2013-04 ENG-393-OL One Writer's Vision: Jane Austen Final Paper The Theme of Friendship in Jane Austens Novels

Nearly anyone who has been to the movies in the past few years has probably seen a film adapted from one of the novels of Jane Austen, who is having one of those revivals of interest that is sometimes inflicted upon artists from pre-mass media eras. And the most enduring scene from each of these movies is the last one, in which everyone of any importance is happily married off. And yet despite the nearly deafening clangor of marriage bells in Austen's works, and despite the amount of mental anguish that her characters devote to matchmaking and being matched, the theme of friendship is just as important as that of romantic love, although rarely acknowledged to be so. If Austen's pages are full of endless dialogue about the importance of love and marriage, it is important to note that all of this dialogue is going on between friends. After a brief summary of Austen's work, this paper looks at the importance of friendship and how the theme of friendship relates both to the importance of marriage and to the characters relationship to the larger society. Austen (1775-1817) has become known not simply as one of the major female English novelists - a position that she held for several decades last century - but simply one of the best English novelists because of her brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction. Born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon, of which her father was rector, she was educated at home and never lived apart from her family, in which she was the seventh of eight children. Austen began as a child to write novels for her family, and these all reflected the life of a country family in which money was never quite plentiful enough. This lack of substantial riches is an

explicit element of Austen's novels, for a family's wealth had a direct impact on a young woman's ability to marry well (or even marry at all), and while Austen may satirize the morals of her time, she does seem to believe in the idea that a woman should marry for love. (Ash and Higton, 1995, p. 14). However, money does not have nearly as much to do with friendship as it does with marriage, and this is one of the reasons that the theme of friendship between and among women is of such importance in Austen's novels - added to the fact that the world in which Austen lived was in many ways segregated by sex, ensuring that people would draw most of their friends from their own sex. Finally, it seems clear that Austen's emphasis on the importance of female friends (including sisters and other female relatives as friends) probably stems at least in part from her own experiences as a spinster from a large family (Ash and Higton, 1995, p. 15) The importance of friendship in improving the lives of individuals but of not disrupting the overall social order is an important aspect of the author's popularity. We see throughout Austen's work a certain democratic tendency in the nature of friendship, for women are far more likely to have friends (often many of them) who have more or less money than themselves than they are likely to have suitors who are so economically different from themselves. Friendship may indeed go where lines of inheritance cannot. The women of Jane Austen take friends who are outside the fine level of economic distinction that they inhabit, but not entirely outside their class. Someone like Harriet Smith is as far as an Austen heroine will ever go in friendship. Women below them can receive charity (honest and sincere charity) but never friendship (Johnson, 1995, p. 78). Austen may have sensed that this was a potentially radical notion, that women could flourish in the company of other women not as a poor substitute for the company of their

husbands and not as something to do simply until a man happened to come along and propose, but as an end in itself. And yet, it is also true that friendship does quite often supplant marriage, and Austen's novels (as is life itself) are full of women who are content to fill their time with female companionship. While Austen's brothers, Francis and Charles, as Admirals of the British Navy, battled Napoleon, Jane "brought to the page the only kind of combat a woman was allowed: the conquest of hearts and the overturning of domestic arrangements" (Shields, 45). By cloaking so many of the friendships in her novels as examples of fictive kinship Lady Russell as a surrogate mother, Emma Woodhouse as a surrogate sister and Bingleys sister as an in-law - Austen seems to suggest that women's friendships, even when independently arrived at, are in fact supported by a web of familial and therefore male-based family links (Johnson, 1995, p. 126). Some of these women are spinsters by choice, some not, some too young to be spinsters, but all of them thrive on friendship. As a result of friendships, Emma Woodhouse is admonished for her arrogant matchmaking when her protge, Harriet Smith--who has under Emma's tutelage become too uppity to accept the marriage proposal of Robert Martin, a respectable farmer--sets her cap at none other than Mr. Knightley, leading Emma to realize, perhaps too late, that "Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!" (Austen, 408). Anne Elliot suffers for her weakness in allowing Lady Russell, a surrogate mother-figure, to persuade her to refuse the proposals of Captain Wentworth. "Jane Austen, the stern moralist" (Shields, 175), displays a judicial sense of reform for wicked bounders, such as Willoughby, Wickham, and even Mr. Elton, who find their due in their marriages to Miss Grey, Lydia Bennet, and Augusta Hawkins respectively. Friendship for Austen's characters is the glue of daily life, providing a world of interest, emotional support and busyness that is otherwise denied to those who are kept removed from

public life. But while friendship is vital and important, it is not revolutionary. The circles of friendship in Austen novels change the lives of the individuals they touch, but leave the whole of society intact.

Work Cited Ash, R. & B. Higton (eds.) (1995). Jane Austen. London: Aurum Press Ltd.

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