Paper 6 - Prose Flashcards

Emma, RC, Bleak House, Oroonoko, Watt, Anti-Watt, etc.!!!

Emma - Reading and Writing

‘Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. […] She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience’ [K on E]

‘You […] who an see into everybody’s heart; but nobody else’ [Harriet to Emma]

Emma constructs other people’s stories but doesn’t read enough, so they end up failing [Harriet, etc.]

SECONDARY - Old Books

William Hazlitt

Old + good books ‘bind together the different scattered visions of our personal identity’

Emma - Marriage

‘I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry. Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! but I have never been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall’

Emma’s confidence and precociousness - figuring herself as outside gender norms, just as she is outside marriage and social convention

Emma - Interest

‘Human nature is so well-disposed towards those who are in interesting situations that a young person who either marries or dies is sure of being kindly spoken of’

Underscoring importance of stories, moral character or happy/sad endings are irrelevant, whole purpose is titillation

Emma - Etiquette and Compliments

‘my playing is just good enough to be praised, but Jane Fairfax’s is far beyond it’

Social convention dictates how some things are left said or unsaid - compliments take on opposite function, harming instead of uplifting

Emma - Miss Bates

‘a woman that one may, one must laugh at, but that one would not wish to slight’ [FC]

‘I shall be sure to say three dull things as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I? (looking round with the most good-humoured dependence on everybody’s assent)’

‘you will be limited as to number - only three at once’

Miss Bates is paradoxically socially inept and deeply socially integrated - arguably selfish and narcissistic conversationally - example of how social conventions aid people, and how Emma is in fact very limited socially

Emma - Mrs. Elton

‘as elegant as lace and pearls could make her’

‘I am not one of those who have witty things at everyone’s service. I do not pretend to be a wit’

‘“No I fancy not” replied Mrs. Elton with a self-satisfied smile […] Emma was silenced’ [on Surrey being ‘garden of England’]

‘Very little white satin, very few lace veils, a most pitiful business!’

Mrs. Elton is embodiment of precocious nouveau riche - insists on her correctness of taste and knowledge - reflection of Austen’s provincial conservatism, no ““class””

SECONDARY - Emma’s Creativity

Eugene Goodheart

‘Her “imaginism” in its wilful reality-bending predilection is the antithesis of the Romantic sympathetic imagination’

‘In her manipulativeness she does Austen’s work and generates the plot’

‘the novelist within the novel’

SECONDARY - Realism

Ian Watt

‘Formal Realism’ = communicating sense of truth more so than any truth through form

‘the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’

‘Modern realism […] begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses’ [Cartesian]

SECONDARY - Novel’s Context

Ian Watt

‘The novel is thus the logical vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel’

SECONDARY - Background

Ian Watt

‘the characters of the novel can only be individualised if they are set in a background of a particular place and time’

Robinson Crusoe - Date and Context

1719

Celebration of Glorious Revolution, Defoe was friends with William (III) of Orange

Subverting many tropes of adventure and travel writing [popular during Age of Empire]

Emma - Date and Context

1815

Later Austen - more interior and willing to write a protagonist ‘whom no one but myself will much like’

Pits various economic lives against one another in rural context - gentry, nouveau riche, etc.

Crusoe - The Sea

‘every wave would have swallowed us up’

‘apprehensions of being swallow’d up by the sea’

‘buried me at once 20 or 30 foot deep in its own body’

Sea is amorphous and uncontrollable force - also fears about being consumed [cannibals too], gets sublimated into consumption of other things on the island [capitalist??]

Crusoe - Freedom

‘I’ll shoot you thro’ the head, for I am resolved to have my liberty’

‘I could not write or eat, or do several things, with so much pleasure without a table’

Balance between positive and negative freedoms is important - freedom styled as inherently individual

Crusoe - Rationality

‘by making the most rational judgement of all things, every man may be, in time, master of every mechanic art’

‘we never see the true state of our condition, till it is illustrated to us by its contraries’

Rationality is the highest virtue, alongside religiosity - rationality and logic used as motivating factor for construction

Crusoe - Materiality

‘two or three razors, and one pair of large scissors, with some ten or a dozen of good knives and forks’

‘I took all possible caution to preserve my Effects’

‘not to trouble you with particulars’

After Friday kills incoming cannibals, they are ordered in a structured list ‘2 Kill’d at the next shot / 2 Kill’d by Friday in the boat’

Distributed agency, New Materialism - pre-occupation with items and objects, persists onto the island and used as evidence of civilisation - merging of people and object epitomised in structured death list

SECONDARY - Crusoe + Fiction

Kevin Seidel

‘Defoe’s fictional narratives mean more than what the narrators say’

Narrators do ‘moral meiosis in their recollections, a habitual understatement that leaves the readers with an excess of moral significance’

Bleak House - Date and Context

1852-3

Responding to Chancery law [dealt with private property] - famously difficult and long-winded unproductive processes [Jarn/Jarn based off real law cases]

Many elements spin Gothic and make it urban

Disease and Germ theory beginning to take hold, no longer miasmas one could avoid through social class

Bleak House - Societal Decay

‘homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native ignorance’

‘There is not a drop of Tom’s infected blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere […] There is not an atom of Tom’s slime […] not an ignorance […] but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high’

‘Dead, your majesty […] and dying thus around us everyday’

Jo and TAA both represent decay at heart of London, Jo is victim and TAA is physicalised victim-as-perpetrator - Jo often explicitly referenced as microcosm of w/c victims

Bleak House - Satire

‘Lord Doodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in […] there has been no Government. […] England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking’

‘My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout’

‘The agitation and indignation from which I have recently suffered […] I am subject to - gout’

Government is absent but country functions fine, satire on superfluous politicians - gout used as satire of importance of patrilineage, valued and valorised despite being big illness

Bleak House - City

‘Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot as big as full-grown snowflake’

‘its smoky house-tops lose their grossness, in the pale effulgence; the noises from the streets are fewer and softened’

‘as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating’

London is grim and inhospitable place, only seeing its beauty when taken above it - sound and life unites the city, and is a virtue

SECONDARY - London

Rosemarie Bodenheimer

‘Dickens famously writes a hellscape of filth, disease, drunkenness, and death’

Modest Proposal - Date and Context

1729

Potentially satirising a lot of things: Irish discrimination, anomie, mercantilism

Could be satirising outlandish schemes [South Sea Bubble = Burst 1720]

Modest Proposal - Comedic Phrasing

‘a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth’

It would ‘encrease the care and tenderness of mothers towards their children’

Disguising horror through positive language, satire is integral to the argument and its versatility

Modest Proposal - Cannibalism

‘a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled’

It is ‘very proper for landlords who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title for the children’

Gleeful detailing with efficiency as top priority - cannibalism both literal and metaphorical through economic oppression

SECONDARY - Modest Proposal

Robert Phiddian

‘The essay is grotesque without being carnivalesque, and the feeling it induces in readers is one of unease rather than pleasure or release’

‘The text does not make a serious attempt to lull us into a false sense of security. Rather, it attacks us; everywhere it makes us vulnerable’