The Gothic novel (romance) Jane Austen
Late 18th-century Changing readership Aristocracy middle classes Men women Circulating libraries Shift in genres Poetry fiction Epic novels Newly emerged sensibility Approaches in fiction: Realism Romance
The Gothic novel/romance 2nd half of 18th century Gothic/medieval paraphernalia Time: medieval Gothic setting (castles: trap doors, cellars, winding staircases, spires, dungeons, hidden doors, etc.) France, Italy (Catholic cultures) Multiple dislocation Function: Removing it from contemporary reality Yet: code for expressing contemporary anxieties and fears Later reception/history: Dubious genre (romance, fantastic) But: elements: present even in realism Contemporary fiction: substantial use of the tradition
The Gothic novel/romance Peak: 1765 1820 Preceding literary and cultural phenomena: MacPherson, James. The Poems of Ossian. 1762 Percy, Thomas. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 1765 Horace Walpole: Strawberry Hill Graveyard poetry (Young, Hervey, Gray)
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible subjects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
Gothic Goths: Teutonic, barbaric, Dark Ages Gothic architecture: Sophisticated, refined, sublime, transcendental Excessive, Grotesque, frightening, uncivilised Gothic mansion: history and home Terror and fear located in the ancestral mansion Use of the supernatural Stereotypical stock characters
Fear and rationality Fear: product of the enlightenment Whatever is uncontainable within rationality Passions and emotions: not under rational control excess/taboo incomprehensible fearful Gothic dislocation: inverted form of representing those areas of the world/consciousness that are NOT available in the realist processes of representation Topics: incest, rape, transgression, human/animal, natural/supernatural Unadmitted horrors of the psyche a code for the Other Social and psychological elements projected onto the distanced/dislocated elements of the Gothic romance
Mary Shelley: Introduction to the 2nd (1831) edition of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus I busied myself to think of a story a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.
A List of Gothic Novels Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. 1764 Reeve, Clara. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story. 1778 Lee, Sophia. The Recess: or, A Tale of Other Times. 1783-85 Beckford, William. Vathek. 1786 Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794 Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. 1796 Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian, or the Confessional of Black Penitents. 1797 Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818/1831 Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. 1820
Contemporaries: Two contrasted worlds Jane Austen vs Sir Walter Scott Novel of manners vs historical novel Scott: wide scope in time and space rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape (often: Scottish highlands) Austen: self-admitted miniature painter cornfields, cottages and meadows Just three or four families in the neighbourhood Never just men taking to each other in her novels (how shall I know?) For a long time: Austen: of minor significance reevaluation
Jane Austen (1775-1817) A Lady Even though: mid-18th c: Samuel Johnson: Amazons of the pen ; WH Auden: You could not shock me more than she shocks me. Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable an English maiden of the middle class describe so ironically this narrow world.
List of novels by Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility. (Elinor and Marianne). pb. 1811; (Értelem és érzelem) Pride and Prejudice. (First Impressions). pb. 1813; (Büszkeség és balítélet) Mansfield Park. pb. 1814; (A mansfieldi kastély) Emma. pb. 1815; (Emma) Northanger Abbey. (Susan) pb. 1818; (A Klastrom titka) Persuasion. pb. 1818; (Meggyőző érvek)
Cover stories Writer s attitude: Covering her writing, writing anonymously Vs: self-conscious writer Writing: double-edged discourse Romance plot: apparent conformity to values Vs: narrator s irony (problem: adaptations) Re-writing even the romance plot (new heroine) Mixed characters (vs pure characters)
Austen: I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit down seriously to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at any other, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. I must keep to my own style and go on my way. Pictures of perfection make me sick. Mary Wollstonecraft: sentimental novels render women more artificial, weak characters than they would otherwise have been novel of manners: descendent of Restauration comedy of manners cover story vs. narratorial (ironic) distance
Basic concerns A young woman indviduality Conduct books, prescription of decent/proper behaviour Propriety/limits vs transgression Transgression vs self-destruction A life of one s own; a life story of one s own Elizabeth Bennet: partly in control of her own plot Austen: women: Feel and think just as men do Capable of moral growth Both men and women: sense and sensibility (vs gendered division: men: sense; women: sensibility) Novels: female education (against the sentimental novel) Context: economic man vs domestic woman
First sentences/tone Northanger Abbey: No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Self-reflexively literary Reflects on the Gothic and the sentimental novel Emergence of a new heroine Pride and Prejudice: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Narrator: various grades of distancing herself from the narrated story and the different characters Result: irony, humour, sarcasm Closest identification: Elizabeth Bennet
Novel of manners Descendant of Restauration comedy of manners Cover-up by linguistic codes What decency and propriety does not allow to utter What culture hides, even from itself Excess of polite talk vs hidden reality Centre: Accomplished ladies Vulnerability of women Gilded cage syndrome Dispossession of women
William Blackstone, professor of law at Oxford By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french fem-covert.
Sociopolitical and literary implications of Austen s fictional world New voice Less the limited conservative than the limited revolutionary Taking social and generic limits into consideration Yet recreating femininity by challenging the boundaries Both: In reality By reflecting on literary discourse (genres and literary history) Exposing literary-political implications of Genres Modes of speech Genders: femininity (masculinity)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One s Own (1929): Towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.
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