How Is Jane Austen's Spacial Description Economic?

- Jane Austen’s unique economy of spacial description accentuates the subjective variability of place, while de-emphasizing its objective rigidity. - What makes Austen’s spacial descriptions economic? - They exclude the verisimilar particularities there is very little accumulative detail in Pride and Prejudice. Austen explores the dynamism of space to explore the interrelation of place and action. Because she describes dynamic space, not static objects or decorations, her descriptions encourage subjectivity. - Austen’s emphasis of the subjective is anachronistic; most of her contemporaries emphasize the particular while she emphasizes the variable. - However, Austen’s setting of Pride and Prejudice in “contemporary England” does

- By sparing unnecessary aesthetic detail, Austen’s character’s movements are more dramatic. Moreover, because the room is established as a space of social potentialities, when a character moves within a room special emphasis is placed on their movements or actions. For example, when Darcy paces the room “fancying himself so very great,” (10) we (the readers) are hinted of his general disdain for the rooms and its members. - The rooms are nothing more than vaguely outlined places that breed variability and perceptive difference. Keeping with this, one may imagine the room as a petri dish and characters as various bacterium therewithin. The petri dish is merely an observation tool through which we observe the various reactions of bacterium. Moreover, if a petri dish was ornamented we would be distracted from the bacterium themselves.

- Despite the obvious spacial disparity between the outdoors and indoors, Austen describes both similarly. - What is the obvious spacial

- Regardless, Austen’s minimalism encourages one to actively interact with Pride and Prejudice. Her minimalism highlights the social aspects of space rather than its particulars. - Her minimalism invites readers to imagine the particulars by purposely creating voids into which ones perceptions seep. - Austen doesn’t merely avoid minute descriptions like Samuel Johnson does, instead she turns prohibition into possibility. - For this reason, Austen’s characters are vivified; we implant a bit of ourselves within them to compensate for their scant descriptions. - We also do this with her environmental descriptions, both external and internal. We conjure up memories of our own particulars and implant them into generals; take Pemberley for example, we are told of its beauty and delightfulness but not of its particular flora or unique topographic features. “…through a beautiful wood, stretching over a wide extent.” (166) “…Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abstruseness wound.” (167) The hill…was a beautiful object.”