What's Been Happening to Jane Austen?

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

presupposes and enforces, its author's own under-representability, a condition I can describe most simply . . . by observing that the realism of her works allows no one like Jane Austen to appear in them. Amid the happy wives and pathetic old maids, there is no successful unmarried woman. . . . The social grounding is insufficient not of course for this woman to exist-she does, she is Jane Austen-but to entitle her existence to the same dignity of novelistic representation that she gives Elizabeth and Emma, or even Mrs. Elton and Lady Bertram. Like the Unheterosexual, the Spinster too resorts to Style, the Utopia of those with almost no place to go.

Excellently said, until perhaps the final sentence where the "like" induces a bit of discomfort. Miller's discussions of Pride and Prejudice, Emma ("the melancholy of Austen Style"), Persuasion ("the sacrifice of the very essence of Austen Style") and Sanditon ("the formal ruination of the Austen novel") are fresh and provocative. (He shows how in the last named its signifiers go out of control-though to these eyes and ears that doesn't prevent it from being a fragment full of splendidly comic bits.) He is excellent on free indirect discourse in the writing, and his own identity as a "Stylothete" (he likes the word) means there's never a page without a lot going on in writing so dense as to make abstracting from it, as in the attempt above, virtually impossible.

Ten years ago, Miller began a short piece, "Austen's Attitude," as follows: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Perhaps most attached to this commanding sentence is the frightened soul who has never recovered from the terrors whose reign in Austen's novel it pronounces. "Jane Austen and the Secret of Style enacts such a recovery on the part of D. A. Miller, even as the Absolute Stylist Herself remains unwrung.

1 Since 1992, a year that saw publication of what seems to me the best critical introduction to Jane Austen's work (Jane Austen's Novels by Roger Gard), there have been over six hundred books and other items about the novelist. Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1997.

2 JANE AUSTEN, by Carol Shields. Viking. $19.95.

3 THE HISTORICAL AUSTEN, by William H. Galperin. University of Pennsylvania Press. $39.95.

4 Sedgwick's essay is collected in Tendencies (Durham, NC, 1993); Castle's is in Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, (New York, 2002).

5 A leading Sex and Gender scholar, Sedgwick is famous for her homemade prose, an example of which may he found in the same essay: "And for that matter, if we are to trust Foucault, the conceptual amalgam represented in the very term 'sexual identity,' the cementing of every issue of individuality, filiation, truth, and utterance to some representational metonymy of the genital, was a process not supposed to have been perfected for another half-century or three-quarters of a century after Austen; so that the genital implication in either 'homosexual' or 'heterosexual' to the degree that it differs from a plot of the procreative or dynastic (as each woman's desire seems at least for the moment to do), may mark also the possibility of an anachronistic gap." Yes, most definitely a possibility.