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CMP#85   A Digression on Female Virtue

1/27/2022

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I'm discussing Mansfield Park and its theme of education. Here is a digression on female virtue as it relates to this theme. The fall of Maria Bertram is a central event in the book, and it comes about because of her pride, her passion, and--as​ Austen tells us--because her moral education had been neglected.
"But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.”
                                      -- Elizabeth Bennet, thinking about Lydia and Wickham, in Pride and Prejudice

CMP#85   A Digression on Female Virtue
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Introduction
   I've been reading some recent online discussions about a modern-day Henry Crawford called West Elm Caleb, so this seems like a good time to talk about Austen and sexuality.
   Jane Austen’s depictions of human nature are timeless, even if the customs and beliefs of the long 18th century are not.
   Since Austen's time, economic and social changes have overthrown the centuries-long enforcement of female chastity before marriage. (And yes, Austen knew there was a double standard in play here, and she mentions this in Mansfield Park.)
    Not every modern consumer of Jane Austen novels or adaptations understands just how radically our social mores have changed since her time. For
the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice mini-series, screenwriter Andrew Davies added additional dialogue not found in the novel, to underscore the crisis brought on when Lydia ran off with Wickham. “Oh, Jane,” Elizabeth exclaims to her sister. “Jane, do you not see that more things have been ruined by this business than Lydia’s reputation?”  Later, Jane comes to Elizabeth and confirms, “You meant, I suppose, that you and I… and Mary and Kitty… have been tainted by association; that our chances of making a good marriage have been materially damaged by Lydia’s disgrace.” The sisters are not spelling this out for each other's benefit, but for the viewer's...


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CMP#84 Cultivating the Mind

1/24/2022

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"Mrs. Bennet... was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper."
                                                                 -- Jane Austen describing Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

CMP#84  Cultivating the Mind
     In the previous posts, we have looked at the way novelists of Austen's day wrote about the natural dispositions and innate intelligence (or lack thereof) of their characters. Of course, merely being blessed with intelligence, aka "a good understanding," was not sufficient. That understanding had to be enriched and cultivated with knowledge, or “information.”​
  • In Pride & Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet has "little information." She's narrow-minded and ignorant.
  • Elizabeth Bennet lists Darcy's "information" as one of his attractive attributes: "She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes... and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance."    
  • Fanny Price's father "did not want abilities but he had no curiosity, and no information beyond his profession; he read only the newspaper and the navy-list; he talked only of the dockyard."
  • Henry and Mary Crawford are intelligent and well-educated, as Austen makes clear. Mary quotes poetry and invents a satire of that poetry on the spot. Henry converses knowledgably about Shakespeare and even how best to conduct a church service, "shewing it to be a subject on which he had thought before, and thought with judgment." Mary and Henry are lacking, however, in moral judgement, a topic we'll turn to later in this series.

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CMP#83  Apprehension and Discernment

1/17/2022

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"He knew her to be clever, to have a quick apprehension as well as good sense.”
                                        -- Edmund's opinion of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park

PictureGirl Reading (detail) Charles Edward Perugini
CMP#83  Apprehension, Penetration & Discernment
​     In the previous posts, I've been discussing the vocabulary that Austen and other writers of the period used to describe people's personalities and intelligence, as part of my discussion of the themes of Mansfield Park.
     This post looks at other mental qualities regarded as mostly innate. For example, t
he ability to learn quickly, what we might describe as "cleverness," was referred to as "apprehension." 
   
 "My father," explains the main character in Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, "originally intended that I should have no other education than such as might qualify me for commerce; and discovering in me great strength of memory, and quickness of apprehension, often declared his hope that I should be some time the richest man in Abyssinia."
    
 A biography of the poet Richard Savage says "His judgment was accurate, his apprehension quick, and his memory so tenacious, that he was frequently observed to know what he had learned from others, in a short time, better than those by whom he was informed."
    In Constantia Neville, or the West Indian [1800], Miss Neville avoids showing up her superior knowledge when she talks to Mrs. Rochford, aware of that other lad
y's "dullness of apprehension."


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CMP#82  A Good Understanding

1/12/2022

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"There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal, and Lady Russell had been less gifted in this part of understanding than her young friend."
                                                                             -- Jane Austen narration in Persuasion

CMP#82: Nature versus Nurture: Understanding
PictureSylvestra Le Touzel and Jonathan Stephens
 introduction and Recap
    In the previous post we looked at how Austen and other writers of her time used the terms "temper" and "disposition" to describe innate personality. For example:
  • Fanny Price is taken aback when she meets her fractious sister Susan: "it was at least a fortnight before she began to understand a disposition so totally different from her own."
  • Mrs. Grant has "a temper to love and be loved" and a "happiness of disposition."
    People of Austen's time made a distinction, just as we do, between natural disposition and the way that people are shaped by circumstance...


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    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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