Jane Austen and Critical Theory

Michael Kramp, Michael Kramp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000401547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jane Austen and Critical Theory is a collection of new essays that addresses the absence of critical theory in Austen studies—an absence that has limited the reach of Austen criticism. The collection brings together innovative scholars who ask new and challenging questions about the efficacy of Austen's work. This volume confronts mythical understandings of Austen as "Dear Aunt Jane, " the early twentieth-century legacy of Austen as a cultural salve, and the persistent habit of reading her works for advice or instruction. The authors pursue a diversity of methods, encourage us to build new kinds of relationships to Austen and her writings, and demonstrate how these relationships might generate new ideas and possibilities—ideas and possibilities that promise to expand the ways in which we deploy Austen. The book specifically reminds us of the vital importance of Austen and her fiction for central concerns of the humanities, including the place of the individual within civil society, the potential for new identities and communities, the urgency to address racial and sexual oppression, and the need to imagine more just futures.

Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART I

The Cultural Work of Austen’s Life and Afterlives

1

Lady Oracle

Jane Austen as High Priestess of Modern Romance or Secret Icon of Female Independence

Megan A. Woodworth

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181309-3

In 2007, I encountered my first Austen meme. In the style of the “I Can Has Cheezburger” cat meme, it featured a colorized close-up of the face from the Victorian engraving commissioned for James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen, with blocks of text reading “im in mah novels/ hidin mah subtex.” The meme juxtaposes the inane “dear Aunt Jane,” with her vacant expression, and the richness and complexity of her texts, championed by academics and subversive fan cultures alike.¹ The tension between highly polished but insipid image and irreverent text is the visual representation of the problem of biographical mythmaking that continues to influence understandings of Jane Austen.

In his introduction to the “Austen and Deleuze” special issue of Rhizomes, Michael Kramp reflects on the ways in which Austen’s image has been crafted and notes that academics have “often expressed a desire to congeal and contain ‘Austen’ in order to assert dominance over her work.”² The same tendency exists in Austen biography, in ways that contribute to some of the same critical containment strategies. Kramp counters those who “insist upon reading Austen’s novels as an experience of the author’s opinions or advice,” framing Austen instead as a Deleuzian concept: “because of the immense reach and influence of her life and works[,] she has impacted a range of peoples, groups, and institutions, creating new kinds of relations and possibilities.” Each Deleuzian concept is “a combination that did not exist before”—this kind of energy would have a salutary effect on Austen biography.³

In “Literature and Life,” Gilles Deleuze claims writing “consists in inventing a people who are missing.”⁴ Biography answers this by shaping the facts of a life together into narrative, inventing a person who if not quite missing would be otherwise inscrutable to posterity. This sense of someone being missing has driven modern biographies of Austen, but despite the many attempts to fill her in, she is still missing. Austen biography has relied on the same family authorities and has fallen into the narrative patterns expected in the biography of a woman, namely the marriage plot. In order to invent the missing Austen, one that better accords with an expansive and expanding sense of her life and novels that has emerged through our engagement with feminist critical theory, these patterns must be broken.

Originally, this essay was to explore how the making of Austen as a biographical subject is filtered through reception of the novels to produce Jane Austen as an infallible oracle for romantic fulfillment. This particular Deleuzian concept of Jane Austen is recognizable to those who came of age during the 1990s Austen film craze, which as Emily Auerbach notes, tends to promote romance at the expense of other themes;⁵ it is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the sensibility of these adaptions was melded with the self-help genre to produce a profusion of Austen-themed guides to dating.⁶ Austen became a kind of oracle whose teachings could bring women the romance they desperately desired. But the story is more complicated because oracles, as David Shaw notes, can be Janus-faced, looking forward and backward at the same time.⁷ The Jane Austen that remains persistently, stubbornly present is “Jane” (sometimes “dear Aunt Jane”): the inoffensive, backward-looking oracle that seems to champion love and marriage as women’s ultimate fulfillment. She is the Jane Austen of girls being taught a lesson, bemoaned by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.⁸ But there is another Jane Austen—“Austen,” whom Auerbach identifies as a serious philosopher, a purveyor of wisdom whose work must be taken seriously as such.⁹ Her exclusion from Shaw’s study, subtitled A History of Wisdom from Zeno to Yeats, is in many ways the legacy of her original biographers’ shaping of her story.

The “faultless” Jane Austen, whose “temper was as polished as her wit” and whose compositions “came finished from her pen,” was constructed first by her brother Henry in his “Biographical Notice” and later elaborated on as “dear Aunt Jane” by her nephew.¹⁰ These narratives still have an oversized influence on our understanding of Austen’s life, but the tension between such pictures of perfection and her work has long invited skepticism. As Jason Solinger observes, Virginia Woolf sought “to supplant the familiar image of female craftwork (the little bit of ivory) with the figure of the master artist.”¹¹ Woolf famously suggested that writing about Austen has a tendency to rouse the passions of “25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London, who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts.”¹² There is an important intersection here between the sensibilities of elderly gentlemen and protective impulses toward virgin aunts; of course, it recalls the relationship between Austen and her first biographer. More than that, however, it exposes the ways in which women—even those who remained single and are now dead—are valued primarily in terms of their marriageability and in reference to their utility to men’s lives (transmitting their property or leaving their honor unsullied). These are the sensibilities that govern the biographies of women, even when their lives do not fit neatly into the narrative.

Woolf complains family biographies focused on the wrong details. Indeed, this could be said of many recent biographies. The attempts to find the missing Austen, obscured by family lore, excised by Cassandra’s knife, sacrificed to a fire, or otherwise obliterated, focus all too often on romance. But it is a wrong detail, so Austen will remain elusive. The missing Jane Austen is the forward-looking face—perhaps the sketch done by Cassandra that was found wanting by Austen-Leigh and his siblings. Despite being declared unlike its subject, the sketch bears a strong resemblance to a portrait of young Frank Austen and also, as Annette Upfal and Christine Alexander argue, matches the Mary Queen of Scots miniature in The History of England.¹³ Modern critics have abused the sketch as amateurish and unattractive. But it is just disconcerting in its honesty: too much at odds with Austen-Leigh’s insipid facsimile. It is the face not of a sour young woman, but of one who is not performing for strangers. There needs to be more of her and less speculation about romantic disappointments or context or stories about family members. The missing Jane Austen, the forward-facing oracle, can be written with a conscious use of feminist theory to temper biography’s imposition of the marriage plot and its gendered expectations on the lives of real women. Erasing these embellishments from the traditional Jane Austen narrative will foreground Austen’s own choices and commitment to her profession, to present her as the author not simply of important literary works but of a life of her own.

Biography and Theory and the Woman Problem: Jane Austen as Case Study

Biography has long grappled with its fiction problem, but it has yet to deal with its gendered narrative problem. On the slippage between biography and fiction, Hermione Lee observes that the details that anchor a life in its reality are just glimpses that must be knit together; thus, a biographer must compose a “whole out of parts” and give “a quasi-fictional, story-like shape to their material.”¹⁴ John Wiltshire concurs, suggesting “biography is a hybrid form, a compromise formation between fact and make-believe, in which imaginative possession continually comes up against, and engages with, stubborn resistance.”¹⁵ This dance is complicated, however, by less well-acknowledged narratives of gender expectations that creep, often unrecognized because ubiquitous, into biographies, and add an unnecessary fictional wrinkle to a form that clings to ideas of truth and objectivity.

One truism stubbornly remains: men’s lives, whatever form they take, are, as Laura Marcus observes, viewed as “representative” in ways that women’s are not believed to be.¹⁶ Marcus traces how ideas about biography and autobiography were informed by theories of identity that posited male experience as “whole and continuous” and female experience as “fragmentary.”¹⁷ She offers Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903) as an influential, disturbing, and ultimately representative example of the limited inner life ascribed to women. Weininger argues that because of woman’s focus on “sexual drive and reproduction”—which form her “one class of memories”—“A genuine woman never arrives at any consciousness of a destiny, her destiny.”¹⁸ This purported inability to make narrative sense of her life, Weininger concludes, prohibits women from existing in any meaningful sense. The conclusion is not simply “that women are effaced, subsumed into a supposedly universal selfhood which is in fact gendered male because all agency and identity are seen as masculine”; rather, Marcus clarifies, “It is that women, or ‘woman,’ must be presented as a negation in order for the male to be affirmed, as incoherent in order that male identity can be secured.”¹⁹ Ideas about biography, then, re-inscribe sexist ideology and are part of the apparatus of misogyny that philosopher Kate Manne defines as keeping women in “their place.”²⁰

A solution would seem to be the application of feminist theory to writing biography; however, as Sharon O’Brien observes, theory is problematized by biography as a genre because it seems to betray objectivity. Because it is supposed to be “truth,” the “overt use of feminist theory explodes the ...