Dance, Physicality, and Social Mobility in Jane Austen's Persuasion

Abstract

IN JANE AUSTEN AND THE PROVINCE OF WOMANHOOD, Alison Sulloway notes, exception of Anne Elliot, all heroines either meet their lovers at balls or their creator provides them with crucial scene at ball (155). Austen scholars have noted indisputable importance of dance in novels, usually arguing that prominent ballroom scenes stand as microcosms of Austen's social world. However, in Persuasion, Austen appears to have abandoned dance and relegated Anne Elliot to status of heroine without ball.'u While there is very little dancing in Persuasion, images and rhetoric of English appear at key moments in text, enabling Austen to employ time, space, and physicality to advance consideration of social mobility. Attention to dance highlights tension between body and spaces within which it can move, and in turn reinforces Austen's approach to social mobility in novel--she uses rhetoric of dance to explore role desire plays in negotiating boundaries between individual and society. In Persuasion, Austen depicts society as of separate closed circles, modeled on formations, and uses these to illustrate possibilities for--and yet limitations of--individual mobility within established social structures. I Austen's use of dance and dance metaphor can most effectively be understood if Persuasion is first situated within landscape of Regency Era social dance. with which Austen and her characters would have been familiar was a social dance of English origin in which number of couples perform pattern of (Country Dance 254). (2) In its most inclusive definition, country-dance included square dances in which four couples stood in square formation and movement of dance occurred in, around, and across square. This square form, which illustrates French influence on English country-dance, became increasingly popular in second half of eighteenth century: the square form of contredanse, or cotillon, gained some popularity in England through works such as G. A. Gallini's Critical Observations on Art of Dancing (c. 1770) (Country Dance 256). (3) These square dances were called Contredanse Francaise, and longways dances became known as Contredanse Anglaise. Thus, countrydance was used comprehensively to signify most types of social dance and specifically to refer to longways dances. (4) Contredanse Francaise, known as (or cotillon) in England, used same steps as longways dances (Contredanse Anglaise), changing only form (the arrangement of dancers). In dance manual, a dance might be given in two forms so that it could be danced either as Cotillon or as Longways Progressive set (Wood 95). By beginning of nineteenth century; longways dances and cotillions were phased out in favor of quadrille--a dance that retained square formation of cotillion, but employed less energetic movements. Thus, cotillion occupies transitory place in history of English social dance because it was adapted from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century longways dances and introduced square formations that would characterize much of nineteenth-century social dance. legacy of cotillion was noted in Ball-Room Preceptor (London 1843): The Cotillion, that once universal favorite in ball-room has now also, in great measure, been superseded, at least in name; but 'even in its ashes live its wonted fires,' for its figures have been cut up to form new quadrilles (qtd. in Aldrich 145). (5) Like cotillion, Persuasion occupies space between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; novel both structurally and thematically follows and deviates from eighteenth-century traditions. (6) role of square formation in has been emphasized here because Persuasion is modeled on this dance form. …

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