| This work begins with an overview of the convention of travel in the novel and proceeds to an analysis of Jane Austen's six completed novels. Each chapter after the first pairs two novels. The second chapter examines Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, tracing the influence of ironically or obliquely introduced "shadow plots," plots involving travel or mobility which serve as a commentary on the main plot. Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, the two novels treated in Chapter Three, illustrate Austen's progressive revocation of travel as a dominant structural device. Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price illustrate the development of a powerful impulse in Austen's writing: the tendency to portray the heroine's limitations by reducing her to a single organ of sense--in Elizabeth the eye, in Fanny the ear--and by doing so to confine both heroine and text to the limited range of that organ. Emma and Persuasion further and complicate the relationship between motion and perception. Emma's dominant mode of thought, imagination, and Anne Elliot's, memory, are opposites: one projects forward, the other backward. These two characters are truncated individuals each of whom must gain what the other has: Emma must recall and reinterpret, Anne must project and act.;In all six novels, Austen's use of motion and stasis contributes to her ability to communicate through multiple but coherent details the psychological, epistemological, ethical and literary dimensions of her story. |
