Jane Austen (1775-1817). Janeite Janeitism James Edward Austen- Leigh, A memoir of Jane Austen (1870)

Jane Austen (1775-1817)


• Janeite• Janeitism

• James Edward Austen-Leigh, A memoir of Jane Austen (1870)


• Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom

• Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion, and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community



• Parody stems from the Greek “para” (counter and beside) and “odos” (song)


• Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740); Clarissa (1747-48)

• Henry Mackenzie The Man of Feeling (1771)• Oliver Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield

(1766)• Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy (1759-67); A

Sentimental Journey (1768)


• Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799)

• Such is the frightful facility of this species of composition, that every raw girl, while she reads, is tempted to fancy that she can also write…the glutted imagination soon overflows with the redundance of cheap sentiment and plentiful incident…’; such works ‘teach, that chastity is only individual attachment; that no duty exists which is not prompted by feeling; that impulse is the main spring of virtuous actions, while laws and religion are only unjust restraints.


• Purposes of the Gothic Novel:• To create terror• To open fiction to the realm of the irrational—

perverse impulses, nightmarish terrors, obsessions—lying beneath the surface of the civilized mind

• To demonstrate the presence of the uncanny (unheimlich) existing in the world that we know rationally through experience.


• Characters• May include an innocent heroine persecuted

by a villain• Appearance of ghosts• Characters who disappear mysteriously• Characters act from negative emotions: fear,

revenge, despair, hatred, anger.


• Characteristics• Supernatural occurrences• Focus on death and the events surrounding

death; the living may seem half-dead and the dead half-alive.

• An atmosphere of gloom, terror, or mystery.• Elements of the uncanny (unheimlich)


• The Uncanny

• Heimlich I: known, familiar

• Heimlich II: secret, unknown

• Freud

• Unheimlich I: unknown. unfamiliar

• Unheimlich II: revealed, uncovered


• Even though the Gothic novel deals with sublime and the supernatural, the underlying theme of the fallen hero applies to the real world as well. Once we look past the terror aspect of this literature, we can connect with it on a human level. Furthermore, the prevalent fears of murder, rape, sin, and the unknown are fears that we face in life. In the Gothic world they are merely multiplied


• Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764)• Ann Radcliffe , The Mysteries of Udolpho

(1794)• Matthew Gregory Lewis,The Monk • Charles Robert Maturin ,Melmoth the

Wanderer


• The Sublime

• Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756)


• TZVETAN TODOROV• The Fantastic• Fantastic Marvelous- Fantastic-Fantastic

Uncanny• “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced

by a person who knows only the laws of nature,confronting an apparently supernatural event”


Eve Kosofsky “massively blocked off from something to which

it ought normally to have access” .


• No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings — and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters.


• Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on — lived to have six children more — to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself.


• The Morlands [...] were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features — so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy’s plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy,[...].


• Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief — at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take.[...]. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. [...]Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinner; so, at eight years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it;[...].


• The day which dismissed the music–master was one of the happiest of Catherine’s life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character! [...]


• Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave way to an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart; she had now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her father and mother remark on her personal improvement. “Catherine grows quite a good–looking girl — she is almost pretty today,” were words which caught her ears now and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.


But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives. [...] She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient. [...]


• There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no — not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door — not one young man whose origin was unknown. [...] But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way. (pp. 17-18)


• “Northanger Abbey is a text about reading, reading novels, reading people and reading situations”

• Isabella Thorpe: “poor inattentive reader” John Thorpe : “boorish inattentive reader”

• Henry and Eleanor Tilney are “competent, attentive readers”


• “talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with reverential care” (Ch. 20; 153).

• “yet less what her fancy had portrayed” • "To an imagination which had hoped for the

smallest diversions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt, and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing. "(153)


• “large high chest” in her room (155); “large, high black cabinet” (159); “an inventory of lines” (163).

• " The night was stormy; the wind had been rising at intervals the whole afternoon; and by the time the party broke up, it blew and rained violently" (Ch 21, p. 158); "her candle and looked closely at the cabinet" (Ch. 21, p 159)


• "Catherine's heart beat quick, but her courage did not fail her. With a cheek flushed by hope, and an eye straining with curiosity, her fingers grasped the handle of a drawer and drew it forth. It was entirely empty. With less alarm and greater eagerness she seized a second, a third, a fourth; each was equally empty. [...]but at length it did open; and not vain, as hitherto, was her search; her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable. Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript, for half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters" (Ch 21, pp. 160-161)


• The dimness of the light her candle emitted made her turn to it with alarm; but there was no danger of its sudden extinction; it had yet some hours to burn; and that she might not have any greater difficulty in distinguishing the writing than what its ancient date might occasion, she hastily snuffed it. Alas! It was snuffed and extinguished in one. A lamp could not have expired with more awful effect. Catherine, for a few moments, was motionless with horror. It was done completely; not a remnant of light in the wick could give hope to the rekindling breath.


• Darkness impenetrable and immovable filled the room. A violent gust of wind, rising with sudden fury, added fresh horror to the moment. Catherine trembled from head to foot. In the pause which succeeded, a sound like receding footsteps and the closing of a distant door struck on her affrighted ear. Human nature could support no more. A cold sweat stood on her forehead, the manuscript fell from her hand, and groping her way to the bed, she jumped hastily in, and sought some suspension of agony by creeping far underneath the clothes.

• (Ch. 21, p. 161)


• Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? An inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand. She seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats faced her in each (Ch.22, p. 163).


• She felt humbled to the dust. Could not the adventure of the chest have taught her wisdom? A corner of it catching her as she lay, seemed to rise up in judgment against her. Nothing could now be clearer than the absurdity of her fancies. (Ch. 22, p. 164.)


• “It was the air and attitude of a Montoni!” (Ch. 23, p. 176)


• "What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you " (Ch. 24, p. 186)


• “it had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion”; “might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged” (Ch. 25, p. 188)

• "the vision of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened (Ch. 25, p. 187).


• “I shall not enter into particulars, they would only pain you more. You will soon hear enough from another quarter to know where lies the blame” (Ch. 25, p. 190)


• Such a strain of hollow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine. Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood, struck her from the very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of ever having loved her. (Ch. 27, p.203)


• Marvin Mudrick “demands too abrupt a transition from Catherine the matter-of-fact ingenue to Catherine the self-appointed Gothic heroine”(Mudrick, 57).

• “incapable of discovery implications: she is credulous only because she believes exactly what people say, not because she draws false or sentimental inferences from what they do”(57).


• “presents their anti-types in the actual world, and organizes these into a domestic narrative that parallels or intersects, and at all points tends to invalidate, the Gothic narrative to which it […] corresponds” (39).




Documents

Jane Austen (1775-1817). Janeite Janeitism James Edward Austen- Leigh, A memoir of Jane Austen (1870)