Jane Austen and Modernization

Sociological Readings

J. Thompson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137496010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137491152
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Jane Austen wrote when sociology was being established as the new discipline to understand social issues such as urbanization and industrialization. Drawing on landmark sociologists such as Durkheim and Bourdieu, this study argues that the novels of Austen were heavily influenced by these early developments in sociology.

N O T E S

1 Introduction: Jane Austen and Modernization

1. Throughout this book, I will be referring to Jane Austen’s works with their abbreviations as follows: E—Emma; L—Letters; MF—Mansfield Park; NA—Northanger Abbey; P—Persuasion; PP—Pride and Prejudice; and SS—Sense and Sensibility.

2. R. W. Chapman, “Jane Austen’s Methods,” Times Literary Supplement (February 9, 1922), 82a.

3. In Jane Austen and the State (London: Travistock, 1987), p. 87, Mary Evans struggles to find, define, or explain “the state” in Austen’s novels, implicitly admitting that such a concept/structure is anticipatory if not entirely proleptic—a nineteenth-century, not a regency development.

4. R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1948), p. 151.

5. Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, in their anthropological study, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1990) see Austen as an ethnographer, whose object of study is courtship and kinship: “Marriage ideally provides a regularized and perpetual transition between natural ties of family and humanly constructed connections, for in marriage two people are removed from their natural attachment to their families, and united in a selected attachment that will in turn generate new natural ties . . . In sum, marriage represents a claim to reproduce the natural order of society and the social order naturally.” (p. 39). See also Christopher Wilkes, Social Jane: The Small, Secret Sociology of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), for an application of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to Austen: “Austen saw and decoded social complexity” (p. 258). See also Gary Kelly, “Jane Austen’s Real Business: The Novel, Literature and Cultural Capital,” in Jane Austen’s Business, McMaster and Stovel, eds. London: Macmillan, 1996, 154–167 for an application of Bourdieu’s notion of social capital and Tony Tanner briefly uses Erving Goffman in his classic study, Jane Austen (1986, rpt. London: Palgrave, 2007), 123: writing of Pride and Prejudice and the characters’ self-awareness of their performance, “Such gestures are expressions of what Erving Goffman calls ‘role distance.’” As the title suggests, in Jane Austen’s Civilized Women: Morality, Gender and the Civilizing Process, Enit Karafili Steiner reads the novels from the perspective of Norbert Elias: “when she insists on an ongoing sociability which unfolds in domestic settings and permeates the public realm as well as on the impact of embodied socialization, introspection, and self-monitoring, far more is at stake than a proper lady’s sense of decorum.” (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), p. 2. See also Heather Love, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History, 2010, 41: 371–391 for the use of Goffman with literature. Further along the social science scale is Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s intriguing Jane Austen, Game Theorist, who argues: “Jane Austen was not just singularly insightful but relentlessly theoretical. Austen starts with the basic concepts of choice (a person does what she does because she chooses to) and preferences (a person chooses according to her preferences). Strategic thinking, what Austen calls “penetration,” is game theory’s central concept when choosing an action a person thinks about how others will act.” (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013), p. 1. As Chwe notes later (p. 28), Goffman was excited about game theory, and as we shall explore in chapter 3, Goffman’s whole concept of social interaction—face work—is essentially strategic.

6. B. C. Southam, Jane Austen: Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), II, 2.

7. Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), pp. 16, 48. There have been a number of studies in recent years that focus on the phenomenon of the fascination that Austen holds for her readers over the years. Several have been prompted by the flood of films from 1995 and after: Jane Austen in Hollywood, ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1998); Jane Austen and Co., ed. Suzanne Pucci and James Thompson (Albany: SUNY P, 2003); and John Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). More pertinent to this study are those studies that explore the way Jane Austen’s reputation was shaped over the years, including Sutherland, Rachel Brownstein, Why Jane Austen? (New York: Columbia UP, 2011); and Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012).

8. For the chronologically opposite approach, focusing on Austen contemporary and early readers, see William Galperin, “Austen’s Earliest Readers and the Rise of Janeites,” in Diedre Lynch, ed., Janeites (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), pp. 87–114, William Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003), p. 44–81.

9. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, p. 127.

10. Mary Poovey writes of Pride and Prejudice, “Marriage remains for Austen the ideal paradigm of the most perfect fusion between the Individual and society.” Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), p. 203.

11. Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971), p. 20.

12. See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford UP 1981), pp. 97, 102: “The tendency of her fiction is to rebuke individual self-assertion . . . [She] held old-fashioned notion of social cohesion and obligation.” So too, David Monagham, Jane Austen-Structure and Social Vision (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 7. “Jane Austen’s thesis [is] that the fate of society depends on the ability of the landed classes to live up to their concern for others, and on the willingness of the other groups to accept this ideal.” The most elegant expression of this balance comes, naturally from Lionel Trilling: “The great charm, the charming greatness, of Pride and Prejudice is that it permits us to conceive of morality as style. The relation of Elizabeth Bennet to Darcy is real, is intense, but it expresses itself as a conflict and reconciliation of styles: a formal rhetoric, traditional and rigo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• One  Introduction: Jane Austen and Modernization
• Two  Authority in Mansfield Park and Persuasion: Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons
• Three  Emma , Simmel, and Sociability
• Four  Pride and Prejudice , Goffman, and Strategic Interaction
• Five  Northanger Abbey , Sense and Sensibility , and Frame Analysis
• Six  Conclusion: History, Sociology, and Literature
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index