Cyclical Concealment of Understanding Pertaining to Literacy Sponsorship and Legalese can be found via URL:
​
​
Jane Austen’s “of Love and Friendship”: A Satirical Critique of Incautious Idolization
While common knowledge that Jane Austen wrote on women’s dependence on men for social standing and economic salvation, it is just as true that Austen wrote other social commentary. “Of Love and Friendship” is an example of a work through which Austen critiques both genders of gentry. Having taken a stance wherein Austen asserts that the main characters of popular literature were bad examples for those reading it, this compilation of fictional letters serves as a guide to what behaviors Austen felt were being unwisely promoted and normalized through novels of her day. This paper is going to supply a short summarization of “of Love and Friendship,” as well as outline the vices that Austen feels are being perpetuated through popular literature. As for what those vices are, there are many possibilities. The ones going to be touched on in this paper would be sensibility and defying parents as well as the repercussions of those vices.
The opening is a letter written by Isabel to Laura, wherein Isabel expresses that she wishes Laura to convey her story to her daughter, Marianne. Laura’s story is a sad one- dawning with the excitement of a doomed marriage of an exceedingly young couple, continuing with the living off of other people and credit, as well as jail and death. She ends her story living out her days off of an allowance from the father of who once was her husband. Throughout the journey, Laura often writes about times during which they had no answers and relied on turning to someone else to solve their problems. The girls, Laura and her friend Sophia, were mostly unconcerned with the repercussions of their decisions, and largely relied on their husbands, their husbands’ families, and their families to support their survival. These are ladies of “quality” who purported themselves to be mistresses “of every accomplishment accustomary” to females.
The younger folk in this story are found to be making a lot of decisions that impact others. Having little regard for their families or social ties, the girls are narrated to steal from basically everyone they go to stay with, citing the family member’s insufferable character as an excuse that makes stealing okay. This is shown through more than just the girls, however. Near the end of the compilation, Austen highlights the actions of two male cousins to Laura. Having been born to a set of poor single mothers, the boys decided at 15 to steal all of the money that their mothers had hidden away, using it to live off of for two months. The boys were going to then return to their mothers, but they had found out that they had starved to death. They looked at this as more of an affliction than a consequence, and further showed no indication that they felt at all responsible for their mothers’ demise. The same could be said of Laura and Sophia when Sophia was caught stealing from her friend Janetta’s father. Instead of looking at her own behavior as wrong, Sophia saw the accusation itself as an affliction to her dignity, instead of her stealing as wrong.
I would argue that the most forthright reason for Austen including these similar instances is to highlight the egocentric nature of these characters. Compounded to theft without remorse is the story of Sophia and Augustus, where they told their neighbors that “their happiness centered wholly in themselves, (so) they wished for no other society”. Due to them distancing themselves from society for purely selfish reasons, they had no support system in place to help them acquire new methods of income. Laura later speaks with Isabel and says how Isabel found fault with her responses to the situations she had been placed in, highlighting the fact that Laura views everything as happening to her instead of analyzing her reactions to things happening around her. Without the ability to analyze her responses further than how they represent her sensibility, she is often found acting in ways that are anything but helpful.
The concept of sensibility during this time period was on the rise, with many stories and novels creating characters that did away with the veil between acceptable behavior and what they felt. The premise of this ideology was to be fully enveloped within one’s emotions. So boisterous was their representation of their feelings that many paid attention, leading to the idolization that Austen wrote these letters to warn against. The defying of parents and following one’s own sensibility are correlated enough, but what about the lack of accountability that stems from both?
The younger generation were bent on defying their parents, with Laura meeting her husband when he ran away from his father because Sir Edward, the father, wanted Edward, the son, to marry Lady Dorthea. He liked Dorthea, but because his father had recommended he marry her, he refused and labeled his father “a mean and mercenary wretch”. Edward goes on to state that “never shall it be said that I obliged my Father". Laura saw this response as noble and manly, and this is how they went on to get married. This trend is shown many times in this short story, with Janetta’s story being another example. Bridget, a “mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman”, who listened to her mother, was held in contempt by Laura and Sophia and is an example of the condemnation of listening to one’s parents.
Jane Austen, in “of Love and Friendship”, is illustrating the negative characteristics that are being normalized through the literature of her time, as well as warning what people who emulate such behaviors may encounter as repercussions. The dishonest and impetuous vices of these youths are akin to their virtues, with being in touch with your emotions in an almost over stimulating way the largest indication of social prowess. This compilation serves as a warning and illustration of idolizing unwise virtues while turning a blind eye to their respective vices.
Paper on Sue Thomas’s “Genealogies of Story in Jean Rhys’s ‘The Day They Burned the Books’”
​
The article “Geanieologies of Story in Jean Rhys’s ‘The Day They Burned the Books’” (2021) by Sue Thomas provides insightful analyses on many aspects of the work “The Day They Burned the Books” (1960). Among these analyses are how this work represents the return of Rhys’s “sense of (a) literary vocation” (Thomas, p 1), as well as how the other works Rhys incorporated into this piece represent a deeper level of symbolism, and how this “story is the earliest known exploration of what has been termed ‘the daffodil gap’ (Thomas, p 1). This paper will be discussing the key highlights of Sue Thomas’s article and how they provide an insightful way to read “The Day They Burned the Books.”
Jean Rhys was left disturbed by WWII, and she didn’t want to write for a while. Sue Thomas asserts that this piece, the first after a long hiatus, marks Rhys’s return to the literary field. Rhys had a journal, called the “Black Exercise Book” wherein Rhys would write about things that inspired her. It was here that she wrote descriptions of her West Indies home that are seen throughout “The Day They Burned the Books.” The realism of this piece is rooted partly in the fact that many of these scenes were taken directly out of the author’s childhood.
Thomas informs her audience that Rhys intended to publish this work under a different title- “Fort Comme La Mort”- which meant ‘strong as death.’ This is also a biblical allusion to the Song of Solomon, as it mentions “for love is strong as death” (Thomas, p 8). Thomas also informs her audience that when Eddie references his mother’s inability to make up a story other than gossip (Thomas, p 7), that he is having his imagination be fueled by scenes from Mr. Sawyer’s The Arabian Nights. Rhys also refers to Wordsworth’s work “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” with great emphasis on daffodils. Sue Thomas argues that there are multiple layers of symbolism attributed to the insertion of daffodils. The daffodil gap is a term that is being used to coin the dissonance between groups after colonization.
In “The Day They Burned the Books,” daffodils are used to represent the English's love for the English. Wordsworth’s poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” is largely about how beautiful the landscape is with these glorious daffodils. This is seen as a symbol of how greatly most of English descent would hold their heritage. Thomas also informs us that “daffodils, which are in the plant genus narcissus, named for the legendary character Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection, are native to the Iberian Peninsula, and have naturalized in England” (Thomas, p 5). In this quote, Thomas relates that not only do daffodils have a direct relationship with narcissism, but they also have a symbol of England’s natural landscape. This serves as a platform for Thomas’s argument that while both daffodils and Mrs. Sawyer’s mango tree shows the effects of imperialism, Rhy’s real intention for inserting them is to highlight the contention between “the temperate and the tropical” (Thomas, p 5). These different regions have been associated with different stereotypes, and with the mango tree the universality of this story is truly highlighted.
The mango tree is from South-east Asia, which is another “tropical” climate. Tropical climate regions were often seen as less modern, and therefore had the connotation of “lesser than” or primitive. This, paired with the English’s tendency to have opinions of white supremacy, allowed for the English to try and culturally dominate the areas it imperialized. They would take things from cultures all over their empire and exoticize them, using them as a symbol of their culture’s dominating pervasiveness.
This dominating pervasiveness found within English culture is one reason Sue Thomas argues that Mrs. Sawyer wanted to burn the books. The books represented a class and culture that she was barred from being a part of. Mr. Sawyer is blatantly abusive and racist towards Mrs. Sawyer, and Mrs. Sawyer sees the books as the creation of a culture that endorses that type of treatment of her. Thomas argues that Mrs. Sawyer did not want these symbols of “cultural heritage” (Thomas, p 6) to affect her relationship with her son, Eddie. Thomas urges that Mrs. Sawyer was selling the books to help provide for her son, and relished the opportunity to dismantle something her husband had barred her from due to his racism.
Overall, this article gives deep insight to a great number of symbols that are placed throughout the work. It shows how careful Rhys was about what was referenced throughout her work, and each title and reference made relates to the overall theme of racism and class inequalities in the aftermath of colonial imperialism. This is the basic premise for the daffodil gap, which is first seen within the work “The Day They Burned the Books.” This way of interpreting Rhys’s work helps us to understand the gravity of what Rhys is really trying to say about daffodils, mango trees, and systemic oppression.