In the latest edition of the London Review of Books (subscription required for most online pieces, I am afraid) there is a lovely piece by novelist Colm Tóibín on the importance of aunts in the 19th-century novel. He starts by investigating the aunts in Jane Austen, having quoted a passage in Ruth Perry's book The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature 1748-1818
...mothers in novels of the period are notoriously absent – dead or otherwise missing. Just when motherhood was becoming central to the definition of femininity, when the modern conception of the all-nurturing, tender, soothing, ministering mother was being consolidated in English culture, she was being represented in fiction as a memory rather than as an active present reality.
Tóibín expands:
The novel in English during the 19th century is full of parents whose influence must be evaded or erased, to be replaced by figures who operate either literally or figuratively as aunts, both kind and mean, both well-intentioned and duplicitous, both rescuing and destroying
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Mothers get in the way, he says: for the 19th-century novel, self-realisation, self-transformation, the assertion of the individual is key. "The necessity was to separate oneself from one's mother, or destroy her, at least symbolically, and replace her with a mother figure of one's choosing."
Tóibín writes about the aunts in Austen. I like his analysis of the two most important aunts in Pride and Prejudice – Elizabeth's aunt Gardiner and Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. You might say they represent opposite tendencies in English culture: Lady Catherine as standing for an almost feudal, traditional set of values from which Darcy must separate himself to become worthy of Elizabeth, while Aunt Gardiner represents the new upwardly mobile woman – rational, elegant and sensible, Cheapside nouveau wealth notwithstanding. For the purposes of the plot, Aunt Gardiner becomes, perhaps, Elizabeth's "true" mother – and the crucial means by which Elizabeth discovers both Darcy's worth (via the trip to the Peak District and Pemberley) and the extent of his assistance to the family after Lydia's elopement. For Elizabeth, her uncle and aunt Gardiner are the only members of her family, aside from the stalwart Jane, of whom she has no reason to be ashamed.
Austen loves a motherless heroine: think of Anne Elliot, who learns the hard way about placing too much trust in her figurative aunt, Lady Russell; and Emma, whose stand-in aunt, Mrs Weston, her over-indulgent ex-governess, also provides flawed guidance (and whose removal from the household on her marriage provides the initial motor for the plot). One might also consider Jane Fairfax, alike motherless, and considerably more isolated than Emma: her aunt is the well-meaning, garrulous, irritating and near-impoverished Miss Bates. But the twin apogees of Austenian aunts are, of course, are the supine Lady Bertram, welded to her sofa, and the ghastly Mrs Norris, in Mansfield Park. The latter's insidiousness and subtle power almost outweighs the brutality of Charlotte Brontë's cruel creation Mrs Reed, who consigns her niece Jane Eyre, monstrously, to the red room.
As an aunt myself, I prefer to think about more joyful varieties. Who doesn't love Betsey Trotwood, who, when the unfortunate, motherless David Copperfield appears on her doorstep, stalks out of the house "carrying a great knife", crying "Go along! No boys here!". When David – ragged, starving, exhausted – announces: "If you please, aunt, I am your nephew," Miss Trotwood's response is: "Oh, Lord!"… and she sat flat down in the garden-path." David explains his predicament, and Betsey marches him indoors, unlocks a press, uncorks some bottles, and pours some of the contents of each into his mouth – as restoratives. "I think they must have been taken out at random, for I am sure I tasted aniseed water, anchovy sauce, and salad dressing." So begins the eccentric and utterly marvellous reign of Betsey Trotwood: simultaneously one of the most benign, and alarming, aunts in literature.
