The Flirt's Tragedy

Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction

Richard A. Kaye

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780813921006
• eBook ISBN: 9780813922003
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and W. M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-doubles. In the writing of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, flirting harbors potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In revising Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton critiques the nineteenth-century European novel as morbidly obsessed with deferred desires. Finally, in works by D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations.

In The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction, Richard Kaye makes a case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novel. The author examines flirtation in major British, French, and American texts to demonstrate how the changing aesthetic of such fiction fastened on flirtatious desire as a paramount subject for distinctly novelistic inquiry. The novel, he argues, accentuated questions of ambiguity and ambivalence on which an erotics of deliberate imprecision thrived. But the impact of flirtation was not only formal. Kaye views coquetry as an arena of freedom built on a dialectic of simultaneous consent and refusal, as well as an expression of "managed desire," a risky display of female power, and a cagey avenue for the expression of dissident sexualities. Through coquetry, novelists offered their response to important scientific and social changes and to the rise of the metropolis as a realm of increasingly transient amorous relations.

Challenging current trends in gender, post-gender, and queer-theory criticism, and considering texts as diverse as Darwin's The Descent of Man and Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, Kaye insists that critical appraisals of Victorian and Edwardian fiction must move beyond existing paradigms defining considerations of flirtation in the novel. The Flirt's Tragedy offers a lively, revisionary, often startling assessment of nineteenth-century fiction that will alter our understanding of the history of the novel.

1

Dialectical Desires

The Eighteenth-Century Coquette and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Fictional Character

He was to be a plaything for her whims; he was to surmount one obstacle after another while making no advance, like an insect which, teased by a child, hops from one finger to the next in the belief that he is getting away while its malicious tormentor keeps it stationary.

—Honoré de Balzac, “La Duchesse de Langeais” (1834)

BALZAC AND THE PERILS OF THE COQUETTE-ARISTOCRAT

Despite her ubiquity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and British literary narrative, the figure of the coquette has eluded a sustained critical consideration in discussions of the novel. Although both men and women may play at flirtatious games, it is largely the coquette who in the novel of realism becomes the living symbol of a dangerous form of eros, as well as an enduring exemplum of a French aristocratic class so given over to glittering effects that it has lost its purpose. As we shall see, by importing the eighteenth-century coquette to nineteenth-century fiction, Victorian novelists come to highlight problems of female sociability as well as seemingly “unnarratable,” dissident desires. Additionally, the artful, “aimless” carnality of Congreve's Millamant (the prototypical eighteenth-century coquette explored in this chapter) offers a paradox in literary narrative. For as integral to realist fiction as the coquette's strategies become, coquetry always threatens to stall a plot that strives to move toward a resolution in marriage. At the same time, coquettish desire signifies an unmentionable female eroticism precisely because it would seem to defy narration.

The grande cocotte who Balzac makes the subject of his novella “La Duchesse de Langeais” (1834) has her origins in French salon culture in which female conversational prowess found a place. Recent historians of eighteenth-century French literary culture such as Erica Harth, Joan De-Jean, and Mary Vidal have examined the place of salon-based conversation in French high society of the ancien régime—a central aspect of culture in France before the Revolution—and have explored its paramount role in the development of the modern French novel. Harth, for example, argues that the eighteenth-century “art of conversation” was a uniquely accommodating sphere for female interests, one that functioned in keen opposition to the period's all-male academies.¹ Through her social inroads into salon life and her transformation of this once exclusively male preserve into an arena of feminine power, the salon's grande dame exemplifies the potential for greater female agency. That power is acquired not through the privileges of birth but through conversational talent. The site of female cultural achievement, the salon also signaled an independent aesthetic system in its own right, one that relied on literary nuance, intellectual badinage, and playfully orchestrated scenes of social performance. With the rise of a more constraining post-Napoleonic social ethos, however, the high mandarins of official French culture increasingly regarded “la parole,” or salon-based “speech,” not as an unassailable realm of achievement for women but as a site of feminine uselessness—and peril.²

Throughout the eighteenth century, French and British writers continually linked female coquetry to a once-exalted aristocratic ethos that had disintegrated into wicked, erotic gamesmanship. Thus, in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses (1782), the amoral aristocrats the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil take professional pride in toying with a young woman and forcing her to acknowledge their power over her. In explaining why he delays lovemaking with the ingenue Cécile Volanges, the vicomte tells his sometime-lover and fellow gamester the marquise, “My plan…is to make her perfectly aware of the value and extent of each one of the sacrifices she makes me; not to proceed so fast with her that remorse is unable to catch up.” The point of his cruel enterprise, notes the marquise, “is to show her virtue breathing its last in long-protracted agonies; to keep that sombre spectacle ceaselessly before her eyes; and not to grant her the happiness of taking me in her arms until I have obliged her to drop all pretence of being unwilling to do so. After all, I am not worth much if I am not worth the trouble of asking for.”³

Aware of the passing authority of his class and the devaluation of his own precarious “worth,” the marquise's letter suggests a large dose of sexual sadism. Society itself, meanwhile, has adopted aristocratic games of coquetry as an everyday ritual: indeed, it is a fundamental prerequisite for a social identity. “Mother Perpetué was right, I think,” Cécile glumly confides to a friend. “One turns coquette directly one enters society.”⁴ Feminist intellectuals of the period depicted coquetry as a largely male invention designed to diminish female power and autonomy. In The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the pioneering advocate of women's rights Mary Wollstonecraft reprimanded Jean-Jacques Rousseau for insisting that a “woman should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chose to relax himself.”⁵ For Wollstonecraft, coquetry was an unnatural distortion of the female's innate powers of mind. In rebuking the author of The Social Contract and Emile, Wollstonecraft affirmed that the tensions surrounding flirtation occurred at the cultural borders separating France and England. Indeed, the contributions to realist fiction of novelists such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot involved the intensification of a process whereby, in the era following the French Revolution, British fictional character was formed in marked opposition to French culture. Thus a reprimand of French conceptions of femininity provided the basis of Brontë's Villette, whose heroine Lucy Snowe demonstrates her probity by obsessively castigating Ginevra Fanshawe, an English-born coquette who nonetheless flamboyantly continues to declare her Gallic lineage.

In popular fiction and conduct literature of the nineteenth century, the female flirt denoted less female sexual misbehavior per se than the potential for misconduct in woman, a distinction that stymied ethical and legal categories even as it formed the foundation of energetic inquiry on the part of novelists. “I do not say that she is actually guilty,” observes Lord Bertie of the irresolute Louisa Conolly in Opie's Dangers of Coquetry, “but the woman who is not startled at indulging the adultery of the mind, is not far removed from yielding to that of the body; and the former, I am sure, she is not far from.”⁶ With the deployment of such distinctions, the public realm became a dangerous place for a young woman setting out into the world. An increasing number of writers seized on elaborate, Thackerayan military metaphors for what they considered a continual war between the sexes. “Renée was downcast,” observes the narrator of George Meredith's Beauchamp's Career (1876). “Had she not coquetted? The dear young Englishman had reduced her to defend herself, which fair ladies, like besieged garrisons, cannot always do successfully without an attack at times, which, when the pursuer is ardent, is followed by a retreat, which is a provocation; and these things are coquettry. Her still fresh convent-conscience accused her pitilessly.”⁷ In Lady Charlotte (Campbell) Bury's popular 1841 novel The History of a Flirt (As Told by Herself), the contrite narrator traces her coquettish behavior to her mischievous girlhood:

I remember, at eight years of age I was a flirt in every sense of the word. My brother's playfellows were my earnest quarry: and I coquetted with undefined but strong feelings of pleasure, if I only drew their attention from kites and balls. To win any notice which might have been directed towards my sisters was triumph to the uttermost; yet I loved them in my heart, and would not willingly have given them pain under any circumstances; but the demon of coquetry was strong within me, and provided that passion was gratified, all was well. But sometimes it was not gratified; it would happen that my happiest efforts failed, when Charlotte with her gentle insouciance won the heart I only wished to act and trifle with; and then anger and revenge urged me to do and say a thousand things I bitterly regret now. Oh! the diary of a flirt is a heartless, hopeless catalogue of vanity and injustice.⁸

The drama of this emotionally fraught family romance is not, significantly, simply one of sororal competition for a coveted male; rather, two distinct kinds of desires come into marked conflict: Charlotte's sincere attraction to a young man, and the narrator's “heartless” impulse both to beguile and deny the opposite sex, an impulse that begins in childhood games.

The fundamentally literary challenge confronting novelists such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot was that despite their interest in creating improved, morally deep-grained models of female behavior, the feminine art of coquetry was an ideal means of enhancing those aspects of their literary craft that distinguished them from the authors of conduct literature and popular fiction. Flirtatious activity fostered the multidimensionality of character so crucial to the makeup of Victorian heroines, and multidimensionality of character was precisely what remained absent in the works of conduct book writers. Indeed, Austen, Brontë, and Eliot had turned to the novel at the precise historical moment when fictional character was becoming more nuanced, more nebulously elliptical, and more difficult to evoke in a few thumbnail descriptive calibrations. Wollstonecraft, although she had no rivals in her hostility to the idea of coquettishness as an essentially female attribute, found herself acknowledging the enchantments of flirtation when, in the midst of an otherwise ferocious critique of Rousseau's idealized, coy “Sophia,” she noted that the Frenchman's depiction of his heroine was “undoubtedly a captivating one.”⁹ Still, neither the notion of character fostered by Rousseau's image of a coyly doting female nor that engendered by Wollstonecraft with her idealized, clear-eyed daughter of the Enlightenment would suffice, given the increased demands placed on the art of the novel. However shocking the moral outrages of the heartless coquette, the nineteenth-century novel heralded by Austen, Brontë, Thackeray, and Eliot needed its Lady Susans, Ginevra Fanshawes, Becky Sharps, and Rosamond Vincys. The new aesthetic of the realist novel demanded them.

Coquetry serves a dialectical purpose in the realist novel, for it is an activity that strikes at the tensions between a wanton female sexuality fostered throughout eighteenth-century culture and a more restrained Victorian ethos. In a sense, the coquette functions “dialogically” in the terms established by Mikhail Bakhtin, but she does so through a dialogism of competing desires. For Bakhtin, dialogic tensions arise not only from opposing ideologies animating fiction but also from the generic clashes that the novel at its most “novelistic” epitomizes. Lady Susan, Isabella Thorpe, Becky, Ginevra, and Rosamond, in their clashes with idealized heroines, at once enact a generic and ideological battle that is ostentatiously dialogic in nature. Furthermore, in terms of the changes in the way Austen, Brontë, and Thackeray render character in fiction, coquetry had distinct advantages as thematic material. Most significantly, flirtation enhanced the dialectical tensions of a private identity functioning in marked conflict with a public persona, an inner self continually checked by external societal pressures. Coquettish behavior exists in an ever-changing matrix, one that fosters a highly mutable erotics arising from simultaneous affirmation and refusal. In generating unnatural narratives, coquetry hints too at unsanctioned impulses that otherwise seem resistant to representation in nineteenth-century fiction.¹⁰ Even when she is frustrated, the eighteenth-century coquette as she reappears in the Victorian novel reveals the residual, inadequately repressed traces of an older, dominant class, an ancien régime that refuses to disappear.¹¹

Thus, Becky Sharp's success at conquering London in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, in a series of triumphs that reach their apotheosis when she meets the Prince Regent, indicates more than an aristocratic culture open to permutation by an increasingly assertive “populace.” That a Becky Sharp becomes so decisive to the disruption of the central plot in Vanity Fair suggests, at a much deeper level, the intractable endurance of both an aristocratic presence and a Restoration archetype in nineteenth-century fiction after the novel has been “democratized” as a genre. Indeed, Becky's triumphs make it difficult to conceive of Victorian fiction as a series of “evolutionary” advances on the eighteenth-century novel. Like the deluded insect of Balzac's analogy, the novel of courtship only appears to push forward the novel as a genre. In actuality, the machinations of the coquette keep the novel stalled, its phylogenesis retarded by a series of deferrals. In a paradox, given her centrality in Restoration theater, the coquette is crucial to nineteenth-century fictional form. Thwarting the systematic epistemological enterprise that the novel historically aspires to promote, she nonetheless helps to give that project a purpose and a focus. In a configuration that animates the large part of Vanity Fair, female coquetry as a social activity threatens the conventions of mimesis, suggesting a hidden world of personal relations that resist literary representation.

Imported to the nineteenth-century novel to be routed, the coquette often helps to jump-start the marriage plot, although, to be sure, this is not her only or even her most significant function. In the much-noted process of “democratization,” explored by Ian Watt in his classic 1957 study The Rise of the Novel (and more recently critiqued by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel), in which the novel emerges as the vehicle of middle-class interests, writers such as Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Thackeray discipline the coquette on behalf of emergent class aspirations and a new, concomitant conception of the feminine. Mischievously maneuvering on the perimeters of Victorian narrative, the coquette is arguably as pervasive as the archetypal Madwoman in the Attic, the culturally resonant “Demonic Woman,” or the proverbial Angel in the House. At once the focus of intense erotic desire yet also herself obdurately immune to eros's power to disrupt the certainties comprising the stable self, the coquette is the flip side of MacKenzie's Man of Feeling, the sentimental novel's representative figure, whose tears are empirical evidence of unknown depths of feeling. Thus Lady Susan undermines the evidentiary value of the emotions. “I have subdued him entirely by sentiment and serious conversation,” she confides to Mrs. Johnson.¹² With increasing intensity, the coquette undermines concerted attempts at eliciting verifiable evidence of sincerity.

The coquette suffers a contradictory fate in nineteenth-century fiction: she is introduced into fictional narrative so as to be extirpated. She receives this reprimand not only because of a more conservative social ethos but also because of a radically altered conception of fictional character. In the eighteenth century, both The Way of the World and the Tatler conclude with their coquettish females in positions of considerable power. But in nineteenth-century fiction, the coquettish woman becomes, most importantly, a fallen female signifying that which cannot be evoked explicitly. Austen's Lady Susan and Isabella Thorpe, Charlotte Brontë's Ginevra, and Thackeray's Becky Sharp all represent the perversely unnarratable, women of dangerously theatrical qualities. This paradox—that she is alluded to obliquely but cannot be rendered directly—haunts the coquette's appearances in the nineteenth-century novel. As Leo Bersani notes in an essay on “Realism and the Fear of Desire,” realist fiction typically “admits heroes of desire in order to submit them to ceremonies of expulsion. This literary form depends, for its very existence, on the annihilation or, at the very least, the immobilizing containment of anarchic impulses.”¹³ However, the often-elaborate procedure of expulsion may last the entirety of the novel.

In a quest to define new archetypes of female behavior and identity, Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) and Brontë's Villette (1853) must diminish the fictional power of the eighteenth-century flirt. However, these novelists succeed only in partly displacing her from the novel's domain. By granting their coquettes a simultaneously central and liminal status in their novels, Austen and Brontë intimate that Isabella of Northanger Abbey, Kitty of Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Ginevra of Villette are stumbling blocks to the emergence of protofeminist ideals. Even while they punish these coquettish females, however, both Austen and Brontë depict Isabella and Ginevra as crucial to the smooth functioning of social relations and the advancement of female interests. Isabella and Ginevra emerge as weightless doppelgangers against whom Austenian and Brontean heroines such as Catherine Morland and Lucy Snowe—wise, intelligent, but unworldly—struggle to define themselves. Significantly, in both Northanger Abbey and Villette it is invariably the male suitor who imparts pragmatic lessons in flirting while remaining free from accusations of playing at coquetry, whereas Isabella and Ginevra are socially ostracized for their flirtatious behavior. However much Austen and Brontë insist on the uncontrollable nature of Isabella's, Ginevra's, and Kitty's manipulative deportment, both authors repeatedly imply that female coquetry is an aspect of literary performance itself—specifically, female literary performance. In order to understand the coquette's devolution from a state of potent feminine majesty, we must appreciate her at the pinnacle of her authority in eighteenth-century Restoration theater and in popular narrative of the same period.

CONGREVE'S “THE WAY OF THE WORLD”: THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COQUETTE AS FEMININE EXEMPLUM

Before considering in greater detail the coquettish female in the work of Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Thackeray, I want to consider a notable representation of the eighteenth-century coquette: William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700). While other eighteenth-century literary archetypes suggest themselves as key precedents for the Victorian coquette—notably, Pope's Belinda from “The Rape of the Lock” (1714)—the case of Congreve's Millamant highlights Victorian coquetry's crucial theatrical affinities. It was in response to an array of popular representations of the coquette that both Austen and Brontë fashioned their own versions. They participated in a widespread cultural fascination with the flirt that depicted her at once a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fiction and the Poetics of Flirtation
• 1. Dialectical Desires: The Eighteenth-Century Coquette and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Fictional Character
• 2. The Flirtation of Species: Darwinian Sexual Selection and Victorian Narrative
• 3. George Eliot and Thomas Hardy: Flirtation, Female Choice, and the Revision of Darwinian Belief
• 4. Deadly Deferrals: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and the Exhaustion of Flirtatious Desire
• 5. “Acceptable Hints of Infinity”: Dissident Desires and the Erotics of Countermodernism
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index