Austen's Northanger Research Articles

Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840

For scholars of the Gothic, thinking about buildings and books together is an ingrained habit. Not only did Gothic fiction emerge alongside the Gothic architectural revival, but the author of the first self-proclaimed “Gothic tale” was also the builder of what he called a “little Gothic castle.” Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill, the villa he transformed into an ersatz relic of the architectural past, is thus permanently linked in the critical memory with the ghost-ridden medieval structure he conjured up in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The many later romances that followed in the footsteps of Otranto often also wore their architectural features on their sleeves—or, rather, on their title pages, where “castles,” “ruins,” and “abbeys” proliferated for decades after Walpole's pioneering experiment. Among the pleasures of Townshend's formidably erudite book is the thoroughness with which it revitalizes this by now automatic coupling. Townshend shows that Gothic structures and Gothic romances were linked by the same heated arguments over the valence of what he calls “Gothic antiquity”—a “mythical, vague, and somewhat nebulous sense of the national British past” that spanned the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For some, this was a dark epoch of barbarity and benighted Catholicism, while others saw it as the wellspring of British political liberties and the source of a native artistic tradition epitomized by Shakespeare. The crumbling medieval edifices that fill the period's popular romances—Ann Radcliffe's Castle of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's Convent of St. Clare, even Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey—are thus more than formulaic settings for eerie adventure or (in Austen's case) didactic parody. They are expressions of an uneasy fascination that Townshend tracks across eight decades of controversy. As Townshend shows, the eventual deflation of the debate over the Gothic legacy in the modern age was foreshadowed by a seemingly mundane linguistic innovation: the coinage of the word medieval. Its first recorded usage dated by the Oxford English Dictionary to 1817, this more neutral historical marker pointed ahead to the Victorians’ taming of the “Gothic” past into an unthreatening subject of historical and aesthetic inquiry.

Dan Shen's Theory of Dual Narrative Dynamics Linked to Ian McEwan's <em>Atonement</em>

Dan Shen's Theory of Dual Narrative Dynamics Linked to Ian McEwan's <em>Atonement</em>

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.

Where'd I Put My Character? The Costume Character Body and Essential Costuming for the Ensemble Actor

Where'd I Put My Character?The Costume Character Body and Essential Costuming for the Ensemble Actor Aly Renee Amidei (bio) For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings. —Shakespeare, Henry V, prologue In a small theatre housed in a former Commonwealth Edison substation on the North Side of Chicago, ten actors are trying to bring Treasure Island to life on Lifeline Theatre's stage. The actor playing Captain Flint runs offstage, removes his captain's coat, takes a deep breath, and sips from his water bottle. He has one whole page before he has to come back as Israel Hands in the next scene. Then he hears his cue line. "What the …? They skipped a page!" He looks around frantically: "Where'd I put my character?" The assistant stage manager points to a black thing on the floor. Relieved, the actor puts on Israel's eye patch and dashes to his next entrance just in time. "Yarr!" Chicago storefront theatres, as exemplified by Lifeline Theatre, regularly cast a small ensemble of actors to play multiple roles. When a company produces an ambitious play with a small cast, distinguishing between multiple characters becomes an opportunity for discovery between the director, costume designer, and the actor. When the additional challenges of budget, space, blocking, and time are factored in, sometimes the only visual indication between shifting characters comes down to a single garment or costume prop. The manner in which these tangible pieces are determined and the way they then inform both the work of the actor and audience reception are excellent ways to reflect on the powerful relationship of the performer and the costume. This essay examines the function of costume within this type of production model. Further, it looks at the manner in which costume becomes a type of body to be worn by the actor, and the way in which the multiple "costume bodies" worn by an ensemble actor create a composite body that contributes added meaning [End Page 49] for the audience. Additionally, best practices for costuming an ensemble actor are outlined and explored. The majority of the non-Equity and smaller Equity theatre companies of Chicago produce in spaces converted for performance. Former retail businesses, car dealerships, fire stations, and factories become venues for resident companies and rental spaces for itinerant companies. Space and budgets are always used "creatively"; many of these retrofit venues lack proper backstage space or adequate dressing rooms. Even if a company has the budget to fully cast Much Ado About Nothing, there might not be enough room either on or offstage to contain all the actors, let alone provide and store their costumes. Despite the physical and financial constraints, the artistic vision of these Chicago storefront theatres is boundless. When challenged by space and budget, casting fewer actors for productions is a sensible solution for these companies. Lifeline Theatre, founded in 1982 in Chicago, focuses on bringing new works and adaptations to the stage. They adapt epic novels such as Tolkien's The Two Towers, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Alexandre Dumas père's The Three Musketeers and perform them with ten actors, a costume budget of $2,000, and ambitious (some might say reckless) imagination. Actors cast in Lifeline productions are assigned to "tracks," which can include one to twenty different characters. For example, the actors playing the titular Musketeers play only Aramis, Porthos, Athos, and d'Artagnan. However, the actor playing Cardinal Richelieu also plays four other characters, including a soldier in service to the cardinal, a soldier in service to the king, and various ruffians for the Musketeers to dispatch. Costume designer Rosemary Ingham likens designers to "crime scene detectives" searching for clues about characters, which become the basis for the costume designs.1 Factoring in demands from countless sources, a costume designer fashions the external "body" of a character, something that requires an impressive understanding of costume history, literature, art history, theatre, clothing construction, anthropology, and human psychology. Ingham states that "designers have a special knowledge about the effects of design on human responses."2 The costume designer curates the visual external body of the character while the actor gives life to...

Buried in Plain Sight: Jane Austen's Gothic Critique of Interiority in Mansfield Park and Persuasion

ABSTRACTJane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) famously satirizes the excesses of gothic fiction while revealing a patriarchal oppression all the more dangerous because of its subtlety. Although later novels do not so directly translate the drama of the gothic into the drama of the domestic, Austen does continue to suggest how women may be quietly isolated and imprisoned. This article proposes that in Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), Austen gothicizes the very interiority that her heroines have cultivated as an apparent refuge. Austen's portrayal of interiority and its implications for feminism have already been complicated by many critics, but this article demonstrates that Austen herself was well aware of how female interiority could become a trap, a place into which a woman might be forced and cut off from others as assuredly as she would be in any hidden chamber.

"[M]easuring from the Standard": Barnaby Rudge's Post-Enlightenment Reading Geography

"[M]easuring from the Standard":Barnaby Rudge's Post-Enlightenment Reading Geography Jeffrey E. Jackson (bio) "measuring from the Standard . . . or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore." -Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1841) The opening of his Child's History of England (1851–53) finds Charles Dickens contemplating a map of Britain, devoting particular attention to Scotland: he writes, "The little neighbouring islands, which are so small upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland,—broken off . . . in the course of a great length of time, by the power of the restless water" (129). In this paper, I discuss Barnaby Rudge (1841), a historical novel of London's anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, as Dickens's contribution to what I like to call a post-Enlightenment re-mapping of Britain's reading geography—as Scotland's Enlightenment-era status as the center of British intellectual and publishing work had, itself, broken off in the course of a great length of time. Many have discussed Barnaby Rudge as Dickens's anxious engagement with Scotland's most famous and formidable author, historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. Thus, Kathryn Chittick writes, "to understand Dickens's ambitions in his early manhood is to come round inevitably to Scott" (18). In my essay, however, I read Barnaby Rudge as a larger expression of cultural insecurity. Devised in the 1830s, in the wake of what Chittick summarizes as the "collapse of the Edinburgh publishing scene" (41) and the uncertain, tentative shift of British publishing activities to London, 1841's Rudge is a late contribution to what I think of as a tradition of literary cartography charting England's cultural distance from the world of the Scottish Enlightenment. The distinctiveness of 18th-century Scotland within Britain has long invited commentary. Thus, discussing Edinburgh of the 1700s, historian J. G. A. Pocock notes that in it one could readily find "all the essential elements of an Enlightenment," elements that simply "did not exist" in England at the same time (525). Pocock is arguing here that, unlike the English Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment was embodied in its various institutions: in the universities, debating clubs, and learned societies that so typified the Edinburgh metropolis. These signature material cultures made Scotland what Clifford Siskin has called "the Enlightenment home of philosophical inquiry"—"so much so that . . . [many] routinely [End Page 298] followed the path north from England to the universities of Scotland" (80). Yet, Siskin goes on to note, "by the early nineteenth century, the path no longer seemed so inviting" (80). Thus, an anonymous commentator in Fraser's Magazine laments how "the vaunted Modern Athens [i.e., Edinburgh] is fast dwindling away into a mere spelling book and primer manufactory" (qtd in Chittick 41). I am interested in the terms of the last quotation, which juxtaposes the decline of the Scottish Enlightenment's public sphere with the mass production and distribution of reading matter. The distinctive material cultures of 18th-century Scotland, where publishing and intellectual work had what Jon Klancher calls the quality of "face-to-face relations" (19), yielded ground to what Ina Ferris has called a "less institutionally defined, more stratified and unpredictable readership" (23). The shift, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, in significantly precise wording, raised "the spectre of . . . mass literacy producing the opposite of enlightenment" (2–3, emphasis added). I suggest here that Barnaby Rudge, a Gothic-tinged, London-based novel of urban terrorism and mob violence registers this cultural re-orientation, one I describe in my paper as a shift toward London and away from the onetime standard set by Scotland. I. "Something Very Shocking . . . Will Soon Come Out in London" Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) finds its heroine Catherine Morland telling Henry and Eleanor Tilney that "something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London," and she "shall expect murder and every thing of the kind" (77). Henry explains to his confused sister, "Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duo-decimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in...

The Submerged Plot and the Mother's Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy by Kelly A. Marsh

Kelly A. Marsh. The Submerged Plot and the Mother's Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State UP, 2016. 283 pp. $84.95. The Submerged Plot and the Mother's Pleasure by Kelly A. Marsh, part of the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series edited by James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, seeks to pull the narrative of the absent mother's pleasure out of the shadows. This search for the story behind the plot is most frequently conducted by a seeking daughter, although Marsh tantalizingly suggests in her conclusion that in more contemporary works, sons are now positioned to take up this pursuit. Marsh launches into her examination immediately when she quotes Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: ... she had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as any body might expect, she still lived on. Ever the keen social critic, Austen identifies the missing mom trope as being so commonplace in novels as to be nearly laughable. But Marsh, as she admits in her citing of scholars who have studied this convention, is not as concerned in the absence of the maternal figure as how that absence illuminates the existence of a submerged plot in the novels she includes in her survey. Marsh is interested in how these mothers pass a legacy of oppression on to their daughters that must be resisted and overcome by them in order for the surviving daughter to attempt to forge her own path (3). The relative success or failure of those daughters, as Marsh demonstrates, has much to do with how well they can discover, internalize, and in some cases, reject, that submerged plot of their mother's pleasure. Marsh has an immense scope to her inquiry: the mother's pleasure, the communication of the unnarratable, limitations to inheritance (financial, but, it would seem, emotional inheritance as well), the ever-dubious position of rootless women, and, ultimately, the potential for the daughter to eventually experience pleasure for herself. A constant presence, hovering over the women Marsh focuses on, is the critical, often lacerating eye of society, which she says dampens communication between mothers and daughters, putting any discoveries by those daughters at even greater risk. Marsh has not exactly overreached, but has merely threatened her own investigation by the sheer weight of her interests. In her first chapter, Marsh displays how both Austen (Persuasion) and Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre) utilize a (somewhat rote) marriage plot simultaneously to a submerged plot to seek out the mother's pleasure. Positing that Anne Elliot cannot achieve and experience pleasure until she has first discovered it in her mother's story also suggests to what extent the daughter is left in thrall to the mother's memory--including the many missteps of the mother. In her examination of Jane Eyre's utterly disconnected familial position, she suggests that the search for the mother begins immediately as a young Jane fights back against the Reeds--putting her own identity and selfhood before the selfish and constricting desires of the household. Yet a demonstration of Jane Reed's own pleasure (surely marrying the man she loved could not be the extent of it!) is never provided, and the reader is left wondering if the compactly powerful force of Jane Eyre's character needs no maternal validation. In this first foray, Marsh exhibits her meticulous (and occasionally labyrinthine) dexterity, which she maintains throughout. This is only expanded upon when she folds Charles Dickens (Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White) into a discussion of narration. In this second chapter, Marsh demonstrates how mystery plots, multiple seekers, and the daughters' own resistance to the stories of their mothers' pleasure complicate the already heady presence of both the explicit surface plots and the unnarratable submerged plots. …

Labyrinths of Conjecture: The Gothic Elsewhere in Jane Austen's Emma

In recent criticism, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey has been reconsidered as a comic rather than mock-Gothic novel, shifting its mockery onto a variety of other targets: domineering men, unwary readers, the violence underpinning English domesticity. I argue that Austen continues her engagement with the Gothic, beyond Northanger Abbey, using Emma as an exemplary case. Emma not only includes explicit mentions of Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, but implicitly reformulates the relationships between Female Gothic figures: finding a frail, victimised heroine in Jane Fairfax and a seductive femme fatale in Emma herself.

Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey , the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer

This essay explores how Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817) posits the engaged but ultimately discerning woman reader as an ideal in response to the dominant ideology of the dangerously absorbed, anti-social female quixote. Intertextual play between commentary on novel reading in the emergent genre of fashion magazines, Charlotte Smith's Emmeline (1788), Henry James Pye's The Spectre (1789), and Austen's Catharine, or the Bower (written 1792) reveals a counter discourse in defense of women's novel reading. Austen deploys this discourse in Northanger Abbey, shifting focus away from reforming the heroine, to show how quixotism initiates socialization and subsequently functions both to enable and emancipate the increasingly overdetermined and intertwined categories of women's reading and women's writing.

William Jerdan and "The Literary Gazette"

William Jerdan, Scottish by birth and education, arrived in London in 1806, at age twenty-four, determined to make writing his career. Like Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Dickens (Hessell), Jerdan began as a parliamentary reporter and supplemented his income writing for Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, which he bought in July, 1812. It collapsed in 1814, after Napoleon, main target, was defeated. However, Jerdan was already writing for Sun, and, in May, 1813, was appointed editor, with a salary and one-tenth share. Under pen name Viator, he contributed thirty-one articles written in Paris over six months after Napoleon was exiled. After a bitter dispute among other shareholders in 1817, Jerdan sold his share, dissolved partnership, and, on July 12, 1817, became editor and one-third owner of Henry Colburn's Literary Gazette, first weekly review magazine of arts, launched previous January and in its 24th number. At one shilling, three columns per page, it proposed to form at end of year, a clear and instructive picture of moral and literary improvement of times, and a complete, and authentic Chronological Literary Record for general reference. In December, 1819, Longmans purchased journal and took on management of sales and accounts, which Jerdan had found irksome and for which he was ill-suited. He announced new arrangement in issue of December 18, 1819. The Literary Gazette was ideally placed to participate in a new literary culture comprised of popular poets such as Byron, novelists such as Scott, and, along with other reviews, help create new reading public Among first to use lithography, it could be printed faster, more efficiently, and more economically than competing journals. According to Samuel Carter Hall in Book of Memories, Literary Gazette exercised immense power ... between 1820 and 1840. A laudatory review there was almost certain to sell an edition of book, and an author's fame was established when he had obtained praise of journal ... for a quarter of a century there was but one who was accepted as an 'authority'. The Gazette stood alone as arbiter of fate, literary and artistic. (285) Although, initially, Jerdan wrote most of reviews himself, he confessed that the dignity and stilts of authorship never suited me. If I tried to write grand or fine I was sure to fail. (11:174) Gerald Pyle calculated that, during time Jerdan edited, Literary Gazette contained, exclusive of advertisements, roughly 25,000 words per issue, a million and a quarter a year, totalling 42 million words--the vast majority written by Jerdan himself' (8). To help support his family of five children, Jerdan also wrote leaders for North Staffordshire Potteries Gazette., essays for Chelmsford Chronicle, edited two books for John Murray (for 125 [pounds sterling]), negotiated a copyright (for 100 [pounds sterling]), and contributed an article to Quarterly Review. Reviewing involved conflicting interests. Colburn, for example, wanted to use Gazette to promote books he published and other publishers courted Jordan to time his reviews to their advantage. Jerdan, however, in charge of selection, reviewers, and timing of reviews, wanted to publish objective reviews. Sometimes he was wrong: he overlooked Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, but featuring Washington Irving's Sketch Book, included excessively long extracts that would interfere with sales. The long extract was a common practice among literary reviews with advantages for both editors who needed to fill space and promote their own sales and for reviewers who were paid by word or sheet. Pyle calculated that quantity of extracted text from work reviewed rose from about 43% in 1818, to over 80% in 1847, when Gazette was in rapid decline. (68) Letitia Landon, as L.E.L., at age eighteen, published her first poem in Literary Gazette in 1820. …

“True Indian Muslin” and the Politics of Consumption in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817), Henry Tilney and Catherine Moreland's first flirtation occasions a lengthy discourse on muslin. Demonstrating a curiously nuanced attention to women's dress, Henry speculates that Catherine will document their meeting in her journal by referring to her sprigged robe with blue trimmings (15)* The two are soon interrupted by Catherine's chaperone, Mrs. Allen, whose pin has torn a hole in her gown; unfortunately the dress is a favorite of Mrs. Allen's, even though, as she confesses, cost but nine shillings a (16). Examining Mrs. Allen's damaged muslin, Henry remarks that he would have guessed the fabric's cost exactly, to which the astonished Mrs. Allen replies, Do you sir? (16). Henry does, in fact, understand and understands them particularly well, as he proves to his incredulous female audience (16). He boasts:I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown. I bought for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a yard for it, and a muslin. (16)What does it mean for Austen's hero to understand muslins, and moreover, to emphasize his penchant for those of the true Indian variety? I argue that Henry's preference for muslins constitutes a particular mode of imperial connoisseurship, a masculine aesthetic taste that performed an important regulatory function both within the metropole and abroad. As Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins has pointed out, the literature of the long eighteenth century often frames problems of national identity, global economy, and political power as privatized problems of taste, virtue, and individual desire (3). More than a personal aesthetic preference, Henry's fashionable taste indicates his adherence to a new masculine identity based upon conspicuous consumption rather than inherited or landed wealth.1 This consumerist identity developed in response to Britain's imperial expansion, which had engendered the importation and eventual domestication of muslin.Both Mary Hafner-Laney and Claire Hughes have addressed Henry's interest in muslin, though neither considers the significance of this commodity's origin or the ideologies that influence Henry's consumption of it. Hafner-Laney claims that Henry and Mrs. Allen's exchange about evinces Austen's enduring interest in fashion and underscores the fact that early nineteenth-century dresses were made, rather than bought off the rack (137). Hughes offers a more detailed reading of muslin's material and symbolic significance and argues that Henry selflessly transgresses gender boundaries to supplement Mrs. Allen's inadequate education of Catherine, emerging from the text as one of Austen's most attractive heroes (196). I would elaborate upon Hughes's reading of Henry and propose that his interest in true muslin indicates not only his personal investment in Catherine's education, but also his political allegiance to larger structures of imperial and patriarchal oppression.Through his self-appointed position as an excellent judge of the market, Henry controls both female commodity consumption and virtue, policing women's sexual purity through his interpretation of their dress. Distinguishing between and imitative equips Henry to separate honest women from artificial women and to subordinate all women to his expertise. Henry converts his knowledge of feminine fashion into patriarchal power, construing his regulation of women's social and sexual behavior as benevolent and necessary. Likewise, British merchants of the period exploited and eventually undermined the textile industry by appropriating weavers' knowledge of muslin. Just as Henry casts his criticisms of women's dress as a mode of generous instruction, British merchants, industrial spies, and officials often present their calculating surveillance of weavers as paternalistic aid. …

Leah Price. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

Leah Price. <i>How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain</i>.

Female Quixotism and the Novel: Character and Plausibility, Honesty and Fidelity

Verisimilitude (probability, plausibility) began to be cited in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries as the feature that distinguished the novel from the other narrative genres of romance and history. Observing that verisimilitude was borrowed from neoclassical dramatic theory, and defined in terms of (gendered) character typologies, I argue that the decorum of dramatic verisimilitude was specially implicated in the decorum of female honor. I explore the much-discussed shift in the European discourse around gender and sex during the same period, and the connection others have established between that and the emergence of the modern novel, as a shift from "honesty" to "fidelity." Specifically, I examine this shift in the context of verisimilitude and the fictional representation of gendered and interiorized character in the European novel. With reference to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, David Hume's History of England, and Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, I suggest that the aesthetic paradox of the quixotic figure in the early novel, and "female quixotism" in particular, performed, rather than directly representing or reflecting, this shift in the decorum of femininity from honesty to fidelity. In the process quixotism helped produce the effect of psychological interiority so often associated with the novel, by performing a gesture of internalizing moral norms that had traditionally been imposed from without..

The Waiting Game: Medieval Allusions and the Lethal Nature of Passivity in Ian McEwan's Atonement

In his seminal essay Tradition and Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot claims that writer's best work often occurs in places where the dead poets, his [the writer's] ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously (467). Novelist Ian McEwan certainly seems to subscribe to this view, for he imbues his works with references to literary endeavors of his predecessors. McEwan's novel Saturday, for example, hinges on recitation of Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach (see Hillard), and in Atonement, McEwan creates literary landscape haunted by specters of famed characters from earlier fictional realms. Indeed, intertextual quality of McEwan's novel about young girl and lifelong consequences of her terrible fabrication has fascinated critics of Atonement, particularly those who focus on novel's first section. Brian Finney, for example, regards Atonement as a rereading of classic realist novel of nineteenth century, just as it is displacement of modernist novel, particularly as instanced in fiction of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence (73). Similarly, both Earl G. Ingersoll (249) and Maria Margaronis (142) note author's indebtedness in opening section of his novel to country-house tradition, while Pilar Hidalgo stresses Part One's connection to works ranging from Austen's Northanger Abbey and James's What Maisie Knew to Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (84). McEwan does not limit himself just to mining works of his nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors for literary inspiration, however, for he also plumbs literary productions of an era much more remote: Middle Ages. The novelist peppers Atonement with references to storied medieval characters found in Chaucer's oeuvre and in Arthurian Romance, such as Troilus and Criseyde, Griselda, and Tristan and Isolde (McEwan 192). Additionally, McEwan subtly evokes King Arthur by having Briony, youngest member of self-involved Tallis family, mimic legendary Briton in her desire to wait for pre-dinner miracle (72). However, unlike his allusions to more modern texts, McEwan's medieval references have received little critical attention. Those who analyze McEwan's intertextual habits seem interested primarily in determining Atonement's relationship with other novels. For critics consumed with work's status as novel, medieval narratives simply belong to wrong genre (McEwan 42) and, therefore, do not warrant too much attention. Although Finney, for instance, does mention briefly hero Robbie's transformation into Petrarchan lover following his fraught encounter at fountain with his benefactor's daughter, Cecilia (Finney 78), critic concentrates predominately on ways in which Atonement offers trenchant critique of realist novel, particularly its method of cloaking its status as fiction (73). Alistair Cormack takes issue with Finney, but Cormack too focuses on Atonement's position to other novels, claiming that, far from criticizing realism as Finney contends, McEwan's novel represents return to heart of 'Great Tradition' of English novelists (79). Richard Pedot concentrates on Atonement's conversation with modernism (155) as opposed to realism, but he looks solely at modernist novels in his analysis, neglecting potential influence of modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, poets to whom McEwan alludes in his story's pivotal chapter (McEwan 77). (1) Thus, like medieval writers, modernist poets, who, significantly, often hearken back to medieval, find themselves--and their literary productions--relegated to sidelines in analyses of McEwan's text. Bringing works from other genres and, hence, other eras off bench, however, enables critics to develop new ways in which to tackle McEwan's dense tale. As Finney notes, once text establishes its interdependence on other texts, its signification proliferates (73). …

Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot (review)

Reviewed by: Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot Anne Mallory Elizabeth Sabiston , Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 214 pp. Elizabeth Sabiston's book takes up a scene central to the history of feminist scholarship: a heroine, circumscribed not least by gender, acquires agency through artistic, often literary, expression. It is easy to understand the attraction this scenario holds for feminist critics, above and beyond its self-reflexivity. As a common literary story and, for many women, a life story, it may have played a part in motivating many of us to become scholars. Having witnessed, in the last four decades, efforts to define and explore the category of "women's writing," in today's critical climate we may be less inclined to create narratives that group nineteenth-century women writers into a straightforward trajectory of artistic or personal development. [End Page 417] Private Sphere to World Stage examines works by five British novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Sabiston argues for a strong lineage derived from these authors' sense of themselves as living in a world that begrudges women the pleasures and powers associated with artistic production. She has selected these works because she believes they share a preoccupation with women's writing and its ability to affect the world. As she asserts in the book's conclusion, "The most important factor linking the five women novelists is their movement, however tentative, provisional, and anonymous, from private sphere to public" (190). The opening chapter focuses on Austen's Northanger Abbey and Persuasion as defenses of the woman novelist's craft; each contains a "buried manifesto" (3). After a discussion of mentorship in Northanger Abbey, Sabiston turns to the oft-cited passage, "Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body." She uses this defense of the novel form, as practiced by women, to set up a reading of Persuasion that emphasizes the gradual development of Anne Elliot's creative abilities: "discipline, detachment, shrewd observation of others" (33). Sabiston analyzes at length the scene at the White Hart in which Anne's semi-public defense of women's constancy — a speech that counters conventional masculine histories — prompts Captain Wentworth to drop his pen (33). By the novel's end, she argues, Anne "has moved from private sphere to public and becomes an eloquent defender (to an all-male audience) of the female point of view in literature" (56). In Chapter Two, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre takes up the pen that Captain Wentworth drops. Having recounted some familiar ideas about the color red and the meanings of "eyre," Sabiston embarks on a valuable discussion of Jane's knack for narrative. Reflecting on the manner in which Jane's abilities develop, Sabiston makes the excellent point that the novel which "begins with Jane Eyre's book being flung as a weapon at John Reed's head" ends "with Jane Rochester's book, the book that she has written, directed more gently and compellingly at the reader, at a more appreciative and receptive public that will be complicitous rather than compelled against its will" (80). Jane's manuscript allows her to move from isolation toward community, since "in writing from her heart as well as her conscience, she emerges from the private sphere and speaks to other women over a span of many generations" (81). The chapter ends with an interesting, though underdeveloped, discussion of Brontë's influence on Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy. Under the heading, "Charlotte Brontë: Only a Women's Novelist?" Sabiston suggests that Melville may have named Edward Fairfax Vere, the captain in his short story "Billy Budd," after Brontë's Edward Fairfax Rochester, and notes that Vere is also the surname of Georgiana Reed's suitor, Lord Edwin Vere. She goes on to make an intriguing comparison between Brontë's novel and Tolstoy's "Happy Ever After," which also features a female narrator and a silenced governess. Sabiston argues for an important distinction: while Brontë empowers her female narrator, Tolstoy disempowers his. [End Page 418] Sabiston reads Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as a novel in which "female literariness" challenges...

Haunted Heroines: The Gothic Imagination and the Female Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and L. M. Montgomery

Haunted Heroines:The Gothic Imagination and the Female Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and L. M. Montgomery Kathleen Ann Miller (bio) Using its popular competition "The Great Wednesday Compare," John Mutford's literary online discussion forum "The Book Mine Set" posted a challenge in 2007, asking readers to vote on whether Jane Austen or L. M. Montgomery, best known for her canonical children's classic Anne of Green Gables (AGG), was their favorite author.1 One blogger responded, "Wow, I'm really surprised at the number of people picking Montgomery over Austen! Although L. M. Montgomery has a huge place in my heart, I'm going to have to vote for Jane again. . . . It makes me sad not to be able to vote for Montgomery, which I would have done if she'd been up against almost anyone else." Many bloggers offered similar sentiments; the "Sophie's choice" of selecting between Montgomery and Austen proved, for many, almost too much to bear.2 By examining message boards and blog posts, we can see that, especially for female readers, these two authors share a hallowed place in the collective memory, due to girls' culture and youthful reading. Both authors have created texts that female readers read and re-read, generation after generation; and their works have earned not only devotion, but international popularity and successful film and merchandising industries. Yet, despite a host of similarities linking them, there have been few critical discussions that consider Austen and Montgomery together. According to Miriam Rheingold Fuller, whose "Jane of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Reworking of Austen's Legacy" (2009) is the first critical study to undertake an extended comparison of Austen and Montgomery, "Many 'Janeites' are 'Anneites' too, and for very similar reasons: Austen and Montgomery both write domestic romances in rural settings; both critique society's mistreatment of women; and, most significantly, both create compelling, memorable heroines." She continues, [End Page 125] The connections between Anne Shirley, Austen's heroines, and Montgomery herself are extremely complex. . . . I believe Montgomery enjoyed Austen's novels because she strongly identified—or in some cases wished to identify—with her heroines, and that she incorporates many elements of Austen's plots and heroines in the first three Anne books3 to help rewrite her own life through writing Anne's.4 Fuller claims that Anne's experience rewrites the romantic scenarios of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot in order to "alter them to reshape her fictional self and to comment on Austen's treatment of her heroines". Although Fuller does cite examples connecting Montgomery's Anne to other heroines in Austen's fiction, Fuller is most concerned with Montgomery's repetition and manipulation of Austen's courtship narratives, in both her fiction and her journals. In her essay's opening, though, Fuller also asserts that Anne is like an Austen heroine other than Elizabeth, Emma, or Anne, because she "frightens herself with Gothic fancies." Here Fuller makes a direct allusion to the heroine of Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland, and indirectly references one of the most memorable scenes in Anne of Green Gables (AGG, 1908), the incident of the Haunted Wood. Although Austen's Northanger Abbey offers an extended satire of the Gothic genre, Montgomery uses the brief, but unforgettable, Gothic intrusion of the Haunted Wood for parodic and didactic purposes similar to Austen's. In both Northanger Abbey and AGG, Gothic intrusions into these realistic female bildungsromane serve as a means of social instruction for the heroines and discipline for their Gothic imaginations. Moreover, these texts suggest that correct reading practices can lead to right uses of reason in the social sphere and that novels can further the goal of female education—both for their heroines and for their readers. Furthermore, Austen and Montgomery posit that once the false teachings of Gothic romances—their improper reading and imaginative practices—are swept away, then the heroines will be prepared for their own real-life romantic courtship narratives. Ultimately, though each writer cautions against letting the female imagination run wild, neither writer denies the power of the imagination nor suggests that a woman's life can be negotiated through reason...

Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity David Punter Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity. John Paul Riquelme, ed. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 236. $25.00 (paper). This is a surprising book. One might initially expect to find a run-through of modernist texts with Gothic elements, and wonder how this could fit alongside the admirably comprehensive Gothic Modernisms, edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, and published in 2001. But in fact Gothic and Modernism is quite different: it does not attempt to live up to any fictional notion of coverage; it addresses a very unusual canon—or anti-canon—of texts; and it is centred around a specific idea, or set of ideas, about what the Gothic has become in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, when it comes to expressing exactly what this idea is, the difficulty becomes apparent. It is in fact extremely complex, not least because, of course, it is articulated, to a greater or lesser degree, by ten different writers; but it also hinges on the suggestion that Gothic, which began life as a mode of grotesquerie and exaggeration, has now become horrifyingly assimilated into the [End Page 252] actual processes of history. The Gothic is no longer a perturbation or troubling of an accepted mainstream of historical documentation: it now records, in one sense, the actual dreadfulness of events and, in another, the state of a consciousness whose perceptions are coloured—darkly—by a sense of the imminence, if not the actuality, of catastrophe. John Paul Riquelme, in his introductory essay, speaks of a "doubling characteristic of Gothic writing" which "evokes the mixed, ambiguous character of human experience, which holds the potential for both destructive and creative transformation" (9): here the emphasis is very much on the destructive side—this is, after all, a collection of essays on the "dark" aspects of modernity—beginning with two interesting pieces on Wilde and Stoker. Riquelme's essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray reflects very acutely on the aesthetic "debate" between Wilde and Pater in the context of a highly developed opposition between Echo and Narcissus; Joseph Valente is eloquent on Stoker as a figure for the "metrocolonial." We then move on to a challenging essay by Patrick R. O'Malley called "Jude the Obscure and the End of the Gothic," which concludes with the following words: If Austen's Northanger Abbey rejected the Gothic because it was too foreign to English experience, Jude destroys it because it has become too familiar. Jude the Obscure signals the end of a certain kind of Gothicising novel as it does the end of an era; the Gothic as a genre has collapsed into the contemporary novel, because the Gothic has, indeed, come home to England. (75) Behind this claim lie two arguments: the first is to do with the battle for historical primacy during the nineteenth century between the Protestant and Catholic churches in England, the second centres on Havelock Ellis's remarks on the way in which the child corpses in Jude disturb the otherwise "realist" carapace of the novel. Each of these apparently wildly different trajectories converge on the question of what is Gothic and what is realist, and thus also on the question of what society does with the residues of its past, with the movements towards and away from, for example, "medievalising," with the depiction of the depths to which a man's soul might sink—all questions which obviously could be taken to summarise Matthew Lewis's The Monk, but which here spring into a different light—or, one might say, bearing in mind the notion of the "obscure," a different chiaroscuro. The next three essays move us across the atlantic, to consider Dorothy Scarborough's anti-Western The Wind, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Susan Kollin's essay on Scarborough focuses on how American Gothic seeks historical correlatives in the absence of the stock European Gothic repertoire of castles, convents and related scenarios; Charles J. Rzepka's essay on Chandler is fascinating on the traces of medieval, chivalric ("white Gothic") legendry which ripple...

The Literary History of the Sash Window

Invented in England in the final decades of the seventeenth century, the sash window quickly replaced the casement window, becoming a defining feature of eighteenth-century English architecture. With its liberal use of expensive panes of glass, its vertical opening system, and its novel rope-and-pulley mechanism, the sash window attracted attention from those interested in scientific advancement, supporters of new English inventions, and those who longed for what was new and fashionable. While architectural historians have long noted the sash window's predominance in English architecture, literary historians and critics have overlooked how the sash window often features as one of the few descriptive details in early modern fiction. After a short history of the sash window, this essay examines the literary significance of the sash window in works ranging from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver Travels and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

The Literary History of the Sash Window

Invented in England in the final decades of the seventeenth century, the sash window quickly replaced the casement window, becoming a defining feature of eighteenth-century English architecture. With its liberal use of expensive panes of glass, its vertical opening system, and its novel rope-and-pulley mechanism, the sash window attracted attention from those interested in scientific advancement, supporters of new English inventions, and those who longed for what was new and fashionable. While architectural historians have long noted the sash window's predominance in English architecture, literary historians and critics have overlooked how the sash window often features as one of the few descriptive details in early modern fiction. After a short history of the sash window, this essay examines the literary significance of the sash window in works ranging from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver Travels and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger (review)

Reviewed by: Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger Daniel Purdy (bio) Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger. By Susan Bernstein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 216 pp. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.95. Susan Bernstein's Housing Problems: Writing and Building in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger examines how architectural terminology organizes literary and philosophical texts. She presents striking new scholarship, moving clearly beyond the first forays to unearth the architecture of metaphysical thought. This is an important work that will be read by architects, literary critics, and philosophers alike. The author's theoretical alliances are clear from the first page. She cites Mark Wigley's important Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), but she has a much more nuanced deconstructive manner. When required, the book provides clear, useful summaries of major theoretical terms; however, it is mainly interested in exposing instability and the lack of clarity when architecture is invoked to provide order in a literary narrative. Bernstein's brilliant introduction argues that architecture is divided between ideal plans that lay out a structure of meaning and real, empirical buildings that often diverge into domestic complexity. Bernstein provides concise summaries of architectural reasoning in Descartes and Hegel as she elaborates on Derrida's key interventions into architectural debates. Her opening lays out a complex plan for the book, yet the order of this book [End Page 669] is never uncertain. The thread of the argument is never lost. Each chapter ends with a pithy theoretical conclusion that brings the reader back to the opening section. Bernstein is very careful about her theoretical terms; she is never jargony, and the simple verbs she chooses often have a rich theoretical connotation. These loaded terms are not repeated as fetishes; instead, each chapter has its own terms to describe how its texts organize and define an inside and an outside. The themes of housing, holding, containing, and walling-in run through the book but always resurface in such a manner as to seem fresh and relevant. The book is very well written; it feels well honed, as if each argument has been pondered for a long time and carefully rephrased. The title and introduction do not reveal just how deeply Bernstein is interested in the gothic, both as a literary genre and an architectural style. These connections become clear slowly in the first chapter in which she explains the importance of architectural distinctions in Goethe's formulation of education (Bildung) as a lifelong project. She couples a compelling reading of Goethe's encounter with the Strasbourg cathedral with the climax of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Goethe's musealized house in Weimar. She shows compellingly how texts and the museum embody the tension between abstract plans and lived space. Her discussion of Goethe's essays about the gothic cathedral goes beyond the traditional commentaries because she juxtaposes Goethe's famous early essay against the revisions he made in old age. The importance of the gothic comes to the fore in the chapter on Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, where Bernstein argues that architecture's traditional role as the physical framework that stabilizes meaning falls together, that is, literally collapses, thereby producing a distinctly gothic effect wherein signifiers produce and participate in the signified. In other words, gothic architecture shapes Walpole's narrative while lending it the telltale signs that define the genre—dark corridors, vaulted rooms, twisted, mysterious labyrinths. The novel's concern for establishing authenticity, both as a compelling tale and as a standard of moral judgment, depends upon a gothic organization of space. Having laid out the gothic novel's features, Bernstein reads Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey as gothic tales that mimic Walpole's architectural language only to bring about the demise of its references, most literally with the gothic structure's collapse. In discussing Goethe's Elective Affinities, Bernstein explains how the novel depicts the protagonists' failed attempt at constructing a coherent architectural hermeneutic. Bernstein goes further than any previous scholar in taking up Derrida's challenge not to read figures as metaphors...