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Book review
Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion

Edited by Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner

Published by Duke University Press, 1998

This series of articles grew out of the 1994 conference on ‘The Political and Aesthetic Education of Romanticism’ at Duke University in North Carolina. As a collection, they reflect the tension between the desire to define Romanticism and yet to recognise the complex forms, ideas and ideologies associated with it. Articles, not surprisingly, have been included on the poets Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. The political aspects of Romanticism are included – there is a chapter on Thoreau.

A chapter entitled ‘Reading Habits: Scenes of Romantic Miseducation and the Challenge of Eco-Literacy’ examines the links between Romanticism and ‘green criticism’ which argues for ‘returning nature to the centre of scholarly romanticism’ as a defence against ‘the onslaught of post-structuralists, historicists, feminists and new cultural critics’.

Of interest to JASA members are the three chapters on Jane Austen. Given that many readers of Jane Austen may associate her mind-set with earlier 18th Century values (the importance of reason; feeling which is firmly based on rationality; balance and proportion), this movement towards connecting her with Romantic ideology and its march into the 19th Century is worth considering.

The three chapters are ‘Liberty, Connection and Tyranny: The Novels of Jane Austen and the Aesthetic Movement of the Picturesque’ by Jill-Heydt 

Stevenson; ‘What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney enter the Romantic Canon?’ by William Gilperin and ‘Domesticating Gothic: Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe and National Romance’ by Miranda J. Burgess.

I found Heydt-Stevenson’s contribution most interesting. In examining the differences between picturesque aesthetics and picturesque improvements, the writer sets out to examine notions of personal liberty as it relates to both landscape and women. "How much freedom of movement," she asks, "either through the land or through the network of social classes should the individual – especially a woman – be permitted?"

By defining the picturesque aesthetic in terms of freedom and picturesque improvement in terms of restriction, forced design and confinement, Heydt-Stevenson develops a critique of Austen’s heroines as they relate to the landscape. She makes good use of Fanny Price and Fanny’s rejection of the path prescribed for her by others. By affirming the ideas of Uvedale Price and his desire for a ‘wilder beauty’ over those of designers such as Repton and their desire to make the land conform to their own design, Heydt-Stevenson argues that Fanny represents a desired disconnection with the despotic. Fanny ‘will grow where she will’ in spite of the attempts by others to have her grow as they direct. In passing – surely Fanny, then, is not named ‘Price’ without some echo of Uvedale Price himself.

The rejection of ‘improvement’ by Austen reveals a ‘liberal and feminist attitude towards women’. Her heroines are associated with ‘freedom, playfulness, introspection and connection to others, to their landscape and to their nation.’ As does Uvedale Price, they may well proclaim that ‘thraldom (is) unfit for a free country’. These notions are essentially Romantic.

Galperin’s article argues for moving beyond the famous five or six who seem to represent the Romantic canon. Austen and Burney, argues Galperin, are both concerned with issues of ‘individual agency and social change’ and that they represent the diversity rather than the singleness of the Romantic movement.

Mansfield Park is once again at the centre of the argument, this time in its relation to notions of theatricality and thus interesting to JASA readers of Penny Gay’s Jane Austen and the Theatre. The romantic ‘turning away from public performance’ is not to be limited to ideas of antitheatricality. Byron’s use of the term ‘mental theatre’ allows many different performances to be explored. So while Heydt-Stevenson argues for the freedom of Fanny’s determination to be what she will as the essence of romanticism, Galperin sees Fanny’s retreat to her room (her ‘lime-tree bower’) as a kind of mental theatre – a form of acting a role – as romantic.

The third chapter on Austen, by Miranda J. Burgess, presents an Austen able to absorb the contradictions of ‘embracing the radical view that the role of women in families is indeed a conservative political fiction’ and accepting the ‘desirable and nationally vital fiction generated and supported by writing, selling and reading moral novels’.

Burgess begins with reference to Scott and his celebration of the domestic in fiction. It was precisely what he liked about Jane Austen - Emma in particular. Although often presenting a largely conservative Austen, Burgess allows for the complex and the provocative in her work, even if she is not the confronting Jacobin recognisable in Mary Wollstonecraft.

By contrasting the attitudes of Hurd, Burke and Wollstonecraft to political readings of the Gothic, by drawing attention to Austen’s ironic treatment of Radcliffe’s The Italian in Northanger Abbey and by contrasting Catherine Morland’s development (a personal revolution) with Wollstonecraft’s ideas of social revolution, Burgess draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in Austen’s work. Does the reader or the text ‘settle the moral’? What is Austen revealing of the English national character? How does she stand in relation to both Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe? Even the two volume publication of Northanger Abbey and its duodecimo binding buys into the argument.

Each of these articles is closely argued and indeed challenging and each certainly recognises rich and complex views of both Austen and Romanticism. Politics and aesthetics are not only widely covered but shown to be interdependent. This is not a book that you would sit down in an idle hour to read; nor do the writers set about explaining their references (the articles are based on conference papers presented to a knowledgeable audience, after all) but it is rewarding nonetheless.

Pamela Nutt

14 February 2004

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