or no control. She states that Austen’s protagonists use landscapes to observe the world, to take shelter and to embark on processes of self-discovery, declaring that “[…] a clever tension may exist in literary landscape: the landscape influences the behavior of the characters, but characters, especially Jane Austen’s heroines, find ways of challenging the landscape and find new meaning there” (WENNER, 2006, p.2).
Reflections about space are productive ways to think about mobility, since the latter is, of course, directly related to the former. Thus, I will use Wenner’s statement to observe that Jane Austen’s heroines also need to find ways of challenging the restrictions to their mobility, and that the way they deal with these restrictions can be used as keys to their personality. In Jane Austen’s six major novels, the ways male and female characters move are very different:
while young, unmarried men from the middle class, even if not very rich, need only jump on a horse after a moment’s notice to change their location, to young women, even a simple walk through the neighborhood is a source of gossip among the village, and every movement is controlled and scrutinized. With this difference, and the effect it has over her female characters, I believe Jane Austen was calling attention to how women had their freedom of movement defined solely because of their gender, and criticizing this and other forms of curtailing their independence.
Gender is one of the variables that determine the degree to which, for example, we travel between countries, or walk through the streets at night. Massey mentions that countless surveys have shown that women’s mobility, even in the Western world of today, is restricted if compared to men’s, and that they suffer limitations imposed solely on the basis of their sex.
She explains that, as some groups of people are in charge of mobility, this leads to the possibility of developing a politics of mobility. She states that “[…] mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. It is not simply a question of unequal distribution […]. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people” (MASSEY, 1994, p. 150). To Massey, in the context of today’s world, where you can find the same clothes, the same music and the same food almost everywhere you go, instead of lamenting the demise of local communities, one should seize the opportunity of developing a more progressive concept of place. To her, no place is static – rather, a place’s uniqueness comes from the specific way in which all the social relations at work within it function there.
Therefore, a more complex way of conceptualizing place is analyzing the individuals that inhabit it and their social interactions.
Linda McDowell, in the book Gender, Identity and Place (1999), agrees with Massey in stating that places are not simply points on a map, but rather made through interactions that create both social and spatial boundaries. Different groups that inhabit the same physical space can have a very different experience of it: those who hold more power have the ability to exclude those who have less. Even though many feminist scholars have called attention to the fact that the experiences of women are not homogeneous, being affected by, for example, factors like social class or race and ethnicity, McDowell believes that there needs to be a theoretical space that defines sexual difference and gendered relations as a specific axis of power relations. To McDowell, despite the fact that feminist scholarship over the last decades has demonstrated that binary gender divisions are flawed, and despite a growing recognition of the plurality of experiences, the idea that women and men are associated with certain characteristics remains extremely powerful in most of the world. The assumption of categorical differences between women and men influences our idea of ourselves, our daily interactions and our institutional structures; and this categorization is not only binary, but also hierarchical, constructing women as inferior to men.
One of these categorical differences is the idea that women are associated with the private and men, with the public sphere. Because of that fact, one of the many aspects of daily life that is affected by binary gender divisions is the definition of which places should include or exclude women, and how and when women should move from one place to another. As
McDowell affirms, “This binary division is also deeply implicated in the social production of space, in assumptions about the ‘natural’ and built environments and in the sets of regulations which influence who should occupy which spaces and who should be excluded”
(MCDOWELL, 1999, p.11). Thus, to McDowell, gender divisions and spatial divisions are mutually constitutive:
The idea that women have a particular place is the basis not only of the social organization of a whole range of institutions from the family to the workplace, from the shopping mall to political institutions, but also is an essential feature of Western Enlightenment thought, the structure and division of knowledge and the subjects that might be studied within these divisions (MCDOWELL, 1999, p.12).
McDowell points out that in advanced industrial societies the control of men over women is constructed and enforced through a number of ways, including social conventions and the legal system. As an example, she cites the fact that in Britain, until the passing of the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1870, women were entirely dependent either on their fathers or on their husbands, and had no individual existence under English law. When they married, all their property passed into the hands of their husbands, and they were allotted only a weekly or monthly allowance. Furthermore, women had no right to own property, sign contracts, sue for divorce or, in the case of a divorce being obtained by the man, try to gain custody of their children. Jane Austen’s novels were published in England between 1811 and 1818, and, therefore, in a time where these rules still applied. An example of this is the allusion to the so-called “pin-money”, the allowance that women received after their marriage and which, in Pride and Prejudice, is listed as one of the advantages of Elizabeth’s marriage to Darcy, who are, respectively, the heroine and the wealthy hero of the novel: “How rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have!”
(AUSTEN, 2006, p. 357).
This control was also expressed in the rules that dictated from which places women should be excluded and how they should move, something that Roger Sales, in Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (1996), calls “the politics of movement” (SALES, 1996)5. While analyzing Emma, Sales notes how Jane Austen’s text shows the very different way the male characters and the female characters move, drawing attention to the gendered control of transport. In fact, it would be a long time before British women began to move more freely between the public and the private spaces. In Beginning Modernism (2011), Jeff
5 The edition used here is a Kindle edition without page numbers.
Wallace, while discussing Mrs. Dalloway (1925), states that Virginia Woolf, by having the characters Clarissa Dalloway and her daughter Elizabeth Dalloway walk about London, was emphasizing that the ability to stroll through the city alone was relatively new for women in the 1920s (WALLACE, 2011). In Jane Austen’s novels, written over a century earlier than Woolf’s, it was virtually impossible for any woman in Clarissa and Elizabeth’s social class – and in the class of every Austenian heroine – to do so. The social rules and conventions that circumscribed their movements can be clearly understood through a brief analysis of contemporary conduct books, to which we will proceed in the next session.