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Thursday, July 24, 2008
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Money Matters
This is my final from Bob's Austen class.
I was still ticked off at Mooneyham for calling Sense & Sensibility a "failure," so I had to write something that showed how great it really is.
Take that, Laura G. Mooneyham White!! (or whatever you are calling yourself these days)
My girl Jane Austen had her issues and may have needed an editor, but that particular claim of yours is ridiculous.
Money Matters
In the opening chapters of her first published novel, Jane Austen offers a social critique via a family critique of the fictional Dashwood family. Austen responds to the writing of Edmond Burke, Mary Wollenstencraft and Thomas Paine, all of whom were concerned with the social impact of issues of inheritance and family security. By beginning Sense & Sensibility with an extended history of the Dashwood family and the financial situation of the novel’s main characters, Mary Dashwood and her daughters, Austen displays her knowledge of the importance of family history and social history. Unlike Austen’s later novel Pride & Prejudice in which the entailment of an estate has not yet driven out the unfortunate dependants, the anxiety surrounding loss of financial security has been fully realized upon the opening of Sense & Sensibility.
Gene Ruoff writes in his article “Wills” that the peculiar darkness of Sense & Sensibility is starkly social in nature. The novels two main protagonists, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, do not appear until Chapter III: money matters take up Chapters I and II. While both are “fictively excessive” in their descriptions of family history and finances, they are necessary to establish the social matrix in which Elinor and Marianne find themselves (349). Austen creates this social matrix by first responding to the work of Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, is cited by Ruoff as the origin of the “emergence of inheritance as a central subject of public political discourse” (353). Austen uses Burke’s idea of the intersection of family reproduction and social reproduction as the basis for Chapters I and II. Burke states that the perpetuation of property in families tends to the perpetuation of society itself (354). He assigns a responsibility to those who control the money matters in the family and assumes in them a benevolent disposition, for the “idea on inheritance” furnishes sure principles of conservation, transmission and improvement (354). Family virtue and civic virtue are thus inextricably tied together.
Austen interrogates the responsibility Burke presents through the figures of Elinor and Marianne’s half-brother John and his wife Fanny. John has given his promise to their father that he will do everything in his power to make comfortable the futures of his stepmother and half-sisters. Ruoff points out that John’s means are far from meager and at 10,000 per year, his annual income is roughly equal to that of Mr. Darcy’s in Pride & Prejudice (355). In her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft materializes Burke’s anticipated situation of the Dashwood women, that girls would become dependent upon their brothers (355). Austen uses this idea in an explicit social setting through John’s promise and his eventual betrayal of that promise. John at first determines to give each sister with 1,000 and illustrates the “good sort of men” Wollstonecraft imagined (355). Austen continues Wollstonecraft’s scenario by including Fanny’s meddling in the situation. Wollstonecraft writes about the wife who is “cold-hearted, narrow-minded” and “displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister” (355). It is Fanny who subtly convinces John to abandon any sort of financial gifts to his half-sisters. She does this by continual references to her son Henry’s inheritance taking the strain of possible financial gifts given by his father.
Austen uses Fanny as an embodiment of Thomas Paine’s response to Burke in The Rights of Man, where Paine attacks the law of primogenitureship. Paine claims that such a law is a “law against every law of nature, and nature itself calls for its destruction” (356). Paine recognized that such a law allowed the holder of the purse strings to trample on siblings and relations. While John initially represents Burke’s claim of the benevolent aristocracy, Fanny eventually shapes John into a representation of Paine’s critique of the hereditary principle: “that it provides a schooling in self-interest which blinds its adherents to notions of distributive justice” (357).
Money matters a great deal in Jane Austen’s world and in Sense & Sensibility, she responds to the public political discourse of inheritance in the 1790’s. Referring to Chapters I and II, Ruoff notes that Austen’s opening movement is “as stunning a public advent of a new writer as we have ever witnessed” (348). Her masterful response to the writings of Wollstonecraft, Burke and Paine display her knowledge of contemporary texts and her understanding of the political nature of family money matters.
I was still ticked off at Mooneyham for calling Sense & Sensibility a "failure," so I had to write something that showed how great it really is.
Take that, Laura G. Mooneyham White!! (or whatever you are calling yourself these days)
My girl Jane Austen had her issues and may have needed an editor, but that particular claim of yours is ridiculous.
Money Matters
In the opening chapters of her first published novel, Jane Austen offers a social critique via a family critique of the fictional Dashwood family. Austen responds to the writing of Edmond Burke, Mary Wollenstencraft and Thomas Paine, all of whom were concerned with the social impact of issues of inheritance and family security. By beginning Sense & Sensibility with an extended history of the Dashwood family and the financial situation of the novel’s main characters, Mary Dashwood and her daughters, Austen displays her knowledge of the importance of family history and social history. Unlike Austen’s later novel Pride & Prejudice in which the entailment of an estate has not yet driven out the unfortunate dependants, the anxiety surrounding loss of financial security has been fully realized upon the opening of Sense & Sensibility.
Gene Ruoff writes in his article “Wills” that the peculiar darkness of Sense & Sensibility is starkly social in nature. The novels two main protagonists, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, do not appear until Chapter III: money matters take up Chapters I and II. While both are “fictively excessive” in their descriptions of family history and finances, they are necessary to establish the social matrix in which Elinor and Marianne find themselves (349). Austen creates this social matrix by first responding to the work of Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, is cited by Ruoff as the origin of the “emergence of inheritance as a central subject of public political discourse” (353). Austen uses Burke’s idea of the intersection of family reproduction and social reproduction as the basis for Chapters I and II. Burke states that the perpetuation of property in families tends to the perpetuation of society itself (354). He assigns a responsibility to those who control the money matters in the family and assumes in them a benevolent disposition, for the “idea on inheritance” furnishes sure principles of conservation, transmission and improvement (354). Family virtue and civic virtue are thus inextricably tied together.
Austen interrogates the responsibility Burke presents through the figures of Elinor and Marianne’s half-brother John and his wife Fanny. John has given his promise to their father that he will do everything in his power to make comfortable the futures of his stepmother and half-sisters. Ruoff points out that John’s means are far from meager and at 10,000 per year, his annual income is roughly equal to that of Mr. Darcy’s in Pride & Prejudice (355). In her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft materializes Burke’s anticipated situation of the Dashwood women, that girls would become dependent upon their brothers (355). Austen uses this idea in an explicit social setting through John’s promise and his eventual betrayal of that promise. John at first determines to give each sister with 1,000 and illustrates the “good sort of men” Wollstonecraft imagined (355). Austen continues Wollstonecraft’s scenario by including Fanny’s meddling in the situation. Wollstonecraft writes about the wife who is “cold-hearted, narrow-minded” and “displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister” (355). It is Fanny who subtly convinces John to abandon any sort of financial gifts to his half-sisters. She does this by continual references to her son Henry’s inheritance taking the strain of possible financial gifts given by his father.
Austen uses Fanny as an embodiment of Thomas Paine’s response to Burke in The Rights of Man, where Paine attacks the law of primogenitureship. Paine claims that such a law is a “law against every law of nature, and nature itself calls for its destruction” (356). Paine recognized that such a law allowed the holder of the purse strings to trample on siblings and relations. While John initially represents Burke’s claim of the benevolent aristocracy, Fanny eventually shapes John into a representation of Paine’s critique of the hereditary principle: “that it provides a schooling in self-interest which blinds its adherents to notions of distributive justice” (357).
Money matters a great deal in Jane Austen’s world and in Sense & Sensibility, she responds to the public political discourse of inheritance in the 1790’s. Referring to Chapters I and II, Ruoff notes that Austen’s opening movement is “as stunning a public advent of a new writer as we have ever witnessed” (348). Her masterful response to the writings of Wollstonecraft, Burke and Paine display her knowledge of contemporary texts and her understanding of the political nature of family money matters.
Update
I finally remembered the username/password, so here we are again.
All these security measures are hilarious.
Someone must have tipped off TPTB about all the nuclear secrets to which I have access.
I guess I better sheath my dagger and put away my Secret Agent baseball cap.
Just wanted to mention that I have been using Myspace and Facebook rather than Blogger.
If I post a blog on Myspace I'll try to remember to post it here as well.
Friend me on Myspace and you can see all the evidence of my terribly exciting life.
:)
Since I LOVE the current background photo (from the girly trip to Medieval Times in Dallas the day after Sondra's wedding) and the current color scheme, it shall remain.
Over and out.
All these security measures are hilarious.
Someone must have tipped off TPTB about all the nuclear secrets to which I have access.
I guess I better sheath my dagger and put away my Secret Agent baseball cap.
Just wanted to mention that I have been using Myspace and Facebook rather than Blogger.
If I post a blog on Myspace I'll try to remember to post it here as well.
Friend me on Myspace and you can see all the evidence of my terribly exciting life.
:)
Since I LOVE the current background photo (from the girly trip to Medieval Times in Dallas the day after Sondra's wedding) and the current color scheme, it shall remain.
Over and out.
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