HOW TO STUDY AJANE AUSTEN NOVEL

Transcription

1 HOW TO STUDY General Editors: John Peck and Martin Coyle HOW TO STUDY AJANE AUSTEN NOVEL Second Edition

2 How to Study Series editors: John Peck and Martin Coyle IN THE SAME SERIES How to Begin Studying English Literature (second edition) Nicholas Marsh How to Study a Jane Austen Novel (second edition) Vivien Jones How to Study Chaucer Robert Pope How to Study a Joseph Conrad Novel Brian Spittles How to Study a Charles Dickens Novel Keith Selby How to Study an E. M. Forster Novel Nigel Messenger How to Study a Thomas Hardy Novel John Peck How to Study a D. H. Lawrence Novel Nigel Messenger How to Study James Joyce John Blades How to Study Linguistics Geoffrey Finch How to Study Milton David Kearns How to Study Modern Drama Kenneth Pickering How to Study Modern Poetry Tony Curtis How to Study a Novel (second edition) John Peck How to Study a Poet (second edition) John Peck How to Study a Renaissance Play Chris Coles How to Study Romantic Poetry Paul O'Fiinn How to Study a Shakespeare Play (second edition) John Peck an' Martin Coyle How to Study Television Keith Selby and Ron Cowdery Literary Terms and Criticism (second edition) John Peck and Martin Coyle Practical Criticism John Peck and Martin Coyle Studying History Jeremy Black and Don M. MacRaild

3 HOW TO STUDY A JANE AUSTEN NOVEL Second Edition Vivien Jones ~ MACMILLAN

4 Vivienjones 1987, 1997 All rights resejved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright! Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First edition 1987 Reprinted 1993 Second edition 1997 Published by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

5 For Anna and Luke

6 Contents General editors' priface 1x Acknowledgements xi Priface X111 I Introduction: Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility I Introductory analysis: Northanger Abbry 2 Looking at plot: Sense and Sensibility 23 2 Money and marriage: Pride and Prejudice 35 3 Judgement and irony: Ernm.a 52 4 Self and society: Persuasion 70 5 The importance of place: Mansfield Park 86 6 Moving on: Jane Austen and critical debate 106 '3 or 4 Families in a Country Village': Austen and questions of value I 08 'A neighbourhood of voluntary spies': Austen and questions of historical context 126 'An accomplished woman': Austen and questions of gender Writing an essay 157 General guidelines 158 Essays on Jane Austen 167 Furthn reading 172 V11

7 General editors' preface EVERYBODY who studies literature, either for an examination or simply for pleasure, experiences the same problem: how to understand and respond to the text. As every student of literature knows, it is perfectly possible to read a book over and over again and yet still feel baffled and at a loss as to what to say about it. One answer to this problem, of course, is to accept someone else's view of the text, but how much more rewarding it would be if you could work out your own critical response to any book you choose or are required to study. The aim of this series is to help you develop your critical skills by offering practical advice about how to read, understand and analyse literature. Each volume provides you with a clear method of study so that you can see how to set about tackling texts on your own. While the authors of each volume approach the problem in a different way, every book in the series attempts to provide you with some broad ideas about the kind of texts you are likely to be studying and some broad ideas about how to think about literature; each volume then shows you how to apply these ideas in a way which should help you construct your own analysis and interpretation. Unlike most critical books, therefore, the books in this series do not simply convey someone else's thinking about a text, but encourage you and show you how to think about a text for yourself Each book is written with an awareness that you are likely to be preparing for an examination, and therefore practical advice is given not only on how to understand and analyse literature, but also on how to organise a written response. Our hope is that although these books are intended to serve a practical purpose, they may also enrich your enjoyment of literature by making you a more confident reader, alert to the interest and pleasure to be derived from literary texts. John Peck Martin Coyle IX

8 Acknowledgements I AM grateful to my colleagues John Whale and David Lindley for reading and improving earlier drafts of this book; to school teachers who attended day courses on Manfold Park organised by the School of English at the University of Leeds, for valuable discussions of the problems of teaching Jane Austen; and to my general editors, particularly Martin Coyle, for their help. xi

9 Preface jane Austen's novels are as popular with readers as they are with examiners of papers in English Literature, but there are many students who find it very difficult to get on with a world which can seem remote and inconsequential. And, judging from the kinds of comments made by examiners, even those students who enjoy Jane Austen don't always find it very easy to translate that e~oyment into the kind of confident analysis required in essay and examination questions. To many, in fact, there appears to be a very definite gap between the enjoyment of reading the novels and the task of critical analysis. There are all sorts of reasons for this, some of which are relevant to the study of any novel, some of which arise more specifically from Jane Austen's subject-matter and method. Because of the sheer length of a novel, selecting and arranging material can be a problem and here the gap between reading and analysis might seem particularly difficult to bridge. The pleasure of reading a novel over a period of time depends on such things as suspense, a desire to know what happens in the end, or a sense of close involvement with characters as we watch them develop. A critical analysis of the text, on the other hand, involves trying to see it complete and all at once, in terms of significant patterns rather than as a sequence. These two ways of seeing a novel are not, of course, mutually exclusive, but expressing whatever it was that made you eager to keep reading the novel in the first place in terms suitable for essay-writing can be difficult. Sometimes it seems easier to abandon your own first impressions altogether and to rely instead on the often rather different points made by teachers and critics. This can be a particularly strong temptation when reading Jane Austen's novels. If you are reading Jane Austen for the first time the peculiarity and limited social scope of her world can be off-putting and her concern with the fairly uneventful progress of her heroine to a happy-ever-after marriage can seem rather unimportant. Yet you Xlll

10 XlV PREFACE quickly find that critics and teachers claim that these novels offer subde and incisive social and moral analysis. What can seem far from clear is just how that is achieved and what form it takes. What makes these novels different from other enjoyable romantic fiction? Or, for those who don't find this kind of fiction particularly appealing anyway, what makes them more than expressions of a narrow snobbery with no obvious relevance to a modem reader? Again, from a practical point of view, how do you begin to select significant episodes from a series of very ordinary events? Can you really analyse a Jane Austen text confidendy unless you have a thorough knowledge of the historical context, or of Jane Austen's other novels, or both? This book is an attempt to help you tackle some of these problems, not by offering an inte1pretation of Jane Austen's work which you have to learn and regurgitate, but by suggesting ways in which your first responses to a novel can be used to lead to further questions and further analysis. In other words, I shall be trying to help bridge the gap between reading and studying. Reading, even a very quick reading, is in fact a complicated process, and yet it is something we're all good at. Even if your experience of novels is fairly limited, your experience of stories, of narratives - from television, film, magazines, wherever - is probably extensive and helps you to make sense of all the other kinds of fiction you encounter. So, although your initial impressions of set texts might fie! vague and unfocused, more often than not they are based on quite sophisticated responses to the ways in which the novel is organised - and this is true whether you actually like the book or not. Responding to a novel in this way is usually an unconscious process, but one of the main differences between reading and producing a critical analysis lies simply in the degree to which we are aware of how this process works. One of the things I try to do in this book, then, is to suggest the kinds of questions and the critical vocabulary which will help you to be more conscious of what is actually going on when you read and make sense of a novel. Reading is a combination of two elements: the experiences, expectations, assumptions, prejudices that each individual reader brings to a text; and the characteristics of that particular text which subdy encourage certain kinds of response, organising, shaping, perhaps even changing readers' preconceptions. Though it would be impossible ever to give a complete account of all the factors in that process, it helps enormously if, as a student of literature, you have some sense of what's happening as you read. So one of the things this

11 PREFACE XV book attempts is to help you develop the habit of self-conscious reading. The aim is to make you more confident about your own ideas and responses to Jane Austen's novels, to help you use them as the starting-point for more complex analysis and as the basis for generalisations about the novel as a whole, instead of abandoning them in favour of those offered by a more experienced reader. Obviously, this basic approach should be of value when you read any novel, but, since this is a book about how to study a Jane Austen novel, it is applied here in the context of the particular responses and problems raised in reading Jane Austen's work. In the introductory chapter I suggest ways in which the early chapters of a novel, in this case Northanger Abbf!)l, set up expectations and establish a pattern of reading for the whole work. I do this by using three basic questions to analyse passages chosen to illustrate several different ways in which Jane Austen presents material- the introduction of characters, characters in conversation, a social gathering, a passage in which the author analyses the heroine's feelings - and to suggest the different kinds of things we learn from these different kinds of narration and the ways in which we begin to put them together into a general impression. This basic method of starting from an analysis of different kinds of passage is used throughout the book and will, I hope, provide a useful model for your own analyses of the novels. In the second part of the introductory chapter, I look at Jane Austen's basic plot structure, using Sense and Sensibility as my example, and suggest a way of getting to grips with the overall pattern of the novel which you can again apply to any of Jane Austen's novels. It is important that you read the introductory chapter because as well as establishing the analytic method used in the whole book, it raises important basic questions which you can ask of any other Jane Austen novel and which will only be briefly summarised in other chapters. Don't worry if you are not studying or haven't read Northanger Abbf!Y or Sense and Sensibility. Short plot summaries are provided to put you in the picture and the aim of the chapter is to provide a general framework rather than specific points about these particular novels. If you read the first chapter together with the relevant chapter on the novel you are studying, you should have a useful set of questions and vocabulary which will help you shape your own ideas into a critical analysis of that novel. I deal with the four later novels, the ones most commonly set on exam syllabuses, in the order in which they were written, with the

12 XVI PREFACE exception of Man.ifieUl Park which I have chosen to deal with last. This is because it seems to me in some ways more complex than the other novels, so it provides a useful opportunity for suggesting how you might extend the basic analytic method. The chapters on individual novels can be read separately, but together they also provide an overall view of Jane Austen's work which will extend your ideas of your particular set text and suggest to you new questions and critical angles. So, ideally, you will read the whole book and, much more important, one or two of Jane Austen's other novels in addition to your set text. As I've already suggested, the way we read is the result of our previous experience of different kinds of texts: the more we read, the better we get at reading and the more enjoyment we get out of it. The aim of this book is not to tell you what to think aboutjane Austen but to suggest a basic analytic method which will not simply help you to write better essays on her novels (though I hope it will do that) b.ut, by showing you how to use and clarify your first impressions, will help to make you a more confident reader in general and, as a result, help you to get new kinds of enjoyment from studying a Jane Austen novel. Chapter 6 is for those of you who want to move on to read critical material on Austen. It uses a very similar analytic method to that used throughout on the novels, but applied this time to passages from important representative critical readings of Austen from the past fifty years or so. As so many editions of Austen's novels are available, references throughout are restricted to chapter references.