Supporting quotations
for Lecture #3 on Austen
►The following quotations are from Brian
Southam’s Jane Austen and the Navy
(2000). Southam does not have a
“thinking against” thesis. In fact, his
discussion of Harville is quite sympathetic with Austen’s aims:
“There follows a
remarkable passage, central to Persuasion’s
naval purpose, the description of
Harville’s ‘fitting-up’ of the rooms, his practical skills and ingenuity in
transforming these indifferent lodgings into a place of comfort, convenience and
beauty, a treasure-trove mingling the
homely and the exotic. The scene carries
a sense of calm and fulfillment. It
points to a life // which as Barbara Hardy remarks) ‘has nothing to do with
great estates or rich possessions’ and everything to do with Harville’s
‘profession, the fruit of its labours, the effect of its influence on his
habits’” (286-7).
But Southam provides information
that would allow a reader to develop a “thinking against” thesis. See details that follow.
“It has to be said,
however, that Jane Austen skates over a good deal [in Mrs. Croft’s account of life at
sea]. The gap here between fiction and
fact is wide. Even for the wives of
Admirals and Captains, there was far more to be endured. A sound witness to this is Betsey Wynne. Before their marriage in January 1797, Thomas Fremantle warned Betsey that she had
not seriously considered what life at sea with a frigate Captain would entail,
details she recorded in her diary: ‘to what I engage myself, to how much misery
I shall be espoused, how could I live on board?
What shall I do if the ship comes to action? etc.’ But she felt that she had properly thought of
‘all this’ and was confident of enduring ‘the inconveniences which must of
course occur from being at sea’. Over a period of seven-and-a-half months,
traveling from Naples to Portsmouth . .
. , with stays of several weeks at Elba and Gibralter, and an attack on
Tenerife, Betsey was to face ‘misery’ and ‘inconveniences’ she had not
anticipated . . . “ (278).
“Even more distressing [than the
noise of the guns, the groaning of the wounded, and her own husband’s injury],
were the ship’s punishments. Fremantle
was a strict disciplinarian and drunkenness, a habitual offense, resulted in
‘Much flogging’ of the crew. In her
cabin, Betsey ‘could distinctly hear the poor wretches cry out for mercy’,
something which ‘broke my heart’” (279).
“ . . . On this same day, other sailors were also
flogged on board the Inconstant. Once
again, ‘in the cabin’ Betsey heard ‘all that is going on quite distinctly’,
leaving her ‘miserable all the morning’.
For all that she enjoyed her honeymoon at sea in the privacy of her own
‘comfortable cabin’, the sail-maker’s wife in attendance, and that she could
pass her days with her harpsichord, her books and her watercolors, and make
music with other passengers, the grim realities of naval life, its cruelty,
bloodshed and horror, could not be blocked out” (279).
“How much Jane Austen knew of and
how much she assumed her readers to know is uncertain. But she must have been aware that for the
ordinary sailor life in these ships was often ‘a hell upon earth’—the words of
the naval historian William Laird Clowes, writing in 1900. To quote an account from 1812, it was no
better than ‘dwelling in a prison, within whose narrow limits were to be found
Constraint, Disease, Ignorance, Insensibility, Tyranny, Sameness, Dirt and Foul
Air: and in addition, the dangers of Ocean, Fire, Mutiny, Pestilence, Battle
and Exile’. Besides the injuries and
mutilations of war, these were the ‘common afflictions’ of shipboard life:
‘hideous ulcers (a general complaint) arising from bruises received in the
course of their hard work, and exasperated by the damp in which they lie, and
by the foul water they are obliged to drink’; ‘ruptures, an ordinary //
consequence to young men, from pulling ropes’; ‘some with ulcerated lungs’;
‘others suffering from lacerations, dislocations and fractures from falls . .
.’’” (279-80).
Southam’s quotations are from “Edward Mangin’s Journal” in Five Naval Journals. The journals were
written between 1789 and 1817 but were edited and published in 1951.
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►The following quotations are from Edward
Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993,
4), either from “Narrative and Social Space” (62-80) or from “Jane Austen and
Empire” (80-97). (Emphases added.)
“Nearly everywhere in
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions
to the facts of empire, but perhaps nowhere with more regularity and
frequency than in the British novel. Taken together, these allusions
constitute what I have called a structure of attitude and reference.
In Mansfield Park, which within Jane
Austen’s work carefully defines the moral and social values informing her
other novels, references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas possessions are
threaded through; they give him his wealth, occasion his absences, fix his
social status at home and abroad, and make possible his values, to which Fanny
Price (and Austen herself) finally subscribes" (62).
:
“I am not trying to
say that the novel—or the culture in the broad sense—‘caused’ imperialism, but
that the novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and
imperialism are unthinkable without each other. Of all the major literary
forms, the novel is the most recent, its emergence the most datable, its
occurrence the most Western, its normative pattern of social authority the most
structured; imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree
that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing
with the other” (70-1).
“By the 1840s the English novel had
achieved eminence as the aesthetic
form and as a major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society . . .
. Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Mrs.
Gaskell shaped the idea of England in such a way as to give it identity,
presence, ways of reusable articulation.
And part of such an idea was the relationship between ‘home’ and
‘abroad.’ Thus England was surveyed, evaluated, made known, whereas ‘abroad’
was only referred to or shown briefly without the kind of presence or immediacy
lavished on London, the countryside, or northern industrial centers such as
Manchester or Birmingham” (71-2).
At the beginning of his section on
Austen, Edward Said quotes a writer (V.G. Kiernan) who says that “’empires
must have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into’” (80).
The idea expressed here is one of Said's presuppositions and is central to his thesis. He argues that the early novel--from Defoe to Austen--made empire thinkable.
“Perhaps then Austen,
and indeed, pre-imperialist novels generally, will appear to be more implicated
in the rationale for imperialist expansion than at first sight they have been”
(84).
Referring to the work of historians
(in particular to Eric Williams in Capitalism
and Slavery [1961]), Said says, “The question of interpretation, indeed of
writing itself, is tied to the question of interests, which we have seen are at
work in aesthetic as well as historical writing, then and now. kWE must not say
that since Mansfield Park is a novel,
its affiliations with a sordid history are irrelevant or transcended, not only
because it is irresponsible to do so, but because we know too much to say so in
good faith. Having read Mansfield Park as part of the structure of an expanding
imperialist venture, one cannot simply restore it to the canon of ‘great
literary masterpieces’—to which it certainly belongs—and leave it at that. Rather, I think, the novel steadily, if
unobtrusively, opens up a broad expanse of domestic imperialist culture without
which Britain’s subsequent acquisition of territory would not have been
possible” (95).
“Yet only in the
global perspective implied by Jane Austen and her characters can the
novel’s quite astonishing general position be made clear” (95).
“There is paradox
here in reading Jane Austen which I have been // impressed by but can in no way
resolve. All the evidence says that even
the most routine aspects of holding slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation were
cruel stuff. And everything we know
about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery. Fanny Price reminds her cousin that after
asking Sir Thomas about the slave trade, ‘There was such a dead silence’ as to
suggest that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply
is no common language for both. That is
true. But what stimulates the
extraordinary discrepancy into life is the rise, decline, and fall of the