Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-w95db Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-09T13:34:32.818Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

Conclusion

Get access

Summary

In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation […] We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like […] We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits. (Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, p. 203)

What Robert Macfarlane describes here can be thought of as a redistribution of the perceptible, a turning away from the tangible experience of physical existence. Macfarlane's concern is the very modern one of the threat posed by this distancing and abstraction of our experience of the world to its ecological survival. Much earlier, at the turn of the eighteenth century, Jane Austen is also writing in reaction to this same redistributive formation, albeit still in process of emergence and consolidation. In Sense and Sensibility, the term ‘society’ retains for her the immediacy of personal interaction and shared feelings, even while its meaning is in process of change as part of the shift towards abstraction and aggregation as a way of knowing the world.

Struggles of representation as to what is noteworthy, what is above or below the horizon of visibility, are equally aesthetic and political. I have argued that both Austen and Woolf come to maturity as writers in periods of radically contested values in the eras respectively of the French Revolution and the First World War. In addition, their materialist understanding of reality and the writing practices they fashion from that understanding draw upon a tradition they share of British Enlightenment scepticism. The thinking of David Hume, Adam Smith and David Hartley substantiated a position of dissent from what became, increasingly, a consensual aesthetic and political regime, an ideology sustaining the hierarchical ordering of the mental above the material. For both Austen and Woolf what is at stake in this disembodiment of experience is the pushing out of sight of our shared existence as creaturely beings, beings subject to the same physical needs and vulnerabilities. It is recognition of this commonality that underlies the immediacy of Mrs Jenkins's response, in Sense and Sensibility, to threat of hardship, ‘I must see what I can give them’ (p. 241).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Conclusion
  • Pam Morris
  • Book: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism
  • Online publication: 04 May 2021
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Conclusion
  • Pam Morris
  • Book: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism
  • Online publication: 04 May 2021
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Pam Morris
  • Book: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism
  • Online publication: 04 May 2021
Available formats
×