Austen-Wollstonecraft Flashcards
Manners
**Paula Byrne, ‘Manners’ (2005)
**
- ‘as a realist, [Austen] ensured in her novels that her characters’ conduct was commensurate with the conventions of polite society.’
- ‘The fact that Marianne is corresponding with Willoughby in the absence of an engagement indicates that she is a rebel against the constraints of decorum.’
- ‘For Marianne, modesty in courtship is a “disgraceful subjection of reason to common-place and mistaken notions” (1:11). This is a sentiment that could have come straight from the mouth of Mary Wollstonecraft. Austen’s authorial voice is much more sympathetic to Marianne than some critics allow: she shares some of her character’s scorn for the “common-place and mistaken notions” of proper female behaviour.’
**Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984)
**
- Austen writes about ‘the complex relationship between a woman’s desires and the imperatives of propriety’
Morality
**Rachel Gevlin, ‘Adulterous Austen’ (2020)
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- ‘Austen’s novels offer heroines who risk the perilous outcomes of their own choices’
- ‘Austen links Willoughby’s sexual misconduct to natural inclination and a lack of a proper education and divests him of all agency’
**Marilyn Butler, *Jane Austen and the War of Ideas *(1988)
**
- ‘The entire action is organized to represent Elinor and Marianne in terms of rival value-systems’
- Marianne ‘believes in the innate moral sense; and, since man is naturally good, his actions when he acts on impulse are likely to be good also.’
- ‘Another contemporary novelist […] would almost certainly have had Marianne seduced and killed off, after the errors of which she has been guilty.’
Historical context
**Rachel Gevlin, ‘Adulterous Austen’ (2020)
**
- ‘Husbands could obtain divorces from adulterous wives on grounds of infidelity alone, but divorces from adulterous husbands were only granted on the grounds of adultery in conjunction with a second offense, such as life-threatening cruelty, incest, or bigamy.’
Women
**Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984)
**
- ‘Despite her aggressive hostility to feminine stereotypes, Lady Susan conforms precisely to the typical female the mid-eighteenth-century moralists described: she is vain, obsessed by men, dominated by her appetites, and, finally, incapable of creating any identity independent of the one she tries to denounce.’
Lady Susan criticism
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984)
- ‘In the laissez-faire competition the epistolary Lady Susan permits, the reader will identify with whatever character dominates the narration or most completely gratifies the appetite for entertainment.’
- ‘Susan is able to manipulate others chiefly because she knows that the use of language is an art capable of generating plausible, internally consistent, but wholly malleable fictions––just as the manners of propriety can.’
**Janet Todd, ‘Lady Susan’ (2010)
**
- James Edward Austen Leigh, Austen’s nephew, ‘was especially concerned about “Lady Susan”, which, with its brisk treatment of an immoral woman, fitted ill with the gentle, refined image of his aunt which he was eager to promote.’
- ‘The energy of Lady Susan seems to defeat morality mainly because she is much more entertaining than those around her.’
S&S criticism
**Tony Tanner, ‘Secrecy and Sickness’ (1986)
**
- ‘prevalent is the vocabulary of all kinds of concealing, whether the secrets are those kept by the individual from society or those the private self must try to keep from the public self’
- ‘Marianne is one who demands that outward forms exactly project or portray inward feelings; this is that demand for sincerity, that loathing of hypocrisy, which is one of the most sympathetic characteristics of the Romantic movement.’
- ‘Marianne does, in effect, die.’
S&S
Elinor and Marianne’s personalities
* Elinor ‘had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them’
* ‘Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent.’
* ‘Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility’
* ‘Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could struggle, she could exert herself.’
* Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.”
“But I thought it was right, Elinor,” said Marianne, “to be guided wholly by the opinion of other people. I thought our judgments were given us merely to be subservient to those of neighbours. This has always been your doctrine, I am sure.”
“No, Marianne, never. My doctrine has never aimed at the subjection of the understanding.
Manners
* Lady Middleton’s ‘manners had all the elegance which her husband’s wanted. But they would have been improved by some share of his frankness and warmth; and her visit was long enough to detract something from their first admiration, by shewing that, though perfectly well-bred, she was reserved, cold, and had nothing to say for herself beyond the most common-place inquiry or remark.’
* ‘Elinor saw nothing to censure in him but a propensity, in which he strongly resembled and peculiarly delighted her sister, of saying too much what he thought on every occasion, without attention to persons or circumstances. In hastily forming and giving his opinion of other people, in sacrificing general politeness to the enjoyment of undivided attention where his heart was engaged, and in slighting too easily the forms of worldly propriety, he displayed a want of caution which Elinor could not approve’
* ‘I have been too much at my ease, too happy, too frank. I have erred against every common-place notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitful’
* ‘Marianne abhorred all concealment where no real disgrace could attend unreserve; and to aim at the restraint of sentiments which were not in themselves illaudable, appeared to her not merely an unnecessary effort, but a disgraceful subjection of reason to common-place and mistaken notions.’
* Lady Middleton’s ‘reserve was a mere calmness of manner with which sense had nothing to do. Towards her husband and mother she was the same as to them; and intimacy was therefore neither to be looked for nor desired. She had nothing to say one day that she had not said the day before.’
* Elinor on Willoughby: ‘in the whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other’
* ‘if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure.”’ (Marianne on going to Allenham)
Sensibility
* ‘I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.’ (Marianne)
* ‘Colonel Brandon alone, of all the party, heard her without being in raptures. He paid her only the compliment of attention; and she felt a respect for him on the occasion, which the others had reasonably forfeited by their shameless want of taste. His pleasure in music, though it amounted not to that ecstatic delight which alone could sympathize with her own, was estimable when contrasted against the horrible insensibility of the others’
* ‘Colonel Brandon, who was on every occasion mindful of the feelings of others’
Love interests
* Edward Ferrars ‘was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing […] His understanding was good, and his education had given it solid improvement.’
* ‘His manly beauty and more than common gracefulness were instantly the theme of general admiration, and the laugh which his gallantry raised against Marianne received particular spirit from his exterior attractions’
* ‘“I do not believe,” said Mrs. Dashwood, with a good humoured smile, “that Mr. Willoughby will be incommoded by the attempts of either of MY daughters towards what you call CATCHING him. It is not an employment to which they have been brought up.’
Women and men
* ‘Sir John was a sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humoured her children; and these were their only resources.’
* ‘[Mr. Palmer’s] temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman,––but she [Elinor] knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it.’
* ‘The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind him [Edward] to every thing but her [Lucy’s] beauty and good nature; but the four succeeding years––years, which if rationally spent, give such improvement to the understanding, must have opened his eyes to her defects of educatoin, while the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society and more frivolous pursuits, had perhaps robbed her of that simplicity, which might once have given an interesting character to her beauty.’
* Mrs. Jennings: “When a young man, be he who he will, comes and makes love to a pretty girl, and promises marriage, he has no business to fly off from his word only because he grows poor, and a richer girl is ready to have him. Why don’t he, in such a case, sell his horses, let his house, turn off his servants, and make a thorough reform at once? I warrant you, Miss Marianne would have been ready to wait till matters came round. But that won’t do, now-a-days; nothing in the way of pleasure can ever be given up by the young men of this age.”
* “Can we wonder that with such a husband to provoke inconstancy, and without a friend to advise or restrain her, […] she should fall?”
* “I could not trace her beyond her first seducer, and there was every reason to fear that she had removed from him only to sink deeper in a life of sin. Her legal allowance was not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her comfortable maintenance, and I learnt from my brother, that the power of receiving it had been made over some months before to another person.”
* Brandon on Marianne and Eliza: “Their fates, their fortunes cannot be the same; and had the natural sweet disposition of the one been guarded by a firmer mind, or an happier marriage, she might have been all that you will live to see the other be.”
Lady Susan
- Mr De Courcy writes: ‘she does not confine herself to that sort of honest flirtation which satisfies most people, but aspires to the more delicious gratification of making a whole family miserable.’
- ‘to be Mistress of French, Italian, German, Music, Singing, Drawing &c. will gain a Woman some applause, but will not add one Lover to her list. Grace and Manner after all are of the greatest importance.’ (Lady Susan)
- ‘I trust I shall be able to make my story as good as her’s. If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence.’ (Lady Susan)
- ‘Those women are inexcusable who forget what is due to themselves and the opinion of the World.’ (Lady Susan)
*
Austen’s letters
**To Cassandra Austen, 20 November 1808
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- ‘they must be one of the happiest Couple in the World, & either of them worthy of Envy—for she must be excessively in love, & he mounts from nothing, to a comfortable Home.’
**To Fanny Knight, 30 November 1814
**
- ‘I cannot wish you with your present very cool feelings to devote yourself in honour to him. It is very true that you never may attach another Man, his equal altogether, but if that other Man has the power of attaching you more, he will be in your eyes the most perfect’
**To Fanny Knight, 13 March 1817
**
- ‘Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony’
- ‘The most astonishing part of your Character is, that with so much Imagination, so much flight of Mind, such unbounded Fancies, you should have such excellent Judgement in what you do!— Religious Principle I fancy must explain it.’
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Manners
- ‘Manners and morals are so nearly allied, that they have often been confounded […] yet, when various causes have produced factitious and corrupt manners, which are very early caught, morality becomes an empty name.’
- ‘I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority […] I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the LADY could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two.’
Virtue
- ‘private virtue, the only security of public freedom and universal happiness’
- ‘Without knowledge there can be no morality! Ignorance is a frail base for virtue!’
- ‘many innocent girls become the dupes of a sincere affectionate heart, and still the more are, as it may emphatically be termed, RUINED before they know the difference between virtue and vice’
Sensibility
- ‘[Women’s] senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected; consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling.’
- ‘And what is sensibility? “Quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy.” Thus it is termed by Dr. Johnson; and the definition gives me no other idea than of the most exquisitely polished instinct.’
Rights
- ‘if women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges.’
- ‘I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.’
- ‘when a man seduces a woman, it should I think, be termed a LEFT-HANDED marriage, and the man should be LEGALLY obliged to maintain the woman and her children, unless adultery, a natural divorcement, abrogated the law.’
