Abstract
This chapter explores manner in terms of conduct and interpersonal and community-based interaction. The societies plotted by Smith and Austen rely on codes of conduct that regulate behaviour: politeness, observed hierarchies, costume, and occasion. However, these overt forms of social control interest both authors less than do those drawing on secrecy, covertness, and emotional manipulation. Drawing on two paired sets of novels, the chapter will explore surveillance and seduction and their associated codes and outcomes. The chapter, in closely comparing narratives, speculates that Smith and Austen are particularly aware of what ‘manner’ makes, and what it undoes.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance: Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women: in Two Volumes (1767) and Addresses to Young Men (1777); Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1773); Smith, Rural Walks: In Dialogues Intended for the Use of Young Persons (1795); and Rambles Further: A Continuation of Rural Walks (1796).
- 2.
See Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 38–42. William H. Magee notes that Sense and Sensibility ‘recalls Charlotte Smith … frequently and closely …. Jane Austen had Charlotte Smith in general and Celestina in particular closely in mind when writing’ the novel; ‘The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen’, Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 120–132, 125–126. More recently, Devoney Looser has argued for the connection with Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story (1796). See A Gossip’s Story, ed. Looser (Valancourt Books, 2015).
- 3.
Lily Gurton-Wachter constructs an intriguing argument about the place of attention in the poetry of the period in watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
- 4.
Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, 447.
- 5.
In Sense and Sensibility, ed. Tanner (London: Penguin Classics, 1969).
- 6.
In ‘What Happens at the Party’ I offer a fuller discussion of the plot mappings: see ‘What Happens at the Party: Jane Austen Converses with Charlotte Smith’, Persuasions Online 30.2 (2010); http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/labbe.html.
- 7.
Willoughby’s and Celestina’s misapprehensions map almost exactly onto Marianne’s speculations over her Willoughby’s changed behaviour in the letter she writes after their London encounter.
- 8.
The recognition involved in seeing is, according to Assmann, a ‘new ter[m] in our social and political vocabulary’, replacing polite and ceremonial interaction only in our late twentieth-century/early twenty-first century times (73). Smith and Austen should only really be able to utilize the codes of polite interaction, which do, of course, allow for the refusal to acknowledge (that is, cutting). Instead, they push towards recognition in Assmann’s sense, both positing it as an alternative to the damage that can be caused by forms of politeness, and showing its own potential for harm, perhaps because of its immature state: ‘to be seen reciprocally is to be touched, penetrated … even … cannibalized’, says Manushag Powell (260).
- 9.
When Celestina wakes after the awful party, she finds her friend Lady Horatia (a model of good sense) ‘sitting by her bedside, holding one of her hands, and gazing on her with great concern’ (379).
- 10.
‘The impulse to look with deep attention upon any subject can acquire an aggressive and even sexual valence when applied socially’ (Powell, 256).
- 11.
Fletcher makes this remark in Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), 189.
- 12.
Hammond, ‘The Political Unconscious in Mansfield Park’, in Mansfield Park, ed. Nigel Wood (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), 56–90: 68. See also Magee, ‘The Happy Marriage’, 126.
- 13.
See my ‘Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen’, in Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Labbe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 113–128, for a full discussion of the plot mappings.
- 14.
See, for instance, Stuart Curran, General Introduction to The Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 1, viii–xxvii; Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Biography; and Judith Stanton, ed., The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, passim.
- 15.
See ‘“Slipping into the Ha-Ha”: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 5 (2000), 309–339, 313.
- 16.
Her misery might also include the dawning knowledge that she is as much at risk from Orlando’s desire as she is from Mrs. Lennard’s cruelty.
- 17.
Claudia L. Johnson, ‘What Became of Jane Austen? Mansfield Park’, Persuasions 17 (1995), 59–70, 63.
- 18.
This is why marginality and peripherality are not the same. Fanny is marginalized but a central figure; Monimia is peripheral in the Manor House and, while an object of Orlando’s pursuit, not the object: that is the Manor House itself.
- 19.
See Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 100.
- 20.
This observation also easily applies to Wickham. For another take on Austen’s libertines, see Lynda A. Hall, ‘Jane Austen’s Attractive Rogues: Willoughby, Wickham, and Frank Churchill’, Persuasions 18 (1996), 186–190.
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De Montfort University. (2020). Manner: Codes and Outcomes. In: Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_4
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