Jane Austen and Modernization ― Sociological Readings

This study draws on the classic sociological work of Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and Goffman to explore small group interaction in the six novels of Jane Austen. These early sociologists share with Austen the same object of knowledge, and that is sociation, small group interaction, and the self / society dialectic. All five are concerned with the problem of belonging, that is, social cohesion. Austen returns again and again to the contradictions of individual will and social obligation. It is now clear that Austen became the important writer that she is today during the years that sociology was establishing itself as the discipline to understand a new social formation, the result of urbanization, industrialization, secularization, massification—an recognizable society. Writers across the later nineteenth century wrote as if everything around them was changing, such that they no longer recognized the social formation in which they lived. Durkheim's key concept, anomie, that sense of individual rulelessness, embodies the observation that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society was becoming increasingly unglued. Hence the search, for that glue, for some understanding of shared ritual that would bind separate individuals into a coherent whole. Austen's novels, I argue, became so valuable across this period precisely because they served at one and the same time as recognition of the phenomenon of anomie and as a remedy for it.

James Thompson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Curricula at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He has published on restoration drama, the eighteenth-century novel, literary theory and pedagogy, and Jane Austen.