Anyone who has heard of Jane Austen is likely to be aware of the “universally acknowledged” “truth” that “a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (P&P 3). After having been written by Austen, the phrase has been quoted over the last two hundred years by her readers and by literary critics, uttered on the screen by numerous Elizabeth Bennets or back-screen voices, as well as recycled in innumerable sequels and spin-offs of Austen’s most famous novel . Countless other phrases, characters and situations have similarly been repeatedly re-read, re-thought, and re-embodied, for instance, in films, so that, as R. G. Dryden and L. Raw put it, Austen “has become a global traveller” (1). The rereading of Austen’s work seems, moreover, to have taken a multitude of directions. Commenting on Austen’s myriad “afterlives,” Claudia L. Johnson summarizes:
“Jane Austen” has mobilized powerful and contradictory ideas and feelings about taste, history, class, nationality, desire, manners, intimacy, language, and the everyday for very diverse readerships, and their complex histories of emotional, intellectual, and imaginative faith in Austen can inspire us to reread Austen in surprising and stunning ways. (15)
Many scholars and writers have considered the perennial appeal of the novels trying to determine the reason, or the reasons, that impel us to plunge into their worlds again and again. According to Harold Bloom, for example, Austen “created personality, character, and cognition; she brought into being new modes of consciousness” thus, inventing us and explaining us (v). Susannah Carson adds that “Austen novels haunt us our entire lives, inform our understanding of what it is to be human, and in the end fuse so wholly with our thoughts and feelings that it would be difficult to imagine the sorts of people we might have become had we never encountered them” (xii). For Eudora Welty, it is “the exuberance of her youthfull characters” and the novels’ “sheer velocity” that “seems to vibrate through time” (9). Most recently, Devoney Looser in her book The Making of Jane Austen (2017) looks at the history of Austen’s influences and her reception by analysing “particularly important stories of her making as they unfolded in culturally significant zones” (2). She points out that being referenced “by almost every category of people […] Austen comes to us now as a household name” (2, 4).
As a passionate re-reader of the novels, I was curious to answer this question for myself: why has reading Jane Austen become a cyclical activity for me as it has for millions of other Austen lovers? I realized that even though I appreciate the work of the many critics who have placed the novels in their historical context I am drawn to what is not time bound, thus, what is “beyond” the context. The currently dominant historicist approach does not explain the perennial appeal of Austen’s novels, which are not valued by most readers merely as historical documents. I decided to turn away from historicism and to take a look rather at the inner architecture of the texts.
In my work I want to argue that there are recurrent spatiotemporal patterns and structures in all six novels that constitute a source of enduring, if unconscious pleasure. In what follows I point out the overlapping natural and cultural cycles in the novels that co-exist in a constantly transmuting space-time and that are counterpointed with the linearity of pivotal events that drive the plot forwards. I examine the psychological relations of the characters, principally the heroines, to these space/time patterns, especially the transformations of their emotional states that prompt linear leaps. With regard to characters, I thus take the position of John Wiltshire, who treats them “as psychological realities” asserting that “imagining characters as actual beings is the primary, natural act of reading the realist novel, and the re-reading is a poor thing if this is lost sight of” (Wiltshire 2014, ix).
My project is then a formal as well as psychological analysis. It requires a level of generality since it seeks to identify, compare, and contrast patterns across the novels. Hence, though there are examples from the novels throughout, there is not a great deal of close reading except where this directly serves to illustrate the argument. In other words, this project requires reading at a certain distance.
Cyclical and Linear Space-Time
I am interested in looking at space and time as a four-dimensional concept. This concept is elaborated in Doreen Massey’s book Space, Place & Gender (1994).1 Responding to Foucault’s and Jameson’s arguments about a contrast between temporal movement and a notion of space, she claims that “the temporal movement is also spatial; the moving elements have spatial relations to one another” (264). She insists that we should not think of a linear process which reduces space to 3D (or even 2D), but accept four-dimensionality , for “space is not static, nor time spaceless” (264). She argues that there is a need to stop formulating space/time in terms of a dichotomy and points rather to Simone de Beauvoir’s distinction between cyclicity,2 gendered female, and “real change,” gendered male. Cyclicity is central to immanence and “real change” to transcendence. Beauvoir’s position was that females should take hold of the transcendent. Massey thinks that the two dichotomies (immanence/transcendence and space/time) are related. Moreover, according to her, Einstein’s theory of four-dimensional space-time does not imply that difference between spatial and temporal is non-existent. Rather, she argues that “space and time are inextricably interwoven” (261).
My goal is to analyse space in relation with time in the novels of Jane Austen by taking into account its cyclical and linear aspects. I understand the concepts of cyclical and linear as developed by Jean Baudrillard in The Illusion of the End (1994). Linear, and spatialized, time for him is time that has a sense of direction; it is the “time of no return” (Clarke and Doel 31). On the other hand, cyclical time is the “time of eternal return” (Clarke and Doel 31), it is manifold. On the same principle, space can also be regarded as linear or cyclical. Linear space is represented as the straight line, marking “the shortest path between two points” (Baudrillard 10), while cyclical space with its sphericity “deflects all trajectories.” To illustrate this concept, I would like to make a brief reference to the image of Bath in Persuasion (P) and Northanger Abbey (NA). Anne Elliot reluctantly goes to Bath as her new home—she cannot stay in her childhood house. Thus, Bath is her “final” destination, at least while she is unmarried, and represents a linear space. In NA, however, Catherine Morland goes to Bath to enjoy the season and the multitude of possibilities that this town can offer. In this case, it functions as a cyclical space open to various opportunities and trajectories.
The first phenomenon that comes to mind when reading Austen’s novels from the angle of cyclicity and linearity is the changing seasons, which is the focus of Chap. 2. The cycle of nature is metonymically linked to corresponding agricultural activities which, together with weather, determine peoples’ everyday life: what they will have on their table, their mobility; their activities; where they will stay—in other words, what spaces they will occupy and how they will spend and experience their time. The season modifies space/time in a cyclical, ever-repetitive way. For example, the female characters of Pride and Prejudice (P&P) survive through long months of Winter in the countryside wrapped in their warm shawls and lassitude, while others, more fortunate, dance through the animated London season, as in Sense and Sensibility (S&S). Both ways of experiencing Winter are repeated every year.
Next to the seasonal and agricultural cycles, there are the liturgical and calendar cycles, which are intertwined with the cycle of human life in general, and with the social cycles of everyday life. Thus, I show how the rhythms of these natural and cultural cycles coexist. For example, Autumn with its harvest and decaying nature corresponds to the new beginnings in physical, social, and emotional senses in the novels. Autumn is when the Miss Dashwoods move to Devonshire to start their new, socially different life after having lost their childhood home. But it is also in Autumn that both heroines meet the men they fall in love with and/or marry later on. Similar patterns are distinguishable in all six novels. Moreover, there are pivotal moments in every novel that approximately correspond to Christmas, Easter, Midsummer, and Michaelmas, thus emphasizing the importance of the liturgical and, possibly, the old pagan calendar to which the liturgical calendar is related. Within this likeness there are differences between the novels which I discuss using a table that charts the presence (or absence), duration, and importance of each season in the individual novels. This allows me to consider how Austen’s use of these patterns evolves, or simply changes, over the course of her writing career.
During the time of the novels, then, while they follow the cycle of the year with its “usual” events, the heroines live their crucial year which will bring them to the totally new situation of their lives. For example, in P&P Elizabeth meets Mr. Darcy in a public ball in Meryton. These kinds of balls take place at regular intervals and are destined to amuse the young people of the neighbourhood and help them find suitable partners. However, this time, and from this point on, Elizabeth’s year will not resemble her preceding seasons and at the end of this year she will find herself the mistress of Pemberley—far away from her childhood home in geographical, social, and psychological terms. Thus, the linear aspect of moving towards the space/time of ...