Austen's context

Austens context

Austens context

• Pride and Prejudice was first published in 1813.

• Historical context: Georgian era (the period from 1811- 1820 is also known as Regency period).

• Austen’s novels do not allude much to the great political and social events of the age, such as the fairly recent revolutions in America and France, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, the colonisation of Australia (!) etc

• They reflect the world in which she inhabited and are about the middle and upper classes and focus largely on the social interactions within this group.

• There was an emphasis on social class and position, but the rise of the middle class and international events allowed for some social mobility and changes in the way people viewed these class divisions.

Personal can be political!

• Edmund Burke was a counter-revolutionary who defended the class system and the aristocracy and put family life at the centre of his political agenda. By contrast, Mary Wollstonecraft was inspired by the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the new ways of thinking brought about by the Enlightenment and defended these ideals in her essay The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguing for liberty, equality and citizenship for women.

  • We see these two perspectives subtly represented within the world of Pride and Prejudice.

• We also see Austen use the marriage plot, characterisation and narrative techniques to gently criticise some of the excesses of class snobbery – the type of snobbery and entitlement that was arguably one of the main causes of the French Revolution.

  • Caroline Bingley and Mr Collins are embodiments Austen’s critique and mockery of class snobbery.

Class system

If you had land, you were rich. This was because you could tax those who live and farm on your land, therefore have a large source of income.

Class rank vs meritocracy

• Jane Austen expected her readers to be sensitive to questions of social status, but she remorselessly satirised characters who were obsessed with fine social distinctions.

• There is certainly no association in her novels between high rank and any great virtue or ability. Aristocrats are at best buffoons, at worst paragons of arrogance.

  • The most famous case is probably Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, a woman with whom no one before Elizabeth Bennet has ever disagreed

• Meritocracy refers to a system where political or social power goes to individuals based on achievement, talent or ‘merit’.

• In Austen’s novels, we start to see the beginnings of this shift.

• Austen analysed the pretensions of all who thought themselves superior to others. In Pride and Prejudice the Bingley sisters think themselves better than the Bennets, but they like to forget that ‘their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade’ (ch. 4).

• Sir William Lucas has a title, but has made his fortune ‘in trade’ and is ridiculous in a nouveau riche way for calling his house Lucas Lodge. Austen was alive to all the small ways in which members of her own rural society tried to assert their status and distinguish themselves from those below them. It is the main subject matter of her satire.

What does it mean to be a “gentleman”?

But what were you if you were not an aristocrat? The key word in Austen’s world is ‘gentleman’. When Lady Catherine de Bourgh tells Elizabeth Bennet that she is too lowly to marry Mr Darcy, her retort is angrily authoritative. 'He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal’ (ch. 56). ‘Gentleman’ is the most vexed of terms. Mr Bingley’s indolent and impolite brother-in-law Mr Hurst, we are told, ‘merely looked the gentleman’ (ch. 3).

In 18th-century literature, the definition of a gentleman had sometimes seemed to be a man who did not work for his living. However, this is clearly not the case in Austen’s fiction. Elizabeth Bennet’s uncle Mr Gardiner is in trade in an unfashionable part of London, yet he is evidently a gentleman. Indeed, he is befriended by the discriminating Mr Darcy.

Those who thought themselves superior

• Austen analysed the pretensions of all who thought themselves superior to others. In Pride and Prejudice the Bingley sisters think themselves better than the Bennets, but they like to forget that ‘their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade’ (ch. 4).

• Sir William Lucas has a title, but has made his fortune ‘in trade’ and is ridiculous in a nouveau riche way for calling his house Lucas Lodge. Austen was alive to all the small ways in which members of her own rural society tried to assert their status and distinguish themselves from those below them. It is the main subject matter of her satire.

Primogeniture

• The church was the most reliable, but not usually suited to those who were ambitious. With the right patronage, it could open doors.

• The law was next – attractive to those with brains because the financial rewards were greater.

• Medicine did not have the status it does today. An aristocratic younger son would not have been likely to train as a doctor.

• Banking and commerce were seen as a bit suspect because money from ‘trade’ lacked the prestige of money from landed wealth, but gentlemen did enter the financial sector.

• The most glamorous options, especially during the Napoleonic Wars, were the navy and army.

For upper and middle class women - marriage or a bleak future

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Conduct books

• Conduct books were written by men for young women, instructing them how to behave.

• Mr Collins reads one such conduct book, Fordyce’s Sermons to the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice.

• Fordyce instructs women to be dutiful, submissive and modest in dress and behaviour: ‘Meekness, cultivated on Christian principles, is the proper consummation, and highest finishing, of female excellence’. Women should also be sensitive: the 'better kind of woman' will ‘melt into tears at the sight or hearing of distress’. At the same time, they should appear as elegant and attractive as possible, since beauty is a gift from God (p. 12). This emphasis on being attractive is at odds with Fordyce’s belief in the importance of modesty: there is a contradiction in his depiction of the ideal woman.

• Example of quotations from the sermons:

  Nature appears to have formed the (mental) faculties of your sex, for the most part, with less vigour than those of ours, observing the same distinction here as in the more delicate frames of your bodies.

Back to link between the personal and the political

• The French Revolution sent shockwaves through the English upper classes. There were fears that a similar revolution could occur in England.

• Reinforcing what they saw as the ‘natural’ social order, such as the class system and traditional family life was seen by conservative, anti-revolutionary thinkers like Edmund Burke as the best way to suppress revolutionary thought and action. Conduct books, like Fordyce’s Sermons were a way of reinforcing traditional attitudes about the roles and expected behaviour of women.

• In A Vindication of the Rights of Women(1792), Mary Wollstonecraft strongly criticises Sermons for Young Women. She objects to Fordyce’s suggestion that the highest reward for female virtue is male attention; she also objects to his belief that if a husband becomes indifferent, it is because his wife is insufficiently submissive and forgiving.

• Mary Wollstonecraft had been inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and argued for freedom, equality and citizenship for women.

• Austen would have been aware of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, but also of the bloody ‘Reign of Terror’ that followed the French Revolution.

• Austen was no radical like Mary Wollstonecraft, and generally reinforced the status quo in relation to class and gender expectations, but arguably, Elizabeth is a kind of Wollstonecraftian heroine – a thinking, rational woman who has a mind of her own. At the same time, Austen is very harsh about Lydia for her ‘impropriety’.

Would a love story like that of Elizabeth and Darcy really have been possible during the Georgian era

• Vivien Jones argues that the pleasure we derive from the union of Elizabeth and Darcy is a ‘dangerously seductive’ romance plot, because it can make us believe that a great transformation has taken place, when, in reality, the status quo for women, denied agency by the legal and social structures of the time, has remained the same.

• Martin Amis argues, ‘Funnily enough, our hopes for Elizabeth and Darcy are egalitarian, and not avaricious, in tendency. We want love to bring about a redistribution of wealth. To inspire such a man to disinterested desire, non profit-making desire: this is the romantic hinge.’

Would a love story like Pride and Prejudice really have been possible during this time? Would Elizabeth really have turned Darcy down the first time if it meant financial security for her? Or is it simply a romantic fairytale?