EXAM Austen Flashcards
1
Q
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Angles
A
- Money (love thereof and pragmatism)
- Manners, propriety, morals
- Education (formal and societal)
- Sense, sensibility, and dangers thereof
- Women’s position
- Marriage
2
Q
Love of money
A
- Mrs Dashwood on her daughters: ‘Catching [men] is not an employment to which they have been brought up’
- Mrs Dashwood’s Romantic sensibility is a positive here, given the novel’s many examples of misery as a result of financially-motivated marriages
- Mrs Jennings on Willoughby’s desertion: a young man ‘has no business to fly off from his word only because he grows poor, and a richer girl is ready to have him […] nothing in the way of pleasure can ever be given up by young men of this age’
3
Q
Financial pragmatism
A
- Marianne: ‘money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction’ - disparity between hers and Elinor’s ideas of competence and wealth
- Elinor and Edward ‘were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of life’
- Elinor: had Willoughby married Marianne, ‘he would then have suffered under the pecuniary distresses which, because they are removed, he now reckons as nothing.’
- ‘Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony’ (Letter to Fanny Knight, 13 March 1817)
4
Q
Manners
A
- ‘Manners and morals are so nearly allied, that they have often been confounded’ (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman)
- ‘“manners and morals” – a common pairing of terms’ (Byrne, ‘Manners’)
- ‘though perfectly well-bred, she [Lady Middleton] was reserved, cold, and had nothing to say for herself beyond the most common-place inquiry or remark.’
- 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.’
- ‘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’ (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman)
- Accomplishments ‘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, Letter 7)
5
Q
Propriety
A
- ‘in slighting too easily the forms of worldly propriety, he displayed a want of caution which Elinor could not approve’
- Marianne: ‘the restraint of sentiments which were not in themselves illaudable, appeared to her […] a disgraceful subjection of reason to common-place and mistaken notions.’
- Marianne on going to Allenham: ‘we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure.’
- ‘Those women are inexcusable who forget what is due to themselves and the opinion of the World.’ (Lady Susan, Letter 16)
6
Q
Morality
A
- ‘Without knowledge there can be no morality! Ignorance is a frail base for virtue!’ (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman)
- ‘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’ (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman)
- Austen’s novels illustrate Wollstoncrafts arguments by showing ‘how women and men of sound minds and good character believe and act’ (Hansen, ‘Replacing Romantic Sentiments’)
- ‘Austen’s novels offer heroines who risk the perilous outcomes of their own choices’ (Gevlin, ‘Adulterous Austen’)
- Brandon on Eliza: ‘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.’
- ‘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.’ (Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer)
7
Q
Education (formal)
A
- Edward and Lucy: ‘the four succeeding years––years, which if rationally spent, give such improvement to the understanding, must have opened his eyes to her defects of education’
- Robert laments ‘the misfortune of a private education’ for Edward, whereas he, ‘merely from the advantage of a public school, was as well fitted to mix in the world as any other man’
- ‘Novels, music, poetry and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation’ - these are the only accomplishments women are supposed to acquire (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman)
8
Q
Education (societal)
A
- John Dashwood: ‘Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was […] But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;—more narrow-minded and selfish.’
- Brandon on Eliza: ‘Can we wonder that with such a husband to provoke inconstancy, and without a friend to advise or restrain her, […] she should fall?’
- 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.’
- Elinor on Willoughby: ‘too early an independence and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation […] The world had made him extravagant and vain––Extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish’
9
Q
What is sensibility?
A
- ‘Quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy.’ (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, quoting Samuel Johnson)
- ‘[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.’ (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman)
10
Q
Sense vs. sensibility
A
- The entire action is organized to represent Elinor and Marianne in terms of rival value-systems’ (Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas)
- Elinor’s ‘feelings were strong, but she knew how to govern them’. Marianne ‘was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation’
- ‘Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could struggle, she could exert herself.’
- Colonel Brandon ‘was on every occasion mindful of the feelings of others’
- Marianne’s near fatal illness is contracted through walking ‘where there was something more of wildness than in the rest’
11
Q
Positives of sensibility
A
- Marianne has ‘that demand for sincerity, that loathing of hypocrisy, which is one of the most sympathetic characteristics of the Romantic movement.’ (Tanner, Jane Austen)
- ‘Elinor, who is made the repository of other people’s secrets without anyone to whom she can tell her own, experiences to the full the burden and torments of secrecy.’ (Tanner, Jane Austen)
- ‘Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.’
12
Q
Women’s position
A
- ‘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’ (Gevlin, ‘Adulterous Austen’)
- ‘if women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges.’ (Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman)
- e.g. Lady Susan and Miss Grey
- Lady Susan ‘is vain, obsessed by men, dominated by her appetites, and, finally, incapable of creating any identity independent of the one she tries to denounce.’ (Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer)
- Lady Susan: ‘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.’ (Mr. De Courcy, Letter 4)
13
Q
Marriage
A
- ‘Sir John was a sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother [.. ] these were their only resources.’
- ‘Marianne, by general consent, was to be the reward of all’
- Marianne ‘is married off to Brandon to complete a pattern, to satisfy that instinct for harmonious arranging which is part of the structure both of that society and of the book itself.’ (Tanner, Jane Austen)
- ‘nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love, bound to one, & preferring another’ (Austen’s letter to Fanny Knight, 30 November 1814)
- ‘Wollstonecraft thought friendship and mutual respect are the best foundations for marriage, and Austen’s heroines also seek husbands they can first be friends with.’ (Hansen, ‘Replacing Romantic Sentiments’)
14
Q
Quotes I always forget
A
- ‘Austen’s novels offer heroines that risk the perilous outcomes of their own choices’ (Gevlin, ‘Adulterous Austen’)
- Marianne’s near-fatal illness is contracted by walking ‘where there was something more of wildness than in the rest’
- ‘Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony’ (Letter to Fanny Knight, 13 March 1817)
- ‘nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love, bound to one, & preferring another’ (Austen’s letter to Fanny Knight, 30 November 1814)
- Paraphrase: ‘Wollstonecraft thought friendship and mutual respect are the best foundations for marriage, and Austen’s heroines also seek husbands they can first be friends with.’ (Hansen, ‘Replacing Romantic Sentiments’)
