imposed on inclination; not till they have acquired the force of habit, are they adopted by nature as her own. Before this can happen, how many painful sacrifices must be paid!" Austen's letters to her sister Cassandra are full of this same sad resignation, chastened by the corrective of her irony.
But then, not only did every male conduct-book writer urge women never to give way to self-pity, but also he often coupled this advice with the information that women suffered nothing to induce self-pity, while a few pages later, he might insist that the suffering that God had inflicted on women unfitted them for equality with men. In any case, irony can perform the function of allowing its practitioner to accept God's will with as much equanimity as possible, even though Austen's fiction and her correspondence indicate that she thought God was suspiciously partial to his own sex. One evidence of the lost nerve from which the moderates understandably suffered after the worse excesses of the French Revolution and the discrediting of the radicals, was their difficulty in imagining that women would be permitted to form close and nourishing friendships.
Astell and the radicals of the 1790s had offered imaginary glimpses of libraries, classrooms, and feminist colleagues talking back and forth to each other, thus exemplifying that "play of the mind" usually denied them. They all thought that women could remake themselves, enforce some respect from men, and thus ease their own sufferings. As Macaulay had remarked: the human creature "is as artificial a being" as a portrait "on the canvas of the painter," for it is the "distinguishing characteristic of our species .. . that we can make ourselves over again" (Letters on Education, 10). One of the greatest aids in remaking oneself was the friendship of other struggling women, according to feminist wisdom. But if we think back to Astell's radiant apotheosis to friendships between women, it is sad to encounter some characteristic obstacles to women's friendships described by several moderates.
Clara Reeve's allegorical Lady A cannot resume a friendship with Reeve's equally allegorical governess, Frances Darnford, without the "permission" of Lady A's husband. Although Lord A "allows" them considerable frankness, their friendship is bound to be tainted by his previous attempts at seduction inflicted upon the vulnerable Mrs. Darnford. Priscilla Wakefield was particularly distressed over a social phenomenon familiar to students of group rebellions, which enforced additional isolation upon intelligent women. Those who struggle against oppression threaten members of their group who do not: "Of the few who have raised themselves to re-eminence by daring to stray beyond the accustomed path, the envy of their own sex, and the jealousy or contempt of the other, have too often been the attendants" (Present Condition of the Female Sex, 7).
Even worse, among the disciplines that Elizabeth Hamilton catalogued as marital drawbacks was the necessity for women to temporize with women friends, even if the friendship had preceded the marriage. Jane West's anguished remarks about the discomfort that women's friendships often aroused in husbands, sadly repeat what the male conduct-book writers had merely announced as a fact: many men think of their wives' friendship with other women as a form of betrayal. "Friendship is not monarchical in its constitution, like love," but West said that "marriage is constantly the grave of female friendship." A woman's exertions to serve an old friend must be limited by the permission of her husband, and by what she owed to his interests and to those of her children.
But despite the fact that a rich and trustworthy friendship with another woman is "an inestimable treasure, and we ought to feel its value," if husbands become jealous, "Should caprice . . . so cloud their judgments, I conceive that every humble entreaty, every temperate remonstrance which female eloquence can suggest should deprecate the privation; which, if hard necessity compels, female sensibility must with slow reluctance painfully endure" (Letters to a Young Lady, III, 83, 67, 72-73). Although the moderates lacked the vivid vision of a reconstructed world that illuminated even the accusatory rhetoric of the radicals, Wakefield and Reeve both drew up very precise plans for women's education and for methods to facilitate their entry into the world of work and their survival there. Yet as they both admitted, the double standard about women and work was as cruel as the double standard about women's sexuality.
Men of the middle and upper classes, they said, all too often posed as women's protectors by imprisoning them at home, then leaving them penniless and uneducated, and then refusing them any entry into work upon which they could survive without penury or indignity. When a woman was faced with the choice of working or starving, through no fault of her own, why should "degradation .. . attend" her merely because "her good sense and resolution enable her to support herself," and why should she be "banished from . . . the company of which she had perhaps previously formed a distinguished ornament?" (Wakefield, Present Condition of the Female Sex, 72). Austen's semi-authorial voice, describing the anguished thoughts of Jane Fairfax, creates this same mournful scenario, including some of the same terminology. Jane's foster-sister had a dowry sufficient to purchase a husband, "while Jane had yet her bread to earn."
Jane struggles with a profound depression brought on by her impending banishment from her lover and from "all the rational pleasures of an elegant society" and the "judicious mixture of home and amusement" in London. Jane and her foster-parents demonstrate "fortitude" and "good sense," but Jane's interior monologue describes her approaching "penance and mortification" as a "sacrifice" that entailed permanent exile "from all the pleasures of life of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope" (Ε, 164-165). Maria Edgeworth's analysis of marriage and of woman's condition was the most damning of all five moderate feminists. Her collection of satirical feminist essays, Letters for Literary Ladies, includes a scathing attack on current gender relations called "An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification." In this mock correspondence, Edgeworth's fictional female advisor describes marriage for women as a military "engagement" against that "enemy," the "husband."
Throughout this wickedly satirical essay, "the enemy" is usually in immediate syntactical opposition with "your husband." The wife must train herself like an army officer, whose "choice of [her] weapon" should depend upon "those which [her] adversary cannot use." She must never "provoke the combined forces of the enemy to a regular engagement, but harass him with perpetual petty skirmishes." In this war, the conquered can never win, yet by creating an "incessant" military "tatoo," she may be able to manage a "defensive" survival ("Essay on Self-Justification," 7- 8, 20-25). Austen particularly admired Edgeworth, and it is pleasurable to speculate whether she found this satire useful in her own satirical models of marital warfare between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet or Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. Even the full title of Edgeworth's satire, "An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification," is a clear echo of Wollstonecraft's comment about contemporary relationships between the sexes: "defensive war" is "the only justifiable war.. . where virtue can shew its face."
Such a "just and glorious war" against a godless enemy "might again animate female bosoms." But even the impenitent Wollstonecraft felt she must assure her "gentle" readers of both sexes that although she had compared "a modern soldier with.. . a civilized woman," she was "not going to advise them to turn their distaff into a musket," but she did "sincerely wish to see the [male] bayonet concerted into a pruninghook" (Vindication, 145-146). These remarks do indeed deliver a warning that in the war of words, women now had the arsenal of secret self-education and even access to commercial presses. From Mary Astell onward, metaphors describing the nature and the history of the bellicose male express a pervasive feminine terror about marriage, about men's primitive rights over the minds and bodies of women, and their association of these rights with themselves as God's designated scourge and warrior.
Even Austen's favorite, the moderate Elizabeth Hamilton, described how in the past, "Alters raised to the God of heaven were polluted by human blood," while "parents resigned their children to the murderous knife," assuming that they were thus winning the "favour of the deity." But such "cruelties could not fail to make the people cruel," since they "believed that God delighted in injustice." It is true that "wars and revolutions" appear throughout human history, where "one event seems to grow out of another as natural and unavoidable occurrences," and that they represent "Divine Providence." Yet their immediate earthly cause is the "ferocity in the human mind," by which Hamilton here meant the male military mind {Letters to the Daughter of a Nobleman, II, 5-7, 40). Radical and moderate feminists thought it small wonder that the average husband, taught neither to respect his wife nor to offer her those Christian attributes of courtesy or justice, should resemble a pillaging god of war, some Mars descending upon a weakened Troy, which his troops have infiltrated and then sacked.
The moderate Wakefield's advice to women arises out of this pervasive feminine fear. Unlike men, she said, a woman must live, "not for herself only, but to contribute to the happiness of others." The purposes of this feminine appeasement quickly emerge: only by "bearing patiently" with her husband's irascible "tempter" and in learning "to soften his asperities," as though she were pleading for mercy from the emissaries of an advancing enemy, might she achieve the ambiguous blessing of peace in her time (Present Condition of the Female Sex, 36). Clara Reeve was as diffident and as full of the terminology that characterizes appeasement as Wakefield or Hamilton. Yet in her Plans of Education, which defined a rigorous education for women of the gentry classes, she places her imaginary governess, Mrs. Darnford, in an ugly adversarial position with Lord A. His attempt to seduce a penniless upper servant was merely another aspect of the war upon women that was engaging the moral condemnations of all feminists.
Lord A 's. son was at Eton, and readers would assume that his own education had been comparable. But one of the feminists' most frequent accusations, which have their oblique counterpart in the fiction of Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen, was that boys' education at the universities and at the great public schools lacked as much in ethical and moral training as women's lacked in intellectual. Since Lord A felt free to attack a defenseless woman, his own education had clearly been deficient not only in Christian concern for those stripped of power but it had also lacked that sportsmanship upon which Englishmen pride themselves. In their war against oppressive conditions, the moderate feminists were as fully skilled as the radicals in adopting the weapons of classical logic, such as arguments about cause and effect, first principles and premises, and ends and means.
But of these five moderates, only Edgeworth's series of essays in Letters for Literary Ladies fully spells out the rhetorical process necessary for women's defense. In her "Letters of Julia and Caroline," the war of "the woman question" has been declared between two women, each thinking about what women owe men, or what, if anything, they owe themselves. And just as Austen's Elinor Dashwood argues vehemently with her sister to try to protect Marianne against Willoughby's insidious attacks, and just as Elizabeth Bennet tries to arm her naïve sister Jane against the male tendency to enter a town, capture female hearts, and escape for further conquests elsewhere, so does Edgeworth's Caroline argue with Julia in her attempts to save this pathetically craven young woman from the wretched marriage she is planning with an arrogant young nobleman. Caroline begs Julia to see how inconsistent she is when she assumes that the "art" of pleasing men is not only "instinct," or "nature," born of women's finer sensibilities, but that "the sole object of a woman's life" should be "to please."”
- Alison G. Sulloway, “Four “Unsex’d Females,” Five Moderately Sexed, and Two Women Novelists with “the Greatest Powers of the Mind” in Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
#alison g. sulloway#history#regency#jane austen#emma#gender#jane austen and the province of womanhood
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