Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney
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Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783086627 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2017 |
| Series: | Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| File size: | 572 KB |
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Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney
By Jessica A. Volz
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2017 Jessica A. VolzAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-662-7
CHAPTER 1
JANE AUSTEN'S AESTHETIC VOCABULARY OF CHARACTER
Portraiture and architecture are often interconnected surfaces of the self in Jane Austen's use of visuality. Both have the power to convey the way in which characters' shifting perspectives reorient their prejudices and lead to marriages based on compatible views and values. Drawing upon David Lodge's theory that the 'vocabulary of discrimination' allows for a categorical means of communication through a language within language, my discussion moves from two- to three-dimensional forms of aesthetic representation in her fiction. The analysis focuses on Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), which best demonstrate the novelist's manipulation of the gaze and correlatives of character.
After contextualizing Austen's visual technique, the chapter first examines her novels' reliance on the physiognomic qualities of the likeness to compel the viewer, and thus the reader, to picture the subject differently. Unlike Ann Radcliffe, whose references to portraits show the permanence of female subjection, Austen uses the 'likeness' as a positive force for change in her plots: visible and metaphorical portraits improve characters' insights into themselves and others through perceptual substitution, or the replacement of one image with another, that inspires a change of heart. Like Radcliffe, however, Austen discriminates between the male and female experience of viewing and being viewed. While the painted male gaze has the power to 'arrest' the heroine's eyes and heart, the heroine cannot control a male viewer's way of looking and feeling. The reader observes that in contrast to Austen's fictional women, who require visible portraits to alter their perceptions of men, her heroes must be able to 'picture' a woman's character in their mind's eye.
Society's absorption of the Lavaterian habit of looking and René Descartes's philosophy that 'the eyes of the body reify the eye of the mind' anticipate the connection between portraiture and architecture, which comprises the second half of my analysis. Like portraiture, architecture provides characters with an external means of identification. By imbuing the physiognomies of structures and their surroundings with comparisons to the Aristotelian golden mean, Austen reasserts the early eighteenth century's investment in looks that speak. Rather than focusing on the novelist's ambivalence towards picturesque improvements and distaste for Reptonian 'destruction', as Alistair Duckworth, Beatrice Battaglia and Diego Saglia have done, my discussion shows that Austen uses 'place' to convince her readers of the heroine's changing affections. The novelist's application of physiognomic features to architecture conveys the way in which her heroines' shifts in vision guide them to newfound perspectives of their simultaneous attachment to a place and its owner.
Several months after Austen's death in 1817, the British Critic praised her technique of characterization, which allowed conversations rather than appearances to produce universal recognition:
Our authoress gives no definitions; but she makes her dramatis personae talk; and the sentiments which she places in their mouths, the little phrases which she makes them use, strike so familiarly upon our memory as soon as we hear them repeated, that we instantly recognize among some of our acquaintance, the sort of persons she intends to signify, as accurately as if we had heard their voices [...] She sees every thing just as it is; even her want of imagination (which is the principal defect of her writings) is useful to her in this respect, that it enables her to keep clear of all exaggeration, in a mode of writing where the least exaggeration would be fatal.
For the anonymous reviewer, Austen's characters were more verbal than visual; their expressions of sentiment were spoken rather than seen. Even if the novelist was, as he suggests, attuned to the actual visual dynamics within her surroundings, she resisted detailing appearances because the 'least exaggeration would be fatal'. This disjointedness between what Austen saw and what she was at liberty to 'define' points to that which the reviewer's impression underestimates: the novelist's reliance on visuality as an indirect, coded method of communicating more elaborate messages. Even if conversation is 'not simply a vehicle for abstract content', as Marilyn Butler rightly asserts, verbal dialogue is not the only form of the expression of character in Austen's plots. Instead, her use of physiognomic codes conveys nuances that reported speech can repress. As Bharat Tandon contends, the omissions between the sayable and the unsayable animate much of her narratives. For him, Austen's transition to writing for publication adjusted her perspective, challenging the reader to find a voice within the novel. Through her use of an aesthetic vocabulary, the novelist communicates that which neither the counterbalances within words nor pictures could represent.
While Austen's ability to make her 'dramatis personae talk' and her understanding of companionate marriage have persistently fascinated readers and scholars, her visual vocabulary of showing emotional change remains underexplored. Until the publication of Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), scholars tended to assume that Austen and her novels were sheltered from the political tumult of the 1790s. Most critics accepted Reginald Farrer's 1917 theory that Austen was concerned 'only with the universal, and not with the particular'. Butler's conclusion that the novelist's marriage plots reinforce the existing social order identified her as an implicitly conservative author. Subsequent critics, including Claudia Johnson and Nancy Armstrong, have challenged this position, arguing that Austen radically exposes women's unequal power in the marriage market and creates quietly subversive narratives in which exploitative male behaviour is exposed and checked.Austen's use of visuality to create attachments based on similar views and values indicates that, while conforming outwardly to the societal pressures on women to marry for economic security, her heroines pursue happiness more fervently than wealth.
An insightful beginning for theorizing the patterns that are concealed within Austen's narrative universe is offered in M. M. Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination (1975). As Katherine Green summarizes his theory of dialogism, individuation of characters is produced through the conflict between two categories of language: the language of patriarchal authority, which I redefine as Austen's vocabulary of aesthetic discrimination, and the language of internal persuasion, or subjectivity. This premise has important implications for a study of the novelist's use of visuality. In The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (2003), Joe Bray explores the theories surrounding eighteenth-century modes of communication. His reading of Bakhtin's 'Discourse in the Novel' highlights the need for the author's consciousness to choose a language that was culturally understood. Drawing on John Mullan's and Janet Todd's works, Bray offers a survey of the relationship between heightened sensibility and silent speech, arguing that expression in late eighteenth-century epistolary novels tore writers between 'the fevered passion of the experiencing self and the calm reason of the narrating self'. Mullan, referring to Richardson's novels, finds that the most 'natural' form of expression does not require words in conveying truthful feelings. Todd offers a similar argument, contending that Austen's heroines convey their virtue and authentic emotions through their 'meaningful bodies'. Though Bray convincingly highlights the overarching preference for non-verbal languages in late eighteenth-century epistolary novels, he does not pursue the theme of physiognomy in Austen's work. From a dialogic perspective, traditionally 'male' and 'female' vocabularies clash in her fiction, presenting a conflict between different modes of viewingand being viewed that are articulated through different surfaces of meaning physiognomies.
The post-Butler critical tradition has frequently positioned the novelist's fiction in relation to feminism and female destiny. Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Nancy Armstrong and Claudia Johnson are among the many scholars who have explored the relationship between sexual desire and the limitations on women's self-expression in Austen's fiction. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1975), Gilbert and Gubar praise the novelist for informing readers about the tensions resulting from 'grace under pressure'. Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) similarly considers the novelist's skill in making cultural shifts appear ordinary by teaching her readership how to act and adapt, implying a change in vision and perception. Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1990) reinterprets the conflicting forces of self-determination and self-restraint in Austen's fiction. Her assertion that the novelist 'defended and enlarged a progressive middle ground' is a premise that I reconsider and endorse from the vantage point of aesthetics.
Other scholars have examined the centrality of morals in Austen's texts. In Jane Austen and Education (1975), D. D. Devlin traces the trajectory of character 'improvement' in her novels, highlighting the distinctive relationship that she draws between ethics and clear vision. While he does not specifically and fully investigate the novelist's use of visuality and its relation to physiognomic ideologies, his argument remains significant because it implies their linked importance. He cites Aristotle, who explained that 'perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of the good man is his seeing the truth in every instance', and uses it as the foundation for his critique of the underlying ideologies behind the picturesque improvements in Mansfield Park. Devlin suggests that 'Locke's "character" and Jane Austen's "disposition" mean what we are at any given moment, for better or worse, is a result of education'. For Devlin, seeing clearly involves 'both seeing oneself clearly (self-knowledge) and seeing other people and the external world as existing in their own right and independently of the self'. His study of Austen's aim to cultivate 'a new clarity of vision' overlooks, however, a key factor: the distinction between 'will not tell' and 'cannot tell' that Austen negotiates through the didactic language of physiognomy. Whereas Sense and Sensibility's Lucy Steele does not choose to speak of her attachment to Edward Ferrars for over three years, Elinor Dashwood cannot express the effect that this disclosure has on her.
Glenda Hudson also explores the correlation in Austen between ethics and clear sight. She contends in Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen's Fiction (1999) that Austen's use of the courtship novel allowed her to alter the imbalances between male and female power through what she proposes are literally 'incestuous' couples. While rejecting the notion of Austen's couples as incestuous, this chapter shares Hudson's view that the novelist esteems ideological compatibility over sexual attraction in marriage. To borrow Hudson's phrase, 'She posits a system of relations between individuals based on a hierarchy of moral qualities'. Applying this framework to Austen's use of aesthetics, I look at the interconnected roles of portraiture and architecture in showing the reader that the novelist's ideal view of marriage elevates 'companionship' as a form of sexual attraction.
The pedagogical implications of portraiture, landscape and architecture have continued to occupy a vital place in Austen scholarship but not in discussions relating to the marriage plot. Duckworth's Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (1971), for instance, considers the analogous themes of social improvement and the picturesque in Austen's fiction. His analysis of the tendency towards 'relativistic impressionism', or landscape's subjective influence on individuals, remains insightful in the twenty-first century, presenting a theme that I reconsider in the context of portraiture. In 'The Influence of Place: Jane Austen and the Novel of Social Consciousness' (1981), Ann Banfield departs from the themes that Duckworth discusses. Her focus lies in elucidating the novelist's departure from the Gothic tradition: 'place' reverts from the sublime and the beautiful to the English country house and the English landscape. The role of what Banfield refers to as 'the shaping hand or eye' is a notion that I examine from an alternate angle: the eye of the owner of a place reforms the viewer's perceptions and, by extension, the reader's perception of the viewer's prejudices.
Criticism pertaining to landscape and architecture has also drawn attention to the 'place' of the heroine. Claire Lamont's 'Domestic Architecture' (2005), for instance, explores the depictions and descriptions of the heroine's home. She claims that Austen's explicit exposure of the interior organization of a residence compensates for the lack of detailed interior description in her novels. From a complementary perspective, Barbara Britton Wenner's Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen (2006) investigates how landscape trains the novelist's heroines by positioning them in the permeable 'continuum' that is neither outside nor inside. Wenner suggests that 'the act of experiencing the landscape is a double one: helping the heroine – or, in this case, heroine-in-training – to interpret the world and to know her own "self", transforming both world and self'. Lamont's and Wenner's arguments, while discerning, do not consider the continuum between interiors and exteriors as critical signifiers of characters' changing perspectives of others and themselves.
Other recent critics have touched upon the role of landscape in Austen's narrative technique but do so in passing. Bharat Tandon's Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (2003) analyses the relationship between habit and habitation in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. His account connects the moral connotations of the picturesque to the visibility of the self, asserting that prospects are embodied rather than 'static' visions. Tandon's conclusion leads Janine Barchas to reason in Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location and Celebrity (2012) that the overlaps between the worlds of the author and her characters confirm Austen's recourse to polite metaphors that she achieves through the 'universal' language of physiognomy.
Linked to discussions on the visibility of the self in Austen's novels are critiques of her characters' actual appearances. John Wiltshire's Jane Austen and the Body: 'The Picture of Health' (1992) is one of the few accounts that discusses the facial language of health as a form of cultural 'somatization' in Austen's texts. His discussion assumes that 'value exists only in appearance' and reads 'health and vigour as virtue' in connection with Persuasion. Rather than drawing attention to somatic physiognomy, Joe Bray uses portraiture as a lens through which to contemplate visual definitions of character. In 'Belinda, Emma, and the "Likeness" of the Portrait' (2011), he analyses portraiture's absorption of cultural anxieties about the truthfulness of appearances. The 'untrustworthiness' of actual and artistic appearances inspires him to argue that Emma, like other heroines of her generation, must learn to negotiate the 'subjective slipperiness of interpretation'. As Kathryn Sutherland agrees, portraits 'confront the issue of truthfulness of representation' much in the same way that biography does. Bray's theory that the image 'often reflect[s] on the characters of those who observe them' is a premise that I return to in my analysis of the influence of subjectivity on physiognomic judgements. Whereas Bray's article focuses on portraiture's role in Emma, I extend his discussion by offering a more panoramic study of Austen's novels that evaluates portraits as 'speaking characters'.
While many critiques, then, have pointed to Austen's need for visible indices of character, there remains much to explore regarding how portraits and places act as forces of perceptual and emotional change in her novels. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomishche Fragmente (1775–78) permeated the cultural consciousness of Austen's times. The illustrated volumes of his Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind (1789) presented a philosophy of association between visible features and inner character. Lavater's examination of the ideological implications of 'beauty and deformity' is valuable to an analysis of the affective force of physiognomy in Austen's formation of companionate couples. By removing physiognomic interpretation to surfaces external to the self, Austen allows her fictional women, like her men, to gain clear sight. Attuned to the relationship between outward appearance and inner truth, the reader of the novel learns to see the ways in which characters' vision and perception change through the conflicting forces of subjectivity and internal persuasion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney by Jessica A. Volz. Copyright © 2017 Jessica A. Volz. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Caroline Jane Knight; Preface; Introduction: Visuality in Profile; 1. Jane Austen’s Aesthetic Vocabulary of Character; 2. Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Reconstructions of Female Identity and Experience; 3. The Gendered Gaze and ‘Made-up’ Women in Maria Edgeworth’s 'Castle Rackrent', 'Ennui' and 'Belinda'; 4. Optical Allusions in Frances Burney’s 'Evelina' and 'The Wanderer'; Conclusion; Selected Bibliography; Index.What People are Saying About This
‘This wonderful and scholarly book shows us with lively examples how women in the age of Jane Austen were allowed to perceive themselves and how four great women writers responded creatively and spiritually, through their use of the visual imagination in their writing. I read it with huge pleasure.’ —Edward Rutherfurd, bestselling author of Sarum, London, New York and Paris
‘We’ve long understood that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture was structured around seeing and being seen, but it’s taken Jessica Volz’s fine book to reveal how four famed women novelists of the era used visual patterns and cues to promote social change […] Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney is a compelling study of a surprisingly under-examined set of narrative patterns that have been hiding in plain sight.’—Devoney Looser, Foundation Professor of English, Arizona State University
Author interview with Dr Emma Whipday's 'At Home with Austen' video series