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This study of Jane Austen's six novels examines the relationship of comedy and education. Austen carefully constructs two kinds of comedy in her novels: surface comedy derived from inaccurate perceptions and conceptions of the world, and deep comedy, the vital rhythm of growth which is elaborated as growing love and self-awareness. All six novels develop complex relationships between reason, emotion, imagination, aesthetics and ethics. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, victimized by the sterile surface comedy of artificial social conventions and her Gothic fantasy, an artificial aesthetic convention, moves toward a recognition of the deep comedy and vitality which her love for Henry Tilney inspires. Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility perceives and judges the superficialities of life and reacts in an emotional and picturesque fashion, while her sister, Elinor, in love with Edward Ferrars, cannot give surface expression to her emotions. Each sister is educated through tragicomic experiences to the demands of both views of life. Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy, victims of the prevailing social delusion of objectification in Pride and Prejudice, gradually develop a sense of the deeper values in life through expanded aesthetic sensibility and mutual affection. Fanny Price in Mansfield Park possesses deep feelings for Edmund Bertram but must learn to be independent and give her emotions sincere expression in a society deluded by false ceremony. Emma presents surface comedy as a product of Emma's attempt to superimpose her imagined life-patterns on a benevolent world. Educated by sympathy and her attachment to Mr. Knightley, Emma recognises the world below Highbury's glittering surface and the necessity for maintaining society's existing structures. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot achieves surface expression and the capacity to act as Wentworth, a victim of society's delusions of fixed social place, comes to realize the depth of Anne's emotion. Jane Austen's novels portray a complex picture of education through the interaction of surface and deep comedy. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Jane Austen has been called an artist and a moralist. Few attempts have been made, however, to illustrate how she combines the artist and the moralist in her novels. In the light of modern critical thinking, especially, which tends to isolate the function of art from that of morality, Jane Austen's works seem to demand elucidation. [...]

Throughout her novels, Jane Austen exhibits an acute awareness of the problems facing the sensitive, intelligent women of her day in a society which effectively keeps them in a position of inferiority. She exposes their faulty moral training, their inadequate education, their lack of opportunity for independence or any gainful employment, their social and economic dependence on the male and the resulting, inevitable and often defective preparation for marriage around which their youth is centered. Despite her concern for the individual woman, from which tragic implications occasionally emerge, her focus remains on society as a whole, and especially on the problems of male egoism and sentimentalism which block, by the subjugation of women, the evolution of a freer and possibly more creative society. All these social manifestations seem to be manifestations of the comic form as defined by such critics as George Meredith, Henri Bergson, Susanne Langer and particularly Northrop Frye, who specifically outlines the archetypal pattern of comic action. The subjection of women can be seen as the "absurd or irrational law" which Frye contends the action of comedy moves toward breaking; in Bergson's terms, it is an example of something mechanical, automatic and rigid superimposed on living society, which only laughter can remove; in Meredith's, the cause of "the basic insincerity of the relations between the sexes," and a demonstration of the vanity, self-deception and lack of consideration for others, which he considers legitimate targets for the Comic Spirit; in Langer's, a grave threat to "the continuous balance of sheer vitality that belongs to society" and which it is the function of comedy to maintain. Parents and all other members of the society, whether young or old, male or female, who consciously or unconsciously endorse the concept of female inferiority, are identifiable as the obstructing, usurping characters who, in Frye's terms, are in control at the beginning of a comedy. The comic heroine's struggle for self-realization against the obstacles they place in her path—particularly her defective and misdirected education and the traditional pattern of courtship to which they try to force her to conform—constitutes the comic action. The comic resolution is, of course, her eventual victory which enables her to find self-fulfilment in the marriage of her choice. Ever since its emergence as a form from the ancient Greek death-and-resurrection rites, comedy has been a celebration of life, of the absolute value of the group and of the forces through which society is perpetually regenerated. As the comic form has evolved, however, its social and moral implications have widened. Bergson and Meredith believe that comedy, because it works toward removing the anti-social, is "a premise to civilization." Jane Austen's novels reflect this view and demonstrate Frye's parallel contention that the movement of comedy is toward a more ideal society which forms around the redemptive marriage of the hero and heroine and which tends to include rather than reject the obstructing characters. Based on the potential equality of men and women, the new society envisioned at the conclusion of Jane Austen's novels replaces the old, anti-social isolation with a new and vital communication among the members, and thus provides a framework within which men and women can work together, each contributing his special talents toward the public interest. Since this new, ideal society is not only the goal of the comic action but also the only area in which the heroine can find self-realization, it represents the ultimate conjunction of the comic form and the role of the comic heroine to be found in Jane Austen's work. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Jane Austen's novels abound with readers "reading" not only texts but also speech, gestures, looks, scenery, events, each other, themselves. Readers in the novels illuminate her assumptions about readers of the novels; unlike eighteenth-century novelists who judged fiction by readers' responses and who tried to manipulate those responses, she accepted that not all readers read alike. / Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice explore different styles of reading and suggest some ways are more successful than others. A good reader observes accurately, reflects carefully, and judges candidly, disciplining subjective feelings with "objective" truths of religion and morality; above all, good readers trust their own educated judgments rather than rely upon external monitors. / Readers of the novels share the reading experiences of heroines. In Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, readers are invited to judge without monitor or narrator to direct them. Readers, like heroines, discover and reveal themselves in the act of reading.

Jane Austen revises the sentimental epistolary tradition by introducing a structural epistolarity that replaces the anatomical vocabulary of female corporeality with the domiciliar terminology of female domesticity. In Austen's novels, the epistolary metaphor of the passport links letter reading, the heroine's education process, and views of domestic space. Epistolary issues aligned with domestic spaces indicate the metaphorical relationship between the structural dialectic of closed and open and the epistolary paradox of writing to dissemble character and reading to reveal character. Letter writing and reading represent the spatial order within prescribed views and tours of houses and grounds. The heroine's critical letter reading allows her to distinguish between character types presented through different domestic contents, and the letter's interpretive authority finalizes her social education by serving as a passport figuratively transferring her between natal and martial households.

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