Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith [1st ed.] 9783030388287, 9783030388294

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction (Jacqueline M. Labbe)....Pages 1-18
Model: Emmeline (Jacqueline M. Labbe)....Pages 19-42
Mode: Women and Men/Type and Stereotype (Jacqueline M. Labbe)....Pages 43-67
Manner: Codes and Outcomes (De Montfort University)....Pages 69-92
Mood: (In)Sensibility (Jacqueline M. Labbe)....Pages 93-116
Conclusion: Co-writing, or, Who Wrote Jane Austen’s Novels? (Jacqueline M. Labbe)....Pages 117-123
Back Matter ....Pages 125-136

Citation preview

Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith

Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith

Jacqueline M. Labbe

Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith

Jacqueline M. Labbe De Montfort University Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-38828-7 ISBN 978-3-030-38829-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to Sean, Indie and Nathan; and to the scholarly community from whom I have learned so much.

Preface

This book is a provocation and a thought experiment. It creates a Smith/Austen bubble, mostly ignoring other life. It asks ‘what if?’ What if we read Jane Austen after reading Charlotte Smith? What if we accept that Smith held a prominence for Austen that had a deep, essential impact? What if we view the two as players on the same stage, occupying the same spotlight? What if we see them as engaged in a kind of conversation—speaking with each other—abiding together, as the etymology of ‘conversation’ suggests? Several of its ideas have been aired over many years at conferences and some elements have appeared in print. I am grateful to and acknowledge the following: • Earlier versions of parts of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘What Happens at the Party: Jane Austen Converses with Charlotte Smith’ (Persuasions Online 30.2 [2010], http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/online/vol30no2/labbe.html); and as ‘Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen’. Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism. Ed. Labbe. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008, p 113–128. • An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Pathological Sensibility’ (Women’s Writing 23.3 [2016], Eds. Ros Ballaster and Ruth Perry: 354–65).

vii

viii

PREFACE

I have benefitted from the thoughtful responses of colleagues as I have refined my ideas—thank you to colleagues who are too numerous to be named. However, there are always exceptions, and I must acknowledge my deep gratitude to Harriet Kramer Linkin, Sharon Ruston, and Fiona Price, all of whom read parts or all of this book in draft. Their comments and suggestions have made this book better and demonstrated, yet again, the intellectual vigour and amazing generosity of the Romanticist community. I would also like to thank Amar Daxini, whose careful eye ensured that my citations and references are in order. Any errors that remain are my own. Finally, and always: to my family, distant and nearby, and to my partner Sean, thank you for listening to me talk about Smith! Coventry, UK 2020

Jacqueline M. Labbe

Primary Sources

Austen, Jane. 1969. Sense and Sensibility. Edited by Tony Tanner. London: Penguin Classics. Austen, Jane. 1975. Sanditon. New York: Simon and Schuster. Austen, Jane. 1998. Persuasion. Edited by Linda Bree. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2001. Sense and Sensibility. Edited by Kathleen JamesCavan. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2003. Mansfield Park. Edited by June Sturrock. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2002. Northanger Abbey. Edited by Claire Grogan. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2002. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Robert Irvine. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2004. Emma. Edited by Kristin Samuelian. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2008. Juvenilia. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Smith, Charlotte. 1794. The Wanderings of Warwick. London: Printed for J. Bell. Smith, Charlotte. 1795. Rural walks: in dialogues intended for the use of young persons. London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies. Smith, Charlotte. 1795. Montalbert. London: S. Low.

ix

x

PRIMARY SOURCES

Smith, Charlotte. 1795. The Banished Man: London: T. Cadell. Smith, Charlotte. 1796. Rambles Further: a Continuation of Rural Walks. Dublin: Printed for Wogan, Byrne, J. Moore and B. Dugdale. Smith, Charlotte. 1796. Marchmont. London: S. Low. Smith, Charlotte. 1800. The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. London: Sampson Low. Smith, Charlotte. 1999. The Young Philosopher. Edited by Elizabeth Kraft. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Smith, Charlotte. 2001. Desmond. Edited by Antje Blank and Janet Todd. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2002. The Old Manor House. Edited by Jacqueline Labbe. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2003. Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle. Edited by Loraine Fletcher. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2004. Celestina. Edited by Loraine Fletcher. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2016. Ethelinde. Edited by Ellen Moody. Richmond: Valancourt Books.

Scene: The Cliffs of the South Downs Thoughts: On sudden accident, versions of pain, and the fortuitous availability of houses Hardly, however, had they unbuckled one part of the harness before a tremendous burst of thunder broke immediately above them—… the horses instantly reared … and ran with the curricle along the worn chalk way …. The terrified young woman … found herself on a bank of turf, suffering extreme pain, and supported by a stranger, who seeing her restored to sense … told her, that he had been fortunate enough to stop the horses at the moment when another step would have plunged them and the carriage into a chalk pit …. He added, that he had sent his servants to his house, which was not far off, for assistance …. [T]hat [her arm] was broken could not be doubted …. [T]hey reached an house at the foot of the hill …. She was attended to a chamber, and put to bed… Chapter 1, The Young Philosopher , 1798

PRIMARY SOURCES

xi

A gentleman and a lady travelling from Tunbridge towards … the Sussex coast … being induced by business to quit the high road and attempt a very rough lane, were overturned in toiling up its long ascent, half rock, half sand. The accident happened just beyond the only gentleman’s house near the lane …. The severity of the fall was broken by their slow pace and the narrowness of the lane …. [b]ut the gentleman … sprained his foot …. Mr. Heywood … entreat[ed] them not to think of proceeding till the ankle had been examined and some refreshment taken, and very cordially pressing them to make use of his house for both purposes. Chapter 1, Sanditon, 1817

Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

Model: Emmeline

19

3

Mode: Women and Men/Type and Stereotype

43

4

Manner: Codes and Outcomes

69

5

Mood: (In)Sensibility

93

6

Conclusion: Co-writing, or, Who Wrote Jane Austen’s Novels?

117

References

125

Index

133

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The Introduction lays out for the reader a summary of the critical consensus that Jane Austen wrote her novels with very little reference to her contemporaries, and begins the counter-argument that Charlotte Smith is pivotal in Austen’s development as a writer. It rejects the notion of influence and explores ideas of coincidence, forethought, and intertextuality. It invites readers to consider how two writers who never met could nonetheless be seen to be mutually interested in writing in the same model, mode, manner, and mood. Keywords Coincidence · Forethought · Intertextuality · Influence · Writing

Once upon a time, a novelist began to write. Over twelve years she produces ten works, each inflected by thoughtful and sometimes provocative approaches to the concerns of the day: the position of women and men within the law; how the privileged and the underprivileged react to war and oppression; social attitudes to adultery, illegitimacy, and enforced and consensual sex; and relationships. Most of her novels feature a female protagonist (though not all). Marriage is the main denouement, but it’s not always the reward. Another novelist reads the works and writes her own. Is there a happy ending? Two novelists walk down a road. One leaves home in 1788, the other in 1811, although the later novelist begins plotting her trip in the late © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_1

1

2

J. M. LABBE

1780s as well. Each novelist makes several stops: the first halts some ten times, the second six. Although their progress overlaps, the two do not meet, and the second’s first stop occurs after the first’s last one. Are they on the same road? There is a novelist who writes very popular novels but whose popularity wanes and whose critical reception is lukewarm. She falls victim to under-reading, preconception, and inaccessibility. There is another novelist whose work catches critical as well as popular attention, who seems particularly well-suited to reflecting the zeitgeist at any one time. Her novels are constantly read, often preconceived, and readily available. Which is the better novelist? ∗ ∗ ∗ How does an author signal indebtedness? In the period in which original genius and individual artistry became established as marking legitimate authorship, how and why does a writer like Jane Austen signal community? When the model is Charlotte Smith, who is not as yet canonized, what do we learn about emulation and imitation in a period in which the canon itself is not stable? When thinking about how two writers interact, a critical impulse is towards the instrumental (influence: one is indebted to the other and reacts to her debt accordingly). This book is not an influence study because influence itself is a tool by which one writer is elevated over another. The influencer can never be lived up to—or the influenced surpasses the master. Influence figures itself in criticism as hostile no matter the veneration that began it. There is a battle enjoined: a writer gives into or escapes from influence.1 This is Bloomian but not entirely so, as the Bloomian model requires a flavour of hand-to-hand combat, and influence-as-takeover can express itself without physical imagery. Nonetheless, within influence studies there is a winner and a loser, a dominant and a subordinated partner. Instead, I am interested in how Smith and Austen come to be important in light of each other.2 This is a greater challenge than that involved 1 The language of influence seems always to be gendered. 2 This could be construed, via Nancy Youssef, as giving thanks. Focussing on Pride and

Prejudice, Youssef notes that gratitude, typically a humiliating emotion, can be enhanced by the notion of giving thanks, ‘sundering the sense of obligation from the [standard]

1

INTRODUCTION

3

in exploring the manifest and manifold overlaps between Smith and William Wordsworth—there, at least, we had a meeting and diary and letter references, ownership of the other’s texts and a more coterminous publication history.3 In this pairing we have two mentions in Austen’s Juvenilia (of Emmeline and Ethelinde) and nothing at all from Smith, which is not surprising since they occupied very different social circles and Smith was dead by the time Austen began to publish. Instead, we have plot similarities, thematic echoes, character doubling, and shadows (and see below for the critical notice these have attracted). And we have critics’ metaphors: spectrality, kinship, partnership, conversation, assimilation, allusion, evocation, invocation, imitation, emulation, layering, ventriloquizing, covering.4 These coalesce around junctions, which can tell us how to get ‘there’ when ‘there’ is premised on mutuality. ∗ ∗ ∗ Smith has been noted in connection with Austen at least since Mary Lascelles’ Jane Austen and Her Art (1939); for Lascelles, Smith’s Emmeline provides an ironic reversal of type for Austen’s Catherine Morland (60). Critics have mapped links between Mansfield Park and Emmeline; between Smith’s early novels of sensibility and Northanger Abbey; between The Old Manor House and Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility; between Desmond and Northanger Abbey; between Smith’s poetry and Persuasion. William H. Magee, by concentrating mainly on diction and plot echoes, makes the case for many more associations, including Celestina and Sense and Sensibility as well as The Old Manor House and Mansfield Park.5 Magee calls Smith’s influence

feeling of gratitude’ (112). In this formulation, it could be said that Austen reads Smith with but also without thanks. See Romantic Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), especially chapter 4. 3 See Labbe, Writing Romanticism. 4 Spectrality: Katie Halsey; kinship: Glenda Hudson; partnership: Doody; conversation:

Ehrenpreis; assimilation, layering: Harris; covering: Heydt-Stevenson. 5 See Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1939);

Eleanor Ty, ‘Ridding Unwanted Suitors: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5 (1986), 327–329; Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, ‘Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History’, The Wordsworth Circle XLIV (2013), 140–148; Jodi L. Wyett, ‘Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey, the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer’, The Eighteenth Century 56

4

J. M. LABBE

‘profound’ and ‘pervasive’ (121, 127); despite this, ‘she offered Jane Austen no useful example in displaying everyday life, dramatizing inner conflict, or even developing the emotions of her heroines of sensibility’; she is ‘a vital source of situations, characters and themes to borrow, work up, and perfect ’ (128, 131, emphasis added). Smith is not, in other words, in the same league, unable to depict the social or psychological realism associated with Austen. Magee’s is probably the most sympathetic comparison. For Bradbrook, Austen is ‘indebted’ for the ‘odd phrase’ or ‘vulgarism’; Smith’s ‘lack of fastidiousness’ means her ‘fiction was only of negative use’ for Austen (104, 105). For Steeves, Smith is ‘not without invention, but in every aspect of her performance there was a novelist or two who could do better’ (317); although he accepts that Smith was central to Austen’s reading, his conception of Smith’s work is such that, like Bradbrook, he can see her influence as no more than negative, something for Austen to react against. For most readers, it comes down to this: no matter how many situations, phrasings, or character traits Austen may owe to Smith, she inevitably improves on them; this is the ‘normative’ position described by Claudia Johnson, where ‘nothing at all is wrong with Jane Austen, ever’ (59), here expressed in conclusions that, while Smith may lead to Austen, she can never direct her. Hence, ‘where Jane Austen differs from a writer like Charlotte Smith is in her unwillingness to stick by tidy dichotomies, or, indeed, to leave an earlier position unexamined’; or, to use another tone, where Smith’s attempts at dialect are ‘crude’, Austen’s are ‘unstrained’.6 The desire to present

(2015), 261–276; Jane Spencer, ‘Narrative Technique: Austen and her Contemporaries’, in A Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuitt (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 185–194; Anne Ehrenpreis, ‘Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1970), 343–348; Harrison R. Steeves, Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1966), 342; Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 104–105; Magee, ‘The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen’, Studies in the Novel 7 (1975), 120–132; Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6 See Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004), 126; John F. Burrows, ‘Style’, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 170–188: 173. In another example, Ehrenpreis labels the ‘literary conversation’ in Ethelinde ‘heavy-handed’ and contrasts it with Austen’s ‘light-fingered delicacy’ (347).

1

INTRODUCTION

5

Austen as the epitome that characterizes much of even the most recent criticism means that Smith can only ever be an inferior. Given, then, the critical consensus that Smith’s work had some kind of effect on Austen’s, no matter how trivial, it is telling that for some, she still does not feature at all. For a critic like Christopher Gillie, Smith simply did not exist: Austen was ‘extraordinarily isolated from contemporary writers’ (all male), and was the ‘first English novelist to discern [the genre’s] true potentiality and its limitations’ (for Gillie, all other important writers of the time were poets and essayists).7 For Patricia Meyer Spacks, Smith is conspicuous by her absence in a list of forerunners to Austen.8 For Isobel Grundy, Austen’s ‘best loved authors’ and her fertile influences are Crabbe, Richardson, Johnson, Cowper, and Burney, a strikingly maledominated field; Smith does not even make the long list.9 That neither Spacks nor Grundy, specialists in women’s writing, recognize Smith as part of Austen’s ‘tradition’ suggests that the job of placing Austen as a late eighteenth-century novelist, a contemporary of Smith’s (not to mention Burney, Edgeworth, Radcliffe, and others), is not yet complete. Indeed, the sheer frequency of allusion and borrowing noted by Magee and other critics suggests that Austen’s originality is a critical construction, and that as the novels of the period are reread and admitted to scholarly attention a new and fruitful focus will emerge. The burden of needing always to surpass her contemporaries and immediate forebears has had, I suggest, a distorting effect not only on Austen but also on those other writers, like Smith, whose achievements have had to pale as soon as the comparison with Austen is introduced. However, does Austen always need to represent the next stage of growth? Is it possible that readings of her consummate naturalism and realism derive from a conviction of the generic superiority of these modes in Austen’s own literary descendants, and a desire, thus, to locate them in Austen herself? The critics who implicitly or explicitly suggest a hierarchy in which Austen is always already rated higher than her predecessors often seem to base that hierarchy on ideas of progression and development: later (that is, more realist) always trumps earlier (that is, more contrived). Yet, 7 See A Preface to Jane Austen (London: Longman, 1974), 55, 57. 8 See Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2006), ‘Afterword: What Came Next’, 277–285. 9 See ‘Jane Austen and Literary Traditions’, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, 189–210: 197.

6

J. M. LABBE

for every realistically presented character like Emma there is a contrived plot element like Col. Brandon’s two Elizas. Perhaps, then, using realism as a yardstick means that critics have consistently underestimated the seriousness with which Austen views, reads, and writes her novelistic peers. If we no longer need to prove that Austen is ‘different’, then we can begin to analyse the ways in which she is the same. We know that Austen read Smith in her youth: as Brian Southam notes, ‘Charlotte Smith is the only contemporary novelist whose works are referred to in the juvenilia’.10 But Austen’s youthful references to Delamere, the faux hero of Smith’s first novel Emmeline (1788), and to Ethelinde, Smith’s second novel (1789), are matched by a series of allusions, borrowings, and wholesale importations in her mature novels that suggest the centrality of Smith to Austen’s development. As this book will suggest, Austen’s work with the novel—her facility with dialogue, her skill at portraying psychology through event and conversation, her ability to create characters that readers find attractive and want to read about repeatedly—follows from her reading of Smith, whose own novels trailblaze the future of the genre.11 Once we read Smith, which is becoming increasingly easy to do (all of her novels, for instance, are now in print), we can see how deeply she is embedded in Austen. Even ‘pride and prejudice’, that famous phrase, appears in Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), muddying easy conclusions about Austen’s source.12 Of the critical comparisons between the two authors, most note similarities only in passing, one or two sentences in a chapter dwelling on Burney, or Richardson, or Johnson, or someone else; or else overlaps appear as ‘notes’ style articles, plotting plot similarities. Again, the exception is Magee’s ‘The Happy Marriage’; Magee notes that Smith influenced Austen ‘the most frequently and profoundly of any of her predecessors …. Even [her] most mature novels’, mentioning virtually all Austen’s work and most of Smith’s, although (inevitably?) he concludes that Austen was

10 Brian Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 10. 11 This is not to deny or dismiss the impact of other writers and developments (scientific, political, cultural, and literary) on Austen. But it is a premise of this book the ‘Smith effect’ is disproportionately pervasive. 12 As Steeves says, it crops up as well in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1785) and Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796) (Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century [London: Allen, 1966], 342, note).

1

INTRODUCTION

7

the major partner (120). But most of the critics who note a Smith parallel do so without seeming to notice how many others have made similar points with different evidence. And yet, as can be seen when one reads the sixteen novels written by the two authors, all of Austen’s work has relied to some extent on most of Smith’s. This is more than simply a retentive memory; this is a recognition that Smith’s novels not only provided a language for, but in many ways spoke Austen’s. Smith infuses Austen; she is the bedrock to Austen’s story-telling and novel-building. Austen is not simplistic in her borrowings; neither does she borrow merely to fill pages. And yet she is not simply ‘imitating’ Smith either, as Jocelyn Harris, quoting Weinbrot, would phrase it.13 There is, rather, a dynamics of interaction informing Austen as she follows Smith, based on their presentations of event, characterization, and story-telling that outweighs the differences of style inevitable in texts published twenty or more years apart. Indeed, although almost all of Smith’s novels were published, technically, in the eighteenth century (the last being Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, in 1801–1802), their psychological realism, sexual openness, and class-crossing, among other aspects, place them as forward-looking texts despite their inevitable reliance on the language and ornamentation of the 1780s and 1790s. It is perhaps not surprising that many of these interactions are contained in Austen’s early works, the novels that she began in the 1790s, but as I will show Smith continues to inhabit Austen right through to Persuasion.14 ∗ ∗ ∗ The developing acceptance that Austen is susceptible to the impact of her times should not be surprising given the thoughtful ways that study of the Romantic-period novel opens our understanding of cross-fertilization. But in Smith/Austen terms, Austen is still the touchstone whose spark enlivens retrospectively the general interest in Smith. There is not yet a 13 Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. Harris’ book is foundational to understanding intertextuality and allusion in Austen. She unpacks how Austen ‘persistently and sceptically investigated other peoples’ books, concluding that Austen’s ‘book … is typically in charge’ (220). 14 As Siskin phrases it, ‘the issue of Austen’s revisions casts the question of “when” into very literal terms: are Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, begun in 1795, 1796, and 1798 respectively, and published in 1811, 1813, and 1818 respectively, eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novels?’ (127).

8

J. M. LABBE

scholarly book-length study that explores only Smith’s novels (there are, of course, chapters); there are shelves and decades’-worth about Austen’s. A mutual approach that stops at the junctions needs also to erect the signposts: coincidence, forethought, intertextuality? Coincidence, says Brean Hammond, could form a new field of research, wherein one studies how novelists rely on seemingly random incidents shading into meaning.15 Charting how coincidence requires a belief in causality and probability, Hammond gives weight to a technique that often attracts exasperation, a ‘really?!’ moment that can destabilize whole plots. Neither Smith nor Austen is immune from using this device, although some of the perhaps less-probable occurrences make more sense when one remembers the more limited and less flexible social circles of the time. Like mingled with like: and so the Bertrams mainly socialized with each other, and the Bennets and Woodhouses mainly kept to their class. Still, the production of just the right piece of paper/portrait miniature/character with vital information at just the right time allows the novels of each to move towards resolution. What if the reader, however, views the Smith/Austen overlaps and echoes sketched above as mere coincidence? Does that make it so? Coincidence means ‘we want to deny that there is any causal relationship between the events singled out’ (Hammond, 624). We require ‘a notable concurrence of events or circumstances’ (OED)—something to make us take notice. Instances between texts will only become notable if they are noticed. Causality operates when there is consensus. And consensus often arises from repetition. Magee’s ‘The Happy Marriage’, for instance, was published in 1975 and plots moments of overlap between Montalbert and Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and ‘Sanditon’; between Marchmont and Mansfield Park and Persuasion; between The Young Philosopher and Northanger Abbey and ‘Sanditon’; between Celestina and Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion; between Emmeline and Pride and Prejudice; between Ethelinde and Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility; between Desmond and Sense and Sensibility; between The Old Manor House and Mansfield Park and Emma; between The Banished Man and Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Yet this overwhelming list had minimal impact on the critical consensus, as noted above; and Magee’s own insights about Smith’s ‘directing’, 15 See ‘Coincidence Studies: Developing a Field of Research’, Literature Compass 4.3 (2007), 622–637.

1

INTRODUCTION

9

‘guiding’, ‘stimulating’, and ‘prototypical’ effect could not persuade even himself. Magee’s is straightforwardly an ‘influence’ argument, in which Smith’s importance was that she ‘pointed the way’ (129): not a junction, merely a signpost. Coincidence is easy to invoke in the absence of repeated and developing arguments, and Magee’s essay did not institute repetition. The scholarly community could not test his argument because they could not, by and large, access his materials and hence reproduce his results. In the end, coincidence is the equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders and, depending on one’s politics, a moue of the mouth: believe it, or not. A conclusion of ‘coincidence’ does little to displace either author from her critical location. Forethought: now, that would be different. Forethought indicates a plan, purpose, and deliberate causality. It is the transformation of coincidence into significance. It asks for interpretation, and it lays clues. It suggests a writer who is in charge, and whose comfort with influence lies in a conviction of mastery. It is a challenge: did you see what I did there? It is Magee’s charting of echoes. Forethought inspires descriptors, the metaphors listed above, and it sometimes relies on code. So, Austen’s interest in other writers and her modes of usage can be deduced through her reliance on kinship (‘[c]ombative and quiescent sibling relationships elucidate Austen’s view of contemporary affairs’16 ) or remembering or conversation or the spectral (‘literary works that hover in the margins of the novel, not always directly acknowledged, but always reflecting or refracting some of [its] central concerns’17 ). She lays the thread and hence forethought is also and only unidirectional.18 It is referential and if it is to work it expects recognition. The Smith that Austen read in the 1790s, alongside the Burneys, Richardsons, and others, gave up nuggets for incorporation. Forethought is visible when the source texts are as well; without them, it devolves to coincidence. Forethought usefully brings a source author to the table but only as a supplier. As happens to Alice at the tea table, strictly speaking there is ‘no

16 Glenda A. Hudson, Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, 1999), 6. 17 Katie Halsey, ‘Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park’, in British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics, and History, eds. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 48–61: 48. 18 Oddly, it looks back, behind itself.

10

J. M. LABBE

room’.19 Austen in this case is a consumer as well as a retailer (reteller); she is mediator-in-chief in a transaction between reading, thinking, and adapting. It is the nuance of forethought that gives rise to critical excavations and detective work uncovering her reading and her writing about her reading. But it is, in the end, simply influence on a positive plane (in that Austen is in charge). She advertises her indebtedness and her mastery simultaneously. The model of the solitary genius that characterizes the Romantic period for many readers is subtly shifted when a novelist comfortably alludes to a forebear.20 But then this model is also overcooked, as the scholarship of intertextuality has shown. Allusion, referentiality, recycling, and copying across all genres are more à la mode and becoming easier to chart with the advent of resources like ECCO and a broadening of paperback editions outside the canon. Intertextuality is primarily a scholarly construct, a way to theorize something like forethought but also to delve into the possibilities suggested by commonalities of roles, plot scripts, and naming in the novels of the period.21 As I outline in Chapter 4, it may be coincidence that both Smith and Austen have pivotal characters called Willoughby, or it may be forethought—but it seems a clear case of intertextuality, an intersection of texts, which mutually opens interpretation further once the junction is visible. Intertextuality threads texts together and is particularly strong between Smith and Austen since both also have a common stable of sources.22 Allusion is focalized in their texts and the subsequent intense beam illuminates the texts and authors in both directions. Whereas coincidence is critically empty and forethought empowers only the user,

19 As this book argues, in this scenario Smith, like Alice, sits down anyway. 20 For an astute reading of Austen and influence, see Olivia Murphy, ‘Rethinking Influ-

ence by Reading with Austen’, Women’s Writing 20.1 (2013), 100–114. She refers to Austen’s ‘deliberate, playful misreading’ of her contemporaries and predecessors, and notes that Austen expected ‘judicious, critical, ingenuous reading’ by those attuned to her complex literary landscape and how she ‘uses the texts of other writers to create her own fiction’ (101,103). 21 For an overview of how this works in Smith, see my ‘Role Play in Charlotte Smith’s Novels (1788–1795)’, in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romanticism, eds. Frederick Burwick, Diane Long Hoeveler, and Nancy Moore Goslee (Oxford: Blackwells, 2011). 22 Jennie Batchelor expertly summarizes how intertextuality operates in ‘Introduction: Influence, Intertextuality and Agency: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Politics of Remembering’, Women’s Writing 20.1 (2013), 1–12.

1

INTRODUCTION

11

intertextuality can begin a process of re-reading that can be transformative. Not only does it emphasize authorial communities (and hence kicks away the notion that Austen is unindebted), but it demonstrates interpretation and analysis in action. In other words, if Austen finds in Smith such useful stuff, we must re-evaluate what Smith is doing as well in light of her creative offspring. The demarcation between major and minor blurs; decisions about which authors are capable of what advances must be scrutinized. This has always been the case; now it is critically galvanized as well. Had Magee been active now, in other words, he might have written this book. ∗ ∗ ∗ So here is one nub: Austen inserts a Smith into three of her novels in significant ways, thereby elevating a common surname that, on its own, functions merely as an ‘everywoman’ signature. One, or even two Smiths could be overlooked. But Mrs. Smith in Sense and Sensibility, Harriet Smith in Emma, and Mrs. Smith in Persuasion suggest that Austen not only read and retained Smith, she also found ways to write her. By embedding versions of Smith in her novels, Austen signals presence as well as function: Smith is used as a device to speed narrative even as she in so many ways co-writes narrative. Mrs. Smith in Sense and Sensibility is a significant character, since she holds Willoughby’s inheritance, and it is to her house that Willoughby sweeps the willing Marianne in a comic version of the abduction familiar from novels of sensibility (there is, we remember, a deadly serious abduction in Emmeline). Mrs. Smith constructs Willoughby, first by giving him expectations and then by disinheriting him when he lives up more to his Burney than his Smith namesake.23 Austen thus assigns Willoughby’s inadequacies as a hero to her character Mrs. Smith while also giving her the status of property-owner—that is, ‘Mrs. Smith’ owns ‘Willoughby’ and by extension his narrative. This first Mrs. Smith exists exclusively by report; not even Marianne meets her, but without her the storyline of Marianne and Willoughby, that which hews so closely to Celestina as I argue below, would not exist. Certainly a different version could be written, but by calling her faux hero ‘Willoughby’ and giving him ‘Mrs. 23 See Chapter 4 for a fuller discussion. In brief, Burney’s Sir Clement Willoughby is a predatory libertine whereas for all his faults Smith’s Willoughby is not a seducer.

12

J. M. LABBE

Smith’ as an aunt who holds the purse strings, Austen acknowledges her own debt. But she hides it in plain sight: Mrs. Smith exists only by report and by impact, rather than as an active character. Emma’s Harriet Smith is both more central as a character and less central to the plot. Emma is so busy constructing romance narratives and plots for the people she knows that her efforts for Harriet are only the most protracted. Harriet’s function, passively to accept her story—which, as Emma takes most of the novel to see, equates to her life—being written by a more dominant author, would take only the slightest of psychoanalytic nudges to become symbolic of Austen’s desire to overwrite Smith. But psychoanalysing dead authors is notoriously fraught, and it is perhaps enough to note that Austen uses Harriet as Emma’s narrative foil, since the force and skill of Emma’s story-telling on Harriet’s behalf, rather than benefiting her, threatens to unwrite the narrative that is suited to give her happiness ever after. In presuming to compose Miss Smith’s plot, Emma displays her authorial weaknesses. She is shown her own heart through revelatory conversation with Harriet Smith; Miss Smith thus enables Emma’s final, successful turn to self-writing. Emma’s immaturity, then, contrasts with Austen’s confidence: Emma’s is a cautionary tale in writerly terms, an example of what not to do if one is a fledgling author. She writes Miss Smith’s narrative badly and Austen invites a sympathetic response to the plight of a character whose plot is borrowed, and ineptly so. The last Mrs. Smith is perhaps the most interesting. As Anne Elliot’s old school friend, Mrs. Smith functions as a window to the past in a novel deeply concerned with how the past constructs the present. Disabled, immobile, she holds the key to Mr. Elliot’s true personality as well as giving readers glimpses of a younger, more carefree Anne. Austen gives her a backstory that is strikingly familiar to readers who know Charlotte Smith: a ‘husband [who] had not been what he ought’, a knowledge of ‘that part of mankind which made her think worse of the world than [Anne] hoped it deserved’ (176). Mrs. Smith laments, as Charlotte Smith does in her poems and prefaces, that ‘there is so little real friendship in the world’ (176), and suffers financially, as Charlotte Smith did, from being unable to access funds tied up in West Indian property.24 Mrs. Smith 24 In an indication that the Smith/Austen relationship is starting to stick, Elaine Bander also notices this resonance, in ‘“Cheerful beyond Her Expectations”: Mrs. Smith, Adam Smith, and Austen’ (Persuasions 40 [2019], 76–92).

1

INTRODUCTION

13

detests Mr. Elliot partly because he has used his legal expertise to ruin her husband and herself, the kind of ‘chicane and fraud’ that Charlotte Smith inveighs against repeatedly in her writing.25 The biographical similarities of course may be coincidental, but Mrs. Smith’s vital function in the novel, to reveal Mr. Elliot’s true character and thus advance Anne’s plot, places her as another author-proxy. This Mrs. Smith’s impact on Anne’s unfolding story shows both more presence than in Sense and Sensibility and more agency than in Emma. Sir Walter Elliot is comically indignant that Anne should mix herself up with ‘A Mrs. Smith. A widow Mrs. Smith; and who was her husband? One of the five thousand Mr. Smiths whose names are to be met with everywhere …. A widow Mrs. Smith …. A mere Mrs. Smith, an every-day Mrs. Smith, of all people and all names in the world …. Mrs. Smith! Such a name!’ (178). His insistence, however, that Smith is a meaninglessly common name only drives home the point that, for Austen, it is anything but. This third Smith, whose presence is necessary for the successful resolution of Anne’s story, reflects Charlotte Smith’s abiding presence in Austen’s writing. With so many Smiths, and once we notice their number, repetition begins to suggest causality, overcomes coincidence, and foregrounds debt. ∗ ∗ ∗ This book proposes that we read Jane Austen as if we have already read Charlotte Smith and that we re-read Smith after we read what Austen does with her. My purpose is not to construct watertight cases for influence—I hope that I’ve made my reservations about the usefulness of that clear—but rather to open both novelists to a consideration of the implications of their twinning. When we read Austen after reading Smith we discover new and exciting things about both authors. Smith’s writing resonates within Austen’s in ways that prove significant to our understanding of both authors. Questions about Smith’s handling of genre and character (Gothic, sensibility, romance, etc.) become more nuanced when placed alongside our understanding of Austen’s clever and playful, and evasive, story-telling. And to flip this: Austen’s evasions of genre, her sharp wit and careful characterization show up as an outgrowth of Smith’s variety and refusal to conform to form. The infusion of Smith in 25 See The Emigrants, II:355.

14

J. M. LABBE

Austen only becomes visible, however, when we read the latter through the former. It is because Austen borrows from Smith in such a wholesale manner, utilizing plots, characterizations, and methods in all of her novels, that the intertextual weave of these two authors is significant. Reading Austen on her own, as scholars are wont to do, merely allows us to delve deeply into a world informed by Austen alone. Reading Austen after reading Smith opens up the extent to which Austen herself read and internalized Smith. Therefore, chapters will take the form of explorations of key elements of writerly process and decision-making and will address these via multiple points of contact between the two authors, seeking a new understanding of what can happen when one writer reads another writer so deeply as to reply to and repurpose that writer but, crucially, outside the parameters of mere imitation, emulation, or plagiarism. Chapter 2 highlights how pervasive Smith’s first novel Emmeline is within Austen. As the main Smith novel (aside from Ethelinde) to attract a specific notice from Austen (the oft-cited swoon over Delamere in the Juvenilia), Emmeline is signalled as foundational. More than that, however, the preponderance of the novel’s key plot points within a broad range of Austen novels allows for an exploration of how an author like Austen uses a template to ground her story-telling. Illicit love, vengeance, weakness, and culpability characterize Smith; the Austen of ‘manners’ and ‘irony’ as well as the more nuanced historicized and politicized Austen picks up on Smith’s angry and disillusioned plots and channels them to the secondary level, along the way smoothing and simplifying their moral relativities and complexities. This is not to say that Austen is simpler than Smith; rather, the Emmeline template suggests that Austen invests her narrative with an analogous, albeit tempered, mood. The chapter will explore ideas of plunder, modelling, and the generic. Chapter 3 posits that women and men are plotted in both authors via social and cultural scripts and role-playing. But both authors, interestingly, vary the mode of gender identity from the norm that subsists within their genre. Type and stereotype allow scholars to read representation and characterization as forms of historicized evidence. Smith, and Austen after her, diverge from type in their men and women. It is historically interesting and significant in literary terms that Austen’s economically astute Captain Wentworth, for instance, is plotted from Smith’s Captain Godolphin, and that inheritance and debt undermine masculine control in each. It’s

1

INTRODUCTION

15

equally notable that female characters’ independence of thought and ability to stand up to figures of authority are important to both authors, and that both juxtapose such women against more typical wilting heroines. Smith and Austen do not write characters à la mode; they write characters contre la mode in thoughtful and nuanced ways. Indeed, Austen develops Smith’s approach by writing spirited women ‘two ways’: Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford, for instance, share a personality but not a plot. The chapter suggests that Smith’s interest in varying mode marks a path for Austen. Chapter 4 will explore manner in terms of conduct and interpersonal and community-based interaction. The societies plotted by Smith and Austen rely on codes of conduct that regulate behaviour: politeness, observed hierarchies, costume, occasion. However, these overt forms of social control interest both authors less than do those drawing on secrecy, covertness, and emotional manipulation. Focussing on two paired sets of novels, the chapter will explore surveillance and seduction and their associated codes and outcomes. It’s not simply that both authors are interested in the manner by which people observe and punish each other; it’s that Austen rewrites Smith and Smith pre-writes26 Austen. Surveillance in an age of war and terror puts even the reader in a compromised position and obviates privacy. Seduction loses any romantic gloss when it is paired with punishment and discovery. The chapter, in closely comparing narratives, speculates that Smith and Austen are particularly aware of what ‘manner’ makes, and what it undoes. Chapter 5 will demonstrate how Austen draws from Smith an understanding of temperament and mood as reflective of selfhood but also restrictive. The trope of sensibility is compromised by the time Austen is publishing, and is undergoing substantial revision during her formative writing years—the years Smith plots out a keenly thoughtful deconstruction of its attractions. How characters feel, how others react to their feelings, what actions are prompted by feeling, and how feeling transmutes to mood: the impact of feeling rightly, wrongly, violently, and badly compels plots in which characters suffer and cause suffering. Feeling is both an illness and a weapon; the mood, tone, and timbre of the novels, notwithstanding happy endings and suitable marriages, infuses lightness

26 Preplots?

16

J. M. LABBE

with shadow. Indeed, the visibility of shadow in Smith, and the transferral of Smith to Austen, requires a re-evaluation of Austen’s playfulness. Why do characters need to suffer? Why should love provoke violence? Why does sensibility mute its victims? The chapter demonstrates how Smith, and then Austen, mandate that sensibility-as-mood reverse and undo itself. ∗ ∗ ∗ The linear nature of influence means that someone’s example must always precede someone else’s. The chancy nature of coincidence means that the most elaborately reasoned argument with the tightest seams may still be only a fantasy. The scholarly nature of intertextuality means that as long as I can tick the right boxes it’s up to someone else to disagree. I opened this chapter with three scenarios that posed exam questions. My answers are: yes, yes, and both.

References Bage, Robert. 2002. Hermsprong: Or, Man as He Is Not. Edited by Pamela Perkins. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Bander, Elaine. 2018. “Cheerful Beyond Her Expectations”: Mrs. Smith, Adam Smith, and Austen. Persuasions 40: 76–92. Batchelor, Jennie. 2013. Introduction: Influence, Intertextuality and Agency: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Politics of Remembering. Women’s Writing 20: 1–12. Bradbrook, Frank. 1967. Jane Austen and Her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrows, John. 1997. Style. In The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, 170–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doody, Margaret. 1986. Jane Austen’s Reading. In The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey, 347–363. New York: Macmillan Press. Ehrenpreis, Anne. 1970. Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25: 343–348. Gillie, Christopher. 1974. A Preface to Jane Austen. London: Longman. Grundy, Isobel. 1997. Jane Austen and Literary Traditions. In The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, 189–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1

INTRODUCTION

17

Halsey, Katie. 2005. Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park. In British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics, and History, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, 48–61. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammond, Brean. 2007. Coincidence Studies: Developing a Field of Research. Literature Compass 4: 622–637. Harris, Jocelyn. 2003. Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. 2013. Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History. The Wordsworth Circle 44: 140–148. Hudson, Glenda. 1999. Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Johnson, Claudia. 1989. A “Sweet Face as White as Death”: Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility. Novel 22: 159–174. Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2004. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2011. Role Play in Charlotte Smith’s Novels (1788–1795). In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romanticism, ed. Frederick Burwick, Diane Long Hoeveler, and Nancy Moore Goslee. Oxford: Blackwells. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2011. Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lascelles, Mary. 1939. Jane Austen and Her Art. London: Oxford University Press. Lee, Sophia. 2000. The Recess. Edited by April Alliston. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Magee, William. 1975. The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen. Studies in the Novel 7: 120–132. Murphy, Olivia. 2013. Rethinking Influence by Reading with Austen. Women’s Writing 20: 100–114. Siskin, Clifford. 1988. The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Southam, Brian. 1964. Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spacks, Patricia. 2006. Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spencer, Jane. 2012. Narrative Technique: Austen and Her Contemporaries. In A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuitt, 185–194. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Steeves, Harrison. 1966. Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century. London: George Allen and Unwin. Ty, Eleanor. 1986. Ridding Unwanted Suitors: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5: 327–328.

18

J. M. LABBE

Waldron, Mary. 1999. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyett, Jodi. 2015. Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey, the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer. The Eighteenth Century 56: 261–276. Youssef, Nancy. 2013. Romantic Intimacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Model: Emmeline

Abstract This chapter highlights how pervasive Smith’s first novel Emmeline is within Austen. As the main Smith novel (aside from Ethelinde) to attract a specific notice from Austen (the oft-cited swoon over Delamere in the Juvenilia), Emmeline is signalled as foundational. More than that, however, the preponderance of the novel’s key plot points within a broad range of Austen novels allows for an exploration of how an author like Austen uses a template to ground her story-telling. The Emmeline template suggests that Austen invests her narrative with an analogous, albeit tempered, mood. The chapter will explore ideas of plunder, modelling, and the generic. Keywords Mode · Script · Role-playing · Type · Stereotype

( Generics /Genus) There is a child. There is a castle. There is a scandal. There is a mystery. There is growth. There are ructions. There is death. There are arrivals. There is self-sabotage. There is a threat. There is desire. There is love. There are declarations. There is pursuit. There is friendship. There is sisterhood. There is marriage. There is a woman, handsome, admired, passionate, at risk. There is a woman, magisterial, dictatorial, bombastic. There is a woman, rational

© The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_2

19

20

J. M. LABBE

and unhappy. There is a woman, independent, or decorous, or selfwilled, or sensuous, or giddy, or lonely, or submissive, or thoughtful, or traumatized. There is a man, impulsive and self-willed. There is a man, thoughtful, mature, reserved. There is a man, consumed by family pride. There is a man, rakish, irresponsible, punished. There is a story that is told again and again after its initial telling. It is about a woman and a man and another man; and to one side a woman and a man and another man; and to another side a woman and a man and another man; and to another side a woman and another woman and a man. In the background, as backdrop, a castle, a history, some law, some wrongdoing. We see Emmeline and Delamere and Godolphin; Adelina and Trelawney and Fitz-Edward; Lady Frances and her husband and her lover; Emmeline and Lady Montreville and Delamere. We learn about Mowbray Castle, Emmeline’s legitimacy, her claim to property, the attempts by others to disencumber/disavow/discommode her. The generic is a term to mean the underlying plot, structure, and characterization standard that appears often enough to be seen as expected and typical. It provides both an exemplar of genre and a pattern, model or template for onward use. Emmeline to a certain extent escapes generic boundaries, being a novel of sensibility and anti-sensibility; a novel of romantic courtship and of carnal pursuit; a novel of manners and of the unmannerly. It poses the question ‘what is a novel’ even as the novel is still being given shape. It is inhabited by realistic people and also by caricatures, who display realistic behaviours and also theatrical gesturing. Emmeline delves into the psychology of toxic masculinity and poisoned (and poisonous) femininity. It is generic to itself, Smithian in the freedom it exhibits to pick and choose and cohere and inaugurate. At its heart, it tells a story of people who love each other or themselves, who choose both or neither, who use structures to harm and help and hinder—and it provokes into existence a genus, a class of its own common things. The woman and the man and the castle and the history and the actions settle into their space and place and pattern, a model of a story that proves irresistible to another reader and writer. ∗ ∗ ∗ When Charlotte Smith published Emmeline in 1788, she was well-known and highly regarded as the author of the heart-rending Elegiac Sonnets

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

21

(1784; and in its fifth edition by 1788). Her poetry established her voice as sorrowful, afflicted, highly literate, and performative; her Prefaces added anger, strength, independence, and agency. She was ‘Charlotte Smith, of Bignor Park, in Sussex’; she was a mother; she was independent of a worthless husband and happy to say so. Emmeline went into three editions within eighteen months, making her some money and extending her authorial voice to one of narrative power and imaginative scope. The novel both spoke to the fashion for sensibility and subverted its allure. Indeed, when Mary Wollstonecraft in her anonymous review described Lady Adelina Trelawney’s ‘theatrical contrition’ and called her ‘a character as absurd as dangerous’, she may have meant to critique Smith’s story-telling. Instead, she spies through a keyhole the forcefulness of a novel that simultaneously pleased the critics, massaged their sense of what is appropriate for an ‘amiable authoress’, adhered to type, and broke its own mould—while settling into the creative imagination of the teenage Jane Austen.1 Austen reads Smith’s novels carefully, retains their plots, and understands what I call their modernity. As this book will suggest, she renders and re-renders Smith so that her main narratives map, in significant ways, closely on to Smith’s. Her six complete and mature novels resonate with Emmeline.2 Frederick Delamere, who captures her attention in ‘The History of England’ as a modern-day Lord Essex, completes his storyline as a more excitable and active Edmund Bertram when his unhappily married sister runs off with a rake figure, Chevalier de Bellozane, who had spent most of his plot line, Henry Crawford-like, wooing Emmeline. When the news is known, Delamere fights de Bellozane and is fatally injured. ‘“Oh! my father! my father!”’ exclaims Delamere’s other married sister, Fannylike: ‘“What will become of him when he hears this?”’ (470). Meanwhile, the adulterous sister is imprisoned indefinitely in a French convent, Marialike, with a lettre de câchet obtained by her husband. Austen leaves out the duel and adapts the mode of imprisonment.

1 For Wollstonecraft, see her anonymous review in The Analytical Review (July 1788), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (1989, vol. 7, 22– 27). For the ‘amiable authoress’, see the anonymous review in The Monthly Review. For both see Emmeline, ed. Loraine Fletcher (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003), 480. 2 See Stephen Derry, ‘The Ellesmeres and the Elliots: Charlotte Smith’s Influence on Persuasion’, Persuasions 12 (1990), 69–70.

22

J. M. LABBE

Meanwhile, Emma famously needs to learn her own mind and accept not only who she loves, but that she loves at all, just as Emmeline does. Although Emmeline occupies a social position in every way the obverse of Emma’s, this is itself suggestive: self-knowledge does not depend on who one’s father is, but rather on who one sees oneself to be. Whether this is the socially secure Emma at Hartfield or the peripatetic and marginalized Emmeline, moments of truth come from self-scrutiny: ‘That she was most partial to Godolphin, [Emmeline] could no longer attempt to conceal from herself’ (361); ‘A few minutes were sufficient for making [Emma] acquainted with her whole heart’ (382). And Austen follows Smith in relaying the moment of the declaration of love through free indirect discourse: ‘Godolphin, however, was … pressing; and at length brought [Emmeline] to confess, with blushes, and even with tears, her early and long partiality for him…’ (417); ‘[Emma] spoke … on being so entreated. What did she say? … She said enough to show there need not be despair’ (366). Emmeline offers Emma a pattern of psychological inwardness which, for both authors, is a marker of modernity. And Emmeline also haunts Persuasion in a way that suggests that for Austen, Smith’s first novel is constantly, actively present. Persuasion, Austen’s last complete novel, written in 1815–1816, represents for most readers her maturity; its spare narrative and bleak tone contrast strongly with the densely narrated and optimistic Emma. But its tale of a woman whose life seems blighted by her passivity and her susceptibility to persuasion acts as a counter-narrative to that of Emmeline, for Smith’s protagonist is notable for her resistance to persuasion. Throughout the text she is badgered by Delamere to marry him, hounded by Lord Montreville and his agents to renounce Delamere, and, most difficult of all, exhorted by her close friend, Delamere’s sister Augusta (Lady Westhaven), to accept him as her husband. Emmeline will not be persuaded to marry a man she does not love, although she esteems him; Anne Elliot is rather easily persuaded not to marry a man she does love. Emmeline offers multiple scenes where Emmeline’s firmness and confidence in her own judgement are reaffirmed; Persuasion outlines Anne’s journey towards such confidence and firmness. ‘“When I yielded, I thought it was to duty”’, says Anne (251); Emmeline understands that it is her duty to herself that requires her not to yield. Emmeline gets her Captain Godolphin, and Anne her Captain Wentworth, but for all the happy nuptials Persuasion’s preference for duty to others over duty to oneself represents a narrowing of the options contained in Emmeline. Has 27 years made such a difference?

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

23

∗ ∗ ∗ Can a novel inhabit an oeuvre to the extent that it becomes a model? Can Emmeline underpin Austen so that she returns again and again to its contours? Can a text prove its mode, provide plunder, supply plot, tell its story in different voices, be both specific to itself and generic to another? Can it create its own system by feeding another? Stephen Voyce’s theory of ‘open source poetics or commons-based poetics’ is ‘based on a decentralized and nonproprietary model of shared cultural codes, networks of dissemination, and collaborative authorship’ in which ‘acts of appropriation are ultimately shaped by our attitudes towards originality, authorship, property, and the ontological status of art objects’.3 For Voyce, ‘the history of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde is a history of plundering, transforming, excavating, cataloguing, splicing, and sharing the creative output of others’ (408). He locates this in the modern and contemporary period and describes the extension of copyright at the turn of the twenty-first century as a reaction. Compare Michael Gamer, whose work on copyright at the turn of the nineteenth century suggests an earlier genesis for a commons of literature, if such an entity is galvanized by moves towards restricting common access.4 And consider whether Tilar Mazzeo’s unpicking of the weft of the plagiaristic is subtly reflective of a Romantic-period open-source environment.5 Is Emmeline Austen’s private open-source commons, her source-code? Perhaps Tina Lupton’s definition of ‘contingency’ as ‘referring to something that already is, and … making it apparent that it need not have been so’ comes into play as well.6 Lupton sees the eighteenthcentury novel as pretending chance (is this ‘coincidence’?). Stories come into being, sui generis, as if they are told by continually surprised narrators. This fictive fiction-making figures the ‘codex’, ‘a machine that makes

3 In music, he calls this ‘plunderphonics’. See Voyce, ‘Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons’, Criticism 53 (2011), 407–438, 408. 4 See Gamer, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 5 See Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 6 Christina Lupton, ‘Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, English Literary History 81 (2014): 1173–1192, 1173.

24

J. M. LABBE

a group of words into a discrete and stable unit of writing’ (1174). Something is both randomly generated but also, since ‘the most fixed or foreseeable plot can exacerbate awareness of contingency’, seems as if it was always meant to be (1181). If the codex thus fixes direction, corrects the sense of chance, and relies on contingency, is Emmeline Austen’s codex? Does Emmeline tell, contain, spur Austen’s creative imagination, provide an antidote to the sickness of influence? Kevis Goodman explores how ‘nostalgia’ moves from a pathology of spatial dislocation—a literal homesickness—to the very feeling that treats or ameliorates homesickness, and locates Austen at the crossroads of this change. Austen’s ‘voluntary recollection and reconstruction of the past’ ‘eases’ the discomfort of dislocation.7 As Goodman explains, older models of nostalgia saw it as leaving a mark on the brain. What if we extrapolate to posit that nostalgia—a longing for the past and the simultaneous recreation of what has passed—can also be expressed via the act of writing? In that case, Austen’s oeuvre is another mark of nostalgia. She reads Emmeline and revisits it, pleasurably, by rewriting it, and then we reread Emmeline via Austen’s nostalgic versions. Is Emmeline, then, home?8 A model is always the original which plots its own offshoots. It is template and system and source and flow. Its fixity encourages reproduction and spurs digression. It is, in Clifford Siskin’s words, ‘something that could be blamed’.9 If adhered to obviously, it restricts the ambition of the user, or it demonstrates the limitations of the user. It models its own stifling influence. If departed from energetically, it loses its form and shape: a template made of foam. Emmeline always already exists for Austen. Its stories push forward as she tells her own. Emmeline supplies the elementals of Austen’s romances, traumas, and histories. It provokes into existence her heroines, heroes, foils, and villains. It overlays her plots; she both follows and amends it. So overdose implies antidote, voice-over speaks the voiced, romance aligns with realism.

7 Goodman, ‘“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Read-

ing’, Studies in Romanticism 49 (2010): 197–227, 200. 8 Elizabeth Johnston argues that the novel offered a communal space for women to be with other women imaginatively, that it provided the fullest expression of female friendship. See ‘“Deadly Snares”: Female Rivalry, Gender Ideology, and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 47.2 (2014), 1–21. 9 Clifford Siskin, ‘Novels and Systems’, Novel 34.2 (2001), 202–215, 203.

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

25

Emmeline supplies models which Austen plunders (commons-like, codex-like, nostalgia-like) with energy and enthusiasm, wholesale and in subdivisions and cross-sexed. And its systems, which as Siskin notes can take the blame, are internal, external, legal, and reputational—and inescapable for the plots they encircle, the characters they control, and the reader they enthral. Emmeline is visible within Austen, however, only if we are able to see it. To re-invoke a term: coincidence. Goodman quotes Walter Benjamin in her examination of Smith’s excavatory technique in Beachy Head: ‘The writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal expression that was aimed at’.10 Austen’s digging, upturning, and replanting is another lesson she learns from Smith. ∗ ∗ ∗ Emmeline as template means that it provides Austen with a model which she plunders for material. Emmeline echoes through the six mature Austen novels, its heightened emotions and extraordinary plot lines tempered and subdivided because, as Jillian Heydt-Stevenson remarks, in this context ‘Austen’s work [is] less calamitous, and far more devoted to happiness’.11 Emmeline’s plots circle around risk, loss, inhumanity, sexual trauma, and deceit; Austen with some exceptions lightens this load for her primary plots, telling ‘calamitous’ tales in her secondary plots. Sex, within and outside of marriage; speculation and gossip; how coincidence in plot terms transforms to story-telling; who writes a woman’s plot and what she tells herself: Emmeline’s contours mould themselves around voices but also around voids. People make up stories to fit expectations and preconceptions, a move that will become pronounced and increasingly threatening in Smith’s later novels.12 The plot itself relies on tales recounted both in print (e.g. marriage certificates and explanatory letters) and in person 10 See The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 2009), 179. Quoted in Kevis Goodman, ‘Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Grounds of the Present’, English Literary History 81 (2014), 983–1006, 997–998. 11 See Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, ‘Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History’, The Wordsworth Circle 140–148, 142. 12 Ethelinde, where gossip creates Ethelinde’s reputation in the face of her model behaviour; Montalbert, where assumption and suspicion result in a catatonic Rosalie;

26

J. M. LABBE

Plot/Story Main/Secondary Stories: Telling, Hearing, Making (up),Placing

Author?

Template (Generics/Genus)

Modelling Plundering (for characters)

Systems Internal(ised) External(ised) Imposed

Fig. 2.1 Connections

(e.g. Le Lemousin’s fortuitous presence on a mountainside and his verification of said marriage and Emmeline’s parental history) (Fig. 2.1). By telling the tale of Emmeline, Smith invites scrutiny of tale-telling itself. Is a woman’s voice audible? What do we hear when she speaks? Is a corroborator required? Is her story always on the brink of being written by others according to their own social template? Emmeline herself exhibits a steadfastness and honour that surprises those around her so deeply, they mostly cannot realize it for themselves. Her ‘word’ is an empty signifier for Lord and Lady Montreville, Delamere, Fitz-Edward (in rake mode, less so in distraught mode), Augusta, Mrs. Ashworth… none will fully believe that she means what she says and says what she Celestina, where a willingness to believe outrageous tale-telling nearly results in the permanent estrangement of Celestina and Willoughby…and so on.

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

27

means. Repeatedly they rewrite her words and revoice her statements, in order to place her in the template or model of femaleness they are primed for. Only Godolphin seems ready to both hear her and take her at her word (and see Chapter 3 for Godolphin as a new mode of man). What happens when a woman tells herself the wrong story? What about when a man tells her story back to her? Who supplies the ending? Adelina inhabits at least three plots: the young and giddy wifelet, disillusioned; the heroine of a doomed love; the woman driven to distraction by her own perfidy. She tells herself all these tales and none are supported by the narration itself, which emphasizes instead her foolishness and literary hackwork and offers her repeated chances at happiness. Fitz-Edward wants to retell her tale and does so to Emmeline, and rewrites his own character in the process; Godolphin wants to see her not as fallen but as in need of protection. The key moment when Fitz-Edward and Godolphin agree to listen to one another and forsake the pre-written code of ‘honor’ for one of justice is one of several that focalize Emmeline’s journey from its own generic imperative towards a new plot. By discounting Adelina’s versions of truth and substituting Emmeline’s (or Mrs. Stafford’s, Fitz-Edward’s, Godolphin’s…), Smith indicates the vacuity of the cultural plot of female irrecoverability. Perhaps this is why Wollstonecraft sees Adelina’s ‘contrition’ as ‘theatrical’: not because Adelina is an insincere performer, but because the script itself is overtly and self-consciously insincere. So the love-plot, the sex-plot, the risk-plot, the entanglement-plot, the gossip-plot, the shenanigans-plot, the law-plot, the inheritance- and property-plot, and the sensibility-plot resident in Emmeline show Smith re-plotting her own novelistic moment. ∗ ∗ ∗ The love-plot, the sex-plot, the risk-plot, the entanglement-plot, the gossip-plot, the shenanigans-plot, the law-plot, the inheritance- and property-plot, and the sensibility-plot are of course the bases for Austen as well. She spreads them out over six novels so that the model provides templates for each. A template at its simplest provides something to copy or, in another image, is merely the generic carrier of something that will be customized. It can be a thing that serves as a pattern. It might provide an example for imitation or, more complexly, emulation. Plunder. A source-code, pacé Voyce, subsequently modified. Austen is not a

28

J. M. LABBE

passive transmitter of Smith but an active user of her material. So Emmeline, and Emmeline, are picked apart and reconstituted. Emmeline as a character resonates with an exploded sensibility: she exhibits traits of perfection, able to educate herself via tattered books in a neglected library: ‘her uncommon understanding, and unwearied application … supplied the deficiency of her instructors, and conquered the disadvantages of her situation. … Emmeline had a kind of intuitive knowledge; and comprehended every thing with a facility that soon left her instructors behind her’ (46). She is twelve…. ‘[T]he progress of her understanding was equal to the improvement of her person; which tho’ she was not perfectly handsome, could not be beheld at first without pleasure, and which the more it was seen became more interesting and engaging’ (48). Now she is sixteen. Smith adds details: slightly tall, blue eyes, brown hair, sweet although irregular features, open countenance. She likes exercise and has a strong sense of her own bodily integrity. She loves her home. She pays respect to her elders (‘I am happy in having an opportunity of paying my respects to your Lordship’, 59) although it is clear that she struggles to see some of them as her betters. Emmeline honours contracts and expects others to honour her word. She rejects the notion that femininity is only expressed through the passive acceptance of the will of others. She succumbs to physical reactions to emotional trauma (e.g. debilitating fever as a result of being abducted) although the narration also notes her lack of suitable wraps and her overwhelming frustration at being subjected to the physical control of Delamere. At the same time she travels significant distances on her own, negotiates complicated social situations, overmasters intense personal pressure to do what she considers to be wrong. She is, although young, mature in her sense of self and reliant on her intellectual assessment of situations. She is, in these and other ways, ‘new’ (and see Chapter 3). And she gets a new outcome: in that her first admirer, although himself ‘new’ in his combination of sex and sensibility, does not grow to deserve her but instead retreats to the code of ‘honor’ rejected by Godolphin, and dies of it. Emmeline’s favoured alternative is Godolphin, a mature and thoughtful man. Chivalric, sensible, passionate, and financially independent, he always already deserves her. Emmeline models for Austen a strong female character and her parts appear, reconstituted, across Fanny, Elizabeth, Emma, Anne, and Catherine. Fanny: gifted with Emmeline’s sense of trauma and uneasiness

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

29

(‘uneasiness affected [Emmeline’s] frame’, 141), albeit for very little reason. Where Smith externalizes Emmeline’s risks, Austen internalizes them in Fanny. Fanny’s childhood transportation from Portsmouth to Mansfield Park and her sense of abjection, inconsequentiality, and helplessness give us Emmeline without the strength of mind. In other words, Fanny embodies, plays out Emmeline’s lack of ease and comfort, and Austen extrapolates the psychological damage caused by extended and persistent uneasiness. Fanny, once made uneasy, never regains her ease. All her experiences show her either being chided for seeking ease (Mrs. Norris), apologized to for her inconvenience and unease (Edmund), mocked for her sense of unease and impropriety (Mary Crawford et al.), seeking unease (the white unheated garret), or substituting her ease for others’ (ministering to the whole Bertram clan). Even her ending is marred by the unease she feels at others’ actions and her implicit self-comparison with Mary. Where Emmeline feels uneasy, Fanny embodies Unease. Elizabeth Bennet is, as explored more fully in Chapter 3, an inheritor of Emmeline’s independence of thought. Her humour and propensity for objectivity falls short in one area where Emmeline shines: friendship. Elizabeth’s rejection of Charlotte Lucas for making a choice Elizabeth eschewed contrasts with Emmeline’s acceptance of Mrs. Stafford as a voice of reason and warmth despite her making a marital decision similar to Charlotte’s. More importantly, though, Elizabeth shows Emmeline’s ‘presence of mind’ (Emmeline, 135) throughout her story, and is, like Emmeline, prone to reacting to the foibles of others with what Emmeline calls ‘mirth’ (164). And most importantly, Elizabeth is a disruptive element in the world of Darcy and his family. Darcy’s hesitations and Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s horror arise because Elizabeth and her family bring ‘uneasiness and contention’ into their own families, just as Emmeline does for the Montrevilles. Darcy eventually reaches Godolphin’s status but Lady Catherine is Lady Montreville. Emmeline models for Elizabeth an unconventional valuing of her own opinion which manifests as the ‘spirit’ noted in Chapter 3. Elizabeth’s newness is Emmeline’s newness. Emma, too, subscribes to Emmeline’s independence of thought—but while Emma exhibits both spirit and mirth, both tend to be misplaced and immature. Emma has from the start the social position and authority that is Emmeline’s only putatively at her story’s start but legally by her story’s end. As noted, Emma also must arrive at a knowledge of her own feelings in a circuitous way that mirrors Emmeline’s. Where Emmeline ‘was herself sensible of great pain in the approaching parting’ (280) with

30

J. M. LABBE

Godolphin, because ‘in spite of herself she thought as much of the brother as the sister’ (282), so too Emma feels a similar great pain when she contemplates that Knightley might love Harriet and is suddenly conscious he must marry no one but herself. What connects the two is an acknowledgement of an inner emotional shift, where things fall into unexpected place for the character even though the place has been clearly set by the plot.13 For both, a cognitive shift is required so that Emmeline can release herself from her own word binding her to Delamere, and Emma can relinquish narrative control over her friends and neighbours so that her own story can proceed. Anne’s plot of persuadability, as noted above, is learned from Emmeline, but her character is twinned with Emmeline in their self-control, good breeding, simple manners, and attractiveness to the Godolphin/Wentworth composite. And Catherine is an heir in plain sight. Catherine is the real-world foil to Emmeline’s supposed perfections: she is not a natural student, she misjudges people and situations continually, she misunderstands the relationship between her reading and the world she lives in. She wants very badly to be the kind of Gothic heroine she would read Emmeline as, even as Emmeline would chide her for her foolishness as she longs to do with the ‘eldest Miss Ashwood’: She had taken it in her head to form, with [Emmeline], a sentimental friendship. She had learned all of the cant of sentiment from novels. … Of ‘the sweet novels’ she had read, she just understood as much as made her long to become the heroine of such an history herself, and she wanted somebody to listen to her hopes of being so. But Emmeline shrunk from her advances… (235)

Catherine’s crucial fault, as shown in her application, Miss Ashwood-like, of her reading to the real world, is her weakness in critical thinking, established straightaway as one of Emmeline’s strengths. So Catherine, presumed often to be the anti-Emmeline, must actually learn to hew closer to Emmeline as she is. And so it goes. Lady Montreville models not only Lady Catherine de Bourgh but also, in her family pride and her sense of ‘the obligations

13 By contrast, Edgeworth’s Belinda stands by Mr. Vincent despite Clement’s utter romantic presence until the narrator can stand it no longer and creates a crisis that even Belinda can’t overlook.

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

31

[Emmeline] has received at our hands’ (163), Mrs. Norris. Strains of Lady Catherine are audible in Lord Montreville (family pride) and Sir Richard Crofts (pressure to marry elsewhere).14 Delamere underlies Austen’s selfish men (such as Henry Crawford, Frank Churchill), Godolphin her more mature heroes (Darcy, Wentworth, Knightley), Fitz-Edward her rakes (Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford, Frank Churchill). There is a tinge of Fitz-Edward in Lucy Steele: they share ‘plausibility and insinuating eloquence’ (Emmeline, 100). There is a hint of a malignant Delamere, touched with Crofts the younger, in the rakish and reputation tarnisher John Thorpe. Lord Montreville is also channelled by Mrs. Bennet and Sir Thomas: the former in his determination that Delamere marry as befits his material needs as well as his dignity, the latter in his lax and indulgent parenting that ruins Delamere’s moral constitution. In Adelina one sees a malignant passivity and devotion to the sensibility that creates and maintains victimhood, which Marianne (perhaps) outgrows and which Col Brandon’s Eliza does not. The model presents an opportunity for fullscale, wholesale plunder. Austen is meticulous and creative. She liberally reconstitutes fragments and pieces of Emmeline and is choosy as she assigns and reassigns elements of Emmeline’s friends and family. Emmeline is not a preserved relic but a kind of co-conspirator as it gives up its elements to its most careful reader and re-writer. While not the re-treatment described in Chapter 4 that occurs when The Old Manor House encounters Mansfield Park, Austen’s designated model peoples her plots. ∗ ∗ ∗ Plots: open to plunder as well. Emmeline furnishes numerous storylines on both primary and secondary levels. There is a shift in tone: where Smith puts it all out there, with competing primary stories directed through Emmeline’s need for a family narrative, Austen relegates, with

14 Smith gives Sir Richard a particular habit of speech which, although not exactly

mirrored by Lady Catherine, conjures her up: ‘[T]here can be no reason, indeed none will be allowed, or listened to, or heard of, why you should not eagerly, and instantly, and joyfully accept a proposal so infinitely superior to what you have any claim, or right, or pretence to’ (134). Emmeline reacts with commendable Elizabeth-style indignation and disdain.

32

J. M. LABBE

plots of jealousy, despair, and sexual entanglements told sotto voce.15 These secondary plots offer backstory and explanations for behaviours, but in most cases they are not, strictly speaking, essential to the main story, of a woman and a man (and sometimes another man and sometimes another woman). Instead, they provide counter-narratives: the what-ifs and cautionary tales and revelations and ‘oh-my-god’ moments that give clarity as to motives, desires, and actions. People—characters—make up (create/devise/fabricate) their own stories and those of the people— characters—around them. It can be precisely character that gets told: and so Emmeline is subject to the story-telling of those with vested interests in alternative narratives. Mrs. Ashworth, for instance, needs Emmeline to be the flighty, coy, and coquettish woman she herself is. This normalizes her own sense of self, a psychological innovation that Austen develops more visibly as free indirect discourse.16 And Crofts needs Emmeline to be depraved, corrupt, and insincere, as this justifies his own conduct. Telling, then, galvanizes plot-plundering by allowing for speculation while also (deeply) containing a sense of determining, unconscious betrayal, and repetition.17 Where Smith can use coincidence (Le Lemousin’s fortunate location on the mountainside and Emmeline’s fortunate inadvertent eavesdropping leads directly to confirmation of her parentage) and Austen morphs this to reasonable interventions (people know people in the way they do), even Smithian coincidence is a kind of tell. We meet Le Lemousin in the last chapter of Volume 3 (of four), but as early as Chapter 2 of Volume 1 Emmeline has held the solution to her parentage in her hands: letters in a casket bequeathed to her by her nurse, ‘in a hand which she had been shewn as her father’s. But she left them uninspected’ (52): for hundreds of pages and a few years. Le Lemousin, then, is not necessary to tell the story; instead he is necessary to remind Emmeline to tell her own story. This brings to the fore the interest Emmeline pursues in women’s stories and who speaks (tells) them. The woman’s voice is complicated. Some women tell themselves a faulty story (Adelina), some women tell other’s stories with added error (Mrs. Ashworth, Lady 15 Kelly A. Marsh notes that ‘elements of a narrative that appear to be expository, merely background, are signs of the submerged plot’. See ‘The Mother’s Unnarratable Pleasures and the Submerged Plot of Persuasion’, Narrative 17.1 (2009), 76–94, 79. 16 See Joe Bray for a discussion of free indirect discourse in Smith. 17 Repetition: telling the beads, a circular tale, forever marking the same points at the

same places.

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

33

Montreville, even Augusta who persists in believing a narrative in which Emmeline actually does, really, no really, love Delamere), some women avoid the story staring at them (Emmeline with her casket and her submerged feelings for Godolphin), and some are merely, constantly, and maliciously, talked about. Austen listens. Men tell stories, too. Fitz-Edward regales Emmeline with a lengthy tale of his love for Adelina and his transformation from rake to romantic hero. Godolphin tells Emmeline the story of his love for her. Crofts tells Emmeline the story of her own base birth. Le Lemousin tells Emmeline the story of her own respectable birth. Godolphin even uses the privilege of his own story-telling to force Emmeline to reciprocate: ‘Godolphin … was still pressing, and at length brought her to confess, with blushes, even with tears, her early and long partiality for him, and her resolution either to be his or die unmarried’ (417). If this confession scene makes us think of Willoughby with Elinor, Col. Brandon again with Elinor, Edward (again) with Elinor; or Darcy with Elizabeth; or Knightley and Emma: what a coincidence. ∗ ∗ ∗ Such confession scenes are not unique to Smith and Austen, of course. Simply to rely on this overlap would be the equivalent of gossip and rumour-mongering (‘Did you hear how Jane literally copied from Charlotte?’). Balancing the character modelling is a series of plot retellings, however, that suggest an equivalence and a shared story-telling endeavour. Northanger Abbey features (and seems to laugh at) several ‘peril’ scenes. Catherine is ‘abducted’ by John Thorpe who carries her away in his carriage for a day trip without her consent. Later, she is thrown out of Northanger Abbey without ceremony (and without money) by General Tilney in a pique. The former is a familiar point from the novel of sensibility in general, and in Emmeline it results in Emmeline’s fortuitous fever (so that she can travel no further) but also creates a new risk for her: the foolish Elkerton sees them, speculates, gossips, provokes Delamere’s anger and a foreshadowing duel. When Catherine is taken on a ride against her will, the Tilneys see her, speculate, others gossip (including John Thorpe himself), and although there is no duel, the Tilneys look grave and their friendship is threatened. Austen shifts the risk from bodily

34

J. M. LABBE

to emotional. Catherine’s ejection from Northanger is different, presenting a real and present risk to her person and her position. The surprise expressed by her mother and the distress shown by Henry betray the violence of the event which is neither Gothic nor derived from sensibility but, like Smith’s in-plain-sight manoeuvres, shows the lack of capital a woman actually owns when a situation is decided on by a man, including the telling of her story. This is emphasized since Catherine’s experiences are themselves drawn from and caused by the stories of others. The playfulness that seemingly characterizes Northanger Abbey is questioned by its underlying plot of social threat—that which colours Emmeline until the very last pages. Mansfield Park similarly features threat and risk. Mary Crawford remarks that ‘every generation has its improvements’ and Austen improves—updates, replants, reorients—what in Emmeline is a culmination of perfidious, and fatal, behaviour only partly explained by the failings of the parent to a scandal both significant and easily dismissed. When Maria Bertram flirts with Henry Crawford she is not yet married to Mr. Rushworth; when Lady Frances takes up with Bellozane she is a married woman. Maria’s escape from marriage is foreshadowed by her slipping through the gate and over the ha-ha; Lady Frances is bored and hopelessly self-indulgent. But both are brought up by lenient parents to feel that their desires justify any behaviour, that others are there to sustain those desires. Their adultery plays out at different levels: Lady Frances’s, while not centre stage, is nonetheless a significant plot point. Maria’s happens off-stage and is recounted through letters. Lady Frances’s provokes a duel and the death of Delamere; Maria’s ‘rescues’ Edward from Mary, Fanny from Henry, and pushes them together. Lady Frances is confined by a lettre de câchet to a French convent; Maria is exiled with Mrs. Norris. Where Smith catastrophizes, Austen builds: her improvement does not so much humanize as calm the situation. Sexual misbehaviour, parental failings, and a sense of obligation pervade both texts and spur the story. And while Emmeline underpins but is not Fanny (see Chapter 4 for who Fanny derives from), they share the experience of displacement. Emmeline draws a ‘comparison between the people she had lately been among, and Delamere, [which] was infinitely favourable to him’ (125). So too Fanny in Portsmouth when Henry shows up with his Mansfield Park evocativeness; and so both are on a brink where comparison threatens to override sense.

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

35

Delamere nearly achieves his aim of a private marriage in this scene. His continual importunings resonate in Emma, where Frank Churchill’s pursuit of Jane Fairfax is deflected by his own gossip and misdirection with Emma. Frank tells and retells false stories to no discernible end; although like Willoughby he has an irascible woman to please, there seems no actual need for his gossip over Jane. He seems to do it because he can, in a novel where story-telling and fictiveness are continually troped. The story-telling (and tale-telling, and fibbing, and lying) that structure Emmeline and nearly consume Emmeline point Emma, and Emma, towards resolution. Frank’s mischievousness tones down, say, Crofts’s gossip-mongering, but it makes Jane ill and does not bode well for their marriage. Emma’s tale-spinning for and about Harriet, reminiscent of, though more benevolent than, the stories told about Emmeline, nearly narrates Harriet right out of a happy ending. Col. Brandon’s Eliza carries the weight of traumatic plotting that might have afflicted Harriet. Her story is Adelina’s without the reformed rake, and her daughter’s is as well. As if the tale is too strongly flavoured for foregrounding, Austen buries it not just to a secondary level but in the past, exemplary not of female suffering so much as male. There is no other story in Austen as miserable as Eliza’s; indeed, no other rake as determined as Willoughby. Fitz-Edward without the moral compass, Willoughby sees only a character he can take advantage of; Adelina without Emmeline, Eliza pursues a pre-written plot to its end. And yet the story of Eliza is not, strictly speaking, necessary. Brandon could be the same romantic hero of sensibility without her; Willoughby could be the same lovable rogue (Delamere without the meltdowns). Eliza is a vehicle, telling us something about these two men, next to nothing about herself. Smith brings Adelina right to the forefront and forces a confrontation with her story, but Austen does not seem to want this. So Eliza is there and not there, a hint of Adelina to match the tinge of Delamere. When Edward contracts his secret engagement with Lucy, he is described by Lucy in Delamere-like terms: ardent, not to be refused, herself at his mercy, herself managing his fervour with Emmeline-like patience and tenderness. But switch the perspective: We are both too young to form such an engagement, — You are not yet quite one and twenty; a time of life in which it is impossible you can be a competent judge of what will make you really happy. … Should you bind yourself by this promise, which you now think would make you

36

J. M. LABBE

easy, and should you hereafter repent it, which I know to be far from improbable, pride, obstinacy, the shame of retracting your opinion, would perhaps concur to prevent your withdrawing it; and I should receive your hand while your heart might be attached to another. The chains which you had yourself put on, in opposition to the wishes of your family, you would, rather than own your error, rivet, tho’ your inclination prompted you to break them; and we should then both be miserable. (186–187)

This is Emmeline reasoning with Delamere, and forecasting Edward’s backstory, and not even Elinor could put it better. As Emmeline predicts, so it comes to pass, just in a different novel. It is lucky for Edward that Lucy is not Emmeline; Lucy can swerve to Robert, break her promises. Austen is astute in her rewriting: Edward exemplifies the risk Emmeline identifies and at the same time, with the risk already written, she can plot to rescue him from his predicament. In Pride and Prejudice, Emmeline again makes plain both risk and outcome. ‘He will lament the infatuation which has estranged him from his family, and thrown him, for some years at least, out of the rank in which he has been used to appear; and recovered from the delirium of love, will behold with coldness, perhaps with hatred, her to whom he will impute his distresses’ (Emmeline, 171). When Wickham runs away with Lydia, it may perhaps be too optimistic to call his impetus ‘love’, but he surely very soon experiences the lamentations Emmeline foresees. Again, Austen’s plot is less traumatic; Lydia and Wickham are fairly easily made comfortable and their elopement gives Darcy a chance to prove his own worth. Lydia, in other words, is not required to be another Adelina nor is she subjected to Eliza’s fate. She is saved, perhaps, by her own levity: unable to notice her risk, she eliminates it. The persuadable Anne and the steadfast Emmeline described above serve as bookends: last and first, update and model. Emmeline’s plausibility as a character undergirds Anne’s; neither is unlikely or out of character in behaviour, both learn and grow and demonstrate valour, virtue, and virtuosity in a world that is realistically plotted for their needs. Emmeline’s has its share of surprises, as noted, but is also rooted in a world of warfare, both political and personal; those who pursue her do so for personalitybased reasons. Hence, Delamere is spoiled rotten and can’t be checked, Crofts’ motive is self-aggrandizement via the vehicle of Lord Montreville, Lord Montreville himself has a depth of remorse at his actions even as he can’t help himself from behaving selfishly, Lady Montreville loves her

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

37

son not wisely but too well. Anne’s world is smaller and less spectacular, but her Cinderella-like position in her family and her initial submission, perfectly suited to a heroine of sensibility even if undercut by the world her novel lives in, is itself both realistic and fantastic. They are mirror images who in the end come together as full complements in a key scene: ‘You have killed her, Sir! – She is certainly dead! – Oh, my God! the sudden alarm … has destroyed her!’ ‘I am afraid it has!’ exclaimed Godolphin wildly, … ‘Send instantly for advice – run – fly – let me go myself for assistance.’ He would now have run out of the room; but Emmeline, whose admirable presence of mind this sudden scene of terror had not conquered, stopped him. ‘Stay, Sir,’ said she, ‘I beseech you, stay. You know not whither to go. I will instantly send those who do.’ (263)

They are in a room in Bath rather than on the Cobb at Lyme, but situationally they are in the same space. In the face of fear and panic, Emmeline keeps her head and preserves those around her. Adelina is ‘not actually dead’ (264). The episode introduces Godolphin and Emmeline to each other and Godolphin to Emmeline’s fortitude and strength of mind and character. When Louisa falls on the Cobb, she too is ‘not actually dead’, although her personality change enacts a kind of death (see Chapter 5). More importantly, the scene (re)introduces Wentworth and Anne to each other. Anne’s Emmeline-style presence of mind (‘strength and zeal, and thought, which instinct supplied’, 139) calms those around her and impresses Wentworth with the conviction of her ‘strength’ where before he had struggled with his sense of her weakness: ‘Anne, Anne, … what is to be done next?’ (139). Things are from here on different between them, even as Emmeline’s introduction to Godolphin makes things different for both of them. The line from the Cobb to the drawing room at Bath is direct: love (re)ignited over the body of a (not actually dead) woman. Austen compresses Adelina’s habitual (over)sensibility to a single moment of transformation, and in this way the scene on the Cobb is a rare instance in which Austen makes the outcome worse. Where Adelina is written to suffer what are mainly self-imposed slings and arrows, Louisa stumbles into it, and fares worse. She gets a man, but she loses herself as Louisa

38

J. M. LABBE

and becomes her own pale imitation. Her function is to reunite Anne and Wentworth and having done so, Austen more or less unwrites—decomposes—her. This is indeed catastrophe for a character defined by ‘highspirited, joyous talking’: ‘The day at Lyme, the fall from the Cobb, might influence her health, her nerves, her courage, her character to the end of her life’ (186). Adelina’s ‘restored tranquillity’ transmutes to Louisa’s ‘fate’ (476, 186).18 ∗ ∗ ∗ The treasure chest of Emmeline: plunder for Austen. The pre-existence of Emmeline: a model for Austen. Within both metaphors lies a system of use that maps subsystems ordering Smith’s and Austen’s plots. Citing Siskin again, this is ‘something that can be blamed’ (203), but it is also something that can clarify (render) both. There is Law. It is inescapable. Throughout Smith’s oeuvre law and lawyers are bywords for corruption and disorder (think Mr. Vampyre in Marchmont : as overt a symbol as can be imagined). Emmeline’s story hangs on law. Her presence at Mowbray Castle is at Lord Montreville’s pleasure; her status as a ‘natural daughter’ means she has no actual claim even if she has a moral one, and Lord Montreville’s vacillations and his eventual empowering of Crofts to use the verbiage of the law to disenfranchise her is a show of the law’s distance from justice. Throughout the novel, actions and decisions depend on documents that assume the status of forms of legal dictate: letters act as bonds and guarantees, and so Emmeline’s pledge to Delamere is not ‘real’ until it is written down. Marriage proposals are communicated in writing, presaging their contractual status. This is why it is significant that Godolphin persuades Emmeline to marriage through conversation; and it may also be why Smith narrates this conversation rather than giving her characters free voice. It is thus still written. And Emmeline’s legal status is established, as it must be, with documents. Le Lemousin’s word is helpful but not the clincher. That Emmeline had the proof of her own claim on her autonomy all along—the bequeathed casket—shows the power of a system that requires its own proving. Like a kind of narrative dough, it must sit so that it can expand 18 There are other echoes: of retrenchment, of gentry letting houses, and of course the polar opposites of the Crofts family and the Croft family.

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

39

and grow into readiness. Lord Montreville’s claim, then, that rests on an assumption of primogeniture and entailment, is overturned by documents that validate Emmeline as a proven daughter as well as a natural one. Law is implicit throughout Austen and explicit when it comes to property. The famous entailment in Pride and Prejudice is regarded by Mrs. Bennet as both unnatural and inescapable, a monster devouring her family’s prospects (a kind of Crofts, or Vampyre). For her, ‘such things I know are all chance in this world’ (100). But it is itself the result of Mr. Bennet’s own manipulations of the law. It is a truth often overlooked that Mr. Bennet himself entailed the estate in order to gain ready money to be married, and the unacknowledged cause of the quarrel between himself and Mr. Collins’ father might be traced to this event. So when Mr. Collins, with his ‘good fortune’, decides he is ‘in want of a wife’, Austen writes into the novel a prepossession narrative, and then overwrites it when Mr. Collins end up with Charlotte instead.19 It is not, for Austen, the law that is at fault, but rather what people do with it. Mrs. Bennet is not wrong when she regards the entail as unnatural; it did not have to exist, and yet does, via a written document that must exist even though no one ever sees it. There is Reputation. Is it inescapable? The reports and stories people tell each other in Emmeline are necessary to the plot. So Delamere must hear a report about Emmeline’s faithlessness, and Fitz-Edward must hear a report about Adelina’s whereabouts, and Lord Montreville must hear a report about Delamere’s pursuit of Emmeline. Emmeline’s reputation must descend from her status as ‘natural’, and Adelina’s must be protected even when the cost is to Emmeline’s. Emmeline’s status as ‘natural’ must derive from the stories told (and untold) about her parents:

19 According to Melina Moe, Charlotte marries for security and this is what ends her intimate friendship with Elizabeth: she ‘represents past norms whose modern irrelevance is made apparent through the progress of the novel towards a culmination in two affective, consensual unions. Charlotte’s views … are anachronistic to developing standards of mutual regard that govern modern heterosexuality’. Charlotte is an example of a female character ‘whose personal fulfilment is not oriented to freedom, growth, and improvement’ and hence she is a challenge to critics of the ‘modern’ novel. See Moe, ‘Charlotte and Elizabeth: Multiple Modernities in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice’, English Literary History 83 (2016), 1075–1103, 1076, 1077. Another way to regard Charlotte is that she makes a reasoned decision and then sticks to it. Is Charlotte, in this way, Mrs. Stafford tinged with Emmeline?

40

J. M. LABBE

ardent, pursued, eloped, dead. Even Fitz-Edward’s happiness must connect to his progress from careless rake to hero of sensibility, reformed by love. Without his initial reputation as rake, he would not have pursued Adelina; without her story-telling of their doomed love, he would not become reformed. This reliance on, and need for, people telling stories about each other translates to Austen’s own narration, her refinement of free indirect discourse, and her characters’ reliance on stories. Emma, in particular, wants to be a master storyteller whose propensity to make and to believe carries the story, almost to its own destruction. Emma’s troping of the fairy-tale structure fills in her ‘once upon a time’ approach to her life and that of those around her (‘Knightley’ is an authorial wink to his fairy-tale status). Fanny is a listener of stories par excellence but she also tells herself many outrageous fibs in order to avoid confronting her own needs and desires. Catherine is talked about. Sir Walter relies on his family story as told by the Baronetage.20 And Emma, Elizabeth, Marianne, and Elinor listen: to Frank, anything but candid; to Wickham, master knave; to Willoughby, with his own pre-story (see Chapter 4) and his need to tell all. There is Family. Surely one can escape it, via marriage, but that just reinscribes the parameters. Emmeline’s family, both paternal and maternal, regard her as an outlier, an inconvenience, a threat, a hanger-on. Adelina’s family is a step up in forebearance but must be mainly protected from her truth. Augusta links the two, being too good for the Montrevilles and just right for the Westhavens. The Montrevilles are rotten stock, as it happens, self-poisoned, and their line dies in the novel since Emmeline becomes a Godolphin and was never really a Montreville anyway. Smith, as she does throughout her works, creates new family trees that rely on affinity and extend to include friends: a modernizing of the term given its historical association with blood relatives. And Austen is all about family, notoriously so. Little worlds characterized by common surnames and contingent houses. Cousins marrying each other. Social worlds determined by breeding. The family system, in Siskin’s words, is to ‘blame’ for personal, social, and even historical limitations. The Bennet family with too many girls, in need of many husbands, gains three with a new extended family. The Bertrams whose sons and daughters are such poor learners and who require the corrective of 20 Compare Emmeline’s Lord Montreville, obsessed with heraldry and the narrative embedded in his family crest.

2

MODEL: EMMELINE

41

Fanny—but she herself is ‘family’. The Elliots, hobbled by family pride so that Anne must marry ‘out’. Underlying the family system in Austen is a social system she both critiques and extends. Smith’s comfort with a relative mixing of class via marriage and friendship is less obvious in Austen, who is calmer about seeking change from within. Systems, like entangling vines, prompt Emmeline to prune, reshape, and renew. Emmeline rejects being oppressed and controlled by them; she makes her own choices. Systems, like an underweave, support and enclose Austen’s plots. Guided by Emmeline, she carefully selects her tools and her design. What is overt in Smith can be covert, even subterranean, in Austen.21 ∗ ∗ ∗ Modelling: emulation. Plunder: booty, swag, pillage, spoil, loot. Systems: methods of controlling, shaping, transmitting.

∗ ∗ ∗ The thing that is Emmeline is pervasive, even as Emmeline herself pervades her novel. There is more to plot and to say about its abiding presence within Austen. But it’s not about reproducing and it’s not about copying. There is no charge levelled here of undue influence or attempts to gain advantage by deception. A model (or a template) provides in outline what is then fleshed out, coloured in, by the user. Smith is loud, she is angry, she despairs, she tantrums. Her tale of trauma, disillusion, and excess is meaningful in a period where the power exercised by the few has such a devastating impact on so many. Smith writes very large and very real. Austen may not reduce herself to the two inches of ivory, but she tempers Smith. Trauma resides more in the interstices, trials more on the margins. Austen mutates Emmeline, developing an antidote to its anger and grief. You can’t have one without the other.

21 ‘Submerged’, as Marsh calls it?

42

J. M. LABBE

References Bray, Joe. 2007. The “Dual Voice” of Free Indirect Discourse: A Reading Experiment. Language and Literature 16: 37–52. Derry, Stephen. 1990. The Ellesmeres and the Elliots: Charlotte Smith’s Influence on Persuasion. Persuasions 12: 69–70. Gamer, Michael. 2019. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, Kevis. 2010. “Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading. Studies in Romanticism 49: 197–227. Goodman, Kevis. 2014. Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Grounds of the Present. English Literary History 81: 983–1006. Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. 2013. Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History. The Wordsworth Circle 44: 140–148. Johnston, Elizabeth. 2014. “Deadly Snares”: Female Rivalry, Gender Ideology, and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers. Studies in the Literary Imagination 47: 1–21. Lupton, Christina. 2014. Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-Century Novel. English Literary History 81: 1173–1192. Marsh, Kelly. 2009. The Mother’s Unnarratable Pleasures and the Submerged Plot of Persuasion. Narrative 17: 76–94. Mazzeo, Tillar. 2006. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Moe, Melina. 2016. Charlotte and Elizabeth: Multiple Modernities in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. English Literary History 83: 1075–1103. Siskin, Clifford. 2001. Novels and Systems. Novel 34: 202–215. Voyce, Stephen. 2011. Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons. Criticism 53: 407–438. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1989. The Analytical Review. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 22–27. London: Pickering and Chatto.

CHAPTER 3

Mode: Women and Men/Type and Stereotype

Abstract This chapter posits that Smith and Austen plot female and male via social and cultural scripts and role-playing. Type and stereotype allow scholars to read representation and characterization as forms of historicized evidence. Smith, and Austen after her, diverge from the established type in their men and women. Smith and Austen do not write characters à la mode; they write characters contre la mode in thoughtful and nuanced ways. Indeed, Austen develops Smith’s approach by writing spirited women ‘two ways’: Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford, for instance, share a personality but not a plot. The chapter suggests that Smith’s interest in varying modes marks a path for Austen. Keywords Mode · Script · Role-playing · Type · Stereotype

Emmeline models for Austen, and so too Smith’s corpus presents bodies, people, who live for her, providing copy. Both authors, however, look around with keen eyes at a supply of actorly modalities—behaviours that order their society, continually reproduced in text. Their facility with character and their willingness to overwrite suggests that for Smith and Austen, an intertextual flair is fuel for an intertextual flare, a signal of knowingness and novelty. The ceremonies and conventions of late eighteenth-century genteel society mandate a harmonized approach both to social and more private interactions that is modal in form. Social expectations will always trump © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_3

43

44

J. M. LABBE

spontaneity if one behaves by the book. Once in the book, characters fill out predetermined shapes, or modes, of speech, action, and interaction, which is one reason why the novel of sensibility, for instance, or the Gothic, strike such chords: the one dramatizes the effects of giving in, the other the impact of acting out. Mode is how one acts, according to what script; type is how one is, one’s character and, in the novel, characterization. When a certain angle of bow or a specific duration of visit carries a mutually agreed meaning, mode and type not only mirror, they make each other: they construct the stereotype. In print terms, type enables mass production, but stereotype enables mass production of the same thing. Choose your font; write the shape and size of your character. The proliferation of type in the current modern age maps onto a willingness to vary mode and celebrate individualism. But this awareness of the opportunities afforded by varying mode and type is key to Smith and Austen as well, and announces their interest in playing with both, exploring type via stereotype, evading the mode of the day by writing that mode, again and again, around corners and slantwise. As Clarinthia Ludford says in Ethelinde, describing her plans to write a ‘little sketch’ of ‘only two volumes’, ‘I believe I have got writing enough to make them. But you know now ‘tis the fashion to have little books, with a wide margin, and a vast deal of white paper; then people read them so easily while their hair is dressing, that it is quite comfortable’ (II: 168). This observation, coming in Smith’s very odd second novel, anticipates Austen’s exchange between Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, wherein reading a novel is replaced by talking about reading one. Type and mode are conveyed through lists of titles and comparisons with other, ‘unreadadable’ books (as Isabella says of Sir Charles Grandison, ‘I thought it had not been readable’ [p. 64]). These reflections on the mechanics of producing writing and the impact on reading demonstrate Smith’s and Austen’s own mode of production: be aware of what the reader wants and expects, write it with one hand, and unwrite it away with the other.1 1 In these terms, one wonders about Austen’s famous defence of the novel, which takes the place of plotting Catherine and Isabella actually reading any novels. Just before these few pages, in introducing Isabella’s mother as a ‘widow, and not a very rich one … a good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother’, the narrator dispenses with her summarily: ‘This brief account of the family [two sentences] is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

45

Their novels are populated with heroes, heroines, villains, rakes, and fallen women; we see virtue and vice; duty, obedience, and wilfulness; extremely bad behaviour. We see rewards and punishments meted out, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. Narrators observe, provide commentary, are complicit, misdirect us. Mode, type, and stereotype are overtly used as devices to provide hints about motivation and moral character. Their plotted worlds are governed by customs that almost become sentient in their own right: they fight against being overcome by countermodes. Smith and Austen concentrate on how women and men succumb to or resist the narrative modes that create types. They do this by writing stereotypes against themselves: shaping normative scripts and then countermanding them. Their plots therefore contain secondary plots so that mode can be both upheld and undone. It’s not that both eschew or otherwise subvert type and stereotype; their novels are fairly well populated with the aforementioned heroes, heroines, etc. Instead, they in effect write case studies (examples of ways of being) of virtue and vice, passivity and agency, duty and wilfulness wherein women and men act against and therefore outside type and are rewarded, women and men reject type and are punished, and women and men new-type themselves and their outcomes. ∗ ∗ ∗ The impulse to ‘type’ characters informs modes of reading them. Is Fanny a model of femininity or enthralled by her own passivity? Is Ethelinde contained by her emotionalized mode or does she cultivate it? Is Orlando a hero? Is Darcy? What about Willoughby (either of them)? Are Mrs. Rayland and Lady Catherine de Bourgh written to be mocked? When women fall, can they get up again? When men stray, have they lost their plot? Why is Mary Crawford objectionable and Elizabeth Bennet not? Why does Philip Somerive die from his fever but Tom Bertram recover from his? Do women want love or money? Do men need either or both? ∗ ∗ ∗ or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of lords and attornies might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated’ (56). The narrator’s impatience with story-telling is again evident. And if Mrs. Thorpe had been another Mrs. Smith, we might have had the story of Celestina in a nutshell.

46

J. M. LABBE

Critical readings of Smith’s and Austen’s men and women look for identifying characteristics such as whining (Fergus), blushing (Walle), nerves (Cummins), conceit (Morris), pride (Morgan), and sentimentality (Ford). They look for ways in which the novels employ nuanced emotional landscapes (Ford, Richardson, Looser, Jenkins). They defend their plot treatments by showing how, after all, the plots make emotional sense (Watson, Wyett). This is a highly selective list. It is also Austen-centric: even the global Modern Language Association database finds it difficult to locate work that combines the keywords ‘Charlotte Smith’ and ‘men’/‘women’ (just try this with Austen).2 A speculation: do current readers assume, like her original ones did, that in terms of characterization Smith hews close enough to genre (sensibility, mainly; Gothic, sometimes) not to trouble mode, even though her plots and her politics do?3 Thus, ‘Smith’s Emmeline adopts the conservative perspective of novels as toxic to further a more radical critique of women’s limited access to economic opportunities’ (Wyett 263).4 In this reading, Emmeline’s character is thoroughly modal because her plot refuses to be. Smith’s and Austen’s play with mode becomes more interesting when weighed together. New Women and Modern Men compete with stereotypes of both. Questions of virtue, money, debt, entitlement, expectations, birth, and breeding turn on the shape and size of the font in which they’re written. ∗ ∗ ∗ For Smith and Austen, manhood presents a complex relationship with the masculine imperative to provide. The type of man who has, or expects, or lacks money maps onto a mode of being that is informed by duty and honour. Men are stamped with an identity derived from family and monetary background and financial opportunities. Emotional lives and options carry a currency as well: what can be afforded, what can be spent. How men act, the mode they embody, comes to signify capability and capacity: 2 The exception focuses on Orlando as romantic hero/hero of his own romance, a

reading established by Joseph Bartolomeo and so far uncontested. See ‘The Subversion of Romance in The Old Manor House’, Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 645–657. 3 A further thought: how interesting that for many, Austen’s plots and politics have been read as resisting innovation, which rests with her characters. 4 This observation is immediately followed, in the essay, by a reference to Smith’s biography: her own plot.

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

47

for change, and for reward. In other words, the two work to retype both heroes and villains, money and income, expectations and inheritance. Throughout Smith’s novels, men search for or obsess over income, and in so doing often compromise their status as hero, leaving many heroines to their own devices—left behind, neglected, even abandoned—in their quests for money. Smith explores the ways in which inheritance and the need to curry favour with the relative who will bequeath it infantilize, demoralize, or otherwise reduce manliness. This is a key concern for Austen as well: many of her heroes and most of her rakes spar on some level with those from whom they have expectations. This indicates something about how the two novelists understand a modern economy where money is as important as land, and is gaining the ascendance. Smith’s novels are as gentry-focussed as Austen’s, yet neither author relies on an inherent nobility in landownership. For both, the pursuit of cold, hard cash often creates cold, hard men, men for whom love, whether filial, familial, or romantic, becomes a distraction.5 Both Smith and Austen are careful, however, to differentiate between men who passively await ‘expectations’ and men who make their own fortune. We can take, for instance, the two Willoughbys. Despite Fletcher’s claim that Austen’s ‘choice of the name Willoughby alone for a central character proves nothing’ (Celestina, ‘Introduction’ 38), it is one of the clues Austen uses to convey her distrust of her attractive rogue (the other being his inheritance from his Burney namesake Sir Clement, the rake in Evelina). The full picture requires the addition of Burney, but even without her character to leaven Willoughby, the Smith/Austen composite is telling. Smith’s Willoughby is another in her long line of unreliable heroes, in thrall to his own sensibility and unable to cope with the emotion of love and to fulfil his romantic function of heroism. Smith gives her Willoughby encumbered estates and overbearing relatives, and flavours him with an emotional immaturity that means he simultaneously worships Celestina and flees her (under the mistaken impression that she is his half-sister). Feeling he needs money more than love, he engages himself to his cousin at the behest of his uncle (who controls his fortune) even as he agonizes over his loss of Celestina. Where Austen holds back her Willoughby’s motivations, saving them for the revelation scene with Elinor, Smith unfolds hers in ‘real time’, 5 Although this distraction may well be eventually given in to, it is just as likely not to

be.

48

J. M. LABBE

making her Willoughby less of an enigma but at the same time rendering the assertion that it is ‘impossible for Mr. Willoughby to be guilty of any unworthy action’ questionable (156). For Austen, it is precisely this destabilizing of the hero’s worthiness that she follows through for her Willoughby. His plausibility conceals an inability to act on authentic emotion; indeed, Austen clarifies Willoughby’s choice between love and money, while also making it more harsh. Smith, in the end, allows Willoughby to have love and money, but she does not resolve his erroneous choice; Willoughby only gets his reward because of the mistakes of other characters. In other words, Smith makes it clear that he is a hero, or occupies the hero’s role, despite himself. Austen sees this and forces her Willoughby to suffer the consequences Smith saves hers from.6 For both, money is key; Austen’s Willoughby only more openly accepts what Smith later requires her character Orlando to realize: He … remembered that he used to think, that, were he once blessed with Monimia, every other circumstance of life would be to him indifferent; yet she was now his – she was more beloved, as his wife, than she had ever been as his mistress …. But far from being rendered indifferent to every other circumstance … he found …that the romantic theory, of sacrificing every consideration to love, produced, in the practice, only the painful consciousness of having injured its object. (508)

Austen’s similar understanding that money, the need for it or love of it, trumps emotion informs her portrayal of another character in Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood, who famously downgrades his half-sisters’ and stepmother’s claim on him from financial support to the occasional game bird. Readers see this scene as a typically Austenian dissection of human weakness. This scene has its analogue in Smith’s Ethelinde, where Ethelinde’s brother Harry, once married to an heiress, becomes more and more enthralled by his wealth and less and less alive to family feeling. A major reading of Austen is that she charts the shift from a feudal economy based on a squire’s understanding of his duties and responsibilities to one where self-sufficiency is supplemented by formalized charity. John Dashwood’s choice to maintain his personal family at the expense of his extended one reflects this. When Smith narrates the same kind of choice in Ethelinde, readers are offered a new chronology of the advent of this social 6 Is this morality, or mischievousness?

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

49

change. Austen does not radically change the scene; instead, she reiterates it, deriving from Smith the type of the man for whom brotherly love is replaced by self-interest. The prominence John Dashwood’s actions are frequently given in discussions of the Dashwood women’s predicament indicates the power of the scene, especially in an economy where female inheritance and ownership are under the power of male family members. Celestina and Sense and Sensibility share a 1790s genesis, but the issue of money and how men get it resonates throughout Austen’s novels. The man with expectations crops up as late as Persuasion, where Mr. William Elliot spends much of his time kowtowing to Sir Walter. Persuasion, however, has also been noted for its introduction of a new kind of character, the self-made man: Frederick Wentworth, who goes to sea with nothing and returns, eight years later, a captain and a rich man. Persuasion is in part the story of an economic shift from ‘old money’ to ‘new money’ brought about by the Napoleonic Wars, as men took advantage of war to make their fortunes. It is significant, then, that as far back as 1788—just a few years after the conclusion of another war where spoils could be had— Smith writes into her first novel Emmeline a professional ‘naval officer who acquires prize money through taking enemy ships’, as Fletcher also notes.7 Godolphin is independent of his older brother, Lord Westhaven, in a way that Delamere can never achieve with his father Lord Montreville. Smith makes it plain that Godolphin’s autonomy allows him a maturity that she signifies by giving him his own house (rather than having him live in a family house controlled by his brother). Both Godolphin and Wentworth must pass a series of tests to prove their fitness to match with the heroine. Godolphin must show he is capable of declining a duel, and instead use reason in dealing with his sister’s seducer. Wentworth must show he is capable of reactivating his love for Anne. Their tests are not the same, but their embrace of love is, made possible by their authors’ freeing them from a humiliating financial dependence on the will of others. Smith and Austen create new types of modern manhood as informed by finance; they demonstrate the unmanning effects of an inheritance economy and the liberating maturity gained by men with cash in hand. These men model a relationship with finance and with emotion that shows how money may enable the pursuit of love, 7 Fletcher, Introduction to Emmeline, 21. Fletcher is probably the most astute critic in noticing many of the Smith/Austen overlaps; however, she shies away from placing Smith as a deeply formative influence on Austen.

50

J. M. LABBE

but it will not substitute for it. Compare Willoughby, whose self-narrative (self-typing) gives him one without the other. Or the other Willoughby, who must effectively remodel himself to mitigate this risk. These younger sons, who replace dependency with agency, are typed against the wastrel oldest son. Both Smith and Austen, as sisters to brothers, are well aware of the disenfranchisement that attends this family position. Smith suffers it directly, when her brother Nicholas inherits the family estate, Bignor Park, which she can then only visit on his sufferance. Austen may have been luckier in her brothers, but she nonetheless shows her full awareness of what it means to have to depend on a brother with the Dashwood women’s situation. And when the firstborn inhabits expectations mode, the effects of an oldest son’s irresponsibility resonate throughout their families. Philip Somerive in The Old Manor House, and Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park, motivated by their own senses of entitlement, demonstrate the limitations of a social system that allows order of birth to overcome personal worth (a point not lost on Mary Crawford, of course). Smith complicates her version from the start by allowing the estate of Rayland Park to be held independently by a single woman (Mrs. Rayland’s title is merely honorific). Since it is not entailed, she is able to dispose of it by testament. This does not stop Philip from assuming his right to inheritance, an idea encouraged by his father: ‘The eldest son [Philip], who would, as the father fondly hoped, succeed to the Rayland estate, he had sent to Oxford, where he had been indulged in his natural turn to expense; and his father had suffered him to live rather suitably to what he expected than to what he was sure of’ (41, emphasis added). Consequently, Philip ‘had early in life seized with avidity the idea … that he must have the Rayland estate’, and his boasting and poaching having been communicated to Mrs. Rayland, ‘now, whenever he was at home, the family were never asked’ (42). While this allows Orlando to be seen with favour by Mrs. Rayland, it also provokes brother’s hatred and jealousy; Philip believes that Orlando is robbing him of his rightful inheritance, but Smith is careful to show that Philip destroys his own chances. She is equally careful to show his absorption in his own expectations: though nothing was more certain than that Mrs. Rayland’s fortune was entirely at her own disposal, and nothing more evident than her dislike to him, he never could be persuaded that, as he was heir at law, he should not possess the greater part of the estate …. ‘No, no; the old hag has been …

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

51

brought up in good old-fashioned notions, and knows that the first-born son is in all Christian countries the head of the house’. (57–58)

Philip designates for Orlando the profession of ‘parson’, but as his father makes clear, his extravagance has already ensured that Orlando cannot go to Oxford himself, and without a degree he can never be a clergyman.8 Philip’s lack of care for the future of his family (as well as the future of the estate; his first planned action is to deforestate it) shows his inherent unsuitability to inherit: Smith makes him weak and vicious, given to gambling, drinking, and casual sex. He sets up with the servant Betty Richards in London; lands in debtor’s prison, having failed to establish his ‘lawful’ claim to the Rayland estate; is rescued by Orlando (finally, belatedly acting up to his chivalric pre-type); and eventually dies of ‘debauchery and excess’ (505). Austen’s Tom Bertram is also weak and self-indulgent, and his extravagance is one reason the family finances are straitened. ‘Tom’s extravagance had … been so great … [that] the younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder’ by forgoing the Norris living: ‘You have robbed Edmund for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income which ought to be his …. through the urgency of your debts’, notes Sir Thomas (53). Tom, unlike Philip, feels ‘some shame and sorrow’, but soon excuses himself with ‘cheerful selfishness’ (53). Tom’s type is that of a pleasure-seeker rather than a vice-seeker, and his father exercises more control over his actions.9 There is no question but that Tom will inherit, and even Edmund’s future is settled: he is already at Oxford and is shortly to be ordained. When Sir Thomas takes Tom with him to Antigua ‘in the hopes of detaching him from some bad connections at home’ (61), Austen points out Tom’s pliability: Philip, of course, sees it as his right to defy authority. Even Tom’s sexual adventures are comical, as when he accidentally flirts with the younger Miss Sneyd who is not yet ‘out’ (78). Nonetheless, like Philip, Tom must suffer a ‘dangerous illness’ brought on by ‘a neglected fall, and a good deal of drinking’ while at Newmarket, 8 In contrast to Godolphin, of course, this younger son can’t find a way to make himself. Smith doesn’t create simple types or single modes, and so her characters are often in cross-novel conflict. Austen does this too. 9 Austen thus regularizes the estate by replacing Mrs. Rayland with Sir Thomas and making Tom’s expectations the landowner’s as well.

52

J. M. LABBE

which is worsened by his ‘extreme impatience to be removed to Mansfield’: ‘They were all very seriously frightened’ (425, 427). For Austen, however, a punitive fever is sufficient; ‘he was the better for ever for his illness’ and ‘became what he ought to be’ (458), deserving of his position and advantages as the oldest son. Austen is not prepared to go as far as Smith. Tom must be brought to acknowledge his responsibilities, but the culture of inheritance itself is maintained. Smith, however, does away with this culture, substituting a culture of merit through the violent erasure of the obstructive oldest son. Mrs. Rayland chooses her heir, and Smith rejects the mystique of primogeniture. Austen, in adapting Philip’s storyline so that Tom is not ‘bad’, but merely selfish, preserves the allure of primogeniture. These wastrel types coexist with younger brother agents of change; mode is present but so is countermode. Money and birth (order) are not, after all, mandatory prerequisites; neither can they be entirely overwritten. Heroic status, on the other hand, transfers in these cases to men exhibiting an alternative modality. It certainly helps that Godolphin and Wentworth occupy a more standardly heroic class position (even if Wentworth is one or two rungs below Godolphin on the class ladder), and neither Smith nor Austen is comfortable with the self-made successful merchant, for instance. Does this mean that the hero type rests on a necessary class foundation, notwithstanding an authorial willingness to loosen other ties? Are birth and honour still entangled, codes for worth? ∗ ∗ ∗ Sir Edward Newenden in Ethelinde, Lionel Desmond in Desmond; Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, George Knightley in Emma. Their narratives converge on love and desire; their circumstances are already comfortable. They are generous with their money and emotionally complex men: men of feeling if not demonstrably so. By birth, they have social honour and standing, and their wealth substantiates this. Are they à la mode? Reversions to type? Sir Edward succumbs to and nourishes an adulterous love for Ethelinde, aided by a narrator who can’t quite condemn him for this or for the ways in which he undermines Charles Montgomery, his romantic rival in love. His ambiguity, however, is matched by Montgomery’s own bad choices, and particularly by Ethelinde’s moral equivocations between the two. If he wasn’t already married, he’d be almost Darcy-like in his

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

53

financial support of the heroine and willingness to overlook the stresses and strains of her more questionable relations. If he wasn’t already married, he’d be almost Godolphin-like in his moral support for the heroine once she ran into social problems. If he wasn’t already married, he’d be almost Willoughby-like (which one?) in his desire for true love in place of a rich wife to compensate for a denuded family bank vault. But. He’s married. Everything he feels from the second chapter to the end of the novel is illegitimate. Much of what he does is morally dubious. He has birth and money—although he is a second son lucky enough to have an older brother who died—and he is not self-made. Is he type or antetype? Can he be a hero? By contrast, Desmond is politically advanced and personally devoted to Geraldine, for whom he carries a torch through much of the novel, providing financial and moral support and exalting her above all women. Very Sir Edward, luckily not married. Smith, however, again sows uncertainty about his function when she writes into his plot a sexual affair with his friend’s sister which results in a baby, the handing of this baby to Geraldine to be raised, and the acceptance of Geraldine as a bequest of her corrupt husband on his deathbed. Despite his revolutionary politics, Desmond adheres to a social conservatism that relegates women and children to the status of his own personal chattel. Geraldine spends much of the novel in conversation with her sister, but she is divested of any agency by Desmond, himself oblivious to his reactionary—even ancién régime— tactics but with a less than supportive narrator to bring them out. This plays awfully close to type. Can he be a hero? Darcy’s cultural shadow is now so long that questioning his status takes a risk. His by-now cartoonish ‘pride’, which, as an almost direct replay of Lord Orville’s initial assessment of Evelina aligns him with a standard sensibility-hero, can cause readers to overlook some of the other oddities of his behaviour. Why, exactly, does he keep company with the Bingleys? The comedy derived from their differing reactions to the Bennets might be enough of a reason, but the social cachet the new-money Bingleys derive from an association with the aristocratic Darcy family, complete with ancestral seat (remember that Bingley only rents), is substantial. A real-life Darcy would know this; so too Austen. Complicating Darcy’s hero modality, then, is a world in which he is the hanger-on. Perhaps more charitably, his function as mentor/worldly tutor figure to Bingley resituates him, so that he can deserve Elizabeth not just because he has

54

J. M. LABBE

money, standing, and generosity, but also because his perfections are as compromised as hers (more below). So can he be a hero? Then there is George Knightley, patron of Emma’s romance, her knight and emotional tutor and saviour. Like the others, he shows financial and moral generosity. He is a clear, close reader of the plots unfolding around him, with his misstep around Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax a rare exception. He is in the main supported and celebrated by his text, although his romantic/erotic interest in the teenage Emma brings hints of a character belonging to a different narrative: the Willoughbys and Wickhams who seduce and abandon 15-year-olds; the Emiles and Clarence Herveys who attempt to mould the perfect wife from teenage ignorance; Sir Edward whose eye is caught by Ethelinde when she is very young indeed, and half his age. Can he be a hero? By associating their valiant men with these less savoury elements, Smith and Austen continue the project of undoing type, re-evaluating mode. Smith’s is the more urgent, and less tolerant, project. Her men run against type throughout her oeuvre with some astonishingly negative portrayals. But it’s not simply that she chooses the villain mode over the hero; her bad men are themselves morally complex, with putative men of feeling preying on those around them via a lack of self-control both bred into them and indulged in as an entitlement. Austen’s more charitable characterizations nonetheless carry that tinge of scepticism that wouldn’t be at all surprised if things went very wrong—they just happened to go right. ∗ ∗ ∗ And so, what of the villain: the seducer, the boor, the victimizer? And the secret villain, whose perfidy is revealed late? The type is the rake or libertine; the stereotype is Richardson’s Lovelace or Burney’s Sir Clement, whose character is plain from the start, whose villainy is by mode rather than choice. If a modern man is known by his agency and generosity, then one way Smith and Austen retype the villain is by placing him carefully in the service of some force, whether a patron, or debt, or his own emotions and character. The modern man earns his money and uses it wisely; the villain can be the Toms and Philips, and Willoughbys and John Dashwoods and Walter Elliots, managed by their own expectations and senses of entitlement. They get into debt and see it as their right or as an expression of their manhood; they get into debt and expect to be relieved of this burden by others. Harry Chesterville in Ethelinde enters debtors’ prison

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

55

and is exorbitantly remorseful, spending his emotional outlay as lavishly as he did his finances, burdening those around him with the care of his passions (as does his father, Col. Chesterville) and requiring the payment of their interest in his needs. Frank Churchill draws on Jane’s patience and Emma’s naiveté to maintain the balance of his relationship with his mother, a motif Smith uses to more dramatic and threatening effect in Montalbert . And the villain is a user. In Smith’s hands this translates as an emotional neediness that turns the man of feeling into a predator and a victimiser: whether Delamere, Orlando, Montalbert, or her other examples, Smith’s extravagant men are costly to others. She varies the victim: Delamere’s passion turns on himself in the end, Orlando’s on anyone in earshot, Montalbert’s on Rosalie. That they share a common personality with uncommon outcomes is an enactment of modal variation. Austen gives her readers Henry Crawford, who can’t control his sexual expectations; John Thorpe, minor and comical but who would be the libertine threat if Northanger Abbey was really the novel of sensibility it rewrites; our man Willoughby, the charming narcissist. The villain, in short, expects too much, spends too much, uses too much, and relies on a social and sexual order to study and maintain his comfort. Smith and Austen don’t waste time on villains who twirl moustaches and demand the rent or carry off the heroine. They serve notice on what is outmoded and serve up real risks. ∗ ∗ ∗ The hero draws his interest from money. His honour is derived only partially from birth and family. He earns what he has, exhibits self-control, and saves for the future. He is less devoted to preserving mores like primogeniture, often being himself a younger son. He is giving to others and accrues no debts, either financial or moral. The villain speculates on his expectations. He relies on standing. He expends both money and feeling (desire) uncontrollably. His object is himself, and his debts of honour, money, and love are continually renewed. The modern man, in Smith and Austen, forwards and highlights some of the social changes wrought by revolution and war: upheavals that open spaces for new thinking and re-evaluations of systems. When he is good, he provides romantic, political, and financial momentum and finds his

56

J. M. LABBE

match in the new women both Smith and Austen write. When he is bad, he personalizes the corruption of an order that mandates hierarchy and subservience, in love, war, and commerce. Smith’s very bad men blast the structure’s foundations; her modern men set up the scaffolding for a new one. Austen’s later versions study the blueprints and establish new environs. It’s not tradition; is it progress? ∗ ∗ ∗ The modern man is accompanied, in Smith and Austen, by the new woman. The usual mode of passive acquiescence, typed with virtue, duty, or loss (of reputation, bodily integrity, feminized forms of feeling), acts as the weight dragging women into secondary plots and unhappy endings. The counterweight privileges agency and modal ‘spirit’, drawing readers into a world where we cheer unconvention and frown at custom, here presented via gossip, rumour-mongering, and pitilessness. Some women in these novels are savvy and make choices that take them outside the normal boundaries policing behaviour, whether social or sexual; others remain resolutely within those limits. Neither Smith nor Austen entirely endorse the first approach, writing scepticism into characterization and plot: Elizabeth Bennet, for instance, exercises her abilities badly before she does them well. And neither entirely undercuts the second: Jane Bennet, for instance, lives completely within the world of passive sensibility, waiting to be chosen and content to be left behind, and in the end gets her man. Both are celebrated and loved, but their place in the plot guides us, slipping away from Jane, in this case, and towards those who make active choices, Elizabeth and even Charlotte. In a novel of sensibility, Jane would be the protagonist: which is why she can’t be in Pride and Prejudice. Just to make it harder, both Smith and Austen also write primary heroines whose lack of agency defines them: old types, written to be buffeted, to await, to accept what others offer rather than asking for what they want. They write outsiders, women whose personal history, or style of acting, put them at risk of alienation and social rejection. Some mourn, some die, others maintain a precarious balance, others thrive and, contrary to modal expectations, don’t die. And they write women whose novelty derives partly from their acts and partly from their decisions to act, and partly from the prominence their plots give them, and partly from the tone their narrators strike. ∗ ∗ ∗

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

57

The old woman: not aged, but of a familiar and customary type. She wants things but won’t ask for them. She has needs but won’t express them. She prides herself on duty and exhibits an armoured virtue that, if breached, turns inward and eats her up She is written so that we know all this and admire her for her dutiful observation of custom and her submission of self, as we know we are meant to do, because decorum and authority figures tell us this. What is she doing in the novels of Smith and Austen, if they are indeed progressive, thoughtful, talented, and forward-looking? She is there to remind us of an enduring type and the narrative ramifications of conforming to type. Even if these characters get their man— and they do, in the end, after trials and tribulations—they are lacerated by that time, pulled into punishment, made to suffer and to welcome it. But they are also very good at passive manipulation, at reactive power, and at a hyper-femininity that today would be called ‘girly’. Although they might be helpless in the face of their own plots, this subjection informs their subjectivity, and allows modal lassitude—passivity in extremis —to become not merely visible but open to question. Rosalie in Montalbert is essentialized by, and excessive in, her passivity. Her lack of control over who she sees, where she goes, who she loves is outrageous, and through it Smith opens an avenue for speculation. Why, exactly, must Rosalie suffer as she does? She embodies sensibility; her passivity is exemplary. She is clinically, chronically sensitive. She is a good girl whose desire to please everyone means she is unable to resist other more active demanders. Her extreme sensibility, her definitional weakness, turns into her flaw, creating the paradox that in being perfectly sensitive and feminine, Rosalie explodes this type of perfection. She inhabits her mode so completely that its fundamental lack of plausibility becomes visible. Smith writes the perfect modal heroine and in so doing, unwrites her completely.10 Her second self might be Fanny Price, but Fanny enjoys her subjugation. She chooses it as a comfort blanket when she is first pulled from her Portsmouth noise and exciting disarray and deposited at Mansfield, literally parked on the staircase to wait. From this early age she discovers the pleasures of victimhood. She is downtrodden but then she puts herself in this position, publically neglected, giving ‘humble answer[s]’ (235), ‘look[ing] on and listen[ing]’ (153), thinking conditionally (‘she could

10 Chapter 5 explores this further as pathology.

58

J. M. LABBE

have wished’ [153]), speaking in ‘self-denying tone[s]’ [231]). Fanny inhabits her passivity almost actively, where Rosalie knows she has no other contours that would fit her plot with a complicit narrator who reinforces this by admiring and dwelling on her suffering. Fanny solicits pity, Rosalie horror: it’s the extremity to which Rosalie is driven that calls her plot, and her narrator, into question. Smith and Austen deploy this type to show its unfitness. Smith carefully delineates passivity so that, in the end, it can’t be supported or believed in. So Geraldine’s acceptance of her lack of agency, in a novel that explores rebellion against established authority, is ironic both within Desmond’s politics and across Smith’s corpus. There are too many other disastrously married women who openly lament the confines of their marriages (these are usually figures, like Mrs. Stafford and Mrs. Denzil, whom readers have connected closely with Smith herself) for Geraldine’s subservience to be the rule rather than the exception. It is a tool by which passivity undoes itself. Likewise Ethelinde, whose striking capacity for emotional disintegration is also a tool by which she manipulates others.11 Or Monimia, who grows from timorous teenager to Orlando’s stalwart, fending off various unwanted lovers and ending the book having traversed several class boundaries through active choice rather than passive acceptance.12 Or Isabella, Orlando’s sister, whose move from agency in The Old Manor House to acquiescence in The Wanderings of Warwick is also a move from sound to silence. Austen picks this up when she reverses the trajectory in Persuasion, taking Anne to the boundary of silenced passivity and then bouncing her to active choice by the novel’s end. To get there, she must also move from listening and silence to talking to those around her: who also begin to listen. Anne’s is a complex relationship with type; the attention drawn to her age and her faded beauty render a status as heroine of sensibility 11 This is not entirely unnoticed by her original readers. The Monthly Review for June 1790.2 (161–162) notes that ‘Ethelinde is a very Phoenix – like Richardson’s Grandison far too excellent – far above the standard of Nature. A woman without a fault, or a single imperfection is not to be found in this World’ (161). An unknown reader writes this extract into the margin of the text, indicating agreement with the review and disbelief of Ethelinde’s perfections. See also Joe Morrissey, ‘Sensibility, Sincerity, and Self-Interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde’, Women’s Writing 26 (2019): 342–357. 12 Her management of Orlando’s temper tantrums and ability to keep their finances, which the narrative shows us even when Orlando looks the other way (which the narrative also reveals), indicates that she might be the seed from which Althea Dacres grows.

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

59

unstable. She is the heroine of a new tale that doesn’t require the maintenance of generic plot standards. Indeed, Persuasion carries another form of reversal: Anne grows into her role as a new type of heroine by growing younger, prettier, and freshly ‘in love’. By the story’s end, she is the same age and yet no longer old; instead, she has matured into renewal. And Elinor? Surely she is not an example of the old type of passive heroine. She has sense! So she sensibly refuses to confess, either aloud or to herself, her love for Edward. She sensibly gives in to Lucy’s manipulations of social conventions and allows others to misread Edward’s behaviour and her own. She sensibly keeps her misgivings about Willoughby’s intentions to herself until Marianne requires medical treatment. She sensibly keeps Colonel Brandon in the dark about Marianne’s feelings, either for or against him. She is very sensible indeed until the point of Edward’s revelation that Lucy has married his brother and even then must hide her loss of emotional control. Throughout her plot, she waits for others to reach the same level of sense that she has. This is the old type to its core. Conclusion? There is type and there is stereotype. When it comes to virtue, old-type passivity wields it passively, as a shield, an excuse not to do things. It is a well-used piece of type, however, and it’s cracking. Through the cracks, Smith and Austen push scepticism and irony; they write it too large; they disable its rewards. Their passive heroines are crushed by, or silenced by, or manipulate, or outgrow their type. The old is obsolete. ∗ ∗ ∗ Women in Smith and Austen have been there, done that. Some women also do, or nearly do, much more, taking themselves to the margins of plot and respectability. If the old type of woman starts us off, this type is getting us underway: the fallen and falling women, whose usual function is cautionary, who usually occupies the edges of plot and narration. What happens to virtue when its public version has been destroyed or is at risk? Smith shows a comfort with sexually active women that famously drew the rebuke from Mary Wollstonecraft (noted in Chapter 2), who disliked that the adulterous Lady Adelina Trelawney in Emmeline is on the verge of happiness by the novel’s end. How will young girls learn to resist the libertine now? And what about Betty in The Old Manor House, and Emily Cathcart in Celestina, both of whom trade in service for sex, neither of whom die? It is true that Emily repents (although she doesn’t stop), and

60

J. M. LABBE

that Adelina forces herself into a decline and opposes the efforts of those around her to make herself happy. But Betty thoroughly enjoys her finery and is the means of recovering Philip Somerive from his squalor—while Emily also uses her income to support the family she won’t impose herself on. Sexual activity, in other words, has had no impact on these characters’ virtue, if virtue is (re)defined as actively helping those in need, reserving judgement, and displaying selflessness.13 Austen to a certain extent relies on secondary or shadow plots for her sexually active women, although these are usually the ones who have been victimized by libertines: Eliza, Georgina. But she peppers her plots with women in the act of falling or happy to be thought so. Lydia’s heedlessness is comic but her situation isn’t; what is more interesting than the opportunity her plot presents for Darcy to redeem himself, though, is her ready acceptance back into her family once she is married. She isn’t tarred by her premarital adventures any more than Wickham is—Austen writes her as giddy but that doesn’t mean Lydia controls the reactions of those around her. Instead, the plot revises itself so that she can come home. Likewise Isabella Thorpe, whose flirtatious manners identifies her as a coquette, but whose social standing enables rather than militates against this. Mary Crawford is the stand-out example of the falling woman, coquettish and superficial, attuned to her own pleasure and desires, spirited and unsubdued by convention or expectations of passivity: a foil to Fanny. She is the uncomfortable ripple in the text, voicing Fanny’s desires, encouraging her brother in what she thinks are his unscrupulous designs, arousing Edmund, laughing at authority. In other texts she is Isabella Thorpe or Lucy Steele or Mrs Clay or—Elizabeth Bennet. Like Elizabeth, she is defined by her liveliness and spirit, her willingness to evade some cultural expectations, her attractive agency. But in a novel that plots the course of passivity while also calling it into question, Mary’s verve can’t be supported or endorsed. Austen compels us to attend to Mary, however; she can’t be ignored, and her power turns her into a bridge or transitional type, from old to new. ∗ ∗ ∗

13 The Golden Rule: help others as you would wish to be helped. Judge not lest ye be judged. Think of others before yourself.

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

61

Maria Bertram Rushworth strolls into view. She does what is expected of her: she makes an advantageous marriage. She does the unexpected and allows herself to be drawn back into an affair that becomes, in the terms of the time, criminal. She is neither morally virtuous nor morally attractive; her sexual actions merely surface the venality that was always there. Why is she different—or rather, why is she so true to type? Consider the terms of the sexual relationship: Henry, on the verge of success with Fanny, meets with a ‘coldness [from Maria] which ought to have been repulsive’ and so he ‘attacks’ with ‘animated perseverance’ (463). Maria then ‘entangles’ him and ‘he went off with her at last, because he could not help it’ (463).14 Misery ensues, with mutual reproaches, and both are punished: Henry loses Fanny, and Maria gains only Mrs Norris. Maria is passive in the face of Henry’s onslaught, manipulative in ‘entangling’ him, criminally available when the relationship revives. Henry is not allowed to leave her, although of course he could; his own passivity catches him; he is the villain victimized. Maria’s type combines the worst aspects of the old-style passive woman, whose character, completely formed by social expectations, has also been completely coloured by type. Like Geraldine, she is exceptionally modal: she is the stereotype, enacting her plot strictly. Austen’s decision to align Maria’s plot thoroughly to her type means that she can run her out of the plot altogether, eject her, finish her. It’s tradition, and it’s progress. ∗ ∗ ∗ From old to Maria-bridge to new: writing against type. Elizabeth Bennet’s spirited refusal to be cowed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s magniloquence in Pride and Prejudice signifies her independence and self-respect. Following her equally spirited refusal to be overwhelmed by Mr. Darcy’s magnificent gesture of a proposal, her spirited refusal to be humbled by Miss Bingley’s cutting remarks, and her spirited refusal to submit to Mr. Collins’s offer to resolve the problem of the entailed estate through matrimony, Elizabeth’s behaviour marks her as a young woman who has broken through the constraints of sensibility (unlike her 14 One reason he can’t help it is because his origin story, in The Old Manor House, mandates it; see Chapter 2 and note that Henry’s counterpart is Bellozane, who runs off with Lady Frances.

62

J. M. LABBE

sister Jane, who embodies this state). Austen’s implication in Pride and Prejudice, that sensibility is weakness, while simultaneously portraying sensibility’s fascinations in the character of Jane, indicates one of the conversations Pride and Prejudice is having with its literary context. As suggested in Chapter 2, Emmeline’s ‘native firmness’ enables her to rise above the conventions of the text of sensibility.15 Firmness of mind is what Elizabeth has in abundance. Her resemblance to Emmeline, therefore, is one of type: both are strong-minded, intelligent, independent characters for whom privilege, in the form of wealth and social influence, means little. Each looks instead for true personal worth as exemplified by considerate, courtly behaviour, and neither is fooled by affects of courtliness, as Smith and Austen demonstrate by giving each a foil (Mr. Crofts, lawyer [later Sir Richard] and toady to Lady Montreville, and Mr. Collins, clergyman and toady to Lady Catherine de Bourgh). When Elizabeth does not buckle under Lady Catherine’s beratings, we are invited to admire her self-respect. Elizabeth is read as a new kind of heroine, one who understands her own self-worth, even if she is slightly misguided in her liking for Wickham (making mistakes and recovering from them is also part of the Smith/Austen novelty mode). The point, though, is that she does not seek an identity through marriage or through regaining an absent father, as the typical heroine of sensibility might do (Evelina being the first principle). Elizabeth is not bound by customs of deference and meekness, which is exactly what Lady Catherine cannot understand. So too Emmeline, who manages Delamere’s irrational passion, stands up to Lord Montreville and asserts her standing as a rational, capable, and trustworthy agent, and presents a spirited refusal to be cowed by Lady Montreville when she demands that Emmeline give up Delamere: ‘Humph!’ said [Lady Montreville] …as much as to say, I see no such great beauty in this creature …. ‘So! … my son has absented himself …. Pray what amends can you ever hope to make to my Lord, and to me, for the trouble you have been the cause of? …. You would like a handsome young man with a title! Yes! you 15 It is worth noting again that Emmeline’s beauty is distinguished by the pleasure it gives the viewer: ‘her person … was not perfectly handsome, [but] could not be beheld at first without pleasure, and which the more it was seen became more interesting and engaging’ (48). Emmeline interests those who see her rather than enchanting them, much as Elizabeth does.

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

63

would like to hide your own obscurity in the brilliant pedigree of one of the first families in Europe …. I will hear no objection! I will have the affair closed this morning! I will have it so!’ Lady Montreville, accustomed to undisputed power in her own family … forgot that Emmeline was equally unaccustomed to her commands, and free from the necessity of obeying them …. ‘If your Ladyship has nothing more to say,’ said she, rising, ‘I shall have the honour to wish you good morning…’ (156–157)

Emmeline speaks with more formal politeness than does Elizabeth; she also speaks in 1788 rather than Elizabeth’s slightly more open early nineteenth century. But what she says, and who she says it to, asserts a sense of self-respect and self-worth that informs Elizabeth’s later version of it. Passive submissiveness is not a virtue for either Emmeline or Elizabeth; instead, Smith provides a pattern of feminine behaviour that allows for plain speaking, independence of thought and action, and rational female agency. And because Smith does not always write this kind of heroine— as noted, Rosalie in Montalbert is almost slavishly buffeted by the actions of those around her—Emmeline clearly offers an alternative form of sensibility. She is alive to her own emotional needs instead of existing as a sounding-board for those around her, and admired by her friends for her strength rather than desired for her beauty. She respects herself and extends that respect to those who recognize her worth; she rejects those, like Lady Montreville, who treat her as their inferior. The young single woman who finds within herself strength, independence and agency, as written by Smith and Austen, provides a pattern for a new kind of female protagonist, one not bound by the conventions either of society or of literature. She displays as well a psychological depth that I associate with modernity: the ability to make mistakes and not always to know her own mind—to have to wait for events to bring enlightenment. Contrary to assumptions by those who have read Austen but not Smith, Emmeline is not a perfect model; her strength of character matures as the text progresses, and she too makes mistakes. She takes a very long time to recognize and accept her love for Godolphin, showing the kind of coming to know herself that is often associated with Austen. In this way she is self-made, as is Elizabeth, not in financial terms as with the male characters, but in terms of her subjectivity. Neither Emmeline nor Elizabeth wait for others to tell them how, or who, they should be;

64

J. M. LABBE

each defies a tradition represented by an older moneyed woman and creates her own fortune. Both Smith and Austen use the older moneyed woman to illustrate the ineffectiveness of a modal femininity that makes a virtue of, even fetishizes, submission and decorum. Indeed, the Lady Montreville/Lady Catherine kinship has struck critics at least since 1951 with A. D. McKillop’s entry in Notes and Queries.16 Confronted with a new model of self-worth, Lady Montreville eventually collapses and dies of apoplexy, and Lady Catherine, less explosively, retreats to her carriage and exits the text, stripped of her power.17 Throughout Smith’s oeuvre, she writes independent women who think for themselves, and who only lack money as the final means to autonomy. They seek their fortune sometimes through marriage, but not always: Althea Dacres, for instance, has ‘expectations’ that in this case allow her to assume agency avant la lettre (the letter in this case being a will, the validity of which is contested through legal chicanery). Unlike the men whose expectations create a sense of entitlement, Althea works for her inheritance, hindered not only by the almost supernatural machinations of the lawyer Vampyre, but also by those of another older moneyed woman: her stepmother. Generations are often at war in Smith, and (step)mothers who ‘have’ often striven to cut off permanently younger women (and only sometimes men), who ‘have not’. Althea, from the later novel Marchmont , demonstrates Smith’s interesting social move towards complete female independence. Ethelinde, in her second novel, also continually seeks independence through an income, but in this novel solely constructed through her relationships with men. The entire novel colludes with this point of view: the narrator is complicit as Ethelinde works very hard indeed both to keep Sir Edward as an advocate (even though she is aware of his illicit passion) and maintain her romance with the penniless Montgomery. Again and 16 See F. B. Pinion, A Jane Austen Companion (172), where he cites McKillop (Notes and Queries, September 1951). 17 Mark Fulk has described how Smith reuses this trope in The Young Philosopher; see ‘Mismanaging Mothers: Matriarchy and the Romantic Education in Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher’, Women’s Writing 16.1 (2009), 94–108. Mrs. Rayland, in The Old Manor House, also exerts marital control over, in this case, the hero, Orlando, who submits to her wishes while she is alive and is only allowed, by Smith, to marry his beloved Monimia, of no fixed class, after Mrs. Rayland’s death. And in Montalbert, the (anti)hero’s mother goes so far as to imprison Rosalie in the family castle in an attempt to separate Rosalie from her son.

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

65

again, the narrator, Ethelinde’s father, Sir Edward, Montgomery himself, and Ethelinde converse or think about the absolute necessity for Ethelinde to marry money. Ethelinde is both passive and active: she is a new woman aware of the benefits of acting like an ‘old’ one. Her comportment is never under question within the novel and yet her behaviour, directly modelled on sensibility, does not accord with her hard-headed approach to her lovers. The insights we glean as readers from the access the text grants us to her inner subjectivity are the trail to a more complex female type.18 And so we return to Mary Crawford, whose spirited refusal to contain herself within the limits of Edmund’s or Fanny’s strictures is so Elizabeth-like.19 The two characters flout convention, sparkle, and attract positive and negative attention. They direct their plots by making choices rather than being helpless in the face of a storyline. The difference lies in the social landscape the two novels construct: Elizabeth’s critics are themselves critiqued, Mary’s are upheld. Elizabeth’s mistake is to listen too credulously to Wickham, Mary’s is to support too thoughtlessly Henry’s projects (that is, she is an advocate for her brother, usually a good thing). Elizabeth is rewarded for her spirit, Mary isn’t. Is this caution, or cautionary? Does Mary take spirit too close to brashness? Again, the inconsistency from novel to novel signals that a type is being tested within different conditions. Smith does this too. It’s progress. ∗ ∗ ∗ Types persist because their very familiarity acts as shorthand for plot development. We know what will happen because we know that kind of thing always happens to that kind of character. Mode means that virtue is rewarded, vice punished, duty admired, and wilfulness corrected. Type means that this kind of woman or man gets that kind of outcome. Stereotype means we don’t even have to think about the details. Smith and Austen write novels that make us think. Elizabeth and Mary are a species of double: same type of character, quite different outcome. 18 As Joe Bray notes, free indirect discourse enters the novel with Smith, not Austen. 19 Their similarity has also been noticed by William Galperin: ‘the virtual transposition

of … Elizabeth Bennet into the character of Mary Crawford, who, unlike her prototype, is plainly an exhibit in the case against England’s decadent or residual culture’. See ‘“Describing What Never Happened”: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities’, English Literary History 73.2 (2006): 355–383, 367.

66

J. M. LABBE

Delamere and Montalbert are another type of double: hysterically emotional men whose objective is to possess the woman they desire. Emmeline, new type, can resist this. Rosalie, old type, is destroyed by it. Let’s look again at Willoughby (Austen’s): let’s look at Frank Churchill. Both have expectations, both are charmers, both attract the attention of a heroine, both need to hide their actions from an older moneyed woman. Frank gets his woman and his fortune and lives happily ever after in the fairy-tale plotting of Emma. Willoughby gets a woman and a fortune and indulges in ‘feeling’ in the sensibility-laden plotting of Sense and Sensibility. What are we to think? Never mind—at least we’re thinking. Smith and Austen, together, enforce this. What have they made, together? Prototype.

References Anon. 1790. A Monthly Review. London: Printed for R. Griffiths. Bartolomeo, Joseph. 1993. The Subversion of Romance in The Old Manor House. Studies in English Literature 33: 645–657. Bray, Joe. 2007. The ‘Dual Voice’ of free Indirect Discourse: A Reading Experiment. Language and Literature 16: 37–52. Burney, Fanny. 2002. Evelina. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cummins, Nicola. 2007. ‘A Nervous Man, Easily Depressed’: What Is Wrong with Mr. Woodhouse? Persuasions Online 28 (1). Doody, Margaret Ann. 1986. Jane Austen’s Reading. In The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey, 347–363. New York: Macmillan Press. Ehrenpreis, Anne. 1970. Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25: 343–348. Fergus, Jan. 1993. ‘My Sore Throats, You Know, Are Always Worse Than Anybody’s’: Mary Musgrove and Jane Austen’s Art of Whining. Persuasions 15: 139–149. Ford, Susan Allen. 2011. Mrs. Dashwood’s Insight: Reading Edward Ferrars and Columella; Or, the Distressed Anchoret. Persuasions 33: 75–88. Fulk, Mark. 2009. Mismanaging Mothers: Matriarchy and the Romantic Education in Charlotte Smith’s the Young Philosopher. Women’s Writing 16: 94– 108. Galperin, William. 2006. Describing What Never Happened: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities. English Literary History 73: 355–383. Halsey, Katie. 2005. Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park. In British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics, and History, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, 48–61. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harris, Jocelyn. 2003. Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3

MODE: WOMEN AND MEN/TYPE AND STEREOTYPE

67

Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. 2013. Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History. The Wordsworth Circle 44: 140–148. Hudson, Glenda. 1999. Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jenkins, Joyce. 2006. The Puzzle of Fanny Price. Philosophy and Literature 30 (2): 346–360. Looser, Devoney. 1996. Jane Austen ‘Responds’ to the Men’s Movement. Persuasions 18: 159–170. McKillop, Alan. 1951. Allusions to Prose Fiction in Jane Austen’s Volume the Third. Notes and Queries 196: 428–429. Morgan, Mary Stoner. 2011. Pride and Potentiality: Doubling Elizabeth Bennet. Persuasions Online 32 (1). Morris, Ivor. 1999. Jane Austen and the Interplay of Character. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Morrissey, Joe. 2019. Sensibility, Sincerity, and Self-Interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde. Women’s Writing 26: 342–357. Pinion, F. 1973. A Jane Austen Companion: A Critical Survey and Reference Book. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Richardson, Alan. 2002. Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion. Poetics Today 23: 141–160. Watson, Mary. 2011. A Defense of Edward Ferrars: Austen’s Hero as a Nexus of Sense and Sensibility. Persuasions Online 32 (1). Wyett, Jodi. 2015. Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey, the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer. The Eighteenth Century 56: 261– 276.

CHAPTER 4

Manner: Codes and Outcomes

Abstract This chapter explores manner in terms of conduct and interpersonal and community-based interaction. The societies plotted by Smith and Austen rely on codes of conduct that regulate behaviour: politeness, observed hierarchies, costume, and occasion. However, these overt forms of social control interest both authors less than do those drawing on secrecy, covertness, and emotional manipulation. Drawing on two paired sets of novels, the chapter will explore surveillance and seduction and their associated codes and outcomes. The chapter, in closely comparing narratives, speculates that Smith and Austen are particularly aware of what ‘manner’ makes, and what it undoes. Keywords Mood · Temperament · Sensibility · Disease · Disorder · Pathology

When Smith and Austen get so far into a mode that they turn it inside out and thereby retype it, they are charting how plots that recombine the expected elements can, explosively, lead readers to what could be called a new periodic table. Now, elements are ordered according to a different reading of their trends: chemical properties align vertically within a text via relationships that spark from revised and remodelled forms of friction. They also align as it were horizontally, across texts and decades. Is lead now gold? The mode(l) will require the test of reproducibility, but the reflection of Smith into Austen, the mutual interest in typing, untyping, © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_4

69

70

J. M. LABBE

and retyping, invites their readers to ask: if mode is about shape, outline, the look of the thing, something stamped on the page, does it cast a shadow? Does it have depth? Does it mean, or can it only be? Moving from being to meaning takes us beyond performance to acting. We look for how: manner, and manners. What is privileged? Who notices who? What language do they employ—what code of conduct? The emphasis on noticing and mandating conduct, especially but not exclusively for women, is a feature of the period; James Fordyce, Hester Chapone, Smith herself write how-to manuals.1 Perfecting mandated physical actions are part of the process of growing to adulthood: who to curtsey to, when to look, who bows first, orders of precedence in approaching the dining table (Lydia’s glee in noting that she can now be seated ahead of her older, but unmarried sisters). Both Smith and Austen, with their genteel upbringing, are well-versed in propriety and manners. But they veer from the word-perfect; they unravel the code. ∗ ∗ ∗ If manners maketh the man, what do we make of the man Willoughby? Indeed, there are three: Sir Clement, George, and John. When Burney names her rake ‘Sir Clement Willoughby’ in 1778 she may well have intended merely to evoke his breeding; as Loraine Fletcher notes, ‘Willoughby’ ‘carries the necessary Burke’s Peerage ring; a Willoughby fought at Agincourt’ (38–39). Burney’s character is a distillation of the libertine figure familiar from Richardson and others: as Sir Hargreve Pollexfen in Sir Charles Grandison (1754) does with Harriet Byron, he pursues and abducts Evelina; like Lovelace with Clarissa he masks his sexual intentions behind protestations of love. Unlike either of them he is allowed little success: his abduction attempt lasts only a few minutes, while his pursuit of Evelina is derailed almost from the start by her understanding of his venality. Burney uses Willoughby to embody unsatisfied desire and masculine competition over Evelina; in the end, readers are unsure whether he regrets more his loss of the heroine or his loss of her to Lord Orville, his rival.

1 For instance: Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women: in Two Volumes (1767) and Addresses to Young Men (1777); Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1773); Smith, Rural Walks: In Dialogues Intended for the Use of Young Persons (1795); and Rambles Further: A Continuation of Rural Walks (1796).

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

71

Such is the lasting effect of Evelina that when Smith calls her hero of sensibility in her 1791 novel Celestina George Willoughby, the echoes of Sir Clement are audible. But where Sir Clement is a rake, George is a man of feeling, totally devoted to his love for Celestina and totally undone by his notion that she is his half-sister and therefore unattainable. Although not a sexual predator like Sir Clement, he is nonetheless far from perfect: indecisive and vacillating, self-justifying and self-dramatizing, he agrees to a loveless marriage with his heiress cousin in order to recover his finances, suspects Celestina of duplicity on the basis of mere report and publicly shuns her, and spends much of the novel sunk in his own despair. Yet readers are invited to like Willoughby, as he is invariably called, and to sympathize with him. He is presented as embodying true romantic love, perfecting the lovelorn hero suffering under crossed stars. Defined by love, his desire for Celestina is conveyed almost entirely through a romanticized, stylized view of it; instead of Sir Clement’s predatory sexuality, George Willoughby exhibits emotional wildness, tameable only by Celestina. Celestina voices the anxiety that Austen’s characters later come to feel: ‘“Willoughby – but no! it is impossible: he cannot be unworthy – he cannot have cruelly deceived me – it is impossible….”’ (156). Although she is reassured that ‘“it is indeed … impossible for Mr. Willoughby to be guilty of any unworthy action…”’, and although, eventually, he recovers his equanimity, his unquestioning belief in report and the tales of others belies the noble personality others assert. This transmits two models to Austen, who creates a Willoughby who is simultaneously a man of feeling and a desiring rake. What links the two Willoughbys is obsessive jealousy and possessiveness, expressed as a desire to seduce on the part of Sir Clement and a desire to, in effect, be seduced (by love as embodied by Celestina) on the part of George. Jane Austen’s John Willoughby thus has a complicated pedigree, and his plot in Sense and Sensibility is clearly derived from Smith’s Celestina, as both Fletcher and William H. Magee make clear.2

2 See Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 38–42. William H. Magee notes that Sense and Sensibility ‘recalls Charlotte Smith … frequently and closely …. Jane Austen had Charlotte Smith in general and Celestina in particular closely in mind when writing’ the novel; ‘The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen’, Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 120–132, 125–126. More recently, Devoney Looser has argued for the connection with Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story (1796). See A Gossip’s Story, ed. Looser (Valancourt Books, 2015).

72

J. M. LABBE

Both notice Austen’s re-use of Willoughby’s purely mercenary engagement, the encounter at a London ball, and other plot points, which emphasize that although Austen’s novel was not published until 1811, it was conceived as early as 1795, only a few years after the publication of Celestina. Austen’s Willoughby, however, is also infused with Burney’s: he begins as George and transforms into Sir Clement. Initially impressing the Dashwoods with his devotion to feeling and sentiment, his later exposure as a Sir Clement-like sexual predator means that his sensibility eventually comes to be seen as desire in disguise. As George, he can get close enough to Marianne to touch her and place her in compromising situations (the trip to Mrs. Smith’s house is, in effect, a consensual abduction), but his Sir Clement traits are made clear when the reader learns of his seduction and abandonment of Eliza. John Willoughby is, therefore, the model seducer, both of Marianne and the reader who mourns his exposure as villain to the end. When he allows himself to regret the loss of Marianne, he even seduces himself: his pretended sensibility takes a kind of nostalgic hold, allowing him to suffer the pangs of lost love while also enjoying the comforts of Miss Grey’s £20,000. Readers, as well as his peers in the novel, have a hard time with this. The intricate weaving of narratives means that the three Willoughbys are entangled in narratives of desire requiring different levels of discerning. George and John, that is, enter a character matrix wherein desire evolves from looking. Their communities function by instituting and expecting codes, the successful interpretation of which allow for the smooth running of social systems through manner(s). But their complex of surveillance and seduction is not simply unmannerly: they focus attention on what happens when social mores slip—or rather, when slippage is the outcome of manner. ∗ ∗ ∗ Surveillance: as a term it enters the English language, according to the OED, in 1799. As a practice, it arises when trust erodes and something more than personal assurances are needed. We look at each other to see who is looking back, who others are looking at, and whose attention

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

73

is caught.3 We need to know what is being looked as well as who, but surveillance overlaps with seduction when the object is a ‘who’: seen at a ball, in a street, in a passing carriage, on the other side of a field, in the mind’s eye. It should be harmless (I was only looking) and it should leave no mark. Yet the acts of interpretation and overinterpretation that often follow sustained surveillance indicate otherwise. The lowered eyes of the genteel lady contrast with the bold stare of the street-wise woman. Respect vies with intrusion. There is a code of power in looking that leads seamlessly to the grab for power implied by seduction, so seldom a gentle romantic action, so often an act of taking. In the 1790s acts of war complicated surveillance, and acts of violence tainted seduction. The Willoughbys point towards the inability to have one without the other. Their novels show how social manner requires codes of practice enacted through events and expectations that regulate behaviour. So why do looking, gazing, and taking become so compromised? Why does regulation sow such irregular behaviour? Or are Smith and Austen gesturing towards what perhaps should not surprise us: manner is only superficial, a public performance; codes can entrap as well as create order; the unexpected outcome is the one we should have been prepared for all along? ∗ ∗ ∗ In 1919, George Moore focuses on Sense and Sensibility as providing a ‘supreme scene’ of human suffering, something we all should look at: Miss Austen gives us all the agony of passion the human heart can feel; she was the first …. A young girl of twenty, jilted, comes up to London with her mother and sister, and she sees her lover at an assembly; he comes forward and addresses a few words more to her sister than to herself within hearing of a dozen people, and it is here that we find the burning human heart in English prose narrative for the first, and, alas, for the last time.4

It is striking how resonant the scene is for Moore and other readers; Tony Tanner’s description of Marianne’s subsequent primal scream is only 3 Lily Gurton-Wachter constructs an intriguing argument about the place of attention in the poetry of the period in watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 4 Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, 447.

74

J. M. LABBE

a later example.5 Marianne’s ‘wildest anxiety’ and Willoughby’s struggle between social politesse and ‘embarrassment’ focus our attention on destructive, unmediated emotion in the text. The public forum militates against anything other than formal interaction (codes), which Willoughby understands and Marianne refuses to. The scene shows the moment in which Marianne is punished for her indulgence in sensibility, visible in spite of Elinor’s best efforts ‘to screen her from the observation of others’ (200). In other words, Austen shows us what should not be seen, female emotional frankness leading to a stripped-bare display of ‘agitation’. But Moore is mistaken in his celebration of Austen’s originality, as readers of Celestina know.6 Magee and Fletcher, as noted above, plot the parallels between the texts, and each points out that Celestina, like Marianne, suffers physical and emotional humiliation when rejected by her Willoughby at a party. Smith’s scene is fuller than Austen’s, and where Austen’s Willoughby’s emotion is visible only superficially, Smith’s Willoughby is given the initial point of view as well as the mistaken notion that Celestina has an ‘attachment to [a] new favourite’. But Smith transfers point of view when Celestina and Willoughby physically touch; jostled against him, Celestina turns and utters an ‘involuntary and faint shriek’: The agitation of poor Celestina could not be concealed, nor could she for a moment or two escape from the enquiring eyes of those who remarked it …. Celestina’s eyes followed [Willoughby] with a look of inexpressible amazement and concern. She seemed to be in a fearful dream; and when she no longer saw him, her eyes were fixed on the door through which he had gone out. She … sat, with a palpitating heart and oppressed breath…. (375, 376, emphasis added)

Like Marianne after her, Celestina’s public display of emotion, her ‘violent … perturbation’ (377), affects her physically, and she later apostrophizes her Willoughby in markedly similar terms used in Marianne’s face to face encounter: ‘“Ah! Willoughby … is it thus we meet again after such a parting?”’ (378).

5 In Sense and Sensibility, ed. Tanner (London: Penguin Classics, 1969). 6 In ‘What Happens at the Party’ I offer a fuller discussion of the plot mappings: see

‘What Happens at the Party: Jane Austen Converses with Charlotte Smith’, Persuasions Online 30.2 (2010); http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/labbe.html.

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

75

Smith’s scene assigns almost equal pain to Willoughby and Celestina, but in the end it is Celestina’s suffering that is the focus. Narration, here, pauses to allow characters to feel, and for observers to see this: some through right of access, others through proximity. Austen’s telescoped moment, once reunited with its model, pares down that more elaborate structure to emphasize its cruelty, but both the scenes force readers into a participation in agitation: which is felt but also seen to be felt. Smith and Austen linger on Celestina’s and Marianne’s pain and thus require the reader to acknowledge the truth factor of their portrayals. Both do so voyeuristically: despite efforts to screen, to hide from view, on the part of characters, readers are given special visual access, so that the texts’ plot similarities facilitate a mutual exploration of the relationship between secrecy and surveillance. This is as significant in the 1790s as the 18teens; political tensions and anxieties allow a new trade in spying and a new emphasis on security. Celestina’s 1791 publication and Sense and Sensibility’s 1790s genesis and 1811 publication give the novels an edge inflected by social concerns with seeing , with being seen, with controlling who sees what, and when. In the party scenes, and in the pages leading up to them and subsequently, Smith and Austen make repeated use of verbs like ‘gaze’, ‘perceive’, ‘see’, and ‘observe’; characters ‘betray’ themselves, are looked at, ‘avoid the sight’ of others. What’s more, they write secret letters which are then allowed to be read by others; and they attempt to hide themselves away only for their private spaces to be entered by uninvited guests. The two novels project a keen awareness that people will look at other people; both infuse this culture of gazing with narratives of physical trauma. So, in Celestina, when a feverish and miserable Willoughby attends a card party with his sister, he saunter[s] into one of the apartments where the younger part of the company were seated at a commerce table; where the first person that met his eyes was Celestina … while on one side sat a young man … and on the other another gentleman …. Fixed to the place, [Willoughby] stood unheeded …. [H]is legs trembled so that it was with difficulty that he supported himself, and his heart beat as if it would break …. [H]e staggered, and might have fallen, had not the shame of betraying so much weakness lent him resolution to reach a chair…. (374)

76

J. M. LABBE

Consumed with jealousy, he returns to his sister so that they may leave, as soon as she ‘settl[es] her winnings’ (375), and from here the scene’s perspective shifts to Celestina and her own recognition scene: ‘the well known face of Willoughby … instantly struck her’ (375). Her shriek, which anticipates Marianne’s later scream of agony, corporealizes this strike: beaten by Willoughby’s gaze, she collapses in full view of the company. His secret initial observation, in that she does not know he has seen her, transmutes into a co-observation that is mutually obscuring: Willoughby thinks she has a new lover, Celestina thinks he no longer cares for her.7 Celestina’s agitation, an emotional perturbation and disturbance that manifests itself physically as well, arises from ‘the displeasure with which he surveyed her’, and ‘impresse[s]’ her ‘with terror’ (375). It also seems to dehumanize her, as Willoughby, on leaving with his sister, sees her only as an ‘object’ from which he ‘turn[s] hastily’, leaving Celestina frozen in an observational stance: her ‘eyes followed him with a look of inexpressible amazement … when she no longer saw him, her eyes were fixed on the door through which he had gone out’ (376). Transfixed, Celestina is all eyes, while Willoughby’s behaviour is construed by her friends as ‘insulting’ (377). The code of recognition and regard, that which mandates acknowledgement, has been replaced with a different one: disregard, snubbing, deliberate inattention. This party scene and its aftermath transform the acts of looking, gazing, and seeing into threatening and anxious acts of surveillance, infused as they are with suspicion, dread, and mistrust. As characters observe each other, seeing becomes an invasion that violates bodily integrity. Willoughby and Celestina can barely stand after seeing each other; touch provokes shrieks; a look is reconstituted as an insult. When Celestina sits down to write to Willoughby, she couches her distress in terms that conflate looking and feeling: ‘You look very ill, Willoughby. You look unhappy: and on me you looked unkindly’ (383). Willoughby’s look both indicates pain and inflicts it: Celestina notes that she ‘do[es] not ask to see’ him, but later, another accidental meeting at the opera again leads to more mutually threatening seeing: Celestina becomes faint and nearly falls from her seat, while Willoughby’s eyes ‘fall’ on her and then ‘tur[n] 7 Willoughby’s and Celestina’s misapprehensions map almost exactly onto Marianne’s speculations over her Willoughby’s changed behaviour in the letter she writes after their London encounter.

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

77

towards her, but immediately [are] withdrawn as if they had met a basilisk’ (390). Aleida Assmann notes that ‘recognition’, which arises from looking, is necessary for identity formation (‘[w]ithout recognition we cannot know who we are’ [73]). But it also functions as an ‘asymmetric desire or claim to receive something that can also be withheld’ (74). In this instance, Willoughby decides to refuse to see Celestina and in this way attempts to deny her visibility, her presence. Yet as the reference to a ‘basilisk’ suggests, he must do this since being seen by Celestina threatens to undo his own self-recognition, his ability to know who he is himself.8 In a 1790s context, it is a political move to present acts of seeing as acts of violence, and it transforms a romance of sensibility into an investigation of identities. ‘Enquiring eyes’ follow characters throughout the novel; they are unable to escape, or camouflage their reactions to seeing and being seen. Characters find they can’t trust their eyes, or they trust what they see over what they should know. They allow what they have heard to overcome the truth value of what they can see. They look at each other with: love, desire, hate, confusion, hauteur. Confusingly, they can see and disregard simultaneously. Underlying this is the paranoia induced when codes of conduct don’t result in the manner one expects. So Willoughby rewrites his narrative of Celestina’s virtue to account for what he has heard—and what he sees is re-envisioned too. Moreover, he re-envisages himself as someone who must marry without love for the sake of money to uphold his estate, and therefore must (of course) not actually love if the loved one has become unrecognizable. A few years after Celestina, between 1795 and 1797, Austen drafts and revises ‘Elinor and Marianne’, well into the decade’s turn towards repression, suspicion, and watchfulness. As noted above, the party scene as it finally appears in Sense and Sensibility has struck many readers as vital to the emotional trajectory of the text. Austen models her scene very closely on Smith’s, while also reassigning some of the action: so 8 The recognition involved in seeing is, according to Assmann, a ‘new ter[m] in our social and political vocabulary’, replacing polite and ceremonial interaction only in our late twentieth-century/early twenty-first century times (73). Smith and Austen should only really be able to utilize the codes of polite interaction, which do, of course, allow for the refusal to acknowledge (that is, cutting). Instead, they push towards recognition in Assmann’s sense, both positing it as an alternative to the damage that can be caused by forms of politeness, and showing its own potential for harm, perhaps because of its immature state: ‘to be seen reciprocally is to be touched, penetrated … even … cannibalized’, says Manushag Powell (260).

78

J. M. LABBE

where Willoughby’s sister sits down to cards, here Lady Middleton ‘sat down to Casino’, and where Willoughby begins the surveillance when his eyes are ‘met’ by Celestina in company with a young man, here ‘Elinor perceived Willoughby … in earnest conversation with a very fashionable looking young woman’ (198). Visual verbs abound: she ‘soon caught his eye’, Willoughby ‘could not but see’ Marianne, Marianne in her turn ‘perceive[s] Willoughby and is then mystified when ‘he does not look at [her]’, Willoughby ‘regard[s] them both’ and then ‘avoids [Marianne’s] eye …determined not to observe her attitude’, Elinor ‘watch[es] his countenance’ (198, 199). Austen’s Willoughby is more successful at not looking, but Austen nonetheless concentrates her action on seeing and looking, so that Willoughby is drawn back to his young lady ‘on catching [her[ eye’ even as Marianne insists to Elinor that ‘I must see him again’ (200). And again, curious eyes watch, as Elinor tries to block their gaze. Once again, the card-playing woman is persuaded to leave her game, and once again agitation, torment, and agony result from the acts of seeing and looking. Marianne, like Celestina, retreats to her bedroom, and like Celestina cannot escape being looked at even there: ‘Elinor, roused from sleep by [Marianne’s] agitation and sobs … perceived her…’.9 The recognition event is entirely dependent on the seen. Hence, while Marianne uses the word ‘regard’ to mean esteem and affection: ‘your regard for us all was insincere’, ‘Who regards me?’ (209, 211), the text itself—the narrated text—uses it in its visual sense: ‘[he] regarded them both’, so that when Elinor thinks the word, it is coloured by both meanings: ‘Absence might have weakened his regard, and convenience might have determined him to overcome it, but that such a regard had formerly existed she could not bring herself to doubt’ (201). In this way Elinor surveys her understanding of events, constructs Willoughby’s affection visually, and realizes—makes real—the secrecy that has allowed Willoughby to disregard Marianne at the party. His subsequent letter, read and thus part of the visual economy, is deemed an ‘insult’ (205), just as Willoughby’s glares at Celestina are.

9 When Celestina wakes after the awful party, she finds her friend Lady Horatia (a model of good sense) ‘sitting by her bedside, holding one of her hands, and gazing on her with great concern’ (379).

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

79

Celestina and Sense and Sensibility make surveillance into a narrative device that forces characters into painful, tormenting, and traumatic situations. It becomes impossible, as much as Marianne might wish it, to ‘avoi[d] the sight of everybody’ (202). And whereas ordinary surveillance is undertaken in the service of uncovering secrets, in these two texts looking, gazing, seeing, etc., serve only to mystify situations. Characters watch each other constantly and yet fail to understand motivations or clarify their own and others’ bewilderment. In a culture saturated with fears of security breaches, lapses in border control, and a compromised social order, it is not surprising if people spend time watching each other. What is perhaps discomfiting is how these two novels show the damage, emotional and physical, such a reliance on surveillance can cause despite the period’s dependence.10 Secrets can’t be ferreted out through diligent and rigorous observation; surveillance instead undoes security. By taking their readers to the crush of a party, writing a crowd scene, and then homing in on moments of seeing that enable only suffering, Smith and Austen insinuate modern ideas of violated bodily integrity, a dynamics of interaction rather than influence. ∗ ∗ ∗ The desire that leads men to look at women, or not to look at them, or to look anywhere but at them; and the receptivity that allows women to look for being looked at, rests in the aether in these surveillance scenes: the touching that indicates regard gone wrong is not seductive but, rather, pugilistic. And then there is sex. For Smith and Austen, seduction is an outcome of surveillance and operates sexually, informing plots in which romance is as much about sex as it is about love, and reflexively, acting metaphorically to represent a cultural reliance on domination and submission. Uncovering the Manor House at the heart of Mansfield Park shows the ways in which both novels work to explore and consolidate the codes anchoring seduction. ∗ ∗ ∗

10 ‘The impulse to look with deep attention upon any subject can acquire an aggressive and even sexual valence when applied socially’ (Powell, 256).

80

J. M. LABBE

Under the sign of ‘influence’, scholars have noted that The Old Manor House’s Monimia shares personality traits and domestic trials with Fanny Price: both are poor relations, functioning as upper servants in fact (Monimia) and in deportment (Fanny); both have thoroughly disagreeable aunts (Mrs. Lennard/Mrs. Norris). Loraine Fletcher discusses how The Old Manor House ‘had a profound and lasting effect on Austen’s imagination; she adopted the house metaphor and aspects of the plot for Mansfield Park twenty years later’.11 Brean Hammond also remarks that The Old Manor House ‘may have influenced the plot contours of Mansfield Park’.12 Yet what is overlooked is the wholesale importation of The Old Manor House into Mansfield Park: beyond Fanny and Monimia, beyond ‘aspects’ and ‘plot contours’, Smith’s novel is the blueprint for Austen’s. Let’s reunite The Old Manor House and Mansfield Park; let’s thereby sense-check statements like Isobel Grundy’s, that Austen is ‘chary of influence …. [and] little given to direct imitation, let alone allusion’ (91). ∗ ∗ ∗ It is in the arena of sex and seduction that the two novels converge most closely, only to diverge most drastically.13 The seduction plot that underpins both narratives hinges on representations of crime and punishment as well as love and desire. In adapting Smith, Austen inherits her 1790s radicalism and also her moral strictures, yet her world of seduction is simultaneously the more permissive one of the Regency and the more restrained one of a culture used to war and privation. To return to Hammond’s remark that The Old Manor House ‘may have’ provided the plot for Mansfield Park: once the two novels are read in tandem their narrative similarities are unmistakable. Each text features an autocratic landowner, a downtrodden heroine, a romanticized hero, a wastrel oldest son whose extravagances impact directly on the younger son’s prospects and threaten to destabilize the entire family’s finances, a languid and ineffective mother, 11 Fletcher makes this remark in Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), 189. 12 Hammond, ‘The Political Unconscious in Mansfield Park’, in Mansfield Park, ed. Nigel Wood (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), 56–90: 68. See also Magee, ‘The Happy Marriage’, 126. 13 See my ‘Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen’, in Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Labbe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 113–128, for a full discussion of the plot mappings.

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

81

a misguided and mercenary father, a sister who elopes, a cuckolded partner, a seducer, a libertine whose desire for the heroine leads him to offer her marriage, a sparkling and vivacious although flippant and unreliable coquette, a would-be seducer who hopes his assistance in procuring a commission will be rewarded with sexual favours, and an entirely unlikeable and despotic aunt. As the chart below shows, Austen combines some key roles: People: The Old Manor House/ Mansfield Park • • • • • • • • • • •

Mrs. Rayland/Sir Thomas Bertram Monimia/Fanny Orlando/Edmund/Fanny Philip Somerive/Tom Bertram Mrs. Somerive/Lady Bertram Mr. Philip Somerive/Sir Thomas Bertram Isabella Somerive/Maria Bertram, Mary Crawford General Tracy/James Rushworth, Henry Crawford Warwick/Henry Crawford Sir John Belgrave/Henry Crawford Mrs. Lennard/Mrs. Norris

By basing her cast of characters on those of The Old Manor House, Austen appropriates their stories as well (cf. the Willoughbys). Certain things must happen in Mansfield Park as a result of its Old Manor House modelling. And certain actors within these events find their roles rewritten, especially in storylines involving seduction. Smith’s novels often contain seduction subplots, and The Old Manor House’s inclusion of libertine excess and elopement does not, in itself, stand out. Smith’s willingness to explore less respectable arenas of sexuality have been linked to her status as a married woman (hence sexually knowledgeable), to her radical and Revolutionary sympathies, and to her enlightened feminist ideology.14 Certainly, she is aware of the value of seduction to a plot: heroes reveal unexpected attitudes towards (some)

14 See, for instance, Stuart Curran, General Introduction to The Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 1, viii–xxvii; Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Biography; and Judith Stanton, ed., The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, passim.

82

J. M. LABBE

women, heroines (whether major or minor) claim a freedom and independence not usually allotted to them; moralities can be questioned and mores undermined. Austen has been a different matter. Although from first (Willoughby and Eliza) to last (Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay) seduction has been pivotal to her plots, for many readers her novels may be about courtship but they are definitely not about sex. And yet, as Jill Heydt-Stevenson among others recently have shown, Austen makes extended use of bawdy humour and sexualised behaviours in her texts, ‘breaching conventional propriety and ask[ing] us to question any easy assumption that during her era women would be less likely to experience’ the bawdy and the sexual.15 Indeed, by virtue of timing Austen can invigorate libertine excess and elopement with Regency as well as Revolutionary flavours. Smith heightens the sexualised tone with the drawn-out near-seduction that takes place between Orlando Somerive and the quasi-servant Monimia. From his childhood Orlando is frequently at Rayland Hall and finds in Monimia first a playfellow and then a potential lover: ‘Orlando, who had loved [Monimia] as a playfellow while they were both children, now began to feel a more tender and more respectful affection for her; though unconscious himself that it was her beauty that awakened these sentiments’ (The Old Manor House, 48). In other words, he looks at her, at her ‘beauty’, a lot. The relationship that develops is dependent on Monimia’s ambiguous position in the house: as Mrs. Lennard’s niece, she is more than a servant but definitely less than a lady. Mrs. Lennard seems fully aware of the attractions of her niece for Orlando and contrives to keep them apart; he as studiously creates opportunities for them to be together, mainly at night, at first in his bedroom, and later in hers, a situation he encourages after finding her alone and sobbing over mistreatment from Mrs. Lennard: ‘the unhappy Monimia, who had felt ever since her earliest recollection the misery of her situation, was never so sensible of it as at this moment’ (52).16 Orlando, pressing for clandestine meetings, characterizes his love for her as brotherly (‘[I] love you as well as I do any of my sisters – even the sister I love best’, 53), but at seventeen to Monimia’s fourteen he 15 See ‘“Slipping into the Ha-Ha”: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 5 (2000), 309–339, 313. 16 Her misery might also include the dawning knowledge that she is as much at risk from Orlando’s desire as she is from Mrs. Lennard’s cruelty.

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

83

is sexually mature and aware of his potency: later, in his room, ‘Orlando was tempted to kiss [her tears] away before they reached her bosom; but he remembered that she was wholly in his power, and that he owed her more respect than it would have been necessary to have shewn even in public’ (73). For Orlando, Monimia becomes an obsessive love object; his behaviour over her is wildly volatile; he is seduced by his feeling for her as well as her body’s ‘beauty’. In her treatment of Monimia and Orlando, Austen shifts the focus and in the process transfers desire from male to female. Fanny, whose domestic situation so mirrors Monimia’s, becomes the character in thrall to her love for Edmund, which she attempts to see as sisterly (‘she loves him better than any body in the world except her brother William; her heart was divided between the two’, 52). Edmund accepts a subordinate position in the plot that would not be countenanced by his begetter Orlando. Instead, Austen explores what might be called Monimia’s story in her portrayal of Fanny’s position in the household as ‘lowest and last’ (234) and as thoroughly cowed by her tyrannical aunt. Even when Fanny admits her love is no longer sororal, she sees it as ‘reprobated and forbidden’ (274). Fanny’s pathological self-effacement is a heightened version of Monimia’s: ‘all the impressions that her infant understanding had received, tended only to confirm the artificial influence which her aunt endeavoured to establish over her imagination. Her poverty, her dependence, the necessity of her earning a subsistence by daily labour, had been the only lessons she had been taught’ (The Old Manor House, 81). Fanny, who ‘rated her own claims to comfort as low even as Mrs Norris could’ (Mansfield Park, 235), is as defined by her peripheral position in her household as Monimia is in hers. By pushing Monimia-as-Fanny to centre stage, Austen can also narrate the details of what was, in Smith and at least while in the Manor House, more of a peripheral abjection, seductive because (almost) elusive. For Orlando, Monimia’s sexual beauty combines with her availability as a semi-servant to make her enticing: ‘the restraints that every way surrounded [Orlando] served only to inflame [his passion]’ (59). For Fanny, who internalizes the humiliations of her domestic position, ‘desire [for Edmund] … is thwarted, beaten down, denied, frustrated’17 ; she substitutes for this a submission to her abjection 17 Claudia L. Johnson, ‘What Became of Jane Austen? Mansfield Park’, Persuasions 17 (1995), 59–70, 63.

84

J. M. LABBE

that functions as an alternative seduction, of herself along the lines of Orlando: ‘“If you cannot do without me, ma’am”, said Fanny, in a selfdenying tone—‘ (231, emphasis added). Johnson notes that ‘in [Fanny’s] erotic life pain rarely conduces to pleasure’ (63), but I would argue that, in giving in to the seductions of humiliation, Fanny is content for pain to conduce to pain. Both Monimia and Fanny are characters ‘who become more disturbing the longer we look at [them]’ (Fletcher, 183). Moreover, both seduce through their downtrodden marginality; even for their lovers, their restraint heightens their attractions.18 Thus, Orlando pursues Monimia all the more ardently the less available she is to him. This means both physically, when she is locked in her tower or secreted in her aunt’s closet, and emotionally, when he construes her adventures while he is in America as a series of seductions (‘And [young Newill] kissed [your tears] off … I know he did – yes! this stranger, infinitely more dangerous than [the seducer] Belgrave …. And your protector, I suppose, renewed his solicitations by the way?’ [478, 480]). Fanny’s own celebrated self-restraint, tinged with Monimia’s function as the object of Orlando’s desire, becomes itself desirable, especially to her suitor Henry Crawford. And by partially assuming Orlando’s place in the plot, Fanny is coloured as well by his persona, albeit repressed and suppressed. Hence, Orlando can express on Fanny’s behalf her love, jealousy, and desire to indulge her own feelings, while in her own text all such emotions are restrained into pathology, and restriction itself becomes selfseductive: ‘though she had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost all recurrence of either had led to something consolatory’ (171). In the end, neither Monimia’s unknown parentage nor Fanny’s all-too-well-known background prevent their translations from periphery to centre. Austen’s concentration on fleshing out Monimia’s story suggests, then, a keen awareness of Monimia’s worth. But Smith and Austen also involve their heroines in more conventional seduction plots; the two characters also attract the attentions of their respective texts’ libertines. For Monimia, this is Sir John Belgrave, an upstart baronet whose desire for Monimia stems in part from her perceived availability as a servant. Later, Sir John attempts to enter her bedroom through the same broken door and torn curtain that had admitted 18 This is why marginality and peripherality are not the same. Fanny is marginalized but a central figure; Monimia is peripheral in the Manor House and, while an object of Orlando’s pursuit, not the object: that is the Manor House itself.

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

85

Orlando, persecutes her with letters and in person, and finally approaches Mrs. Lennard with ‘a proposal of marriage’ to which Mrs. Lennard ‘insists’ she consent after ‘seeing Sir John, and hearing what he had to say’ (432, 466, 471). Monimia, however, ‘positively refuse[s]’, and is packed off to Winchester, apprenticed to a milliner, by her aunt. Once there she is again discovered by Sir John, whose attentions and ‘new proposals’ bring her the respect of her new employer (473). When Austen picks up on this for Fanny, she pulls the narrative of seduction to the fore, and emphasizes the ‘seducer seduced’: ‘my plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me’, says libertine Henry Crawford. ‘You must be aware that I am quite determined to marry Fanny Price’, says hero of romance Henry Crawford (242, 298). Like Sir John, he finds Fanny attractive and at first assumes her availability; again like Sir John, he finds himself proposing marriage to the woman he began simply trying to seduce. When Fanny, nonetheless, refuses him and refuses to bow to Sir Thomas’ wishes with the same steadfastness as Monimia shows her aunt, she is sent to Portsmouth (Austen’s equivalent of Winchester) only to encounter Henry there as well, and to teeter on the edge of agreeing to his proposal—or is it blandishments? Smith is careful to distinguish her libertines from her men of feeling—she makes them different men—but Austen seems to recognize their potential parity. Henry Crawford, as shown above, is a composite of three characters: the predatory seducer Sir John, the past-it roué General Tracy, and the romantic seducer Warwick, who runs away with Orlando’s sister Isabella on the eve of her marriage and whose own marriage to Isabella is not confirmed for 150 pages and two years. Smith makes the elopement an embarrassment for General Tracy and distressing for Isabella’s family, but Austen criminalizes it. Her transformation of the roué into the mama’s boy and boor James Rushworth colours him with General Tracy’s aged unsuitability as a husband to Isabella. But it also means that Maria commits adultery rather than simply following her heart. Henry’s compound character ensures he must be seen as a true seducer rather than a bon vivant; although intertextually submerged rather than open as with her Willoughby connections, Austen encodes Henry’s moral weakness when she taints him with not one, not two, but three seducer models. Julia Prewitt Brown has said that Mansfield Park ‘expos[es] horrors without resolving them. [It] is a deeply pessimistic and enervating

86

J. M. LABBE

work’.19 However, Henry Crawford is actually a deeply reassuring character; especially once his immoral pedigree is recognized, readers can see how deeply he deserves his punishment. Austen shows that the man of feeling can easily mask the libertine; where Smith separates them and in so doing allows the man of feeling his reward and his renewal, Austen suggests that someone like ‘handsome Warwick’ is as dangerous and threatening as Sir John.20 Warwick’s John Willoughby-like charm also transfers this element of The Old Manor House to Sense and Sensibility and provides a clear link between seeing and taking. Willoughby’s faux abduction of Marianne could so easily have been a real threat. Henry Crawford is not allowed to have his cake and eat it too; Austen clarifies the most useful tool of the seducer, his charm and apparent sincerity, revealing the predatory nature of sexual feeling, which destroys as it seduces. Although Henry ‘reproaches’ Maria as ‘the ruin of his happiness’ (459), it is plain that by relying on The Old Manor House, Austen ensures that he never had a hope of happiness. And by following the narratives’ deployment of the seduction plot, readers can see how first Smith and then Austen render what in the novel of sensibility was merely a plot device into a necessary element of characterization, structure, and meaning. It’s not merely that characters seduce each other or succumb to seduction; both authors unpack the attractions of roguery and mischief via their shared interest in and exposure of the narrative of enthrallment. ∗ ∗ ∗ The manner by which desire is inflamed and acted on in these novels requires us to look back at the picture being produced. In a highly hierarchical and regimented society, being subject to the eyes of others, or to their hands, arises from codes of conduct that legitimize acts otherwise suspect. Neither Celestina nor Marianne should react the way they do to being viewed so harshly. They should not even notice it: to notice it means they have already declared a vested interest ahead of public announcements. They have signalled that they ‘know’. But the power to ‘know’,

19 See Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 100. 20 This observation also easily applies to Wickham. For another take on Austen’s libertines, see Lynda A. Hall, ‘Jane Austen’s Attractive Rogues: Willoughby, Wickham, and Frank Churchill’, Persuasions 18 (1996), 186–190.

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

87

or ‘not-know’, is inextricably bound up with both a gendered and a class hierarchy. A man can look at or choose not to look at a woman of his own or a lower class; he can choose to have or take (‘seduce’) a woman of a lower class or to seduce (have or take but usually not keep) a woman of his own. A woman can see or not see a man of her own class who is looking—but with care and within codes of modesty. She can look at a man of a lower class secure that if he looks back the fault will lie, socially, with him—as long as she looks with care and within codes of modesty. By making their acts of seeing so visible, Celestina and Marianne risk transgressing the codes of modest acknowledgement—they have looked. They have seen themselves not being seen. The Willoughbys transgress codes of politeness, a social misdemeanour rather than a crime. John Willoughby is embarrassed, George Willoughby is by turns thunderstruck, weakened, and angered. But neither seems to be viewed by the company around them, contrary to the women whose friends seek to shield them from the gaze of others. Who is at more risk? Honour and reputation encoded as ceremonial observances of custom means that the female who decides to look back must be agitated: shaken out of line. And surveillance guarantees that they will be seen, if by no one else than the reader, implicated in a culture where, as Henry Tilney remarks to Catherine Morland, neighbours watch each other: domestic surveillance that complements the social code. As an example of the masculinized gaze, social surveillance in Celestina and Sense and Sensibility does actual harm. It leaves marks. This is why the women must somehow be protected: their transgressive looking can only be interpreted as prohibited doing. Hence (George) Willoughby finds it strikingly easy to believe the reports he hears of Celestina’s unsavoury activities; and (John) Willoughby can excuse himself since Marianne’s responsive looking indicates an unspeakable availability. The codes of conduct enforced by surveillance are neither secret nor complex: by flouting them, Smith and Austen challenge their validity. Seduction, though, is different. As a term, it floats between romance and violence (love and rape), and depending on the social standing of the participants there are stages of bodily interference that act as gates, either leading to or shutting off access to the finale. Orlando’s desire for Monimia arises from his freedom to look at her, specifically at her breasts (her ‘bosom’), with a perspective that reifies his class and visual dominance: she is usually positioned somewhat below him, kneeling or crouching or sitting on a stool, on display. Later, as their relationship matures, they

88

J. M. LABBE

see more eye to eye and Monimia gains more sexual power, able to control Orlando’s impulses by invoking the codes of gentlemanly behaviour. She successfully staves off seduction, in other words, by taking charge of Orlando’s power to look at her. This is in common with many of Smith’s heroines—but it is not itself part of the accepted hierarchy (think of Clarissa, Evelina, Belinda, and other female protagonists who either literally or figuratively give in). This obstructive response contrasts with the patent expectation on the part of male characters that the expression of desire will be enough to achieve the object. Sir John’s, General Tracy’s, and Henry’s shifts from seduction to proposal are acts of desperation undertaken in novels where the code (that someone like Monimia, little better than a servant; or Isabella, clearly a flirt and also financially straitened; or Fanny, Monimia-like and tangential to the family anyway) should operate in their favour. And indeed, it almost does: after all, Maria consents to Henry, and Isabella to Warwick. But then Maria must, given her identity as partIsabella and Henry’s as part-Warwick. Austen is less comfortable with the active expression of sexual desire on the woman’s part, however; this is why Maria leaves a marriage rather than an engagement, why Henry finds no happiness in the trade-off he makes between love (Fanny) and sex (Maria). Where Smith is content to allow her seduced women either to enjoy it or retain their (moral) virtue, Austen absolutely requires either punishment or expiation. This is, after all, another aspect of the code. Both Smith and Austen draw our attention to it: Smith to imply its absurdity, Austen its inescapability. ∗ ∗ ∗ Looking and touching: seeing and wanting. Surveilling and seducing. Seduction, once seen, cannot be unseen. Looks, once noticed, cannot be withdrawn. In the public forum (the ball, the card party) there is a strict hierarchy attached to observation. In a period of war and terror, the assumption that openness equals virtuous intentions vies with codes of modesty and expectations of emotional and physical privacy. Conduct and ceremony, based on strict expectations of class- and gender-based performance, strain against intrusion, infiltration, incivility. Can a hierarchy be maintained if social structures are unravelling, or are feared to be doing so? Does this mean an ever-more-strict adherence to the codes?

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

89

Celestina’s and Marianne’s illegitimate looking and consciousness are, in fact, expressions of desire. They invite seduction; they are seductive. No wonder the Willoughbys reel. No wonder their friends try to cover the eyes of those around them (figuratively speaking). No wonder that each experiences trials and tests of endurance as a result. But in the end, neither experiences lasting damage, and indeed both get what they want. Smith and Austen adeptly reorient the politics and outcomes of looking even as neither rejects the code. But seduction—catastrophe or quotidian? ∗ ∗ ∗ Underlying this is speculation about manner and social control. Manner: a way to act that observes codes and respects outcomes. Manners: the codes themselves, in action. If Smith and Austen are novelists of manners, in what manner do they pursue this? Smith, as the writer of sensibility and Gothic; Austen, as the recorder of the lives of the gentry and little else: both of these stereotypes have been challenged, to great and lasting impact, with Austen, and are being challenged, still rather piecemeal, with Smith. In the novels under discussion in this chapter, social control is omnipresent and characters negotiate its terrain, some obediently, quiescently, others less so. There is secrecy and keeping secrets. This method of objecting to surveillance or attempting to evade it leads to George Willoughby’s misapprehension about his relation to Celestina. Because information is withheld and concealed, he forms a half-vision that undoes his mother’s virtue, nearly destroys his understanding of Celestina, and almost costs him his integrity. Once he believes that Celestina is the product of an illicit liaison—that his mother has been seduced and has liked it—then he rather easily believes that Celestina herself has become susceptible to such lapses. No matter her manners: her very manner invites his suspicion. He is no longer able to see her correctly; she has been replaced by a vision, a tainted avatar of herself. Does this mean that, after all, surveillance is preferable? Is it surveillance that makes secrecy impossible? Smith undoes this as well by writing George as underequipped in seeing/looking/apprehension terms. No matter how hard he looks, he sees the wrong thing. More surveillance would mean only further mistakes. It’s because George expects, in a surveillance society, that secrets are kept that he so easily succumbs to what he thinks he now sees. Celestina rejects secrecy even as she accepts

90

J. M. LABBE

the power of looking. This is not to say she isn’t at risk—her method does not protect her, and those around her contentedly adhere to the existing codes. The novel queries them to the end, though, even as it plots them out, since Celestina is rewarded for her vision and George is smacked out of his hallucinations. Those who live in the world plotted by Sense and Sensibility usually do not want to be looked at but, on the other hand, they quite consistently reject secrecy. John Willoughby deceives Marianne not by telling her lies or by withholding information but because she has already decided who he is and that he has no secrets. But it is really Lucy Steele who enacts both a welcoming of surveillance and a rejection of secrets. Her promenades with Elinor and her unwelcome confidences originate in her (justifiable) anxiety that Edward now prefers Elinor to herself. She obeys absolutely codes of behaviour (although it might be argued that she speeds them up or skips a few steps on the way to female intimacy). The violence that attends unwarranted looking and looking back has no traction with Lucy, who gets what she wants at the novel’s end. Secrecy might, but doesn’t always, mean a covertness, an affinity for hidden behaviour and hidden motives. In expecting surveillance to overcome or reveal the hidden, lookers shade into spies, and lookees into criminals. Having nothing to hide: the protestation implies its own opposite. The necessity of surveillance becomes mannered: manners evolve to placate it. The world of Mansfield Park is that much more devoted to manners and that much less able to see through them. By rewriting The Old Manor House, Austen accepts its challenge: what makes the man (or woman)? Is it manners or their manipulation? Orlando, seduced by his own probity; Monimia, defined by her resistance; Warwick, a slightly more honourable Wickham with a more savvy Lydia: Smith unpicks manners, questions their validity, plays with manner itself. Mansfield Park reflects this back to its progenitor, with added trauma. Fanny’s abjection is a chosen mode that allows her to feel good about feeling bad: this is why she can congratulate herself on resisting the seduction of Henry’s regard. Henry slips from mischief to emotional self-destruction when he chooses the easy target of Maria in the face of Fanny’s resistance. And Maria can never be charming and carefree like Isabella: in thrall to her own self-regard, she is unable to recognise seduction when she sees it. In Mansfield Park, social control is reified through the emotional manipulation of seduction. In The Old Manor House, seduction occurs

4

MANNER: CODES AND OUTCOMES

91

despite social controls. In both, the manner by which characters signal their understanding of their social place and the acceptable level of interaction, whether polite or sexual, also indicates their mastery of manners. In Celestina and Sense and Sensibility, the act of looking, itself innocuous and ephemeral, creates scenes instead of merely observing them. The four novels inhabit cultures where surveillance protects the alreadyprotected and seduction threatens the already-threatened. Social control means keeping composure, keeping together, maintaining cohesion, and respecting the codes. When Austen rewrites Smith to the extent she does in key sections of Sense and Sensibility, and wholesale in Mansfield Park, her new takes should cause a rereading of Smith as well. Smith’s ‘pre-writing’ comes into existence; her text is causal for Austen’s. In the terms offered by this chapter, with Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, Austen says to Smith: I see you. I both succumb and take further. Via her texts, the corpus that outlives the body, Smith looks back, levelly and cooperatively: the feeling is mutual. There are two heads at this table, and a balance of precedence. What perfect manners.

References Assmann, Aleida. 2013. Civilizing Societies: Recognition and Respect in a Global World. New Literary History 44: 69–91. Brown, Julia. 1979. Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapone, Hester. 1773. Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady. London: Printed by C. Whittingham. Fletcher, Loraine. 1998. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Fordyce, James. 1767. Sermons to Young Women: In Two Volumes. London: Printed for A. Millar, T. Cadell, J. Dodsley and J. Payne. Fordyce, James. 1777. Addresses to Young Men. London: Printed for T. Cadell. Gurton-Wachter, Lily. 2016. Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hall, Lynda. 1996. Jane Austen’s Attractive Rogues: Willoughby, Wickham, and Frank Churchill. Persuasions 18: 186–190. Hammond, Brean. 1993. The Political Unconscious in Mansfield Park. In Mansfield Park, ed. Nigel Wood, 56–90. Buckingham: Open University Press.

92

J. M. LABBE

Heydt-Stevenson, Jill. 2000. “Slipping into the Ha-Ha”: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels. Nineteenth-Century Literature 5: 309– 339. Johnson, Claudia. 1995. What Became of Jane Austen? Mansfield Park. Persuasions 17: 59–70. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2008. Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen. In Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe, 113–128. London: Pickering and Chatto. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2010. What Happens at the Party: Jane Austen Converses with Charlotte Smith. Persuasions Online. Available at: http://www.jasna. org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/labbe.html. Last accessed 9 November 19. Littlewood, Ian. 1998. Jane Austen: Critical Assessments. Edited by Ian Littlewood. Bodmin: MPG Books. Magee, William. 1975. The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen. Studies in the Novel 7: 120–132. Powell, Manushag. 2012. See no Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Spectation and the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere. Eighteenth-Century Studies 45: 255–276. Stanton, Judith. 2003. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. West, Jane. 2015. A Gossip’s Story. Edited by Devoney Looser, Melinda O’Connell, and Caitlin Kelly. Richmond: Valancourt Books.

CHAPTER 5

Mood: (In)Sensibility

Abstract This chapter demonstrates how Austen draws from Smith an understanding of temperament and mood as reflective of the trope of sensibility. How characters feel, how others react to their feelings, what actions are prompted by feeling, and how feeling transmutes to mood: the impact of feeling rightly, wrongly, violently, and badly compels plots in which characters suffer and cause suffering. But why do characters need to suffer? Why should love provoke violence? Why does sensibility mute its victims? The chapter demonstrates how Smith, and then Austen, mandate that sensibility-as-mood reverse and undo itself. Keywords Mood · Temperament · Sensibility · Disease · Disorder · Pathology

If Mode gives us shape and Manner gives us action, then Mood gives us depth. Mood, a temporary state of mind linked to humour, temper, and disposition, in its obsolete sense suggests not only the flaring of emotion but also that which lies beneath it: one’s thought and will, the make-up of the mind (OED). Mood (temporary, changeable) derives from ‘temperament’ (established, fixed), itself drawn originally from the four humours but come to mean, by the late eighteenth century, one’s personality and prevailing sense of self. Although the OED dates the common usage of temperament to signify one’s natural disposition to the 1820s, one has only to think of Mrs. Bennet’s flutters and Lady Montreville’s apopletic © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_5

93

94

J. M. LABBE

hauteur to understand how Austen and Smith use embodied behaviour to indicate who characters are, as people. Notably, both often elide mood’s companion meaning of tempering, moderating, compromising, or adjusting, and both associate a lack of such proportionateness with the prevailing mode of mood in the turn of the century novel: sensibility. Emotional make-up, in Smith and Austen, is commonly shaken up to draw attention to the inutility, the futility of sensibility. So often, being made to feel is both a compulsion (women feel) and compulsory (women, feel). And when men display sensibility, it is often the wrong type (Willoughby(s), Henry Crawford, Delamere, Darcy) or wrongly modelled (Edward, Edmund, Desmond).1 But there is an attraction to sensibility and the moods it galvanizes. The disorder it provokes pushes characters, usually female, from place to place in a variety of attractive poses of weakness and need. The romance proceeds from this mood, although it stops frequently to scold and scapegoat the possessor/demonstrator of sensibility as provoking the bad behaviour—the moodiness—of others. This is co-dependence: sensibility as disorder, that pretends to invoke order (plot) but that simultaneously scatters its actors. Sensibility strands its possessors; it stalls mood and transmutes the temporary to the established. Both Smith and Austen write it, frequently, and both push it to display its sickness: half sensitive plant and half Venus flytrap. Is this mood willed, a sign of a body/mind alignment? Or is it a legacy that Smith and Austen refuse to accept? ∗ ∗ ∗ As Smith and Austen are writing, a contradictory position is emerging regarding sensibility: it is both not positive and not negative. Its characteristics still define ideal femininity for many, even as its portrayal becomes increasingly problematic. It is pathologized as both an order, in its connection with the nervous system, and a disorder, in its connection with madness and illness. It is both desirable and undesirable. This ‘sentimental strain’ of sensibility represents not dangerous excess but, quite simply,

1 Edward is passive, Edmund oblivious, Desmond faux heroic, Willoughby (George) gullible, Willoughby (John) hungry, Henry Crawford selfish, Delamere spoiled, Darcy cautious. Col. Benwick in Persuasion, perhaps the male character most closely identified with sensibility, turns out to be the most easily cured of sensibility’s prime trait: devotion to one’s first love.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

95

danger. This bridges mood and temperament and colors sensibility medically in an age where the pathology of the body and of the emotions is closely intertwined. As sensibility devolves from a mid-century generally positive mode of emotional health to a later indicator of ill health and lost happiness, Smith and Austen write it on the bodies and in the minds of certain characters. This is not suffering as a rational reaction to painful situations; this is illness and physical disorder, a pathologically bad mood. In Smith, sensibility can be passing (Emmeline, Celestina, Geraldine), a tool or technique (Ethelinde), a settled, permanent way of being (Rosalie). As early as her second novel, Ethelinde, Smith begins to sow distrust in it as an indicator of virtue or moral good health. Too often, it damages both she who feels it and they who share in it: a sickness, sometimes a weapon for the one, and a burden for those others. Her narrators are sometimes in thrall: Ethelinde is narrated admiringly throughout her novel for her fortitude and bravery even as the plot shows repeatedly how closely she engineers her neediness. They are sometimes impatient: Adelina is critiqued, albeit gently, for her devoted self-abnegation. They can be complicit: Rosalie’s traumas are written almost gleefully, surely giddily, by a narrator who can’t quite get over how willingly Rosalie accepts her debasements. And Isabella’s knowing coquetry in The Old Manor House reverses sensibility’s delicacy, with the consent of a narrator who evades condemning or otherwise judging her (contrast the narrator’s opinion of Orlando). Full-blown sensibility in Smith always does more harm than good, as even its rational exhibitors demonstrate: Emmeline’s moments of greatest peril are direct results of her temporary embrace of sensibility—her passing mood. In this way, Smith uncovers a pathogen and begins to map the progress of the disease.2 Her repetitions of sensitive female characters explore what it means to be defined so physically that one’s thoughts and feelings can only be discerned, and indeed accepted as truly felt, if they mark the body. This is how the pathology of sensibility, as a thing to be diagnosed, becomes pathological sensibility: not normal, a problem, extreme, uncontrollable. It’s not that specific diseases connote or even denote sensibility,

2 Her poetry, especially the sonnets, might be seen as a kind of second opinion, but it should be noted that her speakers never find solace in their sensibility—only food for an intensified suffering.

96

J. M. LABBE

or that sensibility is of the body and hence susceptible to becoming diseased. Smith charts how sensibility itself has mutated and become a disease, with both physical and emotional symptoms, and how it presents a risk to, rather than support for, the romantic lives of its sufferers. It may be that feeling begets mood, or that mood inspires feeling; they are contaminants, and Austen’s subsequent handling is both cautious and authoritative. Rather than ‘sensibility’ (even a ‘moderate’ version) ‘emerg[ing] as the foundation of social harmony’,3 harmony (concord, order) resonates post-sensibility, once a feeling that stymies and harms reverts to something more settled. ∗ ∗ ∗ How is it that sensibility mutates? Medical discourse of the period at first maps this feeling closely onto conditions of good health. Janet Todd has laid out sensibility’s connections to medical discourses of melancholy and hysteria, while also suggesting the period’s interest in aligning sensibility with ‘the organization of the nervous system’.4 But as something that impacts health, sensibility can go wrong, or it can go right. There is no one ‘sensibility’ but rather types or strains (just as there are good and bad bacteria). The ‘sentimental strain’ mutates to the pathological when the bearer of its signs suffers damage or the threat of it: disorder, incoherence, disease. Characters like Smith’s Rosalie and Adelina and Austen’s Marianne and Jane (both Bennet and Fairfax) embody pathological sensibility to differing degrees. The literary interest in sensibility coincided with developments in medical science that sought to unite the domains of the body, mind, and emotions. The orientation on the vascular—that is, to theories of the circulation of health and disease via the bloodstream— shifted to a growing interest in the nervous system. Medics and philosophers found that the body responded to emotional as well as physical stimuli; for many, and for some time, sensibility was the outward sign of a nervous system properly attuned to the moral nuances of daily living. Indeed, according to Alexander Monro primus, whose The Anatomy of the Human Bones and Nerves (1741) proposed that nerves fostered and 3 Taylor Walle, ‘He Looked Quite Red: Persuasion and Austen’s New Man of Feeling’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29 (2016), 45–66, 48. 4 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 7. Quoted from the 1797 Encyclopedia Britannica.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

97

provided a conduit for ideas, ‘moral sense [is] imprinted in the nervous system itself’.5 From this, Christopher Lawrence surmises that ‘the nervous system in the 18th century became the repository of the property of sensibility’.6 Sensibility both arises from and is indebted to the proper and ordered working of the nerves. This is regulated, legitimized sensibility: a healthy and organic body derived from healthy organs of feeling. In this model, sensibility is a sign of health because the sensitive person was manifestly healthy. On the other hand, theories of melancholy, anxiety and even full-blown insanity also relied on the languages of sensibility as analogous to feeling manifested in the nervous system. If sensibility is the outward sign of the feeling body, and feeling itself is conveyed systemically, then depending on the emotion sensibility can be either harmful or healthy. And if feeling, because it is based in the nervous system, is a bodily condition, then one’s body can be healthy or diseased according to the feeling felt. And finally, since the nervous system unites the body and the brain, then feeling itself characterizes its bearer not only physically but also intellectually. ‘Sensibility was synonymous with great feeling, refinement and femininity, [and] was … assumed to coexist with rational thought’.7 But the path from refinement to disease is a short one: by the mideighteenth century ‘nerves’ became shorthand for overwrought sensibility; by the end of the century, as Todd notes, many writers saw sensibility as ‘dangerous and self-indulgent’ (Sensibility, 131). This is a strange outcome for an emotional and bodily state that began as evidence for a strict moral code as well as the outward sign of physiological equilibrium. How could the nervous system go so badly wrong and still support a living body? And how could a social and cultural good—morally stable, thoughtful, refined, spiritual citizens—become so corrupted? ∗ ∗ ∗

5 Geoffrey Sill, ‘Neurology and the Novel: Alexander Monro Primus and Secundus,

Robinson Crusoe, and the Problem of Sensibility’, Literature and Medicine 16.2 (1997), 17 August 2015. http://literature.proquest.com. 6 Quoted in Sill; source unclear. 7 Elizabeth Dolan, ‘British Romantic Melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,

Medical Discourse and the Problem of Sensibility’, Journal of European Ideas 33 (2003), 237–253, 240.

98

J. M. LABBE

The progress of diseased sensibility across Smith to Austen suggests that for both, it is precisely this corruption that requires examination. Female characters act out cautionary tales in worlds where sensibility, and not the actions of others, is the problem. Both authors also write many characters who experience distress and even violence without becoming marked by the physical and emotional illness that signals diseased sensibility, sometimes in markedly similar situations. For both, it is not the external, but the internal environment that is disordered: feeling and mood. Characters infected with pathological sensibility display signs of physical and mental trauma: in medical terminology, they present with bodily weakness (faints, trembling, excessive sighing, lassitude, enervation) and emotional disturbance (depression, introspection, self-isolation, thoughts of death; fantasizing, refusal to accept reality, conviction of their own specialness, solipsism).8 Characters like Adelina Trelawney and Rosalie Montalbert embody this mood: not only rendered ill from their sensibility, they only barely escape death. Emmeline is often called a novel of sensibility despite, as shown in Chapter 2, Emmeline’s line of descent to Elizabeth Bennet rather than to Jane. Adelina, however, evokes a sensibility centred on a strikingly sensitive nervous system. She is continually described with adjectives highlighting not only her beauty but her fragility, her emotionalized reactions to stimulus, her ready tears, her fineness, and thinness. When first seen she is figured as embodied delicacy: ‘a very young woman, pale, but extremely beautiful; and her hand, of uncommon delicacy, lay on the white quilt’.9 When she awakes she is scarcely more sturdy: ‘if it were possible to personify languor and dejection, it could not be done more expressively than by representing her form, her air, her complexion, and the mournful cast of her very beautiful countenance’ (214). What Adelina feels, she shows, and she feels most abjectly, spending the bulk of the novel castigating herself for loving wrongly, with sensibility like a tumour wasting her frame.

8 The mental disruption produced by sensibility is akin to what Thomas Arnold in Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity (1782–1786) called ‘incoherent insanity’: ‘its characteristic is an incoherency of ideas, occasioned by an excessive, perverted, or defective activity of the imagination and memory, accompanied with images existing in the mind, which do not exist externally’. See Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingham (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 164–174: 169. 9 Loraine Fletcher, ed. Emmeline (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003), 213.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

99

Throughout the novel, if Adelina has an opportunity to resist or welcome suffering, she consistently chooses the latter. She continually evades the opportunities Smith allows her characters who have strayed from respectability: to be rehabilitated, even if only through the narrators’ sympathetic portrayals. She rejects her brother’s forgiveness to insist on her culpability; she refuses her lover’s proposals of marriage (thereby rejecting his reformed nature); she places herself in situations that make her ill (foreshadowing Marianne’s actions). She is devoted to debasing herself, a mindset that is not only incoherent (in that her world would very much like to see her rehabilitated), it verges on a deliberate courting of the unreal. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her anonymous review of 1788, argues that ‘Despair is not repentance, nor is contrition of any use when it does not serve to strengthen resolutions of amendment’.10 Wollstonecraft’s review reads Adelina as an attractive character, likely to ‘catch’ a young girl’s ‘attention’ and presumably not contrite enough for her error to be cautionary; this response resonates with the period’s growing discomfort with sensibility. Yet it is hard to see how Adelina’s comportment would inspire imitators; she spends most of the novel ill, on the edge of insanity, metaphorically self-flagellating. We are perhaps relieved she doesn’t die, but her happiness is not assured. Her moody sensibility punishes her from the inside out. Smith focusses on the destructive elements of uncontrolled, unregulated feeling in both women and men.11 As Austen will do later, she usually locates the female variety in secondary characters like Adelina, concentrating on more measured, coherent, and healthy emotional landscapes for her protagonists. However, her exception is Rosalie, in Montalbert , who adheres to a sensibility so passive and nervous that she nearly loses her life. Before that, she is subjected to a catalogue of terrors. She suffers not only the anger of a tyrannical mother over Rosalie’s secret marriage to her son but imprisonment by that mother. She is caught up in an earthquake. She is the object of her husband’s best friend’s illicit passion. Her plot places her so outrageously at risk that the episodes come to seem like 10 In Fletcher, ed., Emmeline, 480. 11 So many of Smith’s heroes are extremely problematic in how their self-indulgent

passions put their loved ones at risk: Delamere, Orlando, Willoughby, and Montalbert himself all victimize the women they love by loving them. The difference is that their sensibility might be better labelled socio/psychopathic in that the destructive impact is on others rather than themselves.

100

J. M. LABBE

manifestations of her disease: not imaginary exactly, but almost hallucinatory in their relentlessness. What are we to make of a heroine for whom every significant development brings anguish? A lonely upbringing is the result of her own mother’s illicit passion and out-of-wedlock pregnancy; Rosalie no sooner learns who her real mother is than said mother dies; her love affair is secret, secretive, and conducted in Italian; she elopes, has a child, but can spend very little time with her husband who must pacify his tyrannical mother: Smith piles on the trials as if testing Rosalie, whose main mode of response is passive acquiescence and drooping duty. Montalbert is a catalogue of sensibility’s failings and how the ‘sentimental strain’ writes itself on the body and the mind. After enduring chapters of masochistic submission not only to these events but also to her husband’s suspicions, hostilities, and eventual abandonment, Rosalie lies stupefied, nearly catatonic. Her nervous system is, essentially, inert, and after many pages in which she shifts between incoherence, insensibility, and extreme pain, her condition culminates with her ‘looking more dead than alive’.12 But it takes the majority of the novel to get to this stage, via multiple events involving tears, illness, fear, and pain. In a text that literalizes Rosalie’s disease through its traumatizing plot, Smith demonstrates forcefully that sensibility expressed through physical and emotional weakness, passivity, and illness is in itself disordering and deranging. While Rosalie does not die, her recovery allows her only the ‘happiness’ of ‘pass[ing] her life in studying how to contribute to [Montalbert’s] felicity, and that of her father … by her sweetness and attention’ (III:314, 324). In other words, her marriage is not the union of equals Smith espouses for most of her protagonists, and this seems key in her portrayal of a pathological sensibility where ‘happiness’, self-abnegation, and submissiveness are interchangeable. This is a woman at bay, cowering. Where Smith writes versions where the infections are literally lifethreatening, Austen’s pathological sensibility threatens its subjects but can be contained. Austen’s inoculatory approach derives from the primary fieldwork of her predecessor. Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne exhibits many of these bodily and emotional symptoms, and as probably the most familiar feeling subject she exemplifies systemic sensibility. Moreover, the compositional development of this novel noted in Chapter 3 means that

12 Montalbert, 3 vols. (London: S. Low, 1795), III:268.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

101

as a text it is infused with both the outright trauma of late eighteenthcentury sensibility and the more tempered, though no less affective, versions post-1800: her attractiveness compels readerly sympathy and compassion.13 Marianne’s emotional state exemplifies not what it is to feel badly but rather the medical impact of bad feeling. As John Wiltshire and Erin Wilson have both argued, Marianne’s sensibility is to ‘the detriment of [her] physical welfare’; ‘in this novel sensibility is an illness’.14 Wilson and Wiltshire see Marianne recovering from her illness, both figuratively and physically, but she is far too riddled with this disease to throw it off. Marianne’s fever is a symptom—not the disease itself. When she recovers from her fever, she has not recovered from sensibility, which at best goes into remission. Hers is a simple substitution of object (others for herself) which shows that her foundational sensibility has not changed. Her long speech after her illness is as extravagant in its selflessness as her solipsism was before: she ‘cannot express [her] own abhorrence of [her]self’, ‘[e]verybody seemed injured by [her]’, ‘[she] shall live solely for [her] family’, ‘[she] shall never again have the smallest incitement to move’ from her home’.15 Marianne is unable to acknowledge that her state of mind is incoherent even if consistent in its expression: she is fundamentally emotionally disturbed, unable to understand either equilibrium or what constitutes healthy balance. Elinor, for instance, suffers for her love, but she does not become ill as a result. This is less a sign of emotional superficiality than it is one of healthy sensibility (but I will return to Elinor). When Marianne actively courts illness, she is manifesting a pathological desire to be as ill as she feels . And her subsequent active courting of others’ admiration of her new selflessness is, likewise, a manifestation of the same dramatic, attention-seeking sensibility that allowed her to read Willoughby’s character in a way that refused reality.

13 Space constraints will not allow me to discuss this fully: however, I agree with Todd that roughly 1800 marks a change in how sensibility is portrayed, but I take a different tack in suggesting that while the early nineteenth-century novel writes threatening sensibility it is more often than not in light of recuperating heroines. 14 Wilson, ‘The End of Sensibility’. See also Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Naomi Booth concurs: ‘In Sense and Sensibility … we find an exploration of the pervasiveness of sensibility as a particularly feminine, pathological self-indulgence’ (‘Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman’, Women’s Writing 21.4 [2014], 575–591, 582). 15 Sense and Sensibility, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Penguin Classics, 1969), 337, 338.

102

J. M. LABBE

Marianne pulls off a complex manoeuvre: she remains subject(ed) to her diseased sensibility and actively pursues it. While Austen rapidly draws the novel to a close after Marianne’s breakdown, it asks its readers to parse ‘recovery’ from keywords that suggest otherwise: her ‘extraordinary fate’ is merely to be ‘as much devoted to her husband, as [she] had once been to Willoughby’ (366, 367). ‘Extraordinary’ functions ironically, of course: Marianne’s ‘fate’ is the usual one for a heroine of sensibility. But ‘devoted’ is more pointed. She threw herself into love with Willoughby, and now she behaves in the same way with Colonel Brandon. It’s hard to see this as matured choice when the text specifically notes that it’s not. Marianne at the end of the novel is the same incoherent, disordered figure as she was at the start, devoted to a model of behaviour the risks of which are abated not by her own actions but by the eventual object of her affections: Brandon, himself a hero of sensibility, is generically more suitable for Marianne than the rake Willoughby. Readers are invited to like and care for Marianne, but hers is still a cautionary tale; she does not destroy her happiness as does another of her possible earlier versions, Marianne in Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story, but this is not due to anything she herself does, but rather the exculpatory acts of those around her (including the narrator) to safeguard her from the worst excesses of her illness. The ‘sensible rational discourse’ that Todd recognizes in the novel ‘socializes’ (145) but does not change Marianne. Austen frequently writes this form of diseased sensibility, where the feeling itself is bad (harmful, corrosive) and where the woman who feels it suffers endangering consequences, emotionally speaking. However, after Marianne such characters are mainly relegated to secondary plots. For instance, Jane Bennet and Jane Fairfax act as foils for the more dynamic Elizabeth and Emma. While Elizabeth and Emma are not themselves similar in personality, both display an emotional landscape more like Elinor’s: once they realize that they love, they incorporate the feeling healthily. This is not to say they do not suffer, but the feeling crystalizes for them a mode of action that represents a new or growing maturity, rather than a succumbing (but see below). Jane Bennet, on the other hand, falls gently and quietly in love, but the language used to describe her feeling is neither gentle nor quiet: she ‘cherish[es] a very tender affection for Bingley’: Having never even fancied herself in love before, her regard had all the warmth of first attachment …; and so fervently did she value his remembrance, and prefer him to every other man, that all her good sense, and

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

103

all her attention to the feelings of her friends, were requisite to check the indulgence of those regrets, which must have been injurious to her own health… 16

Because Jane’s sensitive care for others is highlighted, one might overlook words like ‘fervently’, ‘indulgence’, and ‘prefer him to every other man’, straight from the Sensibility casebook, but the risk to her health again underlines the sickness that sensibility itself entails. Further, when Elizabeth relates the substance of Darcy’s letter to Jane, exposing Wickham’s bad behaviour, Jane’s reaction is equally lexically overwrought: ‘poor Jane! who would willingly have gone through the world without believing that so much wickedness existed in the whole race of mankind, as was here collected in one individual’ (240). Again, the tone is light, but the words are not: Jane’s sensibility strays towards the melancholy and overstatement that disables her ability to see the world as it is. Wickedness such as Jane believes in belongs in a romance and not the ‘real world’ in which she lives: the blows Jane experiences come because her sensibility does not allow her to read the world according to its reality but rather according to her vision of what it should be. This may be a more benignant view, but in medical terms it is not benign: Jane suffers visibly yet won’t help herself, and is unable to undertake the open and rational step of declaring the truth and strength of her emotions, even to herself. Although she is less self-dramatizing than Marianne, she nonetheless exhibits the same kind of distress, albeit to a different degree: Marianne acts out, and Jane represses, but both are disordered and ill in their sensibility. Jane’s withering is corrected by a benevolent narrative in which the happiness of its actors is paramount, but her suffering is nonetheless actively malignant and manifestly derived from her sensibility. When Jane and Bingley reunite, ‘fervency’ is checked by ‘propriety’, yet her selfdescription as ‘indifferent’ is laughed at by Elizabeth: Jane’s inability to accurately interpret emotional situations is unchanged. In the end, her union with Bingley is engineered by Darcy, rather than encouraged by her own demeanour: and in this way her diseased sensibility runs counter to her happiness. I have risked overstating Jane’s situation precisely because the text underplays her risk. With a focus on the more energetic and obvious emotional make-ups of Elizabeth, Lydia, even Darcy, the secondary storyline of Jane and Bingley can be taken for granted. But despite her 16 Robert Irvine, ed. Pride and Prejudice (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002), 242.

104

J. M. LABBE

quiescence, Jane occupies the same position of sensibility that Marianne does, only less visibly. Austen’s shift of characters of sensibility from centre stage to periphery should not render her presentation of pathologized sensibility less distinct; it is a feature of many of her plots and arises again in Emma, where Jane Fairfax’s seeming good sense may be pure sensibility after all. Jane F’.s story is mostly unreadable and open to speculation about her motives in remaining silent in the face of Frank’s churlishness and Emma’s boorishness. Her precarious social and financial position leaves her vulnerable in a way that Jane B. need not worry as much about. However, the romantic features of her plot, as it is revealed, permit an understanding of her behaviour as exhibiting the disorder of sensibility. Jane’s plot captures a different kind of romance, where she suffers from her love, remains true to her principles, and renounces an engagement that has come to seem wrong and unwanted (almost Emmeline-like). Tellingly, her sensibility both leads her to the social error of a secret alliance—she loves too strongly to resist—and undoes her physically. Throughout the text she is described as pale, silent, and marginalized (almost Adelina-like). At her lowest point, when she refuses, passively, to see Emma, she ‘look[s] extremely ill’ to Emma’s sight and Miss Bates notes she is tearful, ‘has a dreadful headache’, and ‘is as low as possible’ (almost Rosalie-like).17 At the point where her romance is resolved she reverts to the more positive manifestations of sensibility: she looks ‘so well, so lovely, so engaging. There was consciousness, animation, and warmth’ in her ‘countenance’ and she speaks with a ‘very feeling tone’ (382; a reversion to Emmeline?). By embedding ‘feeling’ even in Jane’s tone, Austen points to sensibility as intrinsic, integral. And by linking Jane’s health directly with the progress of her romance, she reifies sensibility as the point of contact between the body and emotion. Jane’s risk, like Jane B’.s, is underplayed, but given her unstable social role one can legitimately wonder whether, for her, diseased sensibility is even more dangerous than it was for either Jane B. or Marianne. ∗ ∗ ∗

17 Kristin Flieger Samuelian, ed. Emma (Peterborough: Broadview, 2004), 328.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

105

Sensibility as a feeling, when it is this deadly, colors its texts tonally. The mood of its victims causes nervous discord across plots and between characters. When sensibility eviscerates from within, it acts as self-sabotage; its feelers (tendrils? those who feel them?) are lacerating and lacerated. The pain is organic—it lives. For Rosalie, her hereditary sensibility constructs her selfhood so thoroughly that, even when offered putative escape routes, they are either rejected (she embraces duty to her husband’s will against all reasoned arguments) or illusory (her saviour Walsingham is himself unreasonably devoted to a dead ideal, like a Col. Brandon without a Marianne). If she could, she would keep her pain private, and her catatonia shields her from the horror felt by those around her as she declines. Marianne, while she courts her illness as a manifestation of her authentic sensibility, nonetheless sees, notes, and regrets its impact on others. True, this becomes fodder for the next stage of her woeful feeling/disorder, but she is a complex character because she is both gratified by and sorry about her emotional excesses. The two Janes and Adelina are written not to be looked at too closely, as befits secondary characters; their novels would not require much revision if they weren’t there. Frank Churchill could still be giddy and selfish, Mr. Darcy still supercilious and prone to judgement, Godolphin still able to substantiate his fineness and upstandingness. Mr. Bingley might remain single for a little while longer. A character like Fanny Price fetishizes painful duty like a Rosalie but also hides this in plain sight.18 Where Marianne welcomes illness, Fanny begs for slights. She is a ‘criticism of passivity’, ‘distaseful’, fixedly unpleasant in what Claudia Johnson (speaking for many) calls her passive aggression and Joyce Jenkins her ‘lack of correction’.19 She makes her pain and suffering increasingly visible until it takes over the novel, as she does, consigning all the other female characters to the margins, or worse, to Mrs. Norris (her narrator indulgently complicit in Fanny’s project). Her accommodating stoicism elevates her version of sensibility so that she directs it; rather than the prey of feeling, she broods over and protects 18 As Elizabeth Dolan observes, although to a more general effect, seeing suffering is what makes it real. Therefore Fanny must be seen; as Mrs. Norris notes, somehow Fanny is always there. See Dolan, Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2008), 6 passim. 19 See Jenkins, ‘The Puzzle of Fanny Price’, Philosophy and Literature 30, 346–360, 347, 346, 358; and Johnson, ‘Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind’, in Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 114, quoted in Jenkins, 351.

106

J. M. LABBE

hers. It nourishes and sustains her. Fanny’s sensibility is less an illness than an addiction, less a defence than a weapon. Her ultimate happiness derives from the unhappiness of nearly all those around her, not excepting Edmund, who may have been uncomfortable with Mary Crawford’s irreverence but was certainly excited by it. His inability to see that he has been as much seduced by Fanny’s ‘soft light eyes’ as Mary’s ‘sparkling dark ones’ is a function of Fanny’s skillful deployment of a ‘warm and sisterly regard’ and her recognition that sensibility attracts, whether demonstrated through tears on a staircase or retreats to chilly white attics. Fanny is infectious. In this she resembles not Rosalie but an earlier Smith protagonist who is buffeted by a fate always under her control. Ethelinde makes a point of studying the expectations and preconceptions of those around her and somehow ensures that she is always fed and sheltered in relative comfort. She is never really at risk of much else than a damp frock despite falls in lakes (with a rescuer nearby), being accosted on moors (with a rescuer nearby), being caught in the rain (with a rescuer, etc.). Her unfeasible good luck in the face of gossip and bad-tempered relatives contrasts with, for instance, Emmeline’s or Celestina’s experiences of poverty, social exclusion, and personal risk in similar circumstances. Her companions (and her narrator) are repeatedly and volubly struck by Ethelinde’s sensibility-infused perfections, which she ensures are repeatedly, visibly remarkable. Those in the novel characterize Ethelinde’s demeanour as a shield, but Ethelinde hoists it more as a weapon, which she controls. If all around her agree on her sincere sensibility, it is salutary to listen to those at one remove, the Chorus-like social milieu that uniformly agrees she has played her cards right. By presenting feeling as something to be utilized, Smith and Austen supplement their portrayals of characters infected and made ill by it. Feeling, in the hands of more armoured characters, causes others to suffer. Austen makes a very pointed weapon in the character of Lucy Steele, who parades her sensibility-soaked narrative in front of Elinor to quite effective ends. Unlike the peripheral Janes, Lucy is necessary to Elinor’s plot; she is the sole reason Edward dithers. Her stated position as an innocent at the mercy of an unsympathetic mother and a vacillating son chimes not only with Jane F’s but also Rosalie’s, but her triumph comes because she knows how to create a mood, an atmosphere, of intrigue and seduction. Austen is not above allegory, and Lucy’s surname suggests her shiny, tempered impermeability, and her capacity (and intention) to wound others.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

107

∗ ∗ ∗ The psychology of sensibility hoves into view. When it is a medical condition, it aligns body and mindful emotion (feeling) and is a cultural indicator of the move towards physiological integration that medics and philosophers alike were coming to espouse. Once it is part of its host, it rapidly colonizes; and its standing as a signifier of morality and virtue twists towards the corruption of both. Christopher Nagle states that Austen’s ‘entire oeuvre testifies to an investment in Sensibility’, which is true if we see her as a kind of hedge fund manager, playing both sides.20 As an illness or disorder, sensibility turns feeling inward, in the constitution of the sufferer, and also outward, in the pain and sympathy of her well-wishers. As a weapon, sensibility turns hard as steel(e), almost tangible, embodied not figuratively but almost literally, as constituting the corrupted self. And it can kill, almost. Rosalie exemplifies the effects of the poison it can administer, and as an illness it can, as argued, risk the death of love. Torque it, and we can see sensibility as shorthand for feminine pliability, obedience, and filial observance: virtue, reconditioned. Under this lens, its risks can be even greater. This sharpens further when Smith and Austen both use pliability—or, to give it another name, persuadability— to lead two heroines right up to a precipice. That one is physical and the other emotional only shows that the harrowing nature of sensibility takes different forms. To quote Nagle again: ‘feeling proliferates in … Persuasion, leaving the reader with the sense almost universally acknowledged that this work is special precisely in its intensity’ (101). Further, he uses words like cowed, estranged, abused, and devastated to describe Anne (104). Her difference as a heroine lies in her age, her withered-on-the-vine delicacy, and her unmarried state, and these all derive from her susceptibility to the persuasive words of Lady Russell. By accepting this counsel, she mortifies her lover and spends the next seven years in decline, ‘an early loss of bloom and spirits … [its] lasting effect’ (57).21 Anne is afflicted not only with an inclination to self-sacrifice; she also lives unvalued by her father and without a mother since her early youth. The novel clarifies what might 20 Nagle, Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 99. 21 Seven: a symbolic number.

108

J. M. LABBE

be called her backstory by sketching out this loss, and by noting that, contrary to expectations, her father and her mother’s close friend ‘[do] not marry’, and that the close friend, a widow (Lady Russell), ‘of steady age and character, and extremely well provided for … [had] no thought of a second marriage’ which ‘needs no apology to the public’ (36, 37). Lady Russell, as mother figure, effectively ‘[persuades] Anne to believe the engagement [to Wentworth] a wrong thing – indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of success, and not deserving it’; Anne, in a bind where duty to her lover and duty to her mother-proxy are in conflict, submits to the one ‘whom she had always loved and relied on’ (emphasis added) rather than the one she had only just learned to, while Frederick, ‘totally unconvinced and unbending … and feeling himself ill-used by so forced a relinquishment … left the country in consequence’ (56). All this is familiar to readers of Persuasion. Anne, as we know, eventually regains her bloom and her lover. Readers are drawn to note the effects of pliability and to suspect that Anne’s punishment is both realistically drawn and plausible. In an age when enforcing filial obedience is the aim of many novels which dramatize the overwrought ill effects of following one’s heart in defiance of parental opinion, Austen’s plot, significantly, overturns the expected dynamic—at least partly. Lady Russell is wrong (at least partly) although Frederick’s reaction also draws some criticism; his pique, as we later learn, has elongated the separation. Anne is consigned to years of thin quietness. Persuasion, we come to see, is morally relative, and dutiful obedience morally suspect. But Anne cannot break away because she is constitutionally bound to sensibility, to pliability. Austen paints Anne as both feeling too much and feeling badly. She loves Wentworth (openly), consults Lady Russell (dutifully), steers clear of her father (sensibly, if dubiously), and then pushes it all down and away (Nagle would call this sadomasochistically [116]). The narrator, we feel, is none too impressed with Anne. This dutiful submission has a forerunner in Smith’s last novel, The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. In Volume II, the Wanderer learns his friend Denbigh’s story of love thwarted, for a time, by undue regard for the persuasive arguments of a parent figure. Denbigh falls in love with Henrietta, whose father does not value her and whose mother died when she was young. Henrietta is brought up by an aunt, ‘a remarkably sensible woman, who, having been left early her own mistress, found independence so much more desirable than a matrimonial connection … that

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

109

she voluntarily became what is called an old maid’ (101). Henrietta loves and honours this guardian. When Denbigh enters the picture, the aunt blesses their union, then dies of heart disease, and the absent father, a landowner in the West Indies, simultaneously demands via letters that Henrietta return to Jamaica. Enter Persuasion in the form of an ‘intimate friend’ of the aunt’s, who successfully convinces Henrietta that an immediate marriage would be disrespectful to her father, and that allowing Denbigh to travel to Jamaica in the same boat would be improper. The friend thus successfully ‘persuade[s Henrietta] that she stood in the place of her deceased aunt as a guide to her conduct’ (105), while Denbigh offers the following insight: Henrietta had infinitely more natural sense than the woman by whom she suffered herself to be led; yet, being accustomed to the government of her aunt, and hearing perpetual changes rung upon the words prudence, propriety, discretion, and decorum, the opinion of the world, and the necessary submission of every body to its decisions, Henrietta had given up every opinion of her own, and even her affection for me seemed to be suspended by her apprehensions of censure. (106)

Further, we learn Denbigh in a fit of temper tells Henrietta that she either defers to him or they must ‘part never to meet again’ (105), and although he backs down on this threat, the text follows his lead, allowing Denbigh’s ship to be becalmed and the lovers to be separated. Denbigh is sunk in a ‘persuasion, that … we should never meet again’ (107). Henrietta’s submission models for Austen the reduction of one’s personal autonomy to emblematic obedience. Smith makes it clear that Henrietta, like Anne after her, is persuaded without foundation that propriety and decorum take precedence over happiness and romantic fulfilment. Henrietta, like Anne, must choose between duty and inclination; Henrietta, like Anne, lacks personal value in her family set-up, but unlike Anne lacks also, with the death of her aunt, an advocate, however wrong-headed. The intimate friend acts solely from self-interest, as she hopes both to marry Henrietta’s rich widowed father and to marry her son to Henrietta (a notable contrast to Lady Russell’s disinterest). Henrietta, like Anne, is required to suffer for her wrong decision, although to an extent Austen avoids: where Anne dwindles into ennui, Henrietta experiences paternal tyranny; an abduction during a slave uprising; a fearful episode where she is continually on the verge of being raped

110

J. M. LABBE

by an escaped slave who, having rescued her from violence during the uprising, decides that she is now his property (the irony is intended); and famishment and terrorism before she is reunited with Denbigh. Henrietta is victimized by her own pliability and submission to the will of others in a storyline that is Austen’s writ very large indeed. But Henrietta and Anne display the same delicate beauties and the same dependence on dutiful submission. Each text presents this as a trap for the heroine, even if Henrietta’s trap is more literal and more life-threatening than is Anne’s. If one considers, however, that Persuasion presents Anne’s life as virtually in stasis because of her persuadability, then we see the two novelists as merely differing in degree. For both Henrietta and Anne, the feminine habit of submission to duty, and the novelistic trope of parental righteousness, function as unnecessary evils. Smith defamiliarizes the convention and Austen, in turn, transports its monstrous effects from the external environment to the internal, subjective realm. They are thin, pale, and delicate, embodied sensibility on the one hand and embodied repression on the other. They have relied, misguidedly, on duty and submitted, thoughtlessly, to persuasion. And they have been harrowed by sensibility and feeling. Their sense of their obligations subjects them to distress and pain, Henrietta’s extremity of experience matched by Anne’s continual and ongoing self-doubt and marginalization. Henrietta, penalized by inhabiting Smith’s last work of fiction, itself darkened by her real-life tragedies, is only not Rosalie because Denbigh is not Montalbert. Anne, by contrast, demonstrates Austen’s repudiation of this form of sensitive, feeling selfsubmission because her text gives her an alternate who assumes her quiescence, violently. Louisa Musgrove, as Alan Richardson among others has charted, is the text’s ‘false heroine’ (145); she seems to be there mainly to be giddy and to provide Wentworth with an Anne-substitute.22 But when she leaps from the steps of the Cobb, she crashes into Anne’s territory. In one fell swoop she trades in activity for passivity, laughter for quiet smiles, balls for poetry, ‘turn[ing] into a person of literary taste, and sentimental reflection’ (Richardson, 146). Her transformation into a woman of sensibility gains her a husband but also silences her. She is now the true (tried and

22 Alan Richardson, ‘Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion’, Poetics Today 23 (2002), 141–160.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

111

tested) Anne, while Anne herself, on the Cobb, transmutes to authoritative and active. That Louisa must suffer a traumatic head injury in order to exemplify sensibility is another form of harrowing, another form of medicalized, disordered feeling. She is only not Rosalie because Benwick is not Montalbert. Only Anne experiences the full harrowing, in that her distress and pain represents an awakening, a breaking up of her clod-like existence (the one that Louisa assumes), and her self-harvest from the hell of eternally giving in and giving up. Anne recuperates, in other words, from sensibility, and finds the remedy or antidote that continually eludes those others whose surrender or subservience to or embrace of sensibility traps them in a single mood. The growth, the second spring23 that Anne finds guides her to a post-sensibility emotional fullness and new permanent state, an unfolding of personhood that sees her present to Wentworth not her unsuitable relations, but in a Smithian move a duo of friends, one of whom, of course, is Mrs. Smith herself. Anne, Austen’s last fully fleshed out heroine, completes the treatment and presents us with a character who can grow and change, who is not defined by her feelings. As discussed in Chapter 2, she might have been called Emmeline. ∗ ∗ ∗ Let’s return to feeling, mood. Visible pain and suffering. Subjected to sensibility, being its object. Being in charge or under its influence. Sensibility as a weapon, as a defence. Sickening, sickened. A sign of temperament, or a signal of its absence? Is sensibility inevitable, even in Smith and Austen? Must it be felt, even if only that it might be medicated? If recovered from, can it re-infect? Is relapse inevitable? Is sensibility just the eighteenth-century conceptualizing of a state of mind, or personality, of feeling that prevails? If being made to feel equates to sensibility, can one be made—constructed, have the capacity—not to feel? Can one unfeel? In other words, what about Elinor? ∗ ∗ ∗

23 Adela Pinch cites this as an instance of Smithian allusion; see Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

112

J. M. LABBE

In 1975, Valerie Shaw talks about Austen’s ‘subdued heroines’, Fanny and Anne, as expressing ‘the tragic aspects of the self that is isolated from its own society’. Austen accesses ‘the imagination in its tragic phase’; Anne and Fanny exhibit a ‘solitariness’ that is ‘more painful’ than mere depression because ‘they are not only separated from the men they love – and know for certain they love – they are at odds with the societies in which they love and act’. Shaw contrasts their ‘misery’ with Elinor’s dutiful and ‘sensible interpretation of appearances’, which so easily shades into ‘smugness’. For Shaw, immersed in the world of Austenian irony, Anne and Fanny as victims are always more interesting than a character like Elinor, who maintains outward self-control.24 Elinor is the comic foil to the tragedy of Fanny’s and Anne’s social exclusion. But if Fanny’s isolation is read as chosen, a tool, and Anne’s is seen as the outcome of her own lack of will, then again we return to Elinor, whose selfhood repeatedly draws readers to try and explain it away. What if Elinor and her likenesses are not foils for the attractiveness of sensibility but advances towards its cure? She can choose how and when to feel, and when and to whom to display it. What if Elinor, who is not subject to moods, unfeels in lieu of feeling badly or wrongly? And what of her sisters: Smith’s Althea, Emmeline, Celestina, Geraldine; Austen’s Charlotte Lucas? Smith’s dissatisfaction with sensibility takes shape not only in the trauma she inflicts on the characters who prize it, but also in her portrayals of those whose state of emotional health is more stable. Both Emmeline and Celestina complicate their own genres by restraining their novels’ push towards the extremities of feeling. Although Emmeline falls ill with her fever after being abducted by Delamere, this both preserves her temporarily from his improvidence and is the not unlikely physical (as opposed to emotional) outcome of his actions (where Clarissa, who prepares for her elopement with Lovelace by wrapping up snugly, and Evelina, who has been at the theatre and as such also in her wraps, Emmeline is snatched, unprepared). Emmeline displays what Alan Richardson attributes to Anne Elliot: a ‘blend of exemplary rationality and heightened sensibility’ (151), as does Celestina. Both remain calm in the face of reputational storms that would prostrate one with full-blown sensibility: their 24 See ‘Jane Austen’s Subdued Heroines’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30.3, 281–202, 282, 303, 290, 285. Shaw aligns Emma and Elizabeth Bennet with Elinor as those whose path towards the happy ending is uncomplicated by tragedy.

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

113

feelings are hurt, but not destroyed.25 When the mischief-making Crofts the younger represents Adelina’s illegitimate child as Emmeline’s, Emmeline merely awaits her opportunity to correct public opinion. Adelina nearly kills herself with remorse over her almost entirely private situation. And when ‘the world’, including her beloved Willoughby, decides that rumours about her illegitimacy justify rumours about her loose living, Celestina sets about gathering evidence to disprove the talk. Neither character sinks under her travails, but both must contend with their genre, which inhibits their full rejection of sensibility. Celestina plots shipwrecks and imprisoned mothers; Emmeline turns on hidden documents and coincidental encounters. Although writing novels of sensibility, and in the 1780s and 1790s, Smith already does not subscribe to its prevailing myth, as Ethelinde fully establishes. What proves more of a challenge is writing it out altogether. Desmond’s Geraldine is given the most space to tell her own story in her own way, but what she mostly narrates is her travails at the hands of others, her devotion to her children, and her gratitude to Desmond for his disinterested affection. She is not damaged constitutionally by sensibility, not infected by its diseased strain, but she is not able to break out of a plot that situates her as the object and sometimes the prey of others: the heroine of sensibility in her native habitat.26 Her plot subsumes to Desmond’s even as she becomes the ‘bear[er of] my 27 name’ (414); ‘my’ in relation to Geraldine is repeated six times in Desmond’s flurried final sentences. Both her culture, and her position as Desmond’s erotic fixation, inhibit her progress. And Althea, probably Smith’s most independent heroine, is stymied by law from full capacity: Smith shows that the law needs and requires women to be ‘of’ sensibility in order to justify its own pretensions to objective philosophy. Smith offers hypotheses of women not subjected to feeling. She diagnoses the disorder, and she pays fuller attention to women at its mercy.

25 We think again about Ethelinde, the subject of so much similar gossip, who maintains an oblivious front by simply choosing to and apparently suffers no social consequences. 26 ‘Yet in stark contrast to her budding radical sympathies, Geraldine continues to comply with conduct-book constructions of the dutiful wife; eventually, however, for objectives so baneful they impugn the very ideology of impropriety she seems to [want to] embody’, say Antje Blank and Janet Todd in their Introduction to the novel (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001), 31. But see their full argument, which perceives Geraldine’s unusual characterization. 27 That is, his.

114

J. M. LABBE

She is on the cusp of invention, her feeling women like phlogiston: a theory of substance on the verge of replacement. Smith does not subscribe to the old but cannot yet fully formulate the new. For her, the disappearance of the essence of self is the failure of sensibility. Austen works with the caloric; she sees that sensibility, like phlogiston, consumes itself. Its moods lead only to their own reiteration. She is more interested in chemical combinations and productive outcomes. So Charlotte Lucas can balance Jane Bennet’s fatalistic sensibility with a pragmatic, outcomes-driven understanding of her own needs. Readers may despair at her choice of Mr. Collins, but she has taken her own initiative to get what she wants and is not concerned by what she doesn’t need. ∗ ∗ ∗ So we return to Elinor, the pivotal figure in this exploration of mood, and the main character in a novel that is both early- and late-Austen. The conclusion that Elinor needs to achieve a modicum of sensibility to leaven her sense, even as Marianne requires a good dose of the latter, is undercut if we accept that Marianne does not herself change. Perhaps, Elinor doesn’t need to either. Perhaps, as the narrator gently teases her for requiring two full moments to be ‘every thing by turns but tranquil’ and then another ‘several hours to give sedateness to her spirits, or any degree of tranquility to her heart’, it is her ability to make coherent use of her ‘heart’, her ‘imagination’, and her ‘reason [and] judgment’ Austen emphasizes (366, 367). Sensibility mandates feeling and feeling triumphs, even if its host doesn’t. It foregoes thought and it disregards balance. Elinor, within her array of examples, exemplifies both. For Smith, excesses of suffering characterize sensibility whether it is sought, used, or fought against. Pliability, susceptibility, passivity are symptoms of its disease; when it corrupts, the poison spreads to all. Its impact on plot covers infidelity, mistrust, death, threats of death, sexual violence, expectations of sexual violence, and catastrophe. Austen uses a more measured approach, substituting general loss of happiness for trauma: a diminishment rather than a destructiveness. Within the parameters of her novels, Austen’s critique can almost seem playful, almost comic, and the wholesale move to marriage almost enough. But Fanny remains an enigma, readers continue to question Marianne’s suitability for Col Brandon, Anne only barely gains her happy ending, Louisa still falls on

5

MOOD: (IN)SENSIBILITY

115

the Cobb. And read within the larger scope provided by Smith, the echoes reverberate, highlighting what is grim in Austen’s versions. Feeling as represented by sensibility frames emotions as the receptors of event (plot) and inscription (action). In this kind of world, attractiveness exists purely for entrapment. For Smith and Austen, for Emmeline and Elinor, it is imperative to reverse and undo this mandate, to move from mood to temperament, from temper to temperedness. It turns out that the best sensibility is insensibility.

References Arnold, Thomas. 1786. Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness. London: G. Ireland. Booth, Naomi. 2014. Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman. Women’s Writing 21: 575–591. Dolan, Elizabeth. 2003. British Romantic Melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Medical Discourse and the Problem of Sensibility. Journal of European Ideas 33: 237–253. Dolan, Elizabeth. 2008. Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Press. Ingham, Allan (ed.). 1998. Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Jenkins, Joyce. 2006. The Puzzle of Fanny Price. Philosophy and Literature 30: 346–360. Johnson, Claudia. 1988. Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind. In Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, ed. Claudia Johnson, 94–120. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nagle, Christopher. 2007. Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinch, Adela. 1996. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Richardson, Alan. 2002. Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion. Poetics Today 23: 141–160. Shaw, Valerie. 1975. Jane Austen’s Subdued Heroines. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30: 281–303. Sill, Geoffrey. 1997. Neurology and the Novel: Alexander Monro Primus and Secundus, Robinson Crusoe, and the Problem of Sensibility. Literature and Medicine 16: 250–265. Todd, Janet. 1986. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen. Walle, Taylor. 2016. He Looked Quite Red: Persuasion and Austen’s New Man of Feeling. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29: 45–66.

116

J. M. LABBE

West, Jane. 1796. A Gossip’s Story and a Legendary Tale. London: Printed for T. Longman. Wilshire, John. 1992. Jane Austen and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Erin. 2012. The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century. Literature and Medicine 30: 276–291.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Co-writing, or, Who Wrote Jane Austen’s Novels?

Abstract The Conclusion asks the reader to understand a key provocation underpinning the book: that Smith and Austen mutually write a new model/mode/manner/mood into the novel. Drawing on the idea of the companionate marriage, it pulls together the argument of the book to describe the notion of ‘co-writing’, and it rejects once and for all the picture of Austen as the isolated genius. Keywords Companionship · Co-writing · Plagiarism · Genre · Context

Richard Cronin writes that when Pride and Prejudice was published, ‘the future Lady Byron confidently reported after reading it that it had been written by “a sister of Charlotte Smith’s”’. Cronin, however, asserts that for Austen, ‘it was Frances Burney who took the palm’, providing for Austen ‘the main lineaments of the plot that was to serve her throughout her career, the misadventures of a young woman’ as she ‘makes her choice of marriage partner’ (289–290). Given that this is the standard marriage plot utilized by any number of authors of the period besides Burney it is perhaps less compelling as evidence for Burney’s supremacy. Austen’s mistaken identity as a sister of Smith’s rings truer. As noted in the Introduction, critics for some time have worked to uncover her various debts and influences, while Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen fully illustrates the historical and critical modalities that created the fantasy of primacy which has had such a distorting effect © The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_6

117

118

J. M. LABBE

on our reading of Austen.1 She stands alone; she has no sisters; she can only ever have assistants. And her contemporaries, like Smith, have had to pale as soon as the comparison with Austen is introduced. But I want to look back and forth between Smith and Austen as a matched pair. We must dispense with the notion of an assistant so that we may develop our understanding of their mutual assistance. Let’s open both novelists to a consideration of the implications of their twinning. ∗ ∗ ∗ The aim of concentrating on questions relating to compositional decisions is to highlight that by understanding how Smith and Austen write, we can begin to understand how they write together, and how their writing combines. Let’s call this ‘co-writing’. I suggest this as a concept which reflects a mode of writing that is simultaneously highly original and deeply indebted. It means that a writer, in reading another writer, finds in that writer not merely source material, plot points, or stylistic devices to work on and develop; she finds a companion, a pre-thinker, a co-interrogator of issues, themes, and ideas. So is there a way to read not only sympathetic identification but also writerly recycling that is more interesting than influence, less culpable than plagiarism, as important as individual genius or originality? If Austen rewrites, can she also co-write? If Smith is unaware of her companion, can she be said to be cooperating with her? This is a period in which celebrity culture matures, copycat writing proliferates, allusion is rife, and plagiarism comes into its own. The critical work on these activities and social developments illuminates how easy, indeed profitable, it could be to assume, take over, or use the work, ideas, personalities, cultures of others.2 Claire Brock and Tom Mole describe the arc of celebrity and the work of being one. Tilar Mazzeo unpicks plagiarism: crime or homage? Adela Pinch’s scholarship is still the standard when it comes to the idea that the work of others can and should underpin and resonate within one’s own. Smith is a literary celebrity in the

1 The Making of Jane Austen (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 2 Cultures: the colonial as well as the social.

6

CONCLUSION: CO-WRITING, OR, WHO WROTE JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS?

119

1790s, when Austen is young and impressionable.3 So is Austen a copycat writer, a starry-eyed fan, her novels forms of love-letters to her hero? Is she an allusion-miner, a student determined to get an A for effort? Surely she’s not simply cheating?? If plagiarism is copying and attempting to hide it, for personal gain or to pass someone else’s work off as one’s own, Austen is an unconvincing plagiarist. If influence implies (as the Introduction argued) a hierarchy, something that must be overcome if one is to achieve full authorship, Austen does not seem to want to tear Smith down. And originality and individual genius? The latter depends on a troping of a canon of Very Special Works and ignores the community-based practices of the period, its culture of clubs, coteries, salons, and partnerships. And the former is merely a product of this fictive individuality. So if this describes what cowriting is not, it still leaves open the question of what it is. ∗ ∗ ∗ Companions walk a road together, share a mindset, discuss, and compare. There is a mutuality: of attraction, of ways of behaviour, of plans, wants, and desires. The companionate marriage espoused by Mary Wollstonecraft is case in point. Wollstonecraft points out in Vindication of the Rights of Woman that the initial heady days of infatuation will inevitably lead to disillusionment without a strong underlying sense of companionship: ‘Affection in the married state can only be founded on respect—and are these weak beings respectable? …. Love, considered as an animal appetite, cannot long feed on itself without expiring. … In the choice of a husband, [women] should not be led astray by the qualities of a lover – for a lover the husband, even supposing him to be wise and virtuous, cannot long remain’.4 The companionate marriages that Smith creates are few but significant. Emmeline provides the best example; Emmeline and Godolphin feel a strong initial attraction but their relationship is not confirmed until the 3 Claire Brock, The Feminization of Fame 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Tom Mole, Romanticism and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Tilar Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 4 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough: Broadview, 1997), 54, 192, 249.

120

J. M. LABBE

last few paragraphs. They establish, in this way, a deeper sense of themselves as helpmeets, enjoyable company for each other, with similar casts of mind and similar personal and social priorities. By contrast, Adelina and Fitz-Edward are vexed by a relationship based on sexual attraction and romantic trauma. For them, it is always already implicated by her sense of sin and his sense of responsibility. Smith repeatedly writes relationships that are distinctly uncompanionate: Rosalie and Montalbert, Desmond and Geraldine, Isabella and Warwick, Celestina and Willoughby. They are written not to be emulated but to act as cautionary tales, what not to do. There are fewer companionate couplings because they are harder to achieve in a world (and this is the ‘real’ one) where men and women tend to be segregated on almost every level. Her narratives, however, are clear in terms of what is valued and valuable between women and men and what is harmful (and recall the pains of sensibility). Austen, too, contrasts the companionable with the infatuated. Marianne is infatuated with Willoughby, Elinor companionate with Edward. Fanny, in her self-denying way, looks to Edmund for companionship. Catherine becomes friends with Henry before it deepens to something else. Elizabeth’s bumpy ride with Darcy needs to happen precisely so that he can translate his initial attraction to her person to a more significant attraction to her personhood and she can substitute her assumption of his superficiality for a conviction of his depth. Emma is always (problematically) attractive to Knightley; she must mature to a potential partner rather than remain an emotional subordinate. And turn this around to look at Mary and Edmund: pure sensual attraction; Wentworth and Louisa: superficial; Lydia and Wickham: a little inexplicable but then it’s only about sex. Smith and Austen carefully negotiate a terrain wherein attraction and infatuation are colourful and energetic and companionship hard to vitalise. This is one reason why their texts are not romances (although they clearly contain the romantic). They are not interested in privileging pure fireworks or the spectacle of star-crossing. Together, they plot relationships that have a chance to succeed and contrast them with couplings that are written to fail. Their mutual understanding draws on a consideration of human nature as requiring something deeper than skin, more resounding than whispered sweet nothings. Their thematics of romantic partnership differs from the love matches more common in their contemporaries, where even relatively believable developments (say, those written

6

CONCLUSION: CO-WRITING, OR, WHO WROTE JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS?

121

by Burney) nonetheless require that initial sparky glance across, or at least in, a crowded room.5 This commonality is companionship. The two think along the same lines and move towards a common conclusion. Smith’s signals are read by Austen who pursues her beaten path; perhaps a better metaphor would be that Smith’s tags are noted by Austen as they negotiate their field of expertise. Separated by time, they walk side by side, companionably. ∗ ∗ ∗ What, exactly, is a pre-thinker? We are primed to regard Austen as an originary voice. Her storylines, techniques, her voice are self-possessed. Free indirect discourse is a die-hard concept that continually circles back to her, for instance. But while she was undoubtedly very good at it, this form of inward perception, of ventriloquizing a character previously more simply described, slipped into the novel decades earlier and was extensively practised by Smith. Ethelinde and Montalbert in particular take protracted sojourns into their protagonists’ minds. This is one reason we can discern, eventually, Ethelinde’s curious habit of self-conscious sensibility, her propensity to weigh up the impact of her actions before and during her performance of them.6 It is why Rosalie’s terrors and toxic sensibility are felt as well as told. But the idea that free indirect discourse is not, in this way, solely Austenian simply does not stick. She seems made to be singular. Singularity, however, diminishes as much as it distinguishes. The attentive reader looks for tones, timbres, elements that chime with her own. This can confirm our sense of the audibility of the strike, of the telling. Smith explores in all her novels concepts of inwardness, narratorial critique, authorial distancing, matured love plots, and historicized family histories in the service of writing a new kind of realism. Her sensibility plots and Gothicisms—her troping of genres—are faux because they are not dedicated to the parameters they use. They are not sincerely, authentically, just so but rather, radically, critical. Her plots can be surreal, but

5 Edgeworth dramatizes this when she has Clement meet Belinda at a masked ball. 6 The best investigation of Ethelinde’s play-acting remains Joseph Morrissey’s. See

Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Chapter 5.

122

J. M. LABBE

they are not unreal. She uses pathetic fallacy to underline the risk of simply being female or being friendless or being isolated (Shakespeare does this too) and she uses allegory and symbolism to underscore the outsized power residing in certain areas of the social construct (the Law, for instance).7 But the worlds she writes are emphatically real worlds, with real people doing really bad and sometimes really good things. She is a realist and she thinks this atmosphere into being, a new air for the novel to breathe. So her characters have inward lives and don’t always act as they think, and only the narrator and the reader know this. Her narrators ensure that readers’ attention is drawn to, or deflected from, key moments in the text. Even in Desmond, her one epistolary novel (and hence narratorless), she writes her characters’ letters so carefully that they reveal, for instance, Desmond’s ability to fool himself into thinking he is indeed a knight errant when he is, in too many ways, both Geraldine’s stalker and Josephine’s abuser. And they make plain that Geraldine, Elinor-like, is clear-eyed and reasonable about the limitations of her situation, while also, Fanny-like, choosing to perpetuate her victimhood, even as she (Emma-like?) tells her story without seeming to understand its ramifications for others. And in Ethelinde, her enthralled narrator’s impulses to give Ethelinde free rein is undercut by an authorial disapproval conveyed via tone and the narrator’s lexicon. In the 1790s and early 1800s, as Austen is drafting her major works, she crafts a realism that resonates with Smith’s. As each chapter of this book has argued, she is calmer where Smith is stormy, she is less overtly compositional where Smith is more obviously so, she is drier where Smith is very liquid indeed, she is ‘grrrr’ where Smith is ‘roar’. This, though, is costuming. For what Smith thinks and writes shows us what Austen will think and write, if only we knew it. The concept is realism itself: that a plot could, conceivably, happen, and to people recognizably human. So what is a pre-thinker? It is someone to whom we look and we say to ourselves: yes, that’s what I think too. And that’s what Austen writes. ∗ ∗ ∗

7 From personal experience, Smith knows just how all-encompassing and all-powerful the system of Law is, how easily it can be used against any sense of Justice.

6

CONCLUSION: CO-WRITING, OR, WHO WROTE JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS?

123

Two writers who walk together and think alike. Two authors who interrogate, together if separately, the constructs and constraints of their society. Who holds certain roles and who deserves to? Is birth shorthand for character? Can beauty deceive? What does it mean to be a woman or a man? Is a person born or bred? What about money and standing? Does one lead to the other, or depend on the other, or indicate the other? Should money be earned or inherited and can the two modes ever coexist? What about inheritance in general? Who deserves property? What should money be spent on? And, importantly, who holds the words, who is empowered to tell the story, who must listen, who will listen? These questions are not tangential for either Smith or Austen. They continually pose them, speculate on answers, reach conclusions, and try again. Their fiction is meaningful because of this. Their works withstand interrogation because of this. We read their books and greet them as friends because of this. They make us think and think again because of this. In tandem, because of this, their twin nature emerges. This, then, is co-writing: they can be read in isolation from each other (of course), and Smith wrote without any knowledge of Austen (of course), but Austen is fuller and Smith more resonant when read in the context of each other: a matched pair, complete together, imperfect apart. Go on, test it out—I dare you.

References Brock, Claire. 2006. The Feminization of Fame 1750–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cronin, Richard. 2005. Literary Scene. In Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd, 289–296. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Looser, Devoney. 2017. The Making of Jane Austen. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Mazzeo, Tilar. 2013. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mole, Tom. 2012. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morrissey, Joseph. 2018. Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinch, Adela. 1999. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1997. Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by David Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough: Broadview.

References

Anon. 1790. A Monthly Review. London: Printed for R. Griffiths. Arnold, Thomas. 1786. Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness. London: G. Ireland. Assmann, Aleida. 2013. Civilizing Societies: Recognition and Respect in a Global World. New Literary History 44: 69–91. Austen, Jane. 1969. Sense and Sensibility. Edited by Tony Tanner. London: Penguin Classics. Austen, Jane. 1975. Sandition. New York: Simon and Schuster. Austen, Jane. 1996. Emma. Edited by Fiona Stafford. London: Penguin Classics. Austen, Jane. 1998. Persuasion. Edited by Linda Bree. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2001. Sense and Sensibility. Edited by Kathleen James-Cavan. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2002. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Robert Irvine. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2003. Mansfield Park. Edited by James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austen, Jane. 2004a. Emma. Edited by Kristin Samuelian. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2004b. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by James Kinsley. New York: Oxford University Press. Austen, Jane. 2008. Juvenilia. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Austen, Jane. 2012. Northanger Abbey. London: Penguin Books. Bage, Robert. 2002. Hermsprong: Or, Man as He Is Not. Edited by Pamela Perkins. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4

125

126

REFERENCES

Bander, Elaine. 2018. “Cheerful Beyond Her Expectations”: Mrs Smith, Adam Smith, and Austen. Persuasions 40: 76–92. Batchelor, Jennie. 2013. Introduction: Influence, Intertextuality and Agency: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Politics of Remembering. Women’s Writing 20: 1–12. Booth, Naomi. 2014. Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman. Women’s Writing 21: 575–591. Bradbrook, Frank. 1967. Jane Austen and her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bray, Joe. 2007. The “Dual Voice” of Free Indirect Discourse: A Reading Experiment. Language and Literature 16: 37–52. Brock, Claire. 2006. The Feminization of Fame 1750–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Julia. 1979. Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Burney, Fanny. 2002. Evelina. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burrows, John. 1997. Style. In The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, 170–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapone, Hester. 1773. Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady. London: Printed by C. Whittingham. Cronin, Richard. 2005. Literary Scene. In Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd, 289–296. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curran, Stuart. 2005. The Works of Charlotte Smith. Edited by Judith Stanton. London: Routledge. Derbyshire, Valerie. 2019. The Picturesque, the Sublime, the Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749–1806). Wilmington: Vernon Press. Derry, Stephen. 1990. The Ellesmeres and the Elliots: Charlotte Smith’s Influence on Persuasion. Persuasions 12: 69–70. Dolan, Elizabeth. 2003. British Romantic Melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Medical Discourse and the Problem of Sensibility. Journal of European Ideas 33: 237–253. Dolan, Elizabeth. 2008. Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era. Hampshire: Ashgate Press. Doody, Margaret. 1986. Jane Austen’s Reading. In The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey, 347–363. New York: Macmillan Press. Ehrenpreis, Anne. 1970. Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25: 343–348. Fletcher, Loraine. 1998. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

REFERENCES

127

Fordyce, James. 1767. Sermons to Young Women: In Two Volumes. London: Printed for A. Millar, T. Cadell, J. Dodsley and J. Payne. Fordyce, James. 1777. Addresses to Young Men. London: Printed for T. Cadell. Fulk, Mark. 2009. Mismanaging Mothers: Matriarchy and the Romantic Education in Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher. Women’s Writing 16: 94–108. Galperin, William. 2006. Describing What Never Happened: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities. English Literary History 73: 355–383. Gamer, Michael. 2019. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillie, Christopher. 1974. A Preface to Jane Austen. London: Longman. Goodman, Kevis. 2010. “Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading. Studies in Romanticism 49: 197–227. Goodman, Kevis. 2014. Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Grounds of the Present. English Literary History 81: 983–1006. Grundy, Isobel. 1997. Jane Austen and Literary Traditions. In The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, 189–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurton-Wachter, Lily. 2016. Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hall, Lynda. 1996. Jane Austen’s Attractive Rogues: Willoughby, Wickham, and Frank Churchill. Persuasions 18: 186–190. Halsey, Katie. 2005. Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park. In British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics, and History, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, 48–61. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammond, Brean. 1993. The Political Unconscious in Mansfield Park. In Mansfield Park, ed. Nigel Wood, 56–90. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hammond, Brean. 2007. Coincidence Studies: Developing a Field of Research. Literature Compass 4: 622–637. Harris, Jocelyn. 2003. Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heydt-Stevenson, Jill. 2000. “Slipping into the Ha-Ha”: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels. Nineteenth-Century Literature 5: 309–339. Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. 2013. Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History. The Wordsworth Circle 44: 140–148. Hudson, Glenda. 1999. Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jenkins, Joyce. 2006. The Puzzle of Fanny Price. Philosophy and Literature 30: 346–360.

128

REFERENCES

Johnson, Claudia. 1988. Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind. In Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, ed. Claudia Johnson, 94–120. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Claudia. 1989. A “Sweet Face as White as Death”: Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility. Novel 22: 159–174. Johnson, Claudia. 1995. What Became of Jane Austen? Mansfield Park. Persuasions 17: 59–70. Johnston, Elizabeth. 2014. “Deadly Snares”: Female Rivalry, Gender ideology, and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers. Studies in the Literary Imagination 47: 1–21. Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2004. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2008. Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen. In Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe, 113–128. London: Pickering and Chatto. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2010. What Happens at the Party: Jane Austen Converses with Charlotte Smith. Persuasions Online. Available at: http://www.jasna. org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/labbe.html. Last accessed 9 November 19. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2011a. Role Play in Charlotte Smith’s Novels (1788–1795). In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romanticism, ed. Frederick Burwick, Diane Long Hoeveler, and Nancy Moore Goslee. Oxford: Blackwell. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2011b. Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lascelles, Mary. 1939. Jane Austen and Her Art. London: Oxford University Press. Lee, Sophia. 2000. The Recess. Edited by April Alliston. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Littlewood, Ian. 1998. Jane Austen: Critical Assessments. Edited by Ian Littlewood. Bodmin: MPG Books. Looser, Devoney. 2017. The Making of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lupton, Christina. 2014. Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-Century Novel. English Literary History 81: 1173–1192. Magee, William. 1975. The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen. Studies in the Novel 7: 120–132. Marsh, Kelly. 2009. The Mother’s Unnarratable Pleasures and the Submerged Plot of Persuasion. Narrative 17: 76–94. Mazzeo, Tilar. 2006. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mazzeo, Tilar. 2013. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

REFERENCES

129

Mckillop, Alan. 1951. Allusions to Prose Fiction in Jane Austen’s Volume the Third. Notes and Queries 196: 428–429. Moe, Melina. 2016. Charlotte and Elizabeth: Multiple Modernities in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. English Literary History 83: 1075–1103. Mole, Tom. 2012. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morrissey, Joseph. 2018. Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Morrissey, Joe. 2019. Sensibility, Sincerity, and Self-Interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde. Women’s Writing 26: 342–357. Murphy, Olivia. 2013. Rethinking Influence by Reading with Austen. Women’s Writing 20: 100–114. Nagle, Christopher. 2007. Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinch, Adela. 1996. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pinch, Adela. 1999. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pinion, F. 1973. A Jane Austen Companion: A Critical Survey and Reference Book. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Powell, Manushag. 2012. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Spectation and the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere. Eighteenth-Century Studies 45: 255–276. Richardson, Alan. 2002. Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion. Poetics Today 23: 141–160. Sebald, Vintage. 2002. The Emigrants. Croydon: CPI Bookmarque. Shaw, Valerie. 1975. Jane Austen’s Subdued Heroines. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30: 281–303. Sill, Geoffrey. 1997. Neurology and the Novel: Alexander Monro Primus and Secundus, Robinson Crusoe, and the Problem of Sensibility. Literature and Medicine 16: 250–265. Siskin, Clifford. 1988. The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Siskin, Clifford. 2001. Novels and Systems. Novel 34: 202–215. Smith, Charlotte. 1791. Celestina. London: T. Cadell. Smith, Charlotte. 1794. The Wanderings of Warwick. London: Printed for J. Bell. Smith, Charlotte. 1795a. Montalbert. London: S. Low. Smith, Charlotte. 1795b. Rural Walks: In Dialogues Intended for the Use of Young Persons. London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies. Smith, Charlotte. 1795c. The Banished Man. London: T. Cadell. Smith, Charlotte. 1796a. Marchmont. London: S. Low.

130

REFERENCES

Smith, Charlotte. 1796b. Rambles Further: A Continuation of Rural Walks. Dublin: Printed for P. Wogan, P. Byrne, J. Moore and B. Dugdale. Smith, Charlotte. 1800a. Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems. London: R. Noble. Smith, Charlotte. 1800b. The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. London: Sampson Low. Smith, Charlotte. 1999. The Young Philosopher. Edited by Elizabeth Kraft. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Smith, Charlotte. 2001. Desmond. Edited by Antje Blank and Janet Todd. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2002. The Old Manor House. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2003. Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle. Edited by Loraine Fletcher. Plymouth: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2004. Celestina. Edited by Lorraine Fletcher. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Smith, Charlotte. 2016. Ethelinde. Edited by Ellen Moody. Richmond: Valancourt Books. Southam, Brian. 1964. Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spacks, Patricia. 2006. Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spencer, Jane. 2012. Narrative Technique: Austen and Her Contemporaries. In A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuitt, 185–194. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Stanton, Judith. 2003. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Steeves, Harrison. 1966. Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century. London: George Allen and Unwin. Tanner, Tony. 2007. Jane Austen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Todd, Janet. 1986. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen. Ty, Eleanor. 1986. Ridding Unwanted Suitors: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5: 327–328. Voyce, Stephen. 2011. Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons. Criticism 53: 407–438. Waldron, Mary. 1999. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walle, Taylor. 2016. He looked quite red: Persuasion and Austen’s new man of feeling. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29: 45–66. West, Jane. 1796. A Gossip’s Story and a Legendary Tale. London: Printed for T. Longman. West, Jane. 2015. A Gossip’s Story. Edited by Devoney Looser, Melinda O’Connell, and Caitlin Kelly. Richmond: Valancourt Books.

REFERENCES

131

Wilshire, John. 1992. Jane Austen and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Erin. 2012. The end of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century. Literature and Medicine 30: 276–291. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1989. The Analytical Review. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 22–27. London: Pickering. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1997. Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by David Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough: Broadview. Wyett, Jodi. 2015. Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey, the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer. The Eighteenth Century 56: 261–276. Youssef, Nancy. 2013. Romantic Intimacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Index

B The Banished Man, 8 Birth, 33, 46, 50, 52, 53, 55, 123 Body, 37, 83, 91, 94–97, 100, 104, 107, 109 Burney, Fanny, 5, 6, 9, 11, 47, 70, 72, 117, 121

Code/codes, 9, 15, 23, 27, 28, 52, 70, 72–74, 76, 77, 79, 86–91, 97 Coincidence, 8–10, 13, 16, 23, 25, 32, 33 Community, 2, 9, 11, 15, 72, 119 Companion/companionship, 94, 106, 118–121 Control, 14, 15, 25, 28, 30, 47, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 79, 88–91, 106, 112 Copy, 10, 27, 41, 43, 119 Co-writing, 117–119, 123

C Celestina, 3, 8, 11, 49, 59, 71–72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 87, 91, 113 Character, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10–13, 15, 16, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35–38, 40, 43–49, 54, 57, 60–63, 65, 70–72, 75–77, 79, 81, 83–86, 88, 89, 91, 94–96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104–106, 108, 111–114, 121, 122 Class, 8, 20, 41, 52, 58, 64, 87, 88

D Debt, 2, 12–14, 46, 51, 54, 55, 117 Desire, 4, 5, 12, 19, 32, 34, 40, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 63, 66, 70–72, 77, 79–81, 83, 84, 86–89, 101, 119 Desmond, 3, 8, 52, 58, 113, 122 Disease, 95–98, 100–104, 109, 113, 114 Displacement, 34

A Agency, 21, 45, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 64

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 J. M. Labbe, Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4

133

134

INDEX

E Emma, 3, 8, 11–13, 22, 35, 40, 52, 66, 104 Emmeline, 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 20–25, 27–36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 49, 59, 98, 113, 120 Emotion/emotional, 4, 15, 25, 28, 30, 34, 46–49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 63, 66, 71, 74, 76, 77, 79, 84, 88, 90, 93–105, 107, 111, 112, 115, 120 Ethelinde, 3, 6, 8, 14, 44, 48, 52, 54, 95, 113, 121, 122

F Feel/feeling, 15, 24, 29, 33, 34, 47, 48, 51–56, 59, 66, 71–73, 76, 82–86, 90, 91, 94–108, 110–115, 120 Feminism, 81 Forethought, 8–10

G Gender, 14, 87, 88 Generic, 5, 14, 19, 20, 23, 27, 59, 102 Genre, 5, 6, 10, 13, 14, 20, 46, 112, 113, 121

H Haunt, 22 Hero, 6, 11, 24, 31, 33, 35, 40, 45, 47, 48, 52–55, 71, 80, 81, 85, 102, 119 Heroine, 4, 15, 24, 27, 30, 37, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55–59, 62, 63, 66, 70, 80–82, 84, 88, 100, 102, 107, 110, 111, 113 History, 3, 20, 23, 26, 30, 56, 86

I Ill/illness, 15, 35, 51, 52, 94, 95, 98–107 Imitation, 2, 3, 14, 27, 38, 80 Indebtedness, 2, 10 Influence, 2–6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 24, 38, 41, 62, 79, 80, 83, 111, 117–119 Inheritance, 11, 14, 27, 47, 49, 50, 52, 64, 123 Insensibility, 100, 115 Interaction, 7, 15, 43, 44, 74, 79, 91 Intertextuality, 8, 10, 11, 16

L Language, 7, 70, 72, 97, 102 The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, 108 Libertine, 54, 55, 59, 60, 70, 81, 82, 84–86 Love, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 30, 33, 36, 37, 40, 45, 47–49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 63, 70–72, 77, 79, 80, 82–85, 87, 88, 100–102, 104, 107, 108, 112, 119, 121

M Man/men, 1, 14, 20, 22, 27, 31, 32, 34, 37, 45–47, 49, 52, 54–57, 64–66, 70, 71, 79, 85, 86, 90, 94, 99, 102, 112, 120, 123 Manner/manners, 14, 15, 20, 30, 60, 70, 72, 73, 77, 86, 89–91, 93 Mansfield Park, 3, 8, 31, 34, 50, 80, 81, 83, 85, 90, 91 Marchmont , 8, 38, 64 Masculine, 14, 46, 70 Melancholy, 96, 97, 103 Metaphor, 3, 9, 38, 79, 80, 99, 121 Modal/modality, 43, 46, 52, 53, 55–57, 61, 64, 117

INDEX

Mode, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 21, 23, 26, 44–46, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 62, 65, 69, 90, 93, 95, 100, 102, 118, 123 Model, 2, 10, 20, 23–25, 27–31, 36, 38, 41, 43, 45, 49, 63, 64, 72, 75, 77, 85, 97, 102, 109 Modelling, 14, 33, 41, 81 Modern/modernity, 21–23, 44, 47, 49, 54–56, 63, 79 Money, 21, 33, 39, 45–49, 52–55, 64, 65, 77, 123 Montalbert , 8, 55, 57, 63, 99, 100, 121 Mood, 14, 15, 93–96, 98, 105, 106, 111, 112, 114, 115

N Narrative, 11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 22, 30–33, 38, 39, 45, 52, 54, 57, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 85, 86, 103, 106, 120 Northanger Abbey, 3, 8, 33, 34, 44, 55 Nostalgia, 24, 25 Novel, 1–3, 5–15, 20–23, 25, 27, 33, 35–41, 44–47, 49, 53, 55–58, 60, 64, 65, 71–73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 86, 88–90, 94, 95, 98–102, 105–108, 112–114

O Observe/observation, 15, 44, 45, 57, 74–76, 78, 79, 88, 89 The Old Manor House, 3, 6, 8, 31, 50–51, 58, 59, 80–85, 86, 90, 95

P Pain, 29, 30, 75, 76, 84, 100, 105, 107, 110, 111

135

Partnership, 3, 119, 121 Passive/passivity, 22, 28, 31, 45, 47, 56–61, 63, 65, 99, 100, 104, 105, 110, 114 Pathology/pathological, 24, 83, 84, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101 Pattern, 20, 22, 27, 63 Persuade, 9, 22, 38, 78, 108, 109 Persuasion, 3, 7, 8, 11, 22, 49, 58, 59, 107, 108, 110 Plagiarism, 14, 118, 119 Play, 23, 29, 34, 46, 53, 90 Playful, 13, 114 Plot, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12–15, 20, 21, 23–25, 27, 30, 31, 34–36, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 53, 54, 56–61, 65, 69, 71, 74, 75, 79–84, 86, 90, 94, 95, 99, 100, 102, 104–106, 108, 113–115, 117, 118, 120–122 Plunder, 14, 23, 25, 27, 31, 32, 38 Poetics, 23 Politics, 9, 46, 53, 58, 86, 89 Punish/punishment, 15, 20, 45, 57, 61, 65, 74, 80, 86, 88, 99, 108 R Rake, 21, 26, 31, 33, 35, 40, 45, 47, 54, 70, 71, 102 Repetition, 8, 9, 13, 32, 95 Reputation, 25, 31, 39, 40, 56, 87, 112 Role, 10, 48, 59, 81, 104, 123 Role-playing, 14 Romance, 10, 12, 13, 15, 20, 23, 24, 33, 47, 52, 54, 55, 64, 71, 73, 77, 79, 85–87, 94, 103, 104, 109, 120 S “Sanditon”, 8

136

INDEX

Secrecy/secrets, 15, 35, 54, 75, 76, 78, 79, 87, 89, 90, 99, 100, 104 Seduction, 15, 49–50, 71–73, 79–81, 84–90, 106 See/seeing, 4, 6, 9, 12, 20, 25, 27, 28, 33, 35, 45, 48, 54, 72, 75–79, 83, 85–90, 102, 103, 108 Sense and Sensibility, 3, 8, 11, 13, 48, 49, 66, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 86, 87, 90, 91, 100 Sex, 1, 25, 28, 51, 56, 59, 61, 70–72, 79–83, 86, 88, 91, 114, 120 Source, 4, 6, 9, 10, 23, 24, 118 Stereotype, 14, 44–46, 54, 59, 61, 65, 89 Submission, 37, 57, 64, 79, 83, 100, 108–110 Suffer/suffering, 12, 15, 35, 37, 48, 50, 51, 57, 58, 71–75, 79, 95, 96, 99, 101–107, 109, 111, 114 Surveillance, 15, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 87, 89–91 System, 23–25, 38, 40, 41, 50, 55, 72, 94, 96–98, 100 T Tell/telling, 3, 5, 7, 12–14, 20, 21, 23–27, 32–35, 40, 47, 90, 109, 113, 121–123

Temperament, 15, 93, 95, 111, 115 Template, 14, 20, 24–27, 41 Tone, 4, 15, 22, 31, 35, 56, 82, 103, 104, 121, 122 Type, 3, 14, 21, 44, 45

V Villain, 24, 45, 47, 54, 55, 72 Violence, 16, 34, 73, 77, 87, 90, 98, 110, 114 Voice, 21, 23–26, 29, 32, 38, 71, 121

W The Wanderings of Warwick, 58 War, 1, 15, 49, 55, 56, 64, 73, 80, 88 Woman/women, 1, 5, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 25–27, 32, 34, 35, 37, 45, 46, 50, 53, 56–61, 63–66, 70, 73, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 90, 94, 98–100, 102, 108–110, 113, 117, 119, 120, 123

Y The Young Philosopher, 8