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CMP#47 The Saucy Sidekick

5/12/2021

Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality. Much has been written about Austen. Click here for the first in the series.

“Well, well,” returned she, "we are not all of us born to equal honour. Some of us are to be set up for warnings, some for examples; and the first are generally of greater use to the world than the other." -- Miss Charlotte Grandison, in Sir Charles Grandison

Stock Characters: The Saucy Sidekick: a warning, not an example

In previous posts about 18th century stock characters, we looked at fools and fops, and the female pedant. The pedant has died out as a stock character, but the sidekick is going strong. She's an essential component of romantic comedy. She serves as the confidante to the heroine, which is valuable for exposition (that is, explaining the plot without a narrator). She gives the heroine loving admonitions. She gets the comic lines and the heroine is the straight man.

In her early, 18th century incarnation, the sidekick is often in danger of upstaging the heroine, because she is livelier and funnier. The sidekick can say cutting things about the other characters in the novel, while the virtuous heroine can only say something very mild and forbearing.
In Hollywood rom-coms, the wise-cracking sidekick is made less of a threat to the heroine because she is reliably plumper, plainer, or older than the heroine. Whatever her other characteristics, some traits are consistent -- she is devoted to the heroine, intensely interested in her doings, and always looking out for her interests.

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CMP#46 Stock Characters: The Female Pedant

5/9/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality. Much has been written about Austen. Click here for the first in the series.

“She was, what has often been described, but can never be too often held up to derision—a female pedant, a female politician, a smatterer in philosophy, a perpetual controvertist.” -- Clarentine (1796), Sarah Burney

Stock Characters: Held Up To Derision

Pride & Prejudice pokes fun at a lot of people and a lot of things. It bubbles with the high spirits of its author.
  We laugh at Mrs. Bennet but after all, she has every reason to be worried about the family's future.
And what about poor, studious Mary, who is "mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own"?
Some JAFF (Jane Austen fan fiction) authors have written novels centered around Mrs. Bennet or Mary Bennet; stories which treat them with insight and sympathy. For many readers, Mr. Bennet's insouciance about his family's financial future is harder to defend than Mrs. Bennet's anxiety. And it isn't Mary's fault that she's plain, that she occupies the unfortunate position of the middle child.
We may regard Mary Bennet charitably today but Elizabeth never gives her the time of day and there's no indication that she's ever invited to Pemberley. Why does Mary get this callous treatment?
  Mary is a variation on a stock character of the Georgian and Regency period, the female pedant. (Let me pedantically explain that a pedant is someone who has, or who believes they have, superior knowledge and who likes to lecture or debate others. ("Well, ACKshually...."))
  The author Henry MacKenzie (1745-1831) remarked "The character of a female pedant, from Fielding downward, has been applauded in the closet [that is, in private reading] and on the stage..."

Instead of using the term "bluestockings," and besmirching the fair name of women intellectuals who did receive respect and fame in Georgian Britain, I will use the term used in the novels, "female pedant." The ladies portrayed above are: "Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825), poet and writer; Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), scholar and writer; Elizabeth Griffith (1727–1793), playwright and novelist; Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), painter; Charlotte Lennox (1720–1804), writer; Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791), historian and political polemicist; Elizabeth Montagu; Hannah More (1745–1833), religious writer; Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (née Linley)," singer and writer. More about the Bluestockings in this BBC "In Our Time" podcast.

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CMP#45 Your Mother Cannot Spare You

5/5/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality. Much has been written about Austen. Click here for the first in the series.

In an earlier post I mentioned the faultless behaviour of Adela, a "picture of perfection," who was as dutiful as possible toward both of her unworthy parents. This Mother's Day edition will look at some mother-child interactions, and I'll return to the topic for Father's Day to look at some famous fathers.

Implicit Values in Austen: A Duty to Parents: Special Mother's Day Edition

William, Mrs. Price, Betsey, and Fanny in Portsmouth

“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.

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CMP#44 Stock Characters: Fops and Fools

5/2/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Click here for the first in the series.

Stock Characters of the 18th Century: There to be laughed at

Jane Austen paints Persuasion's Sir Walter Elliot as a dim-witted snob. Throughout the novel, he is obsessed with rank and his own handsome appearance. The Royal Navy is Britain's most potent symbol, but Sir Walter doesn’t care about national identity or the defense of his country when he tells his attorney Mr. Shepherd: “I have two strong grounds of objection to [the Navy]. First, as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of; and secondly, as it cuts up a man's youth and vigour most horribly... A man is in greater danger in the navy of being insulted by the rise of one whose father, his father might have disdained to speak to, and of becoming prematurely an object of disgust himself, than in any other line.”
If we were to view Austen’s depiction of Sir Walter in isolation, if we were to look at this caricature independently of the other characters in the book -- and independently of other novels of the period -- we might conclude that Austen is making a larger point about class distinctions in her time. Is she a secret radical?
However, what have we here? What about Mr. Shepherd? Is he portrayed as an educated, self-made man heroically counterpoised against the decadent aristocrat? Not really. The attorney is drawn in subtler terms, but Austen still skewers him. Mr. Shepherd is a flattering, obsequious subordinate: I venture to hint… what I would take leave to suggest is… And I love the quiet touch of: “Mr. Shepherd laughed, as he knew he must, at this wit, and then added—"I presume to observe…”
Sir Walter and Mr. Shepherd are balanced against each other – the former is a snob and the latter is a toady. And what of Mr. Shepherd’s daughter, Mrs. Clay? If Austen has egalitarian impulses, then why does she portray Mrs. Clay as an upstart, a social-climbing gold-digger? And have we forgotten that she throws some serious shade on social climbing ladies who betray themselves through their lack of breeding?

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CMP#47 The Saucy Sidekick

CMP#46 Stock Characters: The Female Pedant

CMP#45 Your Mother Cannot Spare You

CMP#44 Stock Characters: Fops and Fools

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