"Words don't come easy": Emotional Education in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Authors Avatar by popike_22 (student)

Emotional Education in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

“Words don’t come easy”:

Emotional Education in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Bettina Rad

BA in English Studies

University of Pannonia

Author’s note:

Faculty of Modern Philology and Social Sciences

Institute of English and American Studies

Consultant: Dr. Andrea Szabó F.

Abstract

This study sets out to investigate non-verbal communication, generally underestimated, with a view to the theme of emotional education in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

I claim that body motions, paralanguage and self presentation occupy a pivotal role in how Austen’s heroine teaches her hero to express his emotions, faithful to the novel’s generic indebtedness to the female gothic romance.

First, I will give the definitional framework of my analysis relying on G.W. Porter’s theory of nonverbal communication. Second, I introduce the categories of physical and aesthetic nonverbal communication. In the next section I provide a close reading of the nonverbal interactions of Austen’s main characters, such as body-language, gestures, postures, music, and dancing.

As a conclusion, I claim, that nonverbal communication proves to be an integral part of the novel’s discourse; no wonder, it has served as a blueprint for generations of readers in “speaking without words”.

“Words don’t come easy”:

Emotional Education in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Introduction

Most people tend to underestimate the importance of nonverbal messages in communication –an area, which should receive more particular attention – as opposed to the fact that it penetrates our whole life and has a crucial role in social situations.

The purpose of this thesis is to come up with an interesting problem in connection with late 18th and early 19th century fiction including Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

The heroine Elizabeth is someone who becomes a role-model in the eyes of the reader with all her actions and emotions; therefore it is really interesting to analyze the details of her behaviour, her “communication without words”.

That is why, the main topic this research intends to present is the question of how to teach a man to express his feelings. However, this question could be introduced from different aspects, in my thesis I argue the importance of non-verbal communication and all kinds of communication in which words are not included.

Consequently, what the thesis tries to investigate is that: to what extent does nonverbal communication play a role in the problem of teaching the man to express his feelings. More precisely, the paper tries to reveal what are those types of nonverbal messages that have the most significant effect on emotional education.

The study is based on two important terms introduced by G. W. Porter (1969), who divided non-verbal communication into categories: in which one can find physical (facial expression, tone of voice, touch, body motions, etc.), as well as the aesthetic type of communication (p. 4). Building on Porter’s article, I argue that both type of nonverbal communication have a crucial impact on emotional education; however the most important will appear to be the ones belonging to the physical type.

The first part will present and provide a better understanding of G. W. Porter’s two terms and will include some general facts about nonverbal communication as well to underline its importance in changing behaviour.

After providing background information, the adequate parts of these non-verbal signs are looked up in the novel to support this proposition. It means that the thesis test the hypothesis by applying the method of textual analysis. Moreover, the perspective of this paper is going to be limited to the interactions happening between Darcy and Elizabeth. A number of sentences will be chosen from the text to analyse, especially those, in which different kinds of nonverbal clues can be identified. These nonverbal clues, of course will be put into the category according to their type.

The most serious points are argued in the second part, which presents and analyzes sentences from the text including body-language, gestures, postures, vocal interferences, clothing, etc. These will be referred to as the physical type, as they mainly cover the term used by Porter.

The aesthetic type includes instrumental music, dancing, painting and sculpturing. That is why, the next part is written about creative expressions like piano play or the balls appearing in the novel, which are characteristics of this age.

After carrying out the analysis, the results will show that both type of nonverbal communication have a great influence in encouraging the man for self-expression.

Join now!

While contemplating, one can find an answer to the question of how to teach a man and how to get him to speak about his feelings. Moreover, one can also realize these step-by-step changes that the hero goes through from the beginning to the end, therefore one gets a picture of the whole transformation.

Finally, by proving that nonverbal communication plays a pivotal role in the novel’s discourse, the thesis offers a different way of interpretation of the work.

Part 1.

Literature review

It is often heard that ...

This is a preview of the whole essay