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Chapter in Bradbrook’S Jane A FINE FAMILY PIECE: JANE AUSTEN’S PICTURESQUE REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDHOOD A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Department of English California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Kimberly Terry SPRING 2020 © 2020 Kimberly Terry ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii A FINE FAMILY PIECE: JANE AUSTEN’S PICTURESQUE REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDHOOD A Thesis by Kimberly Terry Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Jonas Cope __________________________________, Second Reader Nancy Sweet ____________________________ Date iii Student: Kimberly Terry I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator___________________ Doug Rice Date Department of Department of English iv Abstract of A FINE FAMILY PIECE: JANE AUSTEN’S PICTURESQUE REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDHOOD by Kimberly Terry In the twenty-first century, there is burgeoning interest in Jane Austen and children. The last decade has seen increasing production of Austen’s fiction for children including various board books for young readers and the Awesomely Austen: Illustrated and Retold series currently being released. In the last four-year period, at least three Austen biographies were published for children. In 2010, Austen critic and scholar, David Selwyn produced a book-length study aptly titled Jane Austen and Children. Overall, Selwyn’s book makes use of the “new” historicist methodology using Austen’s work as an entry point in which to explore various socio-cultural aspects of childhood during her period. His work is thoroughly researched and provides an illuminating and comprehensive view of many facets of childhood during Austen’s time but unfortunately focuses mostly on texts other than Austen’s. Still, it seems that critic and consumer alike see Austen and children as intimately connected. This is a provocative trend as the majority of critics agree with Christopher Ricks when he wrote that Jane Austen “disliked babies and didn’t blankly like children” v (90). Those critics focus intently on the Austen children who, like the meddlesome Middleton children in Sense and Sensibility, disrupt all tranquility and behave, to borrow Selwyn’s phrase, like “brute beasts.” This study focuses on a small subset of Austenian children who, unlike their loud disobedient cousins, are relatively well behaved, are rarely allowed intelligible speech, and slip in virtually unnoticed by the casual reader. Austen writes these children in terms of or alongside allusions to eighteenth-century pictorial arts. By observing how Austen’s “picturesque children” function in her fiction, readers can better understand Austen’s suppressed Romantic reverence toward the concept of childhood and adds critical evidence to the argument that Austen was indeed engaged with the Romantic movement. _______________________, Committee Chair Jonas Cope _______________________ Date vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Professor Jonas Cope and Professor Nancy Sweet for their generosity, patience, and sage advice; this project would not be possible without their kindness and unwavering support. To my husband, Dr. Douglas Terry, MD., who convinced me years ago that education is the best salve for a wounded spirit. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my nine-year-old daughter, Ivy Terry, who is my foremost teacher and shows me daily that one’s perception of childhood is the greatest metric of the human heart. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ vii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION……………....…………………………………………………………1 2. ROLLING DOWN THE GREEN SLOPE: GEORGE MORLAND AND THE IMAGE OF CHILDHOOD IN JANE AUSTEN’S NORTHANGER ABBEY ................................ 15 3. CAPTIVATING THE IMAGINATION: JOSHUA REYNOLDS’ PORTRAITS OF CHILDHOOD IN AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE .............................................. 36 4. POOR LITTLE INNOCENT: AN AESTHETIC INTERPRETATION OF FANNY PRICE ................................................................................................................ 53 5. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 68 Works Cited............................................................................................................................. 74 viii 1 A Fine Family Piece: Jane Austen’s Picturesque Representations of Childhood Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION The cheerfulness of children added a relish to his existence. - Sense and Sensibility Though not the very happiest being in the world herself, [she] had found enough in … her children, to attach her to life. - Persuasion The children in Jane Austen’s fiction are elusive creatures indeed. One strains to remember if there are any children at all. The children who do come to mind are ill- behaved and make a great deal of clatter. At worst, the children in her novels have been loud, spoiled, and disobedient. They have displaced widows and have acted as conduits for insipid and superficial conversation among vapid characters. If one recalls an image of children at all, it is surely the meddlesome Middleton brats who make a ruckus and disrupt all tranquility at Barton Park. But these noisy, ill-behaved creatures are only one such representation of children within Austen’s work. There are other children who slip in virtually unnoticed by the casual reader. Rarely allowed intelligible speech, they are often seen in merely a glimmer and are gone as quickly as they arrived. They are, at times, left unnamed, and we are not privy to their interior consciousness, leaving them flat characters. Whether silent or noisy, fixed or in motion, named or unnamed, these Austenian children are abstract entities – not meant to be characters at all, but instead intended to represent an ideal; as such, they stand apart among Austen’s fictional characters for the mere fact of their “otherness.” What are these flat characters doing in 2 a work by a novelist who so brilliantly subsumes her own identity to create such vivid and realistic characters? What could Austen mean by incorporating such abstract images into her fiction? How does one begin to make sense of Austenian children considering her real-life adoration of children and their childhood games?1 With the social revolution in family dynamics, the explosion of the “Cult of Childhood,” and the on-going debates on education during the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a reader of Austen may consider just how to situate these fictional depictions of children and her representations of childhood within the context of this social phenomenon. This study initially begins with this question. Considering the weight and the importance of this major literary and cultural revolution, one which occurred simultaneously alongside Austen’s writing, we must pause momentarily and put aside discussions of Austen’s children and focus on contemporary views of childhood in general. I would be remiss in omitting a review of the social shift surrounding the ways in which children were viewed in the eighteenth- century, as it will inform this study. To be brief, and as a consequence, reductive, we can say that the cultural phenomena began with the debate between John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Locke’s seminal treatise on education, originally published in 1693, famously views the child as a 1 Austen was deeply loved by the children around her. The so-call spinster aunt was the favorite of her nieces and nephews and always joined in their games. Austen’s niece Caroline writes that “her charm to children was great sweetness of manner – she seemed to love you and you loved her naturally in return … Everything she could make amusing to a child … she would tell us the most delightful stories, chiefly of Fairyland, and her Fairies had all characters of their own” (5). According to Caroline, “in addressing a child, she was perfect” (10). Further, Austen was the aunt whom the children “looked [to] for help-She would furnish us with what we wanted from her wardrobe, and she would often be the entertaining visitor in our make believe house-She amused us in various ways” (10). 3 “tabula rasa,” a blank slate onto which knowledge and morals can be imprinted. Locke believes that “there is no knowledge… no truths cognizable by the mind’s inward light, and grounded on intuitive evidence” (Coveney 39). To Locke, all knowledge is grounded in experience. Furthermore, Locke “seldom considered the nature of the child as a child. Treated as a small adult, the child was to be trained out of his childish ways into the moral and rational perfection of regulated manhood” (Coveney 40-1). To Locke, reason is the highest good, and children can be reasoned into adulthood. As a counterpoint to Locke’s treatise, Rousseau published Emile in 1762. Rousseau states that the child is born innocent and is only corrupted through its contact with society. Instead of being “trained out of his childish ways” and reasoned with as if an adult, Rousseau says that “if children understood reason, they would not need to be raised” (222). His point is that a child is not capable of reasoning
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