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CMP#21 Primogeniture in Sense & Sensibility

12/30/2020

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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.
CMP#21  Primogeniture in Sense & Sensibility
PictureEsau sells his birthright to his younger brother for a "mess of pottage" Genesis 25
   In part one of this discussion of primogeniture, we looked at how the practice of excluding the younger brothers (and all the sisters) from inheriting the family estate became caught up in a debate around revolutionary change. Some public intellectuals, including Mary Wollstonecraft, wanted to follow the French example and abolish primogeniture, but once the French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror, a strong backlash arose in England.   
   In Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, Dr. Helena Kelly argues that Sense & Sensibility is a covert attack on primogeniture. Dr. Kelly writes: 
 “[Austen] wasn’t alone in questioning the fundamental fairness of primogeniture. The feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft did it too, in her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”  The phrasing of this sentence might mislead Kelly’s readers into thinking that the only two people in Georgian England who wrote about primogeniture were Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. That’s obviously not the case. 
    Many people wrote about primogeniture, and inheritance was an anxious topic of discussion among families, especially daughters and younger sons.
   Historian Rory Muir has written that there was more 
open resentment of primogeniture in Tudor and Stuart times, than in Regency times. He suggests it is because there were more opportunities for second sons in Austen's time. Because of war, exploration and colonization, the younger son could join the army or navy or the East India company. Of course this ended up being fatal to many of them. 
Did Austen hold radical views on the topic? Was she even aware of Wollstonecraft?...


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CMP#20 Primogeniture

12/29/2020

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Modern readers who love Jane Austen are eager to find ways 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 this blog series, I've been discussing the values which I think are implicit in Jane Austen-- values such as pride in being English, pride in being an Englishwoman, a belief in the idea of human progress, the maintenance of class distinctions, and decorum in religion. Now we turn to primogeniture.​

Implicit Values in Austen: Primogeniture as the Status Quo
  "Well, if they can be easy with an estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better. I should be ashamed of having one that was only entailed on me.”
  So exclaims Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. A bleak future awaits the Bennet girls because Longbourn is entailed on the heirs male, and Mrs. Bennet frets about it frequently. Austen goes on to write:
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   "Jane and Elizabeth tried to explain to her the nature of an entail. They had often attempted to do it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason, and she continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man [Mr. Collins] whom nobody cared anything about."
  Elizabeth and Jane are presented as calmly accepting the status quo, while Mrs. Bennet is the rebel who is "beyond the reach of reason."     
    Are we to infer from this, or any other of Austen's novels, that she wanted to overturn the law and custom of primogeniture that reserved estates for the oldest male heir? ...

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Jane Austen: Caught in the act of cleverness #2

12/22/2020

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Caught in the Act of Cleverness is my series on Jane Austen and her art. Click here for the first in the series.
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 Those of us who read and re-read Jane Austen admire her for many reasons, and that includes her cleverness in constructing her plots. In an earlier post I gave an example of Austen's cleverness in using a rain shower to move some characters about on the stage. In Mansfield Park, she uses gout.
   ​  I've loved reading Jane Austen for years, and occasionally found a critic (in the sense of literary criticism) that I've also enjoyed reading and have learned from. Tony Tanner comes to mind, and David M. Shapard, Robert Rodi and of course John Mullan. They offered insights into Austen's life and times, her characters and also they have got me thinking about how Austen does it -- how the plots are constructed. Since I became a fiction writer myself, I've developed a new appreciation for how Austen sets up situations and back-stops her plot points. This example is a bit long and detailed, but here goes:


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CMP#19  Your station in life

12/17/2020

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Modern readers who love Jane Austen are eager to find ways 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. 

CMP#19  Implicit Values in Austen: Upstairs, Downstairs
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   As discussed in previous posts, Austen does mention servants in her novels, but they are definitely in the background most of the time -- unlike many other classic novels and plays in which servants play a larger role.
    We also saw that her vulgar characters behave inappropriately, either by not staying properly aloof from their servants, like Lydia, or else fussing and scolding, like Mrs. Norris. But we also saw that servants are indispensable the happy-ever-afters of our heroes and heroines.
     In Pride & Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet exults in Jane's engagement to Mr. Bingley, with thoughts of the
 "fine muslins, new carriages, and servants" her daughter will have. Having lots of servants signifies wealth, as owning a Bentley and a Rolex would today. Really, Mrs. Bennet correctly understands the world she lives in. Her only fault is saying the quiet part out loud.
​   
 In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price’s parents struggle in cramped, grimy poverty in Portsmouth but they still cling to the veneer of gentility. being waited on by two servants. These servants are, obviously, poorer still.
​    
  What if the servants working in the offices at Barton Cottage in Sense & Sensibility could overhear the conversations in the poky little parlour when Marianne and Elinor discuss how much money constitutes a "competence."
      
"What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?" [exclaims the romantic Marianne].
     "Grandeur has but little," said Elinor, "but wealth has much to do with it."
    "Elinor, for shame!" said Marianne, "money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction... two thousand a-year is a very moderate income. A family cannot well be maintained on a smaller. I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less.”


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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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