Abstract
This chapter posits that Smith and Austen plot female and male via social and cultural scripts and role-playing. Type and stereotype allow scholars to read representation and characterization as forms of historicized evidence. Smith, and Austen after her, diverge from the established type in their men and women. Smith and Austen do not write characters à la mode; they write characters contre la mode in thoughtful and nuanced ways. Indeed, Austen develops Smith’s approach by writing spirited women ‘two ways’: Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford, for instance, share a personality but not a plot. The chapter suggests that Smith’s interest in varying modes marks a path for Austen.
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Notes
- 1.
In these terms, one wonders about Austen’s famous defence of the novel, which takes the place of plotting Catherine and Isabella actually reading any novels. Just before these few pages, in introducing Isabella’s mother as a ‘widow, and not a very rich one … a good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother’, the narrator dispenses with her summarily: ‘This brief account of the family [two sentences] is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of lords and attornies might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated’ (56). The narrator’s impatience with story-telling is again evident. And if Mrs. Thorpe had been another Mrs. Smith, we might have had the story of Celestina in a nutshell.
- 2.
The exception focuses on Orlando as romantic hero/hero of his own romance, a reading established by Joseph Bartolomeo and so far uncontested. See ‘The Subversion of Romance in The Old Manor House’, Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 645–657.
- 3.
A further thought: how interesting that for many, Austen’s plots and politics have been read as resisting innovation, which rests with her characters.
- 4.
This observation is immediately followed, in the essay, by a reference to Smith’s biography: her own plot.
- 5.
Although this distraction may well be eventually given in to, it is just as likely not to be.
- 6.
Is this morality, or mischievousness?
- 7.
Fletcher, Introduction to Emmeline, 21. Fletcher is probably the most astute critic in noticing many of the Smith/Austen overlaps; however, she shies away from placing Smith as a deeply formative influence on Austen.
- 8.
In contrast to Godolphin, of course, this younger son can’t find a way to make himself. Smith doesn’t create simple types or single modes, and so her characters are often in cross-novel conflict. Austen does this too.
- 9.
Austen thus regularizes the estate by replacing Mrs. Rayland with Sir Thomas and making Tom’s expectations the landowner’s as well.
- 10.
Chapter 5 explores this further as pathology.
- 11.
This is not entirely unnoticed by her original readers. The Monthly Review for June 1790.2 (161–162) notes that ‘Ethelinde is a very Phoenix – like Richardson’s Grandison far too excellent – far above the standard of Nature. A woman without a fault, or a single imperfection is not to be found in this World’ (161). An unknown reader writes this extract into the margin of the text, indicating agreement with the review and disbelief of Ethelinde’s perfections. See also Joe Morrissey, ‘Sensibility, Sincerity, and Self-Interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde’, Women’s Writing 26 (2019): 342–357.
- 12.
Her management of Orlando’s temper tantrums and ability to keep their finances, which the narrative shows us even when Orlando looks the other way (which the narrative also reveals), indicates that she might be the seed from which Althea Dacres grows.
- 13.
The Golden Rule: help others as you would wish to be helped. Judge not lest ye be judged. Think of others before yourself.
- 14.
One reason he can’t help it is because his origin story, in The Old Manor House, mandates it; see Chapter 2 and note that Henry’s counterpart is Bellozane, who runs off with Lady Frances.
- 15.
It is worth noting again that Emmeline’s beauty is distinguished by the pleasure it gives the viewer: ‘her person … was not perfectly handsome, [but] could not be beheld at first without pleasure, and which the more it was seen became more interesting and engaging’ (48). Emmeline interests those who see her rather than enchanting them, much as Elizabeth does.
- 16.
See F. B. Pinion, A Jane Austen Companion (172), where he cites McKillop (Notes and Queries, September 1951).
- 17.
Mark Fulk has described how Smith reuses this trope in The Young Philosopher; see ‘Mismanaging Mothers: Matriarchy and the Romantic Education in Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher’, Women’s Writing 16.1 (2009), 94–108. Mrs. Rayland, in The Old Manor House, also exerts marital control over, in this case, the hero, Orlando, who submits to her wishes while she is alive and is only allowed, by Smith, to marry his beloved Monimia, of no fixed class, after Mrs. Rayland’s death. And in Montalbert, the (anti)hero’s mother goes so far as to imprison Rosalie in the family castle in an attempt to separate Rosalie from her son.
- 18.
As Joe Bray notes, free indirect discourse enters the novel with Smith, not Austen.
- 19.
Their similarity has also been noticed by William Galperin: ‘the virtual transposition of … Elizabeth Bennet into the character of Mary Crawford, who, unlike her prototype, is plainly an exhibit in the case against England’s decadent or residual culture’. See ‘“Describing What Never Happened”: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities’, English Literary History 73.2 (2006): 355–383, 367.
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Labbe, J.M. (2020). Mode: Women and Men/Type and Stereotype. In: Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_3
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