From Penshurst ...
I’m learning a great deal from my Country House Literature course with Future Learn about how country houses were used in literature to reflect the attitudes and behaviours of the times. I’ve been pondering somewhat on a point made about Miss Havisham and how she is this character with no family ties, no ‘normal’ role to play: she is no one’s mother, wife, or sister, which in those days would have rendered her inconsequential, and certainly a discomforting presence to her peers. Ergo, she is a dysfunctional personage, one that makes the rest of society uncomfortable by her very existence, yet impossible to deny her existence by the tenuous power of wealth she still exhibits on occasion.
She can be directly compared to the aristocracy of the time. She is the epitomic caricature of it, having boxed herself into a reality she is no longer capable of extrapolating from, or even seeing it as inherently destructive, effectively stepping out of the confines of her duties as lady of the manor — she has removed herself from obligation.
By not living up to the expectations of society, she has been deserted of hope, pity, or empathy by it, even if her exile was initially instigated by herself. As with many lords and ladies during that period, all she can do is sit by and watch her estate crumble, trapped in a bizarre web of her own making. She no longer upholds the important economic role her family once held by way of the brewery, as the aristocracy no longer upholds its role within the country estates, so caught up it is within its own sycophancy and vanity. The upper classes are waning from being the mainstay of economic power in Britain but, although they are surely aware of their looming demise, they are powerless — unwilling, even — to recognise what is really going on around them, or to act. In effect, Havisham is the poster girl for a dysfunctional aristocracy no longer living up to what is expected of it, not operating in a constructive, reasonable way.
Maybe that is part of why Dickens chose to write Expectations from the dual perspective of young Pip and older Pip, to show how recognisable this dysfunctionality was to the ‘outsiders’ — the up and coming ‘nouvelle riche’, who had never been brought up within the confines of aristocratic ‘great’ expectations — and from young Pip’s perspective, close up and caught up within the true horror of a psychological sickness that a solely adult view told in retrospect might possibly dilute in order to feel comfortable.
And in general, throughout this course there seems to be the ongoing theme of picking at the aristocracy in one way or another. The tutor during the studying of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest tells us straight out that the play is written around how members of polite society ‘got’ at each other through the high manners and polite rituals in which they had so much invested, highlighting the style of ‘war making’ that had seeped into the literature of the ages way back at the beginning of our studies.
It seems to be the prevailing common exercise between all the authors we have studied: Sir Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst, in an ideological opposition, laid bare the faults of many of the estates at the time; the periodicals that came about with the new printed press, full of polite words and denouncing subtexts; letters between friends discussing appropriate behaviours under the guise of fictitious characters; the clash of cultures between town and country folks in Pride and Prejudice, and the hierarchy within the upper classes; even the comparison between Anne Radcliffe and Jane Austen’s parody of her gothic novel threw up the question on how different classes approached their educations, and many people are agreed it seems that Austen is poking at the style and sheer romantic ridiculousness of the gothic novel itself (and probably, within that, the attitude towards girls’ education in general).
When I consider all these aspects, the pendulum of changing views, from Penshurst, the beating heart of its community, to the neutered, narcissistic and immobilized aristocracy of the later periods becomes unignorably apparent.
I shall never read a classic novel in quite the same way again.
