Superfluous, Invisible, and Invalid

Hall, Lynda A

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50736-1_6

Superfluous, Invisible, and Invalid

Lynda A Hall²

Chapter
First Online: 03 February 2017

569 Accesses

Abstract

Many women in England’s long eighteenth century found themselves unvalued creatures within a world that saw only their (lack of) monetary worth. These vulnerable superfluous women struggle to retain their intrinsic value even as they have lost their expressed value. Both Emma’s Miss Bates and Persuasion’s Mrs. Smith have fallen from a more prominent place in society: they are poor, childless, and have been aged out of the marriage market. They play an important, albeit minor, role in the novels, each fighting her superfluity while exposing the pitiful state of the poor unmarried woman, ultimately warning the heroine of a plight she might have realized had circumstances been slightly different. Miss Bates has already disappeared from a marriage market in which she had little expressed value, and it is her struggle to assert her intrinsic value within her small corner of society that is both comic and distressing, yet ultimately revelatory. Mrs. Smith is a widow who was at one time successful on the marriage market but has found herself dependent on charity, and she must assert her tarnished but ultimately reclaimable intrinsic value to retrieve her lost fortune. Becoming a superfluous woman was a palpable danger for women in early nineteenth-century England because they had little expressed value. Miss Bates and her humility, Mrs. Smith and her resilience, expose an often overlooked dark side of women’s reality and provide a means to demonstrate the intrinsic value of apparent superfluous women while reflecting the difficult world in which they live.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 89.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 119.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 119.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Unmarried women were often referred to as “redundant” or “surplus,” especially after the 1851 census that officially counted them for the first time. Oxford English Dictionary defines “superfluous” as “abundant or numerous to the point of excess; more than sufficient.” Since these women are assumed within their society to not have a real function, they were sometimes referred to as “superfluous.”
2.
W. R. Greg, Why Are Women Redundant? (London: M Trübner & Co., 1869), 17–8.
3.
Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of “spinster”: In 1617, John Minsheu’s Ductor in linguas: The guide into tongues etc. listed “Spinster” as “a terme, or an addition in our Common Law, onely added in Obligations, Euidences, and Writings, vnto maids vnmarried.”
4.
D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 36.
5.
Oxford English Dictionary defines “old maid” as “A woman who remains single beyond the ordinary marrying age; an elderly spinster. Freq. derogatory.”
6.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 380–1.
7.
Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing and Printing Corp., 2007), 132.
8.
John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (Dublin: John Colles, 1774), 47.
9.
Miller, Secret of Style, 36.
10.
Devoney Looser, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 81.
11.
Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 107.
12.
By pseudo-gentry, I am referring to those like the Westons and the Coles who are just moving into land-owning, gentry status, or the Eltons, who mingle with the landowners as representatives of the clergy.
13.
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 257.
14.
Jenny Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 45.
15.
Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, introduction to The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3.
16.
Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don; The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans., Ian Cunnison, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967), 72.
17.
Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 94.
18.
Ibid., 93.
19.
Ibid., 146.
20.
Looser, Women Writers and Old Age, 14.
21.
Emily Auerbach, Searching for Jane Austen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 209.
22.
Butler, War of Ideas, 271.
23.
Linda Zionkowski, “The Nation, the Gift, and the Market in The Wanderer,” In The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, eds., Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 179.
24.
Isobel Grundy, “Why Do They Talk So Much? How Can We Stand It? John Thorpe and Miss Bates,” The Talk in Jane Austen, eds., Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002), 50.
25.
Mauss, The Gift, 15. Mauss explains that though his data is drawn from ethnographic studies based on societies bordering the Pacific Ocean, “institutions of this type are a step in the development of our own economic forms, and serve as a historical explanation of our own society,” 46.
26.
Marilyn Francus,“’Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift.” In The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, eds., Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 98.
27.
Copeland, Women Writing about Money, 107–8.
28.
Sheryl Craig, Jane Austen and the State of the Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 122.
29.
Zionkowski and Klekar, introduction to The Culture of the Gift, 3.
30.
Ibid., 1.
31.
Looser, Women Writers and Old Age, 91.
32.
Ibid., 92.
33.
Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 25.
34.
K. K. Collins, “Prejudice, Persuasion, and the Puzzle of Mrs. Smith,” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 6 (1984): 40.
35.
K. K. Collins, “Mrs. Smith and the Morality of Persuasion,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3 (1975): 395.
36.
Marc Cyr, “Bad Morality, Truth, and Mrs. Smith in Persuasion” Eighteenth-Century Novel 4 (2004): 205.
37.
Harris, Revolution, 98.
38.
Ibid., 199.
39.
Paula Byrne, “‘The Unmeaning Luxuries of Bath’: Urban Pleasures in Jane Austen’s World,” Persuasions, The Jane Austen Journal 26 (2004), 23.
40.
Harris, A Revolution, 177.
41.
Stephen C. Behrendt,“Women without Men: Barbara Hofland and the Economics of Widowhood,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17, no. 3 (2005): 481.
42.
Maxine Berg, “Women’s Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Social History 30, no. 2 (1996): 416, 237.
43.
Elsie B. Michie, The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), xii.
44.
Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd. 1989), 257–8.
45.
Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 167.
46.
Copeland, Women Writing, 27.
47.
Karen Bloom Gervitz, Life after Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2005), 20.
48.
Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 244, 234.
49.
See Cyr, “Bad Morality,” 199, and Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 192.
50.
Duckworth, Improvement of the Estate, 4–5.
51.
John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 166.
52.
Gloria Sybil Gross, “Flights into Illness: Some Characters in Jane Austen,” In Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, eds., Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter, (London: Routledge, 1993), 193.
53.
Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate, 3.
54.
Laura Fairchild Brodie, “Society and the Superfluous Female: Jane Austen’s Treatment of Widowhood,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34 no. 4 (1994): 716.
55.
Ibid., 699.
56.
Looser, Women Writers and Old Age, 81.
57.
Ruth Perry, “Interrupted Friendships in Jane Austen’s Emma,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5, no. 2 (1986): 195–6.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Department of English, Chapman University, Orange, California, USA
Lynda A Hall

Authors

Lynda A Hall
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hall, L.A. (2017). Superfluous, Invisible, and Invalid. In: Women and ‘Value’ in Jane Austen’s Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50736-1_6

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50736-1_6
Published: 03 February 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50735-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50736-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics