Anghraine

Rambling about family relationships based on my research for my PhD exams (16th- to 18th-century British literature):

One of the things that came up in my reading for my exams was, inevitably, ~the rise of the companionate marriage~. The usual framing is often over-simplistic and very heterocentric; people sometimes talk as if there was no concept of marriage involving romantic ties (sometimes even exclusive romantic ties!) until the 17th/18th century or something.

That said, IMO there’s something to it, at least in England. As someone who had mostly done research in the 18th and earlier 19th centuries, 16th-century takes on marriage often sound like they come from Earth 2. Over time, there’s more and more emphasis on the ties of marriage, companionship, and parenthood in cultural discourse, with other family relationships increasingly subordinated to those, even while ideas from earlier periods about the importance of those other family relationships persisted in some ways.

Like, there was a lot of talk about how brothers were supposed to care for the interests of their siblings, especially their unmarried sisters, but there’s also a lot of talk about how that was increasingly not happening, and how the ties between brothers and sisters were becoming less important and less reliable as a "net" for unmarried women.

Men increasingly resented their sisters for taking resources that would otherwise go to their wives and children, or simply denied them meaningful resources altogether in favor of focusing on their own wives/children. It was a really well-established dynamic by the time that Wollstonecraft wrote about it in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Austen in Sense and Sensibility.

One of the things that S&S highlights is that John and Fanny Dashwood’s son does not need the resources that are denied to John’s sisters. He already has a comfortable separate inheritance. John prioritizes Fanny and Harry over his sisters both because of his character and because doing so had become very culturally normalized by then.

By the 20th century (at least in the UK and US), people prioritizing their spouses and children over their siblings or other connections was and is often going to seem "well, of course they would." But the degree to which that is the case is really influenced by cultural norms and expectations. Going back to Austen (surprise), she has an intriguing passage about it that speaks to the shifts in how the sibling tie was seen and experienced:

An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so.—Fraternal love, sometimes almost every thing, is at others worse than nothing.

I don’t even have siblings (sort of surrogate siblings, but not people I was actually brought up with), but I do find the evolution and melancholy over this really interesting. And I do think that a lot of the, hmm, enthusiasm over the rise of the “companionate marriage” tends to ignore the cost of it.

Tagged: #i am pretty sure this is why austen keeps returning to darcy's sense of responsibility and deep affection for his sister #and why elizabeth thinks his way of talking about georgiana should have told her about his character #i've seen people be like 'just bc you care about your own family members doesn't mean you're a good person wtf' about that #but it was a big deal at the time! #wickham brings it up as something that people in general praise darcy for too #obviously this was of really immediate concern for austen herself #but plenty of people write about it over the years #and it's just ... idk #complicated

[ETA 5/28/2024: this is actually extremely relevant to my dissertation and something I was literally just writing about today!]

I've got a lot of P&P hills to die on, but two ideas I will absolutely reject to the end of time:

1. Darcy or Elizabeth has a redemption arc.

Character growth is not redemption. Even while depicting their parallel character arcs, Austen emphasizes the extent to which they remain essentially the same people in terms of their basic flaws (e.g. Elizabeth's continued misjudgments via reductive schemas, Darcy's cold standoffishness upon his return to Hertfordshire), but also that they were always unusually good people despite their fuck-ups and overall arcs of improvement.

2. Darcy/Elizabeth is enemies to lovers.

There's a window of time when Elizabeth genuinely hates Darcy, though even then I don't think she regards him as her enemy. Darcy does not ever hate her or regard her as an enemy, he just initially doesn't like her or find her attractive. One-sided veiled hostility towards a social acquaintance is not enemies to lovers material, sorry.

My actual, serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is relatively close while Elizabeth thinks it's far:

Darcy is so profoundly out-of-touch due to wealth, property, influence, his families' status, etc that he truly does not comprehend the complications and expenses of travel for normal people even among the landowning classes. Like, there's all this ink spilled on his status as a gentleman/landowning commoner and what really differentiates a gentleman like Mr Bennet from one like Darcy if anything, and what that would mean in their social context, blah blah. But in pragmatic terms, Darcy's lifestyle and his interests as a landowner have far more in common with the nobility to which he is connected than the typical lifestyles of the gentry.

Darcy talking about 50 miles of good road being nothing in terms of inconvenience and blithely ignoring the costs of either owning or hiring horses, the complications of maintaining a horse if you do own it, the complications around hiring or owning the vehicle drawn by the horse(s), how much more you'd need to pay in services if you don't own the vehicle/horses, what using that vehicle for travel would entail for the workings of the estate or your trade if your family does own it, the cost of stopping along the way, what's lost by the duration of the journey, etc etc. These are things that even fairly well-off landowners like the Bennets would have to deal with in terms of the convenience of travel on "good road" (and also clues us into the prosperity of the Gardiners). These concerns do not even occur to Darcy as problems to consider. This doesn't represent a malicious, personal callousness so much as the genuine obliviousness that arises from extreme socioeconomic inequality. These kinds of problems simply melt away in Darcy's life (read: there are people who make them melt away) and as a result, he truly does not comprehend the impact of prosaic difficulties on the feasibility of something like travel for people like the Lucases or Bennets. The only calculation of convenience that seems to be happening in his head is the effect of distance and road quality on the timing of the journey.

(I think his confusion at people who have family libraries but aren't buying books at this super important literary moment reflects this as well. Books were still quite expensive at the time. He does not appear to grasp that "always buying books" like he does is literally not an option for most people, even in the gentry. He's right about the important literary moment, but "buying things costs money" is a concept that seems not to even enter his calculus.)

My much less serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is "a very easy distance" while Elizabeth thinks it's far:

His landowning family members don't have to think about these problems any more than he does, and if I were Lady Catherine de Bourgh's nephew, I would also consider living 50 mi away from my relatives pretty damn close.

An anon said:

I keep wondering about this: How/When do you think Darcy and Wickham's friendship ended? A slow disintegration? A sudden realisation. Did it happen at school? At University? How much time did they spend together? I suspect that how audiences interpret this has a big impact on how they see their characters...

I replied:

It’s possible!

Darcy says that he was exposed to Wickham’s real character as a young man, many, many years earlier, which is vague, but gives us a general idea.

It’s worth mentioning that Darcy is also introduced as a “young man” in the present, so his idea of “many, many years” might not be as vast as it sounds. At any rate, this certainly suggests (or states, rather) that he was an adult when he realized what Wickham was, while his father didn't reach the same realization. That gives us another point on the timeline: Mr Darcy was still alive at this point, so Darcy was 23 or younger at the time (making it 5+ years earlier).

To me, it sounds like Wickham went noticeably wrong in early adulthood, not childhood (so not at school), but very early adulthood. It also sounds like they were together pretty often up to that point. Darcy says:


So Darcy and Wickham were around each other enough that Darcy considers his observation of Wickham’s true character to have been inevitable, and their estrangement seems to have followed that. My impression is that they were good friends up to around 20, hung out a lot for a time, but that Wickham soon went down a path that Darcy couldn’t follow or accept. It doesn’t sound like it happened all at once to me, to give Darcy chances to see Wickham’s unguarded moments for some unknown length of time, but it also doesn’t sound all that gradual; Darcy seems to have had a clear (and disapproving) idea of what he was seeing.

At the same time, he kept the whole thing secret from his father—perhaps because Mr Darcy was likely in poor health by then, or because he privately hoped it was a phase (even after this point, he “wished” to believe Wickham was sincere about turning his life around), or some other reason. That’s speculation, but I think we do have a rough timeline for when the estrangement happened.

I have a longer post in drafts about it, but … one of the things I really enjoy about Austen is that she doesn’t hold back judgment of her characters or even altogether deny them agency (though her fandom sometimes does!), but she also frequently goes out of her way to highlight the experiences that have influenced their development into who they are.

Especially (though not exclusively) when it comes to her main characters, her good people aren’t good because they just had the innate moral fortitude to shrug off their upbringings or the things that have happened to them, which seems to be a lot of people’s idea of goodness. Austen main characters are good people and they’re impacted by their experiences and have qualities (often flaws) that clearly arise more out of upbringing than any essential underlying characteristic. Goodness isn’t just about super-resilience, but neither is experience wholly defining.

It’s not at all restricted to Austen, of course, but even now (…particularly now), it’s so refreshing.

Tagged: #i'm so tired of the resilience narrative or blank slate narrative #and i was thinking of how elizabeth/darcy is one of comparatively few ships i'm really into where the characters #are just about squeaky clean—and i think part of it (aside of their general magnificence lol) is it's not a magic resilience thing at all #she is extremely clear about the ways in which they have been influenced—mostly for the worse—by their experiences #they're allowed to be good AND to be affected by their lives in natural ways #shouldn't be as refreshing as it is but it's one of the things i keep going back for

[ETA 4/30/2024: I was also thinking about Mr Collins, of all people—Austen doesn't justify him in any way, obviously, but also doesn't try to pretend that his upbringing and history aren't what made him who he is. The effects of education, upbringing, and general history on people's characters and morals are a constant preoccupation of her books, IMO.]

I've been thinking about ways in which Austen criticism has often fallen down wrt class analysis. Back in the 90s Julia Prewitt Brown wrote a "review" that is actually a guided tour through the failings of feminist analysis of Austen due to many things, but one of them was a failure of substantive class analysis in terms of gender. But I still see a lot of what she was talking about in both academia and more fandom or pop culture oriented interpretations—I'm inclined to think particularly when it comes from a contemporary US perspective.

I have way more thoughts about this than I have time to articulate, but I think US fans and academics in particular (though not exclusively) struggle to understand class in Austen's novels or other literature of the time in a way that is not simplified and enormously dependent on largely unfamiliar formal or legal categories rather than complex, sometimes contradictory or unpredictable, highly, highly striated structures that a quick consult of population breakdowns or tables of precedence is not going to explain. And at the same time, I think we (speaking as a US American!) often focus on the more (to us) exotic elements of 18th and early 19th-century British class dynamics rather than analyzing those dynamics in terms of class interests. These interests aren't purely financial (the understanding of class priorities purely in direct financial terms also seems very much a US perspective on it—maybe not exclusively again, idk).

Easy example, but: analysis of class in P&P tends to focus overwhelmingly on questions of exact legal status, precedence and large-scale categories (military, clergy, gentry, upper vs lower servants...), and reported income. And those things matter, for sure. But this tends to neglect how the characters perceive their own class interests (and how accurate their perception may or may not be), who their "natural" allies are, what larger social structures they benefit from or fail to benefit from (again, not only financially, though also that), their conflicts and alliances. Anne de Bourgh and Charlotte Lucas likely have either the same or quite similar ranks in formalized terms before Charlotte's marriage (as daughters of knights*) and are just about exact contemporaries, but the class structures around them are very different in ways that extend even beyond Anne's vast inheritance and Charlotte's lack of one. The image of Charlotte standing in the cold wind while a closely supervised Anne talks at her from her phaeton without any awareness of Charlotte's possible discomfort makes this seem especially stark.

This is even more glaringly apparent in something like William Godwin's Caleb Williams, in which the terrifying, relentless extent of aristocratic power over common people is represented by a country squire with six thousand a year. Legally that squire, Falkland, is no less a commoner than Caleb himself (relatedly, every member of the extended Fitzwilliam family appearing in P&P are also legally commoners). But that doesn't tell you anything about the sheer degree of power afforded Falkland and what six thousand a year signifies beyond direct buying power (that is very wealthy for the country gentry of the 1790s; it turns out a major part of his income, significantly, derives from slave plantations rather than his property in England; moreover, Falkland is able to bring power to bear everywhere Caleb goes in a way that only partly involves direct purchases).

I do seriously have to go write other things, but I wanted to get some part of this out of my head before I forget.

*Anne de Bourgh could be the daughter of a baronet rather than a knight, and thus higher-ranking than Charlotte in terms of strict precedence, but a) the distinction in precedence is so unimportant to understanding what she represents in class terms that we aren't told, and b) Sir Lewis is more likely to have been a knight than baronet IMO from what contextual information we do have.

I thirst for another direct P&P adaptation. T_T

Tagged: #there is other austen and even other regency coming out #'other' regency anyway #but at the end of the day my great love is pride and prejudice #and i want something new! #i know i know some people only get one adaptation of their fave ever if at all #and it might have major issues (*cough*) #but i'm petulant and spoiled so /shrug #look. it's pride and prejudice. do something vaguely interesting and print the money #(i was going to say a straight adaptation but i mean like... not zombies or someone's glorified fanfic #not 'heterosexual' #f/f pride and prejudice would be amazing if done remotely right ... /sigh) #imagine ... new gifsets ...

My best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.

The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.

This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)

And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.

Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.

Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.

(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)

Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.

This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.

( Read more... )

moggett responded to this post:

It also seems to utterly ignore how Elizabeth is also supposed to be overcoming her initial incorrect first impression of Darcy. It’s not like Elizabeth is perfect in the text while Darcy changes…

I replied:

Oh, definitely. With fandom, to be fair, you get a mix of that and more balanced takes, but I think academia generally (though not always) tends to resist the equality between them forwarded by P&P’s structure and dynamics.

I think it’s partly because P&P does a really good job of inviting readers to participate in Elizabeth’s perceptions and mistakes while leaving open the possibility of doing otherwise, which is especially uncomfortable for academics of a certain type (who are often not great at accepting being wrong), and all the more so for ones who can’t bring themselves to complicate their initial judgment of Elizabeth as the only truly right-thinking character.

It’s an old piece, but I remember reading an essay about how Darcy’s letter hijacks readerly sympathies that should continue to belong with Elizabeth to the point of provoking resentment from readers. I don’t think it actually does that for most readers (Darcy has always been popular, as Austen intended; when she was worrying about what her beloved niece would think of P&P, Austen wrote, "Her liking Darcy and Eliz[abe]th is enough. She might hate all the others if she would"). But it does have that effect for some people who are often prone to these academic approaches. But it’s—the evidence that Elizabeth’s judgments are skewed by her vanity is pretty copious by the time that Darcy proposes, if you’re willing to see it, and unwillingness to see it or give it ethical weight even upon re-reading is, I think, basically an unwillingness to engage with the novel on its own terms.

Tagged: #/rambles #i genuinely think a lot of academia handwringing over pride and prejudice comes from being unable to accept being wrong #with a side of hugely prioritizing theory to the point of neglecting the details of the text #i don't mean subtle detail either ... it's more of what strier was talking about imo

tree responded to this post:

i can’t remember the wording, but someone (mrs gardiner?) even comments on the significance of such a recommendation of his character by an intelligent servant.

I replied:

It’s in the narration, but yes!


The text is emphatic that the judgment of Mrs Reynolds and those in roughly similar positions to her is immensely important as an indicator of Darcy’s (or anyone’s) true character. I think people do tend to treat it as "trifling," unfortunately—nice, but not terribly weighty, despite Austen underscoring its importance here and Elizabeth suddenly grasping that Darcy’s character is best understood by those who are directly subject to his power.

I actually find that moment super interesting in general, because I think the implication is that Elizabeth had not before understood this. It’s not that she never thought about it before because she didn’t have access to the people under Darcy’s power, IMO, but because she wasn’t thinking of his power in those terms. So it’s doing interesting work with Elizabeth’s characterization, too, but still gets relegated to an afterthought. :\