Novel Craft

‘An office in which she had always depended’: Surrogate Managers in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Persuasion

“…62 Throughout the novel Mrs Norris is portrayed as attempting to present herself as someone whose contributions to the household are representative of a 'thrifty, skilful mode of domestic management', and in direct opposition to her sister's inertia. 63 Despite this, she is portrayed as constantly expecting to be complimented for useless managerial work and even for work that she does not actually do. For instance, one of the things Mrs Norris boasts about the most is her resourcefulness and the benefits it brings to Mansfield Park: 'I am of some use I hope in preventing waste and making the most of things.'…”

Rape in Public: Overlooking Child Sexual Assault in Charlotte Mary Yonge'sThe Daisy Chain

“…The picturesque, famously, is an aesthetic perspective that softens the disruptive details of a landscape for the sake of harmony; Yonge herself uses this perspective in The Daisy Chain, as Schaffer argues, to describe colonial life in the Loyalty Islands, resorting to picturesque description in order to repress the "political struggles, cultural conflicts, daily work, religious practices and local traditions" that would necessarily sully a pleasurable European perspective. 24 By denying Ethel this capacity for distanciation, Yonge ensures that her protagonist cannot overlook sites of conflict or scenes of abuse, and her myopia eventually becomes a talent for accurately reading people's faces, as her eldest brother Richard denotes (66), and a Cassandra-like ability to see danger to the family, especially in the faces of strangers who present themselves as "intimate friends." Ethel "takes an aversion" to George Rivers "on the spot"; while he is not without "a certain comeliness," he has "deep, lusterless eyes, and a heavy straight bush of black moustache, veiling rather thick lips" (305).…”

“…. notice is notice to the white Mayflower, and there is my anxiety-I am afraid it is not wholesome to be too engaging ever to get a rebuff" (43). Indeed, Blanche's unwholesome "flirtations" with older men are so well established in the novel by the time George Rivers appears on the scene that they are overlooked only in the sense that they entertain everyone; everybody in the family sees and notices the way "the affected little pussycat," as Ethel terms her at one point, bridles and talks in a mincing voice when male strangers are present, everybody bears witness to and is somewhat relieved by the fact that little Blanche takes the sexual burden of attraction away from her older sisters, making men like visiting doctor Sir Matthew Fleet "take a great deal of notice of her" instead of transferring their attention to the bigger girls (111).…”

“…Flora's unprecedented enthusiasm about orphan asylums bewilders both Miss Bracy and the reader, but it works to remind us that legions of vulnerable girls haunt the pages of The Daisy Chain; as Schaffer has noted, the impoverished village of Cocksmoor, where Ethel devotes so much of her emotional and actual labor, is primarily populated by women and girls, as if to provide a deep enough bench for scenes of female suffering and a wider array of doppelgängers for the daisies at the center of Yonge's narrative. 31 Iterative patterns of abuse and assault are simply an expected part of the "heterosexual life narrative" for legions of overlooked women and children, Yonge seems to insist. 32 Both careless fathers and "willing Clytemnestras" are needed to enable the cycle, or circle, of abuse and subsequent misprision of abuse.…”

“…Her contemporary critics grappled with the social and cultural meanings of her novels, in which characters, including ambitious and intellectual female characters, "start as delightfully rebellious youths who must be painfully, painstakingly trained to adhere to the law." 33 What Gavin Budge identified as a conflict between realism and typology has often meant that readers of Yonge usually read with one eye shut; if you follow the realism, you might overlook the larger typological reflex that conditions Yonge's narratives around Christian traditions of sacrifice, and if you follow the typology you might overlook Yonge's unruly realism, her scenes of disruption that take place at church charity bazaars or at the town hall on the eve of a parliamentary election. 34 But the typology of sacrifice in The Daisy Chain is less Christian than classical, perhaps because archaic rituals better spotlight the specific forms of female suffering required by the heteronormative conventions of family life.…”