PART I
The Cultural Work of Austenâs Life and Afterlives
In 2007, I encountered my first Austen meme. In the style of the âI Can Has Cheezburgerâ cat meme, it featured a colorized close-up of the face from the Victorian engraving commissioned for James Edward Austen-Leighâs Memoir of Jane Austen, with blocks of text reading âim in mah novels/ hidin mah subtex.â The meme juxtaposes the inane âdear Aunt Jane,â 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 âAusten and Deleuzeâ special issue of Rhizomes, Michael Kramp reflects on the ways in which Austenâs image has been crafted and notes that academics have âoften expressed a desire to congeal and contain âAustenâ in order to assert dominance over her work.â2 The same tendency exists in Austen biography, in ways that contribute to some of the same critical containment strategies. Kramp counters those who âinsist upon reading Austenâs novels as an experience of the authorâs opinions or advice,â framing Austen instead as a Deleuzian concept: âbecause 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.â Each Deleuzian concept is âa combination that did not exist beforeââthis kind of energy would have a salutary effect on Austen biography.3
In âLiterature and Life,â Gilles Deleuze claims writing âconsists in inventing a people who are missing.â4 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 âJaneâ (sometimes âdear Aunt Janeâ): the inoffensive, backward-looking oracle that seems to champion love and marriage as womenâs ultimate fulfillment. She is the Jane Austen of girls being taught a lesson, bemoaned by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.8 But there is another Jane AustenââAusten,â whom Auerbach identifies as a serious philosopher, a purveyor of wisdom whose work must be taken seriously as such.9 Her exclusion from Shawâs study, subtitled A History of Wisdom from Zeno to Yeats, is in many ways the legacy of her original biographersâ shaping of her story.
The âfaultlessâ Jane Austen, whose âtemper was as polished as her witâ and whose compositions âcame finished from her pen,â was constructed first by her brother Henry in his âBiographical Noticeâ and later elaborated on as âdear Aunt Janeâ by her nephew.10 These narratives still have an oversized influence on our understanding of Austenâs life, but the tension between such pictures of perfection and her work has long invited skepticism. As Jason Solinger observes, Virginia Woolf sought âto supplant the familiar image of female craftwork (the little bit of ivory) with the figure of the master artist.â11 Woolf famously suggested that writing about Austen has a tendency to rouse the passions of â25 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.â12 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 womenâeven those who remained single and are now deadâare valued primarily in terms of their marriageability and in reference to their utility to menâs 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 Cassandraâs 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 faceâperhaps 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-Leighâs 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 biographyâs 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 Austenâs 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 âwhole out of partsâ and give âa quasi-fictional, story-like shape to their material.â14 John Wiltshire concurs, suggesting âbiography 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.â15 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: menâs lives, whatever form they take, are, as Laura Marcus observes, viewed as ârepresentativeâ in ways that womenâs 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 âwhole and continuousâ and female experience as âfragmentary.â17 She offers Otto Weiningerâs 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 womanâs focus on âsexual drive and reproductionââwhich form her âone class of memoriesâââA genuine woman never arrives at any consciousness of a destiny, her destiny.â18 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 âthat women are effaced, subsumed into a supposedly universal selfhood which is in fact gendered male because all agency and identity are seen as masculineâ; rather, Marcus clarifies, âIt is that women, or âwoman,â must be presented as a negation in order for the male to be affirmed, as incoherent in order that male identity can be secured.â19 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 âtheir place.â20
A solution would seem to be the application of feminist theory to writing biography; however, as Sharon OâBrien observes, theory is problematized by biography as a genre because it seems to betray objectivity. Because it is supposed to be âtruth,â the âovert use of feminist theory explodes the ...