What's Been Happening to Jane Austen?

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Pritchard, William H

Sedgwick's title-for which she is indeed responsible, and which surely provided her with a spasm of pleasure, since it would offend "conservative" admirers of Austen-promises much more than, so far as I can see, it performs. She cites a "a particularly devastating bedroom scene" from Sense and Sensibility in which Elinor Dashwood, roused from sleep, finds her sister Marianne in torment, writing a last letter to the Willoughby who has betrayed her. After treating us to heavy doses of Foucault, Sedgwick compares the Elinor-Marianne scene to a nineteeth-century case history, "Onanism and Nervous Disorders in Two Little Girls," then concludes that "If what defines 'sexual identity' is the impaction of epistemological issues around the core of a particular genital possibility, then the compulsive attention paid by antionanist discourse to disorders of attention makes it a suitable point of inauguration for modern sexuality." Got that, reader? This reader, who didn't get it, lacks the desire even to begin "arguing" with such prose, and so it seems appropriate that eleven years after the essay was published no one to my knowledge has even bothered to "refute" Sedgwick's contention that Marianne Dashwood's "erotic identity" is "that of the masturbating girl."5

After the linguistic contortions of Galperin and Sedgwick (Terry Castle, by contrast, writes clearly and wittily), it is a relief to open a book that begins, "All of us who read Jane Austen early-say, at eleven or twelve, the age when she began writing-were lost to the siren lure of her work." Although I don't know who belongs to that crowd of "us" (certainly not me) who began reading her at such an age, the siren voice of D. A. Miller has struck its first note.6 Mr. Miller has written about Jane Austen previously-in the first chapter of his first book, Narrative and Its Discontents (1981)-about "narratability" and "closure" in the novels. One feels the presence in that book of Barthes and Foucault, who play a significant part in Miller's thinking about writing and other matters and who are heard from also in his lively and original essays on Dickens, Trollope, and Wilkie Collins in The Novel and the Police (1988). Then Miller's books became more personal, less academic, indeed saucy, in Bringing out Roland Barthes (1992) and in Place for Us: Essays on the Broadway Musical (1998). The flavor of his increasingly "outrageous" prose may be conveyed by some sentences from the book about musicals-it is filled with the most inward lore about the genre-when he recounts his schoolboy habit of rushing home after classes to belt out musical comedy songs in the basement of the Miller house. (A full-page photo is provided of the young Miller, decked out in a toothy grin and playing the accordion.) He proceeds to affirm the connection between loving musical comedy and being gay, in a paragraph headed, as all the book's paragraphs are, with a bold-faced-type allusion to a song, this one from Carousel-"You're a queer one, Julie Jordan."