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CMP#145 Stock Character: the Amazon

7/1/2023

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Clutching My Pearls explores Jane Austen and contrasts her works with the tropes of other novels of the long eighteenth century. Click here for the first in the series. For some forgotten female authors, click "Authoresses" at the right.

CMP#145:   18th Century Stock Characters: "a disgusting Amazonian"
Picture"A Masculine Doe," 1792
​    Very often the heroine of an 18th-century novel is a sane and morally upright girl surrounded by a gallery of fools and freaks. We see this in Austen as well; think of Charlotte Heywood in Sanditon, and Anne Elliot in Persuasion, for example.
​     These fools and freaks were often stock characters. In earlier posts, I wrote about some common 18th century stock characters such as the saucy sidekick, fops and fools, and the female pedant.
   Here’s another comic stereotype, played for laughs (that is, for derision), who would have been instantly recognizable to novel-readers of the past: the Amazon. Both Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney created comic Amazon characters but I can’t think of any female character in Austen who is an Amazon.

     Amazons were women with masculine traits. They walked, gestured, and spoke loudly and emphatically. They dressed in riding habits. They were obsessed with horses and loved dogs. They are usually anti-intellectual. They prefer male company to female, but in several cases, they are the matrimonial dupes of fortune-hunters.
     Amazons looked down their noses at feminine women. Often they are paired with a languid, lazy, woman, both of them serving as a contrast to the heroine. 
   Susan Elworth, the heroine of Anne Raikes Harding’s 
Corrections (1818), is “disgusted” with the entire Williamson family and finds the two daughters of the family “just bearable”: “The youngest, a fair insipid looking tall girl, had a passion for being thought a languid beauty. She closed her eyes, lounged on a sofa, lisped out her words in the softest tone imaginable, smiled with the silliest air in the world, which she mistook for interesting sweetness, [and] was always fatigué.
     “The eldest daughter…. was very different. She would be a dasher! So she talked loud and fast, rode on the dickey with the coachman, hunted with all the gentlemen in the county, laughed loud, [and] talked in knowing terms…”


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CMP#138 Guest Post: Jane Austen, Anti-Capitalist

4/1/2023

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It's always a pleasure to encourage young scholars, so I'm pleased to welcome Lura Amandan to "Clutching My Pearls" this week. Ms. Amandan is a postgraduate student at the University of Reinlegen in Germany. Her doctoral thesis is focused on early critiques of capitalism in European literature, and with the kind permission of her faculty advisors, I am sharing an excerpt from her truly groundbreaking work-in-progress concerning Jane Austen and capitalism. My six questions for Austen scholars post is here.

Jane Austen, "A Marxist Before Marx"
PictureKarl Marx and his daughter Eleanor: was her name inspired by Austen? (Source: British Library)
    ​As many scholars of Austen have long pointed out, Jane Austen intended to use Sanditon to explore the social and moral consequences of capitalism. Sadly, Austen laid the manuscript aside during her final illness. Interrogating Austen through a critical lens reveals that she was a committed anti-capitalist who was determined to fight back in the only way she could--through her pen.
    I am not referring to Austen's well-known portrayals of the landed gentry and the lesser nobility, but rather, her subtle attacks on the pernicious influence of consumerism. To a startling extent, the buying and selling of things and the rise of the
 urban bourgeoisie forms a backdrop to her so-called marriage plot novels. Scholar David Daiches called Austen "a Marxist before Marx." 
   
   It is no exaggeration to say that Austen shows us whether a character is good or bad by their reaction to consumerism. Two of Austen’s heroines never step inside a store--Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price. And, significantly, the heroines who do go shopping always live to regret the experience. It is only the fops and fools who like to shop, as we will see. Austen’s message could not be clearer: Capitalism is the root of all evil. Let’s critically take the novels one by one...


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CMP#137  Melinda, the Prim and Proper Heroine

3/27/2023

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If you want superb writing and amazing delineations of character, you can't top Jane Austen. If you want a female author of the long 18th century who discusses imperialism, the status of women, race and class, there are plenty of writers who were more explicit on these issues. I've been featuring some on this blog. Today, meet "M.E."

CMP#137   Book review: The History of Melinda Harley
PictureDrifting off with a book
    “Miss Melinda Harley, of Yorkshire, may pass well enough for a country body; but really her history was not worth bringing up to town.”
    So goes one of several dismissive contemporary reviews for The History of Melinda Harley, Yorkshire (1777). The Westminster Review gave it only one sentence: “the history of an ephemera, that is born and dies on the same day.”
    Another reviewer joked: “It is the general character of many romances, that they are good for nothing; but we must except the History of Melinda Harley from this censure, for we can affirm, from our own experience, that it is admirably calculated—to procure sleep.”
    Ouch, ouch, and ouch, anonymous authoress! I feel for you. Yes, the plot is slight, the characters are wooden, and the detail is sparse, but I became quite interested in the wide variety of moralizing comments that Melinda Harley trades with her BFF Amanda Beaufort while Melinda is away visiting with family friends. The girls share their thoughts on the folly of dueling, the pending loss of the American colonies, and the consolations of religion.
   Some of their exchanges are the sort Mary Bennet would approve of:​
​ “Most of our wants are artificial, and his happiness is much better assured who has learned to contract his desires.” “It is a great inducement to the exercise of benevolence, to view human nature in a fair light, and to put the best construction on one anothers’ actions.” Some remarks are explicitly political or feminist in tone.
  Some of these epistolary sermonettes touch on situations with similarities to Austen novels. I am not saying Austen drew from this novel, rather, that both writers drew from topics and situations prevalent at the time. I will share a few examples but I won’t point out which passage in which Austen novel they remind me of. If you’re not a Janeite, it won’t be relevant to you, and if you are a Janeite, you don’t need me to tell you...


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CMP#131  Book Review: Nobility Run Mad (1802)

2/13/2023

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This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here.

This post is about a forgotten four-volume novel, and is part of an exploration of portrayals of merchants from Bristol and their families in novels of this period. I'm interested in this topic because of Mrs. Elton.

CMP#131:  Nobility Run Mad (and some Bristol vulgarity)
PictureTanya Reynolds in the 2020 Emma
     In my previous post, I suggested that Mrs. Elton is ridiculed in Emma for being a pretentious social upstart. Yes, she comes from Bristol, a city that had enriched itself on the slave trade, but the slave trade is not Austen's target in her portrayal of Mrs. Elton. Mrs. Elton is a particularly well-drawn example of a stock character of the time: the vulgar Bristolian. To illustrate my argument, I've found some other novels which feature vulgar Bristolians and I'll present them in the next few posts. 
​    That brings us to the 1802 novel Nobility Run Mad: I decided to plow through all four volumes, not because I was interested in another story about the nobility behaving badly, (they usually behave badly), but because this book came up in a search for novels of this era that featured the words “Bristol” and “merchant.” I wanted to see if this novel, like some others I’ve read, portray Bristol merchants as being vulgar.


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    I blog about my research into Jane Austen and her world, plus a few other interests. Welcome! 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 about me here. 


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