Jane Austen's Women

An Introduction

Kathleen Anderson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781438472263
  9781438472256
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438472270
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An original critical introduction to women characters in the novels of Jane Austen.

Why does Jane Austen "mania" continue unabated in a postmodern world? How does the brilliant Regency novelist speak so personally to today's women that they view her as their best friend? Jane Austen's Women answers these questions by exploring Austen's affirming yet challenging vision of both who her dynamic female characters are, and who they become. This important new work analyzes the heroines' relationships to body, mind, spirit, environment, and society. It reveals how, despite a restrictive patriarchal culture, these women achieve greatness. In clear, lively prose, Kathleen Anderson shares original theoretical insights from twenty years of studying Austen, and illuminates the novels as guidebooks on how to become an Austenian heroine in one's everyday life. This engaging book will appeal to a broad readership: the serious student, the general lit-lover, and the Austen neophyte alike.

Part 1

Women and the Body

Strength, Sex, and Austenian Wellness

CHAPTER 1

“I am strong enough now to walk very well”

Vigor and Femininity in Mansfield Park

Jane Austen would be amused at the irony of beginning a women’s studies analysis of her work with a focus on the female body. And yet, she wrote embodied narratives about the material world of people, places, mutton chops, and mud, in the materiality of bound print. She encourages her heroines to live in their bodies as her words live on the page because of them, and depicts a human existence in which, as in literature, physicality always points to something beyond itself. The human narrative is grounded in the mud of the material, but communicates through it the more significant realm of the unseen, the mind and spirit, the hand of its Creator. Otherwise, Austen’s women (and her readers) would be no more than mutton chops. Perhaps such considerations make more justifiable and interesting beginning our study with such questions as: If we invited Jane Austen to be guest judge at a beauty pageant today, who would be her winner? What image of the female physique would she promote? In her novels, both robust and delicate women are portrayed as beautiful. The athletic Elizabeth Bennet and Marianne Dashwood as well as the more fragile Anne Elliot and Fanny Price are all attractive in their ways, and their relative size does not determine their feminine appeal for either the author or the characters who love them. Similarly, though Harriet Smith lacks heroine status, her charming corpulence equals Emma Woodhouse’s “firm and upright figure” (E 39) in attractiveness: “She was a very pretty girl, and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired. She was short, plump and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness” (23). Austen communicates a general appreciation for a range of body types and looks in her fiction, yet sketches them in such vague outlines as playfully to foil readers’ preoccupation with appearances.1 She eschews both the reduction of female identity to the sensual and the romanticization of feminine weakness, in favor of encouraging physical health and strength as a signifier of fully embodied, multidimensional selfhood—of woman’s worth. Her heroines take a realist literary journey in which corporeality is not merely a requisite vehicle but a catalyst and mirror of figurative forward movement. Thus, Austen is not so interested in the facts themselves of the size, shape, or color of a woman’s features as in how those features express her character and its progress—her personal growth curve.

Through numerous comedic epistolary references to her own enthusiasm for good food, the author affirms a woman’s right to thrive in body. This message emerges unequivocally, despite the letters’ subjectivity as literary constructs intended to entertain the recipients, and is enhanced by exaggeration.2 Readers love Austen’s oft-quoted pronouncement to her sister, Cassandra, “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me” (15–17 June 1808). She similarly declares that “[g]ood apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness” (17–18 October 1815), relishes “a most comfortable dinner of Soup, Fish, Bouillee, Partridges & an apple Tart” (15–16 September 1813), and praises the merit of Chicken, Asparagus, Lobster, and “Tomatas” [sic].3 Austen’s formal capitalization of edibles endows them with the status of proper nouns, of friends. In a letter sent shortly before her return home, Austen tells Cassandra to have a satisfying dinner prepared for herself and their mother: “You must give us something very nice, for we are used to live well” (19 June 1799).4 On another occasion, she exults, “I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite, which I consider as the chief merit in housekeeping. I have had some ragout veal, and I mean to have some haricot mutton tomorrow” (17–18 November 1798). Austen catalogs her consumption of objectionably unfeminine meats (ironically framed as rewards for her feminine “housekeeping”) and also expresses a penchant for the inessentials of desserts, drinks, and toppings that contribute little nutritional value but add significant enjoyment to one’s diet. Austen’s emphasis on her gustatory pleasure seems simultaneously a satire on the social expectation of women’s abstemiousness and a parody of the other extreme of male-identified self-indulgence, the latter of which was flaunted in the Regency court and elite men’s clubs of her day.5

Beneath her burlesque of gluttonous decadence, Austen advocates in her letters the same goal she conveys through the portrayal of undernourished and well-nourished heroines in fiction: a balanced lifestyle of health achieved through reasonably pleasurable consumption, exercise, fresh air, rest, and creative enterprise. She encourages women to “live well,” by contrast to the admonitory tone of such conduct-book warnings as the negative insistence on “moderation at table, and in the enjoyment of what the world calls pleasures. A young beauty, were she fair as Hebe, and elegant as the Goddess of Love herself, would soon lose these charms by a course of inordinate eating, drinking, and late hours” (Regency 33–34).6 Apparently, the ill-effects to men’s charms of gorging on animal flesh and drinking and gambling the night away are not cause for concern. While rejecting the one-sidedness and reactivity of etiquette authors’ many injunctions to women, Austen likely agrees with the author identified as “a Lady of Distinction” that either “miserable leanness or shapeless fat” (Regency 37) represents an undesirable figural prototype. However, Austen also shares her society’s greater anxiety over thinness as connoting sickness and the threat of early mortality.7 She repeatedly voices concern over loved ones’ loss of weight or appetite while praising their increase in either (“Eliza says she is quite well, but she is thinner than when we saw her last, & not in very good looks. I suppose she has not recovered from the effects of her illness in December” [21–22 January 1801]).

In a parallel manner, Austen’s narrator bemoans the sickliness of heroines Fanny Price and Anne Elliot while affirming the gusto of her most attractive heroine, hearty hiker Elizabeth Bennet, and her most commanding one, dynamo Emma Woodhouse.8 Emma’s spunky appeal, like Elizabeth’s, is associated with her enjoyment of wellness, as Mrs. Weston’s burst of admiration indicates: “ ‘[O]h! what a bloom of full health, and such a pretty height and size; such a firm and upright figure. There is health, not merely in her bloom, but in her air, her head, her glance. … Emma always gives me the idea of being the complete picture of grown-up health. She is loveliness itself’ ” (E 39). Mrs. Weston implies that Emma’s beauty resides in not only her bodily strength, but her strong sense of self, her comfortableness in her own skin. Austen may not allow her heroines the freedom she exercises in letters to parade her gustatory enthusiasms, but she regrets their frailty and celebrates their vitality or restoration thereto—not for appearance’s sake, but for themselves and their ability to fulfill their narrative mission. When one compares the developmental trajectories of female characters in Austen’s novels, it becomes clear that physical condition and its unfit or fit use often function as a commentary on the merit of the characters portrayed, who fit into one of several categories or shift from one to another.

The over-exuberant women of Lydia Bennet–style “animal spirits” (PP 45) whose impulsive activity suggests an over-stimulated body, a dangerous sensuality, and a corresponding lack of mental and spiritual depth include Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia and Kitty Bennet; Eliza, her illegitimate daughter Eliza, and the pre-enlightened Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility; Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey; Mansfield Park’s Aunt Norris, Maria and Julia Bertram, and Mary Crawford; Mrs. Elton in Emma; and the Musgrove sisters in Persuasion. Of these, Kitty and Julia are rescued from destruction by increased guidance, Henrietta Musgrove by re-alliance with her fiancé, and Louisa Musgrove and Marianne Dashwood by a chastening illness.9

On the other extreme from the overactive characters are the chronically sickly ones, such as Anne de Bourgh of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Fairfax of Emma. Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price and Persuasion’s Anne Elliot initially reflect this type, until they toughen up and push past being defined as pining victims. We do not learn much about the interior life of Jane Fairfax and especially of Anne de Bourgh, but their ill health seems to suggest mental weakness as manifest in an inability to rise above emotionally detrimental circumstances. Like the overactive characters, they are too self-interested; although we might sympathize with Jane’s and Anne’s personal challenges, their extreme introversion also proves destructive. The only likeable character in this frail group is Anne Elliot, who leaves behind the category when she becomes hardy enough to contemplate with pleasure being a sailor’s wife.

A more gratuitously irresponsible group of female characters includes the dozers and the willful convalescents. The semi-comatose characters include Lady Bertram of Mansfield Park and, despite her attractiveness and good nature, somewhat Emma’s bovine Harriet Smith.10 The hypochondriacs include Mrs. Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) and Mary Musgrove (Persuasion), who are annoying but humorously egocentric in their endless complaints. Some characters in the more credibly sickly group, such as Jane Fairfax, may be hypochondriacs as well, in a psychosomatic enactment of their suffering; however, they do not offset their tediousness by amusing the reader.

The healthy, active women who rarely, if ever, fall ill and generally live lives of moderation, principle, and reflection include Mrs. Croft, Elinor Dashwood, Aunt Gardiner, Mrs. Weston, and, more so post-reform, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse (and somewhat Catherine Morland). These characters do the best they can with what they have, and do not succumb to a life of superfluous hyperactivity, helpless despair, imagined or real ailments, or mind-numbing malaise. In this respect, Mrs. Smith fits the healthy category of female types, because of her mental vigor and courageous buoyancy—she chooses to live as active a life as possible in her circumstances and does not allow her diseased body to “[ruin] her spirits” (P 153). She refuses to define herself or to live as a sick person.11 Admirable women take pride in neither strength nor weakness nor the feigning of either, but demonstrate outward-thinking and inward growth by developing relationships of integrity, gaining in self-knowledge, and turning thought into productive action. They are secure in themselves because they are—or, in Elizabeth’s and Emma’s case, determinedly become—in moral and emotional balance, as if each is in her own most natural state, neither bubbling over nor fainting away, but fully alive. Fanny Price and Anne Elliot ultimately earn membership in this vibrant group.12

A delicate character’s increasing weight and energy are intertwined with her improved state of mind as well as lifestyle; as she learns about herself and others, she strengthens in understanding and purpose. Austen acknowledges the tangible selves of women as a semiology of their trajectory toward their rightful place in literature and life: a place of dynamism, fulfillment, and longevity that is epitomized by their wholesome blooming in the flesh. Underlying this paradigm is the author’s “deep and instinctive sense of the body as an indispensable signifier” (McMaster, Reading 173). She explores the relationship between female corporal strength and womanliness as a central theme in Mansfield Park, offering readers an especially illuminating study in the author’s prescription of women characters’ and readers’ pursuit of “fitness” in all senses. Fanny Price’s body functions as a symbolic map of her personal and social development, and her increasing activity throughout the novel reinforces her bildungsroman. The Bertram circle’s female family members and friends serve as both catalysts for and contrasts to her evolving identity, while the men attempt but fail to impede her self-fortification.13

Judging from Austen’s epistolary emphasis on the importance of satisfying meals, she empathizes with Mansfield Park’s heroine when her neglectful parents deprive her of a farewell breakfast at the end of her Portsmouth visit: “the breakfast table … was quite and completely ready as the carriage drove from the door. Fanny’s last meal in her father’s house was in character with her first; she was dismissed from it as hospitably as she had been welcomed” (MP 445). Good food connotes the loving support of family, whereas its dearth conveys the corresponding absence of familial affection. The reader hopes that from this point in the novel, Fanny will never return to the chaotic, impersonal home of her early childhood. As both Austen’s letters and fiction stress, bodily nurturance and the symbolic correlative of emotional nurturance are critical contributors to a woman’s well-being.

Fanny Price represents the feminine ideal of frailty in some respects, but she is not allowed to rest on this ideal. As a fringe member of the Bertram household, she relies on the chivalry of her cousin Edmund to assist her with prescribed horseback riding exercise, and her corporal weakness functions as a metaphor for her social precariousness in a divergently tyrannous household of assertive women and passive-aggressive men. The narrator emphasizes Fanny’s marginal position in the background of scenes, where she often sits and suffers from headaches. The underscoring of her delicacy reinforces her martyrdom by cruel relatives, but does not inherently ennoble her as a character. The repetition of references to Fanny’s fragility becomes irritating, renders its realism suspect, and suggests her general lack of agency or impact. One may even feel the sadistic desire for Aunt Norris to slap Fanny out of her righteous torpidity and into concrete action.14 Austen gently parodies the sentimental tradition’s equation of femininity with exaggerated delicacy by implying Fanny’s kinship with her Aunt Bertram—a woman who ignores her dysfunctional children in favor of her dog—in extreme passivity. Then the author turns around and undercuts this typecasting by gradually unveiling Fanny’s Aunt Norris–like tenacity. Like a wilting woman’s ineffectuality, the energetic meddling of Aunt Norris and forceful vitality of Maria and Julia Bertram and Mary Crawford—none of whom ever becomes ill in the novel—can also produce destructive consequences. Maria sacrifices everything to passion and Julia nearly does so; this bodily excess can, at worst, degenerate into an Eliza Brandon–like abandonment to promiscuity and even death. Mary Crawford dazzles Edmund with her more circumscribed vivacity, but he eventually discovers that she is unprincipled at the core, which renders her robustness repulsive and unwomanly, an outgrowth of what Edmund describes to Fanny as “blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind” (456). In Mansfield Park, as in the other novels, neither bodily weakness (Fanny and Lady Bertram) nor might (Aunt Norris and her uninhibited young affiliates), whether innate or pretended, epitomizes feminine perfection. Austen intermingles and transmutes both the naïve frailty of the virtuous sentimental heroine and the heft of the Chaucerian comic wife, to endorse a healthier median between the two.

Fanny Price’s physical being functions as a powerful motif that delineates her struggles and triumphs as her maturing identity emerges among extreme female role models and patriarchal would-be saboteurs. When Fanny first appears at Mansfield Park at the age of ten, she is undersized, which underscores her other disadvantages of timidity, poor education, and social insignificance: “She was small of her age, with no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty; exceedingly timid and shy, and shrinking from notice; but her air, though awkward, was not vulgar, her voice was sweet, and when she spoke, her countenance was pretty” (12). Fanny’s littleness is a metaphor for her unrealized potential and subtlety of character as well as affectional undernourishment. Her cousins Maria and Julia are insensitive in their self-confidence, displaying a critical detachment toward their vulnerable cousin, whose ignorance they continually expose to their governess and Aunt Norris. They communicate a smug, vulgar superiority that renders their physical development a manifestation of their self-satisfaction. They use Fanny’s small stature to demarcate her inferior social status and their figurative, as literal, precedence: “Her elder cousins mortified her by reflections on her size, and abashed her by noticing her shyness; Miss Lee wondered at her ignorance, and the maid-servants sneered at her clothes” (14). Other women exploit Fanny’s lesser size to elevate themselves and degrade her to the bottom-rung position on the family social ladder.15 The narrator’s physiological distinctions between Fanny and her cousins are similarly revealing: “the daughters [were] decidedly handsome, and all of them well-grown and forward of their age, which produced as striking a difference between the cousins in person, as education had given to their address; and no one would have supposed the girls so nearly of an age as they really were” (13). Maria and Julia are “forward” both physically and socially; their boldness is shown to be rude, cold, and unfeminine, whereas the delicate Fanny’s “feelings were very acute, and too little understood to be properly attended to” (14). Her petite physique as a child belies her big heart and deep emotions, whereas her cousins’ bodily substance belies their shallow minds. Austen is not suggesting that brawny girls are evil and slight ones are angels; rather, she presents a metaphorical commentary on the reverse development of the cousi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Preface “Nobody doubts her right to have precedence”: Jane Austen’s Heroine as Universal Subject
• Part 1 Women and the Body: Strength, Sex, and Austenian Wellness
• Part 2 Women’s Natures: Mood, Mind, Spirit, and Female Giftedness
• Part 3 Women and Others: The Female Self in Environmental, Social, and Imaginative Space
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover