Domestic Mobility in "Persuasion" and "Sanditon"

Author(s): Melissa Sodeman

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Autumn, 2005, Vol. 45, No. 4, The
Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 2005), pp. 787-812
Published by: Rice University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3844615

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 SEL 45,4 (Autumn 2005): 787-812 787
ISSN 0039-3657

Domestic Mobi
Persuasion and Sanditon

MELISSA SODEMAN

From the mention of watering places, may the author be

lowed to suggest a few remarks on the evils which have arisen
from the general conspiracy of the gay to usurp the regio
of the sick; and from their converting the health-restori
fountains, meant as a refuge for disease, into the resorts
vanity for those who have no disease but idleness?
This inability of staying at home, as it is one of the most
infallible, so it is one ofthe most dangerous symptoms oft
reigning mania. It would be more tolerable, did this epidem
malady only break out, as formerly, during the winter, o
some one season.

?Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern Sy

tion: With "A View ofthe Principles and Co
among Women ofRank and Fortun

Hannah More's 1799 indictment of her

mobility and its attendant "mania" for le
a conviction that travel, while possessing
ill, actually endangers the healthy?so much so that travelers
whose health is not imperiled have been diseased with idleness
and infected with an "epidemic malady," an "inability of staying
at home." This "inability" proves disabling, but this disability,
rather than imposing limitations upon one's range of movement,
comes from one's moving too much. Travel, in other words, is
both a cure for and a symptom of disease.
Though here admonishing members of both sexes by patholo-
gizing fashionable travel, More elsewhere rebukes women more
Melissa Sodeman is a doctoral candidate at the University of California,
Los Angeles. Her dissertation explores the wandering tendencies of later
eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century novels.

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 788 Persuasion and Sanditon

particularly for abandonin

foreseen," she bristles, "th
notification that on such
significant words (besides
present to the mind an im
can convey?"2 In their que
refined Englishwomen hav
distinguished them.3 Her f
more generally, have aban
engages with and indeed a
that preoccupy Jane Aust
and Sanditon.4
Literary critics have assumed that domestic fiction, the
unique province ofthe woman writer and preeminently of Austen,
produces what Nancy Armstrong calls the "domestic woman," a
paragon of homely virtue whose internalization of the decrees of
conduct literature naturalizes and confirms its moral authority.5
Less recognized, however, are the ways in which domestic fiction
interrogates, disrupts, and resists conservative injunctions plac?
ing women at the center of the modern household. Focusing on
Persuasion and Sanditon, this essay will consider how these nov?
els displace their heroines from their homes in order to envision
them within domestic structures that more readily accommodate
mobility. For Anne Elliot, this displacement occurs involuntarily.
Though she initially departs from Kellynch-hall with sorrow, by the
end of the novel Anne finds happiness within the domestic milieu
of Bath's crowded streets. For Charlotte Heywood, leaving home
launches her into a world where mobility itself has run mad, and
through her actions Austen delineates what constitutes sensible
mobility. In her final works, then, Austen redefines what home
itself means: no longer the spatially enclosed site associated with
the nuclear family, the domestic is conceptualized as an open
and porous place linked to and constituted by local, national,
and even global concerns. And if the category of the domestic
expands outward and is mapped onto England's public spaces
in the later novels, it is because here, as in earlier works, family
has come to signify a community drawn together by ties of the
heart rather than by those of blood.6

In a remarkably suggestive aside, Nina Auerbach has charac?

terized the "problem" of Pride and Prejudice as Elizabeth Bennet's

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 Melissa Sodeman 789

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

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790 Persuasion and Sanditon

the well-traveled group at N

of movement. While Pride
Elizabeth's survey of any n
Longbourn and Lucas Lodg
finally lighting on Pemberley
Persuasion tracks Anne's ex
ment through Uppercross,
Lyme and in Bath, and fin
way deficient, declines to s
Captain Wentworth in a hom
Figuring houses as alternately silent and noisy, the novel
imagines domestic space not only as the quiet, beloved family
home Anne remembers with fondness, but also as a bustling
arena that threatens to deny her quiet and privacy. Anne deems
Uppercross "a domestic hurricane," though her hostess, Mrs.
Musgrove, surveys the same scene and remarks contentedly on
"quiet cheerfulness at home."11 The Musgrove home is filled with
bodies that encroach upon one another, from the "comfortable
substantial size" (pp. 45-6) of Mrs. Musgrove to the clinging forms
of her grandchildren. The presence of these bodies proves over?
whelming and sometimes oppressive to Anne. After Wentworth
releases her from two-year-old Walter Musgrove's tenacious grip,
she escapes to her room as soon as possible in order to regain
her composure. "She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of
being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and
it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover
her" (p. 54). More often, such trifles amuse rather than perturb
her. When Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove propose a long walk to
Mary and Anne, the former, despite her disinclination for walk?
ing, insists upon going. Reflecting upon "the sort of necessity
which the family-habits seemed to produce, of every thing being
to be communicated, and every thing being to be done together,
however undesired and inconvenient" (p. 55), Anne recognizes the
perverse closeness inculcated by communal family life. Though
the enclosed, teeming domesticity of the Musgroves can seem
claustrophobic, it increasingly provides Anne with something
remarkably like solitude. After overhearing Wentworth tell his
parable of the nut to Louisa, she takes comfort in rejoining the
group: "Her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only
numbers could give" (p. 60). Crowds, then, accrue another mean?
ing as Anne adapts to them: the crowd of bodies that at Uppercross
overwhelm her come to offer Anne, paradoxically, more space in
which to be alone.12

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 Melissa Sodeman 791

Having found with

Anne at Bath discovers the domestic within a crowd. As Adela
Pinch has shown, "Anne's crucial encounters with Wentworth are
accompanied by overwhelming moments of access to the outside
world. These moments often seem claustrophobic, moments when
she is crowded in by or at least surrounded by her awareness
of her environment."13 Anne gains the ability to reduce the once
overwhelming physical and aural crush of the outside world,
and it is this skill that enables her to have what Mrs. Smith calls
"a sort of domestic enjoyment to be known even in a crowd
128). Her friend's remark, however playfully ironic, not onl
lapses the boundaries between the domestic and the crowd. It
also alerts us to Anne's increased willingness to find domestic
pleasure within public space. While crowds early in the novel
tend to be alien and somewhat threatening, Anne later perceives
crowds as made up of acquaintances and of social networks to
which she herself belongs. Upon first entering Bath, Anne recoils
from "the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and
drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men and milk-men, and
the ceaseless clink of pattens" (p. 89), but by the novel's end her
"domestic enjoyment" can be known only in a crowd.
As Tony Tanner has noted, Anne Elliot, who is "only Anne" (p.
5) to her father and sister, has "no rank, no effective surname,
no house, no location; her words are weightless, and physically
speaking she always has to 'give way'?that is, accept perpetual
displacement. Anne we may call the girl on the threshold, exist-
ing in that limboid space between the house of the father which
has to be left and the house of the husband which has yet to be
found."14 But the house Anne must find remains elusive at the
novel's close. Unlike Elizabeth Bennet, whose happiness takes
material form as Pemberley, or Fanny Price, for whom Mansfield
comes to represent not restriction but security, or even Emma
Woodhouse, who can be content only at Hartfield, Anne never
achieves a fusion of emotional gratification and spatial belonging.
Or, to put it another way, Anne's reunion with Captain Wentworth
is not embodied in a particular seat of domesticity. Rather, Anne
remains at sea?the home she will make with Wentworth is not
grounded spatially, in either a quiet country residence or ev
board a naval vessel, but is left undefined.15 Persuasiorts readers
may extrapolate that the marriage of Anne and Wentworth will be
patterned after that of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, but whether Anne,
like Mrs. Croft, will go to sea with her husband or wait on shore
for his return remains unclear. Though Anne "glorie[s] in being

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792 Persuasion and Sanditon

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

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 Melissa Sodeman 793

such as More while

ity.19 In other wor
solicitude effectively
No longer defined i
ity is relocated in m
such as the marriag
friends whom they
Their marriage foll
bilities, and in its em
from nearly every o
the marriage of Adm
warmth and equality
avers, "[wjith the ex
who seemed particu
been no two hearts
unison, no countena
and Wentworth. When reunited, the two are "more tender, more
tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth,
and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting" (p.
160) than before. Both are "equal" and "justified" in acting on
behalf of their marriage, and both act together in "bearing down
every opposition" (p. 165) to their union. Their shared efforts offer
a model for a companionate and egalitarian marriage in which
both partners work together toward a shared goal.
Marriage does not isolate Anne and Wentworth from their
friends, but rather increases their circle. As Wentworth comes to
appreciate: "She [Anne] had but two friends in the world to add
to his list, Lady Russell and Mrs. Smith. To those, however, he
was very well disposed to attach himself (p. 167). Though Anne
regrets that she has no family "which a man of sense could value"
(p. 167) to add to his, she recognizes that her marriage has been
mutually beneficial for her friends and her husband. Similarly,
Lady Russell has the chance to reassess Wentworth. After all,
"[t]here was nothing less for Lady Russell to do, than to admit that
she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set
of opinions and of hopes." In doing so, she finds "little hardship
in attaching herself as a mother" to him (p. 166). Mrs. Smith, in
turn, discovers that "their marriage, instead of depriving her of
one friend, secured her two" (p. 167). Both Lady Russell and Mrs.
Smith, then, gain Wentworth's friendship while retaining Anne
as a companion. Anne too acquires more than a husband and a
fortune in her marriage, joining a family of "brothers and sisters"
whose "worth and . . . prompt welcome" (p. 167) add to the felicity

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 794 Persuasion and Sanditon

of her marriage. Marriage

and a woman, but also ext
the married couple and their previously separate social circles.
Friendship's increased social significance makes it a stronger tie
than that of blood and allows it to stand in for deficient family
relations, signaled by Lady Russell's mothering of both Anne and
Captain Wentworth.20 Persuasion, then, reorganizes social bonds
so that friendship takes precedence over kinship.
Persuasiorts reconfiguration of the domestic and parallel re?
organization of social bonds offers recompense for the somewhat
frightening rootlessness of Anne's domestic experience. Changing
scenery, new experiences, contact with a dynamic circle of friends,
and her own good sense counter Anne's nostalgia at leaving her
home. Though the Elliots' withdrawal from Kellynch-hall saddens
Anne, she recognizes its necessity: "however sorry and ashamed
for the necessity of the removal [she was], she could not but in
conscience feel that they were gone who deserved not to stay, and
that Kellynch-hall had passed into better hands than its owners'"
(p. 82). As many critics have noted, in acknowledging Admiral
and Mrs. Croft as more worthy of Kellynch than the spendthrift
baronet whose debts forced him to leave, Anne endorses a middle-
class ethos in which one's social position is earned rather than
inherited.21 Equally significant, however, is that her experience
of domestic life changes irrevocably once she leaves Kellynch. No
longer consigned to her father's home, Anne finds the "continual
occupation and change" (p. 155) needed to save her from brooding
over her failed romance with Captain Wentworth.

II

Despite the friendships she forms and renews as a result of her

social and geographie mobility, Anne remains an isolated figure
throughout most ofthe novel.22 Though she attempts to reach out
to others by performing the sociable rites of letter writing and of
visiting, such efforts do little to relieve her loneliness.23 After all,
her correspondence with her family is "toil" for which there can
be little satisfaction (p. 72), and many of her social visits result in
Anne's sacrificing pleasure for the enjoyment of others, as when
she plays the pianoforte so that the others may dance (p. 48).
Given her isolation, it is surprising that Anne's mobility and
the almost constant contact it gives her with friends and family
members does little to relieve her lack of companionship. "There is
so little real friendship in the world!" Mrs. Smith exclaims (p. 103),

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 Melissa Sodeman 795

and the novel attest

meaningful relation
and Elizabeth, seem
her family. Genero
they are proud, Anne comes to value "nobod[ies]" (p. 17) such
as Captain Wentworth and Mrs. Smith for their personal merit
rather than their social standing. Such independence of mind
and generosity of spirit distinguishes Anne from her family, but
this distinction comes at the cost of alienation from the Elliots,
particularly her father and eldest sister. Even Mary, who, unlik
either Sir Walter or Elizabeth, takes some interest in her sister's
well-being, does so out of motives more mercenary than loving.
Her esteem is for Anne's usefulness?as nurse, as confidante,
and as nanny?rather than her character.
Just as Anne's family relations are flawed, so too are her
friendships lacking in openness. She struggles to speak candidly
even with those closest to her, Lady Russell and Mrs. Smith.
Lady Russell's prejudice against Captain Wentworth has cut off
Anne's ability to confide in her, as Mary Waldron points out,24
and Mrs. Smith finds it difficult to warn her friend of William
Elliot's duplicity. When finally able to confide in Anne, she ex
cuses her circuitous method by saying, "Even the smooth surfac
of family-union seems worth preserving, though there may b
nothing durable beneath" (p. 131). Mrs. Smith's ability to speak
freely has been compromised by an unwillingness to breach th
outward appearance of familial solidarity. She knows well that
"family-union" may not be grounded in shared values or affec
tive bonds, but tact?here associated with class deference and
with observation of increasingly outdated codes of polite respect
for familial bonds?prohibits her from revealing William Elliot's
machinations until she senses that Anne's curiosity about "Mr.
Elliot's real character" outweighs loyalty to her father's heir (p.
132). Friendship does little to aid communication, it seems, for
Persuasion dramatizes a world in which social bonds, even those
based on mutual respect, strain under the pressure of decorous
reticence.

Placed in this context, Anne's preference for "the fran

open-hearted, the eager character" given to "burst[s] of feelin
"warmth of indignation or delight" (p. 106) gains intelligibilit
these qualities threaten to explode the genteel reserve an
politeness that structures her social world. The character w
exemplifies this expressive spontaneity is Captain Wentw
"nobody" (p. 17) with whom she ultimately achieves the

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796 Persuasion and Sanditon

most open dialogue. Ironica

highly mediated. After all,
to one another not through
series of overheard discussions, letters, and declarations made off
the page. While placing high value on the mutual expression of
feeling as an important component in what Mrs. Smith would call
"real friendship" (p. 103), Austen's novel nevertheless struggles in
its imaginative realization of such an ideal. Friendship, a struc?
ture of shared feeling, promises to supplant kinship, a structure
of consanguinity and inheritance, as the most significant and
meaningful domestic and social bond, but the family retains its
hold over otherwise open and warm-hearted characters through
older codes of polite reserve and tactful evasion.
Though the novel may not fully articulate an open dialogue
between Anne and Wentworth, their attempt to speak openly gains
far more narrative endorsement than the alternative. If Captain
Wentworth represents expressive spontaneity, then William Elliot
represents circumspect duplicity:

Mr. Elliot was rational, discreet, polished,?but he was not

open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth of
indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This,
to Anne, was a decided imperfection. Her early impres-
sions were incurable. She prized the frank, the open-
hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth
and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she
could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those
who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing,
than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose
tongue never slipped.
(pp. 106-7)

William Elliot lacks openness, and this "decided imperfection" al?

lows Anne to avoid succumbing to his advances. In resisting his
bid for her hand in marriage, a bid supported by Lady Russell,
Anne repudiates the claims of family and property. As Lady Rus?
sell points out, in marrying Mr. Elliot, Anne would become "the
future mistress of Kellynch, the future Lady Elliot. . . occupying
your dear mother's place, succeeding to all her rights, and all her
popularity, as well as to all her virtues . . . You are your mother's
self in countenance and disposition; and if I might be allowed to
fancy you such as she was, in situation, and name, and home,
presiding and blessing in the same spot, and only superior to her

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 Melissa Sodeman 797

in being more high

immune to the allu
the prospect of beco
momentarily "bewi
resist the "charm"
been" (p. 106), and
ofthe past and to p
the landed gentry
ancien regime by m
the novel of the "m
In becoming a "sai
which is, if possibl
than in its national
noted, Austen unde
of Anne's professio
status as a wife has both private merit and public importance,
enabling her "domestic virtues" to take on a significance that goes
beyond home and family.27 Toward its close, Persuasion no lon?
ger distinguishes between the domestic private and the national
public, but rather imagines them as bound together through a
nexus of social relations. After all, Anne and Wentworth establish
their domestic life together, first on a street and then on a gravel
walk:

There they exchanged again those feelings and those

promises which had once before seemed to secure every
thing, but which had been followed by so many, many
years of division and estrangement. . . And there, as they
slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group
around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bus-
tling house-keepers, flirting girls, nor nursery-maids and
children, they could indulge in those retrospections and
acknowledgements, and especially in those explanations
of what had directly preceded the present moment.
(p. 160)

Amid noise and bustle the reunited couple "exchange[s]" again

the words that make possible their marriage. Significantly, their
reunion is described in the language of commerce, which marks
their "exchange" of private feeling as a contract of public import.
Even more significant is that this exchange, which marks the
beginning of Anne Elliot's life as a "sailor's wife," takes place in a
street, a hybrid space?half promenade, half thoroughfare?that

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798 Persuasion and Sanditon

draws together labor and

bustling house-keepers, flirting girls . . . [and] nursery-maids
and children" mingle with one another. The gravel walk off Union
Street brings together men, women, and children of laboring
and leisured classes, and in a sense the union that takes place
celebrates not only reestablished intimacy, but also collective
heterogeneity. Their walk together leads them to return "again
into the past," allowing them to "indulge in those retrospections
and aeknowledgments, and especially in those explanations of
what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so
poignant and so ceaseless in interest" (p. 160). The street, then,
paradoxically becomes a site of memory and reconciliation; its
clamor and flurry, its very modernity, permits Anne and Went?
worth to speak openly about the past as they have been unable
to elsewhere. The street here unifies and cuts across boundaries
between public and private, past and present, joining toget
what has been temporally, geographically, and economically
divided. Their reconciliation is one of a number of instances in
which the public and the private merge, for Persuasion ma
room for intimate conversation only in larger social gathe
Anne's discussion of men's and women's constancy with Ca
Harville takes place in Wentworth's hearing, and Wentworth
Anne further discuss their past estrangement while "appar
occupied in admiring a fine display of green-house plants"
164) at the Elliots' card party. The private and the domestic
imbricated in the public and the national even as the latter
egories are permeated by the former ones.
By the novel's close, then, Anne Elliot has moved away
the psychologically damaging insularity of Kellynch. No lo
spatially isolated in a private household, domesticity is ins
conceptualized as existing outside the structures of home a
family. Renouncing any definition of the family that mar
limits as consanguineous, Austen extends familial ties to inc
the affective bonds of friends. In doing so, she redefines th
ening circle Anne is part of in order to give her domestic v
greater social import. Domesticity thus acquires the aspect of
sociability. Persuasion signals this transformation by declining to
isolate its heroine within a home and providing her instead with
a landaulette that allows her to move easily through city streets
and country roads. By refusing the confines of more traditional
spatial or familial notions of the domestic, Persuasion accords
Anne remarkable freedom of movement. Domesticity, "always
a contested proposition," as Harriet Guest has shown, is here
contiguous with social, public, and national concerns.28

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 Melissa Sodeman 799

Even as Austen red

it from the enclose
importance, her effo
the spatial grounded
as Persuasion demonstrates, even structures that appear to be
strongholds of old values can be undermined and rented out to
the ascendant bourgeoisie. Reconfigured as companionate, egali?
tarian, mobile, and?above all?public, domesticity in Persuasion
takes on a fluidity and openness that stands in for and modifies
the stability of tradition.

III

Austen returns to debates surrounding travel and domesticity

in her last, unfinished novel. Unlike Persuasion, which regards a
domestic circle expanded into the public realm as an unequivocal
good, Sanditon alerts us to the possibility that this mobile do?
mesticity can veer into what the novel calls "activity run mad."29
While cognizant of the perils of domestic mobility, Sanditon does
not represent so much a retrenchment as a modification of Per-
suasion's endorsement ofa domestic mode inseparable from and
constituted by the larger public. This novel, indeed, affirms a form
of domesticity congruent with the social practices of travel and the
commercial transactions of the marketplace, a form exemplified
by the sensible mobility of its heroine, Charlotte Heywood.
Like More, who describes fashionable culture's "inability of
staying at home" as a "dangerous symptom" in the 1799 View of
the Principles and Conduct. . . among Women, Austen connects
travel with illness in her portrayal of the seaside resort that gives
her work its name. Unlike More, however, who pathologized fash?
ionable travel while condoning travel for invalids, Austen satirizes
the travel of those she regards as fashionably ill. In a letter to Anne
Sharp dated 22 May 1817, she mocks her own peregrinations in
search of health: "[IJnstead of going to Town to put myself into the
hands of some Physician as I shd otherwise have done, I am going
to Winchester instead, for some weeks to see what MrLyford can
do farther towards re-establishing me in tolerable health.?On
Saty next, I am actually going thither?My dearest Cassandra with
me I need hardly say?and as this is only two days off you will be
convinced that I am now really a very genteel, portable sort ofan
Invalid."30 With this declaration, Austen includes herself in the
growing number of fashionable people crisscrossing England in
search of fresh air, healing waters, and skilled (or at least indul

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800 Persuasion and Sanditon

gent) physicians. Though

deprecates the severity
masses widely satirized as migrating between spas and seaside
resorts in search of society rather than health.31 Considering
herself "a very genteel, portable sort of an Invalid" as she writes
Sanditon, Austen examines More's diagnosis of fashionable travel
as a symptom of disease more fully than she had previously. In
this work, she takes seriously the correlation between travel and
illness, and in this way Sanditon is beset by anxieties about the
very mobility Persuasion endorses.
The narratorial approbation with which Austen treats mobility
in Persuasion is more equivocal, if not altogether absent, here.
Far from praising travel, as Anne Elliot does in saying "every fresh
place would be interesting to me" (Persuasion, p. 122), Sanditon
appears to assail it, beginning with an episode that satirizes the
senselessness of wasted movement. Mr. and Mrs. Parker, lifelong
residents of Sanditon, have left home on a poorly planned excur-
sion to find a doctor to bring to their growing seaside town. In
the course of their expedition, in which they "quit the high road,
and attempt a very rough Lane," their carriage is overturned (p.
321). This accident forces the would-be tourists to be housebound
for two weeks, but at the residence ofthe Heywood family rather
than at their own home. Rather than extolling its benefits, Austen
here characterizes fashionable travel as a kind of willful errancy
in which even those who profess to be traveling on business stray
from established routes, risk bodily injury, and neglect domestic
responsibilities.
When the Parkers finally return to Sanditon, their negligence
is confirmed as they bypass their family home in preference for
a newer one called Trafalgar House. Spying "a moderate-sized
house, well fenced and planted" out the carriage window, their
guest Charlotte Heywood inquires after it only to find it is "the
house of [Mr. Parker's] Forefathers." Though "an honest old
Place," and moreover a site inscribed with Parker family history
("the house where I and all my Brothers and Sisters were born
and bred?and where my own three eldest Children were born"),
the family has abandoned the old home for a more geographi-
cally desirable location on a hill (p. 335). Exchanging stability
for novelty, they have moved to a domicile whose very name
observes the vagaries of fashion ("I almost wish I had not named
[it] Trafalgar," Mr. Parker says regretfully, "for Waterloo is more
the thing now" [p. 336]). It is fitting, then, that their move from
the "snug-looking Place" in "a sheltered Dip" (p. 335) to "a light

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 Melissa Sodeman 801

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

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802 Persuasion and Sanditon

from her life in the colo

a Circle,'" Austen observ
"to the prevalence of wh
be attributed the Giddin
the early nineteenth cen
to "move in a Circle," a
fashionable as a commonplace and describes the commonplace
practice of fashionable circulation.
While Sanditon betrays a number of anxieties about ambu-
lating fashionable society, the novel preserves female mobility
as both advantageous and instructive.33 Not only do her travels
enlarge Charlotte's circle of acquaintance, but they also provide
her with an opportunity to learn to adjudicate value in the larger
world. Once she leaves Willingden, her domestic life consists
of assessing value in social and commercial arenas. Soon after
meeting Sir Edward Denham and his sister, Miss Esther Den?
ham, Charlotte finds that she has "pretty well decided" upon
Miss Denham's character, and it requires only the remainder of
a chapter for her to determine the characters of Sir Edward and
that of their aunt, Lady Denham (p. 350). Her estimation of Lady
Denham in particular makes clear not only the legitimacy of her
judgments but also the moral imperative guiding her to decipher
correctly the characters around her. "She is thoroughly mean,"
Charlotte reflects after Lady Denham confides her intention to
tell her nephew and niece to take lodgings in town, closing with
an uncharitable bit of malice that lampoons More's commenda-
tion of domestic beneficence: "Charity begins at home you know"
(p. 356).34 As Charlotte muses, "I had not expected any thing so
bad.?Mr. P. spoke too mildly of her.?His Judgement is evidently
not to be trusted.?His own Goodnature misleads him. He is too
kind hearted to see clearly.?I must judge for myself (p. 356).
Judging for herself is a necessary act that justifies her introduction
into the world. After all, Austen's narrative gives us no information
regarding its heroine for the better part of two chapters preced?
ing the Parkers' invitation, and in a sense Charlotte's character
comes into discursive being only as she leaves home behind for
the imagined world of Sanditon.
The heroine's move into the world, Sanditon implies, is neces?
sary for a woman not only to attain a definitive subjectivity, but
also to learn to interpret properly the characters surrounding her
and to assess value in the marketplace. Charlotte Heywood, unlike
Catherine Morland, Emma Woodhouse, or even Elizabeth Bennet,
is able to read with great precision the characters of those around

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 Melissa Sodeman 803

her. Indeed, as Tanner has observed, she is "the most reliable

witness and critical evaluator of what is taking place."35 In this
way her experience in the world parallels the reader's experienc
of interpreting Austen's novel: Charlotte's effort to understand
those around her reflects the reader's interpretative task. It thus
comes as no surprise that she is a good reader of novels. Unlike
Catherine Morland and Elizabeth Bennet, who both must learn
to read more judiciously, or Emma Woodhouse, whose neglect
of reading is tied to her misreading of Highbury's romances,
Charlotte manages to read her world in a manner that does not
call for correction.36 After meeting Lady Denham's companion
she cannot "separate the idea of a complete Heroine from Clara
Brereton" (p. 346). The narrator defends this novelistic framin
of Charlotte's experiences:

These feelings were not the result of any spirit of Romance

in Charlotte herself. No, she was a very sober-minded
young Lady, sufficiently well-read in Novels to supply her
Imagination with amusement, but not at all unreasonably
influenced by them; and while she pleased herself the first
five minutes with fancying the Persecutions which ought
to be the Lot of the interesting Clara, especially in the
form of the most barbarous conduct on Lady Denham's
side, she found no reluctance to admit from subsequent
observation, that they appeared to be on very comfortable
Terms.

(pp. 346-7)

Enriched but not blinkered by her reading of novels, Cha

observations are "not at all unreasonably influenced." Rathe
intuition that Clara has been ill treated by Lady Denham p
the reasonable influence of Charlotte's reading. Further ob
tion, after all, will justify the novelistic bent of her thoughts
discovers that Clara's dependence upon Lady Denham more t
slightly resembles the literary convention ofthe impoverish
ill-used female relation. But more than reading is at stake
The judiciousness that characterizes Charlotte's assessme
others, a combination of imaginative amusement and reason?
able observation, also characterizes her consumption of goods
in Sanditon's market economy.
Austen's novel closely associates reading with shopping in its
depiction of Sanditon's circulating library. Eighteenth-century
English culture had conventionally linked reading and shopping,

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 804 Persuasion and Sanditon

but in Sanditon the circ

a trope for a larger cult
books and commodities,
Appropriately, then, books and baubles are available side by
side:

The Library of course, afforded every thing; all the useless

things in the World that could not be done without, and
among so many pretty Temptations, and with so much
good will for Mr. P. to encourage Expenditure, Charlotte
began to feel that she must check herself?or rather she
reflected that at two and Twenty there could be no excuse
for her doing otherwise?and that it would not do for her
to be spending all her Money the very first Evening. She
took up a Book; it happened to be a volume of Camilla.
She had not Camilla's [sic] Youth, and had no intention of
having her Distress,?so, she turned from the Drawers of
rings and Broches repressed farther solicitation and paid
for what she bought.
(p. 345)

Despite the many incentives Sanditon gives her to incur debt,

Charlotte for the most part resists "so many pretty Temptations"
and the encouragement of Mr. Parker to buy "for the further good
of Every body." Though making "some immediate purchases," her
prudence prevents her from entirely acceding to the demands
of the marketplace (p. 345). The novel she picks up, Frances
Burney's Camilla, corroborates Charlotte's resolution to be pru-
dent: she "had no intention of having [Camilla's] Distress" of debt
and therefore escapes with some money remaining. Pointedly, a
novel rather than a conduct book confirms her determination to
spend cautiously?a justification of novel reading as significan
Austen's more famous defense of novels in Northanger Abbey
More than a sly rejoinder to conduct literature's indictme
of women's practices of novel reading, this moment in Sand
emphasizes a woman's ability to remain an individual in the
marketplace through the refusal of mass consumerism. Unwill-
ing to capitulate to the demands of fashion despite the pressure
of her new friends, Charlotte's resolve distinguishes her from the
masses of female consumers railed against in conduct literature
for practicing conspicuous consumption, a practice that erases
individual differences through the accumulation of tokens of
mass culture. Austen represents this type of female consumer

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 Melissa Sodeman 805

in the twin figure

even by name who
with, in at least on
these copies can be
young Ladies" signal their similitude through an adherence to
fashion. Experts at "those Labours and Expedients of dexterous
Ingenuity, by which they could dress in a stile much beyond
what they ought to have afforded," the sisters "were some ofthe
first in every change of fashion" (p. 373). Their infection by the
disease of fashionable consumption makes it fitting that they
have come to Sanditon, for in Mr. Parker's words, "Never was
there a place more palpably designed by Nature for the resort
the Invalid" (p. 326). As Deidre Shauna Lynch notes, Burney's
novel insists that the "social disease of consumption, spreading
from woman to woman, does seem to make each one sick," and
thus "Camilla's entrance into the world ultimately leads her to
a sickbed."37 Austen's novel, however, foregrounds its heroine's
immunity to the disease of consumption, inoculated as she has
been against such an epidemic by her previous reading of Camilla.
Novels therefore extricate her from the cycle of consumerism and
cure that Sanditon represents.
If Sanditon makes no apologies for its heroine's entrance into
the world and rather foregrounds the importance of leaving home
for a young woman, it does not unreservedly praise women's ac?
tions in the world. Lady Denham serves as an almost hyperbolic
illustration of conduct literature's warning against women who
misuse their authority, while Diana Parker functions as a cari?
cature of those manuals' idealization of female charity. "Every
Neighbourhood should have a great Lady," Austen's narrator
tells us, and in Sanditon that office is supplied by Lady Denham.
"[B]orn to Wealth but not to Education," she considers her role in
her neighborhood to be that of a speculative investor rather than
a charitable benefactor (p. 331). As even Mr. Parker is forced to
admit, "there are moments, there are points, when her Love of
Money is carried greatly too far." These faults, however, "may be
entirely imputed to her want of Education" (p. 332). But even as
Mr. Parker attributes her lapses in propriety to her lack of educa?
tion, Lady Denham spouts conduct book maxims that show her
to be aware of the codes of behavior she consistently breaks. "I
think they are great fools for not staying at home," Lady Denham
remarks ofthe travelers she hopes to draw to Sanditon (p. 355).
Pointedly, she is not so bothered by this folly that she refuses to
profit from it.

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806 Persuasion and Sanditon

Mr. Parker's sister Diana

and illnesses, similarly m
people away from their h
works benefit not her bu
she preaches,

we are sent into this World to be as extensively useful

as possible, and where some degree of Strength of Mind
is given, it is not a feeble body which will excuse us?or
incline us to excuse ourselves.?The World is pretty much
divided between the Weak of Mind and the Strong?be?
tween those who can act and those who can not, and it is
the bounden Duty of the Capable to let no opportunity of
being useful escape them . . . and as long as we can exert
ourselves to be of use of others, I am convinced that the
Body is the better, for the refreshment the Mind receives
in doing its Duty.?While I have been travelling, with this
object in veiw [sic], I have been perfectly well.
(p. 363)

The effects of her good works, however, fail to live up to such

proselytizing. Rather than recruiting for Sanditon genteel invalids
by the droves, she finds that her efforts have been wasted. Mis-
takenly believing that her machinations have drawn not one but
two families, she finds to her humiliation that "the Family from
Surry and the Family from Camberwell were one and the same"
(p. 372) and thus verifies Charlotte's inference that she embod-
ies "Activity run mad!" (p. 363). Chalking Diana's unwarranted
exertions up to a "love of distinction" (p. 365), Austen exposes
self-interested motives for what her family members consider
her "unequalled" ability to do "Good to all the World" (p. 363).
Austen's censure, like Charlotte's, is not directed against Diana's
mobility, but rather against the way in which her self-interested
and unregulated efforts pass as acts of charity.
If her characters bring to mind the women demonized and ide?
alized in conduct literature, it is to allow her readers to recognize
in her comedic portrayals of Lady Denham and Diana Parker the
grossly exaggerated depictions of "bad" and "good" women in those
works. In rendering these characters ridiculous, Austen satirizes
a moral code that insists that women who live in "the World" are
either virtuous or depraved based upon their performance of
of charity. By showing both Lady Denham and Diana Parker
be capable of mouthing the truisms of conduct literature w

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 Melissa Sodeman 807

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

Charlotte's mobility, like that of Anne Elliot, challenges restric?

tions on women prescribed by More and other moral commenta?
tors. While More exhorts women to leave home only to perform
charitable work or to recover their health, Austen recommends
travel for its own sake; both pleasurable and instructive, travel
frees women from psychologically damaging confinement. She
thus reverses the terms of More's objection to female mobility: th
home is implicitly disabling while travel comes to be associated
with well-being. In this way Persuasion and Sanditon discredit th
ideological assumptions linking virtue with staying at home. He
late heroines are not, of course, the first to travel. Unlike other
mobile fictional women, however, Anne and Charlotte retain their
moral positions despite departing from a narrative trajectory that
would end by establishing and affirming traditional domesticity.
Refusing to allocate virtue to women sequestered in domestic
quietude, Austen's late fiction designates its remarkably mobile
heroines as moral exemplars. Persuasion confronts the strictures
of conduct literature and proposes that a woman who possesses
domestic virtues, as Anne Elliot does in spades, better serves
herself and her society by venturing into the wide world to find
her "domestic enjoyment" in a crowd. In Sanditon, Austen no
longer evinces interest in a woman's sentimental attachment to
home. Indeed, the work scarcely imagines its heroine at home at
all. Only after leaving Willingden does Charlotte Heywood emerge
as the novel's central focus, and once at Sanditon her ability to
decipher the characters of those around her and to adjudicate
value in Sanditon's market economy take the place of more tra?
ditional domestic virtues.
Rather than testifying to and canonizing women's place in
home, Persuasion and Sanditon accommodate their heroines' de?
sire for pleasure, sociability, openness, and well-chosen goods b
exiling Anne Elliot and Charlotte Heywood from home. Launche

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808 Persuasion and Sanditon

into a circuit of spas an

to consider how absorbe
As an unfinished fragmen
have thought to be the
it lacks, after all, even a
which we have read eig
have led us to understand marriage plots and domestic fiction
more generally as forms that bridle illicit desire and corral alterity
into the repressive structure of compulsory heterosexuality. But
as Persuasion makes clear, the "normative" marriage plot can be
anything but normative, entirely reconfiguring women's domestic
relations with home and family. Austen's fictional strategies work
within established structures not to conform to them, but rather
to reveal how such structures can be modified to accommodate
an individuars desire for happiness and fulfillment.
Persuasion and Sanditon raise important questions for Au
scholarship as well as for the study of domesticity more gen
These novels invite us, perhaps even more directly than her
works, to ask how?if at all?Austen's works have accomplish
the ideological work of domestic fiction. What constitutes t
mestic, and how are we to understand it, if it is no longer spat
located in the home? How useful a critical and generic categ
"domestic fiction"? The domestic, rather than simply equiva
and bounded by the home, should be conceptualized as a place
filled with internal contradictions and constituted by its links to
social, national, and global concerns. Our current definitions of
domesticity and domestic fiction have prevented us from being
attentive to the complex ways in which the domestic functions
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works. Persuasion and
Sanditon challenge us to reevaluate long-standing assumptions
about Austen's role as the presiding maven of domestic novels
while calling into question her relation to normalized domesticity.
Even more importantly, they urge us to reassess an underinter-
rogated critical category in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
studies: domesticity itself.

NOTES

I am grateful to Anne Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, Chris Loar, and N

Horejsi for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1 Hannah More, A View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent am
Women ofRank and Fortune, in Strictures on the Modern System of Fem
Education with "A View ofthe Principles and Conduct Prevalent among W

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 Melissa Sodeman 809

ofRank and Fortune" (17

1995), p. 145. The old-st
2 More, pp. 140-1.
3 This equation of fem
viewed by historians inf
ideology based upon sep
ofthe doctrine of separa
and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York and San Francisco: Harper
and Row, 1979), and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes:
Men and Women ofthe English Middle Class, 1780-1850, Women in Culture
and Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). Such a clearly demar-
cated division (masculine public sphere/feminine private sphere) has been
discredited recently by many scholars. Important contributions to the pub-
lic/private debate include Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres?
A Review ofthe Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," in
Historical Journal 36, 2 (June 1993): 383-414, and her introduction to The
Gentleman9s Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and
London: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 1-12; Lawrence E. Klein, "Gender and
the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions
about Evidence and Analytic Procedure," ECS 29, 1 (Autumn 1995): 97-109;
Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, introduction to Gender in Eighteenth-
Century England: Roles, Representations, and Responsibilities (London and
New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 1-28; Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women,
Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 2000); and Anne K. Mellor, Mothers ofthe Nation: Women's Political
Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ.
Press, 2000).
4 More's objection to women travelers draws attention to a debate that
can be traced back at least to Samuel Richardson's contribution to Samuel
Johnson's Rambler 97 (19 February 1751).
5 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political Histor
Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 3. In this
influential book, Armstrong argues that domestic novels, which legi
moral authority to a middle-class domestic woman informed by cond
erature, came to produce and naturalize desire for what she calls the "
household" (p. 258), a household comprising a nuclear family that has
center a mother rather than a father. See also Gary Kelly, Revolutiona
nism: The Mind and Career ofMary Wollstonecraft (London and Basin
UK: Macmillan, 1992) and Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War o
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Recent work assuming that Persuasi
indeed perform the ideological work of domesticating women for the
household includes Monica F. Cohen, "Persuading the Navy Home: Austen
and Married Women's Professional Property," Novel 29, 3 (Spring 1996):
346-66; and Miranda J. Burgess, "Romance at Home: Austen, Radcliffe, and
the Circulation of Britishness," in British Fiction and the Production of Social
Order, 1740-1830, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 43 (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 150-85.
6 Jane Austen's loosening definition of family can be traced back at least
to Pride and Prejudice, which closes with Elizabeth and Darcy's removal "to

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 810 Persuasion and Sanditon

all the comfort and elegance

and Prejudice [New York: W
by affinity than consanguin
Wickham.) The ending of M
consanguineous ties. When M
Mansfield following the latt
greater than he had suppose
in Fanny, "the daughter tha
sfield Park: Authoritative Te
[New York and London: W. W
anonymous reader of this pi
in Pride and Prejudice.
7 Nina Auerbach, "O Brave
suasion," ELH 39, 1 (March 1972): 112-28, 117.
8 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 10.
9 Here, as elsewhere, I have been influenced by Johnson's readings
Austen's novels in Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago an
London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988).
10 As Cohen rightly notes, "Persuasion concludes with a homeless heroine
("Persuading the Navy Home," p. 348). But while Cohen's discussion regards
the novel as recommending "Ship-shape Homes," diminutive, tidy domestic
spaces that take their cue from the navy (pp. 352-3), my reading emphasiz
the way in which Persuasion moves its heroine out of claustrophobic, enclos
spaces into open, public arenas.
11 Austen, Persuasion, in Persuasion: Authoritative Text. Backgrounds and
Contexts, Criticism, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 1995), pp. 3-168, 89. Subsequent references will be to this edition
and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number.
12 As Adela Pinch has observed, "even the best of families, such as the
Harvilles, are perceived as crowds" [Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of
Emotion, Hume to Austen [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996], p. 146).
13 Pinch, p. 155.
14 Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
1986), p. 209.
15 See Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement ofthe Estate: A Study of
Jane Austenfs Novels (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1971), p. 181.
16 This mapping outward ofthe domestic onto social and public spaces
can be viewed not as a kind of liberation but rather as a sign of the growing
power of the cult of domesticity, which has come to reign over the entire na?
tion. This more Foucauldian reading is, however, not in key with the general
tenor of Persuasion, which views the domestic as coextensive with and con?
stituted by the larger world rather than as holding dominion over it.
17 Doreen Massey, "A Global Sense of Place," in Space, Place, and Gender
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 146-56, 154.
18 "You may perhaps like the Heroine, as she is almost too good for me"
Austen informs Fanny Knight in a letter (Austen to Knight, 23-5 March 1817,
in Austen, Jane Austen's Letters, ed. and comp. Deirdre Le Faye, 3d edn.
[Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995], p. 335).

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 Melissa Sodeman 811

19 More did, of cou

activities outside the home. But Austen, unlike More, authorizes women to
leave their homes for pleasure (associated with travel and with the "domesti
enjoyment" of the crowd) rather than for philanthropic motives.
20 As Mellor has noted, for Austen mothering is learned rather than in?
nate (p. 131).
21 Mellor, p. 124.
22 Mary Waldron finds Anne's solitude to be distinctive: "the chief differ?
ence between [Anne] and most ofthe other Austen heroines [is] her isolation.
Not even Fanny Price is so deprived of a companion to whom she can speak"
(Jane Austen and the Fiction ofHer Time [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1999], p. 138). For another discussion of Anne's isolation, see A. Walton
Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1965), pp. 150-60.
23 Jonathan H. Grossman persuasively argues that these rites function
as the labor of a leisured class, pointing out in his discussion of Emma that
"efforts of civility are the very work of Austen's leisure-class societies" ('The
Labor of the Leisured in Emma: Class, Manners, and Austen," NCF 54, 2
[September 1999]: 143-64, 163). See the entire article for a discussion of
how politeness and etiquette allow this class to articulate itself and to re-
produce its values.
24 Waldron, p. 139.
25 Butler, "Persuasion and Sanditon," Jane Austen and the War of Ideas,
p. 275. For further discussion of Persuasiorts break with the old England
represented by Sir Walter, see Johnson, pp. 164-6: Mellor, pp. 122-4; and
Tanner, pp. 247-8.
26 Mellor, pp. 138-9.
27 On the professionalization of domesticity, see Cohen, Professional Do?
mesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work, and Home, Cambridge Studies
in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 14 (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 12-43.
28 Guest, p. 15.
29Austen, Sanditon, in "NorthangerAbbey," "Lady Susan," "TheWatsons"
and "Sanditon," ed. John Davie (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1998), pp. 321-79, 363. Subsequent references will be to this edition and
will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number.
30 Austen to Anne Sharp, 22 May 1817, in Jane Austen's Letters, p.
340.

31 Tobias Smollett's The Expedition ofHumphry Clinker (1771) and W

liam Combe's three tours of Dr. Syntax (1809-21) also satirize the English
craze for spas and seaside resorts.
32 For a discussion of Britain as a culture of tourism during this period,
see Carole Fabricant, "The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public
Consumption of Private Property," in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory
Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York
and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 254-75; Deidre Shauna Lynch, "'Beat-
ing the Track of the Alphabet': Samuel Johnson, Tourism, and the ABCs of
Modern Authority," ELH 57, 2 (Summer 1990): 357-405; and Nigel Leask,
Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: "From anAntique
Land" (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).

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 812 Persuasion and Sanditon

33 For fuller discussions

mobile Regency society, see Duckworth, pp. 209-29; Tanner, pp. 250-85;
and Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Busi?
ness of Inner Meaning (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998),
pp. 207-49.
34 Here Lady Denham invokes a proverb that had circulated in England
since the Middle Ages. In uttering this old chestnut, Lady Denham harks back
to Smollett's Tabitha Bramble, who had repeatedly used the phrase?and
had it used against her?in Humphry Clinker.
35 Tanner, p. 263.
36 For fuller discussions of Austen's heroines as readers, see Johnson,
pp. 132-6, and Lynch, Economy of Character, pp. 213-20, 240-5.
37 Lynch, Economy of Character, p. 174.

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