Jane Austen's Families

Jane Austen’s Families Jane Austen’s Families June Sturrock Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2013 by ANTHEM PRESS 75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © June Sturrock 2013 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 296 5 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 0 85728 296 4 (Hbk) This title is also available as an eBook. For Alan Rudrum TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix References and Abbreviations xi General Introduction 1 Part I Family Dynamics Introduction 11 Chapter One The Functions of the Dysfunctional Family: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice 15 Chapter Two Spoilt Children: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma 33 Chapter Three “Usefulness and Exertion”: Mothers and Sisters in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion 47 Part II Fathers and Daughters Introduction 67 Chapter Four Money, Morals and Mansfield Park 71 Chapter Five Speech and Silence in Emma 85 Chapter Six Dandies and Beauties: The Issue of Good Looks in Persuasion 99 Conclusion “Creative Attention” 111 Notes 119 Select Bibliography 135 Index 145 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Shorter and less complex versions of Chapters Three and Five appeared in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, “Money, Morals, and Mansfield Park: The West Indies Revisited” appeared in Persuasions 28 (2006): 176–84 and “Dandies, Beauties, and the Issue of Good Looks in Persuasion” appeared in Persuasions 26 (2004): 41–50, while Chapter Four is based on an entry in the 2006 Persuasions On-Line (“‘I am Rather a Talker’: Speech and Silence in Emma” 28). I am most grateful to Susan Allen Ford, the editor of the journals, and the Jane Austen Society of North America for permissions and for encouragement. Thanks are due to Jocelyn Harris, Diane McColley, Jack Martin and Alan Rudrum for reading parts of this book at various stages. Alan Rudrum, indeed, has read it all more than once and his comments, encouragement and love have meant more to me than I can readily express. I am grateful to the Jane Austen Society of North America, and to the various local chapters of the society at which I have presented talks and papers over the years. Special thanks are due to Keiko Parker. I have learnt much from the various graduate and undergraduate students in Austen classes over the years. I am especially grateful to Dr Corinna Wagner, now of the University of Exeter. I should thank the staffs of the British Library, the Huntington Library, California and Simon Fraser University Library. Any Austen critic writing in the early twenty- first century is indebted to the wealth of previous scholarship and discussion. I hope I have fully acknowledged all these debts in the text and in notes. While thinking about Jane Austen’s families I have been very conscious of my own great good fortune as daughter, mother, grandmother, sister, niece and aunt. REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS All references are given in parenthesis after quotations and refer to works cited in the Select Bibliography. Where the author has more than one item in the bibliography an abbreviated form of the title is added to the page number. Abbreviations of Jane Austen’s novels are as follows: NA (Northanger Abbey); S&S (Sense and Sensibility); P&P (Pride and Prejudice); MP (Mansfield Park); E (Emma); P (Persuasion). GENERAL INTRODUCTION Jane Austen’s families are not, for my purpose, the Austens, the Austen-Leighs, the Leigh Perrots, or the Knights – actual historical families. My concern is with the Bennets, the Dashwoods, the Bertrams – with the many fictional families whose dynamics are crucial both to Jane Austen’s plots and to her explorations of ethical complexities. Most Austen criticism tends to direct its attention to the interactions of the lovers in the various novels. Given Austen’s narratives, this concern is inescapable: the relations between Elizabeth and Darcy and between Emma and Mr Knightley, for instance, are crucial to my arguments at various points in this book. Yet my principal interest is the central characters in interaction with their own families and (to a lesser extent) with other family groups, interactions that both foster and retard emotional and moral development. Significantly, Austen chooses not to write about orphaned heroines,1 in this respect contrasting strongly with her contemporaries, Frances Burney (Evelina, Camilla, Cecilia), Ann Radcliffe (Emily St Aubert) and Maria Edgeworth (Belinda), and her successors, Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, Shirley Keeldar, Caroline Helstone, Lucy Snowe), George Eliot (Dorothea Brooke, Dinah Morris, Hetty Sorrel) and so on.2 “Orphan” narratives are convenient enough for many novelists, allowing a protagonist to experience the shocks of the world without the usual parental buffers, but for a writer such as Austen, who cares intensely for what is natural, possible and probable in fiction,3 the most common early experience of surviving the pains and pleasures of family life provides far richer material. When Walter Scott writes of her ability to communicate “the current of ordinary life” (59) he is surely referring largely to her treatment of family life. This study includes discussions of the various family interactions in Austen’s novels, both intergenerational and intragenerational. Jane Austen writes often of the power and complexity of the love between siblings, which, according to the narrator of Mansfield Park, while it is “sometimes almost everything” can also be “worse than nothing” (MP 247). At an early stage in all her novels the capacity for affection that is an essential part of the moral nature of all her protagonists 2 JANE AUSTEN’S FAMILIES shows itself through the love of a brother or sister,4 and sibling relations, especially between sisters, are an important element in the moral growth of several of her heroines, Marianne Dashwood being merely the most obvious example. Even more significant are the relations between parent and child, and I discuss the ways, both negative and positive, in which Austen’s heroines are their parents’ daughters – how they respond to and resist their upbringing. Inevitably this concern involves a consideration of the ethics of parenthood and also the ethics these heroines acquire from their parents, through adaptation, imitation and resistance to what they are taught, directly and indirectly. Interactions between parent and child affect both the child in herself and in her active moral life – both what S. L. Goldberg calls “life-morals and conduct morals” (38–9). While Austen’s marriage plots depend on the relations between men and women, she is also deeply interested in intergenerational responsibilities, especially in the obligations of the older generation towards the young. All the same, Austen’s novels are never precisely ethically prescriptive. She does not share much of her period’s taste for the didactic. In the final words of Northanger Abbey she mocks narratives that provide (and readers who expect) simplistic morals: “I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work may be to recommend parental tyranny, or to reward filial disobedience.”5 As Bharat Tandon says, Austen does not indulge in “the detachable, didactic sententiae of which some of her contemporaries were fond” (Jane Austen 34). Most notable among such contemporaries was Hannah More, whose Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) was the best-selling novel of the early nineteenth century.6 Coelebs is structured as a quest for the perfect woman, an unfallen Eve. Coelebs rejects various candidates for his hand for such faults as vanity, coarse manners, over-valuing of accomplishments or wealth, and eventually finds the paragon he has been seeking. The contrast with Austen is clear enough: she does not deal either with paragons or with those who aspire to marry them. While it is certainly possible to provide an itemized list of Austenian virtues (intelligence, charity, self-knowledge), such a list would be both misleading (over-generalized) and less than interesting. In Austen’s fiction moral life is dynamic and not static as it is in Coelebs. It is complex rather than simple; a matter of responding to precisely imagined situations rather than of acting out absolutes.7 The significance of self-examination in these novels – Marianne Dashwood’s, Darcy’s, Elizabeth Bennet’s, Sir Thomas Bertram’s, for instance – indicates Austen’s concept of moral development as an ongoing process. As Alasdair MacIntyre says, “self-knowledge is for Jane Austen both an intellectual and a moral virtue” (241). It is also a virtue most easily acquired in a family, where people often know each other best and comment on each other most freely. * * * GENERAL INTRODUCTION 3 Wayne Booth writes that when he began his own work of explicitly ethical criticism, The Company We Keep, which was eventually published in 1988, he thought such criticism was unfashionable, but adds that during the process of writing it, he came to the conclusion that “we can no longer pretend that ethical criticism is passé” (19).

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