Using Mental Maps to Locate Austen

The following is the second in a series of posts on Jane Austen. This is a guest post written by James Brown, contributor to a special issue of Critical Survey which is devoted to the subject of Jane Austen. James Brown is the author of the article titled “Jane Austen’s Mental Maps.”

The idea of mental maps was planted in my mind when I was a research student in Oxford. It comes from geography, especially from Peter Gould and Rodney White’s 1974 book, Mental Maps.

I’d also been an undergraduate at Oxford – one of Terry Eagleton’s students. I followed up the ideas he threw out about all manner of topics besides English literature. But as a postgraduate, things were different. I was writing about seventeenth-century drama, and Emrys Jones was my supervisor.

Emrys’s interests were wide-ranging. In the faculty’s list of research expertise, Emrys’s entry was ‘English literature 1500 to 1800’, with some later topics thrown in for good measure. He was an expert on Byron, for example. Though there were no degrees in drama at Oxford, Emrys took an obvious delight and interest in theatre. He could look forbiddingly donnish (as he does in Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard), but if he was talking about a performance he’d liked, his delight was infectious. At one of our meetings we got onto the topic of farce, and Emrys thought of a show in which Sheila Steafel had made an entrance that was side-splittingly funny because she was wearing sensible shoes. I can’t remember exactly how or why the sensible shoes were funny, but I do remember Emrys, in his book-lined room in New College, succumbing to a fit of giggles, struggling to gasp out the words ‘sensible shoes’, and wiping away tears of laughter.

Emrys proposed all manner of connections between the drama I was researching and other literature and theatre. But, to me at any rate, he seldom suggested reading something from quite another discipline. So when he recommended Gould and White’s Mental Maps the title lodged in my mind. I thought of using it in my doctoral work as a way of understanding late seventeenth-century playgoers’ perceptions of London. But in the end I didn’t use it in my thesis. So the idea remained filed away at the back of my mind, waiting for its cue. The cue was just over twenty years coming. When I saw the call for papers for the ‘Locations of Austen’ conference at Hatfield a couple of years ago, the phrase ‘mental maps’ popped back up.

As it happens, the way I’ve used the concept shows the influence of Terry Eagleton as well as of Emrys Jones. Though they were both Oxford professors of English, I suspect they felt they had little in common. Even though he’d been at Oxford for 14 years when I met him, and would remain for another 18, Terry gave the impression he was just passing through, and he’s since left. Emrys, on the other hand, seemed wedded to the place. Having been C.S. Lewis’s student, in 1955 he had been chosen by Lewis as his successor at Magdalen, and he only left Magdalen in 1984 to take up the Goldsmiths’ Chair at New College a quarter of a mile away, just the other side of Longwall Street. Yet it dawned on me, as I revised ‘Jane Austen’s Mental Maps’ for Penny Pritchard’s special issue of Critical Survey on Austen, that I had finally succeeded in bringing the two of them together. Emrys had alerted me to the idea of mental maps. But the way I describe them in my essay as performative – as being about what one can do with them rather than simply reflecting false consciousness – goes back to what I learned about ideology from Terry. Having struggled as postgraduate to reconcile what I learned from each of them, there’s a private satisfaction in finally bringing them together.

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James Brown is an associate research fellow in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck, and a lecturer in theatre at IES Abroad, having previously taught politics and sociology at Birkbeck and film and literature at Middlesex University.

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Starting with Place: Understanding Characters and Experiences in Jane Austen’s Final Novel

The following is the first in a series of posts on Jane Austen. This is a guest post written by Rebecca Posusta, contributor to a special issue of Critical Survey which is devoted to the subject of Jane Austen. Rebecca Posusta is the author of the article titled “Architecture of the Mind and Place in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.”

“Architecture of the Mind and Place in Jane Austen’s Persuasion” is in essence a project that explores how the characters of Jane Austen’s final novel understand their physical, social, and psychological place. But, it is also about how the places in which they live tell the story about who they are. It is a project that began to germinate long ago, early in my scholarly career, and is the product of my earliest ideas about myself and how I fit in the world. I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana; and, it is in New Orleans that I first met Jane Austen and found a connection to the ordinary ideas of humanness with which her novels deal. New Orleans is an old city filled with the physical remnants of a luminous past which fascinate me and ground me in my personal history.

I am descended from a long line of French Creoles on my mother’s side who arrived in New Orleans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Growing up, I remember stories my mother and grandmother used to tell of the big house on Esplanade Avenue that was lost after the Civil War, the dashing young man who dabbled in vaudeville and scandalous womanizing, the house on Verbena Street with the mom-and-pop grocery at the back, and the new house on Dodge Avenue with its cinderblock siding, fish pond, and summer house meant for sleeping in on hot summer nights prior to the advent of central air conditioning. Walking through the red-bricked French Quarter with its wrought-iron balconies and cool shaded courtyards, or along the River Road amongst the crumbling façades of the antebellum plantations, I am reminded of a troubled and turbulent past, and have often wondered about my ancestors who once walked the same streets and along the same shelled drives as I have. Who were they? What were they like? Few have told their stories, but the walls and bricks, balconies and flying staircases of the places they lived echo with their lives and experiences.

It occurs to me that even fictional characters, particularly those of Austen, are a product of the place in which they live, or at least a product of the place in which their creator lives. This may be why fiction is so appealing to us; we can see our own experiences in the experiences of others. If I start to tell my story, I begin with a place, as I have done here. Austen’s novels often begin with place as well. We meet her characters as they face a disruption in their normal domestic routine and move, change, or accept unpleasant alterations to the place in which they live. At the beginning of Persuasion, Anne Elliot defines herself by her place at Kellynch, but when she moves away from that place and can look back at it with a more critical and detached eye, she learns to define herself and her future. She learns to tell her story by the new places she occupies just like I know myself by both where I have been and where I am headed.

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Rebecca Posusta, M.A., is a Senior Instructor in the English Department at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

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Celebrating ‘Shakeshafte’ by Rowan Williams

Shakespeare Berghahn recently published the play ‘Shakeshafte‘ by Rowan Williams in the journal Critical Survey. Williams, who was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, is a highly-regarded poet and theologian whose play has been getting significant attention since its publication. To both honor the author and celebrate the publication of his play, we’ve linked to several articles about his work below. We hope you enjoy.