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CMP#26   Pictures of Perfection

1/26/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Some of Jane Austen's admirers are eager to find ways to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century. Further, for some people, reinventing Jane Austen appears to be part of a larger effort to jettison and disavow the past. Click here for the first in the series.

​"[Austen's] novels dramatize not social ills, but individual failings: vanity, greed, pride, selfishness, arrogance, folly. For all her humor and wit, she was a rigorous moralist. Adult life demanded adult behavior: self-awareness, propriety, kindness, good sense."  --Robert Garnett
"Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked"
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  In previous posts, I've discussed why I disagree with the notion that Austen promoted politically radical ideas.  I’ve quoted and re-quoted that wisdom from Professor Garnett, above, because I think he gets at the heart of Jane Austen.
   Of course Austen’s novels featured love stories -- they were novels, after all, not collections of sermons or texts on seafaring. However, she wasn't all about romance, nor was she trying to upend the social order. She believed in virtue, self-knowledge and self-control -- in other words, morality.
    However, after reading Mary Waldron’s Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, I am compelled to add a big “BUT." I think Waldron is correct that Austen did not care for authors who bashed their readers over the head with their morality and their beliefs. 
   Her aversion to this writing style wasn't because she thought preachiness was bad for book sales. For example, she was critical of Hannah More and Mary Brunton, who easily outsold her (in her lifetime.) (However popular in their day, Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife and Mary Brunton’s Self-Control are best known today for what Austen said about them in her private letters, a pretty amazing reversal of fame.)


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CMP#25  Righteousness and Reticence

1/20/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Click here for the first in the series.  

Implicit Values in Austen: Dignified silence
PicturePride and Prejudice 2012 stage production. Photo: Chicago Sun-Times
   In Jane Austen's time, a gentleman's reputation was so important that he sometimes risked his life for the sake of honour -- with pistols at dawn. Or, as in the case of Colonel Brandon, he dueled to punish someone else's dishonourable conduct.
   However, the plot of Pride and Prejudice turns on another characteristic habit of English gentlemen: Darcy does not deign to explain his past dealings with Wickham even though Wickham has slandered him. His reticence has consequences: too late, Darcy realizes that Wickham has prejudiced the mind of the woman he loves against him. Stung, he writes Elizabeth a long letter. After realizing she misjudged Darcy and Wickham, Elizabeth tells her sister Jane. They both decide to keep the whole matter to themselves, as Darcy would wish, and to preserve Wickham's character -- after all, he's leaving town anyway. But that has unforeseen consequences...


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CMP#24  Does Austen care about land enclosure?

1/18/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. For some, recent interpretations of Austen appear to be part of a larger effort to jettison and disavow the past. Click here for the first in the series.  

The Enclosure movement part 3: 

 In my first post on land enclosure in Austen's time, I mostly talked about gypsies and whether the gypsies in Emma tell us anything about land enclosure. The second post looked at whether Mr. Knightley was a villain. In this final post on land enclosure, we'll look at two questions: Do we know how Austen felt about land enclosure? And, was it dangerous to oppose land enclosure?  That is, would a person living in Austen's time get in trouble with the authorities, or even socially, for speaking out against land enclosure?
PictureGleaners look for stray grains of wheat, 1857. It's been a long time since the West experienced this kind of poverty
   We should understand that by Austen's time, enclosure was basically a fait accompli. Much of England's farmland was enclosed before Austen was born, including her home village of Steventon. If Highbury and Northanger Abbey and Uppercross were all real places, they likely would be places where the farmland had already been enclosed. According to the National Archives website, because enclosure happened here and there and gradually over centuries, this "piecemeal" conversion "ensured that opposition to the loss of rights was fragmented although there were various enclosure riots at places such as Charnwood Forest (1748-51), West Haddon (1765), Sheffield (1791), and Burton on Trent (1771-72)."  
​     So what did Jane Austen think? .....
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CMP#23  Is Mr. Knightley a villain?

1/11/2021

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Some Jane Austen fans want to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century.  Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Click here for the first in the series.  In last week's post, I looked at the suggestion that the gypsies in Emma were a veiled reference to the consequences of land enclosure. 

Is Mr. Knightley a villain?  Emma and land enclosure
Picture"How I love... your father's estate."
  Some modern readers of Emma don't care very much for its leading man. "[W]hat's so great about a mansplainer grooming the bride that (as he admits at one point) he's loved since she was thirteen?"  
   I don't object in the least if you don't like Mr. Knightley. To each his own. It's also understandable if you can't enjoy Emma because of its preoccupation with social class. If, after watching the 2020 movie version of Emma, you conclude that it's a story about selfish people who treat their servants like machines, I take your point. But, it's quite another thing to insist that Jane Austen intended for us to dislike Mr. Knightley. 
   George Knightley, the owner of Donwell Abbey, makes his money from his own farmland and from the rents of his tenants. Therefore Dr. Kelly, author of Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, wants to convince us that the leading man in a romantic comedy of manners is actually the villain of a tragedy about land enclosure.
   The enclosure movement involved a changeover from open farmland held and worked in common, to a system where fields and forests once used by everybody were fenced off so that poor people could not graze their cows, or gather berries, nuts, or firewood. 

   And how do we know that Knightley is a villain? ....


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    About the author:

    More about me here. My earlier posts (prior to June 2017) are about my time as a teacher of ESL in China,(just click on "China" in the menu below.) more recent posts focus on my writing, as well as Jane Austen and the long 18th century. Welcome!


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