Guidelines for Response
Write a 1-2 page response in which you engage meaningfully with one of the critics below. You should aim to generate your own reading of the novel (or the part of the novel you have read, of course) by applying the ideas or claims in one of these passages, working closely with Austen. Your response should be carefully structured, with an introduction, well-organized body paragraphs and a conclusion. You should include some carefully integrated brief quotations from the novel, but make sure they don’t take over.
Critics on the Novel
Margaret Anne Doody (The True Story of the Novel)
Novel characters, even those who are truly well-to-do, exist in perpetual dissatisfaction with their financial and social condition (476).
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction
Competing class interests are therefore represented as a struggle between the sexes that can be completely resolved in terms of the sexual contract (49).
D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, Or the Secret of Style:
Of that godlike authority which we think of as the default mode of narration in the traditional novel, Jane Austen may well be the only English example. Whether our standard is Fielding in the 18th century or Thackeray in the 19th the omniscient narrator’s divinity proves constantly betrayed by his human verisimilitude, the all-too-familiar “character” with which he can’t help tending to coincide….By contrast, Austen’s divinity is free of all accents that might identify it with a socially accredited broker of power/knowledge in the world under narration….she always writes like a real god, without anthropomorphism. Nowhere else in 19th century narration have the claims of the “person,” its ideology, been more completely denied.
Sir Walter Scott
The author’s knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature and with a precision which delights the reader (quoted in Homer Brown, Institutions of the English Novel 188)