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eBook details

• Title: Community.
• Author : English Studies in Canada
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 164 KB

Description

Raymond Williams's entry for "Community" in Keywords (75-6) is straightforward enough, though it is characteristically succinct, comprehensive, and subtle. He gives a brief history of the etymology of the word and of the different meanings the word has had since it entered the English language in the fourteenth century. He also sets "community" against French and German words, commune and Gemeinde. He refers to Tonnies' influential contrast (1887) between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: community, on the one hand, and more impersonal organization or corporation, on the other. Though Williams distinguishes five senses of "community." the essence of his definition is expressed in the following phrases: "a sense of common identity and characteristics," "the body of direct relationships" as opposed to "the organized establishment of realm or state." A community is "relatively small," with a "sense of immediacy or locality:' Williams stresses the affective aspect of the word and its performative power: "Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships (76)." What Williams meant by "community" is developed more circumstantially in The Country and the City, especially in chapters to, m, and 18 of that book: "Enclosures, Commons and Communities," "Knowable Communities," and "Wessex and the Border." The last two me on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, respectively. Williams does not wholly admire George Eliot, or Jane Austen, whereas Hardy gets his more or less complete approval. What is the difference? "Jane Austen," says Williams, "had been prying and analytic, but into a limited group of people in their relations with each other" (168). Eliot, according to Williams, was, like Jane Austen before her, ore or less limited in her comprehension to members of the gentry. The latter formed her "knowable community." She did not really understand the common people, rural farmers, laborers, servants, and tradesmen. They and their community were "unknowable" to her. In Williams's view, Eliot projected her own inner life into lower class people in her novels and was consistently condescending to them. "George Eliot" says Williams, "gives her own consciousness, often disguised as a personal dialect, to the characters with whom she does really feel; but the strain of the impersonation usually evident-in Adam, Daniel, Maggie, or Felix Holt" (169). The latter judgment, by the way, seems questionable. Hetty Sorrel, for example, in Adam Bede, seems to me a plausible characterization of someone to a considerable degree unlike George Eliot herself Like Williams, I come from a rural background, though at the distance of an extra generation, so, like Williams, I too can speak from direct experience about this. Can it be that there is a trace of misogyny in Williams's putdown of Austen and Eliot, in favor of male novelists like Hardy and Lawrence? "Prying and analytic" is a really nasty epithet, and what worse can one say of a supposedly objective realist novelist than that all her protagonists are versions of herself?

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