Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Click here for the first in the series.
In Praise of Brusque But Kindly Widows
“My dearest Clarentine, you are always either upon crutches or upon stilts!” -- Mrs. Denbigh
In the last post, I discussed Austen scholar Mary Waldron’s thesis that Fanny Price is not a perfect heroine because she falls short of her own Christian ideals. Waldron suggests Sarah Burney’s Clarentine, who I have also discussed previously, as an example of a "perfect" heroine,
Waldron says Clarentine is a girl who, “despite temptations, never deviates, even in thought, from the accepted path of right conduct.”
While “pictures of perfection” heroines in Georgian literature were a thing, I don’t agree that Clarentine is one of them. It’s not just that, by modern standards, she is ridiculous. It is that there are a sensible people within the novel who can see she is being ridiculous.
Clarentine, like Fanny Price, manages to make timidity look like hauteur. When Clarentine goes to live with her guardian’s old tutor, she trembles as she descends from the carriage:
Waldron says Clarentine is a girl who, “despite temptations, never deviates, even in thought, from the accepted path of right conduct.”
While “pictures of perfection” heroines in Georgian literature were a thing, I don’t agree that Clarentine is one of them. It’s not just that, by modern standards, she is ridiculous. It is that there are a sensible people within the novel who can see she is being ridiculous.
Clarentine, like Fanny Price, manages to make timidity look like hauteur. When Clarentine goes to live with her guardian’s old tutor, she trembles as she descends from the carriage:
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