Space and Identity

We have talked much this semester about the importance of travel to the plot and the expansion of the space in which Jane Austen’s novels operate. Our blog posts and class discussions have identified travel as a way to move the plot along in Gothic novels and to expose characters to different social norms in the same way that people act different when on vacation. In addition to this conversation, movement between the safe starting place for Austen characters – usually some ancestral home – forces a confrontation of their assumptions and a recreation of their fundamental selves before they can reach their happy endings. This essay will touch upon Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and The Romance of the Forest.

The stability of social norms and their physical manifestations as estates point to the importance of things that the characters can identify with, and when these no longer are available, the certainty of social identity and sense of self start to crumble. For example, Persuasion starts with Sir Walter’s obsessive glee over his illustrious ancestral lineage, but his spendthrift ways leads to him having to rent out Kellynch Hall. The Elliots still attempt to hold on to their pride, saying that at least Kellynch was going to respectable people, the Crofts, even if their money had the whiff of new to it. Geraldine in Desmond spends the entire novel displaced from one bad living situation to another because of her husband, barely able to make ends meet, and having nowhere to stay permanently and therefore build a home to identify with as more than a temporary, useful place to be. The marriage plot, common to all of Austen’s novels and a theme in the other novels we have read this semester, is both a search for a husband but also for a stable environment that includes a living and a house. While the men inherit estates or make their own fortune in order to be considered marriageable, the women are no less in need of a living situation. When this fundamental need is taken away, characters have to reevaluate who they are and it is a way to start the search for the self that propels plots.

There is a distinction between the tight-knit social group that Austen characters have and the world beyond that, and many of the plots start off with this being prominent. In Persuasion, the Elliots are forced to let their estate. In Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Dashwood’s death jump-starts the storyline and our protagonists must leave Norland Park. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey is invited by the Allens to join them in Bath and leaves her perfectly nice but boring life. In Romance of the Forest, the de la Mottes flee their normal lives in civilized Paris for the forest to escape creditors. All of these thrust characters from spaces that they understand to a wider unknown.

Catherine Morland Reading The Mysteries of Udolpho

And yet, there are substantial dangers to running out into the great expanse of space. In the blog post “Radcliffe and Shakespeare,” Kate comments on the orderliness of the city in A Midsummer Night’s Dream versus the anything goes nature of the forest. For Romance of the Forest, the untamed areas outside of civil society pose the biggest dangers: strangers come from nowhere, they find a mysterious castle where things are not as they seem. This is the traditional Gothic perception of the “wide unknown.” Our class covered the Romantic art contemporary to Austen and the taste for the Gothic, and it is interesting to examine the two together. On one hand, there is intense interest in sublime natural scenes, such as a painting like Caspar David Friedrich’s Monastery Graveyard in the Snow. Yet at the same time, Friedrich’s Wanderer Over the Sea of Fog also conveys a terrible tempestuousness in the tossing fog; even though the figure stands above the fray, nature is evidently still a dangerous place. This simultaneous feeling of awe and fear, which are perhaps the same thing, translates into literature as the dread but also allure of spaces untamed by society.

Caspar David Friedrich, Monastery Graveyard in the Snow

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Over the Sea of Fog

In Austen, this known/unknown, inside/outside dichotomy becomes what society the heroines know and should belong to. Those who are too close to home are criticized for being too parochial. For example, Lady Bertram of Mansfield Park does nothing all day and Lady Middleton of Sense and Sensibility has no real interests beyond her household and her children. Neither woman is held up to be a model of behavior. Sometimes though, society is stifling and there is a “densely social foreground of the novels” that the heroines need to break away from in order to gather their thoughts (Harding 49). Society both moves overwhelmingly fast sometimes and yet there is a stasis in the form of Lady Bertram and Lady Middleton that give the impression of society as a meaningless flurry of activity.

On the other hand, the characters who go too far away from the acceptable norm are punished severely and in a physical manner. While Austen does not overlook the inane trivialities of society, for example, identifying with Elinor when Marianne pointedly does not take part in social niceties like small talk, her novels also castigate those who wander too far from correct behavior. Most literally, Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is the character most likely to enjoy the freedom from running free but also the one facing the direst consequences for it, coming close to dying for wandering so far from her accepted sphere. And yet even less central characters are punished for seeking too much liberation. In Persuasion, going to Lyme is supposed to be a fun adventure but Louisa Musgrove finds too much fun, finding the feeling of being up high “delightful” but having a dreadful injury at the end.

However, the movement of Austen characters as the plot unfolds is about gaining experience and therefore achieving self-understanding. What Hart argues in “The Spaces of Privacy” is that “the cult of sensibility had popularized the belief that true feeling demands privacy” (Hart 308) but Austen heroines can only understand themselves through going out into the world and then returning back to a more comfortable sphere having been themselves changed. 

For example, as Catherine wrote in the blog post titled “Austen on Education,” Anne Elliot’s trips throughout Persuasion lend her the opportunity to use the newfound ability to “sift through information and determine its trustworthiness”,” a talent that she did not have as a younger woman more easily swayed by Lady Russell. For a woman whose talent is “the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle,” (Persuasion, Chapter 6) and feeling the painful pinch of few of her equals to be with, this ability to go out into the world and figure out what she wants is remarkable. 

In addition, Catherine Morland travels beyond her small geographical confines and starts to learn all the lessons that sensible people should know about what is real and what is not. Had she always lived at home and lived the world only through her books, she would not have been forced to confront new situations that challenged her book-formed sensibilities. When Catherine goes to Bath, her experiences with the lying John Thorpe and the mislead General Tilney teach her that basically good people can be lead dangerous close to bad outcomes. Books like The Mysteries of Udolpho cannot replace real life. Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is deathly ill and starts to understand how self-centered and irrational she had been. Geraldine of Desmond learns perhaps the least about herself of these heroines, though she too finds a gumption and determination within her during the novel that probably would surprise her if the novel had given her the voice at the end to offer self-reflection. And as can be expected, the characters are not content to go out and find themselves, and then return to their lives as usual. Most notably, Catherine Morland did not think her family life before the events of Northanger Abbey to be particularly objectionable but upon returning to them she finds them dull and parochial. She becomes listless at home from the change in pace.

The endings of Austen novels and those of her contemporaries that we read in class end with marriages, but most importantly, they result in the establishment of couples in estates. Marriages are frequently not permitted because there are no funds or livings with which to establish a home, such as the case with Edward Ferrars of Sense and Sensibility. Catherine Morland marries Henry Tilney and gains acceptance with her in-laws, and is therefore rescued from the unsatisfactory life with her own family. Adeline in The Romance of the Forest gets her love interest and comes into a large sum of money as well. In Austen novels especially, when the goal is marriage to a landed man with money, the heroines return from their internal, self-reflective travels to the reward of an acceptable marriage and estate. Interestingly, Anne Elliot of Persuasion seems to be the only Austen heroine who does not get an estate. Even the relatively poorer marriages like Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars get some living. Anne's different fate should be explored more but it is possible that her marriage, to a perfectly wealthy man but not in the traditional way, illustrates a progression in Austen's writing that reflects the more prominent theme in Persuasion of old and new moneyed interests and the rise of a very rich mercantile class.

The expansion and contraction of novels' spaces, and the society with which heroines interact, allow the plot to move but also fundamentally allow characters to grow in self-understanding. In comparing Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and The Romance of the Forest, we find that travel and movement between a safe home-like place to a greater unknown create the opportunity for characters to test their mettle even when they do not originally see the need to do so. Satisfactory conclusions arise from the return to a smaller environment but with the lessons gained, and so characters are rewarded with the acquisition of better prospects through marriage.

Boston College. Accessed 27 April 2012. http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/rom_fri_wand.html

Harding, D. W. Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen. London: Athlone Press, 1998. Accessed 27 April 2012. http://books.google.com/books/about/Regulated_Hatred_and_Other_Essays_on_Jan

Hart, Francis R. “The Spaces of Privacy: Jane Austen.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 3, Jane Austen 1775-1975 (Dec., 1975), pp. 305-333.

University of Adelaide. Accessed 27 April 2012. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/gothic/index.html