| 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 introduction to the series. |
CMP#11 Implicit values in Austen: Better to be English
"It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive." So says Jane Austen of the view from Donwell Abbey in Emma. Jane Austen was proud of her country and proud of being English. English law was superior. English manners and customs were on the whole superior to other nations.
When Catherine Morland talks herself down from her Gothic fantasies in Northanger Abbey, she recalls what Henry Tilney told her: "Remember, we are English."
Austen's narrative voice adds, (in phrases a bit wittier than we would expect to find in Catherine's interior monologue): "But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist." ...
When Catherine Morland talks herself down from her Gothic fantasies in Northanger Abbey, she recalls what Henry Tilney told her: "Remember, we are English."
Austen's narrative voice adds, (in phrases a bit wittier than we would expect to find in Catherine's interior monologue): "But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist." ...
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