“Almost wild”: Jane Austen’s dirtiest of heroines

Abstract

The version familiar to most readers of Jane Austen is that her fiction is concerned solely with social manners and customs, to the exclusion of her characters’ natural environs, but that version bears little resemblance to the reality. This chapter repositions Austen in the provenance of contemporary environmentalist theory by focussing on the role of the English countryside, specifically dirt and grounds. Nineteenth-century conceptions of wildness were inextricable not only from looking “dirty” but also from the pressures on Austen’s heroines to repress an innate and vestigial dirtiness, a dirtiness that externalizes the wild beast locked inside the proper English lady. Of particular interest to me is how the discourse of improvement in Mansfield Park joins one of the major motifs in Austen, that is, the project of female self-discipline, which is also a taming of one’s internal wildness. To approach Austen in this way is to recognize her novels, traditionally separated from the nature-writing of her contemporaries, as outgrowths of such discourses as landscape design and Romantic-era conduct literature.