Abstract
In this chapter, I extend Marilyn’s Butler’s account of Mr Darcy’s reform in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). I argue that he is forged as an imperial man of feeling who learns to align social duty with sentiment. Austen’s vision of Darcy, I demonstrate, draws upon her reading of Henry Mackenzie’s epistolary novel Julia de Roubigné (1777) as a satire of sentimentalism rather than a validation of it, as Butler asserts. Darcy’s emphatically unsentimental use of the letter form in his famous letter to Elizabeth following his failed proposal shows how Austen has dispensed with the epistolary genre as a vehicle for feeling. Instead, the letter becomes a site for duty, sincerity and moral improvement, Puritanical principles that Butler argues characterize the novel as a whole. Darcy is not only an ideal romantic hero, but an ideal Briton at the heart of empire, ready to anchor the landed ancien régime of England as it moves into the burgeoning era of global domination, with a solidified morality rooted in Protestant supremacy.
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Notes
- 1.
Marilyn Butler and the War of Ideas, Chawton House, December 11-12, 2015. https://chawtonhouse.org/whats-on/marilyn-butler-and-the-war-of-ideas/
- 2.
Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university Press, 2017), 218.
- 3.
Looser 218.
- 4.
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975: 1990), 122.
- 5.
“The Alternative Right is characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes. Alt-righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value.” Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right The name “Alternative Right” was created by Richard Spencer, head of the Nationalist Policy Institute.
- 6.
Nicole M. Wright, “Alt-Right Austen”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12, 2017.
- 7.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1993), 84.
- 8.
Said, 71.
- 9.
Said, 78.
- 10.
Butler, 212.
- 11.
Said uses this word throughout Culture and Imperialism to describe the growing coherence of Europe’s imperial vision. Vivien Jones also uses this term in her Introduction to the 1996 edition of the novel with reference to Austen’s heroines “agents of both change and consolidation,” Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin, 1996), xxiii.
- 12.
Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Pres, 2006), 2.
- 13.
Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse. The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2020). Horne explains how Protestantism became the “best fit” for imperial expansion: “Decentralized Protestantism was a better fit than rigid Catholicism, perhaps by virtue of the fabled ‘absence of mind’ in forging a settlement project that relied more heavily on a constructions of ‘whiteness’ or the ingathering of various and disparate European ethnicities”, 9.
- 14.
Warren Roberts, “Nationalism and Empire” in Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 331.
- 15.
Butler, 167.
- 16.
Paula Hollingsworth, The Spirituality of Jane Austen, (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2017). Quotation taken from, “How Jane Austen’s writing reveals her spiritual side”, CBC Radio, May 28, 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/finding-faith-in-creative-acts-1.6044012/how-jane-austen-s-writing-reveals-her-spiritual-side-1.6044468
- 17.
Vivien Jones, Introduction, Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin, 1996).
- 18.
Butler, 212.
- 19.
Butler, 212-13.
- 20.
Patricia A. Matthew, “On Teaching, But Not Loving, Jane Austen”, The Atlantic. July 23, 2017.
- 21.
Austen, 295.
- 22.
John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Edinburgh: T. Cadell, 1774), “gratitude rises into preference”, 48.
- 23.
Austen, 297.
- 24.
Butler, 206.
- 25.
Austen, 36.
- 26.
Austen, 159.
- 27.
Said, 70.
- 28.
Butler, 197.
- 29.
Butler, 12.
- 30.
Butler, 201.
- 31.
Butler, 206.
- 32.
George Fox, Journal. Cited in Writing the Self. Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of Self. Peter Heehs. (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 53.
- 33.
Katherine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 12.
- 34.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, (1905).
- 35.
Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire. Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 6.
- 36.
Gerbner, 11.
- 37.
Vivien Jones, xxiii.
- 38.
Butler, 12.
- 39.
Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home. A Biography, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2017), 125.
- 40.
Frederick Cummings, “Boothby, Rousseau, and the Romantic Malady”, The Burlington Magazine, Dec., 1968, Vol. 110, No. 789, 659-667.
- 41.
Cummings, 659.
- 42.
Cummings, 660.
- 43.
Cummings, 665.
- 44.
The Bristow Family Tree: https://d3d00swyhr67nd.cloudfront.net/_source/phillipson-burton-bristow.jpg
- 45.
A Guide to the Robert Bristow Records, 1668-1750. The Library of Virginia. Accession no. 22953. https://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=lva/vi00122.xml
- 46.
Emma Clery, The Banker’s Sister, (Biteback Publishing, 2017), 5.
- 47.
Austen, 204.
- 48.
Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, ed. Susan Manning, (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1999), ix.
- 49.
Butler, 13.
- 50.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Preface to Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, trans. and ed. Jean Vache, Philip Stewart, and Jean Vache (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2010). 3-4.
- 51.
Manning, 9.
- 52.
Manning, xiii.
- 53.
Butler, 27.
- 54.
Manning, xi.
- 55.
Manning, xix.
- 56.
Manning, 24.
- 57.
Mackenzie, 68.
- 58.
Mackenzie, 79.
- 59.
Mackenzie, 390.
- 60.
Austen, 168.
- 61.
Austen, 171.
- 62.
Mackenzie, 85.
- 63.
Butler, 27.
- 64.
Festa, 3.
- 65.
Mackenzie, 96.
- 66.
Mackenzie, 101.
- 67.
Mackenzie, 96.
- 68.
Festa, 7.
- 69.
Mackenzie, 100.
- 70.
Festa, 5.
- 71.
Mackenzie, 101.
- 72.
Mackenzie, 146.
- 73.
Butler, 28.
- 74.
Mackenzie, 144.
- 75.
Butler, 26.
- 76.
Manning, xix.
- 77.
Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger 20, 18 June 1785.
- 78.
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 103.
- 79.
Austen, 160.
- 80.
Austen, 14.
- 81.
Austen, 12.
- 82.
Austen, 157.
- 83.
Austen, 306.
- 84.
Austen, 159.
- 85.
Austen, 296.
- 86.
Austen, 157.
- 87.
Austen, 157.
- 88.
Tanner, 134.
- 89.
Austen, 162.
- 90.
Austen, 162.
- 91.
Austen, 163.
- 92.
Austen, 172.
- 93.
Austen, 171.
- 94.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 211.
- 95.
Mackenzie, The Man of the World (Kessinger Publishing’s Reprints) 22.
Works Cited
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Sinanan, K. (2023). Mr Darcy, Jane Austen’s Imperial Man of Feeling. In: Sinanan, K., Bautz, A., Cook, D. (eds) Austen After 200. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08372-3_7
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