The Novels Focus On Inner Experience And Everyday Life

8 Pages 1971 Words

e over life; (...) the power to fashion manners, morals and sentiments of the reading public” . If books have, as Bannett implies an educating effect on the reader, than the content of books were of political relevance. Not only female novelists used the power of books. Charles Brockden Brown hoped to reform his readers as well: “We (novelists) hope to enchain the attention and ravish the souls of those who study and reflect.” The question left open is: How did novelists like Jane Austen, Mary Shelly and Charles Brockden Brown use what critics like Ian Watt call now the generic characteristics of the novel in order influence their readers and to bring the domain of everyday life and inner experience into political discussion?
One central feature of the novel is its general interest “in the development of its characters in the course of time” , so Ian Watt. The protagonist is not a type but a particular individual, with a proper name . We follow his or her development in a chronological, “more minutely discriminated time-scale” . Jane Austen focusses in Northanger Abbey on the everyday life and experience of young Catherine who enters the world, unaware of societies ways. Nearly every day is described in more or less detail from “breakfast” (36), over visits at “the Pump-room” (15) and the theatre “in the evening” (42). Firstly the domain of everyday life is politicized simply through its central position in the novel, since the significance of the relation of the self to society and its everyday environment is publicized. Secondly Jane Austen’s Nor...