Tea at Trianon: On Jane Austen’s Politics of Walking

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 16, 2020

On Jane Austen’s Politics of Walking

From LitHub:

Every character in Jane Austen has a way of walking. Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice walks “at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity”; her story resolves on a long walk with Mr. Darcy when they match strides. Marianne Dashwood escapes from oppressive and tedious society to run in the rain, but then the escape makes her ill; at last, she walks with her sister Elinor in a state of relief and mutual understanding. Emma’s father worries so much that he prohibits her from walking beyond their property without a companion; it is partly her confinement that makes her imagination go astray.

In Persuasion, Anne Elliot, who has mourned her mother some thirteen years, grieves to leave the family home, and give up her solitary strolls there, under “the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country.” Her repetitive steps eventually lead her out, into a wider world. It is as she walks by the sea in a coastal town that she begins to wonder if life may hold more for her. Austen’s characters walk to be themselves and to change.

In Austen walking may be escape, memorialization, independence, recklessness, empathy, self-definition, imagination, leadership. The writer knew interiors of “closeness and noise… confinement, bad air, bad smells,” and she knew what it was to go out, to put one foot after another, to be invigorated by “liberty, freshness, fragrance, and verdure” and to think about someone you loved, who was mortal and far away. (Read more.)