Austen's Nostalgics


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N I C H O L A S D A M E S

Austen’s Nostalgics
This morning we have been to see Miss Chamberlayne look hot on horseback.
—Seven years & four months ago we went to the same Ridinghouse to see Miss Lefroy’s
performance!—What a diVerent set are we now moving in! But seven years I suppose
are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind.

—Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 8 Apri l 1805

Mémoire.—Se plaindre de la sienne, et même se vanter de n’en pas avoir. Mais rugir si
on vous dit que vous n’avez pas de jugement.

—Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues1

A h i s t o ry o f n o s ta l g i a : what could this history be but a chimerical
one, given that nostalgia seems to denote an inauthentic longing and vague remem-
brance that would be hostile to the speci� cities of historical recollection? To reclaim
nostalgia as not only a mode of memory but also a mode of history would mean
considering it as a strategy—as a response to social conditions and, in fact, as a
form of therapy: a winnowing of the speci� city, emotional disturbance, and unpre-
dictability of reminiscence into a diluted, comfortable, and serviceable retrospect.2

By understanding nostalgia strategically, or procedurally—what it does, and how
it does it—history and nostalgia might again merge; where they meet is in a series
of crucial shifts in the psychosocial eVects of mobility in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. They meet at a moment when a pathological relation
to physical and psychic dislocation becomes depathologized, when, in other words,
a speci� c form of traumatic memory is erased in favor of a curative memory that
will curiously bear the identical name. The traces of this transformation can be
read, and the procedure studied, not only in a set of historical instances but also in
narratives that bear its imprint: Jane Austen’s � ction.

‘‘The last few hours were certainly very painful,’’ Persuasion’s Anne Elliot tells
her future spouse, Captain Wentworth, ‘‘but when pain is over, the remembrance
of it often becomes a pleasure.’’3 This particular ars memorativa, which has analogues
in every one of Austen’s novels, instructs both Anne’s lover, as well as Austen’s read-
ers, in the very possibilities of nostalgic remembrance that by the early nineteenth
century are coming to supersede an older de� nition of nostalgia. The moves and
tactics that combine to make Anne’s proclamation possible might together be

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118 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

termed a nostalgics: a strategic logic of nostalgia that Austen’s � ction works out with
care. This logic, however, is far from a disembodied one. It has links to a history of
displacements and disease that it carefully shrouds or forgets, making our own
eVorts to recover this history more diYcult and conjectural. The task of my inquiry,
then, is twofold—to analyze a nostalgic strategy integral to the � ction of Jane Aus-
ten that becomes increasingly possible, and visible, in the early nineteenth century,
and to trace this strategy back to the historical pathology that it so eVectively
cancels.

Pathologizing, Depathologizing

In September of 1770, Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook’s vessel
the HMS Endeavour left the coast of New Guinea in haste, its crew having enjoyed
a landing reception of � re darts. On board the Endeavour was Sir Joseph Banks, a
former pupil of Linnaeus and the ship’s resident botanist, who recorded the
leavetaking in his journal:

As soon as ever the boat was hoisted in we made sail, and steered away from this land, to
the no small satisfaction of, I believe, three-fourths of our company. The sick became well
and the melancholy looked gay. The greater part of them were now pretty far gone with the
longing for home, which the physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the
name of nostalgia. Indeed I can hardly � nd anybody in the ship clear of its eVects but
the captain, Dr. Solander, and myself, and we three have ample constant employment for
our minds, which I believe to be the best, if not the only remedy for it.4

Here nostalgia enters the English language— carefully distanced as a medical neolo-
gism, one that the physicians have gone ‘‘so far as to esteem a disease’’ in a concep-
tual leap as large as the geographical journey Cook’s crew has traveled to contract
it. The most immediately curious thing about this taxonomical debut is that, as far
as a history of nostalgia might go, it seems to represent a dead end. Rather than a
comfortable sentimentality, the nostalgia of the eighteenth century—elaborately
studied in nosologies, tracts, and case studies, particularly in the century’s conclud-
ing decades—was a danger, a potentially fatal aZiction. Banks’s journal provides
us with a glimpse of nostalgia in extremis: a homesickness that was powerful and
real, situated � rst among travelers, among the exotic, far from ‘‘home.’’ Indeed, the
eighteenth-century study of nostalgia centered on its prevalence in armies and on
board ships, in precisely those places where travel, particularly enforced travel, was
likely to occur.

This is not quite Jane Austen’s nostalgia, nor is the semantic � eld it encapsulates
very similar to contemporary usage. Something has intervened between Banks’s
illness and the generalized comfort and disembodied quality of current de� nitions
of the word to alter nostalgia beyond any real recognition, something more complex

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119Austen’s Nostalgics

and obscure than the fact of European medicine’s gradual relinquishment of it as
a clinical entity. If during the � rst few decades of the nineteenth century this medi-
calized nostalgia begins to disappear from scienti� c study, and homesickness ceases
to be a pathologized concept, something has operated to reclaim nostalgia as a
social process and a desirable bit of mental furniture—to depathologize and then
propagate a new nostalgia. If nostalgia is transformed from a wasting illness, one
with its own etiology, symptoms, and set of cures, to a regular fact of human mem-
ory, the open question is: where might we locate the pivot of this transformation in
time and in cultural space?

The search for this answer takes me away from medicine and overseas travel
and toward Austen’s novels, a corpus of work that initiates the revision of a patho-
logized memory linked to the perils of dislocation. In attempting to locate the mo-
ment and the site where Banks’s nostalgia becomes a contemporary, depathologized
nostalgia—where, that is, the idea of a nostalgia that might be shared is born—I
turn to a set of social novels from the early nineteenth century, at the very moment
when the peak of an older nostalgia has passed. In this passage from a pathology
to a general cultural category, medicine itself is only part of the story; what it is
necessary to chart is the passage of nostalgia through literary representation,
through the novel, on its path to becoming innocuous, inescapable, and normative.

Telling the story of nostalgia’s transformation is remarkably similar to telling
the story of remembrance in the succession of Austen’s narratives. I begin with Sense
and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood, who courts memory, and who suVers from a
wasting disease brought on by an excess of regret and reminiscence. The keynote of
her character is rung at the novel’s outset precisely through her eighteenth-century
version of nostalgia: she is the most reluctant of the Dashwood family to leave their
former home, Norland Park, and the most consistent in her desire to remain nostal-
gic; ‘‘Elinor,’’ she says to her mother, ‘‘in quitting Norland and Edward, cried not
as I did’’ (SS, 39). This nostalgia is very real—its referent is a real place, not an
inaccessible time—and, of course, highly dangerous, as dramatic in its eventual
eVects upon Marianne’s body as any of the case studies discussed by eighteenth-
century physicians. The nostalgia of Sense and Sensibility is still very much a disease;
it is perhaps more a social disease than the traditional medical understanding of
nostalgia, insofar as it occurs in a restricted compass of space somewhat unlike the
vaster, isolated locales mentioned in eighteenth-century medical texts, but it is a
disease nonetheless, a disorder with potentially drastic consequences, and a disease
(although undeniably somatic) of excessive remembrance.

Next to this early example of Austenian nostalgia, consider one of the � nal
scenes of Pride and Prejudice, in which a newer and more recognizable nostalgia be-
gins to supplant any sense of a mnemonic disease; this nostalgia is explicitly cura-
tive. Elizabeth and Darcy have begun a survey of their fraught, almost accidental
courtship, a review potentially laden with unhappy memories and burdensome

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120 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

emotions. In reaction to this possibly dangerous strain of conversation, Elizabeth
begins, ‘‘Oh! do not repeat what I then said. These recollections will not do at all’’
(PP, 368). When Darcy persists in remembering his earlier, explanatory, often bitter
letter to Elizabeth, she responds with customary spirit:

The letter, perhaps, began in bitterness, but it did not end so. The adieu is charity itself.
But think no more of the letter. The feelings of the person who wrote, and the person who
received it, are now so widely diVerent from what they were then, that every unpleasant
circumstance attending it, ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my philosophy.
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure. (PP, 368–69)

What was a troubled memory—and one with a potential to resurrect resentment
and ripple the surface of this new pairing—is transformed by Elizabeth’s ‘‘philoso-
phy’’ into a nostalgic pleasure. Unlike Marianne’s backward-turned pathology,
Elizabeth’s therapeutic advice asserts the crucial principle of disconnection: the past,
once gone, is of no further consequence, and because it is of no consequence, it
can be forgotten. Of course there is an element of sophistry to this logic, one that
Elizabeth’s own irony lightly registers—if the past were truly of no consequence, it
would hardly be necessary to attempt to forget it; if Darcy’s current feelings are
indeed ‘‘so widely diVerent from what they were,’’ then why is there a lingering
unpleasantness that must be forgotten? But however much Elizabeth’s claim begs
the question of how disconnected their present ‘‘really’’ is from their past, the asser-
tion of discontinuity remains, and it does not depend upon any tight logic. Indeed,
the nostalgic principle of ‘‘pleasure’’ neatly brushes aside any impertinent queries
or lingering doubts, and it is well to remember that fantasy occupies a preeminent
place in any theory of nostalgia. Elizabeth’s nostalgic fantasy—that all is diVerent
in the present, and that the past can be safely, even pleasurably recalled once that
disconnection is asserted—is nothing if not pragmatic. Barring any yearning for
the past, or any continued cathexis to memory, her new nostalgia has cured what
the older, medicalized nostalgia puts into peril. Darcy will insist upon returning to
his past, a moment to which I too will return, but Elizabeth’s proclamation signals
the end of an older style of nostalgia. Her ‘‘philosophy’’ is entirely in the service of
the present, and so it is appropriate that this conversation should end by their � nd-
ing, ‘‘on examining their watches, that it was time to be at home’’ (PP, 370), for
unlike Marianne’s aZiction, the new nostalgia increasingly employed in Austen’s
� ction is turned resolutely forward.

It is possible to take Elizabeth’s request, to think only of the past as its remem-
brance gives us pleasure, as the foundation of Austen’s new nostalgia—and as the
foundation of the semantic range of nostalgia that dates from the early nineteenth
century. Not surprisingly, Austen’s critics have registered the importance of nostal-
gia to her work, but the critical tradition surrounding Austen has understood its
importance only obliquely.5 It is as if nostalgia is an aZiction to which Austen’s
readers are particularly susceptible, for which only the inoculations of a radically
denostalgizing criticism are a cure. As early as 1905, in Henry James, who saw in

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121Austen’s Nostalgics

Austen what he saw with the Brontë sisters—a ‘‘case of popularity’’ that displays
‘‘a beguiled infatuation, a sentimentalized vision’’— one feels the urge to remove
the nostalgic encrustations upon Austen’s image, the urge to read nostalgia as an
unfortunate fact of reception-history, or of popular consumption, that is � nally de-
tachable from the � ction itself.6

Yet what if the nostalgia so often associated with Austen—and so productively
identi� ed and castigated by recent critics—is part of the eVect Austen creates? What
if readers learn their nostalgia from her texts? What has gone unnoticed in all the
recent discussions and corrections of the nostalgic Austen reader is the nostalgia
that inhabits Austen’s own narratives, the nostalgia that she inherits from
eighteenth-century medical diagnoses and begins to transmute into a modern sen-
timentality and poignant yearning. Forgetfulness of former traumas and contesta-
tions, closings of former � ssures, a sense of disconnection from the past: these are
not usually considered the best analytic equipment with which to explore older
texts, but they are conceptual tools that are provided by Austen herself. The very
process of becoming a nostalgic reader, as well as the resultant blind spots and errors
such a process implies, is dramatized in her novels, and there is no better place
to locate the semantic and conceptual transformation of Banks’s pathology into a
contemporary register that tends more to pleasure, or harmless regret, than bodily
dissolution. Nostalgic remembrance begins in Austen, with Sense and Sensibility, as
the object of representation; by the time of Persuasion it has become a principle of
representation, so thoroughly embedded into her narrative practice that readers
learn, perhaps, their nostalgia from these later texts—the very nostalgia that serves
to mobilize the modern Austen critic. In attempting to understand the nostalgia
that remains linked to Austen, however, we must return to the earlier nostalgia with
which Austen begins.

The Unassimilable Self

The fact that the medical origins of nostalgia have been largely forgotten
is itself a tribute to the success of the condition. Hiding or diluting a traumatic past
into one safe for contemplation is the basic work of nostalgizing, which has ex-
tended to the very concept itself—insofar as current usage forgets nostalgia’s origi-
nal ties to the body and to death, it remains nostalgic, one might say, about nostal-
gia. Only recently has the denostalgizing work of studying, and recovering, the
origins of nostalgia been carried on.7 The word itself was still in a comparative in-
fancy in Austen’s time; it is not listed in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, and is never
used by Austen herself. As an explanation for this fact—the word’s presence in
Banks’s travel journals, and its absence from most literary lexicons— one might
oVer the comparatively exotic quality of nostalgia: a term coined by a foreign physi-
cian, and still, by the late eighteenth century, very much a medical diagnosis, for-
eign to other discourses.

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122 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

Indeed, nostalgia begins as an explanation for the often malignant eVects of
foreignness and distance. Its history begins in Basel in 1688, when the Swiss physi-
cian Johannes Hofer published his ‘‘Dissertatio medica de nostalgia.’’8 Hofer’s
coinage—combining the Greek nostos, or homecoming, and algos, or pain—is es-
sentially a translation of preexisting terms, such as the German Heimweh and the
French maladie du pays. But Hofer’s uniqueness consisted in providing the � rst ex-
tended treatment of the perils of what might be more simply called homesickness.
Building around homesickness a set of both psychological and physiological symp-
toms, a speci� c etiology, and a series of suggested ameliorations and cures, as well
as a taxonomic term from the Greek, Hofer gave the malady a new importance
and thus prepared the way for its entrance into serious medical research. Indeed,
in the scienti� c literature devoted to nostalgia throughout the eighteenth century,
there is very little deviation from the outlines provided by Hofer’s thesis. Hofer’s
malady was canonized by its inclusion in the great nosologies of the mid–eighteenth
century: Francisco Boissier de Sauvages de la Croix’s Nosologia Methodica (1760),
Linnaeus’s Genera Morborum (1763), Rudolf Vogel’s De�nitiones generum morborum
(1764), and—most in� uential of all for British physicians—William Cullen’s 1769
Synopsis nosologiae. In the taxonomies of the 1760s, nostalgia was placed alongside
melancholia, nymphomania, hypochondria, and bulimia. From here nostalgia en-
tered European history at large.9 The dislocations of the last two decades of the
eighteenth century—preeminently the French Revolution, the mass emigrations
that it spawned, and the distant movements of armies increasingly based on con-
scription—led to a rise in diagnoses of homesickness. Two separate ‘‘epidemics’’ of
nostalgia swept French armies, the � rst occurring among the Army of the Rhine
from 1793 to 1794, the second aZicting the Army of the Alps starting in 1799;
indeed, Didier Jourdeuil, the French deputy minister of war in 1793, issued a com-
mand intended to reduce desertion by suspending all convalescent leaves except
those necessitated by a diagnosis of nostalgia.10 Even American soldiers � ghting for
independence in the early 1780s were found to be suVering from the disease.11

What was this disease like? One of the best British accounts is from William
Falconer’s 1788 tract A Dissertation on the In�uence of the Passions upon Disorders of the
Body. Falconer, educated at Edinburgh and Leyden, was a physician at Bath Gen-
eral Hospital from 1784 to 1819—during which time, of course, Austen lived in
Bath, enduring an enforced separation from her Hampshire home. Borrowing from
Hofer and succeeding writers, Falconer drew a standard picture of nostalgia’s origin
and progress:

This disorder is said to begin with melancholy, sadness, love of solitude, silence, loss of appe-
tite for both solid and liquid food, prostration of strength, and a hectic fever in the evening;
which is frequently accompanied with livid or purple spots upon the body. Sometimes a
regular intermittent, and sometimes a continued fever attends this disorder; in the manage-
ment of which, the greatest care is requisite not to exhaust the strength and spirits by evacua-
tions of any kind. Nausea and vomiting are frequent symptoms, but emetics are of no ser-

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123Austen’s Nostalgics

vice. . . . when the disorder is violent, nothing avails but returning to their own country,
which is so powerful an agent in the cure, that the very preparations for the return prove
more eVectual than anything else, though the patient be debilitated and unable to bear any
other motion than that of a litter.12

It was, in essence, a disease of yearning—a yearning for home so intense that the
most severe pathological eVects ensued. Falconer’s general description is echoed
throughout the medical literature: general listlessness and melancholy—the dan-
gerous � rst signs—followed by fever and occasionally hallucinatory visions of
home; then gastric distress caused by the body’s torpor, issuing in severe gastroen-
teritis; � nally, the body succumbs to its weakness, a more severe fever killing the
patient.

This was, evidently, not merely a psychological disorder. Hofer’s thesis received
further theoretical ballast from associationist theories of the mind, which claimed
that the brain can be physically altered by the overuse of certain mental pathways.
This sort of associationist thinking, with its physiological implications, provided
nostalgia’s eighteenth-century cartographers with a key methodological tool. In
1821 the First Surgeon of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Baron D. J. Larrey, published
his extensive research on nostalgia garnered from his experience during the French
westward retreat. Larrey performed a series of autopsies on patients found to have
died of nostalgia, and discovered that the sutures and ridges of the brain were often
obliterated, and that brain tissue tended to be in� amed. Using an associationist
physiology, Larrey claimed that the increased activity of a mind turned obsessively
toward home would cause ‘‘a sort of expansion in the substance of the brain, en-
gorgement and torpor of the vessels of this organ, and successively, of the mem-
branes which envelope it, and line its cavities.’’13 Although Larrey’s interest in brain
structure is unusual among most writers on nostalgia, his insistence upon the physi-
cality of the disorder is not; nostalgia was a somatic fact, a remembrance that threat-
ened to break apart the normal pathways of the brain.

Who was prone to this disease? Its usual haunt was the military; the ‘‘ecological
niche,’’ to use Ian Hacking’s precise term, for the disease seems to have been army
camps and naval vessels, where mobility of an enforced and newly vast sort was
common.14 But throughout eighteenth-century writing on nostalgia a more general
clinical pro� le appears. The nostalgic patient is likely to have an aversion to social
intercourse and a preference for solitary meditation, as well as a vivid imagination;
that the usual nostalgic suVerer has an excess of ‘‘sensibility’’ is a theme to which
most medical writers recur.15 In addition to the personal characteristics mapped by
physicians, there was a more vivid, and more highly contested, range of national
characteristics shared by nostalgics. A fascinating linkage is made, starting with
Hofer, between liberty and homesickness: the freer the nation, so the reasoning
runs, the greater the danger that its citizens will miss their homes and fall into
nostalgia. Hofer drew for his evidence upon Swiss nationals living in France, and
thereafter Switzerland was taken as the preeminent site of nostalgia.16 The

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124 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

Helvetian origins of nostalgia could be explained as an instance of climatic fac-
tors—Larrey, for instance, claims that cold regions inspire nostalgia, and adds that
French troops in Egypt were remarkably free of it—but were more usually adduced
as a critique of illiberal governments. Falconer states that nostalgia ‘‘is particularly
prevalent among the Swiss, and to a certain degree among all nations, those espe-
cially where the government is moderate, free, and happy.’’ With a dramatic � our-
ish, Falconer adds that ‘‘this is the only endemic disorder, of which we have any
knowledge, that can scarcely be called with justice a national misfortune.’’17 For
George Seymour, an early-nineteenth-century physician and writer on nostalgia,
homesickness was virtually identical to a liberal nationalism: in his Dissertatio medica
inauguralis de nostalgia Seymour cited William Wallace, John Hampden, and Admi-
ral Horatio Nelson as early ‘‘nostalgics.’’18 There are implications here for a consid-
eration of what might be called colonial consciousness, particularly given the fact
that by the time nineteenth-century imperial projects reach fruition this disease,
with its liberal and centered form (a disease that somatically registered distances from
national capitals), has disappeared.

Political re� ections on nostalgia are given an unexpected in� ection in the work
of Thomas Arnold, the foremost British expert on insanity at the end of the eigh-
teenth century. Arnold’s compendium of mental disorders, the 1782 Obser vations on
the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness, contained these
re� ections on the habitus of nostalgia: ‘‘This unreasonable fondness for the place of
our birth, and for whatever is connected with our native soil, is the oVspring of
an unpolished state of society, and not uncommonly the inhabitant of dreary and
inhospitable climates, where the chief, and almost only blessings, are ignorance
and liberty.’’19 Nostalgia, Arnold claims, is a rural phenomenon only, insofar as
the cosmopolitan mixtures of the city break down former partialities and soften
obdurate memories. It is also, and for similar reasons, a disease found among the
lower orders, thus leading to the following general clinical pro� le: nostalgia � our-
ishes where social discourse is limited, whether limited by geographical factors (the
mountains of Switzerland, England’s water barriers), regional characteristics (the
comparative isolation of rural areas), social class (the restricted opportunities for
travel among lower orders), or psychological traits (the overimaginative, the solitary,
the melancholic personality). Homesickness is a disease, therefore, of failed assimila-
tion—of psyches whose natural, political, social, or constitutional barriers to fre-
quent encounters with new stimuli create an inability to adapt to change.

It was, in short, a disease of transplantation, and it is worthwhile to consider
how many of Austen’s characters � t the pro� le, how many are forced to leave their
home behind, how many of her heroines endure inde� nite or permanent removals
from home.20 The Dashwood family in Sense and Sensibility must leave Norland Park,
the Dashwood seat for several generations, permanently; Fanny Price in Mans�eld
Park leaves Portsmouth, and her family, for her uncle’s distant estate, and when the
novel’s main action begins she has been gone for nine years; and the Elliot family

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125Austen’s Nostalgics

in Persuasion is forced by debt to rent their estate with a seven-year lease and move
to Bath. With the notable exception of Emma, the decisive actions of Austen’s plots
occur away from home, on prolonged visits, on travels, or during enforced segrega-
tions from what constitutes, at the novel’s outset, ‘‘home.’’ As we have seen from
the eighteenth-century creation of the category of the ‘‘nostalgic,’’ in situations of
transplantation memory becomes a potential danger. How, these medical texts im-
plicitly ask, is memory to be managed in a situation of vastly increased mobility?
How does memory function, or malfunction, when those who have never known
foreignness suddenly � nd themselves sundered from the familiar? The clinical pro-
� le established in medical writing de� nes nostalgia as the mind’s resistance to adap-
tation, its refusal to feel at home in a larger world; at the time of Austen’s writing,
therefore, sending a person from home was a test of mnemonic control, a psychic
gamble. The eighteenth-century nostalgic self is unassimilable; confronted with al-
tered circumstances, it begins to malfunction.

It is not surprising, therefore, that with this combination of medical interest
and mass diagnoses, homesickness increasingly in� ects the literary representation
of personality. One might adduce the 1774 appearance of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe’s Das Leiden des jungen Werthers and its lavishly nostalgic account of Werther’s
return to his boyhood home, including the retracing of old walks and a glimpse of
Werther’s old school.21 A relevant British example is Samuel Rogers’s The Pleasure
of Memory, a virtual anthology of nostalgic attitudes that is � rst published in 1792
but reprinted throughout the next two decades; shortly thereafter, the word ‘‘home-
sickness’’ makes its � rst appearance in English, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem
‘‘Home-sick,’’ published in 1800:

Home-sickness is a wasting pang
This I feel hourly more and more:

There’s healing only in thy wings,
Thou breeze that play’st on Albion’s shore!22

The emphasis here is predictably on the virtue of return— on the moral and physical
bene� ts of avoiding nostalgia’s grip; concomitantly, of course, there is a dramatiza-
tion of the obstacles to returning home and the ‘‘healing’’ it might provide.

Certainly by Austen’s time, literary culture was well aware of medicalized nos-
talgia, and prepared to incorporate the various strands of that disease—its nation-
alistic and liberalizing slant, its elucidation of a backward-turned personality, its
interest in the psychic conditions of transplantation—in its own projects. Nostalgia,
that is, provided writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with
a common narrative—the increasing fact of mobility, the necessity of returns—
with which to work; but by the second decade of the nineteenth century this narra-
tive would no longer have any cultural authority, and the word nostalgia itself began
its long, slow shift toward its current semantic range.23 With the strangeness of over-
lapping facts that is so common in cultural history, Austen’s novels stand out among

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126 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

the early-nineteenth-century welter of homesick representations and present a new
possibility: the cancellation of a pathology, and the recon� guration of the unassimi-
lable self, through a set of what might be understood as modern ‘‘nostalgic’’ prac-
tices, a more contemporary ‘‘nostalgics.’’

Plots of Nostalgia:
Opened Possibilities

In 1781 an army physician, Dr. Robert Hamilton, was stationed with
his regiment at Tinmouth, in the north of England, when a recent recruit began
to suVer from a mysterious ailment. The young soldier, named Edwards, seemed � t
enough, but as Hamilton later recorded, ‘‘a melancholy hung over his countenance,
and wanness preyed on his cheeks.’’24 Frequently dizzy, complaining of a noise in
his ears and a general weakness, the soldier was taken into the regimental hospital.
Hamilton at � rst suspected typhus and set about the usual methods to alleviate it,
but to no avail—the recruit’s appetite had disappeared, and he slept little, spoke
less, and sighed frequently. Eventually Edwards’s pulse weakened considerably, and
a hectic fever set in. After three months in the hospital Edwards seemed to Hamil-
ton to resemble a patient in the � nal stages of consumption, with hollow eyes and
sunken cheeks. ‘‘In short,’’ Hamilton relates, ‘‘I looked on him as lost’’ (216).

But at this point Hamilton received some new information:

On making my morning visit, and inquiring, as usual, of his rest at the nurse, she hap-
pened to mention the strong notions he had got in his head, she said, of home, and of his
friends. What he was able to speak was constantly on this topic. This I had never heard of
before. The reason she gave for not mentioning it, was, that it appeared to her to be the
common ravings of sickness and delirium. He had talked in the same style, less or more,
ever since he came into the hospital. (216–17)

Aware of nostalgia and its place in the current nosologies, Hamilton responded
immediately to the nurse’s story. Upon being asked about his home, the young re-
cruit suddenly begged to be returned there, and con� ded in Hamilton that he was
Welsh. Hamilton promised—tactfully neglecting to mention that it was not in his
power—that once he regained some strength, he would be granted six weeks conva-
lescent leave in which to return to Wales. Soon after this oVer was made, Edwards’s
illness began to disappear—an appetite returned, along with some strength, al-
though disturbingly enough for Hamilton, he continued to refer to the promise of
a furlough. With some trepidation, Hamilton mentioned the oVer to his command-
ing oYcers, noting that it had gone some way to curing the patient’s nostalgia, and
the furlough was granted. Edwards, so it seems, was allowed to return to Wales for
a time, and the attack of nostalgia was averted.

It is an isolated instance from the medical journals of the time, but it is an
ample portrayal of what might be termed the ‘‘older’’ plot of nostalgia. This cultural

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127Austen’s Nostalgics

narrative ran as follows: an initial displacement from home, whether that home be
de� ned nationally, regionally, or even more locally; a sudden appearance of morbid
signs of melancholy, indeed a feminization of the patient through the familiar mark-
ers of ‘‘sensibility’’ (sighing, weakness, longing); and then a rapid physical decline,
beginning with the onset of fever. From here the nostalgic plot could only envision
two possible outcomes: the restoration of home, or death. It is notable that this
restoration must be an actual one—although Edwards improves upon having his
fantasies of a return home authorized with an oYcial promise, Hamilton does
not consider the cure � nal until the furlough has been granted and the trip made.
Either an earlier state of being must be returned to—it cannot be merely imagined
—or the patient must be consigned to the fatal eVects of nostalgia. It is an axiom
of eighteenth-century nostalgia that one can go home again, and in fact must go
home again.25

Here it is necessary to introduce a set of buried technical choices concerning
memory and narrative form that few readers of Austen have acknowledged, a set
that revises the exigency of the nostalgic plotting of Hamilton and replaces it with
a series of psychic movements that permit the formation of a depathologized, in
fact curative, nostalgia. I would list them schematically as follows: 1) pleasure; 2)
temporal rather than spatial orientation; 3) disconnection; 4) naming or categoriz-
ing; 5) communal dissemination. What this schema does not quite represent, and
what a further investigation will have to illustrate, is the interdependency of these
� ve strategies, which—as we will see—almost never exist in isolation in any given
moment from Austen’s narratives. The simple binary of eighteenth-century nostal-
gia, repatriation or death, is increasingly dispersed and opened up by Austen’s nov-
els through this newer nostalgic system, in which each of the � ve elements exists
both as cause and eVect of the other four.26 It is imperative to claim this at the start:
that the goal of these � ve processes is as much a readerly memory as the related
memories of characters; what they begin to create, I would suggest, is a nostalgic
reader far from the nostalgic patients of the eighteenth century.

The � rst two processes are visible in one of the more obviously ‘‘nostalgic’’
moments of Mans�eld Park. William Price, Fanny’s naval brother, has returned to
England with his ship, and has obtained leave to visit Fanny at Mans� eld; with their
conversation during the � rst few days of his arrival Fanny is entirely pleased. They
discuss everything without reserve—William’s plans for promotion, Fanny’s adjust-
ment to the ways of the Bertrams, the per� dy of Aunt Norris—and it is William
‘‘with whom (perhaps the dearest indulgence of the whole) all the evil and good of
their earliest years could be gone over again, and every former united pain and
pleasure retraced with the fondest recollection’’ (MP, 234). We catch the authentic
accents of modern nostalgia in the phrase ‘‘fondest recollection,’’ which might
bring to mind Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘‘philosophy’’ of remembrance—and which con-
stitutes the � rst, and perhaps the initial, alteration to the older plot of nostalgia. An
evident switch has taken place from memory as productive of trauma or sickness

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128 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

to memory as a source of pleasure, as a poignant but harmless dip into reminiscence.
Fanny and William are both as sundered from their home, Portsmouth, as any of
the recruits or travelers mentioned in Hofer or Larrey’s medical texts, but their
memory of this inaccessible home does not become malignant. It does not express
itself as a yearning for a return or restoration, but instead as a desire for continued
occasions merely to recall their childhood home, as if the iteration of memory (we
did this, we saw that) was itself enough to supplant any more dangerous desires.
Unlike Hamilton’s patient, Fanny and William � nd that talking is enough.

The shared recollections of Fanny and William are pleasurable despite the dep-
rivations of the past; we hear of ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘pain,’’ but that is all we hear of potential
trauma; the lesson of Austen’s new nostalgia is that very little psychic material is
unavailable to the brighter tints of retrospective ‘‘fondness.’’ The key to this alchemy
of trauma into nostalgia is, perhaps, the fact that for Austen’s readers these Price
childhood memories are really not memories at all: they refer to nothing we have
seen or heard in the text previously, and they do not attain enough of a level of
speci� city to disturb the sentence’s happy conclusion. What ‘‘pain’’ or ‘‘evil’’ the
Prices previously suVered remains persistently— one might say tactically— enig-
matic. Were any of these memories of pain to burst into explicitness (and it is diY-
cult enough to imagine what they might be, so heavy is the curtain hung over child-
hood in Austen), the sentence’s resolution might seem like bad faith or, at best, irony,
but insofar as William and Fanny’s memories are so persistently vague, the pleasure
they yield does not open itself up to suspicion. What we have is the following align-
ment: particularity of mnemonic detail equates to pain, whereas pleasure follows
from a determined inexplicitness.

If uncomfortable memories are de� ected for the reader through a strategy of
vagueness, they are further de� ected for Fanny and William through the second
pivotal alteration to the older plot of nostalgia: the substitution of an inaccessible
time for a still-real place.27 Return is an issue for eighteenth-century nostalgics pre-
cisely because it is at every moment conceptually possible, if not physically possible:
Hamilton’s patient can see Wales again with the help of some oYcial wrangling;
Coleridge’s ‘‘healing’’ is only as far away as the next ship leaving from Antwerp or
Calais. The nostalgia of medicine is � xated on a place that does not lose but instead
gains power when distant; the nostalgia of Austen, like our nostalgia, desires a time
that has already disappeared—and insofar as this nostalgia knows that it desires
what cannot be regained, its desire does not harden into mental disturbance, and
it cannot therefore be captured in the return-or-die con� ict. When the � rst part of
the older closural system—restoration—is forbidden, the second—fatal sickness—
is similarly disabled. Whatever evil or pain the Prices endured cannot be restored,
for it is tied to a completed childhood rather than Portsmouth itself—a fact that
Fanny’s eventual return to Portsmouth, which is an inversion of the older nostalgic
‘‘return,’’ demonstrates.

A tour of the newer nostalgic plot’s collision with its predecessor might continue

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129Austen’s Nostalgics

with a return to Pride and Prejudice and Elizabeth and Darcy, and with the review
of the past in which they were engaged. Darcy answers Elizabeth’s ‘‘think only of
the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure’’ with a renewed allegiance to a
putatively painful form of memory:

Painful recollections will intrude, which cannot, which ought not to be repelled. I have been
a sel� sh being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what
was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to
follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child)
I was spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves, (my father particularly, all that
was benevolent and amiable,) allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be sel� sh and over-
bearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the
world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.
Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you,
dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! (PP, 369)

Darcy’s penitential return to the past constitutes not a refutation of Elizabeth’s
‘‘philosophy’’ of remembrance, however, nor even a correction of it, but its ful� ll-
ment and ampli� cation. For if, as we have seen, pleasurable retrospect is tied to the
inexplicit, Darcy’s avoidance here of particular memories—at the very moment
when his remorse might be expected to issue in an apology for a speci� c action or
turn of phrase—is a triumphant act of nostalgic remembrance. It is a modern nos-
talgia in spite of its manifestly regretful tone, for it is not only vague but also cru-
cially disconnected from the past it relates—much like Fanny and William’s musings
on their childhood, but in a diVerent emotional key, what we might call Darcy’s
‘‘life-review’’ considers his past as passed.

The third alteration of the old nostalgic narrative, then, is the switch from a
memory that is still very much constitutive of a patient’s identity to one that is cru-
cially obsolete, disconnected, and distant for a no longer pathologized subjectivity.
Clearly part of the diVerence consists in the absence, in Austen, of any explicitly
national dimension to this subjectivity. Hamilton’s patient is still, and continually, a
Welshman; Coleridge is still and forever English, however immersed in German
culture and acquaintances he may become. Medical nostalgia assumed a psyche
that was not capable of periodizing life narratives, of treating development as dis-
continuous, and yet was highly amenable to the more static identities of nationality.
Darcy is here clearly marking a discontinuity in his own sense of himself, a disconti-
nuity that is produced by the delineation of periods, eras, or epochs. What Darcy
was from eight to eight and twenty is an identity unto itself, not causally related to
what follows, for the very de� nition of what follows—what might be called the Era
of Elizabeth—is a rejection of what had constituted, in Darcy’s mind, the previous
period: pride, conceit, sel� shness, solitude. A modern nostalgic consciousness is
made up of such revolutions of mind, in which the old is overthrown, barred from
further import, and thereby made safe for remembrance; it should be noted that
Darcy is in a position to recall his previous life only when he can consider it over,

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130 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

only when a conceptual line can be drawn between it and the present. The newer
nostalgia, that is, idealizes not only what cannot be returned to but also what is not
of any more consequence—not only a lost time (as opposed to a still-real place) but
also a time that is felt to be causally unrelated to the present. However phantasmatic
such a belief of Darcy’s may seem—that pride and conceit will not continue to
in� ect his behavior—the belief is implicit in Austen’s own closural processes, which
invite us to imagine a contented marriage founded on a revolution of principle. To
refuse such a belief, to doubt that an epoch has been made in Darcy’s life, is also
to refuse the proVered satisfactions of the novel, so that complicity in Austen’s narra-
tive logic involves a complicity in the logic of nostalgia as well. We are asked, that is,
to see the past as ended: periodized, disconnected, memorable only in the nostalgic
registers of Fanny and William’s fond recollections or Darcy’s relieved regret.28

Darcy’s remorse, therefore, is not the contrary of Elizabeth’s asserted pleasure
in remembrance but its corollary, since the pleasure he takes from remembrance
consists in � nding his memories, in themselves unpleasant, obsolete. Elizabeth’s
dictum had claimed that the unpleasant should be forgotten, but Darcy’s life-review
enables us to see that under the conditions of nostalgia the unpleasant can be re-
membered pleasurably through the lens of disconnection. Darcy’s reappraisal, al-
though newly aware of parental failings, is not, as we might expect, incompatible
with nostalgia; the suddenly formed consciousness of his � awed past yields more
pleasurable relief than discomfort, insofar as his description of that past is felt to
put an end to its lingering eVects. It ends not in a murmur of regret but a welcome
exclamation of release: ‘‘such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest
Elizabeth!’’

What licenses this pleasure of release is not merely the grammar of self-
exculpation—the replacement of active constructions (‘‘I have been’’) with passive
(‘‘I was taught. . . . I was given. . . . I was spoiled’’)—but a particular closural device
frequent in Austen, in which the particularized memories of the novel’s own past,
of therefore our past of reading, yield to a more general and nostalgic reappraisal
of a past that we have not seen. A general and unassailable past: protected from our
own memories of Darcy’s within the text, of which we have perhaps formed judg-
ments, we instead listen to vague ruminations upon a past that we will never know
any better. It is the beginning of a nostalgic readerliness, a method in which our
textual recollections in all their speci� city (and potential for reawakening, given
our ability literally to ‘‘turn back the pages of the past’’) are supplanted at the text’s
end by a new, rather more mysti� ed past.

It is a mysti� cation all the more nebulous for the self-advertising clarity of the
terms under which it is brought forth: ‘‘I have been a sel� sh being all my life,’’ ‘‘I
was spoilt by my parents.’’ What we have here is the fourth alteration to eighteenth-
century nostalgia: a replacement of the ineVable particularity of ‘‘home’’ with a
process of naming, categorizing, or judgment that binds memory into familiar narrative
patterns. The past is contained in Darcy’s phrases; it does not burst into any particu-

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131Austen’s Nostalgics

larity of detail. What Darcy does, in essence, is to provide himself with a series of
explanatory terms (‘‘sel� sh being,’’ ‘‘an only son’’) that situate his past in an under-
standable narrative pattern: the spoiled but nonetheless principled child brought
into contact with, and humbled by, a wider world. AYxing the proper terms pro-
vides the proper narrative context for the past and helps de� ect any speci� cities
that might open up the past to readings other than those provided by the nostalgic
narrator. In a fashion similar to the text’s tactical silence regarding Fanny and Wil-
liam’s childhood pains, the terms provided by Darcy are far more authoritative
than a series of examples; were we to know any instances of Darcy’s sel� sh upbring-
ing, we might be inclined to quarrel with his description of his ‘‘benevolent’’ and
‘‘amiable’’ father, but lacking those instances Darcy’s own adjectives cannot be sup-
planted or revised. By shaping the past through a series of stereotypical terms,
Darcy can arrive at the sort of judgment—‘‘We were happier then,’’ ‘‘I was a badly
taught child’’—that the newer nostalgia always produces, a sort of insight that is
denied to the eighteenth-century nostalgic patient, who cannot judge the past but
can only long for its return. So many of Austen’s characters are prone to this sort
of nostalgic self-review, one that is implicitly pedagogical: an expropriation of an
exemplary pattern from the past, a pattern that is at once disconnected from the pres-
ent (insofar as the current moment of retrospect is its culmination, the sign of the
past’s irrelevance) and named (in order to achieve the proper judgment, in order to
prevent excessive speci� city).29 If we take trauma, in Cathy Caruth’s description, as
not simply the reality of past violence but ‘‘the reality of the way that its violence
has not been fully known,’’ then the function of general, categorical terms in Aus-
ten’s ‘‘life-reviews’’ seems to be trauma’s opposite: a knowing of the past that would
make particularized remembrance obsolete.30

And yet to what purpose is all the wrenching of an older notion of homesick-
ness—the replacements of traumas with pleasures, places with times, constitutive
pasts with disconnected pasts, instances with names—tending or leading? I suggest
that the key lies in the vagueness of nostalgia that seems to be apparent in the work-
ings of the four processes listed earlier—in that vagueness, and in the very social
nature of nostalgic remembrance. Susan Stewart has written of the ‘‘social disease
of nostalgia,’’ and, however interesting the curious persistence of ‘‘disease’’ is in
re� ections on the subject, what is equally important in Stewart’s phrase, and per-
haps more perspicuous, is her insistence that nostalgia is social.31 In Austen’s texts
it is inescapably so, and a tentative explanation of the purpose of the four earlier
alterations to eighteenth-century nostalgia might be the following: the dilution of
the past in the service of making it available to social groups. The � fth and � nal
aspect of modern nostalgia, then, is perhaps the summation of all nostalgic pro-
cesses: a replacement of stubbornly individual pasts with communal pasts.

Eighteenth-century homesickness is, as we have seen, a glitch in the act of as-
similation. Grouped into armies, on explorers’ vessels, or in urban centers, the
homesick individual fails to merge his or her own identity into a new, larger group

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132 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

identity, because personal memory remains too clear and too pressing. Hamilton’s
patient is removed into the hospital where he can only speak of former friends and
locales; sequestered and ill, he is no longer a functioning part of his new identity,
the army, because a preexisting identity (as a ‘‘Welshman’’) maintains its priority.
Thomas Arnold understood nostalgia as a failure speci� cally in urban assimilation,
asserting that homesickness ‘‘shuns the populous, wealthy, commercial city, where
a free intercourse with the rest of mankind, and especially the daily resort and fre-
quent society of foreigners, render the views and connections more extensive, famil-
iarize distant notions with each other, rub oV the partiality of private and con� ned
attachments, and while they diminish the warmth, vastly increase the extent of
aVection.’’32 In Austen the emphasis is much the same—the older homesickness is
allied with ‘‘private and con� ned attachments,’’ attachments that the newer nostal-
gia speci� cally dissolves; with Arnold in mind, we might even see Austen’s plots
tending toward the creation of more cosmopolitan psyches. Claiming a disconnection
from the past, naming and judging it, taking a fond pleasure in it rather than taking
it as a fount of distress, the Austenian nostalgic makes the individual past available
to others.

It is a process most visibly enacted in Emma, where the memory of one private
and con� ned attachment—Harriet’s former attraction to Mr. Elton—is trans-
muted, through a literal act of dispensing with the past, into a diluted memory that
can be shared. Rather than permitting the memory of Emma’s promotion of the
aVair to harden into a settled resentment or a remembrance that, by virtue of its
being unmentionable, would become all the more present to them, Harriet carries
to Hart� eld a box of souvenirs. The parcel, labeled ‘‘Most precious treasures,’’ con-
tains a piece of court-plaster and a fragment of a pencil, both once discarded by
Elton—highly eVective metonymies of the days of Harriet’s interest. Harriet begins
by asserting a disconnection from this past: ‘‘It seems like madness! I can see noth-
ing at all extraordinary in him now’’ (E, 337). Then she proceeds, while wishing
the Eltons well, to state her purpose in visiting Emma: ‘‘No, let them be ever so
happy together, it will not give me another moment’s pang: and to convince you
that I have been speaking truth, I am now going to destroy—what I ought to have
destroyed long ago—what I ought never to have kept—I know that very well (blush-
ing as she spoke).—However, now I will destroy it all—and it is my particular wish
to do it in your presence, that you may see how rational I am grown’’ (E, 337–38).
The mere destruction of the souvenirs— called later ‘‘relicks’’ and ‘‘remem-
brances’’—is not suYcient, for forgetting is not so much the point as is forgetting
in the service of a shareable past. Harriet’s emphasis is upon the burning of the
‘‘relicks’’ taking place before Emma: ‘‘I have nothing more to show you, or to say—
except that I am now going to throw them both behind the � re, and I wish you to see
me do it’’ (E, 340). Of course, before the souvenirs are destroyed and the memory
consigned to the � re, Harriet narrates the ambient incidents surrounding the ob-
jects, small moments of furtive, imagined intimacy between her and Elton, to

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133Austen’s Nostalgics

Emma, and Emma is therefore able to revise her own memories of those incidents,
so that Harriet’s ‘‘private and con� ned attachment’’ is con� ned to her no longer.
By sharing her previously ineVable and appropriately boxed memories with Emma,
Harriet enables their forgetting: the destruction of the souvenirs and the sharing of
the memories with Emma is a single act, one that in releasing the remembered
material from its individual grip annihilates it. Should there be any skepticism re-
garding Harriet’s combined act of forgetting, penance, and sharing, the text does
not support it—the novel proceeds to its conclusion without any further resurrec-
tion of Harriet’s memories of Elton. They are common property between Harriet
and Emma, and therefore forgotten, nostalgized now: ‘‘There it goes,’’ Harriet says,
‘‘and there is an end, thank Heaven! of Mr. Elton’’ (E, 340).

In sharing the past, Harriet’s narration becomes simply interesting, ironic, pi-
quant; it is neither traumatic nor consequential. The nostalgic processes of discon-
nection, communality, and naming or judgment—Harriet calls her former infatua-
tion ‘‘madness’’ and ‘‘nonsense’’—lead to a form of memory capable of making
former pain, as Elizabeth Bennet had suggested, pleasurable for a social grouping,
even those memories that once threatened those social groupings. Of course what
Harriet tells us, just as what Darcy tells of his childhood, we have not seen; what is
Austen to do with diYculty that we have seen, that must in some sense be resolved
and then nostalgized? Here Emma is again instructive. Frank Churchill lets slip,
during a walk to Hart� eld, that he has news of the doctor Mr. Perry’s impending
use of a carriage, forgetting for the time that the means through which he has ac-
quired this bit of neighborhood gossip is his secret correspondence with Jane Fair-
fax. The innocuous slip causes Jane some anxious moments, and the others some
seconds of suspicion, which are allayed by Frank’s claim to have dreamed the infor-
mation. A series of worried glances pass between Frank and Jane, are registered by
the ever-observant Mr. Knightley, and a small crisis seems to have just passed. With
an economy of detail that presages the modern detective novel, Austen does not let
this incident pass away; it becomes instead the object of the novel’s nostalgic close,
a microcosmic example of how we are to regard all of the text’s earlier crises. Much
later, the liaison between Frank and Jane having been brought to light and fully
sanctioned, the chance mention of Mr. Perry’s name sparks a communalized
memory:

Frank Churchill caught the name.
‘‘Perry!’’ said he to Emma, and trying, as he spoke, to catch Miss Fairfax’s eye. ‘‘My

friend Mr. Perry! What are they saying about Mr. Perry?—Has he been here this morn-
ing?—And how does he travel now?—Has he set up his carriage?’’

Emma soon recollected, and understood him; and while she joined in the laugh, it
was evident from Jane’s countenance that she too was really hearing him, though trying to
seem deaf.

‘‘Such an extraordinary dream of mine!’’ he cried. ‘‘I can never think of it without
laughing.—She hears us, she hears us, Miss Woodhouse. I see it in her cheek, her smile, her
vain attempt to frown. Look at her. Do not you see that, at this instant, the very passage of

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134 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

her own letter, which sent me the report, is passing under her eye—that the whole blunder
is spread before her—that she can attend to nothing else, though pretending to listen to the
others?’’ (E, 479–80)

What was anxiety is here comedy, safely transformed into a humorous anecdote
that Jane and Emma can both understand—a communality that nicely eVaces the
original con� nement of Frank and Jane’s mutual secrecy by, in essence, letting
Emma in on the joke. The tone is � rmly nostalgic: taking pleasure in the recollec-
tion of pain when the pain ceases to tell. What had been the transgression of Frank
and Jane, their asocial secrecy and longing, is metamorphosed into the very binding
force of the novel’s completed community. The capacity of this community to re-
member past secrecies as amusing bumps on the road to full revelation is Emma’s
justi� cation for the alchemies of nostalgia. That is, the text demonstrates the neces-
sity of nostalgia to the formation of new identities, for nostalgia acts as the force
whereby previous con� nements are pried apart. Remembrance in Austen, particu-
larly in her closural scenes, is a communal phenomenon, carried out between cou-
ples and groups; Elizabeth Bennet’s or Anne Elliot’s soliloquizing is replaced by
a court of mnemonic appeal. The vague, sometimes poignant, often humorous,
occasionally earnest retrospects of Austen’s texts are social phenomena, enacted in
order to cement new alliances and to erase old contentions. Like Thomas Arnold’s
cities, Austen’s closural retrospects prefer a wide-ranging, forgiving nostalgia to any
sickness for home.

The � ve qualities of modern nostalgia—pleasure, temporal rather than spatial
orientation, disconnection, a naming or patterning in the interests of judgment,
and communality—intertwine and interact, working upon each other to insure
that the physical potency and danger of eighteenth–century homesickness ceases
to aZict the more mobile modern individual. That is, we might say, the purpose
of the revision to nostalgic plots: to create possibilities for mobility, and to make
psychic formation and physical mobility no longer an oppositional pair. Cures of
return will no longer function. ‘‘Mans� eld shall cure you both,’’ Mrs. Grant tells
Mary Crawford; ‘‘London would soon bring its cure,’’ Fanny Price thinks of Henry
Crawford’s sudden aVection for her (MP, 47, 324). What are these oVered cures but
the cure of being somewhere else?

The Harmonies of Distance:
Mobile Subjects

‘‘The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex’’ (SS, 3). From
this opening statement of a rooted existence, Sense and Sensibility, and Austen’s work
as a whole, plots a rapid decline. ‘‘Settlements’’ are disrupted, and the equipoise of
this summarizing sentence will yield to a particularity— of dislocation, transplanta-
tion, and movement—that is only later brought back to the summaries of nostalgic

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135Austen’s Nostalgics

retrospect. The work of Austen’s plots is to convert a psychosocial resistance to mo-
bility, as expressed in eighteenth-century nostalgia, to an embrace of it, by appro-
priating the language of ‘‘settlement’’ for personal memory. Distance is the key:
the vague distance of nostalgic memories, and the very real distances traveled by
individuals seeking to escape, rather than return to, their past. The � gures of Aus-
ten’s later career—Fanny Price, Anne Elliot—are mobile ones. In the nineteenth
century, Richard Terdiman has claimed, ‘‘the inadequacy of available memory
mechanisms to the needs of a transformed society had become critical.’’33 Here, in
a history of nostalgia, we see an older ‘‘memory mechanism’’ beginning to yield to
the social realities that have made it dangerously obsolete.

Even moments of stasis in Austen (sitting still, soliloquizing) can register mobil-
ity; it saturates the paraphernalia of her settings, notably in the form of the souve-
nir.34 One might turn to Fanny Price’s retreat, in Mans�eld Park, to the East room,
which is full of her collections and mementos. Here are kept old drawings of Maria
and Julia Bertram’s, a sketch of William Price made in the Mediterranean, work-
boxes given her by family members: a short lifetime’s worth of ‘‘memorials,’’ all
stored with assiduous care. The history encoded by these souvenirs is not one of
loss, it is one of loss ameliorated and overcome:

Every thing was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend; and though there had been some-
times much of suVering to her—though her motives had been often misunderstood, her
feelings disregarded, and her comprehension under-valued; though she had known the
pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led to
something consolatory; her aunt Bertram had spoken for her, or Miss Lee had been encour-
aging, or what was yet more frequent or more dear—Edmund had been her champion and
her friend—he had supported her cause, or explained her meaning, he had told her not to
cry, or had given her some proof of aVection which made her tears delightful—and the
whole was now so blended together, so harmonized by distance, that every former aZiction
had its charm. (MP, 152)

The East room objects do not tell a detailed narrative. Like any nostalgic retrospect,
the past is ‘‘blended’’ and ‘‘harmonized by distance’’ into a sealed ‘‘whole,’’ a com-
pleted period whose particular pains and disappointments are united into some-
thing more pleasant than distressing. We are oVered a catalog of what Fanny might
choose to remember—from ‘‘tyranny’’ to ‘‘neglect’’—so that the cancellations per-
formed by the East room souvenirs might seem more striking by contrast. The spe-
ci� cally nostalgic function of disconnection carried out by the room’s objects is mir-
rored by their context-free juxtapositions: three souvenir transparencies � ll the
lower panes of one window, ‘‘where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave
in Italy, and a moonlight lake in Cumberland’’ (MP, 152). Furthermore, these sou-
venirs are literally contained, held in one room, not permitted to spill over into the
house at large—like souvenirs in a drawer, they exist to be consulted occasionally,
but not to interfere with work or plans made elsewhere, not to become, that is, living
objects again. What Fanny celebrates here, what these souvenirs provide her with,

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136 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

is not past events but the conclusion of those events, the spectacle of the past’s con-
densation and conclusion. Threatened with a resurrection of old tyrannies, speci� -
cally Aunt Norris’s reminder that Fanny is not in a social position to refuse to act
in the theatricals, Fanny has at least the East room and its souvenirs, where all the
old tyrannies are over. These souvenirs also represent physical, spatial ‘‘distance’’;
for Fanny, the reader of Lord Macartney’s Chinese travel journals, movement is a
curative reality, and distance from the past, from its traumas as well as from its
physical places, is to be prized.

The consequence of this kind of nostalgia is a plot propelled by departures, of
which Persuasion stands as the preeminent example.35 Although Persuasion’s largest
possible motion is a return—Anne and Wentworth’s return to each other—the
return is achieved through a series of leavetakings and exits. Even that largest return
is � gured as the most dramatic departure possible, the departures implied in the
‘‘tax of quick alarm’’ (P, 252) Anne must pay for being a sailor’s wife. Real restora-
tions are not possible, in the fullest nostalgic sense. Anne is oVered the possibility
of a ‘‘restoration’’ in the person of her cousin Mr. Elliot and is not at � rst entirely
disinclined: ‘‘The idea of becoming what her mother had been; of having the pre-
cious name of ‘Lady Elliot’ � rst revived in herself; of being restored to Kellynch,
calling it her home again, her home for ever, was a charm which she could not
immediately resist’’ (P, 160). But resist it she does, of course; the return home � ashed
before her consciousness is rejected fairly quickly, far sooner than in Mans�eld Park,
where Fanny Price’s return home to Portsmouth has to transpire before its impor-
tance can be negated. Persuasion instead leaves the Hamilton-and-Edwards plot of
restoration behind, departs from its consequences before they can become danger-
ous, and chooses instead a constant mobility that leaves its traces on the memories
of its characters. Anne’s modern nostalgia is most evident upon leaving a place or
scene, upon considering a period of time to have concluded; thus her second depar-
ture, from Uppercross to Bath, is far less diYcult than her departure from Kellynch,
for this time she feels the departure to coincide with the closing of an era, with a
nostalgic disconnection:

Scenes had passed in Uppercross, which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensa-
tions of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some
breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and
which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her; all but the recollection that
such things had been. (P, 123)

What we have here is the perfect coalescence of spatial and mnemonic distances,
a physical mobility that licenses nostalgic elisions, and a nostalgic memory that
makes possible a continual mobility.

It should be no surprise, then, that discussions of memory in Persuasion occur in
the context of discussions of travel. Arguing with Captain Harville about gendered
memory during the novel’s climactic scene, Anne insists that the mobility of men
enables their forgetfulness—women ‘‘live at home, quiet, con� ned, and our feelings

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137Austen’s Nostalgics

prey upon us,’’ while men ‘‘have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort
or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation
and change soon weaken impressions’’ (P, 232). When Harville replies by depicting
the homesickness of departed sailors, Anne counters by claiming for the immobile
woman the power ‘‘of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone’’ (P, 235).
What is at stake in this pivotal argument is the shift from one form of selfhood—
the naval memory of Banks’s homesick sailors, the unassimilable self—to another
form, which � nds in mobility a rescue from the con� nements of remembrance. The
terms of the argument are signi� cantly naval, and the theme of the argument is the
shift, the initial phases of which are visible in Austen’s � ction, from an older medical
nostalgia to the newer nostalgia that will be its cure. The lesson is voiced early in
the novel: leaving Kellynch for Uppercross, we learn that ‘‘a removal from one set
of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a
total change of conversation, opinion, and idea’’ (P, 42). It is only later in the novel
that the lesson is implemented. Concluding her narrative as a wife prepared for
sudden alarms and movements, as a wife unmoored from family locales and family
examples, Anne has, one assumes, undergone a ‘‘total change’’—a sea change, per-
haps—and has left behind the yearnings with which she began.

This, then, is the new horizon of ‘‘nostalgia,’’ more thoroughly delineated by
Austen’s last � ction than any of her previous narratives of dislocation. A leavetaki ng
of home spurs a series of further leavetakings; a trauma rooted in the memory is
ameliorated, judged, and left behind; former mistakes are canceled, former times
periodized and then ended, stopped with a mental period; and what is left is a ca-
pacity for communalized retrospect, for what, during a conversation between Anne
and Mrs. Smith, is called ‘‘the interesting charm of remembering former partiali-
ties and talking over old times’’ (P, 153). Matched to this new nostalgia, in fact its
necessary condition, is movement—new scenes, new faces—a condition re� ected
in Anne’s previously cited ars memorativa. Asked by Wentworth if ‘‘disgust’’ perme-
ates her remembrance of Lyme, if memories of Louisa Musgrove’s injury eVace all
else, Anne responds with a formula for a new nostalgia:

‘‘The last few hours were certainly very painful,’’ replied Anne: ‘‘but when pain is over,
the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for
having suVered in it, unless it has been all suVering, nothing but suVering—which was by
no means the case at Lyme. We were only in anxiety and distress during the last two hours;
and, previously, there had been a great deal of enjoyment. So much novelty and beauty! I
have travelled so little, that every fresh place would be interesting to me—but there is real
beauty at Lyme: and in short’’ (with a faint blush at some recollections) ‘‘altogether my
impressions of the place are very agreeable.’’ (P, 183–184)

‘‘Novelty’’ over trauma, ‘‘every fresh place’’ over regret: a vision of a mobile con-
sciousness ful� lls the preference for pleasure over pain that Elizabeth Bennet had
previously advised. Furthermore, what is a ‘‘philosophy’’ in Pride and Prejudice—a
piece of advice, an eVort that must be undertaken—becomes a natural process in

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138 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

Persuasion, a usual occurrence, a psychological metamorphosis that occurs in spite
of the most vivid traumas. Pain is foreshortened into a ‘‘few hours,’’ and pleasure
is widened to � ll the vacuum, all with an eVortlessness, an ease, that was missing
from the wrenching transmutations of Sense and Sensibility. It is the new semantic
range of ‘‘nostalgia’’ that Anne outlines here, and she does so by naturalizing it and
by invoking a renewable mobility alongside it.

There is, famously, no settlement awaiting Anne at the novel’s conclusion, ‘‘no
Uppercross-hall before her, no landed estate, no headship of a family’’ (P, 250)—
what has been accomplished instead is the judgment, dilution, and cancellation of
a diYcult past, nowhere better exempli� ed than in the small–scale cancellation of
Louisa Musgrove’s crisis at Lyme. Nostalgia is a closural process in Austen, a way
of halting the reverberations of narrative—for how can a narrative end unless a
� nality of consequence is asserted? It is a method whereby the traumatic disloca-
tions and injuries of Austen’s openings do not obscure the happier dispositions of
her plots, and whereby the reformations and assimilations that complete her narra-
tives are not shadowed by earlier fractures and � ssures. Yet nostalgia is more than
a narratological principle; in Austen’s � nal novel, it is a narratological principle
naturalized as a psychological process, since the principle exhibited by the texts—
the elision of Fanny Price’s Portsmouth upbringing, of Anne and Wentworth’s eight
missed years, of Elizabeth and Darcy’s mutual woundings—must be learned by
Austen’s characters themselves as a mnemonic habit. Austen’s novels, that is, instruct
her characters in the form of memory that will help close her � ctions. Uncovering
the ‘‘nostalgics’’ of these texts—their nostalgic logic—is not simply elucidating a
technical choice, then, but is also arriving at a sense of where a more contemporary
nostalgia, to use the word so often employed by Austen’s later critics, begins: where
it is � rst taught, out of what situations it arises, against what it � rst reacted. In Persua-
sion, nostalgia is taught as a reaction to the naval homesickness of Banks’s sailors;
we are taken from ‘‘home’’ to ‘‘every fresh place,’’ to a naval memory that celebrates
departures and not returns.

N o t e s

This essay, and the larger project of which it is a part, has pro� ted from the support
and advice of several readers, including Philip Fisher, Elaine Scarry, D. A. Miller, and
Ann Colley; my thanks also go to Catherine Gallagher and the Representations board
for their suggestions. DiVerent versions of this work were presented at the Anonymity
conference at Harvard University’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in 1997
and at the Frontiers of Memory conference sponsored by the University of East London
in September of 1999. I am grateful for the responses I received from both audiences.
My deepest thanks go to Amy Mae King, who has been this essay’s � rst and most re-
sponsive reader.

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139Austen’s Nostalgics

1. Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters, 3d ed. (Oxford, 1995), 99; Gustave Flaubert,
Dictionnaire des idées reçues, vol. 17 of Les oeuvres de Gustave Flaubert (Lausanne, 1965), 430.
Flaubert’s aphorism can be rendered as ‘‘Memory. Complain about your own, and even
boast of not having any. But howl if anyone says you lack judgment.’’ Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are my own.

2. Frederic Jameson’s analysis of the failure of contemporary nostalgia to provide a genu-
ine historical sense—as an ‘‘elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of
our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way’’—is perhaps our pre-
eminent example of the severance of ‘‘nostalgia’’ from a memory that might represent
a full historical consciousness. But Jameson himself is aware of the history of dehistori-
cizing, warning his readers that the current nostalgia he indicts is ‘‘in no way to be
grasped as passionate expressions of that older longing once called nostalgia but rather
quite the opposite,’’ thus hinting at the history of the supercession of trauma (or passion,
or longing) that contemporary nostalgia conceals. What Jameson exhibits here is a
sense of the slight catechresis in terming a contemporary forgetfulness of history nostal-
gia—a catechresis that is nonetheless tellingly ironic, given the fact that what contempo-
rary nostalgia most thoroughly forgets is its own history; Frederic Jameson, Postmodern-
ism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991), 21, xvii.

3. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1982), 183. Hereafter, citations
from Austen’s novels are given parenthetically with the following abbreviations:

E : Emma, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1982)
MP : Mans�eld Park, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1980)
P : Persuasion, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1982)
PP : Pride and Prejudice, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1982)
SS : Sense and Sensibility, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1982)

4. Sir Joseph Banks, Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, ed. Joseph Hooker (London,
1896), 329.

5. Obliquely, but nonetheless insistently. Most of the � nest recent work on Austen is based
on the impulse to refute, re� ne, and unsettle various explicitly ‘‘nostalgic’’ readings.
‘‘It is no accident, of course,’’ Claudia Johnson writes, ‘‘that as modern readers � nd
themselves more nostalgic for the stateliness and stability Austen’s world is said to apo-
theosize, Austen’s class gets higher and higher, and she herself is claimed to be more
conservative’’; Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago,
1988), xviii. The critic with whom Johnson argues most consistently, Marilyn Butler,
makes a similar move, criticizing the politically neutral tenor of earlier Austen criticism
as examples of anything from ‘‘simple nostalgia to a more complex and subtle justi� ca-
tion for inactivity’’; Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1987), xiv.
Johnson has more recently re� ected upon the various diYculties professional readers
of Austen have in relation to a dehistoricizing nostalgia in Claudia Johnson, ‘‘Austen
Cults and Cultures,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland
and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge, 1997), 211–26; while Roger Sales has written perti-
nently on some aspects of the Austen nostalgia industry, including the celebration of
the 1975 bicentennial of her birth, in Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of
Regency England (New York, 1994). What has been consistently opposed to Austenian
nostalgia is what might be called a dramatic historicism, an attempt to restore to cultural
memory what nostalgia has elided or diluted—the most well–known example of which
might be Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,’’ Critical
Inquir y 17 (1991): 818–37.

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140 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

6. Henry James, ‘‘The Lesson of Balzac,’’ In Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers,
Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York, 1984), 118.

7. This denostalgizing has most notably been initiated by Michael Roth, in his work on
French case histories of nostalgic suVerers, and David Lowenthal. See Michael Roth,
‘‘Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France,’’ His-
tory and Memory 3, no. 1 (1991): 5–29; David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Countr y
(Cambridge, 1985), 10–13. See also G. S. Rousseau, ‘‘War and Peace: Some Represen-
tations of Nostalgia and Adventure in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in Guerres et paix: La
Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle I–II, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce (Paris, 1998), 121–40;
George Rosen, ‘‘Nostalgia: A ‘Forgotten’ Psychological Disorder,’’ Clio Medica 10, no.
1 (1975): 29–52; and Jean Starobinski, ‘‘The Idea of Nostalgia,’’ Diogenes 54, no. 3
(1966): 81–103.

8. Johannes Hofer’s little-known work is picked up by two thorough German histories of
nostalgia: Fritz Ernst, Vom Heimweh (Zurich, 1949); Klaus Brunnert, ‘‘Nostalgie in der
Geschichte der Medizin,’’ Düsseldorfer Arbeiten zur Geschichte der Medizin 58 (1984): 1–339.

9. It has yet to depart European history: the most telling recent revision of Hofer’s coinage
is Ostalgie, a persistent, regretful memory of the vanished German Democratic Repub-
lic by former East Germans. In contemporary analyses of and apologias for Ostalgie, a
part of the eighteenth-century structure of nostalgia—the inability or refusal to form
new, assimilated social wholes—makes a ghostly reappearance.

10. Rosen, ‘‘Nostalgia,’’ 40–41.
11. James Thatcher, a physician for the colonials, made this entry in his journal during the

summer of 1780, while encamped in New Jersey: ‘‘Our troops in camp are in general
healthy, but we are troubled with many perplexing instances of indisposition, occa-
sioned by absence from home, called by Dr. Cullen nostalgia, or home sickness. This
complaint is frequent among the militia, and recruits from New England. They become
dull and melancholy, with loss of appetite, restless nights, and great weakness. In some
instances they become so hypochondriacal as to be proper subjects for the hospital’’;
James Thatcher, A Military Journal During the American Revolutio nar y War ( Boston,
1823), 242.

12. William Falconer, A Dissertation on the In�uence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body
(London, 1788), 90–91.

13. D. J. Larrey, Surgical Essays, trans. John Revere (Baltimore, 1823), 155.
14. For Ian Hacking the ‘‘ecological niche’’ is ‘‘not just social, not just medical, not just

coming from the patient, not just from the doctors, but from the concatenation of an
extraordinarily large number of diverse types of elements which for a moment provide
a stable home for certain types of manifestation of illness’’; See Ian Hacking, Mad Trav-
elers: Re�ections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Charlottesville, Va., 1998), 13.
The concept is a highly useful one, insofar as it allows us a way out of the methodologi-
cal bind of reading ‘‘nostalgia’’ as either a comically faulty diagnosis or a mask for a
deeper pathology, such as clinical depression. Hacking’s study—centering on the late-
nineteenth-century malady known as ‘‘fugue,’’ or the compulsion to travel—has inter-
esting implications for a history of its earlier opposite, homesickness.

15. Although the bulk of clinical instances, given the usual military ‘‘niche’’ of the disease,
were male, female suVerers of the malady were known. Emily Brontë seems to have
been understood as one; Elizabeth Gaskell writes that her suVering when forced to leave
Haworth ‘‘became at length so much an acknowledged fact, that whichever was obliged

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141Austen’s Nostalgics

to leave home, the sisters decided that Emily must remain there, where alone she could
enjoy anything like good health’’; see Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë,
ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1975), 158–59. Austen’s biographers have
similarly attempted to read their subject as an eighteenth-century nostalgic, retailing
an apocryphal tale of her fainting upon learning of the family’s relocation from Ste-
venton to Bath. David Nokes in his recent biography casts needed doubt on this story,
reminding us that Austen’s attitude toward the move may have been closer to that of
the modern nostalgic: wistfully regretful, but by no means unwilling to move to a new
locale; see David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (London, 1997), 220–23.

16. See, for instance, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which as late as 1818 oVers us Victor
Frankenstein’s nostalgia—poised neatly between a medical condition and a sentimen-
tality—for his native Geneva: ‘‘Sometimes, indeed, I felt a wish for happiness; and
thought, with melancholy delight, of my beloved cousin; or longed, with a devouring
maladie du pays, to see once more the blue lake and rapid Rhone, that had been so dear to
me in early childhood’’; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (London,
1969), 182. A persistent, if persistently debunked, anecdote of the late eighteenth cen-
tury described Swiss mercenaries in France as perpetually in danger of contracting
nostalgia en masse were they to hear the native anthem ‘‘Ranz des vaches’’; Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, in his 1768 Dictionnaire de musique, relates that French army musicians
were forbidden ‘‘sous peine de mort’’ to play the tune; J.-J. Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique,
vol. 14 of Oeuvres completes de J.–J. Rousseau (Paris, 1831), 79. Sauvages de la Croix’s
1760 Nosologia Methodica seems to have been the origin of the story, but it appears in
virtually every published description of nostalgia, including Falconer’s Dissertation.
Samuel Rogers’s The Pleasures of Memory (1792) made the anecdote a parable for any
nationalist homesickness:

The intrepid Swiss, that guards a foreign shore,
Condemn’d to climb his mountain-cliVs no more,
If chance he hear that song so sweetly wild,
His heart would spring to hear it, when a chi ld;
That song, as simple as the joys he knew,
When in the shepherd-dance he blithely � ew;
Melts at the long-lost scenes that round him rife,
And sinks a martyr to repentant sighs.

See Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory (Oxford, 1989), 20–21.
17. Falconer, Dissertation, 90, 92.
18. George Seymour, Dissertatio medica inauguralis de nostalgia (Edinburgh, 1818), 6.
19. Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy,

or Madness (Leicester, Eng., 1782), 1:266.
20. Dislocation, travel, relocation: categories of place that until recently have been ignored

in studies of Austen; one exception, to which I owe a debt, is Edward Said’s argument,
apropos of Mans�eld Park, that ‘‘we have become so accustomed to thinking of the nov-
el’s plot and structure as constituted mainly by temporality that we have overlooked
the function of space, geography, and location’’; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
(New York, 1993), 84. Of particular value is Franco Moretti’s recent study of Austen’s
cultural geography in his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London, 1998). Histo-
rians, meanwhile, have not been reluctant to use Austen’s work as evidence of the grow-

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142 R e p r e s e n tat i o n s

ing importance of mobility to Regency culture; Linda Colley cites Northanger Abbey as
an instance of the nascent trend of ‘‘internal tourism,’’ while Leonore DavidoV and
Catherine Hall, when discussing the early-nineteenth-century intersection of mobility
and gender, turn to the walks of Pride and Prejudice. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the
Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), 172–74; Leonore DavidoV and Catherine
Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago,
1987), 404, 531.

21. One might also adduce the increasing dignity of ‘‘homesickness’’ in philosophical and
literary registers, such as Novalis’s well-known proclamation: ‘‘Die Philosophie ist ei-
gentlich Heimweh—Trieb überall zu Hause zu seyn’’ [Philosophy is essentially home-
sickness— the impulse to be at home everywhere]; Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluck-
hohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart, 1960), 3:434.

22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘‘Home-sick,’’ in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), 1:314.

23. In fact what one might call a ‘‘terminological nap’’ occurs, in which nostalgia disappears
from active use until its reappearance, much later in the century, in its contemporary
guise. Needless to say, my dating of this semantic shift is meant to account only for
Britain; as Michael Roth has shown, the vibrancy of the pathological version of nostalgia
persisted much longer in France, where it was not until the 1870s—when Jean-Martin
Charcot’s hysteria took precedence—that the depathologization of nostalgia began in
earnest; see Roth, ‘‘Dying of the Past,’’ 21–24. The term was still in clinical use in the
United States as late as the Civil War, when casualties from nostalgia (572 cases with
one death in 1862; 2,016 cases with 12 deaths in 1863) were noted by Union doctors;
see Rosen, ‘‘Nostalgia,’’ 46–47.

24. Robert Hamilton, ‘‘History of a remarkable Case of Nostalgia aVecting a native of
Wales, and occurring in Britain,’’ in Medical Commentaries for the Years 1786, 1787 (Phila-
delphia, 1795), 216–17. Subsequent references will be given in parentheses.

25. Insofar as it was often diYcult to repatriate patients aZicted with nostalgia in distant
lands, examples of the fatal option of the nostalgic plot—death from homesickness—
are present in the medical literature. Larrey describes the case of a soldier in the Royal
Guard, a native of the north of France, who enters a wounded ward complaining of
some numbness, but who dies after a month of futile treatment; ‘‘He exhibited unequiv-
ocal signs of nostalgia,’’ Larrey writes, ‘‘for during the delirium with which he was at-
tacked, he spoke incessantly of his country’’; Larrey, Surgical Essays, 171–72. Honoré
de Balzac’s 1840 story ‘‘Pierrette’’ oVers a � ctional instance of such a resolution; his
central character dies from, among other ailments, ‘‘la nostalgie bretonne, maladie mo-
rale si connue que les colonels y ont égard pour les Bretons qui se trouvent dans leurs
régiments’’ [the Breton homesickness, a moral illness so well-known that colonels allow
for it in the Bretons who serve in their regiments]; Honoré de Balzac, ‘‘Pierrette,’’ in
La comédie humaine (Paris, 1976), 4:107.

26. Michael Schudson has provided a set of terms for understanding how collective remem-
brance distorts the past that dovetail interestingly with those I have supplied to explain
the workings of nostalgia; his � rst process, ‘‘distanciation,’’ mirrors what I have called
disconnection, while his remaining processes (‘‘instrumentalization,’’ ‘‘narrativization,’’
‘‘conventionalization’’) oVer alternate versions of what I term naming. With this taxo-
nomic similarity in mind, it is possible to wonder if nostalgia is the central form of
modern collective remembrance; see Michael Schudson, ‘‘Dynamics of Distortion in

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143Austen’s Nostalgics

Collective Memory,’’ in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct
the Past, ed. Daniel Schacter (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 346–64.

27. What this particular alteration undoes is the ancient linkage of memory to space—
architectural space, imagined interior space—that Frances Yates, in her seminal The
Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966), traces back to the mnemonic loci of classical orators and
rhetoricians. Perhaps part of the eVect of this undoing might be described as a shift
from the arts of memory described by Yates to what might be called a nostalgic art
of forgetting.

28. My description of ‘‘disconnection’’ here owes a debt to Reinhart Koselleck’s analysis
of the term Neuzeit, which—in its early-nineteenth-century formation—encapsulates
a world where ‘‘the diVerence between past and present increased, so that lived time was
experienced as a rupture, as a period of transition in which the new and the unexpected
continually happened’’; Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical
Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 257.

29. The nostalgic process of naming or judging the past—a sort of mnemonic taxonomiza-
tion—bears a strong relation to D. A. Miller’s account of naming in Austen as a ‘‘clo-
sural imposition’’ that is essentially a dilution or condensation of available fact and
circumstance into a precise term; see D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems
of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, 1981), 45. My analysis here is particularly
indebted to Miller’s example.

30. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996), 6.
31. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collec-

tion (Durham, N.C., 1993), ix.
32. Arnold, Observations, 266.
33. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 20.
34. In its purest form, the souvenir produces distance; it is the dead end of the past. ‘‘We do

not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable,’’ Susan Stewart has written.
‘‘Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose mate-
riality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative’’;
Stewart, On Longing, 135. To carry Stewart’s logic one step further, it might be said that
we need and desire souvenirs in order to place the past beyond us, in order to make the
past not repeatable. Such, at least, is the logic of Mans�eld Park’s objects.

35. See also Monica Cohen, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge, 1998),
for an alternate account of one form of departure, the naval, as a form of domesticity—
a version of ‘‘home’’ as continual travel.

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