The Postcolonial Jane Austen

You-Me Park, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415232906
• eBook ISBN: 9781134297320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume offers a unique contribution to both postcolonial studies and Austen scholarship by:

* examining the texts to illumine nineteenth century attitudes to colonialism and the expanding Empire
* revealing a new range of interpretations of Austen's work, each shaped by the critic's particular context
* exploring the ways in which the study of Austen's novels raises fresh issues for post-colonial criticism.

Bringing together work by highly-respected critics from four continents and a range of disciplines, this newly paperbacked volume allows sometimes surprising and always fascinating new insights into some of the most frequently studied - and best loved - novels in the English language.

Part I
Introduction

1 Austen in the world

Postcolonial mappings

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

To view or, more actively to set Austen 'in the world', is, we maintain, a postcolonial enterprise. The essays in this volume are mappings of textual/cultural itineraries and destinations, to persist with the geographical metaphor. What are the ways in which Austen may be said to be 'in the world'? Why is such a location 'postcolonial'? This introductory essay sets out to place and circumscribe Austen criticism in an effort to track the reaches of postcolonial theory today. In that sense it is less about Austen than about a/(this) book about her. Austen is not treated here simply as an exemplary case, however. A historical and textual/'literary' Austen — and hence ways of understanding her work — is central to the project of this book. The essays are arranged in two parts, titled 'Austen at home', and 'Austen abroad', consciously echoing Edward Said's argument that nineteenth-century English novelists shaped the 'idea of England' in ways that depended on the relationship between 'home' and 'abroad' (Said 1993: 72). The extent to which this is so, and the simultaneous deconstruction of the division itself, is what the essays individually and together set out to establish.

A preliminary clarification about what is not intended by 'postcolonial' in our invocation of the term. Though politically informed criticism known in the academy by such identifying marks as 'postcolonial' (or feminist, minority, Marxist, queer, as the case may be) is often taken to indicate the special interests of its practitioners (women/non-white/working class/gay/lesbian) — and in the best situations tolerated within a (often repressive) liberal ideology of pluralism or multiculturalism —it is the contrary agenda of universalizing these concerns — of making it everybody's business — that informs such work. Reading Austen postcolonially is not one critical 'approach' among others, uniquely propagated by 'postcolonial' critics, but rather, an inescapable historical imperative in our times. Postcolonial criticism calls for an engagement that is attentive to all forms of relations of domination. It traces these to the histories of colonialism and identifies their connections to and complicities with the present, in politics as in culture. If we recuperate and reinstall Austen in our world, it is also as an Austen for our times.

The postcolonial method, therefore, to put it simply, is to locate texts and criticism in time and place. The insistence upon this 'worldliness' of texts, Edward Said has passionately argued, is a way of recognizing that they are 'always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society — in short, they are in the world, hence worldly' (Said 1984: 35). Following from this, criticism too will require the critic's 'worldly self-situating' (15) and involve an active 'engagement' (35) with texts. This is a 'secular' criticism, secularism being yet another and related meaning of worldliness, for Said exemplified in Ernest Renan's reduction of divine texts to 'objects of historical materiality' in the nineteenth century (46). This has been a crucial development for literary criticism, where there has been a comparable secularization of the 'humanities' and 'literature': from being the domain of universal and unquestioned values, they are now viewed as a site of contestation and struggle over meanings. For Austen studies, more specifically, 'secularism' also signals a historical moment and an authorial stance that reflect a significant disenchantment with the religious and its replacement by humanist values of the 'self, as my discussion of Lionel Trilling's criticism of Austen, below, indicates (as also does Nalini Natarajan's essay in this volume).

Austen studies has been politicized in the academy in ways that reflect this sense of the worldliness of texts. Two kinds of development may be identified: in literary criticism, the new kinds of questions posed to and by her novels; and in the institution of literary studies, the interrogation of 'English' conducted, specifically but not solely, within a postcolonial context. These developments in relation to Austen and her works are discussed in the first two parts of this introductory essay. The concluding section explores the concept of the 'universal' in relation to literature and culture (here represented by 'Austen'), in the belief that this is a key postcolonial theoretical concern. These critical, institutional and theoretical questions together constitute the problematic — which we term postcolonial — within which Austen is viewed and presented in the essays in this volume.

The 'alternative Austen' that is offered in the pioneering critical work of the 1970s, I suggest here, is above all a worldly one in the several senses of the word: as representative of Lionel Trilling's major modern secular value of'sincerity'; as partaking of the economic 'dialectic of acquisition and representation', and the 'contests of money and power' that Raymond Williams traces in the country-house poem and novel of the eighteenth century; and as the historical figure and product of the political controversies in England in the post-revolutionary decades that Marilyn Butler constructs.

Following this earlier work and building upon it, recent criticism of Austen's novels locates them in a geographically expansive world, the world that European travel, exploration, commerce, military adventure and imperialism brought into being and redefined in terms of colonial relations of domination, raced, classed and gendered. The novels thus constitute a colonial discourse, not only by partaking in this changed world, but by actively marking its transformation in these ways. Questions of gender posed within and against this nationalist-imperialist project have radically revaluated the 'domestic' novel, the genres of manners and conduct, the meanings of'home', femininity, women's labour, marriage and alliance, and the tropes of place, travel, and mobility. In recent feminist criticism Jane Austen's work is 'in the world' in this significant sense of interrogating the gendered public—private ascription of spheres of activity — which includes writing. Feminist criticism of this kind is not only produced within a postcolonial problematic, but radically reconfigures it in terms of its analysis of gender.

Austen's texts are 'in the world' in a literal geographical sense as a consequence of contingent historical and institutional factors, primarily British colonialism and United States global hegemony. As a consequence of British colonialism, English literary studies was institutionalized in many distant parts of the world, providing a different — and frequently unsettling — context for the dissemination and recuperation of the 'English book'. And in the new world order Austen represents Western cultural capital and hegemony in differently mediated ways. How has Austen been transposed into these different contexts? How does Western 'culture' resonate in the 'Third World'? How does the historical method contend with — contesting or succumbing to — the forces of capital and cosmopolitanism? These are some of the questions engaged in the second part of this introduction.

And finally, in the concluding part of this essay, I interrogate the universal, offered as a description of the value of 'great' literature, its transcendence of the time and place of its origins. Postcolonial theory is above all marked by acute angst over a Western intellectual hegemony which masquerades as 'universalism'. It has therefore been concerned to expose the forms of particularity and exclusion on which colonialism's creation of the foundational categories of the 'human', the 'civilized', or the 'universal', has relied, and to denounce the ethnocentrism, the historical limits, the power—knowledge nexus, the depredations of Enlightenment reason, science and modernity upon the colonial world, and the continuing forms of Western cultural imperialism in a neo-colonial world order. Much of this work is clearly of a reactive order, much of it is marked by an impossible nostalgia for an imagined pre-colonial/indigenous cultural plenitude and authenticity, and much is animated by the desire to 'provincialize Europe'. Austen, it seems to us, is a site for some reflexive takes upon these postcolonial positions. How may we deliberate upon universality, its possibility and its value, in the context of 'literature'? Can we locate Austen's texts in a historical context which is also a specific cultural context? What does such a reverse-anthropological project imply for postcolonialism's methods of enquiry? In the following pages I pursue some of these enquiries in greater detail, as preparation for and introduction to the explorations undertaken by the essays.

‘Alternative’ Austen

Criticism in the 1970s

An 'alternative' Austen has emerged and substantially taken shape in the work of a number of distinguished scholars since the 1970s. The question of her stature long settled, the new questions about Austen's work relate to her historical location, her politics and, through these, her meanings for the present. This Austen, viewed in the expansive contexts of English Jacobinism, the anti-slavery campaigns, feminism, nationalism, imperialism,¹ bourgeois-gentry class ideologies, sexuality, and most recently colonialism, has replaced the novelist whose description in terms of limits was as much self-deprecatingly self-propagated as anything else, as Jon Mee observes in his essay in this collection. Those limits, identified in the form, themes, and style of the novels — variously, comedy, gentility, English provinciality, tradition, upper-class leisure, courtship and marriage — had been perceived as matters either of Austen's decorum or ignorance or, in more formalist terms, of a deliberate and knowing irony — the first two attributable to her class-location and her gender, the irony variously to her temperament or to the genre of her writing (satire, comedy of manners, country-house novel).²

Three critics of the 1970s definitively shift the Austen question, I suggest, outside the critical arguments carried on within these sentimental and formal modes: Lionel Trilling, Raymond Williams and Marilyn Butler. Different from each other, they yet combine to give Austen a seriousness that has made possible our continuing engagement with her work, and open her work to debates that have continued unabated. (For all three, significantly, it is Mansfield Park which is the locus of criticism.) The larger context within which my discussion of Austen criticism here is framed, is the shift in literary criticism itself from the influential formalist methods of the New Criticism towards a more politically engaged scholarship in the 1970s; but a full-fledged analysis remains outside its bounds. Short-hand references to the historical events of the 1950s and the 1960s — 'Suez', 'Hungary', 'Korea', 'Vietnam', 'Algeria', 'McCarthy', the 'Cold War' — references to the West's involvement in wars, decolonization, Communism — must suffice to indicate the climate of the seventies in which 'culture' became a crucial term and terrain for political engagement. Feminism, civil rights, anti-racism, the crisis on the left, the crisis of liberalism in Britain and in the United States are the positions from which Trilling, Williams and Butler engage with Austen, in their different ways.

Trilling's landmark 1971 book, Sincerity and Authenticity, placed Austen centrally within a broadly Western current of ideas of the self, specifically the demand for 'sincerity' that the moral life placed upon the individual in the modern European world. In observing already in The Opposing Self (1955), that in Austen's novels 'society, the general culture' plays a part in the 'moral life', Trilling is remarking upon those aspects of her work that had earned her membership in F.R. Leavis's 'Great Tradition' of the English novel (1947). His claim that it was Jane Austen 'who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being', drew, however, primarily from Hegel's argument about the 'secularization of spirituality' that characterizes the modern age. As Sincerity and Authenticity makes clear fifteen years later, her place in this Hegelian frame of ideas, and her 'lineal descent' from Rousseau, give her a more radically formative role in Western secular modernity. This is a daring, and historically problematic, claim, but for Trilling it does much to account for the meaning of Austen in his times, a question that he is however still puzzling in his last, and unfinished, essay 'Why We Read Jane Austen' (1975; published in 1979). I shall return to the rather different implications of that essay later. That Trilling was recasting Austen in a large gesture of appropriation is undeniable, but it does not reduce the potential of Austen to be so recuperable in another place and time.³ By giving her a significance in a broader historical frame than that of the England of 1795 to 1817, within the Europe of the 'last four hundred years', instead, he offers her work in terms of one of the West's major ideological configurations for our postcolonial understanding.

If Rousseau is the figure Trilling allies Austen with, against the grain of their distance and difference from each other, then Raymond Williams places her, for contrast, alongside Gilbert White, the English naturalist, and William Cobbett, the radical journalist, her contemporaries and neighbours in the counties of Hampshire and Surrey. At the beginning of the famous chapter, 'Three around Farnham', in Country and the City (1973), Williams urges his readers to: 'Imagine a journey, for example, round a thirty-mile triangle of roads, in the turning years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . . In this small locality, overlapping wihin a generation, there were these three people, three writers, who could hardly be more different' (Williams 1973: 108). His vivid conjuring up of geographical location and address establishes the writers firmly within a novelistic chronotope. At the same time Williams is calling attention to the differences of class that separate their 'points of view, interpretations, selection of realities' (108), most strikingly the difference that 'Jane Austen was writing from inside the houses that Cobbett was passing on the road' (112). Yet both are writing, as he says, 'social [criticism], in the widest sense' (118). It is this sense of lite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Austen at home
• PART III Austen abroad
• PART IV Poem
• Index