Context for coursework

Jane Austen

Background:

• Austen was born in Hampshire, but she moved around quite a lot
• She has also lived in Steventon, Bath, Southampton and Chawton
• She was never married and had no direct relationships with any famous men or women from her time
• Jane and Cassandra (her sister) had a very close bond
• They were taken out of school due to fever and then received education from their brothers
• In the background, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution was ongoing

From Austen by Christopher Gillie (Pearson 1985)

Critics of Austen:

• "The more accurately the critic can reconstruct Jane Austen's world, the more clearly he is likely to see the macrocosmic significance of the tiny events..."
• "...placing Jane Austen in relation to contemporary thinking about the role and capabilities of women."
• "Jane Austen is totally committed to her society and its values."
• "Affirmation of her society may be the main thrust of Jane Austen's fiction."
• Auerbach argues: "Jane Austen's novels work around tension between the security of a restricted world and its unrelenting imprisonment."

     Nina Auerbach

• "She becomes a plotter of modes of confinement for elastic imagination like those of Catherine Morland..."
• "Many readers have been troubled by the shadowed epithalamia in Jane Austen's novels."
• "Northanger Abbey, 'Henry and Charlotte were married, the bells rang and everybody smiled'... weddings seem to transmit signals beneath their comic reassurances."
• "Jane Austen's novels seem superficially removed from this endless series of dark passageways."
• "Romantic double prison, while General Tilney shifts imperceptibly between ordinary father and monster until the two come to resemble each other."

From Jane Austen, in a social context, edited by David Monaghan (Macmillan Press LTD. 1981)

John Keats

Critics:

• "Certain of Keats's poems, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', 'St. Agnes'... have been the initiating and moving first experiences of the poetic and literary life of so many."
• "I want to consider Keats's writings as comments on his life."
• "Keats, who was in a formal sense the least well educated of the great Romantic poets"

From Introduction to Keats by William Walsh (Methuen & Co. 1981)

Historical anxieties of Bronte, Keats and Austen

‘Gothic should be considered as a ‘mode’ of writing that responds to the conflicts and anxieties of its historical moment.’ In light of this statement, explore he ways Bronte, Keats and Austen respond to the anxieties of their historical moment.

Worries of Bronte:

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights expresses that love causes wildness and an overdrive of emotions; for example, Cathy is so driven by her emotions and feelings that it has driven her to madness. In Victorian society, gothic literature is scorned upon as it expresses a supressed side of humanity that is forbidden and people fear this side of themselves. Bronte is trying to show society is too suppressive and individuals should have the freedom to read and enjoy different genres of texts. Wuthering Heights shows anxieties of the extent of cruelty and how corrupt society can actually be; Heathcliff is a prime example of this. The Bronte family lived in village in the Yorkshire moors and this may have increased their worry of loneliness as it drives you mad (Heathcliff dug up Cathy’s grave 18 years after her death as he still misses her, he claims she is the one disturbing him.) This could link to fears of the supernatural which is a still a contemporary fear of ours.

Anxiety in Keats:

John Keats, firstly, expresses his worry of how it's possible mortality will be lost in the future; the soul and love will die out. He shows anxiousness about death, what lies in the afterlife and what form he would like to be instead of his human self. He writes about immortality and eternity and how an absence of love in his life would be a life not worth living (Fanny Brawne?) As he was living around the time of the 'Great Terror', he conveys his disdain for the monarchy suppressing society and it's creativity/freedom. Humanity is corrupt and people are not living to their full potential. Worries of: sadness, madness, suffering, language.

Anxiety in Austen:

Jane Austen's view towards gothic Literature is that it is driving people almost mad and making people silly. It is sending people's imaginations out of control and we are imagining things completely out of the ordinary which wasn't normal for society. These stories are corrupt and incredulous and she satires the gothic theme with Northanger Abbey; which exaggerates language and emphasises the heroines actions. Gothicism is the main factor as to why her overactive imagination makes her think of mysteries that don't actually exist.