Performing Harmonics: Representations of Domestic Music-Making in Early Nineteenth-Century England by Alexandra Cross

Domestic music-making was commonly portrayed as the essential female accomplishment of genteel Regency society, especially for those with matrimonial ambitions. Yet comparative analysis of Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice, and James Gillray’s companion prints, Harmony before Matrimony and Matrimonial-Harmonics, reveals a multi-faceted pursuit. Bringing together literary and visual sources enables an alternative evaluation of the feminine leisure activity in early nineteenth-century England, contributing to the understanding of the socio-cultural context they embodied and the ideologies they affirmed, particularly as it pertains to the gendered perspective of their creators. Assessment of these representations reveals similarities in underscoring a circumscribed music culture concerned with the male agenda. Whilst the visual and physical experience of music-making placed the female performer as a site for display and their musical instrument as a symbol of gender relations, the manner in which women engaged with the art was a means with which they were required to exhibit passivity as an expression of domesticity. In contrast, these representations called to question patriarchal ideologies to differing degrees. Gillray’s prints highlight the inadequacy of music accomplishment as part of female education in preparing women for their expected matrimonial and maternal responsibilities. However, analysis of Austen’s characters, able to assert agency and embody ‘de-feminised’ musical characteristics, suggests that the female novelist utilised domestic music-making to challenge patriarchal ideologies and invite the reader to reconsider the patriarchal view of women, and thus the creator herself.