Jane Austen For Dummies (7 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Visiting Jane Austen's Georgian World
In This Chapter
Recognizing Austen's Georgian world
Examining the political climate of Austen's time
Checking out the class system
Following the creation of the novel
T
his chapter places Jane Austen in her historical context â Georgian England; her political context â Tory; and her social and economic context â the gentry. In so doing, the explanation also talks about the Georgian class system and the ongoing, real-world events that Austen expected her contemporary readers to understand immediately: Napoleon and the French Revolution, as well as the slavery issue. For Austen fans, perhaps the most important event in her lifetime was the development of the novel as a literary form or genre. Get those reading glasses on and prepare to immerse yourself in the current events of Jane Austen's day. Don't worry; there won't be a quiz at the end!
Because of the charm of her plots, their setting in merry old England, and the Victorian-styled costumes and 1850 setting used in the first film adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice
in 1940 (for more on screen adaptations of Austen's novels, see Chapter 15), you may view Austen as Victorian. (This is not your fault: The 1940 film misled you!) But Jane Austen lived between 1775 and 1817, and her novels came out between 1813 and 1818, the year after her death, which places her and her work in the Georgian period of English history. Figure 2-1 gives you a picture of Jane Austen's England.
Figure 2-1: |  |
For over 100 years (from 1714 to 1830) the four kings of England were all named George, suggesting their parents had little imagination. So this was known as â guess what? â the Georgian period in British history. This period lasted until 1837 when Victoria became queen, which then began the Victorian era. (There was a brief stint with a king named William from 1830 to 1837, but the period was still named the Georgian period. Poor guy didn't even get a period named after him: the Willie period!) In Austen's lifetime, England's monarchs were George III â the king who lost the American colonies â and his eldest son, George, the Prince of Wales, who reigned as the father's regent or substitute when George III was severely ill.
Besides living when the two Georges, king and regent, reigned, Austen's work and personality display the satire, candor, and openness of the Georgian mindset â the prim and prissy days of the Victorian era came just two decades after Austen's death in 1817.
Like Fanny Burney, an earlier Georgian novelist whom Jane Austen admired, Austen writes about young women entering society and the marriage mart. (For more on ladies' “coming out,” see Chapter 6, and for more on Burney's influence on Austen, head to Chapter 4.) Austen's novels also reflect the humorous satire and irony of Henry Fielding, whose contributions to the new novel form or
genre
are discussed in Chapter 4.
Satire
is a type of literature that aims to correct folly, vice, and stupidity, frequently through ridicule.
George III was deemed to be mad: He was addressing trees as other European monarchs and displaying other demented behaviors. Today, scientists believe he suffered not from a mental illness, but from a metabolic one:
porphyria
, a rare disease caused by a malfunction in the production of hemoglobin. So it turns out that George III was neither crazy nor a tree lover.
George's condition caused chemicals called porphyrins to accumulate in the brain and damage it, along with the liver and skin (it itches), as well as the digestive and nervous systems. Symptoms, such as vomiting and various psychological disorders that mimic madness, can be triggered by the administration of certain drugs, such as the arsenic that was once given to George III to treat his mysterious illness. But what did the medical profession know in 1811? Frequently, doctors did more harm than good. So with his father running around in the park at Windsor Castle talking to trees, the Prince of Wales became the prince regent. In 1820 when George III died, the prince regent became King George IV.
To find out more about George III's illness and the Regency in a highly entertaining way, rent the 1994 film,
The Madness of King George,
directed by the great British showman Nicholas Hytner, and written by Alan Bennett, who also wrote the 1991 play,
The Madness of George III,
on which his film script is based.
Austen uses satire, a keynote of Georgian literature, a lot. For example, she ridiculed the patronage system that gave church ministries to sometimes undeserving, unsympathetic men through
Pride and Prejudice
's stupid, lumbering Mr. Collins. He's full of himself and usually behaves like a pompous fool â unless he behaves like an agent of punishment disguised as a Christian clergyman. Austen shows Collins's lack of ministerial qualities just as Fielding showed Thwackum's in
Tom Jones.
(Thwackum, a clergyman, is excessively prone to corporal punishment: He likes to smack 'em â thus, Thwackum!) In Austen's novel, Collins's advice to Mr. Bennet that he “throw-off [his] unworthy child from [his] affection forever” (referring to Lydia, who has lived out-of-wedlock with Wickham), “leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offence” (meaning, cast her off or even let her become a whore!), and “never . . . admit [her] into [his] sight” again, leads Mr. Bennet to remark sarcastically, “âThat is his notion of Christian forgiveness!'” (PP 3:6, 15).
In her personal life, Jane Austen was no prude. But neither was she indecent in speech â which, let's face it, is all too common today â nor in behavior. She was simply a realist, and with her Georgian openness, she acknowledged life as it was. For example, she reported to her sister that she was “disgusted” by the outright “indelicacies,” such as those she saw in the first 20 pages of a French novel,
Alphonsine
(Letter, January 7, 1807). In this book a 15-year-old male character refuses to consummate his marriage to the girl he has married and then discovers that his wife has been sleeping with her 18-year-old page. But Austen wasn't too prim to include in
Mansfield Park
a vulgar joke about sodomy to emphasize the less-than-ladylike character of its teller Mary Crawford. Replying to a query about her orphaned youth, Mary explains her “acquaintance with the navy” through living with her uncle, Admiral Crawford:
Certainly, my home at my uncle's brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of
Rears,
and
Vices,
I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat. (MP 1:6)
Austen has Mary make the remark as an example of the bad “education” that hero and heroine Edmund and Fanny ascribe to her upbringing â an upbringing that particularly pains the highly moral clergyman-to-be Edmund, who is in love with this “remarkably pretty” and lively young woman (MP 1:4).
A Victorian prude would never include a joke like that, but with two brothers serving as officers in the Royal Navy, Austen undoubtedly heard of the sodomy prevalent among a ship full of men sailing around the oceans for months at a time. Having read and reread Fielding's
Tom Jones
(1749), a bawdy novel with sex treated as a hearty roll in the hay without any disgust, Austen writes the sodomy joke to tell her readers something about Mary. (For more info on Fielding, see Chapter 4.) Likewise, Austen's novels also include other taboo topics of her day:
Seduced young women
Out-of-wedlock pregnancies
Couples who live together out of wedlock
Adulterers
Austen is a social realist, like Fielding, and she presents the temper, follies, and problems of the times in her fiction.