Concepts of Family and Home in Jane Austens Persuasion Essay -- Jane

Concepts of Family and Home in Jane Austens Persuasion In Jane Austens last completed fabrication, Persuasion, England is one large family with two distinct branches, the dark blue and the blue upper class-it is no accident that the two large books consulted in the novel are the Baronetage and the Naval Lists. The naval family poses a threat to the aristocratic family in fact, undertones of social instability riddle the text, through imagery of death, illness, and accident. The marriages of Anne Elliott, Louisa Musgrove, and Harriet Musgrove interrupt a gentry which can only redeem itself through exogamy with the professional meritocratic class, symbolically taking on their values of emolument and social responsibility, and abandoning an idle aristocracy in decline. In Persuasion, the only novel of Austens that does not center around a landed estate, the letting of Kellynch vestibule shows an aristocracy ousted from its familial seats of power, in favor of the fashionable exis tence of Bath. Landed responsibility is given up for a hollow world of rented rooms and social display. The aristocracy is replaced in their hallowed hall by members of the new meritocracy, the Admiral and Mrs. Croft. The English navy has been world-renowned from the time of the Spanish Armada, in 1588, and played a key role in the expansion of the British Empire not only does the navy serve as an physical exertion of Englishness, it helped create that very notion of national identity. In Persuasion, Austen domesticates the navy, portraying it as one large brotherhood. In fact, Captain Wentworth cancels a trip to his biologic brother in order to visit his injured friend, Captain Harville. Officers treat transporting each others wives to and fro on their boats,... ... Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. London Penguin Classics, 2003. Beer, Gillian. Introduction. Persuasion. By Jane Austen. London Penguin Classics, 1998. vii-xxviii. Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the figh t of Ideas. 1975. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1987. Wiltshire, John. Jane Austen and the Body. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1992. Works Consulted Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. New York W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Colley, Linda. Britons Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New seaport Yale University Press, 1992. Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1997. Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1988.