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Hyssop2016
JaneAustenPowerPoint2019.pptxJane Austen:
Contexts
“Rank and Social Status”
Romantic-Era England was rigidly structured by social class. Here is a list of some of the elements of the hierarchy.
Monarch
Aristocracy Archbishop and Bishops
Gentry (untitled, usually relatives of aristocrats)
Rich Merchants
Lawyers and high-level professionals Respectable Clergy
“Middling” classes (merchants’ employees, clerks, skilled craftsmen, shop owners, etc.)
Working classes (city and country laborers)
“Austen is much more interested in the types of people who lived more precariously on the margins of the gentry proper, but whose connections, education, or role in the community gave them the right, like her father the rector, ‘to mix in the best society of the neighborhood’” (Lynch, 214).
“Primogeniture, which sought to preserve estates by passing them down through the male line rather than dividing them equally between several children, is responsible for the precarious circumstances of many of Austen’s characters. Though the social respectability of younger sons like Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey [. . .] is assured by their family connections, financially they are much less secure since they have to make their own living” (Lynch 216).
“Austen and the Navy”
Austen’s brothers, Francis and Charles, had lifelong careers in the Navy, rising eventually—after Austen’s death—to become Admirals, and between them they were involved in all the major naval theatres of war” (Lynch 223).
Frank and Charles “achieved promotion and honours through their involvement in specific battles or the capture of enemy ships, the kind of professional reward for merit romantically represented in the heroic career of Captain Wentworth in Persuasion” (Lynch 224).
Army Officers: A Lesser Good
The only thoroughly “good” army officer who appears in Austen’s novels is the heroic Colonel Brandon, the eventual husband of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. The seducer Lieutenant Wickham in Pride and Prejudice is downright wicked, and General Tilney in Northanger Abbey is a grasping and merciless tyrant to his family.
The Military and Scandal
In the late 1770s, due to the American Revolution, the English government feared war with France. Militias including the nobility were gathered in camps in England, and the notorious sex scandals that arose from their affairs with women of social rank changed public perceptions: “The militia’s reputation, after these scandals, would be more about the risks it posed to English ladies’ virtue than the threat it made to Frenchmen’s lives” (Fulford 156).
In the 1790s, because of the war with France, the militia increased enormously: “For the inhabitants of English villages--especially in the Southeast—the militia was, if not overpaid, definitely oversexed and over here” (Fulford 156).
Fulford points out that from the beginning in Pride and Prejudice, “Austen’s depiction of the officers is colored by their contemporary reputation for sexual dalliance” (164). Catherine and Lydia Bennet, and their mother, all women without much sense, talk of the glamour and allure of a man in military uniform.
Fulford concludes of Pride and Prejudice: “Austen effectively demonstrates the dangers of an aristocratic military culture of masquerade and display; in Pride and Prejudice, as in Mansfield Park (1814), dressing up and cross-dressing are signs of moral danger when the line between reality and theatre is blurred” (172-73).
Works Cited
Fulford, Tim. “Sighing for a Soldier: Jane Austen and Military Pride and Prejudice.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 57(2) (2002): 153-178. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2002.57.2.153. Accessed February 10, 2019.
Lynch, Deidre S., ed. Persuasion. By Jane Austen. Ed. James Kinley. Notes by Vivien Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
