Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

Barbara Britton Wenner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351908238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

How do Austen's heroines find a way to prevail in their environments? How do they make the landscape work for them? In what ways does Austen herself use landscape to convey meaning? These are among the questions Barbara Britton Wenner asks as she explores how Austen uses landscape to extend the range of reflection and activity for her female protagonists. Women, Wenner argues, create private spaces within the landscape that offer them the power of knowledge gained through silent and invisible observation. She traces the construction of these hidden refuges in Austen's six major novels, as well as in her juvenilia and her final, unfinished novel, Sanditon. Her book will be an important resource for Austen specialists and for those interested generally in the importance of landscape in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's fiction writing.

Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Landscape of Jane Austen

Readers of Jane Austen’s novels might wonder how an entire book could be written about her landscapes. They might question how many of her landscapes are as fully described as those of later novelists such as Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, who were capable of painting quite particularized scenes. Novelists many times use landscape extensively, not only to establish a sense of place but also to allow readers actually to picture a location in detail. Austen’s landscapes are not detailed. No travelogue visions of the south of France or Italy ever appear in her novels. Her landscape descriptions are few and spare, requiring some imagination on the reader’s part to picture the scenes—“dull elves” will be disappointed as they search for local color. Certainly many of her contemporary readers would have been more familiar than we are with the places where the novels were set and so would not need to know more than Austen writes about the scenes, but still her novels appeal to readers who have never visited England two-hundred years later. As she seldom completely describes her heroines, so she leaves much of the landscape for the readers to fill in for themselves. This gap between what is written and what might be imagined provides us as readers with expanded enjoyment every time we read an Austen novel, as we discover more facets both to the characters and to the landscape.¹ As well, Austen’s lack of elaboration in her landscapes places an obligation on the reader to discover the importance of the scenes she does describe.

Austen did not discuss her use of landscape in fiction very much; however, readers might recognize some similarities between the ways two late twentieth-century women fiction writers approach landscape and Austen’s own approach. In an attempt to understand what one woman writer is thinking as she conceptualizes her landscape, let us begin with the present day American novelist and short story writer, Annie Proulx, as she reflects on the importance of landscape in her work:

The outsider’s eye is a writer’s stock-in-trade, a persistent effort to grasp events through place and season, or through nuances of intonation, language, rhythm, phraseology, or through regional physical characteristics, climate and weather …. The characters in a story, like people in life, behave as their landscape makes them behave—what they eat and wear, the work they do, the thoughts they think … When I write, I try to make landscapes rise from the page, to appear in the camera lens of the reader’s mind. The reader is also an absent presence, but one that’s leaning a sharp and influential elbow on my shoulder. (139)

Did Jane Austen think in the same way about landscape and how the reader would react to it? Of course, cameras had not been invented, but Austen was influenced by the framing device known as a Claude glass, a mirror which a viewer could use to place limitations on the view. Named after Claude Lorrain, whose landscapes were so popular with late eighteenth-century English art lovers, this hinged device the size of a lady’s compact or a miniature book allowed the viewer to see the landscape as though it were a small painting. In many ways the Claude glass allowed the traveler to turn a real scene into art, with its associated frame and limited colors. The traveler then felt obligated to choose the culturally accepted scene and leave the unsightly peasants’ hovels and highway potholes outside the frame.

If a character is armed with a Claude glass, the conventional notion that characters “behave as their landscape makes them behave” might actually be reversed: Landscapes behave the way the characters make them behave. People reproduce what they see as the “norms” in their surrounding geography. If they are gentlemen landowners, the nature of the estate reflects their self-confidence and dominance over the landscape. The ha-has, subtly hidden, long, deep ditches in the parkland, allow them to view their estate without the boundary of a fence between them and their cattle. If they are women, they are very often marginalized and must find other ways of challenging the patriarchal “naturalness” of the landscape. As geographer Tim Cresswell states, “Places are active forces in the reproduction of norms—in the definition of appropriate practice” (16), and “marginalized events question the naturalness and absoluteness of assumed geographies” (149). So a clever tension may exist in literary landscape: the landscape influences the behavior of the characters, but characters, especially Jane Austen’s heroines, find ways of challenging the landscape and finding new meaning there. The questioning of cultural assumptions, learning from liminal locations, and recognizing landscape as critical “agent” are all strongly evident in all of Jane Austen’s fiction.

The importance of understanding the landscape, behaving as the landscape suggests, or finding ways to control the landscape (if that helps the heroine find her “self”) is central to such present-day women writers as Annie Proulx and Canadian Margaret Atwood. When I think of the close attention to landscape and the position of women in Close Range by Proulx and Wilderness Tips by Atwood, I am reminded of their presence in Austen’s work. This same “environmental imagination” comes into play throughout all of Austen’s six novels, but it shows up even in her early writing and makes a strong mark on her final work, the fragment known as Sanditon. Margaret Atwood’s narrator in “Death by Landscape,” a short story from Wilderness Tips, tells the story of Lois, as she collects landscape paintings and remembers her girlfriend, Lucy, who disappeared years ago while they were hiking together: “She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy” (128). Lois retains an abnormal fascination with a wild Canadian landscape in which the figure and the ground shift in some very tricky ways.

Many questions came to my mind as I began to explore Jane Austen’s use of landscape. How does Austen treat landscape differently than some women writers of the same period? How do Austen’s heroines find a way to prevail in their environments? Along with these questions, how do Austen’s heroines respond differently to the landscape than do the heroines of her closest male counterpart, novelist Sir Walter Scott? How do Austen’s heroines make the landscape work in their behalf, whether listening in a hedgerow or finding spiritual rejuvenation in a bower? Can a heroine such as Fanny Price act as a “cure” in the ailing landscape of Mansfield Park? Everything in Emma is “only natural.” What is natural? Does the landscape (and seascape as well) provide a place both to lose and to find self for the Austen heroine? And behind her protagonists, how is Austen herself using landscape to convey her meaning? The reader will find this writer’s answers to the questions in the chapters that follow.

Austen had always taken an interest in geography. She remarked in a letter to her brother, Frank, in 1813, that she had been examining a map of Sweden (where he was then stationed) and “fancied it more like England than many other countries, many of the names have a strong resemblance to the English” (Letters 215). In a letter from 1814, as she critiqued her niece Anna’s novelistic attempts, Jane Austen corrected Anna’s geography, explaining that the characters “must be two days going from Dawlish to Bath; they are nearly 100 miles apart” (Letters 269).

As early as “Love and Freindship,” Austen pokes fun at people who are “geographically impaired.” In this story, a gentleman gets hopelessly lost trying to find his aunt’s house, ending up at least 100 miles off course, although he “flatter[s] [himself] with being tolerably proficient in geography” (103). In Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, Mrs. Musgrove is so ignorant that she cannot tell Bermuda from the Bahamas. These are, of course, examples of very tangible, physical geography, but concern arises as well for how a landscape makes a character feel or behave. In Catharine,—Or The Bower, when Camilla carelessly confuses Derbyshire and Yorkshire, her character is described as “shamefully ignorant as to the geography of England” (143). The primacy in Austen’s mind of a sense of place establishes itself early.

This primacy of place, then, brings me to the aesthetic geographers. Here we will examine what they observe as important in the relationship between humans and their environment as yet another way of interpreting literary landscape. As we explore the ways women authors, such as Jane Austen, create heroines and their response to landscape, we will also note ways that male authors create a different response to the landscape by their heroines. I have the same interest in “socially constructed” landscape, landscape that “reflects human values and ideologies of the resident and viewer” (Ringer 7) as do aesthetic geographers such as George Hughes. Hughes uses a “concept of liminality to describe the ‘betwixt and between’ moments when people are disposed to feel liberated from the norms of their society” (Ringer 22). A limen—or threshold—is the demarcation between one landscape and another. The seashore, possibly at Lyme Regis, exemplifies the best example of a liminal space, one with fluid boundaries. Austen uses such places to provide freedom of movement for heroines.

Cresswell discusses one powerful ideological strategy: to naturalize a place, to cover up the social and historical aspects to provide what the author wants in landscape and call it “only natural.” We will examine this strategy as well and how it provides a way of looking at what Jane Austen does with her landscape and her frequent use of the expression “only natural.” Cresswell has discussed women transgressing and transforming space. Jane Austen certainly provides examples of heroines both transgressing and transforming space. If space is used to control people and things, a novelist such as Jane Austen will certainly try to arrange her “space” accordingly.

Definitions of the term “landscape” vary. Historian Denis Cosgrove describes it this way:

Landscape … is an ideological concept. It represents a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationship with nature, and through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to external nature. (15)

This definition includes not only how certain classes of people see the world but also how gender affects the way landscape is seen. The gaze upon the landscape means something quite different for a woman—author or heroine—than it does for a man. When an eighteenth-century male with a background in the gentry gazes on the landscape, he frames it in a way that objectifies it and indicates its potential for control. When a woman gazes, she is imagining where she fits inside the landscape and how she can position herself to be helped by it.

One of the most influential feminist writers on geography—space—is Gillian Rose. In Feminism and Geography, Rose maintains that “spaces are felt as part of patriarchal power” (146). She goes on to assert that, because men have done the controlling of space, women find it necessary to resist the choices of confinement or exclusion, in a way, “both being prisoner and exile, both within and without” (159). Even earlier in the feminist critique of environmental positioning, we can go to Sherry Ortner’s work examining the associations of women with nature and men with culture, particularly in Western civilization. Although I use the oppositional and seemingly essential terms of inside/outside and nature/culture, they remain fluid. (As Rose has shown us, one can be both confined and excluded, prisoner and exile.) The protagonists in novels may be associated with nature/culture, outsider/insider, and masculine/feminine, or they may find themselves associated with qualities on either side. I am not asserting that all males act one way and females another, whether characters or novelists; however, with men in economic control of land and society in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, women had to find a way to adapt, survive, and succeed creatively within that framework. They could join the men in their pursuits, or, if they had their own agenda regarding position in the landscape, they could openly transgress on male territory, or they could quietly transform the scene. Deborah Kaplan in Jane Austen among Women uses the term “dual cultural responses.” Kaplan explains that women’s culture differs from the culture of the gentry at that time and that Austen, being part of both cultures, expressed a cultural duality. Kaplan finds in Austen’s works “covert or oblique expressions of Austen’s subversive perspectives.” But Kaplan also sees that Austen’s novels “champion the gentry’s culture” (13). “Dual responses” (similar to the ability to understand and use two dialects) express the sometimes conflicting ways in which Austen’s heroines view their landscapes.

Although artists have long regarded landscape as an important means of expression, geographers have only recently begun to focus specifically upon landscape and its meanings. Landscape, according to Rose, “is a central term in geographical studies because it refers to one of the discipline’s most enduring interests: the relation between Nature and Culture” (“Looking at Landscape” 342). In Iconography of Landscape, Cosgrove and Daniels call landscape “a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings” (1). In The Idea of Landscape, Denis Cosgrove explores the cultural and historical influences on landscape and how it is perceived. As an historical geographer, Cosgrove attributes the transition to capitalism during the period of about 1400-1900 as the time when the idea of landscape began to evolve. During this period, landscape “came to denote the artistic and literary representation of the visible world, the scenery (literally that which is seen)” (Idea 9). Another, and no longer conflicting definition, for landscape is the more scientific “integration of natural and human phenomena which can be empirically verified and analysed by the methods of scientific enquiry over a delimited portion of the earth’s surface” (Idea 9).

As I look at Jane Austen’s work, my own definition of “landscape,” while heavily influenced by Appleton, Cosgrove, Cresswell, Rose, and others, remains quite broad: it includes how the natural outdoor setting is perceived, including elements of that setting which might occasionally move indoors. So landscape begins as a recognition of the natural world around us having value, both socially and financially but moving from that definition, which relates best to cultural geography, to one which is more the interpretation of the natural setting by an artist, and, in the case of Jane Austen, a novelist. As we more closely focus our definition of landscape, we will see it from the perspective of a female novelist from the minor gentry, certainly a tenuous position financially, in early nineteenth-century southern England. As we examine Jane Austen’s work from her early writing to the efforts of the last months of her life, we will focus particularly on how the heroines use the natural places to find for themselves protective shields and sources of encouragement—places to hide and places to seek a fulfilling existence.

The Picturesque

“An object is said to be picturesque in proportion as it would have a good effect in a picture … it is applied solely to the works of nature.”

—Joshua Reynolds (qtd from Hipple 199)

Examining Jane Austen’s landscape involves understanding the picturesque, what it meant to Austen, and how her own landscapes both satirize and exemplify the picturesque. Although many critics have written about Austen in a variety of ways, only a few have dealt with her landscapes, in particular, her use of the picturesque. The picturesque is the kind of landscape Reverend William Gilpin suggests should be framed, either as a painting or a Claude glass view from a specific site by a traveler; he writes that the observers should “examine scenery of nature by the rules of painting” (Three Essays of Picturesque Beauty 42). Edmund Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), influenced later landscape aestheticians from Gilpin to Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, and finally Humphry Repton, landscape improver. Each has a somewhat different notion of what “picturesque” means, but they all find that it lies somewhere between the sublime and beautiful, giving the viewer a scene which is neither totally awesome nor totally beautiful, in other words, an English landscape. All of them would probably have agreed that the picturesque landscape has a roughness or irregularity in the topography, possibly a small cottage, or a ruin in the scene, certainly clumps of foliage, neither entirely beautiful (associated with femininity) nor sublime (associated with masculinity).

However, Repton, the only practicing landscape gardener of the group, went further than simply framing the scene. He actively added and removed features to enhance his own notion of the picturesque. Malcolm Andrews, in The Search for the Picturesque, finds that picturesque scenery becomes a kind of commodity: the picturesque artist “‘appropriates’ natural scenery and processes it into a commodity … converts Nature’s unmanageable bounty into a frameable possession” (81). Perspective was extremely important, and the lowest possible viewpoint was usually suggested. Art began to shift from reason to imagination, i.e. a “ruin” evolves from being a lesson in mutability to becoming a structure with melancholy associations. One traveled with pictures as a guide to the actual scenery in the 1790s, and the picturesque painting was framed with stage designs. Gilpin found foregrounds essential to landscape in a way that distances were not. When a picturesque traveler viewed the landscape with his Claude glass, he or she was able to frame it and see it reflected back with some of the details lost.

Two of the few scholars who focus on Austen’s landscape are Mavis Batey and Philippa Tristram. Batey, in Jane Austen and the English Landscape, presents an excellent analysis of Austen’s landscapes from an historical perspective. In Living Space in Fact and Fiction, Philippa Tristram does a remarkable job of discussing Austen’s ambivalence to improvement. Although Tristram does not spend much time on landscape alone, she does deal with cottages. Cottages, during the Regency period, refer to many kinds of dwellings, confusing the reader about the social prominence of the owner. According to Tristram, Austen’s main problem with middle-class cottages lay in the dishonesty with which they are frequently represented. For instance, when Robert Ferrars claims to be “excessively fond of a cottage” (255), Austen satirizes the false modesty his mention of what had once been considered a dwelling of the poor and now has evolved into a lavish cottage ornée.

Some other critics who have dealt primarily with Jane Austen and the picturesque are Alistair Duckworth (The Improvement of the Estate), Roger Sales (Writers and Place in England and Jane Austen and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Introduction to the Landscape of Jane Austen
• 2 The Potential of Death by Landscape
• 3 “Four White Cows Disposed at Equal Distances”—or—Steel Traps to Bowers in Austen’s Short Fiction
• 4 Heroines-in-Training: The First Three
• 5 Enclaves of Civility amidst Clamorous Impertinence
• 6 The Geography of Persuasion
• 7 Sanditon: Half Topography, Half Romance
• 8 Some Nineteenth-Century Reactions, Twenty-First Century Women in the Landscape and Final Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index