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Sodeman DomesticMobilityPersuasion 2005
Sodeman DomesticMobilityPersuasion 2005
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Literature, 1500-1900
Domestic Mobi
Persuasion and Sanditon
MELISSA SODEMAN
struggle to "find a h
ines, after all, can
hunting was a seri
dispossessed by primogeniture, and few?if any?of Austen's
female protagonists were entirely immune to the threat of home-
lessness. Certainly NorthangerAbbey, Sense and Sensibiiity, and
Mansfield Park feature heroines in search of homes of their own.
Catherine Morland acquires her home once she learns to read
appropriately Gothic warnings about paternal figures; Elinor and
Marianne Dashwood both manage to establish homes independent
ofthe patriarchal system that disinherited them, though in doing
so they must renounce the larger world; and Fanny Price strives
to make a place for herself in her adopted home of Mansfield,
first as a cousin who is constantly reminded "she is not a Miss
Bertrarrf8 and later as a daughter ofthe house whose position has
been legitimized by marriage to Edmund.9 Emma's heroine does
not face immediate or potential expulsion from her father's home
but rather stands to inherit it upon his death. Though she never
faces the problem of finding "a house she could live in," Emma
Woodhouse must learn instead that having a stable residence
does not ensure domestic felicity, which comes only when she can
live together with those she loves, her father and Mr. Knightley,
in the home she makes for them at Hartfield. Emma, then, can
be seen as revising the model of house hunting established in
Austen's earlier novels. While early heroines searched for a partner
who could provide them with suitable homes, Emma discovers
the benefits of having a partner with whom to share the home
she already has. But Auerbach's conceptual paradigm, however
useful it may be when applied to Pride and Prefudice, Mansfield
Park, and even Emma, breaks down entirely when brought to
bear upon Persuasion.
Unlike her earlier works, Austen's last completed novel re?
fuses categorization as a story of house hunting or as a tale of
the establishment of tranquil domestic life. Rather, Persuasion
struggles to imagine domesticity itself in positive, or even stable,
terms. Anne Elliot's domestic life is anything but stable over
the course of the narrative. Forced to leave her childhood home
of Kellynch-hall due to the fiscal mismanagement of her fa
and sister, Anne becomes itinerant and thus relies upon othe
for her place of residence.10 Throughout Persuasion, Anne
in no fewer than five residences. In no other Austen novel does
a heroine experience such domestic dislocation. Even Elizabeth
Bennet, whose great energy and athleticism prove shocking to
a sailor's wife" and "the dread of a future war [is] all that could
dim her sunshine" (p. 168), the novel gives very little information
about how Anne's married life is conducted. Significantly, Austen's
most mobile heroine has "a very pretty landaulette" as the novel
ends, but no home, "no landed estate, no headship of a family"
(p. 166). Her domestic experience remains dislocated, as it has
been since the Elliots took leave of Kellynch.
This dislocation allows Persuasion to map the domestic onto
social and public spaces such as the assembly hall or the street.16
In this way the domestic functions according to Doreen Massey's
definition of place, which "is constructed out ofa particular con-
stellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a
particular locus."17 Further, place for Massey is in process and
is unique; it is not bounded by simple enclosures but is linked
to the outside in such a way that the outside is constitutive of
the domestic place itself; and it is internally conflicted. Massey's
work provides a conceptualization of place that allows us to re?
gard the domestic as a set of social relations not confined to the
home, but linked to local, national, and global preoccupations.
The domestic no longer neatly corresponds to the household in
Persuasion. Rather, Anne's attentive devotion to the domestic con?
cerns of her friends takes her far outside a circumscribed home
life and involves her instead in what the novel calls "domestic
society" (p. 62).
Anne's removal from home and alienation from family
the breakdown in the novel of a circumscribed and traditional
domesticity. Moreover, her itinerancy comes to seem more
ally secure than does the confined home she has so recent
behind. "We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forge
she tells Captain Benwick as they debate whether men or w
are more constant. "It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our
We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confine
our feelings prey upon us" (p. 155). Anne here considers w
isolation in the home as emotionally damaging confinement
that differs markedly from the affective and nostalgic perspe
she had of home months earlier. She thus denounces women's
isolation in the home as a form of emotional incarceration, one
all the more suffocating for its nostalgic pull upon sentimental
attachments.
Persuasion licenses female mobility by associating it?rath
than the settled, homebound existence recommended by cond
literature?with virtue. Anne Elliot, who is "almost too good"
heroine for Austen,18 defies the domestic injunctions of fi
II
III
elegant Building"
exposes them to m
ously. The curren
called the Hilliers, "did not seem to feel the Storms last Winter
at all.?I remember," Mrs. Parker remarks, "seeing Mrs. Hillier
after one of those dreadful Nights, when we had been literally
rocked in our bed, and she did not seem at all aware ofthe Wind
being anything more than common." But such evidence does
not quell Mr. Parker's enthusiasm for his hilltop perch: " We have
all the Grandeur ofthe Storm," he insists, finding in the trendy
language of the sublime an additional recommendation for his
new home (p. 337).
Just as the Parkers have left their family home for Trafalgar
House, so too has the town moved from the old village of Sandi?
ton to a new site near the sea. Lifelong inhabitants of the town
become travelers themselves, moving from their homes as though
they are lodgings. In a town in which even permanent residents
relocate constantly, domesticity itself is on the move. Such do?
mestic mobility reveals Austen's recognition that the meaning
of domesticity is unstable and constantly shifting during her
lifetime. No longer signifying a settled existence within the home,
domesticity in Sanditon comes to be associated instead with the
social relations of travel and the commercial transactions of the
marketplace.
Mobility becomes a crucial marker for modernity in Austen's
novel as in her culture. When Charlotte leaves the "lonely place"
(p. 327) of home for the bustle of Sanditon, her departure calls
attention to a new protocol of mobility characterizing youth th
distinguishes it from the customs ofan older generation. Mr. an
Mrs. Heywood, "older in Habits than in Age" (p. 330), remain a
home while encouraging their children to get out "into the Worl
(p. 330). Rather than belonging exclusively to women, domestic
ity offers pleasure and gratification to parents of both gender
while their sons and daughters come and go as opportunity per?
mits. Quiet domestic experience at Willingden is here opposed
to life in "the World," life that Mr. and Mrs. Heywood imagine
will provide "useful connections or respectable acquaintance"
(p. 330). Austen thus introduces her heroine "into the World,"
a world synechdotally?and not entirely ironically?represented
as Sanditon. This small seaside town stands at the crossroads
of national and global patterns of migration, where Bri
mestic tourists cross paths with the "half Mulatto" (p. 3
Indian heiress Miss Lambe, whose illness presumably results
(pp. 346-7)
failing to embody
produce in their readers, the novel not only criticizes a moral
code based on the appearance of benevolence but also manages
to recommend the sensible mobility epitomized by its heroine.
In the figure of Charlotte Heywood, Sanditon celebrates a female
traveler whose excursions allow her to participate in a form of
mobile domesticity that through social relations and economic
transactions is linked to the larger world.
IV
NOTES