“Oh, that my dear mother had more command over herself!” Jane Bennet gently expostulates to her sister Elizabeth. “She can have no idea of the pain she gives me by her continual reflections on [Jane’s lost suitor Mr. Bingley].”
    Austen supplies most of her heroines with very deficient parents. We are left in no doubt about the faults of the vulgar Mrs. Bennet and Fanny Price’s mother in Portsmouth. Nevertheless, the heroines bear patiently with them to a remarkable degree.  If Jane ever asks Mom directly to please please please stop talking about Bingley, we don’t hear about it. There are no scenes where heroines talk back at their parents or complain about them to anyone outside the family.
     As Historian Rory Muir explains, “In theory, children were expected to respect, honour and obey their parents, and while the reality was always more complicated and human than such doctrines suggest, a much greater degree of deference was actually exacted than is common today. Society frowned on children – even adult children – who openly quarreled with their parents." So naturally, when 18th century authors wrote moral tales featuring a heroine who was a "picture of perfection," the author could make the heroine an orphan, as many were, or else the heroine ought to behave in an exemplary fashion toward her parents.  
      Surprisingly, it is gentle Fanny Price who has the harshest thoughts about her parents. Fanny thinks her mother is “a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end.” Austen tells us Fanny scruples to form these words in her head, but she is too intelligent not to see and feel her mother’s shortcomings. 
    As well, her brother William never met his aunt Mrs. Norris until he came to visit Fanny at Mansfield Park, but nevertheless, he was already aware of how awful she was, and this knowledge could only be through Fanny’s letters to him.     

    Margaret, the youngest Dashwood sister, might appear to be superfluous to the plot of Sense & Sensibility. What is she there for? Dame Emma Thompson made skillful use of Margaret in her 1995 film adaptation, using her to flesh out Edward Ferrars' character in the opening scenes. She has a function in the book as well. Without her, the older Dashwood sisters cannot both go to London. Elinor and Marianne cannot both accept Mrs. Jennings’ invitation for a lengthy visit because that would leave their mother home alone all winter with only the servants for company. Margaret’s existence means that they can go.  
​    This fact is not stated explicitly in the novel, but the expectation comes to the fore in Barbara Hofland’s 1814 novel, The Merchant’s Widow:  Handsome young Frederic calls on Louisa Daventree, carrying an invitation from his cousin, Miss Barnet. Louisa and Miss Barnet are friends and she wants Louisa to come spend a week with her and her mother. Mrs. Daventree, the widow of the title, is surprised to learn Miss Barnet is in town: “'I had understood,' said Mrs. Daventree, 'that Miss Barnet had been going to London.'
     “'She had intended it fully, madam,'” replied Frederic, 'but when my uncle was ordered to Bath, she very properly declined leaving Mrs. Barnet.'”
      Mrs. Daventree, suspecting a budding (but hopeless) romance between her daughter and Frederic, who is staying with the Barnets, instructs her daughter to turn the invitation down: “Louisa, my dear, write a line to Miss Barnet, with proper acknowledgement for her kindness, but inform her I cannot possibly spare you.”
      ​  Mrs. Barnet is keeping her daughter away from a man she can never marry due to the disparity in fortune. She is being cruel to be kind. In Mansfield Park, Lady Bertram thinks only of herself when she refuses to let her niece Fanny join a pleasure party for a day-trip to Sotherton. “Oh no! I cannot do without Fanny.” Throughout the novel, Fanny patiently attends upon her lethargic aunt, but we never read of Lady Bertram's own daughters Maria or Julia playing cribbage with their mother or untangling her needlework.
    Edmund offers to stay home in her place so Fanny can have the treat. Julia is uncomfortably aware that she should offer to stay home herself. Luckily Mrs. Grant, the clergyman's wife, volunteers herself as a companion for the day to Lady Bertram, so everyone can go (though of course Fanny has a mostly disappointing visit and never gets to see the avenue of oaks she was particularly interested in).
     At Sotherton, the other young people are out enjoying the gardens, but Julia is stuck with Mrs. Norris and their hostess, Mrs. Rushworth. Her aunt falls behind, gossiping with the housekeeper, and Julia "was obliged to keep by the side of Mrs. Rushworth, and restrain her impatient feet to that lady’s slow pace" rather than go off and leave her hostess without a companion. Austen tells us, “The politeness which she had been brought up to practise as a duty made it impossible for her to escape; while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right, which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.”
      There can be no mistaking the value which Austen places on being polite and dutiful to one’s elders.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, literary scholars call Jane Austen’s brand of satire “Horatian satire:” “Horatian satire is a gentler form of derision that is motivated more towards amusing the audience, as opposed to repulsing them.”
​     They are all ridiculous in their own way; Mrs. Clay with her insinuating flattery, Mr. Shepherd with his unctuous servility, and Sir Walter, with his colossal self-regard. Anne Elliot is surrounded, as author Robert Rodi puts it, by an assortment of "grotesques," and she is the only adult in the room. If Austen finds humor in vulgar people, social climbers, and high-born people, then perhaps she isn't making a radical social point so much as amusing herself and her readers. 
      I’m even more convinced that Austen was poking fun after reading the novels of some of her contemporaries. 18th-century novels tend to feature an assortment of mockable people–- vain young ladies, selfish, spendthrift aristocrats, social-climbing mamas, and of course, the French. There was nothing subtle about these portrayals. These are stock characters. They are also static characters, a literary term for a character who doesn't grow or change during the course of the novel. 
    With the lack of subtlety which abounds in 18th century novels, these characters are introduced as though the author was wheeling them onstage with a hand-truck, and announcing what they are: "Look! here's a stupid aristocrat! Here's a ridiculous bluestocking!" And although Austen is a better writer than her peers, some of her characters have the traits of typical stock characters.
     Mrs. Palmer in Sense & Sensibility is pretty much introduced by way of explanation. Austen makes it clear to us that she is friendly but silly and not very bright or well educated. She "was strongly endowed by nature with a turn for being uniformly civil and happy, [and] was hardly seated before her admiration of the parlour and every thing in it burst forth…. Mrs. Palmer’s eye was now caught by the drawings which hung round the room. She got up to examine them. 'Oh! dear, how beautiful these are! Well! how delightful! Do but look, mama, how sweet! I declare they are quite charming; I could look at them for ever.'"
        “And then sitting down again, she very soon forgot that there were any such things in the room.”  
      For another example, let’s compare Lucy Barclay from Sarah Burney’s Clarentine with Anne Steele in Sense & Sensibility, Austen's earliest novel. Both women try to be more genteel than they are, and they betray themselves with vulgarity and poor grammar.
         Miss Barclay lives with her uncle, Reverend Lenham, and her mother, who acts as his housekeeper. As mentioned in a previous post, Clarentine was terribly nervous about meeting her new housemates when she came to live with Mr. Lenham, but within a few hours of her arrival, she regards them both with contempt, especially the daughter.
      We learn that Miss Barclay has a florid complexion and fierce eyes, and: “Her dress, the laborious result of indefatigable pains and trouble, was, at least as far as she knew how to make it so, fashionable even to extravagance; and betrayed such a total want of taste, and an affectation of negligence so evidently studied, that to Clarentine… she appeared more like a monstrous caricature, intended to excite ridicule and surprise, than any other thing she could compare her to.”
     On the morning after her arrival in the household, Clarentine is taken aback when Miss Barclay enters her bedchamber before breakfast for a chat, and the author tells us so: 

  Another thing I have learned to pay attention to is whether the stock characters are brought into the novel "just to be laughed at" as the 19th century critic Adolphus Alfred Jack says, or if they actually move the plot along. Clarentine, for example, meets and disdains a female scholar who has nothing to do with the plot whatsoever, apart from being the mother of a fashionable fop who plays a very slight part in the story. In Sense & Sensibility, Robert Ferrars, with his toothpick case, is our foolish fop. He plays a crucial role in the happy ending, though he's a minor character. And his dialogue is hilarious. As he laughs over his brother Edmund's downfall, he repeats what he says to his mother: "‘My dear Madam,’ I always say to her, ‘you must make yourself easy. The evil is now irremediable, and it has been entirely your own doing.'"
     In Clarentine, vulgar Lucy Barclay is friends with the designing widow who has designs on the hero, so she is useful to the plot in that respect. Likewise, Mrs. Jennings and her daughter are coincidentally related to the Steele sisters, which brings them into the story. They also play an essential role in taking Elinor and Marianne from Devonshire to London and back again, which facilitates the meetings and separations of the plot. Mrs. Jennings is also a valuable conduit of news in the novel. 
     Anne Steele's most important interventions in Sense & Sensibility happen offstage. She betrays her sister's secret engagement through her stupidity. Later, she eavesdrops on a crucial conversation.  Both Anne Steele and Mrs. Jennings' daughter Lady Middleton are left out of the wonderful Emma Thompson 1995 movie adaptation as unessential to the plot. But we can't imagine Emma without Mrs. Elton.
​      In the small and confined society of Highbury, Emma will be continually brought into contact with the Eltons, even though they would all gladly never see each other for the rest of their lives. Mr. Elton must perform the marriage ceremony for Emma and Mr. Knightley. Because of their relative social positions, Emma must have the Eltons over for dinner and meet them at other people's houses regularly. Surely Emma pays dearly for her sins! Austen has succeeded so brilliantly in her portrait of Mrs. Elton, that she rouses pity on our behalf for Emma.

     I was surprised to discover that the pedantic bluestocking is a stock 18th-century novel character. Female novelists are merciless to the female pedant, and I'll talk about that next time we look at stock characters.
      Next post:  Your mother cannot spare you.