Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2006

Thesis Director

Randall Beebe

Thesis Committee Member

Christopher Hanlon

Thesis Committee Member

Jad Smith

Abstract

Through an examination of three of Jane Austen's novels-Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park-this thesis examines the picturesque debate of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and uses that debate to frame a discussion of the moral values of Austen's characters. This thesis cites extensively from primary sources by Uvedale Price and Humphry Repton, practitioners of picturesque landscape aesthetics, and draws parallels between those works and Austen's writings. While the place of the picturesque is the question common to all three novels, each novel treats other questions that were important to English society at the time Austen was writing. Most notably: in Northanger Abbey, the question of how one should read and then use that reading to frame one's view of the world; in Sense and Sensibility, the questions of whether love at first sight is possible or desirable and who is most worthy to inherit and lead English society; in Mansfield Park, the question of how children should be educated to become people who will feel moral sympathy for their fellow human beings. Other questions that readers of Austen's novels have long asked are also treated, including the question of whether Northanger Abbey is a "broken" novel with its division into the Bath and Northanger episodes and the question of what Austen was doing with the extensive Lover's Vows section of Mansfield Park. In examining all of this, as well as the question of whether marriages should be made for money or love, this thesis draws parallels between those questions and picturesque theory and then uses those parallels to examine the question central to Austen's work: how should the individual fulfill his responsibility to his society? The main argument made is that those characters who follow the Uvedale Price "preserver" school are the responsible characters who are fit to lead society and those characters who follow the Humphry Repton "improver" school are the irresponsible characters who are unable or unwilling to meet the needs of their society.

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