Jane Austen Summer Program Context Corner IV June 20, 2016

Tracing Austen’s Night Sky The only reference to astronomy in Austen’s fiction occurs at the end of chapter 11 in Mansfield Park when Fanny and Edmund observe the evening sky. The novel’s explicit reference to time (mid-August after sunset) and location (Northamptonshire) allows us to chart what the sky must have looked like. The Big Dipper (“Great Bear”) appears in the southwest and Cassiopeia northeast. Arcturus, a very bright star, is prominent in the west. Fanny and Edmund can see the Big Dipper and Arcturus from their position in the drawing room, but they must go outside to spot Cassiopeia. This means that Mansfield Park’s drawing-room window faces due west (Zook 32).

The scene suggests that elementary astronomy was considered a suitable accomplishment for young women like Fanny and Jane Austen, although they would not have calculated the movement of celestial objects. Many wealthy Regency households owned celestial globes and astronomical works, among them Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics (1799).

Doreen Thierauf, UNC-Chapel Hill �1

Astronomy in Mansfield Park: Chapter 11 (pp. 105-6)

Fanny … had the pleasure of seeing [Edmund] continue at the window with her, in spite of the expected glee; and of having his eyes soon turned, like hers, towards the scene without, where all that was solemn, and soothing, and lovely, appeared in the brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods. Fanny spoke her feelings. "Here's harmony!" said she; "here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe! Here's what may tranquillise every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene."

“I like to hear your enthusiasm, Fanny. It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in some degree, as you do; who have not, at least, been given a taste for Nature in early life. They lose a great deal.”

“You taught me to think and feel on the subject, cousin.”

“I had a very apt scholar. There's Arcturus looking very bright.”

“Yes, and the Bear. I wish I could see Cassiopeia.”

“We must go out on the lawn for that. Should you be afraid?”

“Not in the least. It is a great while since we have had any star-gazing.”

“Yes; I do not know how it has happened.” The glee began. “We will stay till this is finished, Fanny,” said he, turning his back on the window; and as it advanced, she had the mortification of seeing him advance too, moving forward by gentle degrees towards the instrument, and when it ceased, he was close by the singers, among the most urgent in requesting to hear the glee again.

Fanny sighed alone at the window till scolded away by Mrs. Norris's threats of catching cold.

REGENCY ASTRONOMY

Stoneleigh Abbey at dusk, Wikimedia Commons

The night sky, as Fanny and Edmund would see it from the lawn.

Jane Austen Summer Program Context Corner IV June 20, 2016

Discussion Questions Question 1Read the passage in ch. 11, p. 105-6, beginning with “Fanny turned farther into the window” up to the end of the chapter.

According to literary scholar Anna Henchman, early 19th-century astronomers and literary writers pondered questions of one’s individual perspective and one’s relationship to society or the world at large. As such, the novel often performs a “telescoping” of a character’s perspective “from the cosmic to the personal, and from the personal to the cosmic” (2). Henchman further suggests that this shifting of perspective between the personal and the general (or “cosmic”) can change or at least unsettle a person’s view of his or her place in the world.

• Why is Fanny retreating into the window? What sort of interaction is she trying to avoid?

• How is the mood changing once Fanny and Edmund look at the stars by themselves?

• How does Austen shift Fanny’s perspective (and ours) here and why?

• Fanny seems to find relief when looking at the sky perhaps because it unsettles her place in the family. How does astronomy help her (if only temporarily)?

• Does Miss Crawford have any room in Fanny’s reverie? Or Edmund?

Question 2Although Edmund suggests that they should catch a glimpse of Cassiopeia on the lawn, he implicitly retracts his offer to renew their old habit of stargazing.

• In light of Fanny and Edmund’s earlier history of companionship, what is the social role of stargazing here?

• What does it mean that they don’t ultimately look at Cassiopeia together?

Question 3Major breakthroughs in astronomy were publicized widely in the late 18th and early 19th century, particularly those relating to changed conceptions of time and space. By the end of the 18th century, astronomers were already developing a notion of ‘deep space’ and understood that they were looking at a universe in which nothing was ever at rest (Henchman 3).

Doreen Thierauf, UNC-Chapel Hill �2

William Herschel (1738-1822)

William Herschel in 1795, Wikimedia Commons

Herschel’s 40-foot telescope (1789), Wikimedia Commons.

Discoveries: • Messier nebulae (old term for diffuse

astronomical objects) are actually star clusters

• Uranus (1781) = instant fame, elected Fellow of the Royal Society

• 2,400+ nebulae • infrared radiation = pioneered use of

astronomical spectrophotometry (prisms and thermometers to measure wavelengths of stellar objects)

• Titania and Oberon (Uranus moons) and Enceladus and Mimas (Saturn moons)

• rotation period of Mars and variation in Martian polar caps

• “evidence” of life on the Moon and on Mars • constructed more than 400 telescopes

starting in 1774; largest and most famous: reflecting telescope with a 49 1⁄2-inch-diameter mirror, 40-foot focal length

• sister Caroline, his assistant, discovered comets and nebulae; son John also became a famous astronomer

Jane Austen Summer Program Context Corner IV June 20, 2016

• How does Austen articulate this sentiment? Is Fanny’s enthusiasm—her sense of awe—perhaps related to the many important astronomical discoveries of her time? What is the role of “harmony” here?

• It was considered inappropriate for young women to express feelings of sublime awe openly. Why has Edmund encouraged Fanny’s Romantic susceptibility to the grandeur of space? What does it mean that Fanny, usually very aware of propriety, reveals her feelings like this?

• Do you think that Miss Crawford would feel the same if she stood with Edmund alone in the window? Why or why not?

Question 4Olivia Murphy argues that the stargazing scene serves as Austen’s critique of traditional notions regarding the biblical Eve and her thirst for forbidden knowledge. In fact, Austen, according to Murphy, directly responds to Milton’s depiction of Eve in Paradise Lost when she shows that even knowledge of astronomy may be displayed with feminine reverence and timidity. This puts political pressure on earlier taboos regarding women’s access to scientific knowledge (114).

• How politically radical is this scene, in your opinion? Is Fanny challenging the status quo between the sexes here?

• In what ways is Austen updating the ideal type of womanhood, particularly when comparing Fanny’s interest in stargazing with Miss Crawford’s tendency to show off her musical skills?

Question 5This question might be difficult, but bear with me. Scholars have long called Mansfield Park Austen’s most Victorian novel (the first critic to do so was probably Barbara Bail Collins in 1949). Victorian novels—i.e. from 1830s until ca. 1900—tend to “get outside the limits of individual perception” (Henchman 4); that is, they have complex plots, many points of view, and refuse to settle or decide things. Astronomy, in that regard, helped writers engage with such complexity because recent astronomical findings had challenged the notion of a stable universe. Before Herschel’s discoveries, of course, the night sky had been associated with rationality, objectivity, and permanence.

• How does the stargazing passage—and certain aspects of Mansfield Park at large—anticipate the nature (complex or multiple plots/many perspectives/unresolved) of the Victorian novel? It helps to remember that Mansfield Park is the only of Austen’s novels where the heroine is absent in some scenes.

Doreen Thierauf, UNC-Chapel Hill �3

Further Reading Jane Austen & Science Knox-Shaw, Peter. Jane Austen and the

Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Murphy, Olivia. Jane Austen, the Reader: The Artist as Critic. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 2000.

Zook, Alma. “Stargazing at Mansfield Park.” Persuasions 8 (1986): 29-33.

19th-Century Literature & Astronomy Gaull, Marilyn. “Under Romantic Skies:

Astronomy and the Poets.” The Wordsworth Circle 21.1 (1990): 34–41.

Henchman, Anna. Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Jenkins, Alice. Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Meadows, A. J. The High Firmament: A Survey of Astronomy in English Literature. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969.

19th-Century Astronomy Aubin, David. The Heavens on Earth:

Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Clerke, Agnes Mary. A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century. London: A. and C. Black, 1902.

Hoskin, Michael. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

---. The Construction of the Heavens: William Herschel’s Cosmology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Otis, Laura (ed.). Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Women & Astronomy Andréolle, Donna Spalding. Women and

Science, 17th Century to Present: Pioneers, Activists and Protagonists. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011.

Brück, Mary. Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy: Stars and Satellites. London: Springer, 2009.