Jane Austen’s Limited canvas due

to her limited exposure

Presented by:Saira ZulfiqarTahira Zulfiqar

TAHIRA ZULFIQAR

First Speaker

Introduction

the most widely read novelist in English literature.Her works include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published in 1818, and began writing Sanditon, but died before completing it.

JANE AUSTEN’S WORLD her materials are

extremely limited in themselves

Jane Austen herself referred to her work as

“Two inches of ivory.” In a letter to her niece,

Jane Austen wrote,

“Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.”

Those three or four families are the mind we knew intimately – the landed gentry, the upper classes, the lower classes, not only the industrial masses, but also the agricultural laborers.

NARROW SETTING

narrow physical setting. Netherfield, Longbourn, Hunsford

Parsonage, Meryton and Pemberley. She confines herself to the general territory that she herself has visited and is familiar with

Her settings are the drawing rooms, ball rooms, parks and gardens of a civilized leisure class.

NARROW

SETTINGJane Austen’s limited range comes from the nature of her novels, the situation of her time and her physical surroundings.

Austen’s novels are termed as “domestic novels”.

She belongs to the era when girls were not allowed:admission to universities to intermingle freely with men. So it is natural that her range is limited

Limited Range and Theme

Jane Austen’s limitations stemmed from her choice of themesJane Austen’s themes:

love, marriage and courtship All of her six novels deal with same theme of love and marriages. There are pretty girls waiting for eligible bachelors to be married to.

Another limitation :the feminization of her novels. Men do not appear except in the company of women. Women play a dominant role in her novels..

She never handles the (conventionally masculine) topic of politics.

Jane Austen believed in:

the organic unity of the society subordinate passions to the larger purpose of society.

She doesn’t express impulsive emotions directly.emotion and strong feelings are brought under the control of reason

There are other emotions, not of course wild and uncontrollable. Jane Austen successfully gives emotions such as envy, jealousy, cunning, hypocrisy, pride, vanity and conceit.

Austen avoids the sense of passions described by the romantics, Because of her classical views of order and control. Bronte condemns her:

“… the passions art completely unknown to her.”

Controlled emotions

NO TERRIBLE HAPPENING

Everything happens in a civilized manner. Even the elopement is settled down before it can cause agitation. The extreme severity in “Pride and Prejudice” is elopement of Lydia with Wickham.

“Wickham may elope with Lydia.”

o no instance of violence and bitterness.

o no frightful or pathetic scenes of death.

A famous critic, Charlotte Bronte believes that Austen has •no concern with the morals and •she is an author of the surface only:

“Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eye, mouth, hands and feet.”

A. H. Wright remarks that •there is very little religion in her novels.• Politics is not mentioned too. •There are no adventures found in her books,• no abstract ideas and •no discussion of spiritual or metaphysical issues.

There is no reference to nature itself.. It seems to be an irony of the history of English literature that when writers like Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge and others were discovering the beauties of nature / outer world, Austen confines her characters within the four walls of the drawing room or Hall. . Her heroines also famously never leave the family. Edward Fitzgerald states:

“She never goes out of the Parlour.”

JANE AUSTEN’S ART OF CHARACTERIZATION

PRESENTED BY:SAIRA ZULFIQAR

wonderful capacity for characterization.truthful and realistic presententation. sensitive to every small nuance of manner and behavior and any deviation from the standard. Wordsworth admitted that her novels were a copy of life, but the light of imagination was totally absent so they hardly interested him.

Narrow range of characters :

confined to the landed gentry in the country-side. Servants, laborers and yeomanry rarely appear even aristocracy is hardly touched upon.

Critics have complained : subject matters are very much the same in all her

novels the same sort of story repeated

No great variety in her characters.

despite such a narrow range. Not a single character has been repeated in any of her six books. Macaulay declares that her characters are commonplace, ‘Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.’

HER CHARACTERS ARE THREE-DIMENSIONAL: portray various human traits.  Collins doesn’t commit suicide when rejected by

Elizabeth, settles down with Charlotte. Darcy shows his unexpected trait after his

proposal is rejected. The psychological and realistic portrayal of her

characters is what makes them according to David Ceil, ‘Three-dimensional’.

Jane reveals her characters dramatically through their conversations, their actions, and their letters or gradually through a variety of point of view and this adds to their three-dimensional effects

Indirect Presentation The characters of Austen frequently gossip with one another about other characters. This makes the plot even more

gripping, realistic and touching.

And we learn of Elizabeth Bennet:through her speech and actions and the remarks of such people as Mr. Darcy, her father and Miss

Bingley. 

Collins and Lydia :revealed through their letters. the vulgarity and stupidity of Mrs. Bennet and the sarcastic humour of Mr. Bennet revealed in their dialogues.

the dialogue between Elizabeth and Darcy reveals:othe antagonism between the two othe intelligence of the both. All the information about Darcy is proved through Elizabeth’s point of view. Hence, the reader looks at Darcy through Elizabeth’s eye

REVEALED THROUGH COMPARISON AND CONTRAST Lady Catharine balances with Mrs. Bennet.

Wickham serves a contrast while Bingley a foil to Darcy. Elizabeth with Jane. Jane Austen’s major characters are intricate; however, there are some failings. Darcy is real and convincing, but appears only in scenes with Elizabeth. The minor characters are usually flat but they also develop when we meet them. Thus each of these wide range of characters are multi-dimensional with a mix of the good and bad qualities, exhibiting strong individual idiosyncrasies and traits, at the same time typical of universal human nature.  

In Jane Austen's works there is hardly any male sexual predation or assaults on female virtue -- a favorite device of novelists of the period.

The only possible case is the affair between Willoughby and the younger Eliza Williams in Sense and Sensibility

And finally, whatever the complex of motives involved in the Mrs. Clay-Mr. Elliot affair in Persuasion it can hardly be regarded as the seduction of a female by a sexually predatory male.

Off stage affairs

In Jane Austen's last incomplete fragment, Sanditon, it is true that Sir Edward Denham likes to think of himself as a predatory male, but he is described as such an ineffectual fool that it is difficult to believe that he would have accomplished any of his designs against the beauteous Clara Brereton, if Jane Austen had finished the work.

Note that all these affairs take place entirely "off-stage" (except for a few encounters of flirtation between Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford, long before she runs away with him), and are not described in any detail.

No one dies "on stage" in one of her novels, and almost no one dies at all during the main period of the events of each novel (except for Lord Ravenshaw's grandmother in Mansfield Park and Mrs. Churchill in Emma.The illnesses that occur Jane's in Pride and Prejudice and Louisa Musgrove's in Persuasion are not milked for much pathos

(Marianne's in Sense and Sensibility is a partial exception, but Marianne is condemned for bringing her illness on herself). .

The only person who actually faints in one of Jane Austen's novels is the silly Harriet Smith of Emma .On three occasions, Fanny Price of Mansfield Park imagines to herself that she is on the point of fainting, and once Elinor Dashwood thinks that her sister Marianne is about to faint, but neither Fanny or Marianne ever does.

In her novels there is no violence (the closest approaches are the duel between Colonel Brandon and Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, in which neither is hurt, and the indefinite menacements of the Gypsies towards Harriet Smith and Miss Bickerton in Emma, and no crime (except for the poultry-thief at the end of Emma.

She never uses certain hackneyed plot devices than common, such as mistaken identities, doubtful and/or aristocratic parentage, and hidden-then-rediscovered wills. In Emma, Harriet Smith's parentage is actually not very mysterious (as Mr. Knightley had suspected all along).

Very few English writers ever had so narrow a field of work as Jane Austen. her works have an exquisite perfection that is lacking in most of our writers of fiction. within her own field she is unequalled. Her characters are absolutely true to life, and all her work has the perfection of a miniature painting. “Were she alive today, Jane Austen would be astonished to see that she is now more popular than she was during and after the years she wrote her great novels.” (Carrigan)