Lona Manning's blog

CMP#90 Poor Household Management

2/28/2022

Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Austen engaged with many of the same topics and issues that other novelists of the long 18th century wrote about, including the topic of female education. Click here for the first in the series.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek. -- Samuel Johnson

CMP#90 The Consequences of Poor Household Management

Suggested by Lady Catherine herself!

I have always been struck by the passage in Mansfield Park where Fanny waits in vain for a cup of tea upon her arrival in Portsmouth: "The next opening of the door brought something more welcome: it was for the tea-things, which she had begun almost to despair of seeing that evening. [Fanny's sister] Susan and a [servant] brought in everything necessary for the meal; Susan looking, as she put the kettle on the fire and glanced at her sister, as if divided between the agreeable triumph of shewing her activity and usefulness, and the dread of being thought to demean herself by such an office.”
Though their household is in chaos, the Prices still cling to the appearance of gentility. Pouring and serving the tea is genteel, carrying in the tray and heating the water is not. We recall as well how Mrs. Bennet is offended when Mr. Collins supposes that one of her daughters had a hand in preparing the dinner she served him. Financial disaster stalks the family if Mr. Bennet dies, but Mrs. Bennet wants the world to know that her daughters don't know how to cook. On the other side of the coin, Austen holds Lady Catherine De Bourgh up to ridicule for her vulgar interference in the minutia of Mrs. Collins' housekeeping. Such details should be beneath her notice.
The novels and conduct-books of the day were unanimous in agreeing that all young women should have some education in how to run a household, even if they never had to do any of the common household chores, and many warned that a genteel education which stressed accomplishments might be useful for the season of courtship, but it was a poor preparation for married life...

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CMP#91 What Austen said about the West Indies

2/28/2022

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As background material for my blog series about Mansfield Park, here are all the excerpts from Mansfield Park which touch on the West Indies (Antigua). For all the posts on Mansfield Park, click "Mansfield Park" on the menu on the right.

When you isolate all the passages which refer to Sir Thomas and his trip to Antigua, I think it's undeniable that the only emotion expressed by Austen is solicitude for Sir Thomas. There are repeated references to the hardships and dangers he must undergo, and the risks he takes in making the journey there and back again, including the well-known dangers of the West Indian climate to Englishmen, the real possibility of shipwreck in a storm, or being captured by pirates or Frenchmen.
The other references to the West Indies have to do with the losses to the family income.
Further, the "good" people in the novel--Edmund and Fanny--are shown as being concerned for Sir Thomas during his absence. The fact that he is exposed to danger in his voyage home is their chief reason for objecting to staging a play. Other, more flawed, characters, like Lady Bertram and Mr. Yates, are not concerned about him. Mrs. Norris worries about him, but this is because she is dramatizing her own role in the family as chief counselor and director and imagining herself as the tower of strength who consoles the family when he dies.
Austen gives us zero particulars about the property in Antigua.
In the following excerpts, I have italicized some words and passages for emphasis and added some explanatory comments...

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CMP#89 Education for Your Station in Life

2/21/2022

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“Here is another one for you, Price: causa latet, vis est notissima— ‘the cause is hidden, but the result is well known’. You are learning Latin, you told me, to converse with your brother officers, but perhaps there is another reason—perhaps, you wish to impress a certain uncle, who is father to a certain young lady…..”
William Price grinned. “It’s like that fellow you told me about—that fellow who wrote War in Disguise. He knew that people can have more than one motive for doing a thing.”
“Mr. Stephen. Yes. Clever fox—he saw that Parliament could not be persuaded to outlaw the trade in slaves for moral reasons. So, he made the French slave trade a casus belli, if you will--
“A casus bell-eye?”
“Look it up in your grammar, Mr. Price."
-- Fanny's brother trying to get a classical education in A Contrary Wind

CMP#89 "Our Elegant Girls Must Be Either Useful or Starve"

Mrs. Leyster rescues a destitute widow

In the previous posts we’ve been looking at education in Mansfield Park and in Austen’s era. The debates about education I’ve been looking at center on the appropriate education for the gentry, but of course this educated, literate class comprised only a small percentage of the population of the United Kingdom. Scholar Amy J. Lloyd says that “In 1800 around 40 percent of males and 60 percent of females in England and Wales were illiterate.” While crusaders such as Hannah More felt that basic literacy was an essential precursor to understanding the tenets of Christianity, others felt that teaching the labouring classes to read was just asking for trouble.
In The Two Cousins (1798), the benevolent Mrs. Leyster takes in a destitute widow and her baby. Mrs. Leyster’s young daughter Constance asks if she can help raise and educate Jenny, the little baby.
“But tell me, my child,” [asks Mrs. Leyster] “What do you intend to teach her?”
“I will teach her, mama, as soon as she can learn, to read, to spell, and to [do needle]work, afterwards she shall learn to write, and I will instruct her in drawing and dancing.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Leyster, “then I suppose you will finish by giving her a good fortune."
When little Constance, surprised, protests that she can't do that, her mother explains that the sort of education Constance proposes will render Jenny unfit for the station in life in which Providence placed her...

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CMP#88 Men Do Not Want Silly Wives

2/14/2022

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"Mr. Palmer's temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman—but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it."
-- Elinor Dashwood's thoughts in Sense & Sensibility

CMP#88 Men of Sense Do Not Want Silly Wives

Jane Austen might have declared in Northanger Abbey that men prefer ignorance, if not outright imbecility in women, but elsewhere she pokes gentle fun at ignorant women. There's her description of Catherine Morland's chaperone in Bath: "Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner." And: "the remarks and ejaculations of Mrs. Allen, whose vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent; and, therefore, while she sat at her work, if she lost her needle or broke her thread, if she heard a carriage in the street, or saw a speck upon her gown, she must observe it aloud, whether there were anyone at leisure to answer her or not."

Mr. Knightley and Emma wrangle over Harriet Smith's marital attributes. "Men of sense, whatever you may chuse to say, do not want silly wives," he tells her.

Austen also uses Mr. Knightley to refute Emma's claim that men only value beauty and sweet temper in women. Professor John Mullan calls Harriet Smith “the most sublimely stupid human being in the history of world literature." After Harriet turns down a marriage proposal from a yeoman farmer, Knightley says that Harriet: "is not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information. My only scruple in advising the match was on [Robert Martin's] account, as being beneath his deserts, and a bad connexion for him. I felt that, as to fortune, in all probability he might do much better; and that as to a rational companion or useful helpmate, he could not do worse."
Emma counters that "Harriet...is not a clever girl, but she has better sense than you are aware of, and does not deserve to have her understanding spoken of so slightingly..." She goes on to argue that most men are not interested in intellect in their wives anyway, they are attracted to beauty and "sweetness of temper."
“Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have, is almost enough to make me think so too," [Mr. Knightley retorts.] "Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do."

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CMP#90 Poor Household Management

CMP#91 What Austen said about the West Indies

CMP#89 Education for Your Station in Life

CMP#88 Men Do Not Want Silly Wives

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