Abstract
Morrissey examines representations of needlework in Smith’s The Old Manor House and Austen’s Mansfield Park to reveal how these authors staged the conflict between women’s work as agency and women’s work as enforcing gender inequality. In The Old Manor House in particular, the heroine’s work with needles and pins exposes the sexual desire that underwrites masculine codes of chivalry and romantic love. In Mansfield Park, women’s work emerges as a subtle but powerful force in structuring social relationships and domesticity. Further, Fanny Price’s embroidery and plain work enable privacy and quiet reflection, and as such are implicated in Austen’s imagined construction of interiority. The chapter also charts how Austen links women’s work to an overarching ideology of taste, thereby shedding new light on the author’s sociopolitical and cultural values.
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Notes
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For a detailed analysis of the social functions of consuming leisure , see Thorstein Veblen (2009).
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The role of status in social relationships, and the mechanisms women might employ in negotiating this, are worked out more thoroughly in Chap. 5, dealing with sensibility in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde. Where Fanny uses domestic activity to affirm her low status, Smith’s heroine uses sensibility as a means of redressing inequality between men and women.
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Morrissey, J. (2018). Needlework in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park . In: Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770-1820. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70356-5_2
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