Austen's Pride Research Articles

Sighing for a Soldier: Jane Austen and Military Pride and Prejudice

This essay is a study of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) in the context of the social and political debates and scandals surrounding the militia and the regular army in England in the period from 1790 to 1813. I argue that Austen's novel contains a vein of reference to these debates, and that in portraying Wickham she was making a detailed commentary on the new culture of social and sexual mobility that the militia spread across the nation. I argue further that Austen's critique of the militia and its habits drew her into alliance - on this issue at least - with the Whig and radical writers and campaigners whom she is normally thought to have opposed: Cobbett, Leigh Hunt, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. In conclusion, I suggest that the militia helped Austen formulate her discriminating account of the changing gender roles and sexual mores of the Regency period.

A Burke Source for the Opening of Austen's Pride and Prejudice

A Burke Source for the Opening of Austen's <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>

The case against charlotte lucas

After two centuries, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice reveals an important but previously undetected subplot. It is Charlotte Lucas who manipulates the events to contrive a denouement in which Elizabeth gets both Darcy and Pemberley, and Charlotte's husband, Mr Collins, gets the prospect of a valuable church preferment. This lends irony to Darcy's complacency when he and Elizabeth discuss the way in which they have been finally brought together. Little does Darcy know that both he and Mr Collins are puppets in one or other of Charlotte's schemes. This interpretation dispels the anxieties of some feminist critics who feel that Darcy gets the upper hand at the end

Parental Responsibility in Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Parental Responsibility in Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Sexuality in Victorian fiction

Rejecting stereotypical notions of Victorian sexual repression, Dennis W. Allen argues for the central importance of sexuality in 19th-century English literature and culture. He combines insights from historicist, feminist and psychoanalytic critical theory to demonstrate that the erotic reserve of the Victorian novel reflects the difficulty of inserting Victorian ideas of sex and sexuality into the larger ideological framework of 19th-century English culture. Allen draws on Michel Foucault's theories of the history of sexuality, as well as the recent work of such critics as D.A. Miller and Mary Poovey, to argue that the sexual was perceived by Victorians as chaotic, anarchic and resistant to rational categorisation. In engaging and original readings of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853), Charles Dicken's Bleak House (1852-53) and Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Allen shows that these novels must be seen less as attempts to repress sex and sexuality than as efforts to produce and construct, and hence control, the sexual. Illuminating these familiar texts from new perspectives, Sexuality in Victorian Fiction demonstrates that an awareness of the sexual strategies of Victorian fiction is essential to understanding 19th-century perceptions not only of the body, gender, identity and sexual preference, but also of the nature of representation itself.

Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Hegel's "Truth in Art": Concept, Reference, and History

Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Hegel's "Truth in Art": Concept, Reference, and History

Marx and Modern Fiction by Edward J. Ahearn (review)

Book Reviews241 important documentation on a seventeenth-century life in science/philosophy and those interested in the topic should consider examining the volumes on the next trip to a major research library. Maria Sibylla Merian, like Anna van Schurman , was a member of the Labadist sect. EDWARD J. AHEARN. Marx and Modern Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. 231 p. In this valuable contribution to a growing body ofAmerican reassessments of Marxist aesthetics, Ahearn concentrates on the practical application of Marx to specific works offiction, unlike other American Marxists who, in various ways, take account of post-structuralism—Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, and Michael Ryan, just to name some of the major ones. The concrete results of Ahearn's close readings, which range from Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, are impressive and open paths that call for further exploration. However, despite Ahearn's successes, his approach still raises some questions about methodology. In reading Marx and Modern Fiction, I'm frequently reminded of two other American assessments ofthe modern condition via Marx: Jameson's The Political Unconscious and Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air. Although an oversimplification, we could call Berman's approach that of critical pluralism and call Jameson's approach that of the master narrative with its need, as Ahearn puts it, "to master and subjugate all conflicting theory" (xi). Ahearn's Marxism does not have Jameson's theoretical scope, nor does it have Berman's diversity. However, these differences give Ahearn's book its own virtues. To some degree, Marx and Modern Fiction can be seen as an advantageous compromise between Jameson and Berman. Two advantages ofAhearn's book are accessibility and scope. While Marx and Modern Fiction lacks the theoretical comprehensiveness of The Political Unconscious , it also lacks that book's theoretical remoteness. Furthermore, Ahearn manages to apply Marx to a more diverse set of specific literary cases. He addresses women's fiction (Jane Austen); feminist criticism (Luce Irigaray); homosexuality in the writings ofBalzac, Melville, and Faulkner; and he is able to recuperate works (The Golden Bowl and Ulysses) whose "aestheticism," Marxists tend to say, deserves at best only lukewarm approval. At the same time, Ahearn's treatment ofhis material is not such as to subsume Marx under the imperatives of cultural phenomena like modernity—an over-determination which Perry Anderson calls, in his review of Berman's book, a lack of "periodization ." Nonetheless, although Ahearn does a thorough and sophisticated job of linking the literary works to their respective economic and world historical contexts, his definition of large epochal shifts, such as what constitutes the modern, seems harder to locate. Of the seven authors examined, only threeJoyce , James, and Faulkner—would conventionally qualify as "modern" writers. I'm not unwilling to see Austen, Flaubert, Balzac, and Melville as modern, but there could be more discussion ofwhy I should. One might say in Berman's study 242Rocky Mountain Review historical periods lose something to modernity, while in Ahearn's study modernity loses something to historical periods. The question of what constitutes modernity raises other questions about Ahearn's interpretation ofMarx. The book's first chapter delineates what Ahearn views as the necessary concepts of Marx. The book then proceeds to analyze how well the works offiction correspond to these concepts. There is something slightly circular in this process which the book's chronological route, beginning with Marx and ending with Melville, reinforces. Furthermore, although Ahearn attempts to preserve the unity ofMarx's thought (as I think he should) by drawing impressively on the full range ofMarx's writings from the Paris manuscripts to Capital, in practice he relies most heavily on Marx's earlier writings with special attention to the themes ofalienation and consciousness. Using the Grundrisse , Ahearn makes his case in the following manner: "Doubtless Marx is committed to the central validity of the wide-ranging discipline of political economy , but no 'theory of levels' intrudes: there are a variety of ways to appropriate reality, all different but apparently all existing on the same 'level' " (3). When Ahearn puts it this way I'm inclined to agree with him. But in other instances, the use...

Psychological change in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

In the spirit of Jerome Frank's (1973) pioneering studies of universal characteristics in psychotherapeutic change, I have tried to demonstrate that character development in Pride and Prejudice can be understood in terms of psychoanalytic process. In the course of this thesis certain observations have emerged. Change occurs in the context of a relationship intense enough to disturb the tendency of personality to homeostasis (engagement). The change-inducing relationship is composed of a sequence of effects and countereffects (mutual influence). For these influences to be salutory (therapeutic) there must be a directional pull provided by the attitude of the primary agent of change, a pull that resonates with important motivations of the object of change (directionality). In Pride and Prejudice we recurrently found self-concept, and particularly the question of worth, to be an important interface of these phenomena. As therapists we are familiar with this as a clinical issue. Study of the novel suggests that self-esteem may play a central role in motivating therapeutic change. This observation raises intriguing unanswered questions regarding the conceptualization of self-esteem in psychoanalytic thinking.

Elizabeth Montagu: Bluestocking Turned Landlady

Eighteenth-century landowning was a man's world. Estates passed from generation to generation in the male line through the legal processes of strict family settlement and primogeniture. Those landowners cursed with a surfeit of daughters and no male heir might entail the property on to a distant-male-heir, to prevent it from being subsumed within the existing estates of a son-inlaw. Hence the plight of the Bennet girls in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, who were passed over in favor of the nauseating Mr. Collins as the result of an entail which barred daughters from inheriting Mr. Bennet's estates.' In the circumstances relatively few estates were run by women, and Elizabeth Montagu was something of a rarity when she took over her husband's property at his death in 1775. Having made her reputation as a leading London social figure, she now turned her attention with just as much alacrity toward administering scattered properties in Berkshire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland. She was active in building, in experimenting with improved farming, and in developing her northern coal mines. From the letters that she wrote while on visits to her northern properties a picture can be built up of her activities as a conscientious and knowledgeable businesswoman, and of her relationship both with estate administrators and tenants. It is almost a unique account for the eighteenth century, and it provides a fascinating cameo of what was possible for a woman in a world fashioned for male chauvinism.2 Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800) was the elder daughter of Matthew Robinson (1694-1778) of West Layton in Yorkshire. Her early years were spent in Cambridgeshire, where she developed an interest in literature. During the 1730s she moved into society, and her letters, mainly to Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, Duchess of Portland, were almost exclusively concerned with the social

Polly Doesn't Want Just Another Cracker

Until three years ago, when I participated in a writer's workshop based on the Bay Area Writer's Project, I taught English but I did not think of myself as a writer. I had written-successfully, to judge by the grades on my college term papers-but I had no desire to continue grinding out such gems as The Role of the Foolish Sisters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Instead, I was content to lay that burden on my students. But they saw even less value in it and displayed much less talent for it. They didn't want to do or learn what I knew how to teach. It was like trying to sell Edsels.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in the Eighteenth-Century Mode

It is no difficult task to cull from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice passages reflecting the period's taste in art and employing a critical terminology made widely current throughout the eighteenth century by many formal discussions of aesthetics. Thus, for example, two performances at the piano by Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, and her sister Mary, are evaluated in terms of the familiar antithesis, drawn in innumerable essays of the period, between “art” and “nature.” Elizabeth performs first and the author comments: “Her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital. After a song or two, and before she could reply to the entreaties of several that she would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display.” As for the sister, however: “Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.”