Austen's Novels Research Articles

BOOK REVIEW: Amy M. King.BLOOM: THE BOTANICAL VERNACULAR IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Reviewed by: Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel Barbara T. Gates (bio) Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, by Amy M. King; pp. xxiii + 265. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £31.00, $49.95. In Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, Amy M. King sets out to show how the Linnaean system of botanical classification and its attendant language influenced English literature. King argues that Linnaeus's work led to a "botanical vernacular," a cultural language that extends well beyond scientific frontiers and into the world of novels. She reminds us that Linnaeus's system, dealing as it does with metaphors of sexual courtship and marriage, applied to plants a language used to discuss human beings and that in a post-Linnaean reversal, plant terms were more commonly applied to human sexual interactions. Primarily, King is concerned with the term "bloom" as it characterizes young women who have become sexually mature. As she explains it, "bloom" can refer both to innocent and provocative behaviors; in so doing, it can also help readers better understand key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels (which King calls "classical novels"), both their descriptions and their narratives. To this reviewer, King's argument seems both obvious and a stretch. After Linnaeus, botanical language was indeed used as code for human behaviors, most particularly in sexual primers where the analogy between plants and their parts and human sexual reproduction was carefully drawn. A botanical vernacular—and King's term is a good one—developed in part through increasing amateur interest in botany and filtered into many discourses. Tracing it into nonscientific avenues could offer a fascinating linguistic journey. But as King extends her metaphor to encompass one novel after another, in each case probing a "workable figure that could represent marital sexuality without transgressing the boundaries of decorum" (7), the reader's own bloom can [End Page 510] quickly fade. Does this botanical vernacular consist of only one word and its variants? Is it mainly another way of talking about the marriage plot or, along with gesture and action, of coding texts for readers in the know? And if so—and King does relate her subject to the marriage plot—how deep can her metaphoric readings take us? To a "bloom narrative," seems King's answer (4, and elsewhere), but how effective is she in showing us just what such a narrative is, or why it is important for us to understand? This last question King never quite answers. For the most part,King organizes Bloom chronologically. In order to forge its primary link between the history of science and the evolution of the novel, the book sets out a useful discussion of Linnaeus's work. It continues with readings of eighteenth- century English texts—novels like Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and poems by Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin, whose Loves of the Plants (1789) is strategically chosen. Next come close readings of Jane Austen's novels in a chapter titled "Austen's Physicalized Mimeses," where King weds the picturesque garden to sexualized young heroines. When King turns to George Eliot and Henry James for much of the second half of Bloom, readers of Victorian Studies may find the book of most moment. The chapters on Eliot and James are also embedded with readings of novelists like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Finally, the book concludes with a brief, if appropriate, nod to James Joyce's Molly Bloom, who might usefully have been contrasted with Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe. Bloom's strengths and weaknesses might best be probed by address to the chapter "Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms," primarily because here King extends "bloom narrativity" beyond the bounds of the traditional marriage plot to the subjects of "second blooms" (Middlemarch, 1871-72)and "clandestine bloom" (Adam Bede, 1859) (133). Eliot, King suggests, might even have found the currency of bloom cloying, an interesting idea in and of itself, though one not developed here. What this all amounts to in King's reading of Middlemarch is this: Lydgate mistakes bloom for love in Rosamund, while Casaubon looks for a blooming girl in Dorothea. Then...

"The Muses O'lio ": Satire, Food, and Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

"The Muses O'Uo": Satire, Food, and Tobias Smollett's The Expedition ofHumphry Clinker Nicholas D. Smith The multiple references to food in TL·Expedition ofHumphry Clinker are integral to Tobias Smollett's satiric recipe, and they relate both to the culinary etymologies of classical satura (and thence to satire's traditional preoccupation wiüi food) and to die culinary politics of eighteenth-century England, which centred on the opposition between English and French cookery styles. Classical scholarship has long acknowledged the symbolic importance offood in Roman satire.1 Studies ofthe eighteenth-century English novel, however, have left the topic offood and its connection with saturalargely unexplored (in spite of Ronald Paulson's classic study of satire and the novel), although outside the generic context ??satura, some critics have shown interest in food and its functions.2 Smollettdoes notconfine himselfexclusively 1 See Nicola A. Hudson, "Food in Roman Satire," Satire and Society in Ancient Rome, ed. S.H. Braund, Exeter Studies in History No. 23 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1989), pp. 69-87, and Emily Cowers, The Loaded Table: Representations ofFood in Roman Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Aversion of the following article was read at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference (January 2003), at St Hugh's College, Oxford. I am grateful to Dr Tom Keymer and the two anonymous referees of Eighteenth-Century Fiction for their helpful comments and suggestions. 2 Margaret Anne Doody, Vie True Story of tlte Novel (London: Fontana Press, 1998), pp. 420-31, Charlotte Sussman, "Lismahago's Captivity: Transculturation in Humphry Clinker," Engtish Literary History61:3 (1994), 597-618, and Peter Sabor, "Feasting and Fasting: Nourishment in the Novels ofSamuel Richardson," Eigliteentli-Century Fiction 14:2 (2002), EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 3, April 2004 402 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION to classical approaches to eating/writing satire. His literary and metaphorical treatment offood may be indebted to the Roman satirists' exploitation ofthe food-satire conjunction, but he adds extra spice for his eighteenth-century reader by setting his dietetic criticism in a contemporary cultural context. Historians of food have shown how culinary styles and practices were important in shaping and promoting asense ofnational identity.3Byadoptingsatire's traditional xenophobic (in this case "Antigallican") pose, Humphry Clinker enters into the culinary debate over "substantial" English fare versus French haute cuisine. Within these two intersecting literary and cultural approaches to food, I propose to situate my reading ofHumphry Clinkerand in so doing shed further light on the importance of satura to the development of the eighteenth-century novel by demonstrating that when Paulson describes saturaas "a form with ... even (itis impossible not to conclude) a preoccupation with food as symbol," the very prominence offood in satire is not nearly as extraordinary as Paulson's adverbial "even" would suggest.4 The culinary origins of classical satura exerted an important and enduring influence over the theory and practice of satire. In his Discourse concerning tL· Original and Progress of Satire, John Dryden surveys the four possible etymologies of satura: the first, which he rejects, is that satire takes its name from saturi, satyrs ("the Lechery of ... Fauns"); the second, that it derives from satura, "a Roman word, which signifies Full, and Abundant; and full also ofVariety"—satura lanx, the third explanation is related to the second, that satura designates "a kind of OIL·, or hotch-potch, made of several sorts of Meats"; and the fourth, that satura is named after legal bills {"Leges Satura") comprising "several Heads and Titles."5 Three of these 141-58. For a study offood inJane Austen's novels, see Maggie Lane,JaneAusten and Food (London: Hambledon Press, 1995). 3 See Stephen Mennell, AU Manners ofFood: Eating and Taste in England and Francefrom tlte Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), chaps. 4-5, and Gilly Lehmann, "Politics in the Kitchen," Eigliteenth-Century Li/i>23:2 (1999), 71-83. 4 Ronald Paulson, Satire and tlte Novel in Eigliteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 21. 5 John Dryden, Discourse concerningtlte Original and Progress ofSatire (1693), The Works ofJohn Dryden, vol. 4: Poems 1693-1696, ed. A.B. Christmas, William Frost, and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley...

Fanny Price and the Sentimental Genealogy of Mansfield Park

Fanny Price and the Sentimental Genealogy of Mansfield Park AmyJ. Pawl Critics have had a difficult time knowing what to make of Fanny Price. Lionel Trilling flatly declares, "Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like die heroine ofMansfieldPark," Marilyn Buder, arguing for the importance of the novel in the Enlightenment "war of ideas," nevertheless concedes: "That Fanny is a failure is widely agreed."1 The negative reaction to Fanny began early.Jane Austen's mother "thought Fanny insipid," an assessment endorsed by CS. Lewis and otherswho focus on Fanny's meekness and passivity.2 Odier critics have made stronger charges, accusing Fanny notjust ofdullness but ofselfishness and moral dishonesty. To Avrom Fleishman, Fanny is "a weak woman with self-defensive and self-aggrandizing impulses"; 1 Lionel Trilling, "Mansfield Park," Vie OpposingSelf: Nine Essays in Criticism (1955; reprint, New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 212; Marilyn Buder, Jane Austen and tlie War ofIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 248. 2 Jane Austen, Minor Works, ed. R.W. Chapman,vol. 6, Vie Works ofJaneAusten (1954; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 432; CS. Lewis, "A Note onJane Austen,"Jane Austen:A Collection ofCriticalEssays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 25-34. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 288 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION KingsleyAmis similarly complains that Fanny is "made odious by a selfregard utterly unredeemed by any humor," calling her "a monster of complacency and pride" concealed under "a cloak of cringing selfabasement ."3Providing the fullestexpression ofthissense ofFanny's monstrosity, Nina Auerbach, in "Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling As One Ought about Fanny Price," likens Fanny successively to DrFrankenstein, his monster, Grendel, and avampire, concluding that she is "a charmless heroine who was not made to be loved."4 A feminist perspective raises still other concerns aboutFanny's character. Making theby-now-familiarassumptionsaboutFanny's lack ofengaging qualities, Margaret Kirkham, inJaneAusten, Feminism andFiction, tries to save Fanny from herself by interpreting her as Austen's intended critique ofthe typical conduct-book heroine.5 The reasons assignedfor Fanny's failure are varied, but the critics' voices expressing puzzlement, disappointment, bemusement, and hostility create a chorus united in sounding a note ofdissatisfaction. MansfieldPark is a "problem novel" largely because Fanny Price is a problem heroine. Fanny's difference from other Austen heroines can best be understood through realizing her similarity to heroines of the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment. Fanny's personal traits, her family situation, and die relationship she has widi her uncle and fatiier figure, SirThomas Bertram, combine to make MansfieldParkin many ways typical ofthe novel ofsentiment. This is, ofcourse, surprising in an authorfamous for her mockery ofsentimental clichés; nevertheless, by noting the ways in which aspects of the sentimental novel are imported directly into MansfieldPark, I will demonstrate thatAusten's most puzzling novel is the product ofher attempt to take some forms ofsentimentalism seriously. Avrom Fleishman, A Reading ofMansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synlliesis (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1967), p. 45; KingsleyAmis, "What Became ofjane Austen?," JaneAusten: A Collection ofCriticalEssays, ed. Ian Watt, p. 144. Nina Auerbach, "Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm," Mansfield Park and Persuasion, New Casebooks, ed.Judy Simons (London: Macmillan Press, 1997), p. 64. Margaret Kirkham,JaneAusten, Feminism andFiction (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1983; NewYork: Methuen, 1986). MaryWaldron expands on Kirkham's claims bysuggesting that Fanny's imperfections should be viewed as part ofAusten's response to die unrealistic moral demands ofEvangelical fiction. See Waldron, "The Frailties ofFanny,"JaneAusten and tlie Fiction ofHer Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 84-111 . Another critic widi agood word to sayfor Fanny is Ellen Gardiner, who sees her as an informed critic, aversion ofdie Female Spectator. See Gardiner, RegulatingReaders (Cranbury, NJ:Associated University Presses, 1999), p. 136. SENTIMENTAL GENEALOGY 289 The very traits that mark Fanny as an atypical Austen heroine are those that bring her closer to the typical sentimental heroine. Our glimpse of Fanny's childhood induction into the Bertram family, including as it does dialogue and action as well as narration, is unique in Austen's novels. As Buder correcdy observes in passing, Fanny's "childish experiences, as innocent victim ofa callous household, are in...

Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel Barbara T. Gates (bio) Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, by Amy M. King; pp. xxiii + 265. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £31.00, $49.95. In Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, Amy M. King sets out to show how the Linnaean system of botanical classification and its attendant language influenced English literature. King argues that Linnaeus's work led to a "botanical vernacular," a cultural language that extends well beyond scientific frontiers and into the world of novels. She reminds us that Linnaeus's system, dealing as it does with metaphors of sexual courtship and marriage, applied to plants a language used to discuss human beings and that in a post-Linnaean reversal, plant terms were more commonly applied to human sexual interactions. Primarily, King is concerned with the term "bloom" as it characterizes young women who have become sexually mature. As she explains it, "bloom" can refer both to innocent and provocative behaviors; in so doing, it can also help readers better understand key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels (which King calls "classical novels"), both their descriptions and their narratives. To this reviewer, King's argument seems both obvious and a stretch. After Linnaeus, botanical language was indeed used as code for human behaviors, most particularly in sexual primers where the analogy between plants and their parts and human sexual reproduction was carefully drawn. A botanical vernacular—and King's term is a good one—developed in part through increasing amateur interest in botany and filtered into many discourses. Tracing it into nonscientific avenues could offer a fascinating linguistic journey. But as King extends her metaphor to encompass one novel after another, in each case probing a "workable figure that could represent marital sexuality without transgressing the boundaries of decorum" (7), the reader's own bloom can [End Page 510] quickly fade. Does this botanical vernacular consist of only one word and its variants? Is it mainly another way of talking about the marriage plot or, along with gesture and action, of coding texts for readers in the know? And if so—and King does relate her subject to the marriage plot—how deep can her metaphoric readings take us? To a "bloom narrative," seems King's answer (4, and elsewhere), but how effective is she in showing us just what such a narrative is, or why it is important for us to understand? This last question King never quite answers. For the most part,King organizes Bloom chronologically. In order to forge its primary link between the history of science and the evolution of the novel, the book sets out a useful discussion of Linnaeus's work. It continues with readings of eighteenth- century English texts—novels like Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and poems by Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin, whose Loves of the Plants (1789) is strategically chosen. Next come close readings of Jane Austen's novels in a chapter titled "Austen's Physicalized Mimeses," where King weds the picturesque garden to sexualized young heroines. When King turns to George Eliot and Henry James for much of the second half of Bloom, readers of Victorian Studies may find the book of most moment. The chapters on Eliot and James are also embedded with readings of novelists like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Finally, the book concludes with a brief, if appropriate, nod to James Joyce's Molly Bloom, who might usefully have been contrasted with Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe. Bloom's strengths and weaknesses might best be probed by address to the chapter "Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms," primarily because here King extends "bloom narrativity" beyond the bounds of the traditional marriage plot to the subjects of "second blooms" (Middlemarch, 1871-72)and "clandestine bloom" (Adam Bede, 1859) (133). Eliot, King suggests, might even have found the currency of bloom cloying, an interesting idea in and of itself, though one not developed here. What this all amounts to in King's reading of Middlemarch is this: Lydgate mistakes bloom for love in Rosamund, while Casaubon looks for a blooming girl in Dorothea. Then...

Rethinking Marginality: class, identity and desire in contemporary Australian writing

This essay fuses together a critical examination of contemporary Australian literary writings and a personal meditation about the author’s own ‘coming into being’ as an Australian: as citizen, critic and academic. The cross-cultural dimensions of this process are explored with reference to contemporary cultural studies of postcolonial and diasporic experiences of identity, as well as through detailed readings of a range of Australian novels. The paper foregrounds a position of self-interested knowledge, both as a recognition of the agonistic fluidity of cross-cultural identity and of the intensely personal nature characteristic of much literary fiction by ethnic minority individuals.

Jane Austen and the Old

Walter Scott and Jane Austen are antitheses of each other, in that Scott wrote historical fiction and Austen was a novelist of the contemporary. If history reveals the continuum of time pressing forward towards the present it is unlikely to be entirely absent from even works determinedly modern. Traces of the past are found in Austen's novels in references to things that are old: old people, old families, old buildings and the old objects associated with them, old places and societies, and old ideas and fashions. These references show her characters mostly favouring the new, and preferring the old only on the few occasions when either the prestige or the comfort it can offer override the excitement and liberation afforded by the new. Three passages, from Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park, all referring to old religious architecture, show the negotiations Austen's characters make with the past. The majority of her characters have moved on into a self-conscious modernity which turns history into something decorative and consumable which does not make too many claims. In the language of today, her novels show history being rewritten as heritage.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen: 'Rape' and 'Love' as (Feminist) Social Realism and Romance

Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for female reason in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains an iconic text for thinking through the his-torical struggle between claims to 'equality' and 'difference' for women. Wollstonecraft herslf embodies the antinomy within European Enlightenment thought exposed by simply being female . Jane Austen's writing career, following on from Wollstonecraft's death, offers a quite distinct mode of writing reason for women in her narrative work. While Wollstonecraft's narratives and theoretical arguments can be shown to raise as textual symptoms the deep struggle between female-embodied subjectivity and Enlightenment reason, Austen sublimates her own magnificent claims to reason in writing itself. Wollstonecraft's novels subsume narrative form to analytical content, dramatizing the sufferings of the female subject of Enlightenment 'patriarchy'. Both her principal characters, Mary and Maria, are as good as dead by the end of their narrative struggles, and these narratives founder on their own analysis of autonomous, rational female subjectivity as 'impossible'. Wollstonecraft projected a historical desire to repudiate the humiliations of femininity under Enlightenment patriarchy. Her work engendered a history of feminist reasoning to answer its painful questions. Austen's work, by contrast, seems to have floated effortlessly to the pinnacle of narrative literary achievement, while remaining uncompromisingly feminocentric. Austen's novels have a tendency to resist feminist theorizing or to fit the paradigms of feminist argument only indirectly. Tauchert explores this apparent polarity between Wollstonecraft and Austen as contrasting origins for distinctive modes of female reason in writing. Wollstonecraft's tortuous textual displays of female reason in writing offer a familiar mode of thinking about the historical and personal enlightenment of women, sustained in a tradition of feminist materialist analysis; Austen's pure narrative offers a hitherto more opaque alternative.

The lover as father figure in eighteenth-century women's fiction

This book is an exploration of the ways women writers of eighteenth-century English fiction invented a father figure who becomes the heroine's lover, and in effect proposed that these novels serve as conduct books for men. Wikborg examines the strategies of women writers devising imaginary solutions to the contradiction between the eighteenth-century belief that women could be safely happy only in marriage and the inequalities endured by the women in those marriages. Beyond their construction of the father figure as various types - guardian, princely suitor, mentor - Wikborg contends that women writers were exploring alternative male behaviors in their novels - that is, they were not in the business of upholding prevailing gender structures. Cutting through the distinction often drawn between the politically advanced novelists of the 1790s and their predecessors, Wikborg finds that many of these writers tried to transform the father figure into an ideal suitor who after marriage would recognize his wife's female personhood. The book is also the first to focus on lover as father figure across such a wide range of writers, from familiar figures such as Aphra Behn in the early 1700s and Radcliffe and Jane Austen at century's end to much less well-known writers early and late. Among the work's illuminating features is the linking of Austen's novels to their eighteenth-century predecessors. Wikborg's examination of the theme of the eighteenth-century father/lover includes a discussion of the figures of parents and mentors in an age when these roles were being renegotiated.

Recreating Jane Austen

Recreating Jane Austen is a book for readers who know and love Austen's work. Stimulated by the recent crop of film and television versions of Austen's novels, John Wiltshire examines how they have been transposed and 'recreated' in another age and medium. Wiltshire illuminates the process of 'recreation' through the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and offers Jane Austen's own relation to Shakespeare as a suggestive parallel. Exploring the romantic impulse in Austenian biography, 'Jane Austen' as a commodity, and offering a re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, this book approaches the central question of the role Jane Austen plays in the contemporary cultural imagination.

Robert Musil and Classical Sociology

The article argues for the thesis that the Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil (1880-1942) may be read as an exemplary kind of social theorist, a philosopher and critic of European civilization who exploits the literary devices of irony, ambivalence and aesthetic distance in order to communicate a particular style of thinking about the social conditions, movements, ideologies and contradictory identities of modernity that could not otherwise be expressed in the abstract discursive language of social science. The article explores a number of respects in which Musil’s writing can be seen as ironizing our frequent perception of modernity as dominated by the evils of alienation, anonymity, fragmentation and occupational specialization, by exposing the extent to which this perception expresses elements of naïvety and complacency inherent in classical European humanistic discourses centring on values of Bildung and the ‘many-sided personality’.

Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

In 1997-98, J. M. Coetzee elected to deliver the Tanner lectures at Princeton University in the form of a narrative in which Elizabeth Costello, an elderly Australian novelist delivers two lectures at a prestigious American university on the subject of the responsibilities of human beings toward animals. That narrative makes up the bulk of The Lives of Animals. In the absence of an explanation from Coetzee, we do not know why he chose that strategy of mediation, but it appears to function as a distancing device, a way of “insulat[ing] the warring 'ideas'” presented in the piece “against claims of authorship and authority” (Lives of Animals 79). The strategy perhaps originated in 1987, with Coetzee's expression of unease at being obliged when making a public address to speak a “language” other than his own–that is, to communicate in expository or discursive rather than narrative prose (“The Novel Today” 3). Storytelling, Coetzee declared then, is “another, an other mode of thinking” (4).

Slovene immigrants in Australia in Richard Flanagan's novel The sound of one hand clapping

The core of this article presents a structural and thematic analysis of a novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1979) written by a contemporary Australian novelist Richard Flanagan (1961-). The novel deals mainly with the life of a Slovene family, which immigrated to Australia in 1954. The story centres on the life of the heroine, Sonja Bulah, who finds herself at the end of the 1980ies in a severe mental crisis. Besides, the author of this article uses information about immigrants' life in Australia obtained from reports and sketches of a Slovene psychiatrist who treated immigrants in Melbourne. The author of this paper also calls the reader's attention to various literary allusions, which appear in the novel (e.g. Eugene O'Neill, John Keats, W. B. Yeats). It also appears that Flanagan was under a strong spiritual influence of the Indian philosopher Osho(= Bhagwan Shree Rajneshi) and his meditations upon life as published in Osho's book bearing the same title as Flanagan's novel and which first appeared in 1981. The novel is particularly interesting for Slovene readers, because it uncovers the emotional and spiritual life of Slovene immigrants in Australia.

Recent Scholarship on Jane Austen

Deidre Lynch, ed. Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Pp. 248. $55.00 cloth. $17.95 paper.

Racializing Babylon: Settler Whiteness and the "New Racism"

Since the beginning of the 1990s scholars from disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, and film studies have been engaged in an attempt at theorizing the role played by whiteness in the formation of dominant subjectivities. 1 Specifically, these theorists have suggested that most white people experience their whiteness as intangible, universal, or transparent, and they find whiteness to be represented accordingly in literature, film, and other media. This essay will explore these issues from a perspective previously unexamined in these theorizations, that of the postcolonial white settler. I will make an intervention into these predominantly British and American analyses of whiteness from the perspective of settler studies and examine how settlers, by way of an analysis of the Australian novelist David Malouf's prizewinning work Remembering Babylon, attempt to define themselves as white subjects; that is, how they represent and construct whiteness in general and, importantly, a sense of their own whiteness in particular in literature. Whiteness is produced in contemporary settler texts in ways different from those identified in the representations of whiteness examined by other critics. Specifically I am arguing that in contemporary white settler texts whiteness is not portrayed as unraced, transparent, or neutral, but rather is racialized or marked. And this desire to mark or differentiate whiteness in these settler texts is part of a general valorization of racial and cultural difference which far from benefiting indigenous and racial others through a respect for difference, conforms instead to ideologies of what Pierre-André Taguieff and Etienne Balibar have called the "new racism." 2

"Slipping into the Ha-Ha": Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen's Novels

"Slipping into the Ha-Ha": Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen's Novels

"Slipping into the Ha-Ha": Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen's Novels

The novels of Jane Austen are filled with instances of sexually risqué humor, but this aspect of her comedy has rarely been recognized or subjected to extended critical comment and analysis. This essay examines the way in which Austen integrates bawdy humor into three of her novels-Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion-in order to demonstrate the surprising prevalence of this material and to show how Austen marshals bawdy humor both in the service of a critique of patriarchal culture, including the system of marriage and courtship, and as a way to affirm the vigorous reality of female sexuality. In Emma Austen uses the riddle "Kitty, a fair, but frozen maid" as the basis of a subversive portrait of the profound linkages between courtship and venereal disease; in Mansfield Park (the novel perhaps most replete with sexual material) she wittily but also poignantly dissects the fine line between the marriage market and prostitution; and in Persuasion Austen's bawdy joking becomes a way to affirm the strength and pleasure of the female sexual gaze. This essay offers a more comprehensive view of the uses to which Austen puts her bawdy humor; it not only helps to clarify her fictional art but also breaks down the image of her propriety that has so long limited our full understanding of Austen and has rendered her less-chaste comedy especially unintelligible and inaccessible.

Mansfield Park (review)

Film Review Mansfield Park. Directed and written by Patricia Rozema. 1999. Advertisements for Patricia Rozema's brilliantly tendentious adaptation of Jane Austen's novel show a half-length picture of Fanny Price looking directly at the viewer while holding a key to her bosom; superimposed on her figure is a small representation of a Georgian house in the classical style, with central pediment and matching wings. It is just such a "modern" house that Mary Crawford encounters in the novel when she comes to Mansfield: "so well placed ... as to deserve to be in any collection of engravings of gentlemen's seats." But as the film quickly shows us, this house is not Mansfield Park at all. The house that the nine-yearold Fanny Price is taken to, in the gloom of a Gothic night, is a ruinous structure dating from the Elizabethan period. Its formal gardens, with their pyramid yews and elaborate parterres, are as old-fashioned as its architecture. Represented by Kirby Hall (the ruined remnant of an Elizabethan "prodigy" house), the cinematic Mansfield Park is closer in character to the novel's Sotherton Park, "ill-placed ... in one of the lowest spots of the park." Oddly, the Elizabethan Sotherton is represented in the film by a "modern" house (Kenwood). The ruined Kirby Hall serves as an appropriate metonym for Rozema's purpose, which is to depict the moral ruin of Mansfield Park's inhabitants. Aided doubtless by her "literary researcher" (mentioned in the credits), she reveals a familiarity with recent scholarship treating the issue of slavery in Mansfield Park. Though slavery is barely touched on in the novel—when Fanny's question to Sir Thomas about the slave trade is met with "such a dead silence" (p. 198)'—scholars such as Moira Ferguson, Edward Said, Ruth Perry, Maaja Stewart, and Brian Southam have argued cogently for its importance, even centrality, to an understanding of the novel. The abolition of the slave trade—if not the emancipation of plantation slaves—had been debated in parliament for decades before a bill was passed into 1 Page references are to Jane Austen's novels, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 4, July 2000 566 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:4 law in two stages in 1807-8. Austen's family had good reason to feel involved in the question. Her father was the trustee of a plantation in Antigua; her sister Cassandra's fiancé died of yellow fever off Santo Domingo while serving as chaplain of a military mission; her brother James's first wife was the daughter of General Mathew, governor of Grenada; and her naval brothers Francis and Charles knew the West Indian possessions well; the evangelical Francis in particular was a critic of slavery. That Austen was in favour of abolition cannot be doubted. She was in love, she joked to Cassandra in an 1813 letter, with Thomas Clarkson, author of The History of ... The Abolition of the African Slave-Trade (1808); and beyond her humanitarianism she seems more than once to imply a parallel between the slavery of Africans in the colonies and the slavery of dependent women (like Fanny Price) at home. In Emma, Jane Fairfax, fearing her future as a governess, speaks bitterly of "offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect" (p. 300). Armed with such support, Rozema clearly felt entitled to film Mansfield Park as a story of a world corrupted by its complicity in the ignoble institution of slavery. As the audience leaves the cinema, they hear the insistent rhythms of "Djonga," a slave song of lamentation. In the film itself Rozema's anticolonial aims are most obvious in the changes she made to the characters of Fanny, Sir Thomas, and Tom Bertram. From the beginning of the film Fanny is aware of slavery. On her carriage ride over the Downs to Mansfield Park she sees a ship in the Channel: "Black Cargo," the coachman says, "darkies" brought home as servants for officers' wives. Later, as a young woman, Fanny hears of Edmund's concern over the plantation in Antigua: "we all live on the profits," he admits...

The Tasman Sea - Common Ground That Keeps Us Apart

For a list of the kind of Australians New Zealanders know about, the title story of Lloyd Jones’s 1991 collection Swimming to Australia and Other Stories is a useful source. Warren, in a bid to gee up enthusiasm for a proposed migration to Queensland, tells his de facto partner, “‘That’s another thing, Marilyn. We would have new heroes. More of them.’ And he began to reel off the names of famous cricketers, tennis and league players.” (36) Whatever such heroes Warren may have identified, they are unlikely to have included the Australian novelist and short story writer Robert Drewe, in Wellington recently for that city’s biennial Writers and Readers Week. Warren’s ignorance, however, is not indicative of a parallel ignorance on the part of his creator. Lloyd Jones, who like Warren knows about sport, also knows about Robert Drewe. In fact, in the December 1985 - January 1986 edition of the short-lived Wellington City Magazine, Jones reviewed Drewe’s own collection of short stories, The Bodysurfers (1983). Jones’s ninety-nine words fail to exhaust the potential for comment on Drewe’s bestseller – published by two different companies, and the subject of seven reprints – but they do nonetheless focus attention on the stories’ most striking motif: “Bodysurfers is ... an exploration of the beach and its curious sub-culture”. The stories in The Bodysurfers are uniformly set at the beach. Jones’s comments on Drewe’s work are of particular interest when considered in the light of Swimming to Australia. Like The Bodysurfers, Swimming to Australia repeatedly locates stories at the sea coast. What is more, the symbolic significance of the beach in Jones’s stories is strikingly similar to that in Drewe’s collection. I should make it clear from the outset that I do not intend to mount an argument for plagiarism here. Far from it. No one writer, least of all in Australia or New Zealand, could presume to hold the rights to the use of sea, beach and coast as motifs. Furthermore, the recurrence of marine motifs is just one among several ploys for suggesting liminality in Swimming to Australia. Given the similarities between the two writers’ stories, however, and Jones’s obvious familiarity with Drewe’s writing, it may be that Jones has been influenced by Drewe; it is impossible to tell. This article will point out likenesses between the two collections, before suggesting a less polemic explanation for them.

"You're so Full On": A Portrait of Australian Playwright, Poet and Novelist Dorothy Hewett

"You're so Full On": A Portrait of Australian Playwright, Poet and Novelist Dorothy Hewett

Induced Recall of Jane Austen's Novels: Films, Television, Videos.

The film industry in the 1990s showed a special interest for Jane Austen's novels. The popularity of Austen adaptations in theaters, television, and videos increases the probability that patients and therapists may recall these movies in treatment. Excerpts from a comparison of an Austen novel with the psychoanalytic process are underscored and available film adaptations in video format are highlighted.