AUSTEN SCHOLAR AND THERAPIST, WENDY JONES, DISCUSSES FAMILY DYNAMICS IN THE LIFE, TIMES AND WORKS OF JANE AUSTEN
Siblings today are apt to recognize elements of their bond—or antipathy—in Austen’s novels. Nevertheless, typical Anglo-American family structure in Austen’s day differed significantly from our own, as seen in Leonore Davidoff’s wonderful book ‘Thicker Than Water’, a study of middle- and upper class families of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England—precisely the strata Austen writes about.
Knowing the culture’s norms can reveal aspects of the lives and situations of Austen’s fictional people that we might miss without this historical perspective. I will briefly sketch typical patterns of family life in order to consider siblings in Austen’s novels.
Families were much larger in Austen’s day. In Britain, one third of married women born in the early 1800s had at least seven live births and fifteen percent had ten or more children. When pregnancies were carried to term, the average space between births was about eighteen months to two years. Austen’s own family had eight siblings. Such large families generated extensive networks of relatives and kin, as shown in in the case of George Moberley, son of a merchant born in 1803. He was one of eleven children and had ninety-two first cousins who produced two hundred and fifty six offspring.
In large families, children often spent a lot of time with one another and away from adult spaces. There were rules about when they could start to join parents for meals, and even then, when they could fully partake of adult food. In families wealthy enough to have sufficient space, rooms on the ground and first floor would ideally be kept sacrosanct for adult use, and children spent the majority of time in nurseries, attics, “outhouses” (smaller houses on the property), and gardens. When all the other Mansfield children have graduated to adult spaces, Fanny inherits the nursery. Constituting their own culture apart from that of the adults, siblings often provided entertainment for one another. Austen’s juvenilia emerges from sibling culture.
Given such large numbers of people in a household, patterns of affiliation and hierarchy were sure to emerge. Gender differences were marked in most families, with boys favoured. Gender often determined emotional closeness, as did the spacing of births. Lack of status and opportunity for women might well have contributed to the bonding of sisters; they were often kept at home while their brothers attended school, or sent to school for much briefer periods of time. That Jane and Cassandra were born two years apart and were the only sisters likely helped to foster their legendary closeness.
Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, drawn by Cassandra Austen to accompany Jane’s juvenilia, The History of England (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Older siblings were often assigned to care for younger ones. With responsibility came power, and older siblings often stood in for their parents as authority figures, although that authority was limited. Such relationships of care were sustained as the family aged. Unmarried sisters typically helped their siblings in caring for the long stream of babies as well as older children, and they provided companionship for mothers. Jane and Cassandra were on call for their brothers’ growing families; many of their letters were written when one or the other was away providing such help.
If unmarried sisters provided a pool of unpaid labour for married siblings, in turn those siblings, especially brothers, had a moral obligation to care for and support their sisters. Even though legal mandates to enforce sibling care were declining in the period, notions of duty, loyalty, and affection constituted a moral code that the nineteenth-century author Elizabeth Sewell called “voluntary kindness.” In short, families were small societies, within which siblings, especially sisters, often provided emotional support and friendship for one another. I turn now to see how these norms play an important part in Austen’s major novels.
In Northanger Abbey, Austen takes pains to emphasise the ordinariness of her heroine, and Catherine’s large, loving family provides one way of underscoring her lack of distinction. The narrator tells of many siblings, and Catherine’s tomboy inclinations testify to the fact that children in her family were given a fair degree of autonomy. But Catherine does not appear to be particularly close to any of her siblings; perhaps there was not a sister close in age. Nor is a particular brother special. Catherine appears to have a loving and uncomplicated relationship with all her siblings. For better or worse, in Austen’s novels, the intense bonds we find between siblings often stem from an atypical family structure, sometimes a dysfunctional one. In this context, Catherine’s lack of such a special relationship indicates that all the children feel on a par with one another, and that the parents are doing a good job in making their many children feel loved and attended to.
Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility (C.E. Brock, public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
In Sense and Sensibility, Mr Dashwood’s remarriage and second family exemplifies a typical pattern of the era given the high mortality rate, especially for women in childbirth. And Elinor and Marianne are typical in being close in age and close to one another. However, the family does not appear to have maintained the separation between adults and children characteristic of the period. The smallness of the family accounts in part for this, but Mrs Dashwood’s character provides a more cogent reason. Mrs Dashwood behaves more like another sister than a mother, and in so doing fails to provide the guidance the family needs. Elinor has had to take over as the source of wisdom and leadership, although she lacks the authority to effectively reign in Marianne’s excesses. The lack of a true sibling culture points to a problem within this family.
John Dashwood is another problem. His failure to follow the wishes of his father by taking care of his sisters certainly characterises him as weak and irresponsible with readers today, but we might not share quite the same expectations about fraternal duty. Readers of Austen’s day would have seen additional moral deficits with respect to the culture of “voluntary kindness”: John is reprehensible not only for disregarding his dying father’s wishes, but also for ignoring cultural expectations about fraternal obligation, especially towards unmarried sisters. Sir John Middleton, as extended kin, fulfils this duty, offering a cottage to the Dashwood women at a price they can afford, as well as the status by association that his place in the community provides.
Pride and Prejudice exemplifies the clusters of siblings typical of larger families. Elizabeth and Jane form one alliance, likely a lot like that of Jane and Cassandra. They are on their own in this family, given their silly mother and absent father. Like Elinor, they—especially Elizabeth—are the voice of reason for others. Kitty and Lydia form another alliance, a parodic mirror, so that we have sense and silliness in this case. And then there is Mary, who is a loner within the household.
We can speculate: perhaps Mr Bennet hadn’t withdrawn so completely from family life when the two eldest girls were born and had some influence on their character. They might also have inherited his intelligence. Lydia, Kitty, and Mrs Bennet again form mother-daughter relationships that are more like sibling relationships, although to her credit, Mrs Bennet realizes the necessity of marrying her daughters—Mrs Dashwood completely jettisons pragmatic considerations. Poor Mary, excluded from both sets of alliances by dint of either birth order or personality, likely attempts to be brilliant as a way of trying to garner attention of any kind. We might also note the helpful presence of extended family, the Gardiners.
William Price speaking to Sir Thomas in Mansfield Park (C.E. Brock, public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
In Mansfield Park, Fanny and William are particularly close (the same is true of the Crawfords, an evil mirror). They might be well-suited temperamentally, but in the chaotic Price family, their relationship also has the feeling of emotional sanctuary, or, to use a naval metaphor, of a life raft. The closeness of this brother-sister relationship might well stem from the dysfunction of the Price family. These two nurture one another because scant nurture comes from their parents. While Fanny and Susan are not close at the start of the novel, Fanny fulfils her duty as an older sister by removing a sibling who shows potential from the destructive atmosphere of the Price family. They become close, repairing the lapses in family obligation so evident on the part of both the Prices and the Bertrams.
In Emma, the culture of siblings is important by its absence. Emma’s family structure would have been very unusual for the time, although one can see why it might have been difficult for a man of Mr Woodhouse’s temperament to remarry. There are only two children, and Isabella must be significantly older than Emma because she marries when Emma is in her early teens (the average age of marriage for women in England was 22). Age difference might be one reason the sisters are not close; another explanation is that these women are very different. In addition, apart from Isabella’s family, Emma and her father appear to lack the extended kin relationships that would have provided places for Emma to visit, where she might have formed other friendships and applied her lively mind to new material. In any case, humans are creatures of comparison, and Emma’s solitariness within a culture of large families would have been accentuated by the unusual nature of her family. Emma’s lack of a culture of siblings and extended kin—her singularity in more than one sense of the word—explains much of her solipsism and unchecked imagination.
In her loneliness as the unmarried sister still at home, Emma adopts several pseudo sisters. The first of these is “poor Miss Taylor,” and when she marries, Emma dreads the prospect of many long, lonely evenings spent in her father’s company. However, like the other wise sisters in Austen’s dysfunctional families, Miss Taylor lacks parental authority (or fails to exercise it). Emma then adopts Harriet Martin, but she is not really an appropriate companion. Jane Fairfax is another potential sister, but one for whom Emma feels jealousy and rivalry, a bit like one might feel for a more accomplished sister.
Anne Elliot and her sister Mary in Persuasion (C.E. Brock, public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
And finally there is Anne Elliot. While Catherine Morland’s family typifies a healthy psychological norm, the most typical of all the novels, Anne’s family is truly pathological. Sir Walter and Mr Elliot respectively fulfil diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder (Lady Elliot must have conveyed her values to Anne, who has also inherited her temperament and intelligence). Anne has two sisters, but her loneliness might be worse than that of the only child—again the comparison with the norm accentuates what she lacks. She does have a relationship with Mary but it is one-sided, with Anne giving but never receiving support or notice. The only thing she envies Louisa and Henrietta is their “seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters.” When Anne marries Frederick at the end of the novel, she gains not only a husband but the equivalent of a sibling in that she gains the companionship and support that she has missed in her own family, and that Austen appeared to enjoy with many of her own siblings - above all, her beloved sister.
© Wendy Jones - author of ‘Jane on the Brain: Exploring the Science of Social Intelligence with Jane Austen’
References
Davidoff, L. Thicker Than Water: Siblings and Their Relations 1780-1920. Oxford University Press, 2013.
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