Dissertation

Tropes of time and space in Johnson, Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen

Karounos, Michael

2005

Overview

This project is an attempt to articulate a new conception of time and space as determined by the internal evidence of the texts and not by social or economic theories. Toward this end it employs a methodology which defines time and space as separate ideological categories with specific cultural distinctives. Furthermore, this essay attempts to prove that the authors figure their fictional arguments as solutions to contemporary social problems. Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759) defines time in the psychological terms of emotion. Hope and fear represent the future; sorrow and regret represent the past; and pleasure and pain represent the present. There are two modes of living: the “choice of life” and the “choice of eternity.” The choice the story posits is between living a material life in the present or a spiritual life in the future. Fanny Burney's Cecilia (1782) likewise portrays the tension between choosing to live in space or to live in time. Cecilia is a young heiress who is put in the guardianship of three men representing three strata of society: the aristocracy, the noveau riche, and the middle class. The first wants Fanny's money to ensure the legacy of the past; the second wants her money to fuel the pleasures of the present; while the third wants to invest her money in the metaphysics of a compound future. Into this scenario enters a fourth guardian, a moral “monitor” who teaches Cecilia that the best use of her money is to spend it on the poor that she may truly have treasure in heaven. Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) is different from the other three works in this study in that her metaphysics of time is political and not spiritual. Edgeworth's “heaven” is a unified Ireland. Her characters' live in a pleasure-driven English present rather than for the future benefit of Ireland. Her purpose in the novel is to show how the Irish people's orientation toward Irish space must change for Ireland to become a healthy polity in time. Finally, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1813) is a revolutionary work in both subject and purpose. Mirroring the cultural conflict of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Austen portrays the tensions between those who would not change society at all, those who would change it too much, and those who would change it in moderation. In portraying these three groups as representing past, present, and future, Austen shows how each affects everyday society and that a moral society can only proceed from people who live for the future.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Austen, Jane (1775-1817) / British & Irish literature / British and Irish literature / Burney, Fanny (1752-1840) / Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
• ISBN: 9780542070822, 0542070820