Any complete texts of Mansfield Park and Persuasion will suffice, but the following World’s Classics editions contain useful editorial material and retain Austen’s original volume and chapter divisions. These divisions can be especially helpful in considering questions of narrative structure.
Jane Austen Mansfield Park. Edited by James Kinsley with an introduction by Marilyn Butler and notes by John Lucas. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) [ISBN 9780192827579].
Jane Austen Persuasion. Edited by John Davie with an introduction by Claude Rawson. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
[ISBN 9780192827593].
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited by M. Holquist. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982)
[ISBN 9780292715349].
Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and her Predecessors. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, originally published 1967)
[ISBN 9780521148252].
*Butler, Marilyn (1975) Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) [ISBN 9780198129684].
Butler, Marilyn Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)
[ISBN 9780192891327].
Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; originally published 1983) [ISBN 9780812216103].
*Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels. (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; originally published 1971) [ISBN 9780801849725].
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) [ISBN 9780300022865].
Hardy, Barbara A Reading of Jane Austen. (London: Athlone Press, 1979) [ISBN 9780485120325].
Honan, Park Jane Austen: Her Life. (London: Phoenix, 1997, originally published Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1987) [ISBN 9781857999686].
Hunter, J. Paul Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. (New York and London: Norton and Co., 1992)
[ISBN 9780393308617].
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1988) [ISBN 9780226401393].
Kirkham, Margaret Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction. (London: The Athlone Press, 1997; originally published 1983) [ISBN 9780485121292].
Lodge, David ‘Composition, Distribution, Arrangement; Form and Structure in Jane Austen’s Novels’ in Lodge, David After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)
[ISBN 9780415050371 (hbk); 9780415050388 (pbk)].
Lodge, David The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts. (London: Vintage, 2011) second edition [ISBN 9780099554240]
*Poovey, Mary The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1985) [ISBN 9780226675282].
Spencer, Jane The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) [ISBN 9780631139157 (hbk); 9780631139164 (pbk)].
*Tanner, Tony Jane Austen. (London and Cambridge, MA: Macmillan, 2007) [ISBN 9780230008243].
Watt, Ian (1957) The Rise of The Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. (London: Pimlico, 2000) second edition [ISBN 9780712664271].
* Highly recommended
Although we will be looking principally at two novels, Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817), it would be equally possible to answer a question from Section A of the examination paper by referring to two of Austen’s other three novels. Indeed, much of the discussion here might be applied, with some necessary modifications, to Austen’s entire canon.
While Austen’s reputation as an ‘important’ novelist has to some extent remained stable from her own time to the present day, there has been, nevertheless, considerable debate among readers as to the value and significance of her writing. If Lord David Cecil could claim in 1935 that Austen’s ‘graceful unpretentious philosophy…is as impressive as those of the most majestic novelists’, then a host of readers – including an influential theorist and practitioner of the novel form like Henry James – has equally complained of what are perceived to be Austen’s profound thematic limitations and the ‘smallness’ of her imagined worlds. Two of Austen’s best-known comments on fiction might be seen to endorse not only this pejorative view of her range, but also a sense of a radically circumscribed vision too. Writing to a niece who was herself dabbling with fiction, Austen expressed her satisfaction that Anna was organising her characters and:
…getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; 3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.
Two years later, in 1816, Austen described her own work in somewhat self-deprecating terms as:
…the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.
Such comments can, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways, but it is worth considering the negative assessment of Austen a little further. In terms of location, it is true that the novels focus almost exclusively on small communities of gentry in the home counties, with the larger urban world represented minimally by the odd ‘excursion’ to, say, Bath, Portsmouth or a roughly-sketched London. More disturbing still for many readers is the apparent absence of any explicit or palpable response to the massive social, political and cultural changes wrought by the industrial revolution at home and the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars across the Channel.
If we follow the logic of this approach, the charges are potentially seriously damaging: living in one of the most turbulent periods in British and European history, Austen writes about the passionless love affairs of the gentry. That ‘love interest’ informs Austen’s novels to the extent that all six of her complete novels replay the basic narrative structure of romance – whereby the heroine wins and marries her man after a series of complications – might indeed add fuel to the view that her concerns are not only trivial but also escapist. Add to this the criticisms that the novels endorse a class-obsessed snobbery, that they are politically reactionary and that Austen is an apologist for the male ideology of female subordination, and we have yet more reasons to question Austen’s reputation.
Debates about literary reputations are, of course, the very stuff of literary history, but it is important to consider the specifics of the controversy over Austen. To what extent is ‘narrowness’ a relative rather than an absolute term, and how might a similar charge be levelled at any number of novelists? What might be the value and the significance of Austen’s focus on such small and relatively homogeneous communities? Because Austen consistently deploys romance motifs, and because her central concern is the marriage of her heroines, does it necessarily follow that she eschews meaningful engagement with the urgent issues of her day? To what extent are readers applying anachronistic judgements when they condemn Austen’s broadly political conservatism?
Although it might be argued that some elements of the debate outlined above amount finally to matters of taste, it is noteworthy that a shift in the orientation of critical approaches to Austen, which occurred in the 1970s, has changed both the nature of the questions asked of the novels and, unsurprisingly, the kinds of answers given in return. Thus, a new Austen has emerged as critics have sought to recover the historical specificity of the novels’ concerns. Because we are primarily concerned with Austen the novelist, the fuller details of the complex relationships between the novels and the wars and revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are outside the scope of this chapter. However, it is important to stress that Austen’s formal and thematic concerns are intimately related to the ideological struggles and debates that informed her times. Because the relationship between ‘history’ and novels is always a complex one, there are some dangers in simply ‘placing’ Austen’s novels in relation to, say, the French Revolution (1789), or the battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815). Nevertheless, you should try to familiarise yourself with some details of the historical contexts that take place ‘around’ Austen’s writing, and the ‘war of ideas’ in which her novels engage.
Before we move on to more particular questions of form, you might think about ways in which Mansfield Park and Persuasion might be described as ‘political’. In what ways does the larger world of ‘history’ make itself felt in the novels? How fruitful is the suggestion that both novels are primarily concerned with the state of a nation felt to be in transition if not crisis?
When Austen’s first-published novel, Sense and Sensibility, was printed in 1811, its title page carried the subtitle ‘A Novel’. If this seems self-evident and redundant to modern readers, then it is worth remembering that Austen was writing after a period of at least a hundred years of experiment in prose fiction. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, the generic boundaries between various kinds of prose fiction and other sorts of writing were by no means concrete or widely agreed. That Austen was able to categorise her novel with such confidence is an indication that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, tacit agreements had been reached enabling both readers and writers to understand something reasonably specific by the term ‘novel’. Just when such agreements became general has been much debated, but we can get a sense of their nature from the comments of Austen’s narrator in Northanger Abbey (a novel published posthumously but first drafted around 1797/98). Referring approvingly to particular novels by Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, Austen’s narrator defines these novels as:
…works in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
If this is a little vague, then the ensuing list of features of the periodical essay, against which Austen seeks to define the ‘novel’, is, perhaps, more telling. Such essays are condemned for offering ‘improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living’.
Activity
What kind of novel is Austen defining here? What do you think she means by the ‘improbable’ and ‘unnatural’ and to what extent is it possible to reconcile such exclusions with Austen’s own approach to plot and character?
What role do romance and fairy-tale motifs play in Austen’s fiction? If we take a longer view of the novel, beginning with, say, Don Quixote and ending with late twentieth-century fiction, how useful and comprehensive is Austen’s definition?
In his review of Emma in 1815, Walter Scott described Austen as an exemplary practitioner of a new realism in prose fiction, a realism which he saw as peculiar to the novel as it was developing in the early nineteenth century. Interestingly, the ‘realism’ that Scott finds in Austen is not a naïve and slavish mimeticism (i.e. imitation), but rather a skilful presentation of characters from ‘ordinary walks of life’ presented ‘with such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners and sentiments greatly above our own’. What Scott recognises here, and what some modern critics have ignored in various condemnations of ‘realism’, is that novelistic realism rarely, if ever, aspires to offer ‘reality’ in unmediated form. Scott’s understanding of Austen’s realism is noteworthy in its suggestion of an expectation of a general level of plausibility combined with an exemplary rather than naturalistic approach to character.
While Scott’s critical tenets differ markedly from those of modern critics and readers, his sense that Austen’s realism is a key characteristic of her fiction is one that has been shared by many recent commentators. Retrospectively, Austen can be seen to have drawn together some of the disparate realist strategies of eighteenth-century fiction and to have developed them in hitherto unprecedented ways.
Familiar equally with Richardson’s refinements of the epistolary form and Fielding’s use of the intrusive third-person narrative voice, Austen blends what has come to be called ‘telling’ (direct commentary and judgement from the narrative ‘voice’) and ‘showing’ (the scenic, or dramatic, presentation of events in which the characters speak and act without noticeable or intrusive authorial intervention) with great subtlety. Although Austen’s own novels are no less didactic or conventional than those of her eighteenth-century predecessors, they can often give the impression that they are ‘slices of life’ rather than carefully contrived fictions.
It might be argued that this is largely a matter of reader response, since the reader generally chooses whether or not to suspend his or her disbelief. Even so, part of Austen’s impressive technical achievement was to create a sense of ‘reality’ by deploying familiar narrative techniques in new ways. Similarly, Austen’s handling of a narrative point of view and her ability to make apparently ordinary and mundane events carry the broader burdens of her most serious concerns, make her as skilled a novelist as any in a century that produced the great ‘classics’ of European realism.
In order to gain a sense of Austen’s relation to eighteenth-century novel traditions, you may find it useful to consult Bradbrook (1967) and Spencer (1986). The latter is particularly helpful because its demonstrates Austen’s inheritance from women writers like Charlotte Lennox and Fanny Burney, and helps us to understand the particular social pressures that helped to shape the tradition of didactic fiction for women. If you are interested in debates about Austen’s feminism, then you might also consult Poovey (1984) and/or Johnson (1988) and Kirkham (1983).
Mansfield Park is the first of what for many readers are Austen’s three most successful and ‘mature’ novels (to be followed by Emma and Persuasion). Notions of maturity and development in treatments of writers’ careers are not always reliable, since they often presuppose a progression that is by no means a given and impose a false sense of teleology. That said, however, it is reasonable to view Mansfield Park as technically more accomplished than the novels first drafted a decade earlier (Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice). Austen is clearly as much concerned in Mansfield Park with the meaning of certain key words (abstract nouns in particular) as she is in her earlier novels. It might be argued, however, that the novel’s greater success is partly a result of its ability to present abstractions in concrete form. Thus the sometimes jarringly obvious antitheses of the kind found in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice have not altogether disappeared in Mansfield Park but are handled with much greater subtlety.
Activity
Make a list of some key words/concepts that you consider important in Mansfield Park. You might want to think about implied oppositions like that between innovation and tradition, as well as explicit ones like the antithesis between propriety and impropriety. How central and how intrusive are such oppositions in the novel?
Now reread Chapter VI of the first volume.
Chapter VI begins with the narrator setting the scene for a dinner-table discussion at Mansfield Park. Thus we are told that Mr Rushworth has just returned from a friend’s who has ‘had his grounds laid out by an improver’ and that Rushworth is now ‘eager to be improving his own place in the same way’. Having prepared the ground with succinct summary, Austen, typically, shows us the fuller significance of these details by having Rushworth himself discuss ‘improvement’ in such a way as simultaneously to further our sense of his rather vacuous mind and to suggest the broader resonance of the topic of estate improvements. Whether or not we pick up the importance of the reference to Repton (an influential and controversial theorist of landscape gardening in the early nineteenth century) in this chapter, we are left in little doubt that Rushworth wants to ‘improve’ out of a fidelity to fashion rather than from any more considered impulse. To confirm the point, Austen has Rushworth repeat his buzzwords in a comically absurd way:
It wants improvement, ma’am, beyond anything. I never saw a place that wanted so much improvement in my life.
That Rushworth’s attitude towards Sotherton is coloured by a sense of bare statistics rather than any character it might be felt to have is clear throughout the chapter, but Austen seems keen to express much more than Rushworth’s mercenary views here.
If Rushworth’s name suggests his precipitous and ill-considered judgement of ‘worth’, then Fanny Price’s indicates, perhaps, not only her own merit, but also her ability to see the real value of things. Tellingly, Fanny – whose true ‘price’ Edmund and the other Bertrams come to learn in the course of the novel – is appalled by the prospect of the avenue being destroyed at Sotherton. More important at this stage, however, is Edmund’s description of Sotherton as a ‘house built in Elizabeth’s time’ that although ‘ill placed’ is nevertheless ‘unfavourable for improvement’. The reference to ‘Elizabeth’s time’ suggests not only antiquity, but also the period often viewed during the eighteenth century as the ‘golden age’ in British history. More particularly, Austen’s contemporaries would have been familiar with the language of ‘improvement’ from controversies about radical alterations to estates, and because such vocabulary served as central metaphors in debates about British constitutional change that followed in the wake of the French Revolution.
Once we have understood that Austen’s approach parallels Edmund Burke’s strategy, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, of embodying traditional cultural values in the actual fabric of estates, the fuller significance of the metonymic relationship between the estates of Sotherton and Mansfield Park and traditional cultural values becomes clear. In the light of continuing debates about whether revolution after the French model or milder kinds of ‘improvement’ were needed in Britain, the conclusion of Austen’s character Edmund is especially resonant:
…had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver. I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired progressively. I would rather abide by my own blunders than by his.
Activity
Bearing in mind that part of Sotherton’s function in the novel is symbolic, have another look at Chapters VIII, IX and X. How critical are Mary Crawford’s remarks on the proximity between the estate and the church at the end of Chapter VIII? Consider how the disuse of the Sotherton chapel and the discussion of Edmund’s desire to become a clergyman relate to the wider concerns of the novel. Think carefully about what Austen is doing in Chapter X. To what extent does this chapter prefigure particular relationships that develop later in the novel?
Chapter X, with its clearly symbolic handling of location, is to some extent an extreme example of Austen’s technique in the novel. Nevertheless, the technique itself should remind us of how Austen’s ‘realism’ works. The details of the imagined world are on one level quite realistic – gardens and gates – and plausible, but at the same time Austen is asking the reader to consider a complex of secondary, or non-literal, meanings. It is in this sense, of course, that realism is not mimetic in any simple way, but rather a carefully constructed, artful representation in which ideology and rhetoric (the novelist seeks to persuade us of the value of particular ‘truths’ or ways of seeing) are to the fore.
Activity
To what extent are Austen’s techniques typical of ‘realist’ novelists? Think about some of the other novels you have read so far on this, and on other, courses. Is this the way, for example, that Great Expectations or Jane Eyre are organised? How important is the rhetorical figure of metonymy to an understanding of realist fiction?
By reading the Sotherton episode carefully, we can discover what are some of the central concerns of the novel. At this relatively early point in the narrative, Austen has her characters debate questions of inherited values and how they might be preserved or radically altered. Allowing for the fact that the novel also engages with other fundamental issues – the education and marriage of Fanny Price, for example – these are the key questions that inform Mansfield Park.
Activity
Bearing in mind that the physical structure of Mansfield Park stands as a metonym for a traditional English culture, how would you set about interpreting the rest of the novel? Look carefully at the preparation for the performance of Lovers’ Vows (the debate begins seriously in Chapter XIII and the remainder of the first volume is largely taken up with the theatricals) and the ramifications that follow the return of Sir Thomas Bertram. How would you explain what might appear to be an excessive reaction to a minor disruption?
What is the significance of the fact that it is Fanny (the poor cousin and ‘outsider’) who defends and in some sense ‘saves’ Mansfield Park? How and with what degree of success does the marriage between Edmund and Fanny resolve the novel’s most urgent concerns?
Alistair Duckworth has suggested that Austen’s novels can be fruitfully viewed as texts which look back to eighteenth-century Providential fictions and forward to the fictions of doubt that flourish as the nineteenth century unfolds. Thus, on the one hand, a novel like Mansfield Park seeks to affirm traditional Christian values in a way that bespeaks some confidence, while on the other it charts the painful isolation of Fanny Price. Fanny’s sense of self-worth is hard won in a milieu that proves sometimes aggressively uncongenial to her values of quietness, stillness and self-abnegation. For all that they finally adhere to the conventions of comedy, Austen’s novels are consistently preoccupied with the lives of young women whose security and happiness are radically threatened.
Partly because it is her last completed novel, and partly because it does signal some formal and thematic departures from Austen’s previous novels, Persuasion has often been placed at the nineteenth- rather than eighteenth-century end of the spectrum touched upon above. Anne Elliot is that much more isolated than even Fanny Price. Austen imbues Anne, like Fanny, with a moral integrity that is lacking in other characters, and, like Fanny, Anne too is ignored and undervalued by those around her for most of the narrative. What makes Anne’s situation particularly painful, however, is that her one chance of happiness – in the form of marriage to Captain Wentworth – seems to be behind her when the novel begins. If the threat of personal and cultural atrophy is raised only to be expunged in Mansfield Park, then it seems to pervade the autumnal atmosphere of Persuasion.
Activity
Consider some of the ways in which Persuasion might be seen as a more melancholy and pessimistic novel than Mansfield Park. Does a sense of flux or stability finally dominate the novel? Why does Austen use several locations rather than a central one in the novel? To what extent does the novel suggest a loss of faith in the privileged value in Mansfield Park?
For a number of complex reasons, many of them ideological, Austen’s novels generally prefer objective ‘facts’ to subjective judgements. Thus, Catherine Morland, Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse and even Elizabeth Bennet learn the dangers of subjectivism in the course of the narratives in which they are central. Interestingly, the situation is slightly different in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. In both novels, the heroines are already exemplary insofar as they think of others ahead of self and tend to judge by external, objective standards rather than subjectively. However, by choosing to present such exemplary and near ideal heroines, Austen is faced with a number of problems. Firstly, she needs to show that, in spite of the generally negative assessments of those around them, Fanny and Anne really are worthy. Secondly, Austen confronts the difficulties of convincing readers that her exemplary heroines are in some sense living and breathing rather than ‘flat’ allegorical figures.
Activity
To what extent do you feel Austen is able to overcome these potential difficulties? What are the primary technical means by which she attempts to transcend these possible limitations?
Austen’s techniques are complex enough to require careful scrutiny, but in simple terms it is a skilful and flexible handling of point of view that enables her to succeed in presenting us with heroines who might otherwise prove totally unsympathetic. If Fanny Price and possibly Anne Elliot remain less than fully endearing to modern readers, it is in spite of Austen’s best efforts. By presenting the majority of events from her heroine’s perspectives, Austen affords us privileged insights unavailable to the other characters who inhabit the imagined worlds of the novels. More particularly, Austen opens up the active and intelligent minds of Fanny and Anne to the gaze of her readers, so that once again the narrative is subtly working to win us over to the approved values of the heroine.
Activity
Think again about how Austen handles point of view in both novels. How does she prevent the subjective views of Fanny and Anne from overwhelming the objective concerns of both novels? Now reread Chapter VII of Volume I of Persuasion, paying particular attention to the way in which Anne responds to her meeting with Captain Wentworth.
For many readers, the paragraph beginning ‘Mary, very much gratified by this attention…’ typifies a peculiarly ‘modern’ subjectivism that pervades the novel. By employing a third-person narrative voice in tandem with a flexible use of focalisation (the important distinction here is between who ‘speaks’ and who ‘sees’ a particular narrative event), Austen is able to move freely between interior and exterior views. This paragraph, for example, begins and ends with apparently exterior views, but in between moves so close to Anne’s perspective that it might be read as a kind of ‘stream of consciousness’:
…a thousand feelings rushed upon Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. And it was soon over. In minutes after Charles’s preparation, the others appeared; they were in the drawing room. Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it […] the room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.
Activity
Austen succeeds brilliantly here in giving a sense of the rush of emotions and impressions that assail Anne, but how far can we go with the notion that here and elsewhere in the novel Austen endorses a subjectivism that verges on solipsism? Look again at the paragraphs that follow the one quoted above. How, and to what effect, does Austen employ free indirect speech here? To what extent is a sense of external and objective values retained in spite of what is clearly sympathy for private emotional experience?
Clearly, Austen’s use of narrative voice in the novel is intimately bound up with her broader concerns. Furthermore, that there is considerable debate among readers as to whether Anne learns to value impulse ahead of reason or vice versa is partly a result of an inherent ambiguity and, perhaps, ambivalence that stems from Austen’s chosen techniques. We are in no way obliged, of course, to resolve and close all the questions that a given novel poses. Indeed, such closure may do some violence to what some theorists of the novel see as the inherently ‘dialogic’ nature of the novel form.
Nevertheless, you might pursue your reading of Persuasion further so as to clarify a broader understanding of the novel. Is ‘persuasion’ finally seen to be a good or a bad thing in the novel? You might find it useful to pay especial attention to Wentworth’s use of the metaphor of the nut in Chapter X, and the events around Louisa’s fall in Chapter XII.
Activity
What values does Austen embody in the Navy and what are the wider social implications of Anne’s marriage to Captain Wentworth?
As you gain a greater sense of some of the preoccupations of the novel as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you might consider how Austen’s fiction relates to novels that appear otherwise quite different. To what extent, for example, does Austen share with other novelists since Cervantes an almost obsessive concern with epistemological questions? What kinds of family resemblances are there between Austen’s heroines and the protagonists of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels? In these and other ways your study of Austen might easily broaden out into a consideration of a topic study that would enable you to answer a question in Section B of the examination paper.
By the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the recommended critical texts, you should be able to: