sensibility:


PERSUASIONS ON-LINE
V.27, NO.2 (Summer 2007)
Inside Out/Outside In: Pride & Prejudice on Film 2005
LAURIE KAPLAN

Laurie Kaplan (email: lkaplan@gwu.edu), Visiting Professor of English and Academic Director of the George Washington University England Study Center (London), teaches British Literature of the Two World Wars for the Elliott School of International Affairs. She is a former editor of Persuasions.
“If it were merely a fine house richly furnished, . . . I should not care about it myself; but the grounds are delightful. They have some of the finest woods in the country.”
(Pride and Prejudice 240)

“I really like the idea of the five virgins living on an island,” says Joe Wright, the director of the 2005 Focus Features film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Speaking in a clip included with the DVD of the movie, Wright also says that Groombridge Place, a seventeenth-century moated manor house in Kent, was selected as Longbourn because it would provide “a sense of reality.” Although Wright does not explain this phrase, he must be referring to the proximity of the house to the farmyard and outbuildings, replete with pigs, chickens, and geese, muddy courtyards, lines of laundry, and cattle. Wright comments further that the house offers a “relationship between the interior and the exterior”; but he does not elaborate upon this relationship, so we might jump to the conclusion that Wright, the screenwriter Deborah Moggach, and the production crew are aware of Jane Austen’s particular use of interior/exterior formal structures and metaphors to underscore larger themes. But in the filmic development of individual scenes, Wright transposes indoor/outdoor scenes without giving attention to the subtext. His vague comments about the relationship between the interior and the exterior belie the fact that the film shows a lack of regard for Austen’s subtext and irony, especially where she has used a particular indoor or outdoor scene to build a thematic network. The film, therefore, fails to capture the coherent thematic relationship between interior and exterior spaces that Austen so carefully delineates.

Pride and Prejudice is not a novel about five young women who are sequestered on an island. Lady Catherine, in fact, is shocked that all the Bennet girls are “out” in Meryton society. With the comings and goings of the Lucases and the officers, Longbourn functions as a hub of activity. Wright’s idea about the five virgins and their island imposes an extraneous falseness on the way exterior space is used in the film. Because Austen’s individual scenes contribute to an overall thematic unity, by exchanging outside settings for indoor settings Wright cancels the impact of such themes as claustrophobia, repression, and lack of choice. The shifting of Austen’s iconic scenes from exterior to interior spaces, or from interior to exterior spaces, breaks the rhythm of the drama, pulls apart the imagistic structure Austen so carefully set up, and creates an anti-Austenian environment by forcing a Brontëan darkness on a novel of manners. In Strange Fits of Passion, Adela Pinch points out that the “innovation” in the novel of manners “is its microscopic and seeming realistic attention to behaviors, bodies, and signs of feeling” (140). What is subtle and “microscopic” in the novel is rendered overt and obvious in the film, especially because Wright’s transposition of the indoor/outdoor scenes negates Austen’s elegant metaphorical subtext. The overall effect of this new cinematic text of the classic novel is something so bland that there seems to be little connection between dramatic action and thematic idea.

In the process of adapting a novel for the screen, the director of the film and the writer of the screenplay must make changes—dialogue, extra minor characters, and some scenes, for example, will need to be edited for a filmic version of a novel. Since we all “see” the characters differently when we read, the selecting of actors offers filmmakers incredible choices in the way they can shape the story’s essential elements—the physical and emotional chemistry (between Darcy and Elizabeth, for example, and between Elizabeth and Wickham). It is therefore significant that Wright chose Keira Knightley for the part of Elizabeth Bennet. Keira Knightley, of course, is more than just “‘tolerable’” (12); she is a gorgeous young woman, and she shifts the perspective and turns the “gaze” away from Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) and back on Elizabeth Bennet.1 Wright’s careful focusing on the character of Elizabeth Bennet remains true to the most obvious thrust of Jane Austen’s novel, and as viewers, we delight in an elegant and energetic Elizabeth Bennet who cajoles the camera’s focus. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the female hero’s most important sentence has been altered. In this film version, Elizabeth is denied her “epiphanic moment” (Stovel) of self-recognition: “‘Till this moment, I never knew myself’” (208) has been edited out of the screenplay. Even if we accept alternatives to adaptive fidelity, Moggach’s screenplay violates not only the spirit and the essence of Austen’s story but the viewer’s expectations as well. Extreme cuts such as this raise questions about a screenwriter’s responsibility to a classic text, especially when a large percentage of the audience probably knows (to the point of quoting) the iconic lines and the physical environment of the scenes.

The shifting of the interior/exterior settings of the most dramatic—and most memorable—scenes in the novel raises larger questions about how a classic text needs to be handled in the novel-to-film transformation.2 In transforming a classic novel into a popular film, what is the screenwriter’s and the director’s responsibility to the text and to the author? How much should a screenwriter edit, refine, purge, and transform the author’s most famous lines and most dramatic scenes? Should a director completely disregard the way a writer, especially a writer as careful as Jane Austen, has structured scenes? The condensed scope and the limited timeframe of a film require that dialogue be pruned, that conversational points be made more quickly, that monologues be truncated and turned into voiceovers, and that scenes be edited out or merged. When Austen’s iconic lines are cut and scenes are shifted, however, the film loses the network of verbal and visual iconography that structures the larger implications and meanings of the book. Without this network of themes and subtext, the film becomes a showcase for a set of discrete visual images that fail to support an overarching idea.

In Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood, Kathryn Sutherland examines aspects of “fidelity criticism, with its awareness of a set of limitations to representation (in the existence of a prior model) and its potentially incompatible belief in the possibility of separating an original from its representation” (340). In the case of a classic text and its representation on film, the existence of a well-known prior model does not negate the possibility of filmic adaptation; however, a classic text does demand a modicum of fidelity—to aspects of dialogue as well as to scenic structures. If the scenes of the film are not as carefully laid out as the chapters in the novel, the result will be an adaptation that is baggy and incoherent, no matter how beautifully it is filmed.

Transferring the major dramatic scenes that Austen has specifically set outdoors (e.g., Elizabeth’s reading of Darcy’s letter in the lane outside Rosings Park) to a parlor inside a house (e.g., Hunsford parsonage) creates a sense of metaphoric incoherence. In this adaptation, the indoor/outdoor scenes and the metaphoric subtexts have been rearranged haphazardly and inconsistently, and the result is a filmic spectacle that lacks a formal aesthetic structure. Although Sutherland argues that in novel-to-film adaptation techniques, “form” is “expendable” (340), in this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice the lack of a structural skeleton and the transmogrification of the structural details create a movie that bears only a superficial relation to the spirit of the classic novel.3

Scenes are the formal building blocks of what Alistair Duckworth calls the “aesthetic whole” (xii), and Austen, the master builder, has structured the component scenes in Pride and Prejudice to show the gradual evolution of Elizabeth’s consciousness and ideas.4 The elements of Wright’s film have not been “homogenized” into a totality (Sutherland 341).5 And although Sutherland points out that “Austen’s text displays a weak dependence on metaphor and figurative language (and film’s power lies in the manipulation of image and imagery)” (341), it is certainly the case that the author’s interior and exterior descriptive passages depend upon metaphors of enclosed vs. open spaces, of extended or inhibited views, of boundaries to be recognized or crossed, of energy and meditation.

The filmic versions of the novel’s exterior scenes seem decorative—more Romantic—rather than connected to a larger thematic or dramatic plan. On full display in this film are the trappings of what Sutherland (among others) calls the English “heritage movie genre” (343), which includes such generic aspects of country life as grand estates and houses, stone bridges, muddy pigsties, and misty, moonlit vistas. Camera work through the open doors and windows offers Wright the opportunity to reveal the inside of houses from the outside—e.g., the dining room at Longbourn where Mary Bennet sits at the pianoforte6 —and the outside from the inside—e.g., the farmyard at Longbourn, and, for one brief moment, the fountains at Pemberley. On the night of the Meryton assembly, a cloud-covered gothic moon hangs over the countryside, and this Romanticized phenomenon seems to help shape Wright’s “take” on romantic lovers and the world they inhabit. Caroline Bingley says that Elizabeth’s appearance when she reaches Netherfield is “positively Medieval.” Darcy stands alone in the landscape, staring, like Heathcliff, at the house of the woman he loves; in a line that seems to come straight out of Jane Eyre, Darcy tells Elizabeth that she has “bewitched [him] body and soul.” These clichéd Romantic trappings are symptomatic of the larger failure of understanding that infuses this film. The makers of this adaptation have apparently been affected not only by English Heritage but also by the Brontës’ vision of England and lovers.

The problems of scenic transference begin to arise after Elizabeth refuses Mr. Collins’s proposal. In the novel, an angry and frustrated Mrs. Bennet seeks Mr. Bennet in his library; Mr. Bennet’s sole response here is to “raise[ ] his eyes from his book” (111). Next, Lizzie is summoned to the library to hear her father’s decree that “‘[y]our mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do’” (112). The library, which signifies Mr. Bennet’s refuge from his wife and daughters and their activities of daily living, becomes a setting that emphasizes the separation of husband/wife roles in the Bennets’ marriage. That he stays secluded in his library when his favorite daughter is being encouraged by her mother to accept an unacceptable suitor reinforces a negative view of the father figure, of Mr. Bennet’s penchant for excluding himself from real life, and foreshadows his lack of concern when Lydia is to go to Brighton. While the library offers Mr. Bennet escape, there is the accompanying suggestion that he is boxed into this room by his unequal marriage. Austen turns Mr. Bennet’s library, a room that resonates with positive metaphoric significance, into negative space.

In the film, however, this important interior scene is transferred to the outdoors. After she rejects Mr. Collins, Elizabeth dashes to the lakeside, and Mrs. Bennet, with a gaggle of geese at her heals, races after her; then Mrs. Bennet runs back to the house to drag Mr. Bennet down to the lake to talk to Elizabeth. By transferring the library scene to the lakeside, the film hides significant flaws in Mr. Bennet’s character. In addition, while the filmic scene provides an opportunity for Mr. Bennet to strike a Byronic pose against the gorgeous watery background, the same scene exposes Mrs. Bennet, who is not a runner, to ridicule: with her petticoats flapping, she is visually and aurally equated with the quacking geese.

The film takes greater liberties with indoor/outdoor scenes once Elizabeth leaves Longbourn to visit Charlotte Collins at Hunsford Parsonage. Pivotal landscape settings that reveal Elizabeth’s character, rather than her social behaviors, are replaced by bland interior spaces. Elizabeth is known for her “love of solitary walks” (182), for those times when she escapes the social fray and indulges in peaceful meditation and contemplation. Elizabeth Toohey points out that “in the spirit of the Romanticism of Jane Austen’s time, appreciation of and psychological connectedness with the land becomes a virtue, one more component of the moral character” (52). The film misses this point completely because Elizabeth is rarely given a chance to be in nature or to observe nature. For example, Colonel Fitzwilliam’s revelations to Elizabeth about Darcy’s interference in Mr. Bingley’s affairs, which Austen has set in Rosings Park, are moved inside—to the church where Mr. Collins is preaching. Austen’s scene provides space for Elizabeth to consider some new concepts about choice and marriage problems and possibilities. Underscoring the “truth universally acknowledged” that overarches the action of the novel, Colonel Fitzwilliam explains some of the monetary facts of the marriage market. He tells Elizabeth that not only do men “‘suffer from the want of money,’” but also that “‘[y]ounger sons cannot marry where they like’” (183). In many ways, Colonel Fitzwilliam reveals that he is as anti-romantic as Charlotte Lucas: he, too, must make a responsible marriage. He then reveals to Elizabeth that Darcy “‘lately saved a friend from the inconveniences of a most imprudent marriage’” because “‘there were some very strong objections against the lady’” (185). In her room at the Parsonage, as she turns these words over in her head, she focuses on class rather than on behavior. She deems that Darcy’s objections were “her having one uncle who was a country attorney, and another who was in business in London” (186); she refuses to entertain the idea that her mother’s behavior and “want of sense” were important enough to have “material weight” in Darcy’s mind (187). Elizabeth’s agitation, tears, and headache are a physical reaction to Colonel Fitzwilliam’s comments and to her own musings.

This 5½-page chapter signals the beginning of a new, imperfect awareness in Elizabeth and serves as an initial widening of Elizabeth’s vision, but Austen shows how difficult it is to accept new ideas, so Elizabeth abruptly denies the ramifications of those ideas. The outdoor setting reinforces the contemplative mood of the beginning of the chapter, but the mood breaks with Colonel Fitzwilliam’s revelations, and Elizabeth wants to get back to Hunsford and shut herself in her room. In the film, however, the setting and the mood are completely different. Colonel Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth sit together and whisper to each other during church services; Elizabeth can look across the aisle and see Darcy. Mr. Collins rambles on (the screenplay attempts a joke by having Mr. Collins use the word “intercourse” in his sermon) while children play with toys and adolescents fall asleep. The crowded church resonates with boredom and bad behavior. Meanwhile, outside it is pouring rain and thundering. The church scene is so busy that the viewer cannot focus on what is important. It seems that the major purpose of transposing what was originally an exterior scene to the interior setting of this scene is to prepare for the cinematographic spectacle that follows: Darcy’s proposal to Elizabeth.

In the novel, Darcy proposes to Elizabeth in a room at Hunsford Parsonage. Pleading a headache, Elizabeth has stayed away from an evening at Rosings, and she has used her time alone to review the contents of all the letters she has received from Jane. When she hears the door bell, she imagines that it might be Colonel Fitzwilliam coming “to enquire particularly after her” (188); instead, Mr. Darcy walks into the room and enquires after her. The mood is set: with a peculiar mix of disappointment and anger, Elizabeth responds “with cold civility” to his enquiry, after which an uncomfortable silence ensues, adding to the nervous tension in the room. Then, with no preamble, Darcy blurts out to an astonished Elizabeth his iconic lines about how he has struggled to repress his affections. She makes the requisite responses to his proposal, but the more she speaks, the more emotional she becomes, and all pretence of civility dissipates. Austen ironizes moments of strong feeling by containing the characters in rooms that are super-charged with emotions, or by placing them in natural settings and showing their manners. In this tête-à-tête, the setting of the scene in a small interior space has the effect of heightening the drama because there is no means of emotional relief—except for Darcy to leave. The contained space of the setting conveys intimacy, but Darcy and Elizabeth are boxed in by four walls and social conventions requiring good behavior. Anger and passion fill the space between and around them.7

The film takes this intimate interior scene and sets it in a picturesque landscape that relies on the weather to convey torment and agony. After church, Elizabeth runs through lashing rain; she sprints over an eighteenth-century stone bridge; she clings to the columns of a Greek temple. Soaking wet and in violent competition with each other as well as the elements, Darcy and Elizabeth shout above the thunder and rain—like Heathcliff confronting Catherine on the Yorkshire moors. What is most annoying is the filmic thunder that underscores important lines of dialogue: when Darcy uses the phrase “lack of propriety,” his words elicit a thunderous boom. Even the rain is loud. In her analysis of the use of sound and voice in film adaptations of Austen’s novels, Ariane Hudelet makes an important point about nuance: “sound,” she says, “works to recreate the type of expressiveness found in the novel, a punctual expressiveness not obvious or conspicuous in any way, but where each hesitation, each sigh, can become loaded with meaning according to the context where it takes place” (183). In this film, nothing is nuanced. The big bow-wow effect may garner rave reviews from some film critics, but it does not correspond to the essence of the novel.8 Moments of strong feeling in Austen belong to the characters, not to the weather.

In the novel, after she has rejected Darcy’s proposal, Elizabeth escapes from the Parsonage to “indulge herself in air and exercise” (195) and to attain some privacy. Attempting to avoid Mr. Darcy, “instead of entering the park, she turned up the lane, which led her farther from the turnpike road. The park paling was still the boundary on one side, and she soon passed one of the gates into the ground.” It is significant that even in her agitated state, Elizabeth notices how the countryside has changed during her visit, and how “every day was adding to the verdure of the early trees.”9 For this scene, Austen juxtaposes the flowering of the landscape, the liberating expanse of landscape, and the gates to Rosings Park; the effect is a set of complex images signifying Elizabeth’s own emotional and psychological changes as well as her sense of exclusion. It is at this point that Darcy and Elizabeth meet at the gate; he holds out a letter for her, which she takes “instinctively” (195); he walks off and she begins to read. Walking and reading, she is absorbed and transformed by his revelations, excuses, and explanations, and for two hours she walks in the lane and thinks about what he has told her. For Elizabeth, the effects of reading the letter are so great that she “felt depressed beyond any thing she had ever known before” (209). What she reads in the letter transforms the way she sees herself and her family, and it is important to consider how the writing of the letter has changed Darcy as well.

Wright’s adaptation plays with the structure of the letter scene and focuses on Darcy’s delivering the letter rather than on Elizabeth’s reading the letter. When Darcy sets the letter on the widow sill, Elizabeth seems almost to be in a catatonic state. When she turns abruptly from the mirror, Darcy is gone. Wright sets this scene in a narrow room where light from a window falls obliquely on Elizabeth as she stands and reads a line or two and then gazes out; viewers see Mr. Darcy galloping away through the woods. The mood of this exquisitely beautiful scene is meditative, and the camera lingers on the female form illuminated in the clear light, clearly an allusion to a Vermeer painting. But what is lost by transferring the reading of the letter from the outdoors to the indoors is the subtextual significance of Elizabeth’s expanding vision. As Barbara Wenner points out, “her landscapes provide Austen’s heroines with spaces to reflect knowledgeably—even psychically—upon their situations” (95). In the film, Charlotte interrupts Elizabeth as she reads Darcy’s letter. There is no room in the parsonage for Elizabeth to reflect on the events that have just taken place or on the contents of the letter.

Jane Austen’s description of the visit to Pemberley includes iconic details that reveal Elizabeth’s growing awareness and maturing self-analysis, but once again the film not only transposes outdoor scenes to the opulent rooms inside Pemberley House, it also cuts pivotal exterior scenes. How important is it that Elizabeth and her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner meet Darcy in the grounds of Pemberley? For one thing, the parkland setting where they meet for the first time after their heated argument at Hunsford is natural rather than artificial. By subtly highlighting the symbolic significance of the house and the grounds, Austen creates metaphorical connections with Mr. Darcy: Pemberley House is set naturally in the grounds, the stream has “some natural importance . . . without any artificial appearance” (245), and a simple bridge leads to “a spot less adorned than any they had yet visited” (253). From the setting, the reader, like Elizabeth, learns more about the character of Darcy, about his connection with the estate. The natural setting exhibits attributes of the owner that reinforce the excellent report given by the housekeeper. Elizabeth intuits and appreciates the connection of Darcy with the land and the estate. The scene allows for the genuine natures of both characters to evolve. Their natural attributes would not have been detected by Elizabeth in the drawing room or the music room or the long gallery of the house, where codes of conduct must necessarily shape behavior.10

In the novel, Austen places characters in settings that challenge or console them, that reflect or reveal a state of mind, that shape their behaviors. When Elizabeth and Darcy are getting to know one another, they are cooped up in crowded and oppressive, albeit beautiful, rooms, where they argue, confront each other rudely, and misbehave shockingly. It is therefore fitting that Elizabeth should meet Darcy again not inside Pemberley House but in the Park, which is full of so many beautiful vistas that Mr. Gardiner is very nearly tempted into a ten-mile walk around the lake. The scene functions as a meditation on natural (not artificial) beauty, and the talk is not of money and matchmaking but of trout and fishing. In the woods along the stream in Pemberley Park, Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s exquisite civilities barely disguise their heightened emotions and physical agitations. In this landscape setting they can be themselves.

What is missing from Wright’s film is the balanced interior/exterior structure that reveals the larger implication of the ways that Austen uses Nature and artifice as elements of the settings, ideas that the film disregards to the point of incoherence. Transposing the iconic re-connection scene from outdoors to indoors confirms Ellingham’s statement that Pemberley has come to symbolize both “fetish and commodity” (90). Interiors in movies provide opportunities for elaborate set dressing and an abundance of material things. In the film, Elizabeth becomes separated from the Gardiners and the housekeeper, so she wanders around Mr. Darcy’s house alone, and she touches art objects that are displayed on the tables. This violation of propriety is demeaning: Elizabeth appears to be interested only in material objects. Wright has used the interior space to project a vision of Darcy’s (and his class’s) acquisitiveness and Elizabeth’s (and her class’s) greed. The interior setting of this scene contributes to the critical view that adaptations of Austen’s novels are nothing more than “visual packaging”—“grand sets crammed indoors with priceless art objects and antique furniture” (Sutherland 343). But it is not simply the over-dressing of the interior sets that presents thematic problems at this point. Pemberley’s (i.e., Chatsworth’s) stone-cold sculpture gallery, abundance of expensive objects, and opulent rooms detract from the emotional and thematic intensity of the re-connection of the two main characters.

Finally, in a rather laughable transference of an exterior scene to an interior space, Lady Catherine comes to call on upstart Elizabeth Bennet at Longbourn. In the film, Lady Catherine arrives so late that the family must be roused from their bedrooms. She mentions the Bennets’ small garden, but instead of walking in the novel’s “‘prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of [the] lawn’” (352), Lady Catherine meets with Elizabeth in the drawing room, thereby cancelling the uncomfortable comedic effect not only of Lady Catherine’s haranguing Elizabeth in the little wilderness, but of Elizabeth’s triumph over intimidation. The wilderness scene in the novel places Lady Catherine, the most artificial character, a grande dame who has not previously been seen in the outdoors, at odds with the setting; it is she who squirms. Is the point of this transference from the wilderness to the drawing room to emphasize Lady Catherine’s hauteur and grandeur? Is it to show Longbourn and its occupants in the most unflattering light? Anyone who has read the novel will try to puzzle out why the film made this very minor change.

Plot-driven to an extreme, Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice aims to get Elizabeth married to Darcy, but if making that match is the only point of the novel, Pride and Prejudice would not have achieved and maintained its unassailable classic status. Austen’s individual scenes reinforce central values and underpin greater thematic rhythms—Nature and artifice, the individual and society, appropriate behaviors in public and private. Instead of analyzing the indoor and outdoor scenes for their metaphorical and thematic significance, and for how they reveal universal truths about human nature and individual and societal behaviour, Wright opts for grandiose set effects and shows that only the surface of the classic text has been highlighted. Since the filmic version radically transposes the indoor/outdoor scenes that the author so carefully constructed, with the consequent exclusion of structural coherence, the main matter of the new form is spectacle. Perhaps novel-to-screen transformations suffer most when the screenwriter and director jettison subtlety for obvious architectural, atmospheric, and “English Heritage” clichés. Bringing Pride and Prejudice to movie theatres is a more complicated project than filming five virgins on their island in the south of England.


NOTES

1. Lisa Hopkins, in her discussion of Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle), analyzes the way this adaptation focuses so intensely on the “iconic centrality” of Mr. Darcy rather than on Elizabeth Bennet. Hopkins comments that although “Andrew Davies’s adaptation is extremely faithful to the novel,” the changes that do occur in the film center on Mr. Darcy’s “feelings, his desires, and his emotional and social developments” (4-5).

2. Other critics have covered some of these questions about adaptation. For collections of essays on a variety of novel-to-film adaptations of Austen’s work, see, for example, Gina MacDonald and Andrew MacDonald’s Jane Austen on Screen, and Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield’s Jane Austen Goes to the Movies and Jane Austen in Hollywood.

3. Sutherland refers to the fact that this film was in the process of being made when her book was published.

4. As Laura Mooneyham White points out in “Emma and New Comedy,” “[t]he 1950s were the last period in which structure, form, and genre were widely discussed, when structuralism drew readers’ attention to the creative function of form, the way in which ‘the larger rhythm of the whole action [of a narrative] shapes and indeed creates the parts’” (129; quoting C. L. Barber). White finds that “literary studies have begun to see a resurgence of critical interest in aesthetics rather than history” (128).

5. Sutherland says that “[t]he screen absorbs the viewer into an artfully homogenized representation in which meaning is delivered as spectacle more swiftly than words absorb the viewer into illusion of a total environment—though words, especially heightened, literary words, can do this, too, but at a slower pace” (341).

6. The scene is one of the allusions to Vermeer’s paintings of women inhabiting interior spaces.

7. It is a claustrophobic interior setting, and the physical details of constricting space contrast with the outdoor setting of Darcy’s second proposal in Volume III of the novel.

8. In her article “What Meets the Eye: Landscape in the Films Pride and Prejudice [1995] and Sense and Sensibility,” Sue Parrill finds it “surprising that more of the filmmakers who have translated Austen’s novels into film have not exploited this obviously visual element for its suggestive value” (33).

9. Mary Jane Curry shows how Austen uses the concept of “serious pastoral” in her descriptions of Elizabeth’s delight in the details of the natural beauty of the countryside. In the film the camera lingers on cloudy skies, Gothic moons, mist, storm—elements that are extraneous to Elizabeth’s walks. The film, therefore, indulges in “decorative pastoral”—using stock Romantic images to conjure emotions.

10. In her discussion of the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility, Sue Parrill finds that Emma Thompson and Ang Lee “recognized the significance of landscape as Jane Austen used it in the novel—to support characterization and character relationships” (33). The important caveat here is the clause “as Jane Austen used it in the novel.”

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1986.
Curry, Mary Jane. “‘Not a day went by without a solitary walk’: Elizabeth’s Pastoral World.” Persuasions 22 (2000): 175-86.
Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels. 1971. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994.
Ellington, H. Elisabeth. “‘A Correct Taste in Landscape’: Pemberley as Fetish and Commodity.” Jane Austen in Hollywood. Ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield. Lexington: UP Kentucky, 1998. 90-110.
Hopkins, Lisa. “Mr. Darcy’s Body: Privileging the Female Gaze.” Jane Austen Goes to the Movies. Ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield. Lexington: UP Kentucky, 2001. 1-9.
Hudelet, Ariane. “Incarnating Jane Austen: The Role of Sound in the Recent Film Adaptations.” Persuasions 27 (2005): 175-84.
Parrill, Sue. “What Meets the Eye: Landscape in the Films Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.” Persuasions 21 (1999): 32-43.
Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: SUP, 1996.
Pride & Prejudice. Dir. Joe Wright. Screenplay by Deborah Moggach. DVD. Working Title, 2005.
Stovel, Nora Foster. “Famous Last Words: Elizabeth Bennet Protests too Much.” The Talk in Jane Austen. Ed. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinglass Gregg. Edmonton: U Alberta P, 2002.
Sutherland, Kathryn. Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford: OUP, 2005.
Toohey, Elizabeth. “Emma and the Countryside: Weather and a Place for a Walk.” Persuasions 21 (1999): 44-52.
Wenner, Barbara. “‘I have just learnt to love a hyacinth’: Jane Austen’s Heroines in their Novelistic Landscape.” Persuasions 24 (2002): 90-101.
White, Laura Mooneyham. “Emma and New Comedy.” Persuasions 21 (1999): 128-41.
Source: http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no2/kaplan.htm

Colonialism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/
bo: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/booksources.html#etexts
/ http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/readers.html

Stylistic site: http://www.exampleessays.com/viewpaper/54245.html

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De QuinceyConfessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey


Research paper:
Sensibility: Drawing together theoretically informed literary history and the cultural history of sexuality, friendship, and affective relations, this is the first study to trace fully the influence of this notorious yet often undervalued cultural tradition on British Romanticism, a movement that both draws on and resists Sensibility’s excessive embodiments of non-normative pleasure. Offering a broad consideration of literary genres while balancing the contributions of both canonical and non-canonical male and female writers, this bold new study insists on the need to revise the traditional boundaries of literary periods and establishes unexpected influences on both Romantic and early Victorian culture and their shared pleasures of attachment.
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered. It also became associated with sentimental moral philosophy.
One of the first of such texts would be John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), where he says, "I conceive that Ideas in the Understanding, are coeval with Sensation; which is such an Impression or Motion, made in some part of the Body, as makes it be taken notice of in the Understanding."[1] George Cheyne and other medical writers wrote of "The English Malady," also called "hysteria" in women or "hypochondria" in men, a condition with symptoms that closely resemble the modern diagnosis of clinical depression. Cheyne considered this malady to be the result of over-taxed nerves. At the same time, theorists asserted that individuals who had ultra-sensitive nerves would have keener senses, and thus be more aware of beauty and moral truth. Thus, while it was considered a physical and/or emotional fragility, sensibility was also widely perceived as a virtue.
Originating in philosophical and scientific writings, sensibility became an English-language literary movement, particularly in the then-new genre of the novel. Such works, called sentimental novels, featured individuals who were prone to sensibility, often weeping, fainting, feeling weak, or having fits in reaction to an emotionally moving experience. If one were especially sensible, one might react this way to scenes or objects that appear insignificant to others. This reactivity was considered an indication of a sensible person's ability to perceive something intellectually or emotionally stirring in the world around them. However, the popular sentimental genre soon met with a strong backlash, as anti-sensibility readers and writers contended that such extreme behavior was mere histrionics, and such an emphasis on one's own feelings and reactions a sign of narcissism. Samuel Johnson, in his portrait of Miss Gentle, articulated this criticism:
She daily exercises her benevolence by pitying every misfortune that happens to every family within her circle of notice; she is in hourly terrors lest one should catch cold in the rain, and another be frighted by the high wind. Her charity she shews by lamenting that so many poor wretches should languish in the streets, and by wondering what the great can think on that they do so little good with such large estates.[2]
Objections to sensibility emerged on other fronts. For one, some conservative thinkers believed in a priori concepts, that is, knowledge that exists independent of experience, such as innate knowledge believed to be imparted by God. Theorists of the a priori distrusted sensibility because of its over-reliance on experience for knowledge. Also, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, anti-sensibility thinkers often associated the emotional volatility of sensibility with the exuberant violence of the French Revolution, and in response to fears of revolution coming to Britain, sensible figures were coded as anti-patriotic or even politically subversive. Maria Edgeworth's Leonora, for example, depicts the "sensible" Olivia as a villainess who contrives her passions or at least bends them to suit her selfish wants; the text also makes a point to say that Olivia has lived in France and thus adopted "French" manners. In addition, the effusive nature of most sentimental heroes, such as Harley in Henry Mackenzie's A Man of Feeling, was often decried by literary critics as weak effeminacy, helping to discredit sentimental novels, and to a lesser extent, all novels, as unmanly works.
During the eighteenth century, cultures of sensibility came into general existence in several European countries and colonies; they persisted well into the nineteenth century, and while they have been fragmented as coherent middle-class cultures, the values they embodied have persisted into the twenty-first century. In their intense interest in the operation of the mind and in interpersonal relations, these cultures displayed the rise of what we think of as modern consciousness and, within it, psychology. Their context was the time and space that newly developing consumer economies first afforded significant numbers of women and men, and they were preoccupied with pleasure and pain, as more and more people found themselves able to choose more of the former and to transcend more of the latter. How widespread the culture was in any nation depended, therefore, on the extent of the consumer revolution in the eighteenth century and thereafter. Cultures of sensibility existed in such urban centers as Edinburgh and Paris, but appear to have been most widespread in England, Holland, and the British colonies that became the United States. They both displayed transnational characteristics (among multilingual and often well-traveled elites) and reflected local ones, as people drew upon their language and other modes of expression—tears above all, but other physiological signs (legible to other people of sensibility), such as blushes and trembling—in response to their own thoughts, to interpersonal exchanges, to the "distress" of others, and to "sublime" natural phenomena.
The word "sensibility" denoted the receptivity of the senses and referred to the psycho-perceptual scheme systematized in the late seventeenth century in the nerve theory of Isaac Newton and the environmental psychology of John Locke, both of whom were influential, not only in their native England, but in European philosophical thought in general. Sensibility (and "sensible" and "sentiment") connoted the operation of the nervous system, the material basis for consciousness. By the mid-eighteenth century, "sensibility" stood for a widely held body of beliefs signifying a particular kind of heightened consciousness of self and others, and incorporating a "moral sense"—a conscience, but also something thought to be an equivalent of the other senses, like sight and touch. The coexistence of reason and feeling was assumed, but the proportion of each was endlessly debated, above all because of what many saw as the dangers of unleashed feelings.
The French Revolution was a turning point in the history of sensibility because its opponents attributed it in part to the emotional abandon of Rousseau. Indeed, its ideology, like that expressed by the American Declaration of Independence (1776), did manifest some of sensibility's values. The debate over the proportions of reason and feeling in persons of sensibility was politicized, and the need for women to channel their feelings toward moral and domestic goals was reemphasized. The word "sentimental," which had been used positively, became a label for "excessive sensibility" and self-indulgence.
Sensibility and sentimentalism continued to flourish at all levels through the nineteenth century, both on the Continent and in the New World, developing into or accompanying Gothic, anti-Gothic, romantic, and realistic forms through the nineteenth century. The tradition extended through antislavery narratives and sentimental novels (Harriet Beecher Stowe), reform-oriented novels (Charles Dickens), and in popular and religious forms (Gustave Flaubert). While there were significant changes in the language of sensibility over time, its major terms and values were still important to the exquisitely conscious upper-class Europeans and Americans described by Henry James at the turn of the twentieth century. Mark Twain continued to place central value on heightened consciousness and on the morality of inner feeling even while he replaced the language of sensibility with fresh democratic forms.
The continuing persistence of this tradition through the nineteenth century, however, is remarkable only if one neglects its deep popular appeal and its links to consumerism. As the word "culture" implies, the phenomenon was by no means limitedto intellectual and literary expressions. Its different origins had included the code of behavior of the Renaissance courts of Italy and France, subsequently imitated by aristocrats and would-be aristocrats throughout Europe, then absorbedbyupwardly mobile groups below them in the social pile, in accordance with "the civilizing process" described by Norbert Elias. Also key had been changesof religious thought (to which Newton and Locke were connected) in England, as well as in France and Holland. Some of the ideals and corresponding behavior were absorbed by evangelized working-class audiences, as well as by the increasingly literate bourgeoisie. That the culture's chief feature was the elevation of pleasurable feelings meant that it held appeal for all, including those who had been denied literacy, let alone formal theological and intellectual, training—those who now found valueinthe"heart"alone, and an empowering sense of victimization and of moral superiority. Thus sensibility can be detected in overlapping Christian, bourgeois, and reformist ideologies and identities, as well as in mere fashion, but could also sponsor, even revolutionize, individual consciousness.
Colonialism
Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. One of the difficulties in defining colonialism is that it is difficult to distinguish it from imperialism. Frequently the two concepts are treated as synonyms. Like colonialism, imperialism also involves political and economic control over a dependent territory. Turning to the etymology of the two terms, however, provides some suggestion about how they differ. The term colony comes from the Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that the practice of colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the new arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin. Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperium, meaning to command. Thus, the term imperialism draws attention to the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control.
The legitimacy of colonialism has been a longstanding concern for political and moral philosophers in the Western tradition. At least since the Crusades and the conquest of the Americas, political theorists have struggled with the difficulty of reconciling ideas about justice and natural law with the practice of European sovereignty over non-Western peoples. In the nineteenth century, the tension between liberal thought and colonial practice became particularly acute, as dominion of Europe over the rest of the world reached its zenith. Ironically, in the same period when most political philosophers began to defend the principles of universalism and equality, the same individuals still defended the legitimacy of colonialism and imperialism. One way of reconciling those apparently opposed principles was the argument known as the "civilizing mission," which suggested that a temporary period of political dependence or tutelage was necessary in order for "uncivilized" societies to advance to the point where they were capable of sustaining liberal institutions and self-government.
The goal of this entry is to analyze the relationship between Western political theory and the project of colonialism. After providing a more thorough discussion of the concept of colonialism, the third and forth sections of the entry will address the question of how European thinkers justified, legitimize, and challenged political domination. The fifth section briefly discusses the Marxist tradition, including Marx's own defense of British colonialism in India and Lenin's anti-imperialist writings. The final section provides an introduction to contemporary "post-colonial theory." This approach has been particularly influential in literary studies because it draws attention to the diverse ways that postcolonial subjectivities are constituted and resisted through discursive practices. The goal of the entry is to provide an overview of the vast and complex literature that explores the theoretical issues emerging out of the experience of European colonization.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a term paper: Unbelievably Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein at the age of eighteen. This great work captures the imaginations of its readers. Frankenstein remains one of the greatest examples of Gothic literature. Unlike other Gothic novels of the time, however, Frankenstein also includes elements of Romantic writing, and therefore cannot be classified as soley Gothic. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist. The daughter of the British philosopher William Godwin and the British author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Born in London in 1797, Mary was privately educated. She met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in May 1814, and two months later she left England with him. When Shelley's first wife died in December 1816, he married Mary. Mary’s first and most important work, the novel Frankenstein, was begun on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 as her contribution to a ghost-story competition. A remarkable accomplishment for such a young writer, Frankenstein was a success. No other work by Mary Shelley achieved the popularity or excellence of this first work, although she wrote four other novels, books of travel sketches, and miscellaneous tales. In 1818 the Shelley’s left England for Italy, where they stayed until Shelley’s death. Only one of Mary’s and Percy’s children survived, Percy Florence, and in 1823 Mary returned to England with him and concentrated on his education and welfare. The image of Mary Shelley presented by the biographers suggests an intensely private, imaginatively exuberant, yet also emotionally withdrawn figure, whose political melancholy and strong religious faith are intriguingly at odds with the optimistic rationalism of her famous parents, and her poet husband’s atheistic radicalism. The story of Frankenstein begins in the polar ice of the Arctic Circle. The ship of an English explorer, Walton, is trapped in the ice and is unable to travel. During the day the men on board spotted a sledge, driven by a huge man and drawn by dogs followed by Victor Frankenstein, a man in very poor condition. Walton nursed him back to health as the stranger told Walton his story. Victor Frankenstein was born in Geneva and at an early age showed promise in the natural sciences. Victor was sent to a university when he grew older, and that’s where he stumbled on to the secret of creating life. With great brilliance Victor created an eight-foot monster and gave him life through electricity. Once Victor had realized what he had done he panicked and left the creature. When the creature wondered into the city everyone he met screamed and ran away. Finally the creature found a place to live in a cottage outside the city. Through observation of the family in the cottage the monster began to learn the ways of man. In doing so the monster longed for friendship, but everyone he encountered was repulsed by him. This repulsion caused the monster to become bitter and angry towards men. The monster’s anger caused him to murder William, Victor’s brother. The monster makes a horrible demand on Victor, to create a companion to give the monster love and friendship. Victor did not go through with the demand, and for punishment the monster kills Clerval, Victor’s friend and Elizabeth, Victor’s wife. Victor vows that he will chase the monster until the monster’s death. Victor died in the frozen North, and the monster disappeares into the ice field. As the before mentioned events show the Gothic novel was a late eighteenth-century revival of the tale of terror. One of the earliest and best-known Gothic novels was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto , a scary story about a castle terrorized by a giant. Another contributor to Gothicism is Clara Reeve who wrote The Old English Barron , which she considered to be an improvement on Walpole’s novel. Then came Frankenstein. The first Gothic characteristic of Frankenstein is evident in its grotesque elements. To create life Victor had to use the bodies of dead humans. At night Victor would secretly steal the bodies from their resting place and take them to his chamber. Victor would take the body part from the deceased that he needed and would cut it off. He would then attach the part to his creation, the monster. The description of the monster at its moment of coming alive is hideous : His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of lustrous black and flowing, his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but those luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes and straight black lips. The monster’s yellow skin, watery eyes, and black lips help add terror to the story and are examples of grotesque elements. Another characteristic of the Gothic novel in Frankenstein is the mystery. In the book Mary Shelly never tells the reader how Frankenstein is really created. We know that Victor used the limbs of dead bodies to create the body of the monster, but we never found out how the monster was brought to life. It is also a mystery that the monster was able to follow Victor everywhere he went. How did the monster know that Victor was going back to his home in England, and how would the monster be able to travel the great distance? These are elements of mystery that can’t be answered. A characteristic that is in many Gothic novels is the desolate environment. As you remember the story of Frankenstein begins and ends in the arctic ice. In the beginning of the story, Walloon’s ship is surrounded by ice and can’t move. The crew is trapped for many days. Victor is confined to a desolate place when he is trying to carry out his experiment. Victor restricts himself inside his laboratory that contains human body parts. At the end of the story Victor dies in the freezing and depressing location of the arctic. The monster also is part of a desolate environment. While the monster is learning the ways of humans he is confined to the small enclosure of a cottage, and is only able to leave the cottage at night. The story of Frankenstein also makes use of fear. Once Victor put life into the monster no one knows what’s going to happen. Fear wasn’t really an element of the story though, until the monster murders William. If the monster is brutal enough to murder a child then he is capable of doing anything. Fear is an element all the way through the book after William’s death. Mary Shelley is a great example of a writer who is the product of the Romantic era. This movement began in Germany with writers such as Goethe, who created the Romantic concept of Faust, yet the movement dominated the Western literature for many years. Since Mary Shelley was so familiar with the great writers of the Romantic era, it is easy to see that her work would reflect the trend. The major characteristic of Romanticism that Mary Shelley uses is the examination of senses and inner feelings. In the beginning of the story Victor contemplates his experiment: ...soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein,- more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. Throughout the book Victor examines his feelings about the monster he created. The monster also examines his feelings and senses through the book. The creature explains: A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, smelt, heard, and felt at the same time; and it was indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses. At the time of the monster’s creation it had only basic emotions and feelings. He gradually learned senses, like temperature through playing with fire. Through great effort the monster was able to learn intelligent matters, such as reading and writing. Almost every scene in Frankenstein deals with some aspect of emotion. The adoption of underprivileged children, the death of William, and the devotion of Victor and Elizabeth are examples of scenes dominated by emotions. Clearly you can see that Mary Shelley was successful in creating a Gothic novel that includes elements of Romanticism. frankenstein what makes it a gothic novel again
Frankenstein: What Makes it a Gothic Novel? One of the most important aspects of any gothic novel is setting. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is an innovative and disturbing work that weaves a tale of passion, misery, dread, and remorse. Shelly reveals the story of a man's thirst for knowledge which leads to a monstrous creation that goes against the laws of nature and natural order. The man, Victor Frankenstein, in utter disgust, abandons his creation who is shunned by all of mankind yet still feels and yearns for love. The monster then seeks revenge for his life of loneliness and misery. The setting can bring about these feelings of short-lived happiness, loneliness, isolation, and despair. Shelly's writing shows how the varied and dramatic settings of Frankenstein can create the atmosphere of the novel and can also cause or hinder the actions of Frankenstein and his monster as they go on their seemingly endless chase where the pursuer becomes the pursued. Darkly dramatic moments and the ever-so-small flashes of happiness stand out. The setting sets the atmosphere and creates the mood. The "dreary night of November" (Shelly 42) where the monster is given life, remains in the memory. And that is what is felt throughout the novel-the dreariness of it all along with the desolate isolation. Yet there were still glimpses of happiness in Shelly's "vivid pictures of the grand scenes among Frankenstein- the thunderstorm of the Alps, the valleys of Servox and Chamounix, the glacier and the precipitous sides of Montanvert, and the smoke of rushing avalanches, the tremendous dome of Mont Blanc" (Goldberg 277) and on that last journey with Elizabeth which were his last moments of happiness. The rest goes along with the melodrama of the story. Shelly can sustain the mood and create a distinct picture and it is admirable the way she begins to foreshadow coming danger. Shelly does this by starting a terrible storm, adding dreary thunder and lightning and by enhancing the gloom and dread of her gothic scenes. Shelly writes so that the reader sees and feels these scenes taking permanent hold on the memory. Furthermore, the setting can greatly impact the actions in a novel such as this. Frankenstein's abhorred creation proclaims that: "the desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge" (Shelly 84). The pitiful creature lives in places where man cannot go for reason that the temperatures and dangers of these settings are too extreme. But near the end, Frankenstein's rage takes him all over the world in an obsessed search for his doppelganger enduring terrible hardships, which the monster, too, has endured. Frankenstein pursues his creation to the Artic wastes, revenge being the only thing keeping him alive. This "serves only to thicken the strange darkness that surrounds and engulfs them" (Nitchie 274). Here it seems as if Frankenstein may finally capture his adversary, but nature thinks otherwise. The monster tempts his enraged creator through a world of ice and the setting becomes a hindrance as the "wind arose; the sea roared; and, as with the mighty shock of an earthquake; it split and cracked with a tremendous and overwhelming sound. the work was soon finished; in a few minutes a tumuluous sea rolled between me and my enemy" (Shelly 191). Because of this gothic setting amid the Artic ice floes, the despair hits both Frankenstein and the reader. So Frankenstein, Mary Shelly's strange and disturbing tale personifies the gothic novel. With her compelling writing, she creates the setting that sets the gloomy mood and causes as well as hinders actions creating dramatic tension. The entire story is mysteriously set in the cold Artic which adds to the dark and foreboding atmosphere. Frankenstein pursues his monster there, fails to destroy him, and dies appropriately in the cold of the Artic that matches the cold of his heart. Likewise, Frankenstein's monster dies on his own terms, springing to his ice raft, "borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance" (Shelly 206). Works Cited 2. Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein. Bantam


Frankenstein: Shelley Use of Mascuine and Feminine Roles:
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Frankenstein: Shelley Use of Mascuine and Feminine Roles Shelley began writing ?Frankenstein? in the company of what has been called ?her male coterie?, including her lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. It has been suggested that the influence of this group, and particularly that of Shelley and Byron, affected her portrayal of male characters in the novel. As Ann Campbell writes: ?[The] characters and plot of Frankenstein reflect . . . Shelley?s conflicted feelings about the masculine circle which surrounded her.? Certainly the male characters in ?Frankenstein? are more developed that those of the females. Elizabeth Fay has suggested that the female characters are ?idealised figures? in much of Shelley?s work, particularly in the descriptions of Caroline and Elizabeth, the two mother figures in the novel. Caroline is, on surface value, a perfect parent, together with her husband, which renders Victor?s irresponsibility in abandoning the creature more unforgivable. She ?possessed a mind of uncommon mould? which was also ?soft and benevolent?; she is compared to a ?fair exotic? flower which is sheltered by Alphonse; she drew ?inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to bestow? on Victor, and her ?tender caresses? are some of his ?first recollections?. She is the idealised mother, a figure that Shelley viewed wistfully, as her own mother died when she was ten days old to be replaced by a disinterested stepmother. Caroline?s parenting provides the care that Frankenstein might well have lacked, had he been left to his father alone ? his father dismisses Agrippa?s work without explanation, thereby setting Victor on his course towards ?destruction?. This is the first introduction of a theme that continues throughout the book, that of the necessity for female figures in parenting and in society. Without a mother figure and left only with Frankenstein who subsumes both parental roles, the creature?s life is blighted by his imperfection and lack of companionship. However, Caroline is also the trigger to Alfonse?s chivalry, thus presenting him in an improved light and allowing his character to develop at the expense of her own weakness. This is a feminist comment from Shelley, whose mother Mary Wollenstonecraft was a notorious feminist and an important influence. Justine, too, is an ?idealised figure?, described during the trial as having a countenance which, ?always engaging, was rendered, by the solemnity of her feelings, exquisitely beautiful.? She is the archetypal innocent, being beautiful, weak and entirely accepting of her fate to the point of martyrdom. She would doubtless incense feminists now, accepting death with equanimity (? ?I am resigned to the fate awaiting me? ?) at the hands of misjudging and dominant men. She is a somewhat two-dimensional character, being compliant in all things, enduring the mistreatment by her mother and not objecting to the injustice of her condemnation. In this sense she serves merely as a plot device, used to introduce the evil of the creature and to show Frankenstein?s cowardice in refusing to defend her in time. Here she is another feminine figure used to further a male character?s development, just as Caroline was used to develop the character of Alfonse. She is also a vehicle for Shelley?s attack on the contemporary judiciary system, which explains her name. The character of Safie is used by Shelley as a direct attack on sexism. Safie is a stronger character than the other women in the novel, as she defies her father in escaping to join Felix. Shelley comments upon the state of ?bondage? inflicted on females in Islamic society at the time, which Safie objects to, encouraged to ?aspire to the higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit? by her mother. Shelley, in applauding this determination and self-respect on the part of women, is condemning a society which oppresses females and upholds males as superior. However, Safie is not merely used for this; she is also presented as a contrast to the creature, who is similarly separated from the De Laceys by a language barrier, but who can never be accepted by them because he lacks her ?angelic beauty?. She is an example of man?s intolerance towards ugliness, as her beauty transcends the barrier of language whereas the creature?s benevolence cannot. Elizabeth is the most ?idealised figure? of all the women in the novel, afforded the following romantic description: ?The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home . . . her smile, her soft voice, the sweet glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us. She was the living spirit of love to soften and attract.? She is here made to transcend ordinary mortality to become ?celestial? and ?saintly?. This makes her death more appalling and triggers Victor?s active fury, whereas the suffering of the innocent Justine did not. The base murder of ?the living spirit of love? can be said to be the creature?s revenge against humankind, as the killing of something so natural and integral to humanity kills happiness with it. But whilst Elizabeth is assigned this pivotal role in the novel, she is in herself two-dimensional as a character, having no friends outside of the family and no interests save ?trifling occupations? within the household. She is content to wait for Victor, despite his long absences and frequent and serious depressions. She is the idealised woman at the time of the novel?s setting, being submissive, supportive and beautiful. However, the character of Elizabeth can also serve a further purpose. It has been argued by several critics that Elizabeth is the creature?s opposite, that she and he together make up Victor. She is his good half and the creature his bad. Both characters are orphans and heavily dependent on Victor. Elizabeth is beautiful, good and female, whereas the creature is ugly, evil and male. The blending of the two create Victor, who has robbed himself of gender by assuming both parental roles. (It has been suggested by one critic that Victor has feminine characteristics, being ?sensitive, passionate about literature . . . and becom[ing] enamoured with [other men?s] voice[s] and feelings?.) This theory can be supported, in that Victor attributes to Elizabeth the ability to ?subdue [him] to a semblance of her own gentleness?. By contrast, the creature unfailingly enrages Victor, causing him to lose self-control and become violent. Whilst the feminine roles are flat and manipulated to affect the character and actions of the male roles, the latter are considerably more defined. As Elizabeth Fay writes, Shelley shows the ?realistic weaknesses and frailties? of men in the novel. Walton is presented as sexist and selfish, mocking his sister?s fears for his safety in his opening sentence: ?You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.? Margaret is an unsatisfactory audience, as he desires a companion ?whose eyes would reply to [his]?. This companion must necessarily be male, for how could a female possibly communicate adequately with him? However, despite this wish for male companionship, Walton possesses certain feminine characteristics, such as his distaste for violence: ? . . . my best years [having been] spent under your gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on board ship?. He writes adoringly of ?the stranger?s? ?conciliating and gentle? manners, ?unparalleled eloquence?, nobility and ?cultivated? mind. Walton?s ambition to discover ?uncharted territories? is arrogant, as he desires to acquire ?dominion . . . over the elemental foes of our race?. He craves idolatry and power. Shelley introduces this here so that Walton?s later failure towards the close of the novel is celebrated by the reader, who has understood that Victor?s arrogance has caused devastation, whereas Walton has paid little heed and is bitter in his failure. Shelley is commenting on the stupidity of male hubris, which she ?sensed in the scientific ambitions of Romantics such as her husband,? as the critic James W. Maerten has suggested. Maerten writes also of Anthony Easthope, who has drawn: ?a circular fortress as a model of the . . . masculine ego. Ego . . . is entrapped in its own defences, unable to escape the barriers it has raised against a universe [which is] an enemy . . . The most praised . . . in our civilisation are those who can contain and control the most monstrous powers: biological pathogens, nuclear fission, toxic waste, vast armies. Such Promethean desires are ultimately the illusions of Icarus.? Victor?s ego causes him to desire ?a new species? which would ?bless [him] as its creator and source?. He cannot control the monster that he creates, thereby losing his essential masculinity. His attempt to defy Nature and steal God?s power for himself is as fatal as Icarus? stupidity in trying to do what man cannot. This male arrogance is introduced by Alphonse, who assumes the care of Caroline and renders her submissive in gratitude. The blatancy of the strong male and weak female roles here has been condemned by some, who suggest that the imposition of a male role on Victor is a form of filicide. This is responsible for his insecurity which in turn leads to his ?overreaching ego inflation?. A critic has argued that: ?Victor Frankenstein is compulsively self-destructive, driven by forces he cannot recognise to create a son by his own efforts and without the troublesome involvement of a woman . . . [upon which] he is horrified . . . and rejects the creature totally, thereby turning the son into the very monster whose existence he has always denied in himself.? It is possible to corroborate this view to some extent, as Victor?s feminine qualities conflict with his identity as a man. Shelley was concerned with the issue of gender, as in her novel ?The Last Man? she created an essentially genderless character, Lionel Verney, and discussed how he only acknowledged his gender when he viewed himself in a mirror. His reflection told him that he was an English gentleman, but without this empirical perception he had no such identity. Elizabeth Fay writes of him that he is a ?feminised ideal?, ?combining masculine and feminine traits in such a way as to confute traditional notions of gender?. Robert W. Anderson writes that: ?Frankenstein?s creature embodies gender transgression on two levels . . . the first being [his] status as being a surgically constructed male, the second being Victor?s non-gender transgression in co-opting the female trait of reproduction, transforming his laboratory into a virtual womb.? The creature has no real gender, despite being created physically as a male. He is denied male dominance over females by Victor, who has made him too ugly to be accepted into human society and then destroys the female mate that he had partially made for him. The creature, like Victor, has feminine characteristics, being profoundly affected by literature and nature, and being sensitive to emotion. He is made male only so that there can be no sexual overtones in the relationship between himself and Victor, and the battle between them can be physical and violent as well as rhetorical. The absence of femininity in the making of the creature is its integral flaw. Despite all of Victor?s efforts to make the creature perfect, it will ultimately be ugly, because it is unnatural for a male alone to reproduce. Beauty cannot result of only masculinity. Shelley is condemning a single father in this. The death of her mother left her to the care of her father, whom she adored. He often neglected her, leaving her feeling unwanted. The lack of grief on the part of her husband as their babies died augmented this conviction in men?s inability to care for children alone. This reinforces her message throughout the novel of the necessity for women in society. Shelley was forced to ask her husband to claim to be the author of the novel, as women were not accepted as writers at the time. Men alone in science and education are fallible, as she suggested in making Frankenstein?s experiment so disastrous. Therefore the oppression of women at the time was irrational and arrogant. Frankenstein represents flawed masculinity, as an example of a society without women. Shelley manipulated masculine and feminine gender identities in her novel to try and persuade her audience that men alone cannot create, whether it be children or art.

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