Abstract: IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, interest in spiritual and physical comfort heightened as British people sought reposition their houses, bodies, and even souls on more comfortable plane. Jane Austen participates in changing perceptions of comfort, and, though her novels are suffused with its varied meanings, comfort and its importance Austen have not received much scholarly attention. (1) Instead, comfort's associations with leisure, redress of poverty, and expression of elegant taste in are consequences of reforming impulses of social theorists such as Thomas Malthus, according John Crowley (Luxury 147). For John Wiltshire, comfort its domestic meaning in later eighteenth century along with development of more leisured society so that it is clearly middle-class idea, relying on a material substrate, steady income, for security, placidity, and ease it evolved denote (Health 174). A member of middling classes, Austen partakes of her culture's preoccupation with comfort, and one of themes her novels explore is way that physical and psychological comforts sustain mental and emotional well-being of even as themselves comfort others. While comfort may be viewed now as state of consciousness, that perspective is informed by physical realities of eighteenth-century especially home under female supervision. For example, Marjorie Morgan reveals how male British tourists abroad felt incapable of bringing about the cheerful comfort of domesticity without aid of women (182-83). Woman's connection with home is not automatic or universal, but derives in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from Teutonic model, showcasing English home['s] ... association with domestic virtues of women, explains Paul Langford (105). In what Witold Rybczynski calls feminization of home, were now identified with that structure (72), where previously they had occupied no specific place. Langford notes that an home was said possess two essentials, wife and fire, both associated with comfort (115). This conflation of with comforts of recurring element in Austen's fiction, provides central crux of Mansfield Park, in which Mrs. Grant is initially character most adept at providing comfort. Tending her husband, gluttonous clergyman fifteen years her senior, who thinks himself ill if meat is imperfectly cooked, keeps young wife from social engagements (171). Mrs. Grant is stoical about her less-than-ideal marriage, explaining her siblings, Mary and Henry Crawford, that '[t]here will be little rubs and disappointments every where,' although 'if one scheme of fails, human nature turns another; if first calculation is wrong, we make second better; we find comfort somewhere--' (46). True her word, Mrs. Grant finds comfort in providing comfort for others by setting hospitable table at parsonage and in aiding Crawfords and Bertrams in rehearsing Lover's Vows (215; 159). Mary commends her older sister for her ability 'be plagued very often and never lose your temper' (213). Mansfield Park's narrator also praises Mrs. Grant's temperament, her tendency to love and be loved, so that though she leaves Mansfield after her brother's disgraceful affair with Maria Bertram Rushworth, her happiness of disposition will inevitably secure her great deal enjoy (469). Mrs. Grant excellently fulfills her duty as parson's wife, modeling role Fanny Price will inherit after Grants quit Mansfield permanently and Fanny marries Edmund. Like Mrs. Grant, Fanny excels at comforting those around her, but comfort that Mrs. Grant derives from comforting others is denied heroine herself for much of novel, thanks Aunt Norris's propensity for depriving Fanny of comfort. (2) Taken from her lower class Portsmouth home at age of ten live with her wealthy relations, Fanny can only imagine that 'it would be delightful feel myself of consequence any body! …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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