Write
a note on novel of manners with special reference to Jane Austen.
Or:
Write
a note on Jane Austen as a novelist.
Ans:-
The novel of manners belongs to the gene of realistic
fiction. In novel of manners the focus is on customs, manners, attitude and
idiosyncrasies of people in a society. Jane Austen can be termed as a novelist
working on the novel of manners. She was the greatest woman novelist during
first part at the 19th century. She wrote six novels, yet all of the
bear the stamp of her craft and artifice. Jane Austen was a highly sophisticated
artist with all scrupulosity that is associated with a neat and clean artist.
In the opinion of W.L. Cross, “She is one of the sincerest example in our literature of
art for art’s sake.” She was a serious and conscious writer, absorbed
in her art wrestling with its problems. When we
compare Jane Austen’s work with Scott’s writings, the hastiness of a man, then
we see Jane Austen did her work with the dexterity of a skilled artist. She has
been considered as a writer of pure novel.
In the novels of Jane Austen, we
do not have anything of the atmosphere which Emily Bronte could create in ‘Wuthering Heights’. Her novels do not represent stormy
passions and high tragedy of emotional life. She was primarily concerned with
the comedy of domestic life and it was to this that she again and again
directed attention in her works. Jane Austen chose a limited back ground in her
novels. Her novels would be recognised
as ‘Domestic’ or ‘Tea –table’ novels
and the reader seeking anything like high romance in her works would be disappointed.
Jane Austen was the supreme
realist among the novelist of her age. Her stories are all drawn from the life
that she knew. All her stories turn on personal relationship between friends,
between parents and children, between men and women in love. Sir Walter Scott
wrote on his diary that the talent of Jane Austen as a realist was ‘The Most
Wonderful’, he had ever met with.
Jane Austen great skill lies in
plot contraction. Her skillfully constructed plots are really the highest
object of artistic perfection. Her plots are simple but pervasive and all the
incidents that are introduced have their particular meaning. Her stories are
meticulously integrated, not a character, not an episode but makes its
necessary contributions to the development of a plot. She makes her incidents
so natural and characters are so independent. ‘Emma’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ are as logically as constructed as
a detective story.
The characters of Jane Austen
are minutely portrayed and accurately described. In her novels, we come across many clergymen
such as Mr. Collins in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and Jane Thorp
in ‘Northanger
Abbey’. Her male characters have
a certain softness of temper but her female characters are almost quite
complex. Mary Crawford is a complex
mixture of sympathy and selfishness, shallowness and common sense. Emma
provides the study of women who is a mixture of vanity willfulness and
fundamental generous feeling.
Jane Austen’s characters are not
only living but are also original. It means that she does not borrow from her
predecessors, or repeats what they have already created. She paints fresh
portraits and new men and women. Her characters are governed by the comic point
of view. All her heroines are touched with the comic spirit. Emma, Elizabeth and Anne Eliot are
creatures of flesh and blood and are able to laugh, if not be bughted at.
Jane Austen was a satirist as
well as a moralist. In ‘Sense and
sensibility’, she satires to much of sentimentality in the characters of Marianne. In ‘Northanger Abbey’, her satire is directed against the Gothic
Romance. Her novels are good lessons in morality.
Jane Austen’s attitude towards
life as presented in her novels is of a ‘humorist’.
Jane Austen was a comedian also. Her first literary impulse was humours and
the end of her life, humour was an integral part of her creative process. “I dearly love a laugh” says Elizabeth in “Pride
and Prejudice” and this statement equally applies to the novelist. Austen
never leaves the realm of comedy. This is her special province.
From the above discussion, we
can say that Jane Austen is undoubtedly the greatest women novelist of the
early 19th century. Her novels present beautifully the manners in
Southern England at the early 19th century. Her characters are more
taken mostly from the aristocracy and upper and middle class of the English
village. All the features of the novel of manners are available in Jane Austen’s
novels and so, finally she is called the finest and foremost novelist of the
novel of manners.
Wish you all the best
& best of luck, by your dearest & nearest Podmeswar