Jane Austen/Emma

First edition published in 1816

Jane Austen's self-imposed restriction of "3 or 4 Families in a country
life" enabled her to focus on the development and interplay of
characters within narrowly discriminated classes in a provincial
community presented in realistic detail. Deftly alluding to war,
politics, slavery, religion, consumerism, medicine, the professions,
and and patronage, Austen extends the range of the "feminine"
novel of the period to reflect the impact of the large national world
on courtship, family life, and local relationships. Austen was, and
often still is, regarded historically as the culmination of eighteenthcentury art, due to her use of its novelistic conventions, her
predominantly rationalistic viewpoint, and an apparent nostalgia for
eighteenth-century certainties communicated through a solid
language of shared moral and social values.
Of particular interest was Austen's innovation in the
customary courtship plot whereby the heroine has to
undergo a process of education in self-knowledge ,rather
than merely learning how to comport herself in society as a
respectable lady. The emphasis on the heroine's subjectivity
and on "timeless" inner virtues shadowed developments in
the Romantic theory of the mid-century. Marilyn Butler's
study of 1975 inagurated the modern school of Austen
criticism of relating her work to the "war of ideas" of her
time. Through her initial characterization of Austen as a
Burkean conservative who found an ideal order in the landed
gentry of her day of her day has been substantially modified.
Much recent criticism, taking its tone from Claudia Johnson's
study of Austen's relation to feminism, sees her taking
inherited forms and subtlety undermining "from within"
their conservative bias. Such approaches align Austen with
Romantic writes such as Wordworth whose work suggests a
reconciliation of aristocratic and middle-class values.
In general, the point of view of the narrator follows the physical
possibilities of one main heroine and has privileged entrance only.
Much of the comedy and moral seriousness of the novels arises from
the limitations of such awareness, and the perceptions and
judgements of the main character tend to become a central concern
of the novel. Titles such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and
Prejudice (1814) might be reminiscent of the political conflicts of the
1790s, but f sensibility is a potentially subversive force it subverts
not society but the perceptions and psychic health of the character
Marianne. The three complete novels produced as an established
author show approaches to more topical public themes, in conscious
rivalry with authors such as Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott.

Mansfield Park can readily be taken as a metaphor for England's old

"family establishment, prey to the temptations of regency
dissipation and political and financial corruption. Old forms of power,
dependency, and moral obligation are put under stress by a
pervasive spirit of exploitation. by a pervasive spirit of exploitation.
The character Fanny Price, as a woman and a dependent, feels the
obligations suffers the injustices of her situation but remains
dedicated to what she believes Mansfield Park stands for. In Emma
(1815), the heroine comes to terms with a fluid, enterprising society
that challenges traditional hierarchies. Her idea of gentility is
broadened socially and she becomes more moral morally sensitive
to the exercise of patronage. The experience of Austen's heroines
opens up onto general aspects of "alteration, perhaps
improvement". Female experience is strongly focused but is
connected with the experience of other comparable social
groups, even heroes have to follow parallel paths of selfeducation. General themes may suggest the possibility of
individual and social progress in integrity, sensivity and
social responsibility, but Austen's heroines remain engaged
in their passionate, individual struggles towards fulfilment,
regarded with tolerant irony by the narrative voice.
Accepted by some commentators as unproblematically feminist
because of its
woman-centered concern with the politics of private life and
sexual relationships,
Austens fi ction has been seen by others as deeply traditional in
its attitude to gender
Roles.

Feminist Austen
In making this suggestion, I dont want to play down those aspects of
Austens work
which have led many commentators to identify her with a feminist
agenda, the most
A Companion to Jane Austen Edited By Claudi a L. Johnson and Clara Tuite
2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14909-9

Feminisms 283
obvious of which is the acute awareness of the fi nancial and therefore
social vulnerability
of women of her class which is central to all her fi ction. As the socialist
and feminist
Rebecca West put it in an introduction to Northanger Abbey in 1932, it is
surely not
a coincidence that a country gentlewoman should sit down and put the
institutions
of society regarding women through the most gruelling criticism they have
ever
received. For West, the feminism of Jane Austen . . . was very marked
and, she
thought, quite conscious (Southam 1987: 295). Certainly, from the
Dashwood
sisters, excluded from their intended inheritance by their brothers

narrow-minded
and selfi sh wife in her fi rst published novel, Sense and Sensibility (p. 5),
to Anne Elliot,
managing the effects of her fathers irresponsible vanity in the
posthumously published
Persuasion, Austens heroines demonstrate womens condition in
material
terms, at least to be one of precarious dependency. Like other critics
since, West
relates Austens critique of womens social inequalities to Enlightenment
ideas, to
the sceptical movement of the eighteenth century which came to a
climax in the
French Revolution (Southam 1987: 295).
In their different ways, Margaret Kirkhams
Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (1983), Claudia Johnsons Jane Austen:
Women, Politics,
and the Novel (1988), and, more recently, Peter Knox-Shaws Jane Austen
and the
Enlightenment (2004), take a similar view, identifying Austen with an
essentially progressivist
position. For Knox-Shaw and Johnson, the infl uence of Enlightenment
skepticism on Austens thinking produces liberal centrist views,
sympathetic to
issues of gender inequality: in Johnsons phrase, Austen defended and
enlarged a
progressive middle ground (Knox-Shaw 2004: 5, Johnson 1988: 166).
Kirkham goes
further, claiming close kinship between Austen and Wollstonecraft as
feminist moralists of the same school, who shared the common line of
feminist concern and
interest, stretching back to Mary Astell at the very end of the seventeenth
century
(Kirkham 1983: xi).
Explicit evidence of that feminist line seems apparent when, at various
key
moments, Austens novels echo the Enlightenment-infl ected rhetoric of
contemporary
debates about gender politics and the position of women. In Pride and
Prejudice, for
example, desperately trying to convince Mr Collins that no means no
after his
unwelcome proposal, Elizabeth Bennet asserts her right to autonomous
choice by
describing herself in Wollstonecraftian terms: Do not consider me now as
an elegant
female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the
truth from her
heart (PP: 109, emphasis added). Rational creature, as a defi nition of
the human
individual, can be found in countless eighteenth-century sermons, or in
John Lockes

much-reprinted Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), where the

humanist principle that Children are to be treated as rational Creatures
underpins his educational regime (Locke 1989: 115). But Elizabeths
opposition between rationality and
elegance suggests a more specifi c immediate referent. In Vindication of
the Rights of
Woman, Wollstonecraft reappropriates Lockes phrase in defense of
womens rationality:
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures,
instead
of fl attering their fascinating graces; and her stated aim is to show that
elegance is
inferior to virtue, that the fi rst object of laudable ambition is to obtain a
character as
284 Vivien Jones
a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex (Wollstonecraft 1989:
75). Economically,
Elizabeth is far from independent. As the closest male relative, under the
law of entail, it is Mr Collins rather than herself or her sisters who is heir to
her
fathers estate. But Elizabeth asserts her moral and intellectual
independence, at least,
and reaches for Wollstonecraftian rhetoric in order to do so.

An important innovation they shared was free indirect discourse, a

narrative technique crucial to the novels inward turn. Accounts of this
technique
regularly name Austen its fi rst extensive practitioner (e.g., Pascal 1977,
Cohn 1983),
but it was used signifi cantly by Austens immediate precursors and
contemporaries,
and enabled the development of a style which could allow a woman
writer to speak
as one having authority (Doody 1980: 268). In free indirect discourse, a
texts dominant
narrative style (typically third-person and past tense) incorporates, for
brief
snatches or longer passages, words emanating from a particular
character, without
such tags as he said or she thought to make their attribution explicit.
Character
and narrator momentarily merge and move apart again.
An important innovation they shared was free indirect discourse, a
narrative technique crucial to the novels inward turn. Accounts of this
technique
regularly name Austen its fi rst extensive practitioner (e.g., Pascal 1977,
Cohn 1983),
but it was used signifi cantly by Austens immediate precursors and
contemporaries,
and enabled the development of a style which could allow a woman

writer to speak
as one having authority (Doody 1980: 268). In free indirect discourse, a
texts dominant
narrative style (typically third-person and past tense) incorporates, for
brief
snatches or longer passages, words emanating from a particular
character, without
such tags as he said or she thought to make their attribution explicit.
Character
and narrator momentarily merge and move apart again.
In Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth tells
Darcy of Lydias elopement with Wickham, she notices his distracted air as
he paces
the room. Elizabeth soon observed, and instantly understood it. Her
power was
sinking; everything must sink under such a proof of family weakness (PP:
278).
Free indirect discourse can achieve a wide range of effects between the
poles of
satiric exposure and sympathetic involvement, depending on a number of
variables:
the size and nature of the gap between narrators and characters
expressions; the
concentration on indirect speech, indicating an external perspective, or on
indirect
thought, indicating greater internalization; the emphasis in internal
presentation on
A similar critical relation to the "mere" novel also characterizes the fiction of
Austen and Scott, thought by contemporary readers (in the case of Scott) or
modern critics (Austen) to have transcended the ephemeral "novel of the day"
and become literary classics, or rereadable texts. Yet Austen is centrally
a novelist of her time in dealing with the major concern of the novel-reading
classes during her lifetime - the relation of the professional middle class and
landed gentry.
She focuses this concern around familiar themes in late eighteenth-century fiction
of social criticism. First there is the problem of passing on the landed estate and
the culture it sustains, seen most critically.
in Mansfield Park; Austen's readers would readily see this problem as a
metonymy for survival of the larger state. The dangers to estate and state are
seduction of county gentry by court culture (in Sense and Sensibility and
Persuasion), local gentry remaining untouched by wider cultural progress and
social responsibilities (in Nonhanger Abbey and Emma)) and excessive social
emulation, subservience, or independence of members of the gentry and
elite professions (in Pride and Prejudice). Finally, in all Austen's novels there
is the important role of women as catalysts in the survival or decline of
families in the upper and middle classes and thus in society at large.

Austen began writing novels in the 1790s but published them during the
Regency, when these familiar issues from prerevolutionary social criticism

had renewed relevance. Like a prerevolutionary novelist of manners, sentiment,

and emulation, she uses the courtship story, settings in genteel
domestic and social life, and the plot of romantic comedy to show the
interaction of landed gentry and their professional middle-class dependents
and allies as they negotiate through temptations of courtliness, contamination
by vulgarity, or socially destructive independence
More important, Austen also uses a metaphor of reading-as-cognition to show
both the
priority of the moral-intellectual self and the necessity of integrating that self
into landed society and culture. Here she merges the prerevolutionary conductbook ideology of domestic women with the revolutionary feminist protest
that women deprived of intellectual development would be unable to
exercise free will correctly in personal and family life and thus would fail to
sustain the major ideological and cultural role in state formation that was
expected of them in the revolutionary aftermath.
Here too Austen reverses the familiar criticism of the novel as disseminator
of court culture and emulation, especially for women. For she both
depicts her heroines' problems in "reading" the world and presents her
readers with the problem of novel reading. She shows heroines negotiating
between social convention and subjective authenticity just as she forces her
readers to negotiate between literary convention - indeed, novelistic cliche and originality. In her youth Austen burlesqued the conventions of various
genres and discourses, including the novel, but as an adult she went further,
taking familiar elements of the novel of manners, sentiment, and emulation,
inviting a conventional reading of them, but repeatedly refusing to meet
conventional expectations and thus presenting her reader with the same
challenge to correct reading that is faced by her heroine, but in literary
discourse rather than "real life." The consequences of misreading novel and
world are different but analogous, making novel reading a cultural and social
practice of the first importance in construction of the individual and thus the
family and the nation. Rather than deny she was writing novels, as many
contemporaries did, Austen subjoined UA Novel" to each of her titles: what,
she implies, could be of more interest to the novel-reading classes than the
problem of reading posed in and by her novels?
Accordingly, these novels deliberately aim to be literature, or rereadable
texts transcending their particular historical and social conditions of production.
Novels of the day exploited fashionable novelty, were rented from
circulating libraries rather than owned by their readers, and were thus
unrereadable texts in several senses. By contrast, rereadable texts require
critical reflection on the literary conventions they exploit. This kind of
reflection is similar to that required by men in their professional work and is
required by the novels' heroines in order to negotiate through social conventions
and gain an "establishment" in life, thereby contributing to social
stability. Thus the aims of Austen's novels resemble both those of feminists
in the 1790s and women writers of national reconstruction in the revolutionary
aftermath.
Austen's novels not only rework the commercialized "trash of the circulating
library" but also exclude thematic and formal topicalities of much writing
in the revolutionary decade and its aftermath. In this way Austen pretends to
deal with central and universal human "nature" rather than the partial
"realities" of one party or another of political and cultural revolutionaries.
Yet Austen is political. As a clergyman's daughter and sister of professional
men, she affirms the relevance of Anglican values, culture, and institutions
in a long and successful coalition of gentry and professions leading local
society and thus the nation from the past through the present crisis and into

the future. Contemporary challenges to this culture were intertwined with

religious Dissent and avant-garde Romanticism; to refute them and bring
about the hegemonic coalition she represents and advocates, Austen
deliberately makes her novels seem old-fashioned in form and technique.
Paradoxically, one of Austen's early admirers was the Prince Regent, leader
of the commercialized culture of emulation that she and most writers of her
time, Jacobin or anti-Jacobin, Romantic or anti-Romantic, attack. Appropriately,
Austen's novels were not widely recognized as classics, or as literature,
until near the end of the Romantic period.