Paper Name: 103.Literature of Romantics
Topic Name:Jane Austen as Georgian Author
Subject Code No:22394
Name: Divya Sheta
Roll No.:06
Enrollment No.:4069206420210033
Email ID: divyasheta@gmail.com
Batch:2020-23 MA SEM-I
Submitted to : Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MK Bhavanagar University.
- Introduction:
“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.” By Jane Austen,From Pride and Prejudice.
According to Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray's Article, For over 100 years (from 1714 to 1830) the four kings of England were all named George, suggesting their parents had little imagination. So this was known as the Georgian period in British history. This period lasted until 1837 when Victoria became queen, which then began the Victorian era. (There was a brief stint with a king named William from 1830 to 1837, but the period was still named the Georgian period. Poor guy didn't even get a period named after him: the Willie period!) In Austen's lifetime, England's monarchs were George III — the king who lost the American colonies — and his eldest son, George, the Prince of Wales, who reigned as the father's regent or substitute when George III was severely ill.Besides living when the two Georges, king and regent, reigned, Austen's work and personality display the satire, candor, and openness of the Georgian mindset — the prim and prissy days of the Victorian era came just two decades after Austen's death in 1817.
According to Jennifer Johnstone,"The Georgian era was a time of sumptuous architecture, literature, music, and style. It was the era that made the modern world we know today. The Georgians gave us many things, from some of our most famous writers such as Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to the industrial revolution. There was also the third Georgian King, King George, who lost American colonies, and went mad. And a class system we still see today in modern Britain.The Georgian era attained an eloquent fashion, style, music, and literature, and is seen as a time that shaped the modern era that we live in today. It shaped the foundations of modern Britain, giving the country an industrial and agricultural revolution, along with a class structure that still exists in modern Britain. The Georgians also gave us some of our finest literature. Simply put, the Georgians gave us modernism.
"
- Literature of the Georgian era
The Georgian era brought us some great writers, such as Jane Austen, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Interestingly, it is the female writers, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, who have stood the test of time, and are as much celebrated in today’s second Elizabethan era, as they were during the era they lived in, the Georgian era.
Today, Jane Austen is celebrated all over the world. There are numerous societies, celebrating the life and work of the woman who gave us stories such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and of course, Mansfield Park. An example of the celebration of Jane Austen comes from the ‘Jane Austen Centre’, a place that is hosting a summer ball and a Jane Austen festival in 2014. Another example of Austen’s relevance in the hearts of the British public is that she will appear on the ten-pound note from 2017. This could show that Jane Austen is as relevant today as she was in Georgian England. It can even be argued that with Austen being the face of the new ten-pound note, she is one of the most loved British authors of all time. After all, few other authors have been given a place on bank notes.
When we think of the Georgian era, we often think of Austen’s worlds and a grand upper class lifestyle. We rarely think of it as a gothic era, full of monsters, but this is what makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein a welcome breath of fresh air. Shelly gives us something completely different in her work.
Mary Shelley’s work of Frankenstein gives us a monster created under the eccentric scientist Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein covers some of the same themes as Austen’s novels, including romance, and social class; however, there are also the themes of knowledge, alienation, guilt, and vegetarianism. Frankenstein forces us to think about the more negative aspects of society, and how societies can mistreat others. Perhaps, this was not surprising, as Shelley was the daughter of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft was a critic of the way women were treated in society, most famously noting this in her work The Vindication of Women’s Rights. Both Shelley and Austen spoke out against prejudice, and the patriarchal nature of society.
- About Jane Austen:
As, Edward Albert mentions about Austen's Life that,Jane Austen, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, was born atSteventon. She was educated at home; her father was a man of good taste in the choice of reading material, and Jane's education was conducted on sound lines. Her life was unexciting, being little more than a series of pilgrimages to different places of residence, including the fashionable resort of Bath (1801). On the death of the rector his wife and two daughters removed to the neighbourhood of Southampton, where the majority of Jane Austen's novels were written.
- Austen's Georgian satire:
As Ray's said in his Article, that, "Like Fanny Burney, an earlier Georgian novelist whom Jane Austen admired, Austen writes about young women entering society and the marriage mart. Austen's novels also reflect the humorous satire and irony of Henry Fielding. Satire is a type of literature that aims to correct folly, vice, and stupidity, frequently through ridicule.
Austen uses satire, a keynote of Georgian literature, a great deal. For example, she ridiculed the patronage system that gave church ministries to sometimes undeserving, unsympathetic men through Pride and Prejudice's stupid, lumbering Mr. Collins. He's full of himself and usually behaves like a pompous fool — unless he behaves like an agent of punishment disguised as a Christian clergyman. Austen shows Collins's lack of ministerial qualities just as Fielding showed Thwackum's in Tom Jones. (Thwackum, a clergyman, is excessively prone to corporal punishment: He likes to smack 'em — thus, Thwackum!) In Austen's novel, Collins's advice to Mr. Bennet that he "throw-off [his] unworthy child from [his] affection forever" (referring to Lydia, who has lived out of wedlock with Wickham), "leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offence" (meaning, cast her off or even let her become a whore!), and "never . . . admit [her] into [his] sight" again, leads Mr. Bennet to remark sarcastically, "That is his notion of Christian forgiveness!"
- Preferring candor over prudishness
In her personal life, Jane Austen was no prude. But neither was she indecent in speech — which, let's face it, is all too common today — nor in behavior. She was simply a realist, and with her Georgian openness, she acknowledged life as it was. For example, she reported to her sister that she was "disgusted" by the outright "indelicacies," such as those she saw in the first 20 pages of a French novel, Alphonsine. In this book a 15-year-old male character refuses to consummate his marriage to the girl he has married and then discovers that his wife has been sleeping with her 18-year-old page. But Austen wasn't too prim to include in Mansfield Park a vulgar joke about sodomy to emphasize the less-than-ladylike character of its teller Mary Crawford. Replying to a query about her orphaned youth, Mary explains her "acquaintance with the navy" through living with her uncle, Admiral Crawford:
Certainly, my home at my uncle's brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.
Austen has Mary make the remark as an example of the bad "education" that hero and heroine Edmund and Mary ascribe to her upbringing — an upbringing that particularly pains the highly moral clergyman-to-be Edmund, who is in love with this "remarkably pretty" and lively young woman.
A Victorian prude would never include a joke like that, but with two brothers serving as officers in the Royal Navy, Austen undoubtedly heard of the sodomy prevalent among a ship full of men sailing around the oceans for months at a time. Having read and reread Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), a bawdy novel with sex treated as a hearty roll in the hay without any disgust, Austen writes the sodomy joke to tell her readers something about Mary. Likewise, Austen's novels also include other taboo topics of her day:
- Seduced young women
- Out-of-wedlock pregnancies
- Couples who live together out of wedlock
- Adulterers
- Austen is a social realist, like Fielding, and she presents the temper, follies, and problems of the times in her fiction.
- Conclusion:
Austen make her works as real as what the society of her work's era. In her Novels, we found such a normal themes which quite appear in our daily life. Like, pride, common sense, prejudice or such normal human vices. Though her novels we came to know about the silent society like Georgian Era.
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