Abstract
In this chapter, I examine the patterns of walking and dancing in the novels. I look at walking as a physical, emotional, and social act touching deep layers of characters’ consciousness. I deal mainly with three heroines: Elizabeth Bennet, who is the most physical walker, Marianne Dashwood, who is the most emotional, and Emma Woodhouse, who is the best example of a social walker. Dancing, on the other hand, often generates strong and contradictory emotions ranging from joy and happiness to frustration and disappointment, thus making it a more problematic and tense experience than walking. I look at the emotional implications and the physical aspect of dancing, as well as the spatiotemporal specificity of the ballroom as a living space. In addition, I analyse the place of dance within different cyclical structures of human life and its impact on linear events.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
See D. Le Faye’s chapter on female fashion (93).
- 2.
Claudia L. Johnson remarks that this passage demonstrates how “Austen’s early work sides with the body and its vigors, particularly as these give the lie to restrictive, high-blown notions of female delicacy” (22). Johnson contrasts this example with Persuasion , where “the pain rather than the vigor of the body […] seems to occupy Austen’s attention” (22). In this case, we could draw a parallel with the declining health of the author herself. However, her last, unfinished novel Sanditon , which she wrote while fatally ill, deals with the severe cases of hypochondria rather than any real feebleness of the body.
- 3.
Charlotte must have felt pressure from her family to accept any eligible marriage proposal she could get, for she was 27 years old and not a good looking woman. This is because at this time women’s “economic security lay in male hands—fathers’, brothers’, husbands’” (H. Jones, 2). In the novel we learn that Charlotte’s brothers “were relieved from their apprehension of Charlotte’s dying an old maid” (137), because after the death of the father, her brothers would have had to take care of her.
- 4.
See Le Faye, 89.
- 5.
According to Tanner, Marianne is torn between, what Foucault calls “the absolute exteriority of other people” and “the irreversible interiority of passion and unfulfilled desire” (84). She falls ill from not being able to “join in the social masquerade” (84) and find a sociably acceptable “outward form.” As a contrast to Marianne, he points out Elinor’s exceptional ability to cover screens, seeing them as a symbolic device to “preserve society” from private feelings, thus, as a selfless act (86).
- 6.
According to Franco Moretti, the fact that in her novels, Austen often marries people coming from different counties is significant and new.
It means that these novels try to represent what social historians refer to as “the National Marriage Market”: a mechanism that crystallized in the course of the eighteenth century, which demands of human beings (and especially of women) a new mobility: physical, and even more so, spiritual mobility. (15)
Thus, they should be able to feel the “nation-state” as “a true home-land” (15). However, Moretti is missing a step in this process: women are fetched by men from their original home .
- 7.
See Jones 45–49 and Pool 78–81.
- 8.
See Fullerton, 15–16.
- 9.
According to D. A. Miller, Elizabeth is wrong when she supposes Darcy has “a very satirical eye” (P&P 24) for he is “far too stiff for that” (43). Miller claims that: “Elizabeth is projectively mistaking him for the only person she knows who does have such an eye, namely, her own father, who is continually casting it, to disdainful effect, on the female members of the household” (43). If that is the case, Darcy must be incapable of making an ironic offer. However, we can clearly hear irony in some of his other comments, for instance, his remark on Wickham during the two dances he shares with Elizabeth (102–103).
- 10.
For D. Siegel and R. Handler, who comment on the etiquette at the time, men had a moral obligation to choose a dancing partner “among the possible choices” (326), and they assert that at balls “each woman may be treated differently by each man, but women must be treated alike by men” (326).
- 11.
Fullerton explains that lack of dancing partners came from the “real shortage of men” (95) because of the war with France: approximately 100,000 men were in the army, and 130,000 in the navy. Many of them got killed, others spent their time fighting in Europe or at sea. Moreover, the expansion of the British Empire “was also starting to lure young men away” (96).
- 12.
See Fullerton (99–112) and Wilson (26–34) for details concerning different country dance patterns.
- 13.
See Davidoff, 21.
- 14.
D. A. Siegal and R. Handler point out that married people’s “dance activities serve frequently to facilitate the dancing of those who should dance, that is, the young and marriageable” (326).
- 15.
Fullerton explains that as dancing was a social activity, a couple dancing always together would neglect “their duties as members of that community” (84).
- 16.
Mr Darcy, however, might have meant for her to hear it for he turns around and looks at Elizabeth “till catching her eye” (12).
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deidre Le Faye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006a.
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Ed. Edward Copeland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006b.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Pat Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006c.
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. John Wiltshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005a.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005b.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Ed. Janet Todd and Antje Blank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Austen, Jane. Later Manuscripts. Ed. Janet Todd and Linda Bree. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Austen, Jane. Letters. Ed. Deidre Le Faye. 3rd edition. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Secondary Sources
Amato, Joseph A. On Foot: A History of Walking. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
Davidoff, Leonore. The Best Circles. Society, Etiquette and The Season. London: Croom Helm, 1973.
Fullerton, Susannah. A Dance with Jane Austen. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2012.
Hanna, Judith Lynne. To Dance is Human. A Theory of Nonverbal Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Jones, Hazel. Jane Austen & Marriage. London: Continuum, 2009.
Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen. The World of her Novels. London: Frances Lincoln, 2002.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Miller, D. A. Jane Austen or the Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998.
Pidduck, Julianne “Of windows and country walks: frames of space and movement in 1990s Austen adaptations.” Screen 39.4 (1998): 381–400.
Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. New York: Touchstone, 1993.
Segal, Daniel A. and Richard Handler. “Creative Dance and Dramatic Sensibility in Jane Austen, Ethnographer” in Man, New Series 24. 2 (1989): 322–339.
Sulloway, Alison G. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. London: Macmillan, 1986.
Wallace, Anne D. Walking, Literature, and English Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Wilson, Cheryl A. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Worsley, Lucy. Jane Austen at Home. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baublyté Kaufmann, R. (2018). Spatiotemporal Movement and Psychological Change: Walking and Dancing. In: The Architecture of Space-Time in the Novels of Jane Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90011-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90011-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90010-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90011-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)