Jane Austen and Literary Theory [1 ed.] 0367696444, 9780367696443

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Jane Austen and Literary Theory

Jane Austen was one of the most adventurous thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but one would probably never guess that by reading her critics. Perhaps no canonical author in English literature has proven, until now, more resistant to theory. Tracing the political motives for this resistance, Jane Austen and Literary Theory proceeds to counteract it. The book’s detailed interpretations guide readers through some of the important intellectual achievements of Austen’s career—from the stunning teenage parodies “Evelyn” and “The History of England” to her most accomplished novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. While criticism has largely been content to describe the various ways Austen was a product of her time, Jane Austen and Literary Theory reveals how she anticipated the ideas of formidable literary thinkers of the twentieth century, especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Gift and exchange, speech and writing, symbol and allegory, stable irony and Romantic irony—these are just a few of the binary oppositions her dazzling texts deconstruct. Although her novels are major achievements of nineteenth-century realism, critics have hitherto underestimated their rhetorical cunning and their fascination with the materiality of language. Doing justice to Austen’s language requires critical methods as ruthless as her irony, and Jane Austen and Literary Theory supplies these methods. This book will enable both her devotees and her detractors to appreciate her genius in unusual ways. Shawn Normandin is an associate professor of English at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

Dickensian Affects Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity Joshua Gooch Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire The Poetics of Imperial Space Jean Fernandez Jane Austen and Altruism Magdalen Ki “Music Makers” and World Creators The Forms and Functions of Embedded Poems in British Fantasy Narratives Michaela Hausmann The Bohemian Republic Transnational Literary Networks in the Nineteenth-Century James Gatheral The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed The New Historical Fiction Ina Bergmann Jane Austen and Literary Theory Shawn Normandin Robert Seymour and Nineteenth Century Print Culture Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration Brian Maidment For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Nineteenth-Century-Literature/book-series/RSNCL

Jane Austen and Literary Theory

Shawn Normandin

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Shawn Normandin The right of Shawn Normandin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Normandin, Shawn, author. Title: Jane Austen and literary theory / Shawn Normandin. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in nineteenth century literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020041800 (print) | LCCN 2020041801 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367696443 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003142669 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Austen, Jane, 1775–1817--Critcism and interpretation-History. Classification: LCC PR4037 .N67 2021 (print) | LCC PR4037 (ebook) | DDC 823/.7--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041800 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041801 ISBN: 978-0-367-69644-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14266-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

To David Normandin

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Literary Theory and Austen Criticism 1

“Evelyn” and the Impossibility of the Gift

ix x 1

“Evelyn” and Derridean Gift Theory 2 Literary Language and the Contradictions of the Gift 9 Austen, Derrida, and Capitalism 15 2

Speech, Writing, and Allegory in Pride and Prejudice

24

Phonocentrism: From Derrida to the Eighteenth Century and Beyond 25 Phonocentrism in Pride and Prejudice 30 Writing’s Rehabilitation 32 Dancing about Arche-Writing 39 3

Allegory, Symbol, and Irony in Mansfield Park

50

Austen, Coleridge, Burke 51 The Fall of Symbol and the Rise of Allegory 57 Between Allegory and Irony: The Last Chapter 65 Between Allegory and Symbol: Lovers’ Vows 67 4

Emma’s Parergonal Realism Kant, Derrida, and the Parergon 84 Emma’s “Schemes in the In-Betweens” 87 Parergonal Lack 89 Parergonal Verse/Parergonal Prose 92 Confronting Front Matter 95 Sex and Citationality 99

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Contents Emma’s Headers and Footers 101 Horrors of Finery 104 Framing “Nothing” 106

5

Austen’s Unromantic Romantic Ironies

119

From Comic to (German) Romantic Irony 123 Theorizing Parabasis: Fichte, Schlegel, and de Man 126 Parabasis of Parabasis in Emma 131 Tracing Austen’s Irony: “The History of England” 136 Closing the Ironic Opening of Pride and Prejudice 142 Mr. Bennet: Being Ironic 146 Irony and the Sublime 152 Index

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I would like to thank my wife, Wu Ying, and my other family members, especially Wang Yuxiang, Wu Dibin, Wu Xun, Li Huimei, Liu Chunxiu, Julie Normandin, and Martha Normandin. An earlier version of Chapter 1, “Jane Austen’s ‘Evelyn’ and the ‘Impossibility of the Gift,’” was published by Wayne State University Press in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 60, no. 1 (2018). An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Speech, Writing, and Allegory in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice” in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 42, no. 1 (2016). An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Symbol, Allegory, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park”; this article was originally published in Studies in Philology, vol. 116, no. 3 (2019).

Introduction Literary Theory and Austen Criticism

In Northanger Abbey, Austen interrupts the plot to praise a genre, the novel, in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (Austen 2006b, 31) Academic critics have followed the lead of this passage in mining Austen’s works for “knowledge of human nature,” in explaining her “wit,” and in confirming that her stylistic choices are “the best.” But few critics seem to take seriously the notion that her novels display “the greatest powers of the mind”—unless the best the mind can achieve is knowledge of human nature, which would suggest that such powers are not so great, since they cannot breach the species. If any English writer knew human nature, it was Jane Austen, and this book has no interest in denying it. Austen is undoubtedly part of a humanist tradition. Yet her display of mental power is a creative performance, not just the delivery of prefabricated “knowledge.” The present book takes Austen’s works seriously as intellectual projects in which great mental powers are brought to bear upon questions irreducible to “human nature”: questions about gifts, technology, tropes, space, time—the more-than-human preconditions of human interaction. Austen’s narratives think these preconditions in ways that put her in dialogue with literary theorists active more than a century beyond her death. Jane Austen and Literary Theory is by no means the first book to detect anti-intellectualism in Austen studies. Over thirty years ago, Claudia L. Johnson addressed it at the beginning of her now classic monograph Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. In her review of earlier scholarship, Johnson claims that most commentators followed R. W. Chapman in the belief that Austen’s novels are off limits to the ponderous diction of literary scholarship. Since Austen herself would, as Chapman writes, “turn over in her grave” if she heard scholars describe her novels in tastelessly highfalutin terms,

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the apparatus of literary history and textual scholarship would misrepresent her enterprise. To Chapman, Austen is in the canon not because of her social vision or even because of her formidable artistry, but rather because she had the good fortune to be able and the good taste to be willing to record the elegant manners of her time. (Johnson 1988, xvi–xvii) Johnson, however, demonstrates that Austen contributed to a “tradition” of female writers who were by no means adverse to “polysyllabic” words (1988, xx). Nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers who regarded Austen as a conservative usually denied her any intellectual independence, and so did readers who called her subversive: her being subversive became “a symptom of emotional disability. … Austen’s irony, her single most brilliant artistic achievement, was pathological, a problem any good husband could relieve” (1988, xix). Both the conservative and subversive approaches to Austen have underestimated her novels’ capacity for thought, and such underestimation has not vanished. Yet, one might protest, thought is one thing—theory, another. As many people in Austen’s time understood it, theory is excessive thought, thought that goes too far. Austen began writing in the 1790s, a period when English nationalism produced anti-theoretical discourses that would recrudesce in the reception of literary theory almost 200 years later. David Simpson recounts how the revolt against theory that took place in the 1790s, contested by the “Jacobin” left but unsuccessfully so, was effectively proposed and identified as a quite natural and proper emanation of the British national character. … This nationalist mythology continues to be available even today for the articulation of a British (and, with some differences, an AngloAmerican) way of doing and seeing things, one based on common sense, on a resistance to generalized thought, and on a declared immersion in the minute complexities of a “human” nature whose essence is usually identified in an accumulation of mutually incommensurable details rather than in a single, systematized personality. (1993, 4) For British conservatives in Austen’s era, the Regency, theoretical ignorance was a defensive tactic: “Conservatives want both to say that they know what is right, and to deny that they can state systematically what it is they know. Like the unwritten British Constitution, their beliefs are a matter of practical citizenship” (Hamilton 2003, 170).1 Austen uses the word theory in pedagogical and parental contexts. In Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas belatedly realizes that his daughters “had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice” (Austen 2005b, 536). Persuasion evaluates Charles Musgrove’s parenting: “As to the management

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of their children, his theory was much better than his wife’s, and his practice not so bad” (Austen 2006c, 47). These occurrences neither advocate nor disparage theory as such. According to Park Honan, the absence of theory was a general literary barrier that Austen circumvented: The English novel with few exceptions was degenerate in the 1790s, because there was no coherent and deeply based theory of fiction to inspire new artistic developments of the genre or to defend it against moralistic attackers. Jane Austen joined the debate over the moral values of novels not by theorizing, but by showing that what a novel imitates is far less important than its technical “forms of expression.” (1977, 144; quoted in Morini 2009, 37n1) But linguistic form does not sidestep theoretical problems: Austen’s rhetoric and narrative structures posit problems and think solutions—however provisional—to them.2 Jane Austen and Literary Theory will develop the hypothesis that her “forms of expression” are modes of thinking with theoretical implications, not only for novels but for philosophy and politics. The conception of narrative as a form of thinking is not as anachronistic as it may seem. Shortly after Austen’s death, Richard Whately defended contemporary novelists for providing in narratives what was earlier available only “in the shape of formal dissertations, or shorter and more desultory moral essays, such as those of the Spectator and Rambler.” He asks whether novelists’ “views of men and manners are no less just than those of the essayists who preceded them” and whether novelists should “be rated lower because they present to us these views, not in the language of general description, but in the form of well-constructed fictitious narrative?” (2016, 309). Though Whately’s “views of men and manners” fall short of the goals of literary theory as they are generally understood today, he accords narrative cognition some of the respect it merits. Modern literary theory can help us tease out Austen’s thought. Nonetheless, linking her work to that of recent thinkers may still cause trepidation. Eric Lindstrom worries: “are we honoring Austen and the tradition of Austen scholarship if we suggest her novels achieve some kind of fullness in a philosophical context as yet not provided? Or doesn’t that rather risk condescension?” (2011, 504).3 The adoption of a twofold method can mitigate the risk of condescension: using literary theory to explain the intricate effects of Austen’s novels while also using Austen’s novels to register the blind spots or deadlocks incurred by specific literary theories.4 Upcoming chapters will show how, for example, Austen both anticipates Jacques Derrida’s gift theory and undermines some of its grandiose claims. We will also see how Mansfield Park calls into question the rigidity of Paul de Man’s system of tropes, though de Man’s rhetorical astuteness can reveal much about the novel that critics have overlooked. Yet, even if this twofold

Introduction xiii method failed to avert condescension, condescension might be more productive than the prudence that continues to distinguish Austen criticism from most other branches of literary study. Adena Rosmarin once acerbically claimed that “The most intriguing characteristic of twentieth-century Austen studies is its consensual blandness” (1984, 315). Twenty-first-century Austen studies have generally been less consensual (less prone to Tory nostalgia); but they remain somewhat bland, as any diligent reader of Persuasions, the leading Austen journal, can attest. One cause of blandness is a preoccupation with the overt moral content of Austen’s writings. This preoccupation, as Brean S. Hammond reports, “can degenerate into mere gossip, further embarrassed by being gossip about unreal people,” which “fails to transform the language of the original text” (1993, 61).5 In such an unadventurous academic climate, where paraphrase often crowds out analysis, literary theory has never been able to prosper. Claudia Johnson argues: “critical theory was slow to come to Austenian studies, for it routinely problematizes the very same qualities – clarity, decorum, common sense, stability – that Austen’s novels were thought to honour” (1993, 93–94). While Johnson’s own work has exposed the gender bias sometimes motivating this resistance to theory, and while she has enriched our understanding of the novels’ navigation of the ideological conflicts of their time, her methods did not chart a boldly new course for Austen scholarship, which was already dominated by historicism. Though theory may have been “slow to come to Austenian studies,” its arrival can easily pass unnoticed today. One can read hundreds of pages of recent Austen criticism without detecting signs that anything like a “theory revolution” occurred in academia. Indeed, it would not be strictly accurate to claim that most Austen critics resist theory, since to resist something usually requires acknowledging its existence. Reading commentary on Austen, we are much more likely to find decorous retellings of the novels than Burkean tirades against theorists.6 The proclivity to paraphrase is warranted so long as readers think of Austen’s writings as straightforwardly mimetic texts, which simply document “the elegant manners of her time.” According to Mona Scheuermann, The decency, moral and aesthetic, that permeates Austen’s novels is immensely comfortable. When we enter Austen’s world we are sure of where we stand in terms of the beliefs and behaviors of the characters. … She writes from the core beliefs in her period, and her perspective carries the authority of her whole society. There is no question in Austen’s fiction about who is virtuous or which behavior is admirable. This assurance delimits a social structure that completely defines every aspect of life. For the reader, the social and moral grid is entirely clear. (2007, 292)7 One does not have to be a literary theorist, however, to doubt whether Austen’s “society” (or any society) was as homogeneous and transparent as

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Scheuermann imagines. One may also wonder whether the comforts “we” take from Austen’s books are the same as the comforts taken by Austen, her initial audience, and her characters. For whom would Mansfield Park have been a “comfortable” book? Not for Fanny Price. Though few critics today can rival Scheuermann’s serenity, Austen scholars often give the impression that to understand the novels is to transcend the need to interpret them. If literary theory is a self-conscious mode of interpretation (in other words, interpretation of interpretation), it would be doubly indecorous. What to an outsider may taste bland, the Austen critic savors as a refined accomplishment: not-having-to-interpret (one reason for the abundance of paraphrase). Jane Austen and Literary Theory seeks to reorient our understanding of Austen’s realism or mimesis by acknowledging how other tropes affect it, compromising its transparency. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the extensive investment in allegory made by Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, novels which in other ways are diametrically opposed. Austen’s use of allegory has attracted some notice. Juliet McMaster finds it “not altogether alien to Austen, even though she is first and foremost a writer of realistic fiction” (2007, 28).8 Jane Austen and Literary Theory will question the priority of realism. The parodic and experimental energies of the juvenilia— the concern of Chapter 1—take less blatant forms in, but still contribute to, both the verbal texture and narrative structure of Austen’s published novels.9 Though Austen scholars have (sometimes grudgingly) conceded the existence of wordplay, they have usually ignored its pervasiveness, which often nudges the novels toward allegory. My purpose is not to deny the mimetic work done by these novels. On the contrary, Chapter 4, drawing on Kantian and deconstructive aesthetics, will attempt to describe the unique mode of Emma’s realism, which departs from the representational methods of its Augustan predecessors and its Victorian successors.10

Deconstruction, Francophobia, Austen My understanding of literary theory owes much to deconstruction. This is partly the result of personal taste and educational shortcomings. But it is fitting that this book should privilege the deconstructive strain of theory. Three reasons stand out: 1) so far, deconstruction has little influenced Austen studies; 2) deconstruction has often served as a representative of literary theory in general; 3) much of the rancor provoked by deconstruction is a historical reflex of English hostility to French culture during the Revolution and its aftermath. A comprehensive review of Austen scholarship finds that “Deconstruction, narratology and other poststructuralist theories have never gained prominence as methods for examining Austen’s work. Nevertheless, a number of studies employing these methodologies have provided important insights into the novels” (Mazzeno 2011, 192). One reason that so-called “poststructuralist theories,” and deconstruction in particular, have had little impact may be the reductive understanding of

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them that has long prevailed. David Lodge, a distinguished literary theorist, alleges that: Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey is the only one that lends itself to a modern deconstructive reading, for it does seem to deny the reader any sure ground for interpretation and discrimination and to make explicit the impossibility of getting the world into a book. (1986, 168)11 Like many other critics, Lodge reduces deconstruction to a willful skepticism that disavows mimesis and seeks to DIE (demonstrate indeterminacy everywhere). Massimiliano Morini’s important monograph also treats poststructuralism as an essentially negative procedure, the denial of determinate meaning. Morini “agrees with the general conclusions of post-structuralist criticism, and tries to extend those conclusions by looking at the technical means by which Austen’s ‘indeterminacy’ is created” (2009, 7).12 His goal is to invalidate both politically conservative and subversive interpretations of Austen by revealing the linguistic basis for her novels’ semantic indeterminacy. One problem with Morini’s argument is that he ignores the political effects of indeterminacy, presenting it as the mere neutralizing of opposed ideologies. Deconstruction not only helps readers recognize textual indeterminacy (or undecidability, if you like): deconstruction also enables them to recognize its political effects; and though deconstruction is not always subversive, its labor is never apolitical. Morini’s concern with constative meaning (the ideology Austen intended to convey) neglects deconstruction’s engagement with literature’s performative aspect—with what a literary work does, something which may be irreducible to, or even at odds with, what the work means. Indeterminacy not only becomes a problem for readers: it is sometimes a problem for Austen’s characters, as this book will demonstrate. A less inhibited approach to deconstruction has the potential to improve our understanding of the novels and to generate new readings, rather than merely negating old ones. Unfortunately, the very words deconstruction and post-structuralism have the power to make critics anxious. Morini claims that “though it would be anachronistic to fashion a ‘postmodern’, ‘poststructuralist’, or ‘deconstructionist’ Austen, it is tempting to believe that she did not believe in truth as an external, verifiable entity” (2009, 36). Were it true (as Morini supposes) that deconstruction and post-structuralism are varieties of philosophical skepticism, and if Austen’s novels suggest that she “did not believe in truth as an external, verifiable entity,” then it would not be anachronistic to “fashion” Austen as a deconstructionist or post-structuralist. She would never use these words to describe herself (or anyone else). But nor would she use “free indirect discourse” to describe her prose style, and critics do not feel the need to ward off anachronism every time they use this term.13

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The reluctance to pursue cogent readings when they threaten to become post-structuralist is an attenuated legacy of a tradition whose most eloquent representative was Edmund Burke. As Marc Redfield explains, The essence of Jacobinism for Burke was mental overreaching—a criminal lunge at the forbidden tree of knowledge. The French Revolution was “a Revolution of doctrine and theoretick dogma,” perpetrated by “men of theory.” Burke bequeathed this counterrevolutionary, antiintellectual, and always potentially Francophobic use of the word [theory] to the Anglo-American polemical lexicon. Theory in this sense names an excess of reason. (2016, 48)14 Coleridge, an admirer of Burke, argues that The comprehension, impartiality, and far-sightedness of Reason … taken singly and exclusively, becomes mere visionariness in intellect, and indolence and hard-heartedness in morals. It is the science of cosmopolitanism without country, of philanthropy without neighbourliness or consanguinity, in short, all of the impostures of that philosophy of the French Revolution, which would sacrifice each to the shadowy idol of ALL. (1816, vii) Here we find stereotypes that still cling to literary theorists, especially deconstructionists, often accused of dangerous amorality and sinister cosmopolitanism. According to Redfield, Burke’s resilient influence accounts for “why deconstruction became identified as ‘high theory.’” academic and extra-academic portrayals of deconstruction have consistently characterized it as a hyperrational critique of reason, reason pushed to the breaking point—to the point of madness … . Deconstruction, Derrida will insist, is not a theory, because it interrogates the totalizing force of reason on which theorization depends. Yet this is exactly why deconstruction has been received as the epitome of “theory”—that compulsively quotation-mark-clad nickname that carries a Burkean slur as part of its DNA, ready for activation in hostile contexts. (2016, 48)15 Deconstruction has become a synecdoche for theory, a synecdoche charged with Francophobic Burkean connotations.16 Jean-Michel Rabaté notes: “it is Derrida who is still blamed for the exportation and re-importation of ‘Theory,’ whether French or Fresh, into Anglo-American universities” (2018, 2).17 Indeed,

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The strong spin that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida put on “theory” in the United States made it, for a time, identical with “deconstructing,” and apparently much more threatening than it had been for the readers of Wellek and Warren, whose Theory of Literature sponsored a certain technicality, but one seemingly less likely to bring about the end of the American way of life or, as is often suggested, the fall of Western civilization. (Simpson 1993, 1) The delayed acknowledgement that Austen belongs to Romanticism also impeded deconstructive critical approaches to her work. The image of Austen as the upholder of eighteenth-century good sense (of Austen as the epigone of Samuel Johnson or the mocker of sensibility) long represented her as lagging behind her own era. Galperin vigorously protests against this image: Although it has been customary to conclude, with Jerome McGann, that Austen’s novels simply prove that not every notable literary production in the romantic period need be romantic, Austen was arguably the first to disagree. Her appeal—or her narrator’s appeal in Northanger Abbey—for a new or different canon wages virtually the same argument on behalf of women’s writing that Wordsworth and Coleridge make in announcing their break and that of their moment from what Charles Lamb disparagingly termed the “past century.” (2003, 9)18 More than anyone, de Man was responsible for the brief flourishing of deconstruction in North American academia, and he was a specialist in Romanticism (including English Romanticism); but he was active during a time that infrequently recognized Austen’s Romantic credentials, and his writings show no interest in her work.19 After de Man’s death and the revelation of his disreputable wartime activities, not only did new historicism eclipse deconstruction, but the latter arguably distanced itself from itself. Derrida’s move away from his early grammatological preoccupations toward ethical and religious topics guaranteed his continuing “relevance,” but also repackaged his work as something unlikely to offend or disturb anyone working in humanities departments at the turn of the twenty-first century. According to Tom Cohen, Derrida was complicit in a process that has offered “late Derrida” … as warm milk to the kids, withdrawing the tequila shots of the (not yet) “early” Derrida—not trusting that it was “time” for that, or whether that path would not lead to a pre-emption of the brand (the example of “de Man”). (2012, 247)20

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It would be wrong to chide Austen studies for avoiding deconstruction if deconstruction has avoided itself. Perhaps it is unnecessary if not regressive for literary critics to return to the canonical figures of “French” or “high” theory. But it is one hope of this book that such regressive reading may disrupt the coziness that continues to hamper Austen studies. Of course, one need not be Francophobic to question the usefulness of such theory. Anthony Mandal points out that “Austen is undoubtedly one of the few anglophone writers whose quintessential ‘Englishness’ constitutes a vital element of her fiction” (2007, 1). If “Englishness” is “vital” to her novels, then we may rightly hesitate to analyze them using concepts derived from a largely non-English canon of theorists. No one would dispute that Austen lived and died in England. But, as Mandal’s scare quotes insinuate, the “quintessential Englishness” of her novels is not an empirical fact: it results from interpretation. To judge the legitimacy of the interpretation requires some engagement with theory.

Austen, Historicism, Theory At least two major theorists have intervened in Austen studies. Eve Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” spiced up Rosmarin’s complaint about blandness: Austen criticism is notable mostly not just for its timidity and banality but for its unresting exaction of the spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson—for the vengefulness it vents on the heroines whom it purports to love, and whom, perhaps, it does. (1991, 833) Sedgwick wittily distills the smugness peculiar to the Austen studies of her time; but, as a reading of Sense and Sensibility, her essay deserves some of the ridicule it attracted, since there is an unfortunate dearth of masturbation in this particular novel.21 Edward Said’s interpretation of Mansfield Park has proven much more influential. One reason may be because Said applied the historicist methodology of traditional Austen studies to neglected themes (slavery, colonialism, empire) without directly attacking (as Sedgwick does) Austenian business as usual (1989, 150–64).22 Said’s attention to geography, which privileges space over time, has inspired many researchers, who have considerably expanded our knowledge of Mansfield Park in particular; but, as Chapters 3 and 4 explain, Said’s influence has diverted attention from the temporality and the material spatiality of Austen’s novels—their incarnation in books, whose physical interfaces sometimes become thematic concerns. D. A. Miller contrasts the heyday of close reading with the heyday of “theory” and promotes the former, though he acknowledges the nostalgic and simplifying nature of the contrast (2003, 57–58). Though it is true that close reading lost some of its prestige, it is odd that Miller would oppose it

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to “theory”: superb close readers were among the most well-known practitioners of “high” theory—de Man, Derrida, Roland Barthes, Barbara Johnson come to mind. The historically significant contrast is between theory and historicism.23 If new historicism seems more theoretically sophisticated than old historicism (and among Austen critics, the difference is not very pronounced), that is because new historicism artfully evades theoretical problems, rather than naively stumbling through them. A particularly shrewd evasion occurs in Deidre Shauna Lynch’s study of character. With an opening enticement, she presents character as the literary category most neglected by theory. But it soon becomes apparent that she will decline to theorize character: it is not the aim of this volume to unmask character’s true identity. The questions I pose do not concern what character is “really” like. Instead, trying to displace the approaches to character that have traded in essences and made a variety of disparate practices appear as versions of a singular form, I address character’s changing conditions of legibility. (1998, 1) Avoiding the dangers of an essentialist understanding of character, Lynch also forfeits the opportunity to make hypotheses that would explain restraints on the historical development of the concept. Why, for example, did late eighteenth-century readers come to laud Shakespeare’s mastery of characterization but not, say, John Webster’s? Could it be that Shakespeare’s characters “really” have some qualities that Webster’s lack, qualities that, though not eternal, may override the epistemes historicists delight in demarking?24 In Lynch’s history, “character” is whatever reading communities have wanted it to be. But to understand how character itself limits and shapes the pragmatics of its production and reception calls for a less risk-averse inquiry. Although Lynch is right that “character” came to mean apparently opposite things (the psychological depth of human individuals and marks on the surface of a page), character may not be infinitely elastic. Only theory (or the fullness of time) can tell. The prudence of the historicism that has long dominated Anglophone literary studies has become more conspicuous as historicism’s hegemony ages. To Andrew Cole, New Historicism … looks like a Hegelianism without Hegel, a figurative method of reading without the hard concept of History but only “social energy,” that anti-Geist Geist that gives literature both the capacity to be an anecdote—representative but not caused—and the power to be a monad, within which is expressed a total state of affairs. (2014, 155) Though new historicism can be taught as one theoretical approach among others, doing so is misleading, since it is precisely the abstention from head-

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on engagement with theoretical problems that has empowered new historicism. Litvak noticed this long ago: “much of the prevailing vagueness about the new historicism is itself a telling effect of new historicist practice as a whole,” which “has been strategically reluctant to systematize its own theoretical assumptions and ambitions: its most overt theoretical pronouncements have in fact been arguments ‘against theory’” (1988, 121). Litvak defends new historicism on aesthetic grounds, arguing that its resistance to theory prevents it from succumbing to the monotonous (or “boring”) nihilism toward which literary theory gravitates: “narrative interest as such displaces epistemological severity as the order of the day” (128). New historicism is better than deconstruction because it tells better (less boring) stories. For Litvak, the key new historicist stratagem is “postponement,” delaying the encounter with the “void” that deconstruction too hastily embraces (1988, 126). But postponing the void has become an exercise in disingenuousness. Alistair Duckworth, one of the most important historicist critics of Austen, notes that different historicists posit different (and not always reconcilable) contexts for literary works: There is an undoubted interest in an approach to Austen’s novels via [Samuel] Richardson’s fiction, and an equally undoubted interest in an approach via the fiction of the anti-Jacobins. But it may be doubted whether these approaches, and the interpretive results they obtain, may simply be added to one another in a process conducing to the goal of interpretive truth and completion. (1983, 41) The “void” Litvak thinks historicist readings can postpone is unpostponable, because it abides laterally—between divergent and often equally plausible readings (or potential readings). Austen’s works are not merely the objects of study for theoretical or non-theoretical criticism: her works confront the same problems critics face. Boredom and the desire to historicize appear in Austen’s plots. Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland attempts to reconstruct the history of General Tilney’s marriage; her fear and exhilaration evaporate when she confronts the demystifying banality, the sheer boredom, of a laundry list. In Mansfield Park, the evasion of boredom is a leading cause of error (Henry’s flirtations, the theatricals, Henry’s going to London instead of Everingham, Tom’s restlessness). Emma’s penchant for rubbing its readers’ faces in triviality dares boredom, and in this respect Austen is as much the precursor of Gertrude Stein as of later nineteenth-century novelists. Emma’s fascination with “nothing” will be one of the concerns of Chapter 5.

Austen and the Play of the Signifier The acclaim lavished on Austen’s prose has also tended to discourage theory. D. A. Miller recollects his early response to Austen’s novels: “No

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extraneous static encumbered the dictation of a grammar that completed, and an art that finished, every crystalline sentence. Altogether, such thrillingly inhuman utterance was not stylish; it was Style itself” (2003, 2). Though Miller begins by invoking the inhumanity of her style, the general tendency of his book is to historicize and thereby humanize the inhuman: the critic reads Austen’s style as a product of her predicament as an early nineteenth-century old maid. Despite its magnificent close readings (most memorably, of the toothpick episode in Sense and Sensibility), Miller’s book is not so much an analysis of Austen’s style as it is a memoir of one man’s idiosyncratic adoration of it.25 The adoration leads to some strange judgments: “Of that godlike authority which we think of as the default mode of narration in the traditional novel, Jane Austen may well be the only English example.” But Austen’s narrators are conspicuously limited in their range of knowledge compared to, say, Henry Fielding’s—though Miller rightly notes Fielding’s tendency to “humanize” his narrators’ “authority” (31). Austen’s narrators are not godlike.26 Further compromising narrative authority, the prevalence of free indirect discourse often merges narrators with the voices of fallible characters. Instead of imagining Austen as an insouciant literary god who repeatedly falls off Olympus (especially in Persuasion and Sanditon), we could just as well argue that Austen demystifies her own narrative authority: the apparent falls could be as intentional as the ascents. Miller finds it depressing to hear the new vulnerability of Persuasion hailed as an extended “reach” for the novelist, when in fact it amounts to the retraction of her great world-historical achievement, which is to have established, within the boundlessly oppressive imperiums of gender, conjugality, and the Person, something like extraterritoriality. We have called that extraterritoriality, or rather the audacious presumption of it: (her) Style. (2003, 75) But is Austen’s style really more impersonal, and more extraterritorial, than, say, Samuel Johnson’s? The “world-historical” greatness of Austen’s style seems to depend, in Miller’s account, on non-stylistic factors: that she wrote as a single woman and in the genre of the marriage-plot novel. Although Miller discusses “why the play of signifiers, that long venerable discovery of Deconstruction, remains so strange, even shocking a phenomenon when sighted in Austen” (2003, 107n42), her style, as Miller conceives it, renounces that play. Irked by alliteration on H in Sanditon, he argues that she had mocked such stupid, automatic affinities as early as “Love and Friendship,” where a character named Sophia is allowed to sigh and faint upon the Sofa. … On a couple of rare occasions, Austen had herself fallen victim to such inadvertent and (as soon as they are noticed ) ridiculous affinities: when, for instance, she has a character named Mr. Palmer say to his wife,

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Introduction “don’t palm all your abuses of language upon me” … or when, during their visit to Pemberley, the Gardiners are “consigned over to the gardener” … or when, in a letter, Austen mentions, sans irony, that “Tom Chute has had a fall from his horse.” (Miller 2003, 86–87)

One could more plausibly argue that Austen is indulging, not mocking, the play of the signifier. At the very least, the sofa joke in Love and Freindship attests to the widely noted ambivalence of parody, whose aggression requires affection (one has to love a genre in order to come to know it well enough to mock it skillfully). Does Austen detest bad puns or love them for their badness? The latter possibility gains credence when one realizes that the “automatic affinities” Miller portrays as “inadvertent” lapses are more common that he suggests; we should not assume that they are inadvertent, since we could just as well assume that they are occasions when Austen furtively assuages the desire for linguistic play that inaugurated her writing career but was at odds with the commercially viable novels she ended up composing. Miller himself, though he dismisses such wordplay as “ridiculous,” seems to relish pointing out examples of it (“when … or when … or when …”). It is not just in the juvenilia or in supposedly faltering late works like Persuasion and Sanditon that the play of the signifier obtrudes. While Miller’s “Austen Style” expunges the “irrational dreamwork of the signifier” (2003, 87), such dreamwork orchestrates one of the most beautiful chapters of Emma. George Knightley begins to suspect “there being a something of private liking, of private understanding even, between Frank Churchill and Jane,” though he also suspects he might be imagining things, “like Cowper and his fire at twilight, ‘Myself creating what I saw’” (Austen 2005a, 373). In William Cowper’s poem, this line appears amid the description of a “waking dream” (1963, bk. 4, line 287; cited in Austen 2005a, 586n2).27 The reference to Cowper forecasts another waking dream, the fake dream Frank devises later in the chapter. Frank blurts out that Mr. Perry was going to set up a carriage, something Frank should not be able to know. He pretends he learned this information in a dream, hoping that no one will guess he actually learned it from his secret correspondent, Miss Fairfax. The characters proceed to Emma’s house, where they play a word game. Free indirect discourse tracks Knightley’s responses: The word was blunder; and as Harriet exultingly proclaimed it, there was a blush on Jane’s cheek which gave it a meaning not otherwise ostensible. Mr. Knightley connected it with the dream; but how it could all be, was beyond his comprehension. How the delicacy, the discretion of his favourite could have been so lain asleep! He feared there must be some decided involvement. Disingenuousness and double-dealing seemed to meet him at every turn. (Austen 2005a, 377)

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The word “blunder” alludes to Frank’s so-called “dream.” The idea of dreaming seems to have motivated Knightley’s metaphor “lain asleep.” As many have noted, Knightley here acquires an epistemological advantage afforded to no other character: he almost solves the mystery of this covert mystery novel. That he should acquire this advantage is fitting, since it supports the tendency to read Knightley as a model of cognitive rectitude, of English common sense. What has passed unnoticed is the linguistic mediation of his discovery. Knightley himself does not understand how he understands, which is “beyond his comprehension.” But the novel does not merely posit his discernment: it gives us a glimpse at its mechanisms. The word blunder calls forth a blush, an alliterative and assonantal link that preps us for more wordplay to come. The der of blunder recalls the dr of dream. At this point, Knightley’s imagination abounds with D-words: “dream,” “delicacy,” “discretion,” “decided,” “disingenuousness,” “double-dealing.” The next word in the alphabet game is Dixon. The leading phoneme of dream directs Knightley’s consciousness. Here his discernment surpasses that of everyone besides the secret-sharers themselves; but, rather than being a simple antithesis to Frank’s disingenuousness, Knightley’s discernment operates in not strictly logical or empirical ways: the alphabetical play of the letter D nourishes Knightley’s suspicions. This is the nighttime aspect of his mind. Countless readers have heard knight in Knightley, but to my knowledge only one critic connects his name to night: Grant Holly calls him “the chivalric knight, and the nightly visitor Emma would house” (1989, 49–50). I would add that Mr. Knightley first appears at night, and one of the first phrases he utters is “moonlight night” (Austen 2005a, 8). Although he is the novel’s chief spokesman for clarity and the chief enemy of secrecy, his name links him to darkness. Metaphorically, this darkness may imply the darkness of Emma’s desire (her ignorance of her desire for him) and the darkness of his desire for her (brought to light by Frank, the liar). Linguistic play gives Knightley more insight than would pure common sense—if there is such a thing. The letter D directs him toward the truth. It is no coincidence that the insight coalesces during a word game. The letter D persists as he considers warning Emma about Frank: “He could not see her in a situation of such danger, without trying to preserve her. It was his duty” (Austen 2005a, 379). Readers, attempting to find significance in what seems like an unusual recurrence of the same letter, are in “danger” of reading the novel the way Cowper reads fires. The reading experience puts us in Knightley’s uncanny position, on the edge of an insight we cannot fully comprehend or trust. When Emma rejects his warning, she uses many D-words: “delighted … do … do … do … deal” (380). The end of the chapter brings Knightley some thermal relief: That he might not be irritated into an absolute fever, by the fire which Mr. Woodhouse’s tender habits required almost every evening

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Introduction throughout the year, he soon afterwards took a hasty leave, and walked home to the coolness and solitude of Donwell Abbey. (Austen 2005a, 381)

His own home is a D-word. Presumably, he will sleep there, perhaps to dream. Knightley’s moment of greatest insight results not from logical deduction or induction, but from the oneiric play of the letter D. The metaphorical Cowperian fire of the beginning of the chapter has become a literal fire. The novel links Knightley to coolness, solitude, and darkness, though his imagination had heated him up. Through the play of letters, language emerges as more than an instrument of communication: it seems by turns to support and to curtail human agency, exercising an inhuman agency of its own. Austen’s manifestations of this inhuman agency are a dominant concern of the following chapters. The agency of language can be hard to differentiate from the unconscious. Finch and Bowen comment on Emma’s belated discovery that she must marry Mr. Knightley: “Free indirect style has here literally created the space of the unconscious as the natural source of Emma’s inner desires, which, naturally enough, now discover themselves perfectly aligned with the overriding social imperative” to marry (1990, 12).28 Although Henry James represented Austen as an unconscious writer, he did not mean of, course, that she had superior access to the Freudian unconscious. Julia Prewitt Brown notes the implausibility of his image of Austen (1979, 1–2). Efforts to combat James’s condescension and the general historicist fear of anachronism have perhaps led most scholars to shy away from the topic of the unconscious. For certain readers, part of Austen’s appeal may derive from their image of her as a novelist at work in a supposedly innocent time before such topics were raised (Johnson 1996, 144). Robert Miles argues that “Austen is not concerned with unconscious drives and their neurotic symptoms … . She is preoccupied, rather, with self-knowledge in a Christian context. As a mainstream Anglican, Austen would have shared the general belief in our fallen, unregenerate nature” (2003, 14–15). Though Anglicans might not be concerned with the unconscious, it is concerned with them. Consider Persuasion, for instance. Louisa’s tumble from the Cobb notwithstanding, the Augustinian doctrine of the Fall is probably not the best way to explain Wentworth’s unconscious constancy to Anne. The good captain “had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. … only at Lyme had he begun to understand himself” (Austen 2006c, 262). Wordplay offers some of Freud’s best evidence of the unconscious, and language’s inhumanity—its material resistance to human control—is perhaps most conspicuous in wordplay. D. A. Miller calls “undecidable wordplay” an “Anti-Style,” which deviates from “Austen Style” proper (2003, 90). This idea of style is odd, since wordplay is a long-attested rhetorical ornament. Would Miller claim that Joyce and Shakespeare are Anti-Stylists?

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Rather than dismissing wordplay as a lapse or negation of style, we could think of it as style’s self-demystification, style’s nod to the arbitrary material basis of its effects. But Miller is not the only important critic who dissociates Austen from wordplay. Fiona Stafford claims: One of the problems about acknowledging the puns in Emma is that there is something distinctly embarrassing about the entire procedure – just as spelling out a joke becomes embarrassing, as the humour evaporates in the explanation. It is simply too heavy-handed to point out that by the end of the novel, both Emma and Knightley have “Donwell”. Austen’s narration is characterized by its lightness and speed, so to start labouring over the connotations of a particular word makes the reader seem dull, even in the fleeting moment of self-congratulation that marks the recognition of a pun. To engage in puzzling over the meanings of Knightley or Woodhouse is uncomfortably reminiscent of Harriet Smith struggling with Mr Elton’s charade … while Emma/Emma remains aloof. (1996, xi) According to Stafford, if something in Austen’s texts embarrasses readers or makes them uncomfortable, even “acknowledging” it is problematic. She argues that it takes longer to explain a pun than to pronounce a pun, and in the time lag the explainer becomes ponderous, which embarrasses her. This is a strange objection for a scholar to make. Do we expect physicists to comment on the speed of light at the speed of light? But it not just scholars who might come out the worse for wear. Laboring to understand puns could also tarnish our image of Austen as a nimble wit—and perhaps this is the real danger Stafford intuits. If Austen was capable of making the corny pun on Donwell (and she was), then our picture of her as an “aloof” realist is false.29 What is at stake here is the role of the critic (and, perhaps, of readers more broadly). Is the critic supposed to work to understand a text, or is the critic supposed to exemplify the sensibility that created the text? Stafford’s resistance to her own keen awareness of Austen’s linguistic play suggests that she favors the second role; but the second role is inconsistent, since the critic must understand the text in order to be able to imitate its sensibility. The prevalence of this imitative method of criticism contributes to the avoidance of theory in Austen studies. For Austen scholars, hope lies in moderation: the ideal Austen critic must know the novels, but should not take that knowledge too far; if an insight threatens embarrassment, do not pursue the insight. Jane Austen and Literary Theory commits itself to the argument that Austen was an inveterate punster. Austen critics should stop trying to dissimulate the vulgarity of her wordplay.30 In “A Beautiful Description of the Different Effects of Sensibility on Different Minds,” the narrator attends the bedside of a sick acquaintance:

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Introduction In these situations we were this morning surprised by receiving a visit from Dr Dowkins, “I am come to see Melissa,” said he. “How is She?” “Very weak indeed,” said the fainting Melissa—. “Very weak, replied the punning Doctor, aye indeed it is more than a very week since you have taken to your bed—How is your appetite?” “Bad, very bad, said Julia.” [sic] “That is very bad—replied he. Are her spirits good Madam?” “So poorly Sir that we are obliged to strengthen her with cordials every Minute.”—“Well then she receives Spirits from your being with her. Does she sleep?” “Scarcely ever—.” “And Ever Scarcely I suppose when she does. Poor thing! Does she think of dieing?” “She has not strength to think at all.” “Nay then she cannot think to have Strength.” (Austen 2006a, 92–93)

The story seems little more than an excuse for wordplay and figures of speech. Puns (“weak”/“week”; “spirits”/“Spirits”) yield to antimetaboles (“Scarcely ever”/“Ever Scarcely”; “strength to think”/“think to have Strength”). Critics would be wrong to dismiss the “Beautiful Description” as a teenage gag. The length of Austen’s published novels and the exigencies of their plots dilute her wordplay, but Emma’s handling of the “Donwell” pun is “heavy-handed” by any assessment. Austen does not leave it to readers to make the Donwell pun explicit: she does so herself. Mr. Woodhouse “thought it very well done of Mr. Knightley to invite them” to Donwell (Austen 2005a, 387). During his Box Hill rebuke of Emma, the owner of Donwell Abbey says: “It was badly done, indeed!” (408). Properly chastened, Emma resolves to make a penitential visit to Miss Bates, and does not mind if Mr. Knightley sees her going there: “She would not be ashamed of the appearance of penitence, so justly and truly hers. Her eyes were towards Donwell as she walked, but she saw him not” (411). Anticipating doing well, Emma looks at Donwell. This is laying it on a bit thick. For a moment, the narrative becomes almost Langlandian. Emma upbraids herself: “She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing—for she had done mischief” (449). Emma has not done nothing: “done mischief” is the opposite of “Donwell” (Austen is also playing with antimetabole here, with the on in done and the no in nothing). The more I read Austen, the more wordplay I find. Perhaps that makes me like Cowper’s fire-scryer, “Imagining what I saw.” But, unlike pyrophilic musings, literary interpretation leaves traces that can be compared to the original text. To some of us, it may be embarrassing to point out the puns in Emma, but we did not write them. The real “imaginist” in this scenario is the defender of decorum who conjures up a tasteful Jane Austen in order to downplay the significance of the verifiable letters on the page.31 Among Austen critics, the boldest explorer of wordplay has been Jill Heydt-Stevenson. One of her readings has proven especially controversial. Mary Crawford says, “Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be

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suspecting me of a pun, I entreat” (Austen 2005b, 71). Heydt-Stevenson proposes that Mary refers to more than her boredom with the “bickerings and jealousies” of naval politics and ambition; that would not involve a double entendre, and her pun, as her false demurral emphasizes, establishes her point. That pun points directly to sodomy in the navy. (2008, 138) Brian Southam emphatically disagrees: Austen was writing in, for, and about the English gentry at a time when “Its culture and conventions allowed no place for joking about sodomy” (2002, 25).32 Southam confines Austen within a restrictive understanding of “the Woman’s Novel” (25).33 Though it is true that this genre shuns explicit sexual references, one highly ambiguous sodomy joke in the course of a three-volume novel can escape scrutiny (and did so, until Heydt-Stevenson publicized it). She deserves much credit for confronting the sexual implications of Mary’s language, but she underestimates the joke’s complexity. She argues that there would be no double entendre unless the joke referred to naval sodomy; since there must be double entendre, it must refer to sodomy. But that is only one of the vices that could be relevant, and Mary’s libertine uncle attests to their diversity. Though Mary knows she made a pun, she might not be fully aware of all its meanings. There are two candidates: 1) “Rears” means buttocks or anus; 2) “Vices” means immoral acts. It is possible that Mary recognizes 2 and not 1, but her joke only refers to sodomy if both 1 and 2 are in play. The statement is amusing even if there are no puns: the flippant reference to admirals as “Rears” and “Vices” would be enough, despite Edmund and Fanny’s misgivings, to enliven the Bertrams’ staid dining table. The joke works on at least three levels, and we cannot be sure whether Mary or Austen intended all of them—though if we have read the juvenilia, we should at least admit that Austen was aware of sodomy.34 Miles agrees with Southam, and argues that it would be “certain social death” for a woman like Mary to make such a joke (2014). But the object of the joke is uncertain, giving Mary plausible deniability. D. A. Miller notes: A vice was a screw as well as a bad habit in Jane Austen’s day. Is the vitium the vis, in its vulgar metaphorical sense? … How far we wish to go with her statement, where we choose to stop in our speculation (which is always embarrassed and often arrested by the question, “Could a character in Jane Austen ever mean this?”), is our business, she would imply, not hers. (1981, 32n13)35 To detect a sodomy joke we have to insert the “Vices” (screws) into the “Rears” (buttocks). Were we to enter Mansfield Park and confront Mary

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with this interpretation, she would have no trouble denying it and laughing at our depravity. Southam would retort that changes in taste rendered the sodomy joke not just deniable but impossible: by the second decade of the nineteenth century, “the broad humour of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne was no longer acceptable in polite society” (2002, 24–25). This tidy historicism does not do justice to Mansfield Park—not even to its historical concerns. It is one of Mary’s functions to evoke a risqué world of eighteenth-century urbanity out of step with the Evangelical fashion Fanny incarnates and Edmund emulates. Mary tells the joke in Volume I, before Edmund or first-time readers know what she is capable of. Much of the drama of Edmund’s courtship of Mary stems from his repeated denials that she really means the outrageous things she says. Volume III represents Mary as an increasingly malevolent figure, so it becomes retroactively more probable that she could have intentionally joked about sodomy. In one of her letters (to Fanny, of all people), Mary fantasizes about Tom Bertram’s death (Austen 2005b, 502)—a linguistic transgression more serious than a joke about naval sodomy, and a transgression whose occurrence no critic would deny. If Mary is capable of such reckless language at this point, why not earlier? But even her increased wickedness in the third volume does not prove once and for all that she intentionally joked about sodomy. The joke is irreducible to conscious intention (Mary’s or Austen’s). The inability to control the effects of language is a pervasive concern of Mansfield Park. This concern comes to a crisis during the theatricals, but it is present throughout. The opening action, the adoption of Fanny, produces a debate between Mrs. Norris and Sir Thomas because they worry about their ability to control the meaning of this gesture: will Fanny think it means she is equal to her cousins? Mrs. Norris spends much of the rest of the novel struggling to prevent this outcome, a counterproductive enterprise. While most critics try to determine what Mary or Austen intended by the pun (sodomy or just vice?), what is more important is the inability of Mary or Austen to restrict the meaning of the utterance. To Mary’s credit (and her creator’s), the fact that she asks the Bertrams not to construe her utterance as “a pun” shows she is aware that the meaning of her utterance is not entirely under her control. Joking about sodomy was certainly dangerous, but there are no funny jokes without risk. Part of Fanny and Edmund’s discomfort is linguistic: they sense that Mary’s bold speech is dangerous because it frequently puts her in the position of saying more than she may know. This is the kind of slippery slope moralism that characterizes much of Edmund and Fanny’s thinking: the relatively mild linguistic transgressions of the Crawfords in Volume I are disturbing because they have the potential to escalate in ways their agents did not intend. Henry’s affair with Mrs. Rushworth comes to justify the paranoia. The newspaper report of their elopement marks the ultimate loss of linguistic control. Deconstruction provides ways of

Introduction xxix conceptualizing the linguistic dangers that beset Mansfield Park and other novels. Understanding Austen’s mastery of the English novel requires attention to the limits of mastery. The following chapters will use literary theory to trace some of these limits.

Notes 1 Jeremy Bentham was perhaps the most lucid contemporary critic of anti-theoretical discourse. He asks: “Can a man disclaim speculation, can he disclaim theory, without disclaiming thought? If they do not mean thought, they mean nothing; for, unless it be a little more thought than ordinary, theory, speculation, mean nothing” (1824, 300; quoted in Simpson 1993, 145). 2 In a wonderfully contrarian reading of Mansfield Park, William H. Galperin contrasts Fanny Price’s rote effusions with Mary Crawford’s silence: “Mary … is always thinking, and when she talks about improvements, she is saying something that accords with the counterplot in ‘thinking back,’ as Heidegger puts it, ‘to what is to be thought’” (2017, 87). 3 Lindstrom argues that even the best studies of Austen’s intellectual heritage— such as Peter Knox-Shaw’s Jane Austen and the Enlightenment—“tend oddly to dampen the play of philosophical energies in the novels” (2011, 504). 4 Consider Shoshana Felman’s argument that literary texts are the “subject” not merely the “object” of psychoanalytic knowing (1977, 6). 5 To be fair, we should note that the gossipy paraphrase prevalent in Austen studies amounts to an oblique insight, since gossip is one of the major activities narrated by the novels; gossiping about Austen’s characters, the critic, teacher, or student is performing a certain knowledge. 6 By “literary theory,” I primarily mean the legacy of structuralism, including its deconstructions. The term theory is often used today to refer to any academic criticism that positions itself as political activism. Feminist and post-colonialist scholars have perhaps done more than anyone else in advancing recent Austen studies; many of these scholars would consider themselves engaged in theory in the broader sense. The next section of this chapter offers a rationale for my emphasis on deconstruction. 7 Scheuermann makes a similar argument elsewhere (2009, 133). For this critic, there is no need for interpretation, let alone theory. 8 According to Galperin, “Austen’s historical role as realism’s most important progenitor has been grossly exaggerated,” though he attributes her unrealism to the use of “an incompetent or perplexed narrator” (2003, 6). 9 Grant I. Holly sees “the dazzling superficiality of the juvenilia remaining uncannily fundamental to the serious works of Austen’s maturity” (1989, 46). 10 Rosmarin takes a harder anti-mimetic line. She faults “the ongoing attempt to justify” Austen’s “art in terms of a mimetic poetics” (1984, 315). She blames the mimetic preoccupations of Austen critics for the monotony of their work (317). 11 To call Lodge’s bluff, none of the chapters in the present book will focus on Northanger Abbey. 12 See also Patteson 1981. 13 Charles Bally originated the term style indirect libre (1912; quoted in Finch and Bowen 1990, 5). 14 Timothy Morton also traces today’s anti-theoretical discourse to “the English dislike of the French Revolution. … ‘Theory,’ goes the argument, is cold and abstract, out of touch. It forces organic forms into boxes that cannot do them justice. It is too calculating and rational. ‘Postmodernism’ is just the latest

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version of this sorry state of affairs. Of course, the English position against the French was its own abstraction, a self-imposed denial of history that had already happened—the beheading of Charles I, for instance” (2007, 20). Two of the greatest close readers of Austen, D. A. Miller and Joseph Litvak, graduated from Yale during the heyday of de Manian deconstruction. Though deconstruction certainly informs their work (and their work influences every chapter of the present book), both critics assimilated to new historicism. Litvak describes his own movement toward historicism in an essay exquisitely sensitive to the limitations of both critical modes (1988, 139). Litvak characterizes Miller as “a reformed deconstructionist” (127). Litvak describes how in his own essay “‘theory’ becomes a kind of synecdoche for ‘deconstruction’” (1988, 139). The use of “French theory” as a synonym for “deconstruction” is amusing, since the latter’s most famous exponents were not exactly French: de Man was Flemish; Derrida grew up in Algeria, where as a young Jew he suffered discrimination from the Vichy government. Francophobia, like other irrational hostilities, does not demand historical or geographical precision, and “theory’s is an uncertain foreignness that spurs nationalistic hyperbole (theory is always too ‘French,’ too ‘American’)” (Redfield 2003, 186–87n11). McGann attacks early efforts to claim Austen for Romanticism (1983, 18–19, 29–30). A certain chauvinism may have facilitated de Man’s neglect of Austen. Barbara Johnson once described her own experience of “female effacement” and concluded: “Like others of its type, the Yale School has always been a Male School” (1987, 32). To my knowledge, Germaine de Staël was the only female writer (besides his own student, Carol Jacobs) that de Man wrote about, and he compared her unfavorably to his main man, Rousseau (1989, 171–78). By Cohen’s reckoning, the years since Derrida’s death have hosted, more often than not, a “soft Derrideanism without deconstruction” (2012, 244). Claudia Johnson points out that Sedgwick was not the first to question Austen’s heterosexuality, a fact of which Sedgwick seems “unaware” (1996, 162). Said was not the first critic to discuss the significant marginalization of slavery in Mansfield Park (Poovey 1984, 220–21). Miller himself mentions the hegemony historicism exerts over Austen studies (2003, 107–08n42). Lynch discusses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies of Shakespeare’s “deep” characterization (1998, 133–39). Miller is a playful rhetorician, so it might not be paranoid to suspect that his theory of “Austen Style” is ironic. Indeed, he spends more time cataloguing the failures of Austen Style than interpreting exemplary instances of it. Discussing Sanditon, he is obviously fascinated by the “badness” of its wordplay (2003, 87–91). Morini points out the inaccuracy of Miller’s reading of Austen’s narration (2009, 29). For an excellent account of the limitations of Austen’s narrators, see Nelles 2006. Cowper introduces his “waking dream” with a defense of his fireside “stupor” (1963, 4.283). Jeff Nunokawa locates a similar play of “unconscious desire” in Elizabeth Bennet’s love for Mr. Darcy (2016, 327). John Wiltshire describes “the ways of the unconscious” determining Mrs. Norris’s neurotic machinations (2014, 90). Edward Neill asks, “Has the over-determined, almost jokey quality of George Knightley of Donwell [=done-well?] been sufficiently remarked?” (1999, 105). The answer is “No.” For a similarly allegorical use of puns, consider Lady Susan’s report: “the whole family are at war, & Manwaring scarcely dares speak to me” (Austen 2008, 5). Not all critics have shied away from Austen’s puns. Janine Barchas points out the “unusual fecundity of puns” in Emma, which reveal “the mischievous

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34

35

wordsmith behind this novel” (2007, 314–15). At one point in Emma, “The weather continued much the same all the following morning; and the same loneliness, and the same melancholy, seemed to reign at Hartfield” (Austen 2005a, 462). According to James Thompson, “The submerged metaphor in reign is particularly suggestive because for four hundred pages Austen has conveyed the impression that it was Emma who ‘seemed to reign at Hartfield’” (1992, 119). The metaphor is also a pun: it “seemed to reign at Hartfield” when it was raining. This is perhaps what Miller would call a “non-elective affinity of signifiers” (2003, 86). Yet separating Austen’s elective from non-elective puns is by no means a simple task. Neill rightly argues that “‘Jane Austen’ is … an image refashioned from moment to moment in the twists and turns of the narrative, an epiphenomenon of the text” (1999, 113). This is not to say that it is easy or even possible for readers to abstain from such fashioning. Southam objects to an earlier version of Heydt-Stevenson’s argument (2000). Heydt-Stevenson responds directly to Southam’s complaints (2008, 24). Anxiety sometimes motivates critics’ appeals to genre. According to Derrida, “as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity” (1992, 224–25). Derrida proposes that the concept of a genre cannot completely regulate individual texts: “a text would not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging” (230). Even if one agrees with Southam that Austen is a practitioner of “the Woman’s Novel,” one might still object that Mansfield Park is eccentric and does not fit the genre comfortably—does not participate in it easily. Heydt-Stevenson notes that “Austen’s taste for bawdy humor first emerges in the Juvenilia, as when the young Austen candidly quips about James I’s homosexuality in ‘The History of England’” (2008, 138). Austen records a charade: “My first is what my second was to King James the 1st, and you tread on my whole” (2006a, 187). The word hole was “a common vulgarism for anus from the fourteenth century” onward (Heydt-Stevenson 2008, 23). Part of the amusement derives from the need for indirection. Clara Tuite finds that here Austen’s history “subverts the category of juvenile ignorance through its deft, knowing manipulation of the euphemizing, censoring logic of the charade, which depends upon an unspoken sexual knowledge of the open secret – whilst refusing to actually name it – to complete the puzzle” (2002, 42). The charade is even bawdier than these critics realize: consider the history of the word tread; The Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “tre-den v.,” accessed April 17, 2019, https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED46887/track?coun ter=1&search_id=870818; OED Online, s.v. “tread, v.,” accessed April 17, 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/205344?rskey=emvNqs&result=2&isAdvanced=false. Isobel Armstrong is one of the few critics besides Miller who perceive the complexity of the situation. Mary’s joke is “a form of concealment, saying one thing under the guise of another … . Edmund and Fanny are certainly alert to a disguised indecency in the words ‘Rears and Vices’ even if they do not fully understand all their possible meanings” (1988, 46).

References Armstrong, Isobel. 1988. Jane Austen: Mansfield Park. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Austen, Jane. 2005a. Emma. Edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Austen, Jane. 2005b. Mansfield Park. Edited by John Wiltshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austen, Jane. 2006a. Juvenilia. Edited by Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austen, Jane. 2006b. Northanger Abbey. Edited by Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austen, Jane. 2006c. Persuasion. Edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austen, Jane. 2008. Later Manuscripts. Edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bally, Charles. 1912. “Le style indirect libre en français moderne. I.” GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift 4: 549–556. https://archive.org/details/CharlesBallyLeS tyleIndirectLibreEnFranaisModerneIII/page/n3. Barchas, Janine. 2007. “Very Austen: Accounting for the Language of Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62 (3): 303–338. doi:10.1525/ncl.2007.62.3.303. Bentham, Jeremy. 1824. The Book of Fallacies: From Unfinished Papers by Jeremy Bentham. London. https://archive.org/details/bookoffallaciesf00bent/page/n3. Brown, Julia Prewitt. 1979. Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. TM Cohen, Tom. 2012. “Polemos: ‘I Am at War with Myself’ or, Deconstruction in the Anthropocene?” Oxford Literary Review 34 (2): 239–257. doi:10.3366/olr.2012.0044. Cole, Andrew. 2014. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coleridge, S. T. 1816. The Statesman’s Manual […]. London. https://archive.org/deta ils/statesmansmanual00coleuoft. Cowper, William. 1963. “The Task.” In The Poetical Works of William Cowper, edited by H. S. Milford, 127–141. 4th ed. London: Oxford University Press. de Man, Paul. 1989. “Madame de Staël and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In Critical Writings, 1953–1978, edited by Lindsay Waters, 171–178. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “The Law of Genre.” In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 221–252. New York: Routledge. Duckworth, Alistair. 1983. “Jane Austen and the Conflict of Interpretations.” In Jane Austen: New Perspectives, edited by Janet Todd, 39–52. New York: Holmes and Meier. Felman, Shoshana. 1977. “To Open the Question.” Yale French Studies 55/56: 5–10. doi:10.2307/2930433. Finch, Casey, and Peter Bowen. 1990. “‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma.” Representations 31: 1–18. doi:10.2307/2928397. Galperin, William H. 2003. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Galperin, William H. 2017. The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hamilton, Paul. 2003. Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hammond, Brean S. 1993. “The Political Unconscious in Mansfield Park.” In Mansfield Park, edited by Nigel Wood, 56–90. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Heydt-Stevenson, Jill. 2000. “‘Slipping into the Ha-Ha’: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 55 (3): 309–339. doi:10.2307/2903126.

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Heydt-Stevenson, Jill. 2008. Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Holly, Grant I. 1989. “Emmagrammatology.” In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, edited by Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock, 39–51. Vol. 19. East Lansing: Colleagues Press. Honan, Park. 1977. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Johnson, Barbara. 1987. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson, Claudia L. 1988. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Claudia L. 1993. “Gender, Theory, and Jane Austen Culture.” In Mansfield Park, edited by Nigel Wood, 91–120. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Johnson, Claudia L. 1996. “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies.” boundary 2 23 (3): 143–163. doi:10.2307/303640. Lindstrom, Eric. 2011. “Austen and Austin.” European Romantic Review 22 (4): 501– 520. doi:10.1080/10509585.2011.583041. Litvak, Joseph. 1988. “Back to the Future: A Review-Article on the New Historicism, Deconstruction, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1): 120–149. www.jstor.org/stable/40754850. Lodge, David. 1986. “Jane Austen’s Novels: Form and Structure.” In The Jane Austen Companion, edited by J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz, and Brian Southam, 165–178. New York: Macmillan. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. 1998. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mandal, Anthony. 2007. Introduction to The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, edited by Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam, 1–11. London: Continuum. Mazzeno, Laurence W. 2011. Jane Austen: Two Centuries of Criticism. Rochester, NY: Camden House. McGann, Jerome J. 1983. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McMaster, Juliet. 2007. “Emma: The Geography of a Mind.” Persuasions 29: 26–38. Miles, Robert. 2003. Jane Austen. Tavistock, UK: Northcote House. Miles, Robert. 2014. “Mansfield Park and the News.” Persuasions On-Line 35 (1). www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol35no1/miles.html. Miller, D. A. 1981. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, D. A. 2003. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morini, Massimiliano. 2009. Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis. London: Routledge. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neill, Edward. 1999. The Politics of Jane Austen. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelles, William. 2006. “Omniscience for Atheists; Or, Jane Austen’s Infallible Narrator.” Narrative 14 (2): 118–131. www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/austen/nelles.pdf. Nunokawa, Jeff. 2016. “Speechless in Austen.” In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, 321–331. Edited by Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Patteson, Richard F. 1981. “Truth, Certitude, and Stability in Jane Austen’s Fiction.” Philological Quarterly 60 (4): 455–469. Poovey, Mary. 1984. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 2018. “Introduction.” In After Derrida: Literature, Theory and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redfield, Marc. 2003. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Redfield, Marc. 2016. Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America. New York: Fordham University Press. Rosmarin, Adena. 1984. “‘Misreading’ Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History.” ELH 51 (2): 315–342. doi:10.2307/2872948. Said, Edward W. 1989. “Jane Austen and Empire.” In Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, edited by Terry Eagleton, 150–164. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Scheuermann, Mona. 2007. “Truths Universally Acknowledged: Social Commentary in Mansfield Park.” Age of Johnson 18: 291–329. Scheuermann, Mona. 2009. Reading Jane Austen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1991. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Critical Inquiry 17 (4): 818–837. www.jstor.org/stable/1343745. Simpson, David. 1993. Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Southam, Brian. 2002. “‘Rears’ and ‘Vices’ in Mansfield Park.” Essays in Criticism 52 (1): 23–35. doi:10.1093/eic/52.1.23. Stafford, Fiona. 1996. “Introduction.” In Emma, by Jane Austen, vii–xxii. London: Penguin. Thompson, James. 1992. “Intimacy in Emma.” In New Casebooks: Emma, edited by David Monaghan, 110–126. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Tuite, Clara. 2002. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whately, Richard. 2016. “[Technique and Moral Effect in Jane Austen’s Fiction].” In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, 309–310. Edited by Donald Gray and Mary A. Favret. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Wiltshire, John. 2014. The Hidden Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1

“Evelyn” and the Impossibility of the Gift

Though not all may agree that “her genius at an early age is as aweinspiring as Mozart’s,” the literary merits of Austen’s juvenilia have by now received widespread recognition (Doody 1993, xxxv). One text that has not benefitted from this critical shift is “Evelyn.” The reasons for neglect are not hard to find. Feminism has generated much academic interest in the juvenilia, and “Evelyn” seems relatively distant from feminist concerns: the protagonist is male, and the female characters lack the refreshing assertiveness that distinguishes many of the juvenilia’s heroines. Other early texts are shrewd satires with clear targets: Love and Freindship mocks the conventions of sentimental novels, while “The History of England” derides Whig historiography.1 By contrast, the humor of “Evelyn” seems whimsically gratuitous. To make matters worse, the tale is unfinished: Austen’s manuscript included “nine blank pages” after the abrupt ending (Sabor 2006, 363). People have been underrating this text even before it was published. Caroline Austen characterized it as “all nonsense”—which is what she thought made it suitable for publishing since, unlike some other early works, it would not shed light on the development of the “wonderful talent” that produced the mature novels (Chapman 1948, 143–44). Surveying Austen’s early works, John Halperin speaks for many when he claims that “Evelyn” is a text about which “comparatively little need be said” (1984, 44). If the story could not compel Austen to finish it, scholars may feel disinclined to take it seriously. Most of its infrequent commentators regard “Evelyn” as an aesthetic failure (Mudrick 1968, 20; Honan 1977, 76; Kortes-Papp 1999).2 But “Evelyn” deserves a more generous appraisal. It attempts with extreme—and hilarious—rigor to imagine a true gift, and the tale’s unfinished status is a consequence of this rigor. “Evelyn” is a philosophically daring text that allegorizes the conditions of a female writer constricted by a gift economy. In Given Time, Jacques Derrida argues that Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “La fausse monnaie” anticipates the anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don, the twentieth century’s most influential study of giving. To Derrida, it seems that Baudelaire “comprehended in advance all the movements, all the possibilities—both theoretical and

2

“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift

practical—of an essay on the gift in general” (1992, 91). As we will see, Austen “comprehended in advance” Derrida’s moves in Given Time. 3 Her awareness of how giving permeates literary language makes “Evelyn” one of the most formally self-conscious things she ever wrote.4 Nonetheless, the political and economic importance of gift-giving makes the tale more than a witty metafiction. Margaret Anne Doody finds the juvenilia questioning “the new Enlightened capitalism,” which wanted to believe that the pursuit of its own interest by each group and individual would or could lead to the good of the whole. Austen is engaged at the philosophic centre of the eighteenth century. To treat her early works as the slight works of a playful child is partly to mistreat their philosophic depths. (1993, xxviii) “Evelyn” should be at the center of any study of the juvenilia’s philosophical pertinence, though its lack of depth is part of its strength. It could be European literature’s keenest examination of the gift—because, not in spite, of its absurd frivolity.5 “Evelyn” is an excellent example of literature as thinking, a productive process rather than a delivery of prefabricated messages (Jacobinism, anti-Jacobinism, or what have you). With her silly tale, Austen is able to think through the concept of the gift.

“Evelyn” and Derridean Gift Theory A summary of Derrida’s arguments will give purchase on “Evelyn.” Almost all of his insights in Given Time follow from the premise that the concept of the gift, if it is to have a coherent meaning, must be distinct from the concept of economic exchange: If there is a gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. (1992, 7) If in giving you something I get anything back in return (material or symbolic), my giving was not a true gift, but a more or less covert exchange. Derrida insists: For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift,

“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift

3

whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or differance. (1992, 12) Perhaps the most explicit Austenian example of gift as self-payment occurs toward the end of Mansfield Park in a description of Sir Thomas: “Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted. His charitable kindness had been rearing a prime comfort for himself. His liberality had a rich repayment, and the general goodness of his intentions by her, deserved it” (Austen 2005b, 546). As Joseph Litvak points out, “In marrying Edmund instead of Henry Crawford, Fanny indeed helps Sir Thomas to consolidate his empire and to protect his property from dispersion at the hands of outsiders”; as a consequence, he now “sees in Fanny a handsome return on his investment” (1992). In denying that true gifts can provide such returns, Derrida is not denying that people give things; rather, he is showing how, as Marcel Hénaff puts it, “anyone believing he or she is giving is in fact performing an exchange and thus remains subjected to the economic order” (2009, 217). Derrida’s theory of the gift is strenuously paradoxical. The true (pure, free) gift cannot appear as a gift: If the other perceives or receives it, if he or she keeps it as gift, the gift is annulled. But the one who gives it must not see it or know it either; otherwise he begins, at the threshold, as soon as he intends to give, to pay himself with a symbolic recognition, to praise himself, to approve of himself, to gratify himself, to congratulate himself, to give back to himself symbolically the value of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give. (1992, 14) Consequently, “a gift must not be generous” (Derrida 1992, 162). What form, then, should the gift take? To preempt any calculation that would repay the giver, the true gift must seem a product of chance—something incalculable, unpredictable: The gift … must remain unforeseeable, but remain so without keeping itself. It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it must appear chancy or in any case lived as such, apprehended as the intentional correlate of a perception that is absolutely surprised by the encounter with what it perceives, beyond its horizon of anticipation. (Derrida 1992, 122) But wrapping the gift in chance will not preserve it. The gift must untie itself from subjectivity: The simple intention to give … suffices to make a return payment to oneself. The simple consciousness of the gift right away sends itself

4

“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift back the gratifying image of goodness or generosity … . And this is produced as soon as there is a subject, as soon as donor and donee are constituted as identical, identifiable subjects. (Derrida 1992, 23)6

Even if a gift could meet all these requirements, calculation would still jeopardize the gift if it kept to itself, if it remained within defined borders: As soon as it delimits itself, a gift is prey to calculation and measure. The gift, if there is any, should overrun the border, to be sure, toward the measureless and excessive; but it should also suspend its relation to the border and even its transgressive relation to the separable line or trait of a border. (Derrida 1992, 91) “Evelyn” is especially adventurous in its disarticulation of borders, which puts it at odds with certain tendencies in Austen criticism.7 “Evelyn” contains four giving episodes, and each one comes closer to meeting Derrida’s stringent criteria. Austen tries to imagine purer and purer gifts, and this is what directs the story (not the desire to create suspense, to reveal character, or to edify readers). Gower’s arrival at Evelyn, a remarkably salubrious and beautiful village, starts the first giving episode. Gower exclaims to Mrs. Willis, the “Landlady” of the “Alehouse”: “What would I not give to be your Neighbour, to be blessed with your Acquaintance, and with the farther knowledge of your virtues!” (Austen 1999, 1–2). Gower does not explain what he will give, and his use of the word “give” may be a rhetorical outburst rather than the first step in a conscious exchange. If Gower expects an exchange, he receives something different. Mrs. Willis directs him to the Webbs’ estate, and as he approached the House, he was delighted with its situation. It was in the exact center of a small circular paddock … the surface of it perfectly even & smooth, and grazed by four white Cows which were disposed at equal distances from each other. (Austen 1999, 2–3) Though the place delights Gower, critics have delighted only in its obsolescence. Janine Barchas argues that the name of the village alludes to John Evelyn, author of the seventeenth-century botanical classic Sylva; though the Webbs’ “hortus conclusus, with its circular boundary of trees, resembles the formalist aesthetics of Evelyn’s day rather than the open picturesque landscapes of Austen’s, the bull’s-eye-like pattern of the scene … is hideous by any standard” (2012, 146). The estate’s “perfectly even & smooth” arrangement certainly defies the picturesque. William Gilpin, its leading eighteenth-century advocate, disapproves of arranging cows in groups of four.8 Distinguishing

“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift

5

the picturesque from the beautiful, Gilpin associates the former with “roughneʃs,” which “forms the moſt eſſential point of difference between the beautiful, and the pictureſque” (1792, 6). Ensuing acts of generosity present giving as feat of chance. When Gower enters her house, Mrs. Webb, whom he has never seen before, hails him as the “best of Men.” Without asking him who he is, she proceeds to hand him her purse. She and her husband treat him to an amazing quantity of foods (Austen 1999, 4–5). They courteously ask him what else he wants. When he suggests “your house & Grounds,” they exclaim: “from this moment it is Yours” (6). When he takes a liking to their daughter, they reply: “We bend under a weight of obligations to you which we can never repay. Take our girl, take our Maria, and on her must the difficult task fall, of endeavouring to make some return to so much Benefiscence” (7). Maria’s father cheerfully gives Gower her fortune, which he accepts.9 Gower marries Maria “the next day,” and the elder Webbs depart, never to return (7). The Webbs’ gifts almost meet Derrida’s aleatory requirement. Gower comes to Evelyn by chance, and his hosts’ extreme generosity surprises readers, who are given no hint of it (Mrs. Willis, who sends Gower to the Webbs, is the only one who could predict his reception). The scene minimizes subjectivity and exchange. The elder Webbs are the flattest of flat characters: they have no characteristics besides irrational generosity, which may not be enough to make them subjects—at least not the subjects imagined by Derrida, those whose awareness of their own generosity reduces their giving to exchange. The narrator tells us nothing about their private thoughts, so we have no knowledge of their interior life, which, as far as “Evelyn” is concerned, does not exist. If they extract any self-congratulation from their generosity, they hide it well, since they express gratitude to Gower, as though he had given them something. After the Webbs yield him their house, Gower says, “you are welcome to stay this half hour if you like,” and “They both burst forth into raptures of Admiration at his politeness, which they agreed served only to make their Conduct appear more inexcusable in trespassing on his time” (Austen 1999, 6). The Webbs give no indication that they have earned gratitude; they do not act like people who realize that they have given gifts. Most importantly, their disappearance from the tale prevents them from receiving any obvious countergift. But, from a Derridean perspective, their gifts fall short of “the gift.” The “house and Grounds” are explicitly “bordered” (3), and the Webbs’ asking Gower what he wants suggests they may be conscious of themselves as givers, though not as givers to whom gratitude is due. Their gifts certainly appear as gifts to readers. The tale’s parody of extravagant generosity proves this (Litz 1967, 34) since, in order to function as such a parody, the Webbs’ exaggerated giving has to appear generous.10 Later giving episodes will be far less conventional. The second one occurs a few months afterwards. When Gower is taking a walk with Maria on his

6

“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift

estate one day, they perceive a rose having fallen from its tree onto the garden path: Maria stooped to pick up the beautiful flower, and with all her Family Generosity presented it to her Husband. “My dear Frederic, said she, pray take this charming rose.” “Rose! exclaimed Mr Gower—. Oh! Maria, of what does not that remind me! Alas my poor Sister, how have I neglected you!” (Austen 1999, 7–8) Only now does the story reveal why Gower came to Evelyn. His sister Rose had been in love with Henry, son of Lord ——, who refused to consent to their marriage and dispatched his son to the Isle of Wight. On the voyage, Henry died in an improbable shipwreck. Gower had set off from his native Carlisle to request Lord —— to give him a portrait of Henry: “It was to soften her affliction by obtaining a picture of her unfortunate Lover that her brother undertook a Journey into Sussex.” Unfortunately, when he passed through Evelyn, he forgot his quest: “The little incident of the rose however brought everything concerning her to his recollection again, & he bitterly repented his neglect” (Austen 1999, 8–9).11 In the garden episode, the recipient of the gift demonstrates his subjectivity by showing that he has a memory and is capable of contrition. Nonetheless, the scene undermines the subjectivity of the giver by dividing the agency of giving. Mr. Webb planted the rose tree (8), so the fallen rose could be seen as an unintentional side effect of the earlier gift of the “Grounds.” The rose tree itself, a synecdoche for nonhuman nature, gives the rose; but the tree of course is not conscious of the gift as a gift. Maria, who hands the rose to Gower, is conscious of the gift, but she does not own the land and its rose trees. The real profit of the gift is not the rose itself but the memory triggered by the word rose, and Maria cannot realize that in presenting the rose she is giving the gift of memory. The word rose, or perhaps the English language, could also be an unintentional giver here. This giving scene is even more “chancy” than the previous one, since it depends on a number of coincidences: that they are walking near the fallen rose; that Maria hands it to him; that she says “rose”; that the not-toobright Gower happens to be paying attention; that Gower’s sister’s name is “Rose” (if her name were Violet, he would linger in forgetful bliss). Maria’s handing over of the rose looks like a gift, and she could repay herself with the flattering thought that she continues the Webb tradition of “Family Generosity,” but she is more an intermediary than a true giver. The rose tree’s involuntary deflowering does not take the conventional appearance of a gift, and the fallen rose, an extension of the Webbs’ earlier gift of “Grounds,” unsettles the borders of the previous gift. The Webbs could not have calculated when this rose would fall and what its mnemonic effects would be: they gave more than they could have known. Yet they receive no

“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift

7

countergift. The rose does not make Gower feel grateful to the Webbs; it causes him to remember someone else. Importantly, in this episode, nonhuman nature exceeds the status of a gift object: the rose tree plays an active (albeit involuntary) role in giving. In the next giving episode, Gower gives himself. When a letter from Carlisle informs him that Rose is dead (Austen 1999, 10), he resolves to complete his journey to Lord —— at —— Castle. Having given up on acquiring Henry’s portrait, he wishes “to find whether his Lordship softened by his Son’s death, might have been brought to consent to the match, had both he and Rosa been alive.” “Late in the evening,” Gower reaches the castle, which was situated on a woody Eminence commanding a beautiful prospect of the Sea. Mr Gower did not dislike the situation, tho’ it was certainly greatly inferior to that of his own house. There was an irregularity in the fall of the ground, and a profusion of old Timber which appeared to him illsuited to the stile of the Castle. (Austen 1999, 12) When Gower enters his drawing room, Lord —— “felt distressed & astonished; yet rose and received him with all the politeness of a well-bred Man” (12). Usually, the statement that a character “rose and received” a guest would be too banal to merit hermeneutic attention, but in this story, whose plot hinges on the pun “rose”/“Rose,” the verb rose is significant: it sutures the third giving episode to the second. Here Gower is the gift being received by Lord ——. Gower does not refer to himself as a gift, and his rudeness makes his visit-gift disagreeable to its recipient. In fact, Gower presents the gift of his presence as a request for a gift. He brings up his dead sister: tho’ she can receive no pleasure from the intelligence, yet for the satisfaction of her Family I wish to know whether the Death of this unhappy Pair has made an impression on your heart sufficiently strong to obtain that consent to their Marriage which in happier circumstances you would not be persuaded to give supposing that they now were both alive. Lord —— demurs: No one can more sincerely regret the death of my Son than I have always done, and it gives me great concern to know that Miss Gower’s was hastened by his—. Yet to suppose them alive is destroying at once the Motive for a change in my sentiments concerning the affair. (Austen 1999, 14) Gower, reporting his sister’s death, “gives” the Lord “great concern.” Gower’s gift of concern is not a pure gift, since he seeks a countergift; but

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“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift

the countergift (the Lord’s consent) cannot materially benefit him, since it is predicated on “an impossibility.” Gower claims that the countergift is for the “satisfaction of her Family,” which would include him, but it is unclear how the consent could satisfy: it cannot flatter the snobbery of the Gowers that the aristocratic —— family would consent to unite with them in marriage, since the precondition for the consent is the impossibility of the marriage. Although the gift of Gower’s invasive visit and distressing information avoids the appearance of a gift, it does involve subjects, Gower and Lord ——, and the prospect of the countergift, while reduced to a vague “satisfaction,” is not entirely eliminated (though Lord —— probably will not return the favor and visit Gower in Evelyn or Carlisle). Yet, unlike the first two giving scenes, this attempt at imagining the impossible gift actually incorporates impossibility (not mere implausibility). “Evelyn” imagines peak impossibility when Gower upbraids Lord ——: “not even the death of your Son can make you wish his future Life happy” (Austen 1999, 14). This episode disturbs borders between present and future, factual and counterfactual.12 The fourth giving episode comes closest to imagining the impossible gift. This time the giver is nonhuman nature—an important displacement, since Derrida occasionally suggests that only nonhuman nature can truly give: “It is nature that gives and one must show oneself worthy of this gift. One must take and learn the gift of nature” (1992, 66). When Gower leaves the castle, he felt an universal tremor through out his whole frame. If we consider his Situation indeed, alone, on horseback, as late in the year as August, and in the day, as nine o’clock, with no light to direct him but that of the Moon almost full, and the Stars which alarmed him by their twinkling, who can refrain from pitying him?—No house within a quarter of a mile, and a Gloomy Castle blackened by the deep shade of Walnuts and Pines, behind him.—He felt indeed almost distracted with his fears, and shutting his Eyes till he arrived at the Village to prevent his seeing either Gipsies or Ghosts, he rode on a full gallop all the way. (Austen 1999, 14–15) Here Austen’s story ends. Nature gives Gower the warmth of August, plus ample moonlight and starlight; he responds with extreme ecophobia.13 Fearing nature’s gifts (for which an ordinary traveler would be grateful), Gower responds by “shutting his Eyes.”14 Through the first half of the story, Gower receives gifts; traveling to the Castle, he becomes an unwanted gift; leaving the Castle, he recoils from nature’s gifts. The fourth episode is probably the least predictable. As he approaches Lord ——’s estate, the narrator says that its “gloomy appearance … struck him with terror,” and that “he was always timid in the Dark and easily terrified when alone” (Austen 1999, 12). Yet this preparation only makes his concluding fit of ecophobia stranger. Though he is afraid of the dark, the twinkling stars “alarmed” him instead of mitigating his fear. His reaction, “shutting his

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Eyes,” makes his journey even darker, and the impossibility of galloping blindly on horseback all the way home without falling or hitting a tree is something that no reader could have predicted. While the third giving scene incorporated impossibility as a hypothetical speech act, the fourth scene ends with an impossible physical act. Derrida supposes that “that there is no gift without the possibility and the impossibility of an impossible narrative” (1992, 117). The givers in this scene (August, the moon, the stars) are not subjects and are not conscious of their giving.15 The recipient does not know he receives a gift, since he reacts to it as a dangerous threat. One might claim that Gower’s ecophobia invests nature with menacing powers it does not have. Sylvia Hunt and her colleagues suggest that his “imagination” causes him to fear the evening and “innocuous tree species such as walnuts and pines,” which are unlikely to cast terrifying shadows (1999, 29n45). We can think of this imaginary investment as an amusing countergift; even so, nature cannot receive it. Gower’s behavior is deranged, and he left “the whole Company” of Lord ——’s castle, “unanimous in their opinion of his being Mad” (Austen 1999, 14). Fittingly, Derrida associates the gift with madness (1992, 35, 57, 147).16 This giving episode unsettles borders more radically than the previous ones, since the abruptness with which it ends implicates Austen’s narration, blurring the boundary between container and contained—between the language of the story and the events it reports. Barchas observes: “Although Evelyn seems neatly framed by two contrasted landscapes, the old formal paddock and the modern picturesque vista, a significant gap in pagination and two separate continuations by Austen’s relatives profess incompleteness” (2012, 151–52). If the story lacked the landscape framing, we could be more certain that it was unfinished, and that certainty might seal the border. But what kind of end have we reached? Is the tale’s lack of an ending an ending, a literary choice? Do the continuations fall inside or outside Austen’s text?17 Is the end in fact a middle? “Evelyn,” which began in medias res, leaves us with Gower’s galloping into an undecidable ending that obscures “its relation to the border and even its transgressive relation to the separable line or trait of a border” (Derrida 1992, 91).

Literary Language and the Contradictions of the Gift One might protest that this chapter has forced a univocal meaning of the gift onto a network of different giving practices. Derrida acknowledges that giving seems to involve “an irremediable heterogeneity” (1992, 50). Criticizing Derrida, Hénaff denies that “the” gift exists: “what does exist” are “various gift-giving practices belonging to different categories that must be defined based on epistemologically convincing criteria” (2009, 218).18 Whatever one thinks of Derrida’s handling of the heterogeneity of gifts, the literary effect of “Evelyn” is to consolidate different giving practices. The generosity of the Webbs links their giving of food and money to their giving

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away of real estate and their giving away of Maria in marriage. Their gifts prepare readers to see the rest of the tale as variations on the theme of the gift. Is reminding someone a gift? Is a fallen rose a gift? Maria’s conveyance of the rose to her husband, which jogs his memory, invites us to answer, “Yes.” Is receiving a visitor analogous to receiving a gift? The verb “rose,” recalling the conspicuous pun, couples these giving practices. Gower petitions Lord —— not for a material gift but for a symbolic gift, his hypothetical consent; this symbolic gift would substitute for the material gift of Henry’s portrait (the first object of Gower’s journey), suggesting that giving consent is as much a gift as giving a portrait. The fallen rose prepares us to see the bounty of nonhuman nature as a gift; starlight and moonlight conclude the series of gift variations. “Evelyn” itself is a gift. Like most of the juvenilia, Austen dedicated it to someone, in this case, Mary Lloyd (Sabor 2006, 229). The giving practices that “Evelyn” narrates reflect the story’s own function as a gift.19 For Derrida, the heterogeneity of giving practices, of idiomatic uses of the word give (or donner, donare—take your pick), cannot dissolve the problem of the gift, since language does not merely describe giving: it is giving. Derrida claims: all semantic ambivalence and the syntactico-semantic problem of givingtaking are not situated only within language, the words of language or the elements of a textual system. Language is also an example of it as is any textual determination. In short, one must not only ask oneself … how it is possible that to give and/or to take are said this way or that way in a language, but one must also remember first of all that language is as well a phenomenon of gift-countergift, of giving-taking—and of exchange … . Everything said in language and everything written about giving-taking in general a priori would fold back on language and writing as giving-taking. (1992, 80–81) Derrida notes that a published text is for us a given. It is there before us who read it and who therefore begin by receiving it. If it has the structure of a given, it is not only because we are first of all in a receptive position with regard to it but because it has been given to us. (1992, 99) While the space of the text—the distribution of marks over its surface—is a given, so is the time of the text: “Evelyn” gives its readers time, a few minutes (enjoyable or not) of imaginary experience; readers, in turn, must give their time in order to read the text.20 From its opening sentence, “Evelyn” marks its awareness of how giving implicates the language that describes it: “In a retired part of the County of

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Sussex there is a village (for what I know to the Contrary) called Evelyn, perhaps one of the most beautiful Spots in the south of England” (Austen 1999, 1). Consider the tentativeness (“for what I know to the Contrary … perhaps”): the narrator is hesitant in setting up the givens of the story. To tell a story requires gifts of information. The narrator mocks the expository giving that narrative beginnings nakedly perform (“Once upon a time, there was …”).21 The narrator’s tentativeness spills into the plot. Gower asks “whether there were any house to be lett in the Parish. The Landlady, who as well as everyone else in Evelyn was remarkably amiable, shook her head at this question, but seemed unwilling to give him any answer” (Austen 1999, 1). Like the narrator, the landlady is linguistically hesitant, giving (shaking her head) and not giving an answer. Though she receives the epithet “remarkably amiable,” her contradictory reticence does not seem amiable. Austen’s characters imitate their narrator, fraying the boundary between them. Integral to the humorous absurdity of “Evelyn” is its withholding of information. Many characters disappear abruptly: what happens to Maria, Mrs. Willis, and the elder Webbs? The narrator does not give this information. Elsewhere, she delays information. We do not learn who Gower is or why he came to Evelyn or wherefrom until after the rose falls. When Gower writes a letter home, he withholds vital information, parodying his own narrator. His letter mentions Maria, but it does not explain that he married her, which puzzles his correspondent: “We all unite in Compts. to Maria, & beg to know who she is” (Austen 1999, 11). The name of Gower’s adversary, Lord ——, emblematizes narrational withholding. Though dashes also mark the omission of names in other texts by Austen,22 Lord ——’s withheld family name is allegorical, since he is the only character in “Evelyn” who resolutely refuses to give. The nominal dash gestures at protecting the reputation of an aristocrat; but no one could confuse this tale with real life, and it was not written to be published. Yet withholding is not pure stinginess: it makes possible the gift of surprise, one of the pleasures of reading. Literary giving becomes both generous and stingy. The characterization of Gower is suitably aporetic: one can construe it as the result of Austen’s generosity or of her stinginess. Gower seems to be an incoherent assemblage of qualities given ad hoc by the narrator. At first, he is so timid that he hesitates to ask the landlady a follow-up question (Austen 1999, 1), but we soon find him accepting the Webbs’ gifts with a regal nonchalance. The narrator does not explain how Gower could have forgotten Rose. Does he have an extremely bad memory, was Rose eminently forgettable, or did the loveliness of Evelyn and Maria lull him into a trance?23 Eventually we learn that Gower is “timid in the Dark,” but he also possesses a “noble courage” that enables him to infiltrate social gatherings of “superior Rank” (12). Then why did he feel so apprehensive with a social inferior, Mrs. Willis? If he fears the dark so much, why would he come to the castle at night, and why would he shut his eyes? The fact that he is from Carlisle

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may enhance the humor of his predicament but does not elucidate his psychology.24 Gower’s characterization is so inconsistent that it approaches the aleatory, which is one of the features of a true gift (for Derrida). Realism and literary types bestow plausibility and predictability on characters.25 Lord —— is a type: the uncooperative father. Rose is a type: the languishing lover. Maria is a type: the accommodating consort. Her parents are a parodic version of a type: the generous host. But Gower is not a consistent type, and he is certainly not realistic. His emotions and acts are unpredictable. On the one hand, we could say that Austen is withholding plausibility: hence, Gower lacks the psychological “depth” of a realistic character, and he does not accrue the historical richness of typological characters. On the other hand, we could just as well say that the canons of plausibility (realism and literary types) are stingy: they deny certain possibilities to a character. Realism forbids a man to gallop home with his eyes shut; the Webbs cannot burn down Gower’s house, or they would cease to play to type. We can construe Austen’s apparently aleatory characterization of Gower as generous: his possibilities are limited only by the length of the text. The type that best fits Gower is “madman,” but this is not very helpful: only at the end of the story does his madness become explicit, and it does not enable one to predict what he will do next, since the symptoms of his madness do not follow any particular diagnostic pattern. We could see him as a grab bag of aborted types: chivalric adventurer, complacent heir, repentant correspondent, gout-ridden epicure, rebel, madman, wimp. Some critics have attempted to foist coherence on Gower by reading him as a narcissist. Patricia Meyer Spacks regards him as a type, “the selfobsessed man” (1989, 129–30). Victoria Kortes-Papp, who characterizes “Evelyn” as “a narcissist fantasy,” claims that “Gower is aware only of himself” (1999, x). But he travels hundreds of miles just to get a portrait for Rose, he hesitates to ask a question that could offend Mrs. Willis, and he writes a repentant letter. These are not the acts of someone incapable of thinking about others. Part of Gower’s absurdity is his sporadic disinterestedness: he braves the terrors of a picturesque nightscape so that he can obtain consent to a marriage between dead people. A true narcissist would have never left Evelyn (or Carlisle). This is not to say that we should read Gower as a moral hero. Relentless in his logic, Derrida argues that the gift “should remain a stranger to morality … . If you give because you must give, then you no longer give” (1992, 156). Gilbert and Gubar describe the protagonists of Love and Freindship as “manic puppets,” and Gower is perhaps best thought of as such a puppet (1984, 119). Austen thwarts morality as well as psychology.26 Gower’s aleatory characterization makes the plot rough: it lurches from one unpredictable episode to another. Since Gilpin distinguishes the picturesque from beauty on the basis of roughness, we can consider the plot picturesque.27 Thus, the structure of “Evelyn” provides a correlative to both

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the picturesque and its discontents. The portrayal of Gower avoids the realism or the sustained typology that would smooth the plot, making it consistent or plausible. The tale’s lack of closure and its loose ends create an impression of picturesque asymmetry. But “Evelyn” is not entirely “rough.” Though the protagonist does not have a unified self, the theme of giving unifies the tale’s events—a unity that may pass unnoticed on a first reading. While “Evelyn” exposes Gower’s aesthetics to ridicule, it shares his taste for symmetry. Almost everybody who writes about “Evelyn” mentions the “four white Cows which were disposed at equal distances.” But this is not the only appearance of that anti-picturesque number. The “four Rose trees” of Evelyn Lodge “mark the quarters of the Shrubbery, by which means the Traveller might always know how far in his progress round the Paddock he was got” (Austen 1999, 8). The trees, “disposed at equal distances,” function as a kind of tracking device or clock: gifts of space bleed into gifts of time. The association of the number four with circular movement (the seasons) allegorizes the dilemma of the gift, which may obtain a countergift that demotes it to an exchange. Not coincidentally, Gower remembers his sister “four months” after he left Carlisle (Austen 1999, 10). Rose Gower is “the thirteenth daughter” (8) of her family—an unlucky number appropriate to her unlucky life. But 1 + 3 = 4. Puns on four cluster in Gower’s letter to Rose, dated “July 14th”: You will perhaps unjustly accuse me of Neglect and Forgetfulness. Alas! I blush when I own the truth of your Accusation.—Yet if you are still alive, do not think too harshly of me, or suppose that I could for a moment forget the situation of my Rose. Beleive me I will forget you no longer, but will hasten as soon as possible to —— Castle if I find by your answer that you are still alive. (Austen 1999, 10; emphasis added) Around the axis of generosity, the tale opposes the human to the nonhuman. Near the beginning, Gower arrives at an estate distinguished by its unpicturesque design; the owners immediately give him their house, land, and daughter. Toward the end of the story, he arrives at a castle in the midst of a picturesque landscape, but the owner refuses to give him any satisfaction. Although the Webbs are supremely generous, their landscape aesthetic counteracts the generosity of nonhuman nature: it seeks to trim, confine, and enclose vegetation. Lord —— does not repress nature’s gifts, but he is ungenerous to humans. The tale unfolds as a four-membered chiasmus: generous people live in a stingy landscape, while stingy people live in a generous landscape. Rather than merely representing the conflict between picturesque and anti-picturesque aesthetics, the tale performs it.28 On a first reading, “Evelyn” may appear whimsically disordered, but rereading can demonstrate its quadrilateral regularity. The repetition of the number four is downright

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mechanical—or allegorical. Yet rereading cannot overcome Gower’s incoherence and the plot’s lack of closure. Orchestrating tension between the picturesque and the anti-picturesque, between irregularity and regularity, “Evelyn” asks us to think about the relationship between human gifts and nonhuman nature.29 Is symmetrical gardening an ecophobic abuse,30 or is it a gift of human time and effort that completes vegetation, imbuing it with order? Is the profuse vegetation of the picturesque aesthetic a gift, or is it a dereliction of the human duty to cultivate the land? However we respond to the ecological problems it broaches, the tale’s performance of the tension it narrates scrambles the borders between narrator and characters, and thereby satisfies one of the Derridean criteria for the gift. Austen’s younger relatives, James Edward Austen and Anna Lefroy, wrote continuations whose unsatisfying quality offers indirect tributes to the brilliance of the original. James systematically nullifies the conflict between the picturesque and the anti-picturesque. His occasionally amusing continuation ties the loose strings of the plot and renders it circular, undoing the Derridean elements that resist circularity in the original tale. While Jane Austen leaves Gower suspended on an impossible journey “all the way” to “the Village” (presumably Evelyn), her nephew restores him to Evelyn Lodge and continues the plot from there. James also sends Gower home to Carlisle, where he reunites with Mrs. Willis (Sabor 2006, 365, 366), whom the death of Maria conveniently enables him to marry. The elder Webbs return: Mrs. Webb sends a letter to her son-in-law conveying her “gratitude” for his “unexampled generosity in writing to condole with us”; they enclose a “draught” for “30 pounds” (367). James retrieves all stray characters, alive or dead, and puts them in their place. Kortes-Papp thinks that this continuation is not brought to a veritable close at all; instead it is brought back to the beginning … . Having the story thus come full circle is as unfulfilling and uncompelling as we had imagined life to be in a home valued for the perfect symmetry of its landscape. (1999, xiii–xiv) Maximizing the symmetrical, James’s continuation suffers from a Gowerlike allergy to the picturesque. Anna Lefroy’s continuation is unsatisfying in a different way. Her ghostly nightmare, an attempt at parodying Gothic fiction, is not as funny as her aunt’s ironic treatment of Gower’s ecophobia. Anna does not manage to finish “Evelyn,” but, like James, she reunites Gower with the “hospitable Mrs. Willis” (Sabor 2006, 368). The invitation to continue the story may constitute Austen’s cleverest performance of the aporia of the gift—of the gift’s (dis)interested status. She wrote “Evelyn” before the birth of James and Anna. Nonetheless, leaving the story apparently unfinished with blank pages attached, Austen seems remarkably generous, giving an opportunity for her less talented relatives (or

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whoever came into possession of her manuscript) to collaborate with her. But this opportunity is a trap, which James and Anna fall into, revealing their inferiority to their aunt: the supposedly free gift of literary collaboration repays the giver—if only after her death. Appropriately, the Webbs, who initiate the tale’s sequence of giving, bear a name that has made more than one critic think of spiders.31 If Evelyn is a trap in which Gower gets stuck (forgetting his mission), then “Evelyn” lures literary dabblers into embarrassing themselves.

Austen, Derrida, and Capitalism It may seem ahistorical to dwell on the ways “Evelyn” coincides with Given Time, but Austen was active in a period eager, like Derrida, to rethink the relationship between gifts and exchange. Surely, all humans are influenced by gifts (if only by their absence), but Austen’s economic precariousness made her especially sensitive to problems of giving. Too high on the social scale to get a job yet too poor to enjoy economic security, the young Austen depended upon gifts—largely, upon her father’s. Jan S. Fergus notes: As an undowered woman, Austen’s place on the fringes of the gentry was more marginal than her brothers’. Unless she married, she would have an assured home and social position only during her father’s lifetime, and perhaps not even then: if he resigned his living or if he retired early, the home would be lost. (1994, 63)32 Her father’s “living” was itself a gift: he owed his appointment as rector to patronage. Though Jane Austen depended on her father’s generosity, he himself depended on the generosity of his patron. In any case, she could not take for granted the material means of literary production, since she relied on George Austen for room, books, and paper.33 Austen wrote “Evelyn” while she was locked in a patriarchal gift economy and denied full participation in the broader exchange economy. Wittily reflecting on these restraints, she uncovers the paradoxes of giving—paradoxes that show how difficult it is to separate giving clearly from exchange. Yet this separation was the goal of the leading political economists of Austen’s time. Edmund Burke’s “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” argues against the notion that in a year of bad harvest the government should increase the wages of agricultural workers or regulate grain prices: Whenever it happens that a man can claim nothing according to the rules of commerce and the principles of justice, he passes out of that department, and comes within the jurisdiction of mercy. In that province the magistrate has nothing at all to do; his interference is a violation of the property which it is his office to protect. Without all

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“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift doubt, charity to the poor is a direct and obligatory duty upon all Christians, next in order after the payment of debts, full as strong, and by nature made infinitely more delightful to us. (1887, 146)

As Simon Jarvis puts it, “Only when the books are legally balanced in the sphere of exchange may the surplus ethically be deployed in the sphere of gifts” (1999, 210). Christian charity opposes yet sanctifies the “sphere of exchange.” Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar sketch the division “between the economy with its underlying profit motive and the gift with its philanthropic purpose,” a division that has become “a constitutive feature of our current culture: it creates an ideology of exchange that ostensibly disallows, elides, and even forbids the mingling of two seemingly disparate forms of human interaction” (2009, 2).34 Burke’s friend Adam Smith famously extolled the good effects of the exchange economy, whose participants are self-interested traders, not generous givers: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (1991, 13; see also Burke 1887, 139–41). Jarvis warns: This is not at all to say that the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments thought that it did not matter whether brewers, butchers, and bakers were benevolent or not. It is rather to see that he insisted that we understand a separation of powers between their actions as benevolent donors and as interested exchangers. (1999, 210)35 Derrida’s paradoxes on the gift are the extreme logical outcome of an economic principle that was already at work in the eighteenth century: the belief that gift and exchange are (or should be) absolutely separate. Derrida’s paradoxes have received much unfavorable criticism. Hénaff accuses Derrida of imposing a Christianized view of gifts on the non-Western subjects of Mauss’s study (2009, 221–22).36 Alain Caillé argues that Derrida was wrong to oppose the anthropologists, and that he is basically quibbling over the semantics of the word “gift” (2001, 29–30). Klekar suggests: “The language of capitalist exchange … always needs to invoke the very ideals of generosity and reciprocal obligation that it is historically in the process of replacing” (2009, 127). This suggests that gifts are a supplement to capitalism, with all the aporetic significance Derrida brings to his reading of Rousseau’s “dangerous supplement” (1997, 141–64). The capitalist sphere of exchange has to divide itself from a sphere of non-exchange, but the latter must also remain part of the former. Derrida appears to think that his insistence on the separation of gift from exchange is innovative. He preens himself on “departing, in a peremptory and distinct fashion,” from the anthropological “tradition” exemplified by

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Mauss (Derrida 1992, 13). But Jarvis points out that Derrida’s abandonment of one tradition places him (perhaps unknowingly) in another, “the tradition of economism: the tradition in which only what is in no way contaminated by exchange can count as a gift” (1999, 211).37 The development of capitalism came to require economism. Christianity’s condemnation of usury long inhibited this development. Jarvis shows how the eighteenth-century French economist Turgot exonerated usury by separating gift from exchange: if I give you money as a gift, I should receive nothing in return; but if I give you money as a loan, it is an exchange. In the latter case, I can receive something in return (interest) because the loan is a free contractual agreement, and no moral objection ought to arise (Jarvis 2001, 74; 1999, 209). Austen did not have to be a prophet to anticipate Derrida. Both Austen and Derrida, obviously different in many ways, inherit (and push to imaginative or discursive extremes) an attitude toward gifts characteristic of modern capitalist economies—in theory and practice. The point is not that Austen was ahead of her time, but that Derrida is, in some respects, surprisingly old-fashioned. If nothing else, comparing her short story to Derrida’s treatise ought to make one better appreciate the economy of her wit. But how should we take “Evelyn”? Its irony obscures the young author’s ultimate political purpose—if she had one. In her attempt to imagine the gift, does she teach us that what usually passes for giving is self-serving hypocrisy? Or does she reveal the disingenuousness of the Enlightenment’s separation of gift from exchange? This separation, taken literally, bequeaths the gift to madmen under a starry sky.

Notes 1 Chapter 5 will discuss the “The History of England” at length. 2 Marvin Mudrick and Park Honan complain that the story awkwardly juxtaposes humor and seriousness. A. Walton Litz challenges Mudrick’s reading and argues for the importance of “Evelyn”; he rightly claims that the theme of generosity unifies the tale, but he reads it in moralistic terms that are inadequate, for reasons the present chapter will explain (1967, 31–35). Janine Barchas provides the most sophisticated reading of “Evelyn,” but she regards it as a derivative work composed before the development of the mature Austen’s “understated realism” (2012, 140). 3 Austen was not the only writer anticipating Derrida. Charles Haskell Hinnant argues that in the eighteenth century “many novelists were aware of the issues that Derrida was raising,” and they tried to represent the gift as “a perfectly gracious and gratuitous act performed without obligation or expectation”; he cites as an example a scene from Burney’s Evelina (2009, 154). 4 Juliet McMaster observes the “intense consciousness of medium that informs” Austen’s “youthful jeux d’esprit” (2012, 81). 5 Austen’s later—generally less frivolous—writings, such as Emma and Mansfield Park, include absurd gifts that may make one question whether one knows what a gift is. Harriet Smith preserves relics from Mr. Elton, such as the court plaister. She explains to Emma: “he cut it smaller, and kept playing some time with what was left, before he gave it back to me. And so then, in my nonsense, I could not

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“Evelyn”: The Impossibility of the Gift help making a treasure of it—so I put it by never to be used, and looked at it now and then as a great treat” (Austen 2005a, 366–67). According to Mary Hong, “the treasure scene locates the narratability of these fragments not so much in themselves as in a dialectic of their value and their worthlessness. Simply put, they are made significant by becoming insignificant” (2005, 248–49). Forestalled gifts also become the objects of satire. John Wiltshire performs a shrewd reading of Mrs. Norris’s irrational parsimony in Mansfield Park (2014, 72–75). According to Linda Zionkowski, “Mrs. Norris’s salient characteristic … is her refusal to acknowledge the gift economy, despite owing her class rank and style of living to its operations” (2016, 159). The closest thing to a pure gift in Austen’s mature novels takes place in Mansfield Park. Edmund gives Fanny a “gold chain,” but he also leaves behind an unfinished note, which Fanny comes to regard as “the dearest part of the gift” (Austen 2005b, 304, 307). Edmund’s gift of the chain is like a sponge that soaks up the reciprocity from his inadvertent gift of the unfinished letter: while the first part of the gift is clearly vulnerable to Derrida’s analysis (Edmund can pay himself back by thinking of himself as a generous person, a good cousin, a future clergyman), the second part may wriggle free. Perhaps a true gift is possible if it hides behind a quasi-gift, a covert exchange. At this point, Edmund takes no erotic interest in Fanny. Edmund realizes he is giving her a note, since he intentionally inscribed it. But he did not intend it as a gift, only as an explanation of the chain (what Derrida might call a parergon). He then forgets to finish the note. What causes Edmund to walk away without finishing it is a chance occurrence: Fanny happens to find him in her room. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have shown that critics frequently resort to notions of enclosure that the “hectic geographical maneuverings” of the juvenilia resist (1984, 109–12). Holly argues that Austen’s critics routinely miniaturize her fictions the better to enclose their subversive meanings (1989, 42–43). Peter Sabor traces this remark to Gilpin’s 1786 work Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (2006, 484n15). A dowry of ten thousand pounds makes Maria Webb among the “wealthiest female characters” in Austen’s work (Sabor 2006, 485n23). The gift of Maria is less bordered. The quickie wedding, for which “no banns have been read, no special license obtained” and at which “no clergyman officiates,” is legally “invalid,” as Sabor points out (2006, 485n24). Maria’s status as a gift is indeterminate: wife or concubine? If she is not his legal wife, Gower may not have any legal obligations to her; the gift comes with a minimum of strings attached. If Maria’s parents receive any countergift, it may be a husband for their daughter, though Gower does not seem an eligible choice, and it is not clear that they have any urgent need to get Maria married; with such a large dowry, she need not long be in want of a husband. Hénaff argues that, according to Mauss’s description of ceremonial giving, the gift is not valued in itself, but “as a token and substitute of one’s self” (2009, 229). The elder Webbs do not seem to have a self with which to imbue their gift, but Hénaff observes that “the highest expression” of ceremonial giving “is the wife who is transferred to the allied group, according to the exogamic rule” (225). This episode could be the farcical seed that later germinates in a melancholy subplot of Persuasion. Captain Benwick had his portrait made in miniature for Fanny Harville, but the gift could not be given because she died; at the end of the novel, he wants to give it to her replacement, Louisa (Austen 2006a, 252). Though most commentators who mention this episode side with Lord —— and reproach Gower for irrationality, the lord’s stinginess, however rational, makes him one of the first in a series of depriving fathers in Austen’s work (Sir Thomas

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Bertram, Mr. Woodhouse, Sir Walter Elliot, General Tilney). Gilbert and Gubar discuss this series (1984, 137). Simon C. Estok defines ecophobia as “a pathological aversion toward nature, an aggravated form of anthropocentrism expressed variously as fear of, hatred of, or hostility toward nature at least in part motivated by a sense of nature’s imagined unpredictability” (2011, 128n2; see also Estok 2018). When Alexander the Great tried to be generous to Diogenes, the latter supposedly asked for nothing “but that you would remove to the other side that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give me” (Johnson 1977, 235). Derrida claims: “There is no nature, only effects of nature: denaturation or naturalization” (1992, 170). Nonhuman “effects of nature” would seem to be the only entities readily capable of the gift. Yet Derrida at one point excludes them, since he requires that gifts be intentional: “There must be chance, encounter, the involuntary, even unconsciousness or disorder, and there must be intentional freedom, and these two conditions must—miraculously, graciously—agree with each other” (123). Perhaps Derrida takes his love of paradox a step too far, or perhaps his clinging to intentionality is anthropocentric. Rousseau also connects madness to one extreme form of the gift. He comments on the idea that slavery began when free humans gave themselves to a master: “To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is absurd and incomprehensible; such an act would in itself be illegal and void, because the person who performed it could not be in his proper senses. To say the same of a whole nation is to suppose the multitude are all mad; but still, folly would not confer the right so vainly contended for” (1791, 18–19). One continuation—in a different handwriting—appears on the pages left blank by Austen; the other, written on loose pages, was inserted in the manuscript (Sabor 2006, 363). Robert Bernasconi traces this problem to Derrida’s reading of Mauss: “If Mauss’s subsumption of the diverse practices he studies under the restricted connotations of the term ‘gift’ was questionable even to Mauss himself … one would have expected Derrida to have known that his readers would be at least equally suspicious about his imposition of the logic of the gift on very diverse cultural practices and would want an examination of the evidence for its applicability” (1997, 262). Marilyn Francus notes that “Authors of the long eighteenth century often called their texts gifts, signaling authorial largesse” (2009, 79). Francus speculates that the Marquis of Halifax’s Lady’s New Year’s Gift was a gift in the Derridean sense (87). Edward Neill mischievously designates all of Austen’s pre-Persuasion novels as “Greek gifts to Toryism” (1999, 116). Emma also intertwines the theme of giving and the novel’s performance of giving. Frank Churchill remarks that he can consider the gift of a piano to Jane “in no other light than as an offering of love” (Austen 2005a, 236). John Wiltshire comments: “This is one of the most delicious moments in Emma, not just double voiced (Frank having one meaning for himself, another for Emma) but triple voiced, since it allows the author simultaneously to reveal the truth of her plot and to hide it within the comedy” (2015, 109). Here Austen both gives away and withholds her plot’s secret, giving all the more satisfaction to rereaders. The famous first sentences of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, harboring free indirect discourse, also subject the exordial gift-function to irony, which takes back part of what the narrator gives. Chapter 5 has much to say about the opening of Pride and Prejudice. For instance, General —— (Austen 2006b, 345). F. B. Pinion compares Gower to a “lotus-eater” (1973, 63).

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24 According to Barchas, it is funny that “Gower, who as a native of Carlisle should be a well-seasoned veteran of grounds ‘of very ancient date,’ finds ‘the gloomy appearance of the old Castle’ at the story’s end utterly horrifying” (2012, 147). 25 For a nuanced account of the tension between realism and typology in the socalled “rise of the novel,” see Alliston 2011. 26 Resistance to morality is common in the juvenilia (McMaster 2000, 182). 27 Peter Knox-Shaw argues that “the plotting of Pride and Prejudice,” in which “unexpected disclosures and ironic reversals abound,” accords with the picturesque (2004, 90). If so, the plotting of “Evelyn” is more picturesque. 28 My claim that “Evelyn” is more interested in literary structure than verisimilitude may seem anachronistically modernist, but John Dixon Hunt persuasively links eighteenth-century appreciation of the picturesque to “a shifting of interest almost exclusively to the merely formal aspects of painting: chiaroscuro, variety of texture or what Gainsborough termed ‘business for the eye,’ composition, and an emphasis on subjects not for their own meaning but for their formal opportunities” (1986, 326). 29 Jason W. Moore proposes that “The genius of capitalism—from the global conquests that commenced in 1492—has been to treat the work of nature as a ‘free gift.’ From the beginning, Europe’s great empires set out deploying science in its widest sense … to make the whole of nature work on the cheap” (2016, 112). Though post-colonialism has exerted much influence on Austen scholarship, the imperialist exploitation of both humans and nonhumans shapes Austen’s work in ways that merit further study. 30 Estok includes “landscaped gardens” in his list of ecophobic symptoms (2011, 4). 31 Sabor notes that it is “an appropriate surname for a family who live like spiders in the middle of a web, in their ‘small circular paddock’” (2006, 484n17; see also Barchas 2012, 146). Of course, text means web: “we might define the theory of the text as an hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s web)” (Barthes 1975, 64). 32 Mary Poovey observes that the Austens “had never been wealthy and, with Austen’s father making less than £100 a year in 1797, Jane’s letters reveal constant worries about money during the entire period in which she composed, revised, and published Pride and Prejudice” (2012, 252). 33 Her father gave her the notebook in which she copied the second volume of the Juvenilia (Sabor 2006, xxv). B. C. Southam speculates that the notebook for Volume the Third, in which “Evelyn” appears, was also a paternal gift (1964, 17). 34 Zionkowski elsewhere notes a wrinkle the history of the gift: “while the conception of a community established and held together by the circulation of gifts appeared defunct in economic and social theory, the role of the gift in preserving human connections became a critical concern in texts written for and about women” (2016, 14). 35 Austen’s beloved Cowper wrote a poem called “Charity” (1963) that illustrates the attitudes toward giving Jarvis describes. 36 Hénaff goes so far as to accuse Derrida of “a complete misunderstanding of the very concept of ceremonial gift giving” (2009, 224). Pierre Bourdieu has Derrida in mind when he attacks philosophers for their “intellectualist” theories of the gift (2000, 194). But Bourdieu’s gift theory is not as different from Derrida’s as he thinks it is (Argyrou 2007, 303). 37 According to Marx and Engels, “The trick of proving to the ‘selfless’ that they are egoists is an old dodge, sufficiently exploited already by Helvétius and Bentham” (1998, 260–61). Perhaps one should not blame Derrida too much for his finicky conception of the gift. As Zionkowski and Klekar point out, “Analyzing gift dynamics poses significant challenges, since the gift itself resists scrutiny:

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those who interrogate its workings and operations appear as unduly suspicious of selfless acts, or as ingrates incapable of appreciating gestures emanating from exalted emotional states or high ethical principles” (2009, 11).

References Alliston, April. 2011. “Female Quixotism and the Novel: Character and Plausibility, Honesty and Fidelity.” The Eighteenth Century 52 (3–4): 249–269. https://muse. jhu.edu/article/455866/pdf. Argyrou, Vassos. 2007. “The Philosopher’s Gift.” Critique of Anthropology 27 (3): 301–318. doi:10.1177/0308275X07080358. Austen, Jane. 1999. Jane Austen’s Evelyn. Edited by Peter Sabor et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press. Austen, Jane. 2005a. Emma. Edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austen, Jane. 2005b. Mansfield Park. Edited by John Wiltshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austen, Jane. 2006a. Persuasion. Edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austen, Jane. 2006b. Pride and Prejudice. Edited Pat Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barchas, Janine. 2012. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Bernasconi, Robert. 1997. “What Goes Around Comes Around: Derrida and Levinas on the Economy of the Gift and the Gift of Genealogy.” In The Logic of the Gift: Toward and Ethic of Generosity, edited by Alan D. Schrift, 256–273. New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Burke, Edmund. 1887. “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity.” In The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 131–170. Vol. 5. London: Nimmo. https://a rchive.org/details/worksrighthonou28burkgoog/page/n9. Caillé, Alain. 2001. “The Double Inconceivability of the Pure Gift.” Angelaki 6 (2): 23–39. doi:10.1080/713650413. Chapman, R. W. 1948. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cowper, William. 1963. “Charity.” In The Poetical Works of William Cowper. Edited by H. S. Milford, 76–89. 4th ed. London: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corr. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doody, Margaret Anne. 1993. “Introduction.” In Catharine and Other Writings, by Jane Austen, ix–xxxviii. Edited by Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Estok, Simon C. 2011. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. New York: Routledge.

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Fergus, Jan S. 1994. Jane Austen: A Literary Life. New York: Macmillan. Francus, Marilyn. 2009. “’Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift.” In The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, 79–106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1984. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gilpin, William. 1792. Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting. London. https://archive.org/stream/threeessaysonpic00gilp#page/n9/mode/2up. Halperin, John. 1984. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hénaff, Marcel. 2009. “The Aporia of Pure Giving and the Aim of Reciprocity: On Derrida’s Given Time.” In Derrida and the Time of the Political, edited by Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Gerlac, 215–234. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hinnant, Charles Haskell. 2009. “The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” In The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, 143–158. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Holly, Grant I. 1989. “Emmagrammatology.” In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, edited by Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock, 39–51. Vol. 19. East Lansing: Colleagues Press. Honan, Park. 1977. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hong, Mary. 2005. “‘A Great Talker Upon Little Matters’: Trivializing the Everyday in Emma.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 38 (2–3): 235–253. doi:10.1215/ ddnov.038020235. Hunt, John Dixon. 1986. “The Picturesque.” In The Jane Austen Companion, edited by J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz, and Brian Southam, 326–330. New York: Macmillan. Hunt, Sylvia et al. 1999. “Explanatory Notes.” In Jane Austen’s Evelyn, edited by Peter Sabor et al., 24–31. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press. Jarvis, Simon. 1999. “The Gift in Theory.” Dionysius 17: 201–222. Jarvis, Simon. 2001. “Problems in the Phenomenology of the Gift.” Angelaki 6 (2): 67–77. doi:10.1080/713650417. Johnson, Samuel. 1977. “The Idler 14.” In Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt, 235–236. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klekar, Cynthia. 2009. “Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Deed of Trust in Congreve’s The Way of the World.” In The Culture of the Gift in EighteenthCentury England, edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, 125–141. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2004. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kortes-Papp, Victoria. 1999. “Introduction.” In Jane Austen’s Evelyn, edited by Peter Saboret al., ix–xv. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press. Litvak, Joseph. 1992. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/ 13030/ft9k4009nr/. Litz, A. Walton. 1967. Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1998. The German Ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. McMaster, Juliet. 2000. “The Juvenilia: Energy versus Sympathy.” In A Companion to Jane Austen Studies, edited by Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin, 173–189. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. McMaster, Juliet. 2012. “Young Jane Austen: Author.” In A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 81–90. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Moore, Jason W. 2016. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 78–115. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Mudrick, Marvin. 1968. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Berkeley: University of California Press. Neill, Edward. 1999. The Politics of Jane Austen. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinion, F. B. 1973. A Jane Austen Companion: A Critical Survey and Reference. New York: Macmillan. Poovey, Mary. 2012. “From Politics to Silence: Jane Austen’s Nonreferential Aesthetic.” In A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 251–260. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Rousseau, John James [Jean-Jacques]. 1791. An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract: Or Principles of Political Right. London. https://archive.org/details/ inquiryintonatur00rous/page/n4. Sabor, Peter, ed. 2006. Juvenilia, by Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Adam. 1991. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Southam, B. C. 1964. Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1989. “Plots and Possibilities: Jane Austen’s Juvenilia.” In Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan, edited by J. David Grey, 123–143. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Wiltshire, John. 2014. The Hidden Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiltshire, John. 2015. “The Heroine.” In The Cambridge Companion to Emma, edited by Peter Sabor, 105–119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zionkowski, Linda. 2016. Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Burney, Austen. New York: Routledge. Zionkowski, Linda, and Cynthia Klekar. 2009. “Introduction.” In The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, 1–12. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Speech, Writing, and Allegory in Pride and Prejudice

Austen’s lively representation of speech has become the topic of several books (Stovel and Weinlos Gregg 2002; Tandon 2003). Most impressive is Patricia Howell Michaelson’s Speaking Volumes, which corrects the tendency of scholars to overemphasize the role silent reading played in the development of the modern novel. Michaelson demonstrates that oral reading was a widespread practice throughout the long eighteenth century, when “reading together functioned both to reinforce domestic relationships and to provide practice in the art of speaking” (2002, 18). She claims that Pride and Prejudice served “as a kind of conversation manual”—especially for women neglected by the elocutionists, who usually presupposed a male audience (190, 188–89).1 This attention to oral reading, which apparently fuses speech and text, promises to overcome an unduly polarized understanding of eighteenth-century literature. But if readers can use Pride and Prejudice as a conversation manual, the story it tells seems disinterested in the consolidating possibilities of oral reading. Mr. Bennet habitually withdraws to his study to read alone. At Netherfield, Darcy and Miss Bingley read separate volumes (Austen 1813a, 121). Mr. Collins continues his oral reading of Fordyce’s Sermons (which is not well received) for no more than “three pages” (154). The Bennets read personal letters aloud, but this just seems to be an efficient way of sharing their content, and the letters (especially those of Mr. Collins) are unlikely models of conversational excellence. The most important scene of reading is Elizabeth’s solitary rumination on Darcy’s letter. Though Austen’s audience may profit from communal reading, the novel’s characters do not find it particularly attractive. It is metaphorically true that “in a literate culture, writing and speech are inseparable” (Michaelson 2002, 17), since humans are prone to mixing media. Writing nonetheless presupposes the potential separation of text from speaker. An emphasis on the inseparability of writing and speech glosses over the historical tensions between them. Michaelson herself notes that the supposedly “firm establishment of print culture” in the eighteenth century coincided with “the development of the elocution movement, which resisted the growth of print culture, emphasizing the virtues of the spoken word along the lines of ancient tradition” (44). She is rightly uncomfortable

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with the “either/or nature of the opposition” between speech and writing (17); but recent critics are not the originators of this opposition, which, despite its logical deficiencies, has shaped the history of media. The chief theorist of this history is Derrida, whose early work documents the pervasiveness of phonocentrism, the prejudice in favor of speech and against writing. Derridean theory, however, went in and out of style and left Austen’s novels nearly unscathed.2 This critical lacuna is especially unfortunate in the case of Pride and Prejudice, whose first two volumes, narrating the opposition of Wickham and Darcy, expose the seductive errors of phonocentrism. One critic observes in passing that Elizabeth Bennet’s conversations with Wickham lead her away from knowledge, not toward it, and deeper and deeper into trouble … . The power of the voice, in Austen’s world, must be disciplined by and tested against the power of writing, embodied in books and letters and assembled personal testimonies. (Simpson 1997, 81–82) Yet the novel does more than discipline wayward talk. While most Austen scholars luxuriate in moral judgment (a response much of her fiction certainly invites), the prejudice of Pride and Prejudice is immanent to language, arising—at least, in part—from asymmetries in our ways of producing language. Language materializes itself in one medium or another (speech, recorded speech, print, manuscript, PDF, tweet, or what have you). We may be tempted to assuage our anxiety about language in general by concentrating that anxiety onto a particular medium. Derrida’s early work shows how this anxiety has circulated; Austen’s Pride and Prejudice allegorizes its undoing.

Phonocentrism: From Derrida to the Eighteenth Century and Beyond Phonocentrism’s demotion of writing attempts to redeem speech. Media prejudice could take other forms—even a prejudice against speech and in favor of writing (graphocentrism). Austen, so different from Derrida in most respects, shares with him a resistance to media prejudice, and Derrida is a useful guide to the codependence of speech and writing in her fiction. People have often assumed that Derrida’s writing expresses a preference for writing over speech. But he emphasized that the challenge grammatology poses to the phonocentric tradition “will not consist of reversing it, of making writing innocent. Rather of showing why the violence of writing does not befall an innocent language” (1997, 37). In interviews, he took pains to make it clear that he was not pro-writing and anti-speech: “What interests me is writing in the voice, the voice as differential vibration, that is, as trace” (Derrida 1995, 140).

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Rather than scorning or idealizing particular media, Austen discloses how various media are made possible by what Derrida calls a generalized writing, an arche-writing. Rather than simply reversing the value judgments of phonocentrism (to claim that writing is good and speech bad), Austen’s novel reinscribes writing into speech, manifesting how speech has always been a kind of writing (which is not to say that oral sounds are really marks on pages in books, though that is true of the speech produced by literary characters). Austen was a thinker as well as a storyteller, and storytelling was her chief means of thinking. Pride and Prejudice is an allegorical reflection on media that goes beyond the empiricist protocols of eighteenthcentury British fiction and philosophy. Derrida characterizes phonocentrism as “the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language” (1997, 29). Writing is the enslaved instrument, speech the autonomous master. Speech, which usually dies on the air leaving no audible trace, can seem to be a pure projection of meaning—unlike written marks, whose visual persistence is more likely to betray the gap between signifier and signified. Though speech is no less external than writing (sound waves radiate outward), the externality of speech effaces itself, permitting the delusion that it is an unmediated unfolding of the speaker’s interior (Derrida 1973, 77).3 In speech, “Between what I say and what I hear myself say, no exteriority, no alterity, not even that of a mirror, seems to interpose itself” (Derrida 1982, 287). As Raoul Moati explains, “In speech, thought thus presents itself as the reassuring face of unfailing unity, preserved from all distance from itself, from all difference between its substance and the signs that it animates” (2014, 31). According to Derrida’s well-known historical synopsis, phonocentrism dominates European thought and establishes a hierarchy in which “good writing (natural, living, knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking) is opposed to bad writing (a moribund, ignorant, external, mute artifice for the senses). And the good one can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad one” (1981b, 149). Among Austen’s contemporaries, perhaps the most resolute advocate of phonocentrism was the actor and elocutionist Thomas Sheridan (1969), who offers the following appraisal of speech and writing: we may plainly perceive the vast superiority which the former must have over the latter, in the main end aimed at by both, that of communicating all that passes in the mind of man; inasmuch as the former works by the whole force of natural, as well as artificial means; the latter, by artificial means only. Sheridan thinks writing should be “an handmaid” of speech. He warns: The natural consequence, indeed, of neglecting the art of elocution, is that of reducing a living language at best to the state of a dead one. For in just and true elocution alone, consists the life of language; that which

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is false or disagreeable, places it below its dead written state, by the uneasiness and disgust which it occasions. He supports his phonocentrism with mythology: while writing is “the invention of man,” speech is “the gift of God.”4 David Simpson reads the eighteenth century’s idealization of the voice as a byproduct of the increasing influence of Shakespearean drama and the increasing dominance of print: “as social subcultures became more dispersed, and more than ever required the mediation of print to perform their communicative tasks, so the immediacy of spoken exchange was emphasized as the standard of exact and proper human intercourse” (1993, 135). Such idealization persists in the nineteenth century. William Godwin claims: A book is an abstraction. It is but imperfectly that we feel, that a real man addresses us in it, and that what he delivers is the entire and deepwrought sentiment of a being of flesh and blood like ourselves, a being who claims our attention, and is entitled to our deference. The living human voice, with a countenance and manner corresponding, constrains us to weigh what is said, shoots through us like a stroke of electricity, will not away from our memory, and haunts our very dreams. (1831, 251–52; quoted in Simpson 1993, 135) Though he does not use the word “phonocentrism,” John A. Dussinger, one of the only critics who has focused on the play of media in Austen, claims that the “privileging of living speech over writing (as inert, dead language) is a predominant rhetorical strategy in the whole genre of the early novel and attains a remarkable technical sophistication in the novels of Jane Austen” (1990, 4). He provides nuanced analysis of Austen’s phonocentrism, and he ends up arguing that “there is a priority of the written over the spoken word in Austen, even though the ideal of letter-writing is ‘to-the-moment,’ in imitation of speech encounters” (147). He finds that “usually in Austen,” books “are suspect, ersatz objects used for ego gratification rather than real sources of knowledge”; thus, the printed book occupies the lowest rank in the media hierarchy, beneath speech and the handwritten letter that, ideally, imitates speech (149).5 But, in fact, Austen does not clearly privilege letters over books. Though Mr. Collins, for example, flaunts his pomposity by reading from Fordyce, his letters (not to mention his conversation) also provide abundant evidence of pomposity; he shuns novels, something readers are unlikely to emulate (Austen 1813a, 154). Austen’s novels include absurd bookish characters like Mary Bennet, but they also include absurd illiterates like Lydia Bennet.6 Austen displays the capacity of humans to make fools of themselves in any medium. By contrast, Mr. Knightley, the hero of Emma, suggests that a fondness for reading is not in itself egocentric or obnoxious, and Austen’s most scrupulous heroines, Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, are enthusiasts of the printed word.7

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In her reading of Emma, Nancy Armstrong argues that Austen valorizes “a new kind of writing based on polite speech,” part of a strategy that “enables her to situate speech logically prior to writing. In this way, she uses speech to authorize her preferred style of writing on grounds that the source of speech, unlike that of writing, resides in the individual” (1998, 135). But what is “polite speech” if not a speech chastened and honed by writing? Politeness regulates the spontaneity of “rude” speech (don’t call Mr. Knightley “Knightley”!). Armstrong is aware that the “new kind of writing” comes under strain: Although Austen suggests that writing should imitate speech because speech comes straight from the self, the novel itself operates according to an entirely different principle. To ground desire in a self that exists prior to language, Austen has to disclose areas in the self that have not yet been spoken. To be present before it is spoken, desire has to be inscribed within the individual. That is to say it has to be written. (1998, 137) In other words, Austen advocates phonocentrism, but her novel ends up presupposing an ontology that resembles writing more than speech. It is arbitrary, however, to associate the phonocentric elements with “Austen” and the non-phonocentric elements with “the novel,” since Armstrong’s (and most critics’) idea of “Austen” is extrapolated from “the novel.” Austen’s attitude toward speech and writing is easier to account for if we imagine her texts disarticulating media hierarchies, rather than perpetuating them. She does not idealize the written word, unlike Samuel Richardson, master of the epistolary novel, who writes to Sophia Westcomb that their “correspondence is, indeed, the cement of friendship”: it is friendship avowed under hand and seal: friendship upon bond, as I may say: more pure, yet more ardent, and less broken in upon, than personal conversation can be even amongst the most pure, because of the deliberation it allows, from the very preparation to, and action of writing … . While I read it, I have you before me in person: I converse with you. (1964, 65) Richardson’s graphocentrism merely inverts the value judgments of phonocentrism: now writing achieves greater purity and ardor than speech; being “less broken in upon,” writing is rich in presence while speech is comparatively poor.8 One of the most startling examples of graphocentrism is Samuel Johnson’s claim in his preface to Shakespeare that “A dramatic exhibition is a book recited with concomitants that increase or diminish its effect.” Low genres such as “Familiar comedy” can benefit from this recitation; high genres (“imperial tragedy”) cannot (1984, 432).

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Austen avoids such graphocentrism but also the bold phonocentrism exhibited shortly after her death by one of her most distinguished early readers, Walter Scott. In The Heart of Midlothian, the character Reuben tells the protagonist, Jeanie Deans, that he will write to the Duke of Argyle to persuade him to save her sister from the death penalty. Jeanie says: We must try by all means … but writing winna do it – a letter canna look, and pray, and beg, and beseech, as the human voice can do to the human heart. A letter’s like the music that the ladies have for their spinets – naething but black scores … . It’s word of mouth maun do it, or naething, Reuben. (Scott 1982, 267)9 Scott narrates face-to-face speech between the sovereign and the anti-epistolary girl as a heroic exploit: Jeanie is able to petition the Queen, who obtains the pardon. Elizabeth Bennet’s final argument with Lady Catherine de Bourgh prefigures this encounter, though—as we will see—in an inverted form: Austen’s ironies sabotage phonocentrism. Derrida underestimates the ability of literary language to resist prejudice. Reviewing Of Grammatology, Paul de Man claims that Derrida’s account of phonocentrism is a “story” told “in order to dramatize, to give tension and suspense to the argument.” According to de Man, phonocentrism is not a historical phase: the myth of the priority of oral language over written language has always already been demystified by literature, although literature remains persistently open to being misunderstood for doing the opposite. None of this seems to be inconsistent with Derrida’s insight, but it might distress some of his more literal-minded followers: his historical scheme is merely a narrative convention. (1983a, 137–38)10 Pride and Prejudice spends its first half evoking phonocentric myth, and then demystifies it in the second half; because the demystifying process has already completed itself (having been written and published) before the reader begins the text, the demystification has happened before it happens. The novel clearly supports de Man’s speculative argument. The remarkable “lucidity” for which he praises Rousseau’s writing belongs just as much to Austen’s (1983a, 136). The story of Pride and Prejudice plausibly represents some aspects of genteel British life c. 1800. But it is also an allegory of the text’s formal operations. The novel gives more than mimetic guidance about the phenomenal world (“don’t trust smooth-talking men”): it dramatizes its own materiality and reads its unfolding. Following the crease of the novel’s allegory will show how.

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Phonocentrism in Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice consistently links Darcy to writing and reading. His bookishness could be a mode of bashfulness, so one may read his bookishness as a sign of his personality. But there are other plausible ways Austen could have depicted Darcy: as a taciturn hunter, for example. She links Darcy with writing so often that the link has an allegorical, rather than a solely mimetic, effect: it presents Darcy not only as an individual person (one who favors writing) but as a sign of writing.11 Early chapters establish Darcy’s discomfort with ballroom culture, a discomfort crystallized in the mot “Every savage can dance” (Austen 1813a, 53). Dancing entails, even in the Regency, corporeal closeness, presence. It also requires small talk. The initial aversion to dancing aligns Darcy with absence and something other than speech. Darcy’s insulting dismissal of Elizabeth (“not handsome enough to tempt me”), spoken within her hearing, marks him as a man who cannot control his voice (21). During Elizabeth’s stay at Netherfield, Darcy reads a book after dinner instead of playing cards, and his literary “progress” becomes the object of “Miss Bingley’s attention” (121). Miss Bingley, trying to get his attention, begins to stroll down the room: “Her figure was elegant, and she walked well;—but Darcy, at whom it was all aimed, was still inflexibly studious” (124). In the next chapter, he tries to avoid showing Elizabeth any sign that “could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity”: he scarcely spoke ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and though they were at one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most conscientiously to his book, and would not even look at her. (Austen 1813a, 133–34) When Darcy at last commits himself to the power of speech, it backfires (Austen 1813b, 123–24). He talks without heeding his audience, and, unlike Wickham, he cannot harmonize speech with its accessories: Darcy “spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real security. Such a circumstance could only exasperate farther” (125). His speech appears to intensify, rather than negate, the difference between signifiers and signifieds. The struggle between Darcy and Wickham is, of course, a struggle between two men; yet it is also a struggle between writing and speech. Long before Wickham’s first appearance in the novel, Austen carefully prepares this media contest by contrasting Darcy’s bookishness with the conversational talent of a series of foils. Austen first sets up a contrast between Bingley’s friendliness and Darcy’s reserve. One night Bingley offers Elizabeth the use of his books, apologizing for his lack of attention to his library (Austen 1813a, 81). Darcy speaks up to defend his own bibliophilic devotion: “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as

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these” (82). This gives rise to a debate on the achievements necessary for an “accomplished woman.” Caroline Bingley reels off a list, which Darcy supplements with “something more substantial”: “the improvement of her mind by extensive reading” (85). Later, “Mr. Darcy was writing, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching”; she offers “perpetual commendations … either on his hand-writing, or on the evenness of his lines, or on the length of his letter” (102–3). After claiming that Darcy “does not write with ease. He studies too much for words of four syllables,” Bingley describes his own style: “My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them— by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents” (105–6). Bingley’s writing too closely resembles spontaneous speech. Darcy chides him: Bingley’s “appearance of humility” is “an indirect boast” (106). These scenes reinforce a binary pattern that has been in development for several chapters: Darcy always appears as the defender of writing instead of speech, deliberation instead of spontaneity, reserve instead of friendliness. Later, Darcy’s cousin takes Bingley’s place, and Colonel Fitzwilliam’s urbane conversation highlights Darcy’s reticent rudeness (Austen 1813b, 84). Wickham’s “appearance was greatly in his favour; he had all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address” (Austen 1813a, 163).13 Wickham tells Elizabeth: “the late Mr. Darcy bequeathed me the next presentation of the best living in his gift”; alas, “there was just such an informality in the terms of the bequest as to give me no hope from law. A man of honour could not have doubted the intention, but Mr. Darcy [the younger] chose to doubt it” (181–82). Darcy comes off as a mean literalist who adheres to the dead letter and violates the spirit of the will. Wickham relies on a spoken promise, while Darcy (according to Wickham) manipulates written law, which Wickham cannot influence. Wickham reinforces the contrast: “I have a warm, unguarded temper, and I may perhaps have sometimes spoken my opinion of him, and to him, too freely” (182). Once again, Darcy behaves as a cold man of writing and reserve, while his foil behaves as a “warm” man of spontaneous speech. It is a tribute to Austen’s skill that more people do not notice how allegorically (and unrealistically) polarized Wickham and Darcy are. As Neill observes, Wickham is “a shadowy character made out of differences from Mr Darcy without positive terms – money/no money; ethics/no ethics; charmless/charming” (1999, 63). Over the course of the novel, Wickham is the only important male character who does not write anything, though Darcy recalls that after Wickham’s father died, the son wrote a letter asking Darcy to pay him upfront, instead of giving him the promised ecclesiastical living: “He had some intention, he added, of studying the law,” a proposal that Darcy dismisses as a “mere pretence … his life was a life of idleness and dissipation” (Austen 1813b, 149–50). Although lawyer and clergyman are two of the most plausible professions for Wickham (whose father was a lawyer), it is allegorically significant that he fails at the art of letters and

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becomes a soldier, since arms and letters are conventionally opposed professions.14 Grounding Pride and Prejudice in eighteenth-century philosophical debates, Felicia Bonaparte argues that the contest between these men teaches Elizabeth about the superiority of empiricism to rationalism: “Elizabeth herself begins with the assumption that what is reasonable must, by that very token, be true. Wickham’s ‘account’ of the relationship between Darcy and Lady Catherine, seeming to be ‘rational,’ seems to her therefore implicitly right”; Elizabeth must “learn that the rational may be false” (2005, 145–46). Wickham’s account, however, does not seem rational. A logical flaw runs through his speech: he says he will not “expose” Darcy, though that is exactly what he has been doing (Austen 1813a, 183). His persuasiveness derives, as Elizabeth admits, from his natural delivery, not his rationality: “Besides, there was truth in his looks” (197). At one point, she seems indifferent to the subject matter (let alone the rationality) of his speech: his conversational “skill” can make even the “most threadbare topic … interesting” (173). Wickham appeals not so much to her rationalist, as to her phonocentric, prejudice. Without his amiable voice and body, his specious reasoning might not stand a chance. Elizabeth later realizes this: “His countenance, voice, and manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue” (Austen 1813b, 161). Though the word “phonocentric” may be recherché, the experience here depicted by Austen is commonplace.15

Writing’s Rehabilitation Darcy’s letter, itemizing Wickham’s sins, obviously lacks Wickham’s advantages. Its formal prose does not imitate a spontaneous voice or encourage Richardsonian intimacy. Darcy writes: Wilfully and wantonly to have thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought up to expect its exertion, would be a depravity, to which the separation of two young persons, whose affection could be the growth of only a few weeks, could bear no comparison. (Austen 1813b, 139–40) This periodic sentence, loaded with alliterating dyads, relative clauses, and appositive phrases—a sentence in which the main verb appears as the fortysecond word—does not imitate speech (not even uptight Darcy’s speech). While not all the letter is so elaborate, Darcy’s writing seems the result of diligence rather than spontaneous emotion. Neill cites the letter’s “insufferable orotundity” (1999, 54). Though a dignified rigidness straddles the letter and Darcy’s foregoing speech, his terse speech is at odds with this sudden orotundity. Moreover, “Darcy’s epistle … is less a confession (it offers little

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insight into the ‘personality’ Elizabeth will learn to love) than a legal defense” (Favret 1993, 149–50). The physical form of the letter is significant. Darcy writes: “Whatever may be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has created, a suspicion of their nature shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character” (Austen 1813b, 148–49). May we be excused for finding a pun in “character” (moral disposition/unit of writing)?16 Darcy inscribes the truth of Wickham in the letter, which is folded for delivery. Elizabeth skims the letter and puts “it hastily away, protesting that she would not regard it, that she would never look in it again.” In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on nothing, she walked on; but it would not do; in half a minute the letter was unfolded again, and collecting herself as well as she could, she again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham. (Austen 1813b, 158) Heydt-Stevenson remarks: “the truth about Wickham ‘unfolds’ before her as she folds and unfolds the letter, and her eyes sprint so impatiently that their movement incapacitates cognition” (2008, 72). The obstructive form of writing, its folding, provides a material emblem for a prominent aspect of Austen’s fictions: though they celebrate “generous candour” (Austen 1813b, 166), their didactic progress depends on opacity, secrecy, and sometimes outright dishonesty—on deferrals or diversions of reference. In Emma, for example, Austen allows Knightley, the voice of good conduct, to disapprove of secrets. Yet, as D. A. Miller points out, “if all her characters behaved according to Mr. Knightley’s principles … there would be no source of narratability” (1981, 40). Likewise, as Gilbert and Gubar observe, though Elizabeth “had scorned Mr. Collins’s imputation that ladies never say what they mean,” at the end of Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth refuses to answer Lady Catherine and lies to her mother about the motives for that lady’s visit. Furthermore, Elizabeth checks herself with Mr. Darcy, remembering “that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin.” (1984, 161) Deferral of understanding is an unwritten rule of Austen’s novels, and this is not entirely to create suspense. Consider Caroline Bingley: she is right about Wickham and Darcy and gives an early warning to Elizabeth (Austen 1813a, 217–18), but she gets nothing in return. Even Mr. Collins and Lady de Bourgh achieve comic grandeur, while Caroline just seems petty—despite, or maybe because of, her apparent exemption from the media prejudice that misguides other characters. An anti-Jane Fairfax, Miss Bingley suffers from

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the transparency of her desire. The novel maroons her on plain old snobbery. While the letter reveals secrets, it owes much of its potency to its folding; by contrast, Darcy’s marriage proposal was too open. The written truth of his letter does more than blot out the falsehood of Wickham’s speech—fortunately so, or there would not be much reason (besides fulfilling conventional romantic expectations) for the novel to fill up another volume. Despite his orotundity, Darcy does not idealize his letter. Writing like a lawyer, he nonetheless avoids graphocentrism by annexing the letter to speech: “For the truth of everything here related, I can appeal more particularly to the testimony of Colonel Fitzwilliam, who … has been unavoidably acquainted with every particular of these transactions” (Austen 1813b, 154–55).17 The letter is a means of delayed, yet incomplete, self-mastery. Though Darcy supplements his poor conversational performance with a letter, he recognizes that the letter itself may need supplements (the colonel’s “testimony”). He does not pitch his letter as an autonomous receptacle of truth. Elizabeth’s reaction is more ironic than most commentators have acknowledged, and its ironies show that plenty of work remains for the novel to do. Having read Darcy, Elizabeth perfectly remembered every thing that had passed in conversation between Wickham and herself, in their first evening at Mr. Philips’s. Many of his expressions were still fresh in her memory. She was now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger, and wondered it had escaped her before. (Austen 1813b, 162–63) Darcy’s letter seems to challenge the claim in Plato’s Phaedrus that writing only promotes bad memory (reminding), not the good memory (anamnesis) that speech, especially Socratic dialogue, can produce (1989, 520; Derrida 1995, 234).18 Perhaps not coincidentally, British interest in Plato was flourishing in the 1790s, the decade Austen started to write the novel (Evans 1943, 107). Darcy’s letter enables Elizabeth for the first time to know what Wickham was really saying, to read his “impropriety.” Her reading incurs an antithesis of phonocentrism: now writing becomes true, good, and instructive, while speech is false, bad, and delusive. Free indirect discourse, however, may qualify our response to Elizabeth’s response: the slippage from “She perfectly remembered every thing” to “Many of his expressions were still fresh in her memory” reveals that these statements record Elizabeth’s momentary convictions, not Austen’s insistence. Elizabeth’s claim to tardy self-knowledge should not be taken altogether seriously, though her openness to self-criticism is no doubt commendable: “How despicably have I acted!” she cried.—“I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who

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have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.” (Austen 1813b, 165–66) Is she literally crying these reproaches on the grounds of Rosings, or is this a silent, paradoxically internal, outburst? We cannot tell.19 The cry braids distinct media: its sentence fragments and exclamation points suggest the informality and volatility of speech; but the dashes, which may indicate intense emotion, are also frequent in Darcy’s legalistic letter,20 and Elizabeth’s penultimate sentence is a Johnsonian period worthy of that letter. She produces a fine example of what Derrida calls “writing in the voice.” The irony of the passage is that when she proclaims her self-knowledge, she sounds (or reads) more like Darcy’s letter than herself. The claim “I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned” echoes Darcy, who writes: “ignorant as you previously were of every thing concerning either” (Austen 1813b, 154). Though she did not possess full self-knowledge in her transactions with Wickham, she has not acquired it in rereading Darcy’s letter. The novel incrementally reveals how even spontaneous speech bears the trace of writing (or, more accurately, arche-writing). Elizabeth’s witty comparison of conversation to piano playing suggests that there is something textual and mechanical about conversation (Austen 1813b, 94–95). It is not purely spontaneous; nor is it a purely natural talent: it is an acquired skill that allows improvisation but often succeeds through iteration (through practice reading “black scores”). The facility acquired through conversational practice can result in gaffes as well as elegant retorts. Accordingly, Elizabeth’s dialogue sometimes reveals a deficit of self-presence. Earlier in the novel, though she is intent on not dancing with Darcy, she accepts his abrupt invitation, “without knowing what she did … and she was left to fret over her own want of presence of mind” (Austen 1813a, 207). This minor and totally plausible scene illustrates how speech can function like writing, how fossilized courtesy can kick in, forestalling a self-present and knowing response. In the dance that follows, Darcy asks Elizabeth what she thinks about books. She declines the topic: “No—I cannot talk of books in a ballroom; my head is always full of something else.” “The present always occupies you in such scenes—does it?” said he, with a look of doubt. “Yes, always,” she replied, without

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Elizabeth wants to exclude books from ballroom talk (the alliteration undercuts the speaker, hinting that the two are not so easily divided). She claims to be engrossed by the present, but the absent Wickham is on her mind. One reason Austen could resist phonocentrism with such aplomb was that she knew from experience that much of what passes for conversation is, in Dussinger’s phrase, “inert, dead language.” The mimetic power of the novel does not result from its avoidance or transcendence of “dead language,” but from the cleverness with which Austen incorporates it, exploiting inertia to underwrite vivacity. After reading Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth becomes more conscious of “writing in the voice.” In encounters with Jane and Lydia (Austen 1813b, 186–87; 1813c, 167), she guards herself against blurting out what she wants to leave unsaid. Speech sometimes threatens to turn the speaker into an involuntary repeating device—like writing.21 Wickham demonstrates that a man of speech can function like a piece of writing, stupidly repeating itself. When Elizabeth encounters him shortly before his regiment leaves town, he changes for the worse by not changing: “She had even learnt to detect, in the very gentleness which had first delighted her, an affectation and a sameness to disgust and weary” (Austen 1813b, 220–21). Note that Elizabeth’s reaction to Wickham’s “gentleness” is no longer automatic: it is the product of studious deciphering. Though his good looks are self-evident, she has to learn “to detect” his “sameness.” There is a gap between the social phenomenon called Wickham and Elizabeth’s judgment, just as there is a gap between the visual arrangement of letters on a page and the meaning we read off them. Wickham is a slow learner. He believes “that however long, and for whatever cause, his attentions had been withdrawn, her vanity would be gratified and her preference secured at any time by their renewal” (221). Iterability—the potential for repetition, even in the absence of the subject—is what makes writing possible.22 Yet it turns out that speech can be as repetitive as writing. Wickham can only repeat his old routines, and he is so unknowing that he thinks others will repeat their earlier responses to him, as though his life were a series of rehearsals. His elopement with Lydia is a pathetic (though, ironically, more successful) repetition of his attempted elopement with Georgiana Darcy. Even after he elopes with Lydia, Mrs. Gardiner claims that he “was exactly what he had been, when I knew him in Hertfordshire” (Austen 1813c, 179). When Wickham first visits the Bennet house after his marriage, he repeats his old demeanor, unruffled by shame (158–59). Though the repetitiveness of the novel has certainly not escaped readers’ notice, scant attention has been paid to its mechanical quality. Wickham’s life, far from a spontaneous enactment of desire, follows a rigid script.

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It is almost as though the novel were first affirming then inverting Socrates’ famous complaint in the Phaedrus that speakers can vary their discourse in response to interlocutors, while a text can do nothing but repeat itself (Plato 1989, 521). Early on, Wickham personifies speech, while Darcy—“inflexibly studious” (Austen 1813a, 124)—personifies repetitive writing. Later, Wickham’s versatility, his ease of adapting to strangers, morphs into a seedy repetition compulsion, while Darcy the stiff shows modest moral improvement (or, at least, amended geniality). Repetitions are not identical; the same differs (Derrida 1973, 129–60). When Wickham repeats himself in the second half of the book, he creates a different impression than he did when Elizabeth first met him, and Darcy’s bashfulness at the Bennet dinner table in the third volume (Austen 1813c, 203–4) has a different effect on her than his previous bashful conduct had. Nonetheless, Darcy, a personification of writing, is rigid to the end. Mrs. Gardiner’s letter explains why he intervened to arrange Lydia’s marriage: “He generously imputed the whole [scandal of elopement] to his mistaken pride, and confessed that he had before thought it beneath him, to lay his private actions open to the world. His character was to speak for itself” (172). But his character (in both senses of the word) cannot speak for itself, just as writing, according to Socrates in the Phaedrus, is unable to defend itself. Even when Darcy attempts to overcome his “mistaken pride,” he still does not speak for himself: it is Mrs. Gardiner’s writing that reveals what he said (and did). The exposure of Wickham’s iterability advances Darcy’s rehabilitation. Many critics have taken interest in Elizabeth’s visit to Darcy’s estate, whose housekeeper and portraits play a significant role in modifying his future wife’s attitude toward him. Studying the larger portrait of Darcy grants her “a more gentle sensation toward the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance. … Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character” (Austen 1813c, 14). Derrida examines how painting differs from writing: Painting, like sculpture, is silent, but so in a sense is its model. Painting and sculpture are arts of silence … . The silence of the pictorial or sculptural space is, as it were, normal. But this is no longer the case in the scriptural order, since writing gives itself as the image of speech. Writing thus more seriously denatures what it claims to imitate. (1981b, 137) Nonetheless, painting shares writing’s constitutive iterability.23 Like a writer writing a text, the painter and the model (Darcy) collaborate to produce an image; the image may be intended to please a patron (Darcy’s father) and may use pictorial conventions to produce such pleasure, but the audience of the painting will be anybody who happens to look at it.24 The model may have had specific intentions (to smile like a good son), but unforeseen

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spectators will find different meanings in the painting, meanings no doubt unanticipated by the model. Encountering Darcy’s portrait, Elizabeth reads his gaze in the context of his earlier “impropriety”—a context that did not exist at the time the portrait was painted (Darcy had not met Elizabeth): [When] she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression. (Austen 1813c, 14–15) The fixing of the gaze is a fiction: rather than just passively receiving sense data from the image, Elizabeth uses it to repair her memory.25 She later asks Darcy when he began to fall in love. He replies: “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun” (Austen 1813c, 304). This is a plausible assessment of the limitations of human memory: if he wanted to “fix on” the cause, he could only do so by making up an origin story; etiology would require simplification, selective memory, Elizabeth’s softening. In a humorous chat with Jane, Elizabeth also has trouble fixing the origin of her love (290). But these difficulties say something about love as well as memory. Love may have no simple (pure) origin: like a written sign, it can only emerge as a repetition. The love between Elizabeth and Darcy contrasts with love at first sight, in which the lover thinks that he or she began at the beginning. The depictions of Darcy (in paint and the housekeeper’s words) become supplements required for the redemption of the model—if not the original. In Volume I, Elizabeth met Darcy, and things went awry. Volume III re-unfolds their acquaintance: now she meets the copies of the man before the man appears. Earlier in the novel, Wickham united gentleness of voice and physical beauty. Then Darcy defended himself by writing a letter that could mortify his beloved but could not make himself attractive to her. At last, through the portrait and the housekeeper’s voice, Pemberley succeeds in making Darcy attractive; but the two media of attraction, looks and speech, united in Wickham, are split. Darcy will soon appear in the flesh and earn Elizabeth’s admiration with his kindness to the Gardiners; but, unlike Wickham, he has—as Yeats might put it—to be rent before he can become whole. If one ignores the play of media—that is, if one reads the chapter as straightforward mimesis—the visit to Pemberley seems to indulge in patriarchal kitsch. But Austen does not sentimentalize the origin; she leaves that to her readers. Though few events could be more common in a novel than the disappearance and reappearance of a character, Pride and Prejudice shuffles Darcy and his copies so frequently that it underscores the oscillation between presence and absence at stake in phonocentric discourse about writing.26 Elizabeth is

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Amazed at the alteration in his manner since they last parted … when he spoke, his accent had none of its usual sedateness; and he repeated his enquiries as to the time of her having left Longbourn, and of her stay in Derbyshire, so often, and in so hurried a way, as plainly spoke the distraction of his thoughts. (Austen 2013c, 16–17) Wickham disgusted Elizabeth with the “sameness” of his speech; Darcy now amazes her with his changed accent. Yet Austen complicates the reversal by making repetitive “enquiries” a symptom of Darcy’s change. Repeating himself, he becomes more like Wickham, but in a way that punctuates their difference: while Wickham’s conversational “sameness” is the result of chronic insincerity, Darcy’s repetitiveness marks a refreshing change and implies genuine feeling. Darcy’s variability continues to augment. After their meeting, he quickly disappears. Just as the text that announced Wickham’s “real character” had to be folded and unfolded multiple times, so the rehabilitated Darcy cannot arrive all at once, but racks up presence through a series of intermissions. He disappears from the novel at Rosings, reappears in the form of a portrait and the housekeeper’s praise, disappears when Elizabeth leaves the house, reappears when he accidentally crosses her path, disappears after an embarrassed conversation, then reappears to ask for an introduction to her uncle and aunt (Austen 2013c, 23). In the first chapter of Volume III, Darcy’s original becomes derivative.27 This is how writing works. For a written mark to function as writing it must repeat a preexisting convention; otherwise, it would appear as a random doodle or accidental stain. Iterability, the “factor that will permit the mark (be it psychic, oral, graphic) to function beyond” the moment of its inscription, “namely the possibility of its being repeated another time—breaches, divides, expropriates the ‘ideal’ plenitude or self-presence of intention, of meaning (to say) and, a fortiori, of all adequation between meaning and saying” (Derrida 1988, 61–62). The original of Darcy was already a copy. Austen inaugurates Volume III by dramatizing this insight: at Darcy’s ancestral home, Elizabeth experiences origin as an array of repetitions, copies.

Dancing about Arche-Writing Repetition will empower Elizabeth. Lady de Bourgh drives to Longbourn to prevent her marriage: “I instantly resolved on setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to you” (Austen 1813c, 244). Elizabeth triumphs in this contest by refusing to promise not to marry Darcy. She does not openly confess her love, and her reticence “could only exasperate” Lady de Bourgh “farther.” After receiving Darcy’s second marriage proposal, Elizabeth

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Speech, Writing, Allegory: Pride and Prejudice soon learnt that they were indebted for their present good understanding to the efforts of his aunt, who did call on him in her return through London, and there relate her journey to Longbourn, its motive, and the substance of her conversation with Elizabeth; dwelling emphatically on every expression of the latter, which, in her ladyship’s apprehension, peculiarly denoted her perverseness and assurance, in the belief that such a relation must assist her endeavors to obtain that promise from her nephew, which she had refused to give. But, unluckily for her ladyship, its effect had been exactly contrariwise. (Austen 1813c, 274–75)

Readers have noted the irony that Lady de Bourgh’s attempt to thwart the marriage brings it on (Mudrick 1968, 103). But the irony of this sequence ramifies if we consider the grammatological implications. When Lady Catherine visits Longbourn, Elizabeth thinks she must have come to deliver a letter from her friend Charlotte: “But no letter appeared, and she was completely puzzled” (Austen 1813c, 241). Letters pile up in Volume III, but Lady de Bourgh refuses to make her “sentiments known” through a letter: she insists on traveling far away to the Bennets’ house to exert the fullness of her aristocratic presence. As Laure Blanchemain puts it, she “firmly believes in the biblical equation between the word and the thing itself, as if by simply saying things she could make them happen” (2009, 114). Though Lady Catherine has not borne a letter to Longbourn, she there becomes a letter to Darcy. Eschewing the convenience of writing, she visits him; and, like a letter, repeating words whose ultimate significance she does not know, she has an effect she does not intend. Perhaps her biggest mistake is repeating exactly what Elizabeth said: Lady Catherine’s “dwelling emphatically on every expression” not only gives her nephew a hint that Elizabeth would favor a second proposal, but authenticates the hint with direct quotation; a loose paraphrase or summary might have given him less confidence. Elizabeth’s responses to Lady Catherine wed pride and cunning irony. Unable to anticipate the exact outcome of her defiance, Elizabeth nonetheless writes lines under her enemy’s words, transmitting a coded message to Darcy.28 The absent writer (Elizabeth), who cannot communicate the message (her desire) in person to the reader (Darcy), does so through the text of Lady de Bourgh’s speech.29 Elizabeth’s refusal to cooperate with her interrogator is to Lady Catherine a sign of her “perverseness and assurance”; Lady Catherine’s account of her “perverseness and assurance” becomes for Darcy a sign of Elizabeth’s desire, something he cannot see directly but can read indirectly. This triangular relationship dramatizes arche-writing, the trace that makes possible both speech and writing. According to Derrida, the dominant, though reductive, concept of writing (of writing, for example, as mere ink marks on paper designed to represent sounds) “could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the

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desire for a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference”; arche-writing “threatened the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning” (1997, 56–57). The common conception of writing as “an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language” arises to conceal language’s impurity of origin and lack of fullness. Phonocentrism positions writing as utterly contingent, if not parasitic, on the speech (or thought) it represents; this idea of writing permits speech the illusion of autonomy. It can be difficult, however, to maintain the illusion. Lady de Bourgh, who goes to great lengths to exercise the prerogatives of speech and presence, ends up becoming an instrument that exhibits inadequacies often attributed to writing (repetitiveness and ignorance). Michaelson, reading Pride and Prejudice as a conversation manual, considers the Longbourn exchange between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine the book’s “true climax” (2002, 210). But the exchange brings about a witty reversal of eighteenthcentury elocution. While elocutionists claimed that mastering the proper oral delivery of texts could transform readers into competent public speakers, Lady Catherine—so confident in her speaking ability—becomes a self-defeating private text. Elizabeth expedites this defeat with her curt deflections—something for which she would need no elocutionary manuals. Iterability takes time. The delay between the raising of phonocentric expectations and their demystification enables Pride and Prejudice to be read as a de Manian allegory, though one that relapses into mimesis.30 De Man argues that the “relationship between signs” in allegory “necessarily contains a constitutive temporal element”: it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it. The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition … of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority. (1983b, 207) Wickham, the novel’s primary agent of phonocentrism, functions allegorically: his “gentleness,” first a pleasing aspect of his outward behavior, subsequently becomes a sign of “affectation and a sameness,” of an anterior falseness that makes his charm retroactively insipid (Austen 1813b, 220–21). While the outward behavior remains the same, a secondary meaning attaches to it, a non-spontaneous meaning that belies the obvious or habitual interpretation of social phenomena. Consequently, Austen’s narrative performs what Andrzej Warminski would call “a properly allegorical reading since what it does is to convert something available to the senses into a figure for a meaning that bears no necessary or motivated relation to the phenomenal aspect of that figure” (2013, 25). There is no necessary link between phenomena of “gentleness” and the moral truth of “affectation.”

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The quality of “sameness” is not visible in any instance of Wickham’s behavior: it becomes readable in the repetition of the behavior. Here Austen departs from one aspect of the British epistolary novel, which, despite (or by means of) its self-referential orientation, links truth to the senses. As Michael McKeon observes, “in the first edition” of Pamela, Richardson appears only as the “editor” of an authentic set of documents that constitute a true “History.” … Because it is a documentary history, Pamela is not a romance, and it is singularly qualified thereby for moral instruction and improvement. The familiar rationale links Richardson not only to the established strain of naïve empiricism in narrative but also to the Protestant conviction that concrete and sensible means provide the best mediation to moral and spiritual ends. (2002, 357)31 The temporal displacement characteristic of allegory distinguishes Austen’s work from Richardsonian “writing to the moment,” which fetishizes the empirical activity of composition, strengthening the novelist’s “claim to historicity” (McKeon 2002, 358). Pride and Prejudice makes no such claim. The fate of Wickham’s name exemplifies the “temporal element” of allegorical reading. First (so to speak), Wickham is the proper name of a particular man to whom the text attributes a phenomenal form, handsomeness. The novel eventually reveals that Wickham is (and was) “wicked.” The name continues to refer to the man, but he is no longer what Elizabeth thought: his name has become the sign of a moral convention, wickedness, something non-phenomenal, just as an allegorical use of the word olivebranch might indicate, in addition to part of a particular tree, the concept “peace,” which pre-exists any particular olive-branch that the writer may have seen or imagined. Miller argues that Before everybody in Meryton declares Wickham “the wickedest young man in the world” … the novel has had three hundred pages to keep the association at bay, and even then it is given as the work of townspeople who, in their ignorance of just how bad Wickham has been, seem all the more unconsciously enslaved to alliteration. (2003, 87) But many pages earlier, in a passage where W occurs even more frequently, Austen describes the revelation of Wickham’s immoral nature: “What a stroke was this for poor Jane! who would willingly have gone through the world without believing that so much wickedness existed in the whole race of mankind, as was here collected in one individual” (Austen 1813b, 201). The decision to name Wickham Wickham was, as far as we can tell, Austen’s own. It does not make sense to argue that the book is trying to keep at bay something that it voluntarily introduced. If Austen were so wary of

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wordplay, she could have picked a different name. The transformational discovery of the meaning is not immediate (it takes time, the passage from a proper name designating a person to a crypto-adjective designating a moral danger concealed by that person). Although the book delays the full-blown discovery of Wickham’s wickedness, and though first-time readers (no matter how paranoid) cannot immediately obtain this discovery, the letters of “Wickham” mark from the beginning his wicked promise.32 The allegorical significance of the name awaits, in mute anteriority, its belated recognition.33 Wickham’s becoming allegory is not so different from what happens in any narrative that reveals that a seemingly good character is actually bad— or vice versa. What makes Pride and Prejudice unusual—though maybe not unique—is that the transvaluation of the morality of characters (a main interest of the plot) accompanies a transvaluation of media: the seemingly good man of speech (Wickham) turns out to have been always bad, while the seemingly bad man of text (Darcy) turns out to have been good (enough). Thus, the moral turnaround maps onto the demystification of phonocentric “myth” that de Man argues is a perennial feature of literary language. Pride and Prejudice is doubly allegorical: first, because the behavior of the characters takes on radically different meanings through repetition; second, because the activities of the characters are signs of the novel’s own linguistic operations, though the signs can “never coincide” with the operations, since the characters are only parts of the novel, not the novel itself, and since the acts of the characters are fictions while the rhetorical effects of the novel are real. Pride and Prejudice reads its materiality, but only in the tropological form of represented human interactions—that is, it reads its own linguistic functions as a story about conflicts between characters metonymically linked to speech, writing, or arche-writing. One cannot read the materiality directly: reading its materiality, the novel inevitably refers to things outside itself, producing a mimetic fiction.34 Pride and Prejudice does not rest content with a chiastic inversion of media prejudices. It takes a step beyond demystification and traces the limits of its self-knowledge. Studies that foreground the moral education of Elizabeth or Darcy neglect Austen’s literary rigor; and in our period of media upheaval,35 Austen’s decomposition of media prejudice emerges as one of her novel’s most instructive accomplishments.

Notes 1 Michaelson prudently admits: “one cannot know that Austen consciously planned for her novel to be a kind of conversation manual” (2002, 203). But if Austen had such a plan, it would account for the high proportion of talk in Pride and Prejudice. By Morini’s reckoning, “dialogue takes up the greatest part of P&P, with a ratio paralleled only in E[mma]” (2009, 45). 2 Thomas Dutoit notes how rarely studies of Austen refer to deconstruction (2007, 81).

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3 Derrida elsewhere discusses Kant’s argument that hearing is superior to sight and that “linguistic sounds … are the most appropriate means for characterizing concepts” (1981a, 19). 4 Mansfield Park demonstrates Austen’s familiarity with elocutionists (Michaelson 2002, 128–29). 5 To Dussinger’s credit, he does not present phonocentrism as truth: he claims, on the contrary, that Austen’s privileging of speech over writing is a “trick” and that the speech in her novels is “the final illusion to be conjured up from the printed page” (1990, 170). 6 The novel’s disdain for Mary, a relatively innocuous character, is troubling. Perhaps Mary attracts derision not because she speaks in a bookish manner, but because she is so predictable. Elizabeth’s dialogue is not devoid of bookish sentences, but she, like Austen, is capable of a variety of registers. Nonetheless, Austen’s demystification of media prejudice does not seem to offer an equally robust challenge to gender bias: while the novel vindicates a bookish male character (Darcy), it repeatedly degrades a bookish female, who, as many have noticed, bears some resemblance to the author. 7 Joseph Litvak goes so far as to claim that Fanny Price can “consolidate her personhood” only by subscribing to a circulating library (1985, 764). 8 Richardson’s praise of writing seems mild compared to that of some of his precursors. Lynch discusses Daniel Defoe’s arguments for the superiority of writing over speech (1998, 32–33). 9 Jan B. Gordon examines the way Scottish culture inflects the representation of media in Scott’s novels so that “orality could simultaneously be imagined as a metaphysical Origin, the voice which precedes inscripted history, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s paradigm, and as a potentially dangerous, in the sense of superstitious, supplement” (1996, 7). Gordon discusses the conflict in The Heart of Midlothian between written law and gossip (26–27). 10 While Mladen Dolar praises Derrida’s work on phonocentrism (“The sheer extent of evidence is overwhelming, its coherence compelling”), he traces “a different metaphysical history of voice, where the voice, far from being the safeguard of presence, was considered to be dangerous” (2006, 42–43). 11 Mudrick agrees with Q. D. Leavis that the novel is a rewriting of Burney’s Cecilia and, as Mudrick puts it, “Darcy fails because he does not transcend his derivation: he is a character out of a book, not one whom Jane Austen created or reorganized for her own purpose. But why Darcy alone: why is he, among the major figures in Pride and Prejudice, the only one disturbingly derived and wooden?” Mudrick proposes that since Darcy is the heroine’s love object, he encroaches on “the personally involving aspects of sex,” which Austen is unable or unwilling to represent (1968, 117). But we do not need to insinuate Austen’s sexual frigidity in order to account for Darcy: he is bookish, derivative, and wooden because he allegorizes writing, and these adjectives express common notions about writing. 12 To emphasize Darcy’s allegorical function is not to deny him all realistic plausibility. Lynch points out that “The new architectural prominence of the library in the home registered how it had become de rigueur among the propertied classes to number books among one’s personal effects … . Being good and being English—really experiencing pleasure—now meant protracting one’s reading and becoming at home with one’s books” (1998, 144). 13 In the next chapter, his appearance receives even greater praise (Austen 1813a, 172–73). 14 See, for example, de Cervantes 1992, 337–43, part 1, chapters 37–8. See also Swift 1984, especially lines 157–72.

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15 Elsewhere, Austen inverts the genders: Reginald De Courcy can properly understand Lady Susan only when he keeps an epistolary distance from her. 16 Litvak notes that “when characters in [Austen’s] work suggest … the artifice and materiality of written characters, moralism encounters significant obstacles” (1985, 763). Lynch locates a similar interest in early eighteenth-century fiction, which reveals “enthusiasms that were adapted to … ‘typographical culture’: an interest in the material grounds of meaning and a fascination with the puns that could link the person ‘in’ a text to the printed letters (alphabetic symbols, or ‘characters’ in another sense) that elaborated that text’s surface” (1998, 5–6). According to Lynch, “Nineteenth-century fiction regrets writing’s failure to be true to the self’s complexities, laments writing’s ineluctable exteriority”; she cites as an example Elizabeth Bennet’s advice to Darcy: “Think no more of the letter” (45). But Lynch overlooks the considerable ironies of Elizabeth’s statement— among them, the fact that here speech is the means of forgetting, while the written text is the means of memory. Rather than endorsing nineteenth-century phonocentrism or rallying eighteenth-century graphocentrism, Pride and Prejudice shows the inadequacies of both sets of value judgments. 17 Oakleaf points out that “Darcy challenges Elizabeth’s character of Wickham by offering auricular proof” (1991, 300). 18 According to Wiltshire, Austen designs the written text to serve as a superior engine of memory (2014, 61). 19 Wiltshire notices the opacity of cried, which “indicates little more than a voice’s increase in volume, leaving the reader to imagine the actual tone or inflection of an exclamation or exhortation” (2014, 56). He traces “I never knew myself” to the “inscription on the temple of Apollo at Delphi” (67). 20 The heavy use of the dash is the most visually striking aspect of Austen’s own personal letters, though most of the letters in Pride and Prejudice use the dash far more sparingly than Darcy’s. 21 For a different view, see Gordon, who argues that Austen’s “novels seem to move from, initially, a faith in inscriptive representation only to confront a deconstructive subversion of the mimetic order by an oral alternative which threatens self-sameness, resemblance” (1996, 85). But Pride in Prejudice, initially representing Elizabeth’s faith in orality, does not even “seem to move” the way Gordon suggests. Gordon notes: “When Darcy anonymously consents to pay off Wickham’s debts, he is buying off speculative talk with an equally risky financial speculation. Gossip is ‘bought off’ by a bribe that legitimizes properly contractual marriage” (88). Though gossip poses a threat, Darcy here demonstrates the power of writing. Darcy, the allegorical figure of Writing, counteracts Wickham’s (Speech’s) deviancy though the force of money, which, whether it takes the form of bank notes or inscribed coins, is writing—not speech. 22 For an explanation of iterability, see Derrida 1988. 23 The medium of the published novel minimizes the difference between writing and painting—as it does between print and manuscript (Favret 1993, 148). Readers do not see the portrait of Darcy; they read about it. Readers consume the painting as a non-resemblance, as the difference Elizabeth imagines between the Darcy of the portrait and the Darcy she used to know. 24 Galperin notes that since the portrait was taken during the life of the elder Mr. Darcy, it was to some extent solicited or influenced by the not-yet-dead father (2003, 130). 25 Alexander Bove considers the ambiguity of “expression” important: “The illusion of presence captured in the mimetic image, by both supplementing and supplanting the memory of the original, masks the aporia of reference that language had only succeeded in displacing” (2007, 662).

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26 Some critics have noticed the play of presence and absence (Neill 1999, 53; Greenfield 2006, 346). 27 Derrida claims that “immediacy is derived” (1997, 157); arche-writing challenges “the myth of the simplicity of origin” (92). Free indirect discourse (FID) also challenges this myth. FID involves the apparent melding of at least two entities, a narrator (or author) and a character. Laura Buchholz surveys theorists of FID and observes that they usually privilege one of these entities over the other. She recommends conceiving of FID in terms of morphing, rather than mimicry, “Otherwise, the character’s voice potentially becomes a caricature, thus, in my view, reducing the voice’s authenticity” (2009, 207). But Buchholz’s clever attempt to preserve authenticity is unwarranted: inauthenticity is part of the pleasure of FID, especially in Austen. FID is a form of coquetry. It tempts readers with “direct access” to a character’s thoughts (ibid.). But it also reminds readers that this directness is indirect, is mediated by the narrator (or author), who is herself—thanks to FID—a network of different voices, rather than a unified point of origin. The cognitive content of FID cannot be “fixed” (one of Pride and Prejudice’s favorite words). 28 Lydia’s letters to Kitty “were much too full of lines under the words to be made public” (Austen 1813b, 232). This was a popular mode of encryption (Rogers 2006, 515n7). 29 Alternatively, Gordon proposes that “Lady Catherine de Bourgh was forced to become a gossip in order to gain an attempted denial of gossip, thereby unwittingly orally creating the very attachment between Elizabeth and Darcy” she wished to prevent (1996, 93). But Lady Catherine’s proclivity to gossip manifests itself in her first appearance at Rosings, where she talks at great length and interrogates Elizabeth, seeking information about the Bennets (Austen 1813b, 69). 30 For de Man, allegory is a component of novelistic structure as well as poetic diction (1983b, 200–204). He contrasts allegory with “a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality could coincide” (222). 31 Richardson maintained this editorial pretense in the first two editions of his last novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison. In a letter to Richardson, a distinguished friend objects to this pretense (Johnson 1992, 74). 32 As Margaret Doody points out, “Austen, while producing multiple meanings, avoids obtrusive allegory—but not all allegory” (2015, 10). 33 Austen’s names are not as obviously allegorical as, say, Dickens’ names, but this discrepancy is significant. The “cratylic tradition” operative in Fielding, Sterne, and Dickens suggests that “names express the nature of their bearers” (Barchas 2012, 135). In Austen, however, the meaningfulness of names is rarely legible at first sight: the names do not help us judge characters until after we have judged them. 34 Warminski cautions that “in de Man, the materiality of language, materiality as such, is not ever something that we can know” (2013, 181). 35 Austen’s contemporaries were undergoing their own media upheaval. The spread of print expanded the ranks of readers: “The literacy rate in England soared following the Evangelical movement’s foundation in 1780 of Sunday schools targeting the laboring poor. It is well established that the following decades saw England’s new readers turn their literacy to some frightening antiauthoritarian uses” (Lynch 1998, 129).

References Armstrong, Nancy. 1998. “The Self Contained: Emma.” In Critical Essays on Jane Austen, edited by Laura Mooneyham White, 121–145. New York: G. K. Hall.

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[Austen, Jane.] 1813a. Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. Vol. 1. London: T. Egerton. https://a rchive.org/details/JaneAusten-PrideandPrejudice-1sted-1813-vol1/page/n5/mode/2up. [Austen, Jane.] 1813b. Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. Vol. 2. London: T. Egerton. https://archive.org/details/prideandprejudi00sensgoog. [Austen, Jane.] 1813c. Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. Vol. 3. London: T. Egerton. https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.21684/page/n5/mode/2up. Barchas, Janine. 2012. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Blanchemain, Laure. 2009. “Verbal Conflicts in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Burney’s The Wanderer.” English Text Construction 2 (1): 111–120. doi:10.1075/ etc.2.1.06bla. Bonaparte, Felicia. 2005. “Conjecturing Possibilities: Reading and Misreading Texts in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.” Studies in the Novel 37 (2): 141–161. www. jstor.org/stable/29533681. Bove, Alexander. 2007. “The ‘Unbearable Realism of a Dream’: On the Subject of Portraits in Austen and Dickens.” ELH 74 (3): 655–679. doi:10.1353/elh.2007.0022. Buchholz, Laura. 2009. “The Morphing Metaphor and the Question of Narrative Voice.” Narrative 17 (2): 200–219. www.jstor.org/stable/25609363. de Cervantes, Miguel. 1992. Don Quixote. Translated by Charles Jarvis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Man, Paul. 1983a. “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 102–141. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Man, Paul. 1983b. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 187–228. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981a. “Economimesis.” Translated by R. Klein. Diacritics 11 (2): 2–25. doi:10.2307/464726. Derrida, Jacques. 1981b. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 61–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Qual Quelle: Valéry’s Sources.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 273–306. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Edited by Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber. Translated by Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corr. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Doody, Margaret. 2015. Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dussinger, John A. 1990. In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen’s World. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Dutoit, Thomas. 2007. “Speculations about the Obsession with Mastery in Jane Austen and Jacques Derrida.” In Les Formes de l’obsession dans la littérature

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anglaise et américaine, edited by Marc Amfreville and Claire Fabre, 2:74–94. Paris: Michel Houdiard. Evans, III, Frank B. 1943. “Platonic Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century England.” Modern Philology 41 (2): 103–110. doi:10.1086/388608. Favret, Mary A. 1993. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics & the Fiction of Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galperin, William H. 2003. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1984. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Godwin, William. 1831. Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries, Interspersed with Some Particulars Respecting the Author. London. http s://archive.org/details/thoughtsonmanhi03godwgoog/page/n4. Gordon, Jan B. 1996. Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo’s Economies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Greenfield, Susan C. 2006. “The Absent-Minded Heroine: Or, Elizabeth Bennet Has a Thought.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (3): 337–350. doi:10.1353/ecs.2006.0005. Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. 2008. Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Samuel. 1984. “The Plays of William Shakespeare: Preface.” In The Oxford Authors: Samuel Johnson, edited by Donald Greene, 419–456. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1992. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Edited by Bruce Redford. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Litvak, Joseph. 1985. “Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text in Emma.” PMLA 100 (5): 763–773. doi:10.2307/462096. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. 1998. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McKeon, Michael. 2002. The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Michaelson, Patricia Howell. 2002. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Miller, D. A. 1981. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, D. A. 2003. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moati, Raoul. 2014. Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language. Translated by Timothy Attanucci and Maureen Chun. New York: Columbia University Press. Morini, Massimiliano. 2009. Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis. London: Routledge. Mudrick, Marvin. 1968. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Berkeley: University of California Press. Neill, Edward. 1999. The Politics of Jane Austen. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Oakleaf, David. 1991. “Marks, Stamps, and Representations: Character in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 23 (3): 295–311. www.jstor.org/sta ble/29532795.

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Plato. 1989. ‘Phaedrus.” Translated by R. Hackforth. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 475–525. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Richardson, Samuel. 1964. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson. Edited by John Carroll. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rogers, Pat, ed. 2006. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Walter. 1982. The Heart of Midlothian. Edited by Claire Lamont. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sheridan, Thomas. 1969. A Discourse Being Introductory to His Course of Lectures on Elocution and the English Language. Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society. www.gutenberg.org/files/38444/38444-h/38444-h.htm. Simpson, David. 1993. Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, David. 1997. “The Cult of ‘Conversation.’” Raritan 16 (4): 75–85. Stovel, Bruce, and Lynn Weinlos Gregg, eds. 2002. The Talk in Jane Austen. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Swift, Jonathan. 1984. “The Grand Question Debated: Whether Hamilton’s Bawn Should be Turned into a Barrack or a Malt-House.” In Major Works, edited by Angus Ross and David Woolley, 500–505. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tandon, Bharat. 2003. Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation. London: Anthem. Warminski, Andrzej. 2013. Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wiltshire, John. 2014. The Hidden Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Allegory, Symbol, and Irony in Mansfield Park

According to Paul de Man, “It could be argued that the greatest ironists of the nineteenth century,” who “generally are not novelists,” demonstrate “a prevalent tendency toward aphoristic, rapid, and brief texts … as if there were something in the nature of irony that did not allow for sustained movements. The great and all-important exception is, of course, Stendhal” (1983, 210–11). That name is not as inevitable as de Man’s “of course” implies. Jane Austen deserves a place among “the greatest ironists of the nineteenth century”—if it is possible without irony to gauge their greatness. De Man lauds Stendhal as “a full-fledged ironist as well as an allegorist” (227), but Austen also spreads these wings. Early works such as “The History of England” display her “rapid” wit. Later works incorporate irony into the “sustained movements” of novelistic storytelling. Of particular interest is Mansfield Park, her most overtly allegorical novel.1 Whatever the causes of de Man’s neglect of Austen, revisiting his analysis of Romantic tropes can improve our understanding of Mansfield Park, which in turn reveals some of the theoretical limitations of “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” De Man begins this epochal essay by bracketing “value judgments that blur distinctions and hide the real structures” of rhetoric (1983, 188). Yet, as he proceeds, a hierarchy of value emerges: he contrasts allegory and irony on the one hand “with mystified forms of language (such as symbol or mimetic representation)” on the other (226). He celebrates texts in which demystifying forms of language eclipse their mystified counterparts. The celebration encourages the belief that authors, by devoting themselves to the right tropes, can avoid delusion and achieve authenticity.2 Though he would no doubt approve of her allegories, which undermine the pretensions of symbol and mimesis, Austen sometimes eludes the framework of de Manian reading. Not just critical value judgments but literary texts themselves “blur distinctions.” At key moments, Mansfield Park stages the undecidability of tropes: allegory becomes difficult to distinguish from symbol, and irony from allegory. Yet such blurring is not just a rhetorical curiosity. The novel confronts a dysfunction paradoxically empowering the conservative ideology of Austen’s time. Mansfield Park’s theoretical success is twofold: it charts the limitations of one of the most powerful literary

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theories of the future, de Manian rhetorical reading; and it also discloses the bad faith of Regency conservativism, whose contempt for theory relies on a theory of rhetoric.

Austen, Coleridge, Burke De Man attempts to counteract the legacy of Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual, which commends symbol and denigrates allegory.3 The Statesman’s Manual was published in 1816, the same year as the second edition of Mansfield Park. While composing Mansfield Park a few years earlier, Austen obviously could not have read Coleridge’s lay sermon.4 But the novel participates in the disruption of figurative language that constitutes much of what is called Romanticism. The promotion of one kind of metaphor demands the demotion of another. Coleridge distinguishes symbol from allegory: Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picturelanguage which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the sense; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a Symbol (ὁ ἔςιν [sic] ἄει ταυτηγóρικον) … always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. The other are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter. (1816, 36–37) Symbol “operates through a kind of incarnation” or “ontological participation” (Madsen 2010, 231).5 Coleridge identifies symbol with nature: The power delegated to nature is all in every part: and by symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents. (1816, xix, under “Appendix”) As “a living GERM” (Coleridge 1816, 62) symbol also defies linear temporality, since through symbol “the Past and the Future are virtually contained in the Present” (36). Coleridgean allegory, by contrast, requires temporal displacement. It is a step-by-step process involving abstraction from the senses and the translation of concepts into verbal imagery. Though the poet calls symbol “a representative,” this term better fits his definition of allegory: as Graham Allen suggests, “traditional allegory can usefully be understood in terms of re-presentation, a presenting of something which existed prior to the

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existence of the allegorical work itself” (1996, 212). The opening canto of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example, depicts the concept of error as a disgusting snake-woman, Errour: the poet translates the concept into misogynistic (and ecophobic) imagery; though the monster refers to a pre-existing concept, one would not say that the concept refers to the monster. While the description of Sotherton in Mansfield Park includes obvious allegorical signs of the Garden of Eden, no one would say that the Garden of Eden is a sign of Sotherton. For Coleridge, allegories are belated and ontologically divorced from their referents, while symbols are “tautegorical”—consubstantial with their referents (1848, 160).6 Coleridge does not always deride allegory: he sporadically praises allegorical texts and republished his own “Allegorical Vision” (Fried 2006, 764). But, despite its intemperate polemics, The Statesman’s Manual usefully foregrounds two opposed possibilities within language: “determined versus arbitrary figuration” (Hodgson 1981, 292).7 Derrida remarks on the etymology of symbol: “any symbol is, stricto sensu, a hyphen, bringing together, according to the symballein, the two pieces of a body divided in contract, pact, or alliance” (1987, 235). Symbol unites; allegory disjoins. From a de Manian perspective, to believe in symbol is to yield to the [delusive] temptation of immediate readability, which turns out to be a denial of the structure of representation and of the difference between self and non-self. “Allegory” is the recognition of the difference between signifier and signified, of the relation between any use of language and its linguistic or cultural past. (Johnson 1994, 63) One could go further and argue that language is essentially allegorical; if so, the difference between allegory and symbol would be that the former lays bare its difference from itself, while the latter conceals it. In a provocative essay, Peter Crisp attempts to refute both the Romantics and de Man. Crisp contends that symbols and allegories are both metaphors; since all metaphors are motivated, no metaphors are arbitrary: The claim of the last 200 years that symbol and allegory are fundamentally opposed in nature has rested on the belief that, while symbol is radically motivated, allegory is radically arbitrary. If this belief is false, the claim falls to the ground. (2005, 331) He suggests an alternative way of differentiating between the tropes: “The difference between allegory and symbol … is simply that in allegory the text world functions continuously as a metaphorical source domain, while with symbol it does so only occasionally” (Crisp 2005, 331). But he admits that the concept of allegorical continuity is “vague”: “although there is a

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distinction worth making between allegory and symbol, it is one of degree rather than kind” (335). Crisp is right to point out that most, if not all, allegories and symbols are motivated. But he does not notice that what applies to continuity applies to motivation: the difference between arbitrary and motivated metaphors “is one of degree rather than kind” also. When he claims that “allegory like symbol is highly motivated” (337), the adverb betrays what his argument denies: the Romantic distinction between symbol and allegory is legitimate. Pondering some examples will clarify the legitimacy. Spenser’s association of error with a snake-woman is not entirely arbitrary, since the poet wrote for a Christian audience that traced human error to Eve and Eden’s serpent. But Spenser himself reveals the arbitrariness of his own allegory. In canto 1, the greatest source of error is not Errour, but Archimago, who appears as a man. Men are just as capable of causing error as women, so the figurative feminization of the concept of error is relatively arbitrary. Such relative arbitrariness (or motivation) determines the most important metaphor in Christianity: Christ’s statement “This [bread] is my body.” Bread resembles human flesh in some ways, so we can say that the metaphor is motivated; it is not entirely arbitrary. But what if Christ had held up a piece of fish instead? Fish is closer to human flesh than bread is, since fish is meat. But what if Christ had held up a piece of lamb? Lamb more closely resembles human flesh than fish does, since lamb is mammalian meat. Christ would be unlikely to hold up a piece of pork, but what if he had held up a piece of beef? Is beef better motivated than lamb as a vehicle for human flesh? What about goat? At what we could call the “highly motivated” end of the spectrum, it is unclear which vehicle is most appropriate to the tenor, and the choice between these options might be arbitrary—that is, it might be decided (like the gender of Errour) by ideology, not motivation alone. The ultimate symbol for Christ would be a piece of human flesh. In the Eucharist, the vehicle (bread) is absorbed into the human body and becomes what Coleridge would call “tautegorical.” In a Coleridgean manner, Hegel opposes the Eucharist to allegory: the connection of objective and subjective, of the bread and the persons, is here not the connection of allegorized with allegory, with the parable in which the different things, the things compared, are set forth as severed, as separate, and all that is asked is a comparison, the thought of the likeness of dissimilars. On the contrary, in this link between bread and persons, difference disappears, and with it the possibility of comparison. Things heterogeneous are here most intimately connected. (1975b, 249; quoted in Cole 2014, 91) Continuing the argument of Chapter 2, we can understand Romantic symbol as a form of logocentrism. Just as the phonocentric denigration of writing is a way of nourishing the hope that self-presence is possible

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somewhere, be it in speech or thought (Derrida 1997, 56–57), the Romantic denigration of allegory is a way of nourishing the hope that tautegorical language is possible: that we can overcome difference through difference.8 A truly tautegorical metaphor would be a tautology, not a metaphor: my body is my body. In all likelihood, both non-motivated and absolutely motivated metaphors are impossible; yet, between these vanishing ends of the spectrum, there are many degrees of motivation. If allegory designates conspicuously arbitrary metaphors, then Coleridge is not wrong to distinguish them from symbols, even though true (that is, “tautegorical”) symbols might not exist. The fact that arbitrariness and motivation are distinctions of degree causes much unrest in Mansfield Park. When the tenor (a human individual, a nation state) is ill-defined, there is no reliable metric of motivation. Ideology often determines why what seems “highly motivated” to one reader strikes a different reader as arbitrary. The relative arbitrariness of allegorical signs has political implications— as any woman offended by Spenser’s Errour can see. Coleridge’s lay sermon, as its title suggests, links rhetorical analysis to the duties of the ruling class (Fried 2006, 763). Daniel Fried observes that in “his famous denunciation of allegory,” Coleridge “is denouncing it as a flawed hermeneutics that leads to flawed politics.” That politics, an “abuse of abstractions,” culminates in “Jacobinism … the chief villain in Coleridge’s writings of the period,” which he considers “an essentially allegorical mode of thought.” Coleridge is not, in this respect, original, since he is indebted to Edmund Burke for “the association of Jacobins with abstraction” (771–72).9 Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France has certainly loomed large in criticism of Mansfield Park. The architectural metaphors of Burke’s treatise inform Austen’s novel, which centers on Sir Thomas Bertram’s house. Mansfield Park is, in effect, Austen’s Statesman’s Manual: the owner of the eponymous estate is a Member of Parliament, and his estate tropes the nation. Burke (2004) repeatedly discusses nations or commonwealths as though they were buildings (106, 121, 124–25, 138, 152, 189, 230, 285, 286). The following passage is representative: one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and liferenters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation – and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. (Burke 2004, 192)

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This passage helps us recognize the political significance of Austen’s entailminded novels, especially Mansfield Park, whose “estate as an ordered physical structure is a metonym for other inherited structures—society as a whole, a code of morality, a body of manners, a system of language” (Duckworth 1994, xxix). Alistair Duckworth’s claim that Mansfield Park is a figure for the English “commonwealth” has met with widespread acceptance, though some later critics have found Austen mocking, rather than endorsing, Burke’s politics.10 What Duckworth calls Austen’s “metonymy” corresponds to Coleridge’s “symbol”: Her metonymy extends beyond simple metaphorical convenience, for by locating traditional systems in the fabric of the house, or in the landscape of the park, she has affirmed her faith in the substantial existence of certain pre-existing structures of morality and religion. (1994, 57) Comparing the country estates of Austen’s novels to the Bororo villages described by Lévi-Strauss, Duckworth emphasizes “the cultural importance of locality” to Mansfield Park, “where a traditional religious and moral ethos is, in a real sense, embodied in the estate’s fabric and where the changes effected or proposed … in house and landscape carry strong overtones of the disorientation of a whole culture” (1994, 57–58). The “embodied” estate is an incarnation of the “whole culture,” is a synecdoche with all the ontological heft (“in a real sense”) Coleridge grants symbol and Hegel grants the Eucharist. Duckworth is following Burke as much as Lévi-Strauss, and Burke encourages synecdochic thinking, which he regards as the basis of patriotism. He rebukes proud “men of quality” who turn against their own class, since he believes love of one’s class is a precondition for love of society: To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind. (Burke 2004, 135) Burke mocks the revolutionary proposal to divide France into new administrative regions, a proposal that could endanger longstanding attachments: Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality. Perhaps it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and more large regards,

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Defending monarchy as a synecdoche, Burke invites his correspondent to consider that the devotion of the pre-revolutionary French to their king was a kind of patriotism, not something servile; he asks the French whether “it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king?” (2004, 123). Burke scoffs at “mechanic philosophy,” which holds that “our institutions can never be embodied … in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment” (172).12 But reading The Statesman’s Manual against the grain of its author’s political commitments can show that Burke’s synecdoches are Coleridgean allegories. Burke would have his readers believe that the king is an incarnational synecdoche for the kingdom; but perhaps the king is merely an allegorical sign of the kingdom, a trope that need not constrain his subjects. The king is no doubt like the nation in some ways—but so is a French baker or a French beggar. To be a Jacobin is to doubt the legitimacy of reading the king as a symbol: the French (or the English) need not submit to royalist fancy. If allegory wears “its factitiousness on its sleeve (so to speak), whereas the symbol presents itself as an organic form that is indivisible from its transcendent ground” (Kelley 1997, 11), then a Jacobin reading of Burke would profit from stressing the allegorical quality of his figures. Though arms and legs are parts of an empirically verifiable whole (the body), the commonwealth will never submit to such verification: one can only see parts of it, as Burke himself suggests.13 Although symbolically invoking the commonwealth by means of the king attempts to affirm its transcendent existence, perhaps the commonwealth is only intelligible through allegory, through a relatively arbitrary metaphor. Since the country estate anchors Austen’s novel in a way that recalls Burke’s rhetoric, we should ask whether Sir Thomas’s estate is an allegory. By the end of the novel, Mansfield Park has lost population, suffered shame, and turned inward. If the Bertrams ratify Burke’s symbol, they do so in an unenthusiastic way: rather than consolidating already existing alliances, as in Emma, or forming new ones which extend the ties of family outward, as in Pride and Prejudice, the principals in Mansfield Park gather together in a tighter knot of consanguinity because the larger world outside has always proved more than they could manage. (Johnson 1988, 119) Mansfield Park better resembles an affluent retreat than a “link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” Though, as Robert Clark reminds us, “the English country house, standing

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at the center of its productive estate, had for centuries before Austen symbolized an ideal national political order” (2014, 144), Mansfield Park alludes to this tradition equivocally. To Miles, “the sobriquet ‘Park’ … suggests something suspiciously nouveau” (2014). It might be wrong to think of Sir Thomas as a West Indian planter (Downie 2010, 752), but the novel hints that his status may be a recent imposition. Most tellingly, Austen ascribes a “modern-built house” to Mansfield Park (1816, 1:96). Michael Karounos argues that Tom’s “unlocking Sir Thomas’s door is a symbolic invasion of the estate’s sanctuary” (2004, 720), and Fanny’s distress at the theatricals marks them as a violation of the patriarch’s sacred space. But the space Tom invades is, like Coleridgean allegory, empty; and when Sir Thomas, its symbolic possessor, returns, he finds his place taken, with comic arbitrariness and ease, by a ranting stranger (Austen 1816, 2:17–18). Sotherton, an Elizabethan edifice, has a better claim than Mansfield Park to stand as an organic symbol of England. But since Sotherton’s current master is an idiot who neglects its disappointing chapel—where the Eucharist goes uncelebrated (1:178)—Sotherton would be unlikely to warm the heart of a Burkean patriot: if it symbolizes anything, it is Regency England’s spiritual apathy and mediocrity. Tuite may be right that “Austen is one of the first practitioners of Romantic organicism” (2002, 11), yet Mansfield Park makes organicism a mechanical enterprise. Austen might not have intended to refute Burke’s Reflections, but Mansfield Park can nonetheless destabilize his rhetorical economy.14 If it turns out that his house metaphors are allegorical impositions rather than organic symbols, then Burke’s Reflections would express his private interests or misunderstandings, which need not compel our assent.15 Mansfield Park does not resolve the problem of whether the country estate is a genuine symbol or a tendentious allegory. But by pitting allegory against symbol, Austen reveals the precariousness of the rhetoric favored by Burke and his admirers— including Coleridge. The analogy between the inherited house and the nation is only philosophically sound if they share a synecdochic consubstantiality, if the house somehow embodies in miniature the essence of the nation. Should the English find that the Burkean house is an allegory of England, then they are no more obliged to structure their lives around it than they are obliged to think of Spenser’s snake-woman when they think of error.16

The Fall of Symbol and the Rise of Allegory Shortly before deriding allegory’s “phantom proxy” and “apparitions of matter,” Coleridge contrasts “mechanic philosophy” with Scripture’s mediating symbols (1816, 35). Symbol is the trope of God and nature; allegory, the trope of ghosts and machines. It is no coincidence that pious and natureloving Fanny is Mansfield Park’s most outspoken advocate of symbol. One night, while Mary Crawford and the Bertram sisters sing a glee, Fanny and Edmund, standing by the window, look at

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Allegory, Symbol, Irony: Mansfield Park the scene without, where all that was solemn and soothing, and lovely, appeared in the brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods. Fanny spoke her feelings. “Here’s harmony!” said she, “Here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and music behind, and what poetry can only attempt to describe. Here’s what may tranquillize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such as night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.” (Austen 1816, 1:235)

If the viewer could go out of herself, becoming a synecdoche of the cosmos that contains her, the night “scene” would dissolve individual “wickedness and sorrow.” Positing “the immediate readability of the prospect” (Williams 2013, 321) and imagining the transcendence of the divide between self and non-self, Fanny’s speech partakes of Coleridge’s symbol, whose musical correlative is “harmony”—a synchronic phenomenon. But allegory adulterates Fanny’s totalizing symbol. To Karen Valihora, “The woodenness of the scene suggests that Fanny … has been taught her feelings and thoughts on the subject of nature, and nature has been therefore framed, here quite pointedly by the window casement” (2007, 107).17 Edmund recognizes this. Although he applauds Fanny’s sentiments (“I like to hear your enthusiasm”), he qualifies their spontaneity by disclosing their mediated character: “It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel in some degree as you do.” Fanny replies: “You taught me to think and feel on the subject, cousin.” The “lovely night,” an acquired taste, has by this point become less transcendent—just another object of human appreciation (like “painting,” “music,” and “poetry”). She desires to “see Cassiopeia” (Austen 1816, 1:235–36), but, as Peter KnoxShaw observes, “When Edmund postpones this to join in the singing, Fanny’s boast of an all-absorbing sublimity is punctured by a sense of incompletion” (2004, 193). The immediacy of “rapture” has yielded to the temporality of cultural transmission. Recent critics may have cast too harsh a light on Fanny’s lack of disinterestedness (Valihora 2007, 107; Knox-Shaw 2002, 45). The novel declines, however, to sustain Fanny’s symbolic impulse. Edmund, who begins to demystify her speech, is caught in an allegorical tableau: “flanked by his two admirers,” he “seems at first to figure—almost in morality-play fashion—as the subject of a temptation scene” (Knox-Shaw 2002, 43). Though he resists the temptation of Fanny’s symbol, Edmund surrenders to the temptation of Mary’s body: he turns “his back on the window,” and Fanny “had the mortification of seeing him advance too, moving forward by gentle degrees towards the instrument, and when it ceased, he was close by the singers, among the most urgent in requesting to hear the glee again” (Austen 1816, 1:236).

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While many critics have upbraided Edmund for his attraction to Mary, the novel shares his preference: instead of contemplating the “sublimity of Nature,” it devotes itself to an anthropocentric narrative. After Edmund moves off, “Fanny sighed alone at the window till scolded away by Mrs. Norris’s threats of catching cold” (Austen 1816, 1:236). The rhyme on cold and scold is a poor substitute for cosmic harmony. To make matters worse, Fanny’s discontent, as Colin Jager points out, “belies her own earlier claim” that contemplating nature will diminish human suffering (2002, 58). Previous critics have amply described how the scene reveals the characters’ ethical shortcomings; yet the scene also dramatizes a conflict between linguistic functions—symbol and allegory. The protagonist may not realize that she is contradicting herself, but readers are in a position to notice; those of us who are initially moved by her rhetoric may find ourselves in the state of somber enlightenment that de Man imputes to allegorical texts, such as Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1983, 224). The night scene ends with a bitter aftertaste of demystification. The “sublimity of Nature” is not too big to fail. Fanny’s look outward anticipates an important trend in the exegesis of her narrative. By inducing a shift from a “temporal” to a “spatial” (that is, geographical) approach to Mansfield Park, Edward Said has had an enormously productive influence on critics (1989, 151).18 But more awaits to be said about time, which this novel foregrounds. Talia Schaffer points out that “the novel begins, almost uniquely in Austen’s oeuvre, with the previous generation” (2015, 162). Mansfield Park enacts an unusual split between the three sisters of the first page and the narrative that follows, which chiefly concerns less than a year in the young adulthood of the next generation. The character who most obviously conjoins temporality and allegory is Rushworth. One critic has noticed the allegorical possibilities in the name of a man “who is ‘rushing’ to improve his ‘worth’ both in fashion and in love” (Brodey 2014, 179).19 His first appearance in the novel links him to accelerated temporality: “Mr. Rushworth was from the first struck with the beauty of Miss Bertram, and being inclined to marry, soon fancied himself in love” (Austen 1816, 1:76). But not only does Rushworth rush—he is also the cause of rushing in others: “as far as Mrs. Norris could allow herself to decide on so short an acquaintance, Mr. Rushworth appeared precisely the young man to deserve and attach” Maria (1:77–78). Rushworth rushes to value others, and others rush to value him. Austen reports the first meeting of Sir Thomas and his prospective son-in-law: “There was nothing disagreeable in Mr. Rushworth’s appearance, and Sir Thomas was liking him already” (2:10). Shortly thereafter, he rushes to the conclusion that Rushworth is prematurely wise (2:26–27), a judgment Sir Thomas will come to doubt (2:55–56). Fully aware of Rushworth’s flaws, Maria rushes to obtain his financial worth and escape her father (2:60). We learn that “the situation of the house” at Sotherton, Rushworth’s estate, “excluded the possibility of much prospect from any of the rooms” (1:175). While the lack of “prospect” is not

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a surprising demerit in a house built long before the era of the picturesque, the lack is also an allegorical sign of its owner, who rushes into decisions whose consequences he cannot foresee. As a realistic character, Rushworth is a plausible, though not terribly vivid, representation of an upper-class dunce; he is also, however, a personification allegory linking time and value.20 Rushworth’s romantic rival starts off with the opposite disposition. Henry Crawford does not rush: “I am of a cautious temper, and unwilling to risk my happiness in a hurry. … I consider the blessing of a wife as most justly described in those discreet lines of the poet, ‘Heaven’s last best gift’” (Austen 1816, 1:86). As D. A. Miller notes, “Henry Crawford’s narratability comes from his systematic deferral of a gift whose finality he prefers to stress over its superiority … . To flirt for Henry Crawford means to cultivate a suspense in relationships” (1981, 21). By contrast, Rushworth is under-narratable: after his wedding, he largely disappears from the book. Henry’s deferrals annoy Maria and Fanny for different reasons: the one hopes that he “lose no time in declaring himself” (Austen 1816, 2:38); the other wonders why he does not “go away” (3:1). Henry is Rushworth’s opposite in intellect, charm, and height, but also because he favors delay over rushing. Yet Henry’s delayed feelings for Fanny begin to alter his temporal orientation. Describing his work to get William promoted, Henry exclaims at “how impatient, how anxious, how wild I have been on that subject” (Austen 1816, 2:274). Later, Henry informs “Fanny that his only business in Portsmouth was to see her, that he was come down … because he could not endure a longer total separation” (3:209). Though it is impossible to decide at any particular moment whether Henry is in earnest, he at least plays at losing patience. Yet his most powerful ally in his courtship, Fanny’s uncle, regards Henry’s patience as the key to a successful outcome: Sir Thomas repeatedly associates the word persevere with Henry (3:21, 33, 42). Edmund is also confident that Henry will win Fanny’s love through the “work of time” (3:80, 98). Eventually, however, even Sir Thomas’s faith comes under strain: he hopes Henry will “be a model of constancy; and fancied the best means of effecting it would be by not trying him too long” (3:76, 99). Indeed, the effect of perseverance is not as fortunate as Henry hoped. True, he begins to make a good impression on Fanny, but even this goes awry: “So anxious for her health and comfort, so very feeling as he now expressed himself, and really seemed, might not it be fairly supposed, that he would not much longer persevere in a suit so distressing to her?” (3:225). This passage prompts us to think that Fanny is beginning to like him, but Austen withdraws that possibility at the end of the sentence, which ends the chapter with a flourish. Fanny perseveres in wishing that Henry will not persevere, and his elopement with Maria fulfills the wish. For much of Mansfield Park, Fanny, Edmund, and Mary are waiting—more or less passively—while the

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Rushworth–Henry opposition decides their fate. Early in the novel Henry takes the lead, but ultimately Rushworth evens the score. Henry, the deferrer, grows impatient and rushes into stupid activities; his dubious triumph over Maria costs him Fanny, while Rushworth, released from a loveless marriage, is available for the next “pretty girl” (Austen 1816, 3:334). Henry’s crucial mistake is remaining in London: “he resolved to defer his Norfolk journey.” Maria’s “coldness” rouses him; he is determined to “make Mrs. Rushworth Maria Bertram again in her treatment of himself. In this spirit he began the attack; and by animated perseverance had soon re-established the sort of familiar intercourse—of gallantry—of flirtation which bounded his views” (3:541). Paradoxically, his perseverance puts him in a situation in which he must make a rash (rushed) move. When Fanny reads the newspaper report of the elopement, she tells her father “it cannot be true,” and She spoke with the instinctive wish of delaying shame, she spoke with a resolution which sprung from despair, for she spoke what she did not, could not believe herself. It had been the shock of conviction as she read. The truth rushed on her. (Austen 1816, 3:282; emphasis added) Many critics and common readers have balked at the implausibility of Henry’s elopement with Maria, but the erotic triangle allegorizes formal necessities: at the beginning of the story, the resolution of the plot must be deferred (if only to fill up three volumes), but eventually deferral must give way to resolution. For the novel to end, the delayer must stop delaying, and the end of Mansfield Park is notoriously rushed—or, to use the narrator’s self-description, “impatient” (Austen 1816, 3:326). As Wickham and Darcy allegorize the media constituting Pride and Prejudice (speech and writing), so Rushworth and Henry allegorize Mansfield Park’s temporal oppositions.21 At once the most dilatory and recognizably allegorical part of the book is the visit to Sotherton. I say dilatory because nothing happens that is required for the plot, which still makes sense if one skips the Sotherton chapters. In fact, the pretext for going to Sotherton—the improvement of Rushworth’s estate—drops out of the narrative (though Henry will later think of renovating Thornton Lacey). For Nicholas M. Williams, the Sotherton episode “captures, in miniature, something of Mansfield Park’s noted oddness within Austen’s oeuvre, an instability in representational strategy by which realism can blur into allegory” (2013, 318).22 Such blurring prevails in the tour of the grounds. From the Garden of Eden (with its Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge) to the Roman de la Rose, the garden has established itself as an optimal site of allegory.23 De Man’s interpretation of Rousseau’s use of allegory hinges on a horticultural episode in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Julie’s walled orchard repeats the allegorical conventions of the Roman de la Rose (1983, 202), some of which recur in Mansfield

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Park: besides the fuss about keys and gates featured in both Rousseau and Austen, the fenced wilderness at the edge of which Maria compares herself to a bird in a cage is an inversion of Julie’s uncaged “aviary” (Rousseau 1784, 133–34).24 Saint-Preux jokes about “a rich man” who would bring to Julie’s garden “an architect who is paid an extravagant price for spoiling nature” (140), and Rushworth’s trees become vulnerable to a similar intervention. De Man claims that when Rousseau describes Julie’s orchard, he “does not even pretend to be observing. The language is purely figural, not based on perception.” Sotherton, however, does realistically represent a British estate. Yet allegory exerts itself in this impure episode, which, thanks to the negative presence of Fanny, shares the “ethic of renunciation” de Man finds in Rousseau (1983, 203). Whereas de Man reads the account of Julie’s orchard as a moment of demystification, Rushworth’s grounds cultivate mystifications that will only get worse (Maria’s love for Henry, Edmund’s love for Mary). Fanny, the only demystified character at hand, is unpersuasive. Despite its negative epistemological influence on its visitors, Sotherton abounds in the disarticulations de Man attributes to allegory. The frequently out of sync characters are comically preoccupied with time.25 Fanny’s ascetic attitude jars with the episode’s erotic emblems: “Henry and Maria climb over the gate together, leaving without Rushworth, rendering impotent his proprietary ‘key’” (Park 2013, 173). Allegory usually posits images as the signs of invisible concepts; the sexual allegory here would seem to deploy one image to evoke another—not unlike the salacious parts of the Roman de la Rose. But in a book by Austen, sex must remain as invisible as if it were a concept: she can no more depict sexual intercourse than she can depict Reason or Philosophy. Focalizing Fanny, the narrator causes readers to imagine events from her chaste perspective—to not see what she does not see: “By taking a circuitous, and as it appeared to her, very unreasonable direction to the knoll,” Henry and Maria “were soon beyond her eye; and for some minutes longer she remained without sight or sound of any companion” (Austen 1816, 1:207–8). Though most readers would no doubt prefer following them and discovering what exactly they did on the way to that knoll, the narration keeps readers on the bench beside Fanny.26 The foreshadowing generated by the Sotherton visit is partially symbolic, since foreshadowing links the present and the future, a function of Coleridge’s symbol—at least, as it occurs in sacred texts (Austen 1816, 62).27 But Sotherton’s foreshadowing is allegorically disjunctive, not symbolically cohesive. Alicia L. Kerfoot points out: “Fanny’s fear that Maria will come to harm in the process of escape metaphorically foretells her ruin at the end of the novel” (2008, 279). Maria, however, does not actually fall on the spikes. Her (physical) non-fall is a sign of the future (moral) fall incurred by her elopement with Henry, and an allegorical tradition obviously mediates his role as the Satan/serpent of this wilderness.28

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The later jewelry scenes also involve sexually charged allegorical foreshadowing, and in them Fanny is not always the agent of ascetic detachment. William gives an “amber cross” (Austen 1816, 2:174), and in a deft realistic contingency, “Fanny is obliged to search for a necklace or chain to substitute for the ribbon because William could not afford to buy both cross and chain” (Festa 2009, 444n20). Mary Crawford gives a necklace, which she tells Fanny she had once received from Henry (Austen 1816, 2:186). Edmund then surprises Fanny by giving her a chain. Fanny tells Edmund: “The chain will agree with William’s cross beyond all comparison better than the necklace” (2:194). The chain, however, obliges Fanny to make a difficult decision: which gift should she wear? Luckily, “when she came to the necklaces again, her good fortune seemed complete, for upon trial the one given her by Miss Crawford would by no means go through the ring of the cross” (2:211), while Edmund’s chain does. This crudely foreshadows the ending of the novel, in which Henry’s courtship will collapse and Edmund will presumably enjoy the conjugal penetration of Fanny. It delights her to put on the chain and cross when she feels “how full of William and Edmund they were” (2:212).29 William’s and Edmund’s gifts bestow a feeling of union with the givers, while Mary’s gift makes Fanny uncomfortable. When she learns that it was Henry’s idea to have his sister give the gift, Fanny criticizes Mary with unusual bluntness: “Oh! Miss Crawford, that was not fair” (Austen 1816, 3:112). The necklace, its transmission mediated by Mary, is an allegorical sign of Henry’s affection—a sign that, like Coleridge’s allegory, is twice removed from its referent. Yet the opprobrium garnered by Henry’s necklace is a decoy. In fact, all three gifts are allegorical—“a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language” according to which a piece of amber or metal is a sign of love. Neither the cross nor the chain is “a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.” If they seem “full of” the givers, that is because the wearer’s “fancy arbitrarily associates” William and Edmund “with apparitions of matter.” None of the gifts is an incarnation of the givers, who cannot even boast that they manufactured them. The scene showcases Fanny’s sympathetic but illogical effort to treat allegorical signs as symbols. The allegory of the gifts is realistic, since men and women really do invest neckwear with symbolic or allegorical significance.30 But by the end of Mansfield Park, allegory predominates over mimesis as well as over symbol. Henry wants his treatment of William to be a symbol of his treatment of Fanny, a symbol whose recognition will earn him her love—and what could be more consubstantial than siblings? But Fanny reads this as a violation: “she could not but feel that it was treating her improperly” (Austen 1816, 2:278). As the fetishizing of an object because of its real or imagined consubstantiality, love is prone to symbol. Fanny, however, treats Henry’s courtship as a series of allegorical ploys. Eventually, she can harvest her love of Edmund, but other potential or actual loves die (Edmund’s for Mary,

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Mary’s for Edmund, Henry’s for Fanny, Maria’s for Henry). Imitating her sister, Julia rushes into an apparently loveless marriage to a fool. Mansfield Park’s acerbic treatment of love coincides with the triumph of allegory. The wedding of Edmund and Fanny results from an allegorical fiat that rewards Anglican rectitude and chides Crawfordian trespass. Symbol’s erotic domain contracts to the bland incest of the Edmund–Fanny marriage, while the novel sacrifices more engaging symbolic possibilities.31 Duckworth argues that “marriages between Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford and between Fanny Price and Henry Crawford … would require a traditional morality to capitulate to relativism, and ‘society’ to surrender to ‘self’” (1994, 38). In other words, the claims of allegory take precedence over those of mimesis and symbol. The abstraction “society” must not give in to “self”—not, anyway, for the sake of plausibility or to appease readers’ symbolic impulse to identify with the characters. As Kathleen Kerr-Koch observes, Coleridgean “symbol posits identification, allegory distance” (2013, 97). The novel forces Mary into a demonic allegorical mold.32 If most readers today chafe at the ending, the main reason is not that they are distant from Regency culture: it is more likely that they have inherited Coleridge’s aversion to allegory.33 Mansfield Park flaunts the coerciveness of its ending. Some of the narrator’s interventions are laughably contrived: “Dr Grant has to be killed off by deus ex machina gluttony … in order to make Fanny and Edmund’s ‘home of affection and comfort’ Mansfield’s parsonage rather than Thornton Lacey’s” (Graham 2008, 114). In a morbid allegorical irony, Dr. Grant’s death grants Edmund a living. The narrator’s coercions fill a vacuum created by (or for) the passive protagonist. Mary Poovey assesses the effect of Fanny’s passivity on readers: If our identification with Fanny could be rendered complete, we would—like Mansfield Park itself—be reformed by an internal agent (the principled imagination), not by an external and authoritarian teacher. But as long as her example contradicts the energy we seek and express in imaginative activity, it is difficult to imagine how Fanny might engage readers who do not already share her principles and priorities. (1984, 223–24) Had Austen constructed Fanny in such a way that we could identify with her, the novel’s dominant mode would be symbolic; as it happens, the narrator (“an external and authoritarian teacher”) imposes solutions that the passive Fanny cannot implement on her own. It might help us to identify with Fanny if at least Edmund could convincingly love her, modeling an attraction that might contaminate readers. But “Edmund does not speak one word of erotic love to Fanny in the whole of the novel” (Sørbø 2014, 244). Indeed, as Brian Wilkie puts it, “Edmund’s

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courtship of Fanny consists of little more than the withdrawal of his affection from Mary Crawford, in an emotional zero-sum game” (1992, 533). The narrator contends that “Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire” (Austen 1816, 3:347). But “marry Fanny” is a pun: Edmund will Mary Fanny, make Fanny into a Mary substitute. The endings of other Austen novels are also reticent in their proposal scenes; yet the lack of phenomenal details is especially striking in Mansfield Park, as if “the coming together of the hero and heroine is enough of a downer at this juncture to be kept from view” (Galperin 2009, 129). With an artifice suitable to allegory, Austen “reminds her readers that she has invented these characters, events, and circumstances, not watched them unfold” (Graham 2010, 889). The ending of the novel becomes an allegory of virtue rewarded, rather than a symbolic union of reader and protagonist in a shared joy. The resulting disappointment, however, is not without epistemological benefits. Allegory, de Man teaches, disavows symbol’s appeal to “an identity or identification … . In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self” (1983, 207).

Between Allegory and Irony: The Last Chapter Allegory does not triumph alone: it crowds the podium with irony. De Man notes that traditional definitions of “irony as ‘saying one thing and meaning another’ or … as ‘blame-by-praise and praise-by-blame’” could define allegory just as well, since in both irony and allegory “the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous” (1983, 209). Such discontinuities permeate Austen’s novels, including Mansfield Park. But the kind of irony that interests de Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” is the same kind of irony that becomes obtrusive in the last chapter: an abrupt doubling of the self.34 De Man claims that “in speaking of irony we are dealing not with the history of an error but with a problem that exists within the self” (211). The problem arises as a “duplication … It is a relationship, within consciousness, between two selves, yet it is not an intersubjective relationship” (212). He finds the “duplication” exemplified by Baudelaire, who proposes, in de Man’s paraphrase, that irony “divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that becomes like a sign in its attempt at differentiation and self-definition” (213). In other words, “ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity” (214). In the context of Mansfield Park, the relevant self is the narrator—who becomes herself only at the end. She suddenly uses first-person pronouns and directs attention to her own work: “LET other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort” (Austen

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1816, 3:326).35 The impersonal narrator we have hitherto known would never confess her impatience. It is difficult to imagine such a narrator saying “I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion” or “I only intreat every body to believe” (3:346). Wiltshire remarks on the disjunction between the last chapter’s “vagueness about time” and “the day-to-day accuracy of the preceding chapters” (2014, 121). The valedictory narrator also confesses her partisan feelings: “My Fanny indeed at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of every thing” (Austen 1816, 3:326). The voice of the narrator has reminded some of Mary Crawford (Heydt-Stevenson 2000, 324). Critics routinely fault Mary for being superficial, but the narrator, reducing Edmund’s love objects to their eye colors, imitates the abjected Mary: “what was there now to add, but that he should learn to prefer soft light eyes to sparkling dark ones” (Austen 1816, 3:347). The light/dark contrast is conventionally allegorical (good versus evil); here irony and allegory compete for dominance. Mentioning “My Fanny” could be a pun in the style of Mary (“Rears and Vices”) Crawford (Heydt-Stevenson 2000, 338). The phrase “Sir Thomas, poor Sir Thomas” (Austen 1816, 3:327) echoes Mary’s presumptuous reference to “Poor Sir Thomas” (3:268). Once the astute chronicler of other people’s inauthenticity, the narrator (or, if you like, Austen) now falls into it. The narrator used to be a protean non-self that, by means of free indirect discourse, floated in and out of individual characters, existing, in the meantime, in a spatially and temporally indeterminate realm—existing, that is, “in the form of a language.” Conversely, the narrator of the last chapter is an “empirical self,” who sounds like Mary, holds an impatient pen, and possesses a happy Fanny. The belated introduction of the narrator’s “empirical self” abruptly doubles the narrator, creating a non-“intersubjective relationship”—non-“intersubjective” since there can be no dialogue between these selves. This ironic complication puts pressure on “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” which associates allegory with temporal development and irony with instantaneousness. De Man argues that allegory involves the tendency of the language toward narrative, the spreading out along the axis of an imaginary time … . The structure of irony, however, is the reversed mirror-image of this form … irony appears as an instantaneous process that takes place rapidly, suddenly, in one single moment. (1983, 225)36 “Essentially the mode of the present,” de Man’s “Irony is a synchronic structure, while allegory appears as a successive mode capable of engendering duration as the illusion of a continuity that it knows to be illusionary” (de Man 1983, 226). But the doubling of self at work in Mansfield Park’s final chapter, though it appears abruptly, is only intelligible as “a successive

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mode.” If irony itself (an allegory) “knows neither memory nor prefigurative duration” (226), we should acknowledge that without memory the irony of the last chapter would be illegible. When the narrator says she is “impatient to restore every body … to tolerable comfort,” Miller rightly asks: “how are we to take an impatience that has been able to contain itself over almost three volumes?” (1981, 49). Were it not for all those previous chapters, the impatience would not strike us as ironic. To detect irony, we have to compare the present to the past. Here, irony relies on, rather than suspends, consciousness of time. The irony of the last chapter, since it is the last chapter, inscribes irony in a temporal sequence. Perhaps this is “the allegory of irony” de Man locates in Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme (1983, 228), but yoking the tropes with a preposition does not solve a problem so much as it cites an impasse. Austen’s performance is so dazzling that it frustrates rhetorical taxonomy.

Between Allegory and Symbol: Lovers’ Vows The most dazzling segment of Mansfield Park is the theatricals episode, whose narration of a mimetic endeavor—acting in a play—entangles allegory and symbol. One could locate in this entanglement what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe refers to as “the ‘constitutive undecidability’ of mimesis”— though it would be a strange mimesis indeed, bearing little resemblance to verisimilitude (1989, 97).37 By forcing the German world of an old text, Lovers’ Vows, into Mansfield Park, the theatricals create a classic allegorical situation in which one story systematically points to an antecedent. Rehearsing their roles, the characters sketch links between Austen’s story and August von Kotzebue’s. Readers of The Statesman’s Manual should ask whether these links are symbols or allegories: do the novel’s characters match their roles (are they symbolically consubstantial with them), or are the characters allegorically representing roles with which they cannot coincide? Penny Gay argues that “Edmund and Mary are undoubtedly perfectly type-cast in” the roles of Anhalt and Amelia (2002, 110). Yet being “perfectly type-cast” (an oxymoron) is not the same as being perfectly cast. Edmund himself notes this. When Mary says the role of Anhalt the clergyman should tempt him, he denies it: for I should be sorry to make the character ridiculous by bad acting. It must be very difficult to keep Anhalt from appearing a formal, solemn lecturer, and the man who chooses the profession itself, is, perhaps, one of the last who would wish to represent it on the stage. (Austen 1816, 1:303)38 Perfect casting suggests symbol: the character is consubstantial with the actor; they are ontologically coextensive or tautegorical (“I was born to play

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this part!”). Type-casting suggests allegory if the performer lacks skill and can only allude to the type, or if the performer resents having to act a part that alludes to earlier performances. A truly great professional actor—a master of theatrical mimesis—would be able to succeed in spite of being miscast. But only Henry is a candidate for such mastery.39 Most of the actors are not much better off than Fanny, who reads Anhalt’s lines with no pretense of mimetic success, “with looks and voice so truly feminine, as to be no very good picture of a man” (Austen 1816, 1:354).40 Edmund admits he likes to see real acting, good hardened real acting; but I would hardly walk from this room to the next to look at the raw efforts of those who have not been bred to the trade, — a set of gentlemen and ladies, who have all the disadvantages of education and decorum to struggle through. (Austen 1816, 1:258) Rather than convincingly imitating or symbolically incarnating their roles, “gentlemen and ladies” can become at best allegorical signs of their roles. Edmund, however, does not give some “ladies” enough credit. According to Bruce Stovel, “each character—for instance, Edmund in the role of Anhalt, the idealistic clergyman, or Maria as Agatha, the fallen woman—plays a role that enacts his or her own situation at Mansfield Park” (2006). But the relations of the characters to their roles are much more complex, and this complexity—a scrambling of allegory and symbol— accounts for the exhilaration of the theatricals episode. Marie N. Sørbø can claim that “The haughty and spoilt Maria is the opposite of the starving Agatha, although both are deserted by men” (2014, 230). Agatha was a poor girl adopted by the castle (Inchbald 2005, 571). She is more like Fanny than Maria, though tainted, as Maria will be, by illicit sex. Agatha recalls, “I was questioned, and received many severe reproaches: but I refused to confess who was my undoer” (572). Likewise, Fanny, questioned and reproached by her uncle, refuses to admit her love for Edmund or reveal Henry’s flirtation with the Bertram sisters (Austen 1816, 3:4–25). Fanny might even fit the role of Amelia better than Mary Crawford does (Lott 2006, 279). In Lovers’ Vows, the baron says that Count Cassel is an “idiot” (Inchbald 2005, 611). Rushworth is also an idiot; but unlike the count, an exuberantly impudent womanizer, Rushworth is stolidly monogamous (Sørbø 2014, 230). The connection between actor and role is not entirely arbitrary, but it is hard to imagine Rushworth summoning the verve to play the count well: all he shares with the count is the type “idiot,” and his mimetic skills are so meager he cannot even learn his lines—a mark of idiocy, perhaps, but not one that will help him much in a performance. The discontinuity between character and role becomes especially pronounced in the case of Edmund and Anhalt. Susan Allen Ford notes that Anhalt “is a clergyman, the voice of conscience in the play. The comparison

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between Anhalt’s effectiveness and Edmund’s ineffectiveness in the role is telling” (2014, 146). While Anhalt drives the “main plot” of Lovers’ Vows (Ford 2006), Edmund is an inept figure, who consents to Henry’s courtship of Fanny, seems to forget about her when she is in Portsmouth, and cannot even complete his courtship of Mary, which unforeseen circumstances derail. Being a clergyman is not natural: it is a linguistic convention, the result of the speech act of ordination—which Edmund, during the theatricals, has not yet undergone. When he takes the role of Anhalt, he marks a disjunction between character and role. As Duckworth puts it, “by agreeing to act the part of a clergyman rather than be one,” Edmund “has in effect admitted the possibility that his role may be temporary, his office ‘nothing;’ he has ‘stepp[ed] out of his place to appear what he ought not to appear’” (1994, 63). As a theatrical sign, Edmund can only refer to the role of the clergyman by giving up (at least for the length of the performance) his vocation, his spiritual claim to that role. Edmund’s performance, which Austen does not characterize as a mimetic success, functions more like allegory than symbol, though his desire for Mary matches Anhalt’s desire for Amelia. While Edmund veers toward allegory, Maria, despite her dissimilarities to Agatha, veers toward symbol, and it is Maria’s performance that is the most disruptive. Ford contends that “onstage at Mansfield Park, maternal, paternal, or filial love serves merely to mask erotic desire” (2006). In Ford’s reading, the roles are allegorical signs: the characters use the gestures of familial love to signify erotic love, a fundamentally different desire. Tuite would agree: “The aborted theatricals are … a pretence at real theater, and the tawdry disguise of real desires – as the allegorical doublings between Mansfield’s players and Kotzebue’s characters make abundantly clear” (2002, 113). Marilyn Butler, who argues for the sincerity of the actors, would disagree: In touching one another or making love to one another on the stage these four are not adopting a pose, but are … expressing their real feelings. The impropriety lies in the fact that they are not acting, but are finding an indirect means to gratify desires which are illicit, and should have been contained. (1975, 232) The exact nature of Henry’s “real feelings” is unknowable.41 Both Tuite and Butler oversimplify the theatricals and are too quick to judge what is real; but their disagreement reflects Mansfield Park’s confusion of allegory and symbol. Two possibilities arise: either emotion makes the characters consubstantial with their roles (as in Method Acting), or the actors perform through sheer willpower—as Tom adopts heterogeneous roles and seeks to impose one on Fanny. Austen keeps in play the possibility that Maria’s performance of a mother is not an allegorical sign or “mask.” Her desire

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could be consubstantial with maternal love—particularly since she knows Henry is an orphan, a fact that perhaps makes him more lovable. If using maternal love as a mask for erotic desire is an allegorical sign of depravity, then it may be disturbing to see such depravity let loose in a patriarch’s house. But the symbolic alternative would at least partially exonerate erotic desire: Maria’s love of Henry, one might argue, is an imprudent manifestation of maternal instinct, and her symbolic performance of a mother could be commendable in a story whose real mothers are negligent or dead. It should not unduly surprise readers that Maria’s performance confuses maternal and erotic love; after all, the protagonist’s love for her cousin is an obvious transference of her love for her brother William. Incest is symbol incarnate at last. While non-improvised acting always bears an allegorical valence, since the performer becomes a sign for a character who pre-exists in a text (Helen Mirren is Prospero), the stage frequently accrues symbolic energy.42 Mary Evans argues that the characters “use the semblance of distance that is an essential part of acting to voice ideas, desires and fantasies that they themselves might have and yet cannot voice in conventional society” (1993, 48). It is the ambiguity of acting (symbol or allegory— “semblance of distance” or actual distance?) that eases the pursuit of illicit desire. If acting were purely symbolic or purely allegorical (completely motivated or completely arbitrary), it would not pose much of a threat: in the former case, no respectable person would dare to do it; in the latter case, few people would want to watch it. Yet the inability to decide which trope is at play bucks conservative thought, always keen to control youth, sex, and women. On their own, both symbol and allegory can abet counterrevolutionary discourse. Symbol may invoke politically oppressive syntheses—jingoistic versions of “the people,” for instance. Though construing Burke’s house metaphors as allegories would undermine the persuasiveness of a specific text, Reflections on the Revolution in France, elsewhere allegory has often proved useful to conservatives. Allegory’s abstraction may accommodate revolutionary violence,43 but by conspicuously referring back to previous signs, allegories may support tradition. Joel Fineman sees allegory as an intrinsically “hierarchicizing mode, indicative of timeless order, however subversively intended its contents might be” (1981, 32). Allegory encourages a renunciatory disposition and upholds the past as the locus of truth or value. This why Coleridge, the most outspoken denouncer of allegory among canonical English Romantics, uses it himself when convenient; an integral part of revolutionary propaganda, allegory can also serve the anti-Jacobin cause. The aura of scandal generated by the acting in Mansfield Park has less to do with the contemporary reputation of Lovers’ Vows than with the way the theatricals frustrate discrimination between symbol and allegory. By blurring tropes, the theatricals enact the unreliability of political and moral rhetoric—be it on a domestic or national scale. If we cannot decide whether Maria’s performance is allegorical or symbolic, how can we be certain that revolutionary culture—a much more complicated

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thing—is a devious intellectual encroachment rather than an organic expression of the French people’s interests? What is truly disturbing is the possibility that we often do not know whether the rhetoric we encounter and produce is symbol or allegory; in other words, we do not know how motivated it is. Claudia Johnson and Joseph Litvak have proven that theatricality inhabits Mansfield Park both before and after Sir Thomas cancels the play. But this insight threatens to devolve into the cynical idea that “every major character is acting all the time” (Johnson 1988, 100).44 The saturation of the world by theater was an eighteenth-century commonplace. According to Henry Fielding, This thought hath been carried so far, and is become so general, that some words proper to the theatre, and which were at first metaphorically applied to the world, are now indiscriminately and literally spoken of both; thus stage and scene are by common use grown as familiar to us, when we speak of life in general, as when we confine ourselves to dramatic performances; and when transactions behind the curtain are mentioned, St. James’s is more likely to occur to our thoughts than Drury Lane. (1996, 283, Book VII, Ch. 1)45 The notion that theatricality pervades Mansfield Park may upset those advocates of Fanny who are committed to the value of sincerity, but this notion would not have surprised Fielding. If Mansfield Park is a genuinely disturbing text, it is not because it features this commonplace, but because the novel exposes the unintelligibility of action—the inaction constitutive of action (and reaction). By contrast, the idea that everyone is always faking it is strangely comforting: at least you know not to take anyone seriously. How can we cope with theatricality if we cannot understand it? Anne Mallory observes that when Fanny “is asked to perform the role of Cottager’s Wife, what Tom Bertram refers to as ‘a nothing of a part, a mere nothing,’ adding that ‘it will not much signify if no one hears a word you say,’ she is being asked—and for as long as possible refuses—to perform her unimportance” (2014, 131). But Tom’s insistence that she play the role indicates its importance: it is important to him that the unimportant one “perform her unimportance.”46 While Fanny is (relatively) unimportant to Tom, she is the most important character to Austen, who focalizes her, and is probably the most important character to readers—whether they like it or not. Because she is unimportant, she is consubstantial with her unimportant role (symbol); but because she is important, she is not consubstantial (allegory). Litvak argues that “Mansfield Park is about … the theatricality of everyday life, in which to say, with Fanny, ‘No, indeed, I cannot act’ … is already to perform” (1992). True—but only half. Since she is acting not acting, she is also not performing. She succumbs to Tom’s pressure and joins the

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theatricals. Sir Thomas, however, immediately returns, cancelling the play before she can utter a scripted line on stage. So in a sense she does not join the theatricals.47 It is bad enough when people are acting when they should not be acting or not acting when they should; it is worse when the distinction between acting and non-acting malfunctions. Gay notes that while Edmund savors professional acting, he disapproves of amateur acting because “it would allow the sort of carnival disruption of hierarchised society that had been going on in France for the previous quarter of a century” (2002, 104). Yet carnival’s inversions all too easily retract into the hierarchies that vented them—unlike the confusions at work during Sir Thomas’s absence, which have staying power. Litvak concludes that the novel’s “subversive theatricality can only be repressed, temporarily neutralized” (1992). Acting generates an epistemological problem that Mansfield Park can interrupt but not solve or void. Some of us may think that symbols do not exist—that it is impossible for all difference to disappear between a tenor and its vehicle. But merely thinking does not deprive language of the performative power of specious unification, which is only too capable of neutralizing thought. Symbol is a lie about language that language can always rehearse.

Notes 1 Lorraine Clark proposes that “What makes this novel so different from Austen’s other novels … is that it asks to be read in highly schematic allegorical fashion” (2011–12, 359). According to Clara Tuite, the novel achieves a “stark recuperation of Protestant allegory” (2002, 115). Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire have argued that “reading the novel symbolically or allegorically” has been a way for some critics to redeem a protagonist “that they perceived as a failure in realist terms” (2014, 41). Folsom and Wiltshire seem to presuppose that allegory and realism are mutually exclusive. But Theresa M. Kelley maintains that “that allegory survives after the Renaissance … by making border raids on the very categories that have been presented as its contraries: realism, mimesis, empiricism, and history” (1997, 2). 2 “The Rhetoric of Temporality” is a transitional text, after which de Man stops positing “a purer or more authentic use of language, which could be termed allegorical” (Rosiek 1992, 222). 3 De Man’s reading of Coleridge may attest to the survival of pre-Romantic thought in the late twentieth century. Fredric Jameson represents de Man as “an eighteenth-century mechanical materialist” (1991, 246). De Man’s demystification of tropes recalls the Enlightenment, though today’s cheerleaders for the Enlightenment are unlikely to take comfort from de Man. 4 Though “Coleridge is not mentioned at all in her novels or manuscripts,” William Deresiewicz considers it “improbable to the point of being incredible” that Austen did not read Coleridge (2004, 5, 8). John A. Hodgson notes that “Coleridge’s advocacy of a symbolic, synecdochic mode of writing, though first specified only in 1816 in The Statesman’s Manual, is in fact strongly implicit in his writings as much as twenty years before” (1981, 275). Mark Parker briefly connects Austen’s writing to The Statesman’s Manual (1992, 347). 5 Hegel’s pejorative characterization of modern allegory resembles Coleridge’s (1975a, 224–25, 237–38).

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6 For an explanation of the religious context, see Dawson 1990, 302–3. 7 The distinction Coleridge draws between symbol and allegory distributes between different terms a conflict that originated within allegory itself (Turner 2010, 78–79). 8 Just as phonocentrism links speech to life and writing to death (or to the nonliving), so the Romantic theory of symbol links symbol to life and allegory to lifeless mechanisms. 9 The Statesman’s Manual is “replete with Burkean gestures”; in fact, “Coleridge’s political starting point is the Burkean reverence for historical particularity as a means to political truth, and this debt must be acknowledged if Coleridge’s later swerve into symbol and allegory is to make sense” (Fried 2006, 766–67). Kelley discusses the prevalence of allegory in French revolutionary propaganda and Coleridge’s reaction to it (1997, 110–19). Simpson establishes the poet’s “clear affiliation with a Burkean politics” (1993, 59). 10 Susan Allen Ford argues that the amusing contingencies of Sir Thomas’s homecoming “convert the Burkean concern with the fabric of the estate to an overdramatized concrete particularity” (2006). Anthony Mandal criticizes Duckworth for interpreting “Austen too firmly within the crucible of the 1790s, consequently neglecting the debate which was occurring in very different (that is, Evangelical) terms during the 1810s. Rather than the Burkean public model that Duckworth employs, in which the movement is from the state down, Mansfield Park can be seen as being informed by an Evangelically private model, which filters from the village or estate up” (2007, 107). But the 1816 publication of Coleridge’s lay sermon shows the lasting viability of Burke’s public model. Roger Sales documents the persistence of Burkean house metaphors in the first two decades of the nineteenth century (1996, 87–89). 11 As Simpson points out, “Sieyès’s plans for the creation of the new départements in fact made provision for elaborate local consultation and modification, but they were mathematically self-conscious enough to offer a target for the British press” (1993, 56). 12 Burke’s esteem for synecdoche has its limits. He deplores the French National Assembly’s inclusion of workers as political representatives (Furniss 1993, 222– 23). Only certain parts can stand for the whole. 13 Redfield claims that “the nation is radically imagined: it cannot be experienced immediately as a perception” (2003, 49). 14 For the argument that the young Austen wrote “The History of England” “specifically to refute Burke’s spurious account of English history,” see Spongberg 2011, 56. 15 Of course, there are many other reasons for not believing Burke. His account of Marie Antoinette’s arrest, probably the most famous part of the Reflections, is a dramatic embellishment of “already histrionic counter-revolutionary reports” (Furniss 1993, 154). 16 Litvak presents the ideological “instability” of Mansfield Park as a function of “a conservatism so riddled with internal contradictions as to trouble the authoritarian temperament” (1992). The difficulty of managing distinctions between symbol and allegory may help explain how conservatism got so riddled. 17 James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women recommends astronomy as a branch of learning most appropriate for them (Sprayberry 2014). 18 Tuite’s symbolic reading of Mrs. Norris’s green curtain is an exemplary development of Said’s approach (2004, 109). 19 Doody suggests that Rushworth “comically indicates the shallowness of a reed in a marsh” (2015, 133). Rushworth is not the only allegorical name in the book. David Marshall notes that when Fanny marries Edmund she will lose her surname and be “considered priceless rather than worth nothing” (1989, 102).

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20 Doody argues that “Mansfield Park stands out as the Austen novel most fully employing personification” (2009, 175). 21 Erika Wright ingeniously connects the novel’s temporality to disease prevention (2010, 379). She argues that readers must learn to “delay”—like Edmund, who learns to delay marrying Mary Crawford (380). But, as this chapter has already shown, the toxic Henry is also an agent of delay, interfering with the novel’s effectiveness as a preventative regimen. 22 Marilyn Butler complains that in the Sotherton episode “the naturalism and the scheme sometimes jar” (1975, 229). One word for this jarring is allegory. 23 The allusive texture of the Sotherton episode makes its allegory salient. Kate Beaird Meyers notes the allusion to Matt. 7:13–14: “By taking a circuitous route around the gate, Maria chooses the ‘easy’ path—the path that ‘leads to destruction’” (1986, 97). For a similar moment in an allegory Austen probably read, see Bunyan 1984, 32–33. To Serena Moore, the “locked gate” recalls “Bunyan’s wicket” (2014, 93). 24 For a discussion of links between Austen and Rousseau, see Vandersluis 2014, 174. 25 Nigel Wood observes that “Julia Bertram is obliged to ‘restrain her impatient feet’ and keep pace with Mrs Rushworth and Mrs Norris” (1993, 20). Edmund objects to the “feminine lawlessness” of Mary’s timekeeping (Austen 1816, 1:196– 97). Rushworth is in a hurry to tour the grounds before dinner (1:185). He protests that he did not delay to fetch the key: “I went the very moment she said she wanted it.” Fanny replies: “I dare say you walked as fast as you could; but still it is some distance, you know … and when people are waiting, they are bad judges of time, and every half minute seems like five” (1:212–13). Fanny speaks from experience. She reflects on being ditched by Edmund and Mary: “It was evident that they had been spending their time pleasantly … but this was not quite sufficient to do away the pain of having been left a whole hour, when he had talked of only a few minutes, nor to banish the sort of curiosity she felt, to know what they had been conversing about all that time” (1:214–15). 26 Wright notes that “we are left to anticipate rather than to witness what ought not to happen” (2010, 385). 27 According to Paul Pickrel, “The narrative unity of Mansfield Park resembles the narrative unity of the Bible; early events prefigure later events that complete them” (1985, 151). 28 Robert Clark discusses the biblical references embedded in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gardens, and he proposes that “As an Anglican, Austen would almost certainly have had these religious understandings in mind when she represented the Sotherton wilderness in Mansfield Park, and it is highly probable she had first-hand knowledge of such Renaissance wildernesses” (2015). 29 Deresiewicz anatomizes the sexual implications (2004, 76). 30 Wiltshire argues that rather than imposing symbols, Mansfield Park avails “itself of the symbolism already imbued in the cultural material at its disposal” (2005, lxxxi). 31 Austen’s own sister found fault with the ending (Hudson 1991, 53). 32 Mudrick thinks that the Mary Crawford who ends up writing mean letters is an implausible imposition on the reader (1968, 167). 33 Farrer protests against the dénouement, which he labels “a dishonest bit of sheer bad art” (2007, 73). This complaint may chime with readers whose literary preferences Coleridge and other advocates of symbol have shaped. 34 The last chapter of Jane Austen and Literary Theory will examine other kinds of irony. 35 There is at least one earlier example of the narrator’s use of I (Austen 1816, 2:123). Perhaps Henry becomes infectious here: in neighboring speeches, he

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frequently uses first-person pronouns (2:121–23). Marshall explores the significance of this earlier I (1989, 103). This statement seems to contradict the claim that “the temporal void” revealed by irony “is the same void we encountered when we found allegory always implying an unreachable anteriority. Allegory and irony are thus linked in their common discovery of a truly temporal predicament” (de Man 1983, 222). Lee Edelman tracks the ironic twists of de Man’s argument (2016). Discussing Lacoue-Labarthe’s theory of mimesis, Derrida claims: “The subject, which is thus de-subjectivized, would not have to identify itself were it not for the desistance that makes absolute identification absolutely impossible for it” (1989, 30n22). The Mansfield theatricals, largely unbeknownst to their participants, superimpose identification and dis-identification. Fanny Price, as we will see, becomes the most anguished subject of “desistance.” Ironically, Edmund sounds like “a formal, solemn lecturer” when he makes this speech, which raises the “question of what the difference is between representing the profession on stage and in the pulpit” (Miles 2003, 96–97). One answer is that the stage is more likely than the pulpit to let desistance obtrude—though Mr. Collins’s parishioners might disagree. Ford argues that British acting in Austen’s time was more interactive than mimetic: “Attending a play … was not an experience of giving oneself over to the illusion of watching real people feel and act” (2006). Marshall thinks that when Edmund and Mary rehearse their love scene, “Both acting and not acting become impossible for [Fanny] as she is plunged into vertiginous acts of identification and impersonation” (1989, 94). Mary Evans speculates that since his mother died when he was young, Henry, playing the role of Frederick, is sincerely acting his love for his mother; unfortunately, Maria, who plays his mother, “loves Henry Crawford not as a son, but as a potential husband” (1993, 49). Gay observes the similar “erotic feeling” that links theatrical experience and “falling in love” (2002, 117). Burke ridicules Lord Auckland for using “abstraction and personification” to make the Jacobin cause seem less violent (1907, 326). Daniel O’Quinn takes issue with the critical concept of “theatricality.” Using “theater as an analytical tool for understanding narrative dynamics” results in a “metaphorization of the theater,” which “comes at a cost. The shift from theater as a lived social and material praxis which takes place in a specific time and place to notions of theatricality strips theater of the very elements which define its operation in the cultural field” (2009, 377). But O’Quinn’s heavy reliance on metaphors, even in the passage just quoted, vitiates the persuasiveness of his argument. Moreover, the theatricals of Mansfield Park are not a real play that critics have abused: they form an episode in a novel. If there has been a “shift” away from living theater, it begins at the tip of Austen’s pen. St. James is not the only court to host theatrical ambiguity. See Mary Wollstonecraft’s description of Louis XIV’s court (2008, 299, 299n1). Marshall argues that when Henry talks to Fanny after his Shakespearean performance, she tries “to sit silent and motionless, to refuse to speak or gesture, to attain a kind of ‘degree zero’ of signification … . Fanny wants to mean nothing. It is as if she wants to say: Fanny I nothing am. But Henry … insists that she speak, that she mean” (1989, 101). This moment, however, is a restaging of Fanny’s earlier confrontation with Tom, when she resisted his demand for her to act. Isobel Armstrong detects an irony: “an unperformed play helps to determine the ‘action’ of the events which follow it” (1988, 60). Fanny’s performance, however, casts doubt on the distinction between rehearsing and performing.

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References Allen, Graham. 1996. “Romantic Allegory.” In Romantic Writings, edited by Stephen Bygrave, 205–226. New York: Routledge. Armstrong, Isobel. 1988. Jane Austen: Mansfield Park. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. [Austen, Jane]. 1816. Mansfield Park: A Novel. In Three Volumes. 2nd ed. London: J. Murray. https://archive.org/details/mansfieldparknov13aust/page/n7/mode/2up. Brodey, Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer. 2014. “Avenues, Parks, Wilderness, and Ha-Has: The Use and Abuse of Landscape in Mansfield Park.” In Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire, 175–189. New York: Modern Language Association. Bunyan, John. 1984. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Edited by N. H. Keeble. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burke, Edmund. 1907. “Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France.” In The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. Vol. 6. London: Oxford University Press. https://archive.org/details/work sofrighthono06burkiala. Burke, Edmund. 2004. Reflections on the Revolution in France: And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. Edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien. London: Penguin. Butler, Marilyn. 1975. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, Lorraine. 2011–12. “Remembering Nature: Soliloquy as Aesthetic Form in Mansfield Park.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24 (2): 353–379. doi:10.1353/ ecf.2011.0039. Clark, Robert. 2014. “Mansfield Park and the Moral Empire.” Persuasions 36: 136– 150. Clark, Robert. 2015. “Wilderness and Shrubbery in Austen’s Works.” Persuasions On-Line 36 (1). www.jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/vol36no1/clark/. Cole, Andrew. 2014. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coleridge, S. T. 1816. The Statesman’s Manual […]. London. https://archive.org/deta ils/statesmansmanual00coleuoft. Coleridge, S. T. 1848. Aids to Reflection. Vol. 1. Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge. London. https://books.google.co.kr/books?id=DKrDnoP6gxkC&printsec=front cover&dq=coleridge+aids+to+reflection+volume+I&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0a hUKEwiFn6a18LLiAhXNG6YKHczlDooQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=coleridge %20aids%20to%20reflection%20volume%20I&f=false. Crisp, Peter. 2005. “Allegory and Symbol: A Fundamental Opposition?” Language and Literature 14 (4): 323–338. doi:10.1177/0963947005051287. Dawson, David. 1990. “Against the Divine Ventriloquist: Coleridge and de Man on Symbol, Allegory, and Scripture.” Literature and Theology 4 (3): 293–310. doi:10.1093/litthe/4.3.293. Deresiewicz, William. 2004. Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. New York: Columbia University Press. de Man, Paul. 1983. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 187–228. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “Introduction: Desistance.” In Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 1–42. Edited by Christopher Fynsk. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corr. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doody, Margaret Anne. 2009. “Turns of Speech and Figures of Mind.” In A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 165–184. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Doody, Margaret Anne. 2015. Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Downie, J. A. 2010. “Rehabilitating Sir Thomas Bertram,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 50 (4): 739–758. www.jstor.org/stable/40928285. Duckworth, Alistair M. 1994. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2016. “Brief Encounter: de Man on Wordsworth, or The Irony of ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’.” In Minimal Romanticism, edited by David L. Clark and Jacques Khalip. Romantic Circles. www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/brevity/praxis. 2016.brevity.edelman.html. Evans, Mary. 1993. “Henry Crawford and the ‘Sphere of Love’ in Mansfield Park.” In Mansfield Park, edited by Nigel Wood, 30–55. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Farrer, Reginald. 2007. “Jane Austen, ob. July 18, 1817.” In Jane Austen’s “Emma”: A Casebook, edited by Fiona Stafford, 57–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Festa, Lynn. 2009. “Losing One’s Place in Mansfield Park.” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 6–7: 429–463. Fielding, Henry. 1996. Tom Jones. Edited by John Bender and Simon Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fineman, Joel. 1981. “The Structure of Allegorical Desire.” In Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–80, edited by Stephen J. Greenblatt, 26–60. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Folsom, Marcia McClintock, and John Wiltshire. 2014. “Introduction.” In Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire, 21–49. New York: Modern Language Association. Ford, Susan Allen. 2006. “‘It Is about Lovers’ Vows’: Kotzebue, Inchbald, and the Players of Mansfield Park.” Persuasions On-Line 27 (1). www.jasna.org/persua sions/on-line/vol27no1/ford.htm. Ford, Susan Allen. 2014. “Reading with Mansfield Park’s Readers.” In Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire, 143–154. New York: Modern Language Association. Fried, Daniel. 2006. “The Politics of the Coleridgean Symbol.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 46 (4): 763–779. www.jstor.org/stable/4127507. Furniss, Tom. 1993. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galperin, William H. 2009. “The Missed Opportunities of Mansfield Park.” In A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 123– 132. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Gay, Penny. 2002. Jane Austen and the Theater. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Graham, Peter W. 2008. Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Graham, Peter W. 2010. “Falling for the Crawfords: Character, Contingency, and Narrative.” ELH 77 (4): 867–891. www.jstor.org/stable/40963112. Hegel, G. W. F. 1975a. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1975b. “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.” In Early Theological Writings, translated by T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner, 182–301. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Heydt-Stevenson, Jill. 2000. “‘Slipping into the Ha-Ha’: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 55 (3): 309–339. doi:10.2307/2903126. Hodgson, John A. 1981. “Transcendental Tropes: Coleridge’s Rhetoric of Allegory and Symbol.” In Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, edited by Morton Bloomfield, 273– 292. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hudson, Glenda A. 1991. “Incestuous Relationships: Mansfield Park Revisited.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1): 53–68. doi:10.1353/ecf.1991.0009. Inchbald, Elizabeth. 2005. “Lovers’ Vows […].” In Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen, 555–629. Edited by John Wiltshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jager, Colin. 2002. “Mansfield Park and the End of Natural Theology.” Modern Language Quarterly 63 (1): 31–64. doi:10.1215/00267929-63-1-31. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Johnson, Barbara. 1994. The Wake of Deconstruction. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Johnson, Claudia L. 1988. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karounos, Michael. 2004. “Ordination and Revolution in Mansfield Park.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 44 (4): 715–736. doi:10.1353/sel.2004.0040. Kelley, Theresa M. 1997. Reinventing Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerfoot, Alicia L. 2008. “Replacing the Old Silver Knife: The Convergence of Antislavery Rhetoric and Legal Discourse in Mansfield Park.” Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies 31 (2): 275–292. doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00104.x. Kerr-Koch, Kathleen. 2013. Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory in Benjamin, de Man, Shelley. New York: Bloomsbury. Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2002. “Jane Austen’s Nocturnal and Anne Finch.” English Language Notes 39 (3): 41–54. doi:10.1215/00138282-39.3.41. Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2004. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1989. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Edited by Christopher Fynsk. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Litvak, Joseph. 1992. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/ 13030/ft9k4009nr/. Lott, Anna. 2006. “Staging a Lesson: The Theatricals and Proper Conduct in Mansfield Park.” Studies in the Novel 38 (3): 275–287. www.jstor.org/stable/29533765. Madsen, Deborah L. 2010. “American Allegory to 1900.” In The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, edited by Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, 229–240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mallory, Anne. 2014. “Understanding Fanny Price: Close Reading Early Scenes.” In Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire, 123–131. New York: Modern Language Association. Mandal, Anthony. 2007. Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, David. 1989. “True Acting and the Language of Real Feeling: Mansfield Park.” Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (1): 87–106. Meyers, Kate Beaird. 1986. “Jane Austen’s Use of Literary Allusion in the Sotherton Episode of Mansfield Park.” Papers on Language and Literature 22 (1): 96–99. Miles, Robert. 2003. Jane Austen. Tavistock, UK: Northcote House. Miles, Robert. 2014. “Mansfield Park and the News.” Persuasions On-Line 35 (1): www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol35no1/miles.html. Miller, D. A. 1981. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moore, Serena. 2014. “Inside the Language of Mansfield Park.” JAS Report: 83–99. Mudrick, Marvin. 1968. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Berkeley: University of California Press. O’Quinn, Daniel. 2009. “Jane Austen and Performance: Theatre, Memory, and Enculturation.” In A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 377–388. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Park, Julie. 2013. “What the Eye Cannot See: Interior Landscapes in Mansfield Park.” The Eighteenth Century 54 (2): 169–181. doi:10.1353/ecy.2013.0015. Parker, Mark. 1992. “The End of Emma: Drawing the Boundaries of Class in Austen.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 91 (3): 344–359. www.jstor. org/stable/27710688. Pickrel, Paul. 1985. “Emma as Sequel.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (2): 135–153. doi:10.2307/3044587. Poovey, Mary. 1984. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Redfield, Marc. 2003. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rosiek, Jan. 1992. Figures of Failure: Paul de Man’s Criticism 1953–1970. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press. Rousseau, J. J. 1784. Eloisa: Or, a Series of Original Letters […]. Vol. 3. London. https://archive.org/details/eloisaoraseries02rousgoog. Said, Edward W. 1989. “Jane Austen and Empire.” In Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, edited by Terry Eagleton, 150–164. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Sales, Roger. 1996. Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England. London: Routledge. Schaffer, Talia. 2015. “Reading on the Contrary: Cousin Marriage, Mansfield Park, and Wuthering Heights.” In Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature, edited by Duc Dau and Shale Preston, 157–175. New York: Routledge. Simpson, David. 1993. Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sørbø, Marie N. 2014. Irony and Idyll: Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and “Mansfield Park” on Screen. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Sprayberry, A. Marie. 2014. “Fanny Price as Fordyce’s Ideal Woman? And Why?” Persuasions On-Line 35 (1). www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol35no1/spra yberry.html. Spongberg, Mary. 2011. “Jane Austen and the History of England.” Journal of Women’s History 23 (1): 56–80. doi:10.1353/jowh.2011.0012. Stovel, Bruce. 2006. “Once More with Feeling: The Structure of Mansfield Park.” Persuasions On-Line 27 (1). www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/stovel. htm. Tuite, Clara. 2002. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuite, Clara. 2004. “Domestic Retrenchment and Imperial Expansion: The Property Plots of Mansfield Park.” In The Postcolonial Jane Austen, edited by You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, 93–115. New York: Routledge. Turner, Denys. 2010. “Allegory in Christian Late Antiquity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, edited by Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, 71–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valihora, Karen. 2007. “Impartial Spectator Meets Picturesque Tourist: The Framing of Mansfield Park.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20 (1): 89–114. doi:10.3138/ ecf.2007.20.1.89. Vandersluis, Melora G. 2014. “Reflections on Mirrors: Jane Austen, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Socio-Politics.” In Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony, edited by Natasha Duquette and Elisabeth Lenckos, 163–178. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Wilkie, Brian. 1992. “Structural Layering in Jane Austen’s Problem Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (4): 517–544. doi:10.2307/2933805. Williams, Nicholas M. 2013. “‘Literally or Figuratively?’: Embodied Perception and Figurative Prospect in Mansfield Park.” European Romantic Review 24 (3): 317– 323. doi:10.1080/10509585.2013.785678. Wiltshire, John, ed. 2005. Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiltshire, John, 2014. The Hidden Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 2008. A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Edited by Janet Todd. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, Nigel. 1993. “Introduction.” In Mansfield Park, edited by Nigel Wood, 1–29. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Wright, Erika. 2010. “Prevention as Narrative in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.” Studies in the Novel 42 (4): 377–394. www.jstor.org/stable/41203484.

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Emma’s Parergonal Realism

Of the four tropes squared by “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man takes least interest in mimesis. Mansfield Park suits de Manian reading because here Austen multiplies the oppositional play of symbol, allegory, and irony. As important as this play is, it should not make us overlook the fact that Mansfield Park contains the most intensely mimetic passages in all of Austen’s works. These passages cluster in Fanny’s return to her hometown. Linda Zionkowski comments on the resulting “anomaly in the novel: no setting is described in such disturbing detail as the Price family home, with its torn carpets, dirty cutlery, damaged furniture, dented walls, and greasy food” (2016, 168). The apex (or nadir) of Austen’s mimesis is her description of the “stifling, sickly glare” of urban sunlight: [Fanny] sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust; and her eyes could only wander from the walls marked by her father’s head, to the table cut and knotched by her brothers, where stood the teaboard never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca’s hands had first produced it. (Austen 2005, 508) Such mimesis does not reconcile Fanny to her origins: it produces, rather, a definitive break from them. Portsmouth’s glaring vividness calls attention to the non-mimetic texture of the rest of the book. For all the psychological plausibility of her discomforts, Fanny seems like an allegorical refugee, a Christ in the Wilderness.1 An unpleasantly vivid space distinguishes the Portsmouth episode, but it is an episode, a waiting game in a larger narrative. Said’s call to pay less attention to the temporality of Mansfield Park and more attention to its spatiality has had a paradoxical effect: it has honed our understanding of the novel’s time. Said’s influence on Austen studies—in particular, his foregrounding of slavery—has made the chronology of Mansfield Park a much more pressing concern.2 Yet the privileging of geographical or imperial

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space has obscured the literary space of her novels. Denunciations of Austen’s complicity in colonialism and defenses of her abolitionist bona fides have something in common: both are uninterested in the difference between geographical space and the space taken up by writing, between the layout of Austen’s fictional world and the dependence of that world on the materiality of books. Unlike geographical borders, textual borders do not circumscribe. What they contain, words, point beyond themselves to things (and words) that also point beyond themselves. The borders of texts (covers, title pages, epigraphs, chapter breaks, paragraph indents, margins) only mime bordering, since what they would enclose is unenclosable. They are quasi-borders. A nation might be able to keep some immigrants out by building a wall, but a text cannot keep its own words in. While we can go to Antigua or Northamptonshire, our access to fictional worlds is much less straightforward, since the latter are mediated by physical devices (printed books, manuscripts, computer screens) that are different from those worlds but on which those worlds depend for their existence. Lacoue-Labarthe warns: one cannot “come to” the text, for the text is precisely without a shore. There is therefore no way to reach it, and if we imagine ourselves able to do so, we must understand that we never disembark except where we have already had a foothold for a long time, according to an almost unthinkable movement, a kind of turning inside out by which we would move to that outside of ourselves which is already our interiority, by which we would no longer be either “outside” or “inside.” (1993, 12) It is time for Austen criticism to examine the “turning inside out” that her novels enact. In such an examination, metaphors of center and circumference, of inside and outside, become both unavoidable and inadequate. Luckily, philosophers have already prepared the way for such criticism. To discuss the quasi-borders and ornamental supplements of artworks, Austen’s contemporary, Immanuel Kant, introduced the concept of the parergon. Jacques Derrida’s analyses of the parergon gain purchase on the peculiar spatiality of artworks in general, and literary works in particular. The relevance of the parergon increases as we turn from Mansfield Park to Emma, whose fictional world is Austen’s most insular and proudly provincial. The action of Emma centers on a town that flouts geography. While Mansfield Park is locatable somewhere in Northamptonshire, Emma’s Highbury explicitly resists mapping. Chapman observes: “no possible place is at once 16 miles from London, 9 from Richmond, and 7 from Box Hill” (1933, 521). As Lacoue-Labarthe would say, one cannot come to Highbury. The insularity of Emma has often struck readers. Rosmarin notes that “Confined to the immediate vicinity of Highbury, Emma alone approaches Austen’s own proffered if dubious ideal of ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’” (1984, 316). Emma is the least geographically mobile of Austen’s protagonists (Barchas 2007, 328). The novel’s greatest advocate for

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constriction is the misogamist Mr. Woodhouse. As Daniela Garofalo observes, he wants to prevent “the outside air from affecting his enclosed and controlled environment,” and he wants “to exclude outsiders who shake up the sameness of his social relations” (2017, 228). Yet the fruit does not fall far from the tree: Rachel M. Brownstein concludes that, by “Marrying Mr. Knightley, Emma proudly reaffirms family connections already made, joins estates that are contiguous. She goes nowhere, stays the same, resists change. At the end she is as she was at the beginning, mistress of and resident in her father’s house” (1999, 236). Critics have not agreed on the value of Emma’s insularity. Brian Southam detects “a rich parochialism to be treasured and smiled at” (2008, 199).3 Marshall Brown, by contrast, considers Emma an “airless, boxed-in novel” (2014, 8).4 If Highbury is relatively enclosed, then Hartfield, Emma’s home, is an enclosed site within an enclosed site: an estate with minimal land (Delany 2000, 539). Tony Tanner reminds us that Hartfield “was always in some way just separate from Highbury, and the ending could be seen as a symbolic retreat from society at large to a single, anxiously defended – and isolated – house” (1986, 205). Despite the discomfort of some readers, Emma’s representation of constricted lives has triumphed in arousing what Deidre Lynch calls “feelings of insidership” (2000). These feelings owe as much to form as to content—as much to the way the novel controls the release of information as to the information itself. According to Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan, “Emma may well be the first novel in English written not to be read but to be reread” (2005, lv). By augmenting secret knowledge, rereading Emma would make us insiders and invite us, Mr. Woodhouse-like, to remain within the literary shrubbery forever. Highbury’s citizens are also engaged in rereading Emma. In his lengthy letter, Frank Churchill revisits his flirtation with the protagonist: Amiable and delightful as Miss Woodhouse is, she never gave me the idea of a young woman likely to be attached; and that she was perfectly free from any tendency to being attached to me, was as much my conviction as my wish. (Austen 1816c, 262–63) Frank precipitates a recursive movement: going through his epistolary ruminations, even first-time readers of Emma are compelled to reread the novel’s events before the novel has finished. Knightley then comments on Frank’s letter (Austen 1816c, 276–84), another rereading of events. Austen integrates rereading into the first reading.5 The characters plume themselves on insider knowledge, and thereby anticipate the complacencies of rereaders. Emma thinks of the “secret satisfaction” of visiting Jane and reflecting on their “similarity of prospect”—“secret” because Emma knows Jane is engaged to Frank, but Jane does not know that Emma is engaged to Knightley (Austen 1816c, 293). When Emma visits Jane’s home, she finds

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Mrs. Elton, who thinks that Emma does not know about Jane’s engagement. Emma “soon believed herself to penetrate Mrs. Elton’s thoughts, and understand why she was, like herself, in happy spirits; it was being in Miss Fairfax’s confidence, and fancying herself acquainted with what was still a secret to other people” (295). Mrs. Elton is easy to ridicule; but the pleasure she takes is the same as that taken by rereaders of Emma, who can spot traces of Jane’s engagement that other characters (and first-time readers) miss. Emma entices rereading yet allegorizes the potential folly of rereaderly satisfaction; in the process, borders between reading and rereading, outsiders and insiders, become confused. The recursiveness of rereading abets Emma’s tendency to self-enclosure; savoring “rich parochialism,” rereaders become complicit in the novel’s containment strategies, but this process cannot completely annul unease. In becoming insiders, we always remain outsiders, always lag behind the characters, whom we cannot reach. Nicholas Royle argues that Emma “only becomes legible once a ‘first’ reading has been completed … we are called upon to locate a decisive aporia, a kind of death sentence in which the text has finished but has not properly begun” (1988, 47). Because a rereading promises greater knowledge than the previous reading, to read Emma is an interminable initiation, an asymptotic ingress. Whatever feelings of insidership the reader may have, she will always be an outsider to Highbury, which she can only enter as a ghost. A novel written to be reread privileges the reader’s participation and enhances Emma’s parochial pleasures. Absorbed in Emma, one may intermittently feel insulated against the non-literary world (or post-Regency life). Such a reader obtains an unflattering allegorical counterpart in Mr. Elton, who extols the carriage delivering him to the Christmas party: What an excellent device … the use of a sheep-skin for carriages. How very comfortable they make it;—impossible to feel cold with such precautions. … Weather becomes absolutely of no consequence. It is a very cold afternoon—but in this carriage we know nothing of the matter.— Ha! Snows a little I see. (Austen 1816a, 242–43) Ultimately, Elton’s desire, erupting in the carriage, will make for an unpleasant ride home.6 Emma represents the pleasures of a geographically constricted world, but the novel also demystifies these representations, exposing how its fictional world depends on the literary devices organizing the text’s spatial contingencies.

Kant, Derrida, and the Parergon Insularity implies a neat division of the inner from the outer. The edges of artworks resist such division even as they activate it. Kant’s Critique of Judgment, his major study of aesthetics, briefly discusses how

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what we call ornaments (parerga), i.e., what does not belong to the whole presentation of the object as an intrinsic constituent, but [is] only an extrinsic addition, does indeed increase our taste’s liking, and yet it too does so only by its form, as in the case of picture frames, or drapery [Gewänder] on statues, or colonnades [Säulengänge] around magnificent buildings. On the other hand, if the ornament itself does not consist in beautiful form but is merely attached, as a gold frame is to a painting so that its charm may commend the painting for our approval, then it impairs genuine beauty and is called finery [Schmuck]. (1987, 72; 1974, 142)7 Emma gives a prominent role to finery, and the novel, though deficient in statues, includes Kant’s other examples of parerga: frames, colonnades, and clothes. Reading Kant, Derrida draws attention to “the insistent atopics of the parergon,” which he considers “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below.” The parergon “disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.” If the work in question is a painting, the parergon “is no longer merely around the work. That which it puts in place—the instances of the frame, the title, the signature, the legend, etc.— does not stop disturbing the internal order of discourse on painting” (Derrida 1987, 9). In Derrida’s exposition, the parergon seems to be separate from particular ornaments, from “the instances of the frame, the title, the signature, the legend, etc.” It is not the frame itself, but the impulse to frame, that “gives rise to the work.” What distinguishes Kant from Derrida is that the former casually evaluates the aesthetic consequences of specific parerga, while the latter is more concerned with parergonality, the tendency that gives rise to things like frames and titles and prevents their reduction to disposable afterthoughts— mere embellishments. Irene E. Harvey addresses the relation between ergon and parergon, between the frame and the enframed. And it is clear that deconstruction problematizes this distinction in order to reveal that which grounds both ergon and parergon and makes this relation possible, which is evidently neither term, but rather parergonality. What parergonality entails includes the parasitic contamination of inside and outside. (1989, 63) Emma is a remarkably prolific source of such parasites. Emma’s home, for starters: “The landed property of Hartfield certainly was inconsiderable, being but a sort of notch in the Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged” (Austen 1816a, 290). Hartfield is a parergon: part of Donwell, though in the negative mode of the notch; neither inside nor outside. It is the not-Donwell in Donwell or the Donwell out of Donwell.

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Why not place the parergon both inside and outside? After all, it is easy to conceive of a frame as both inside and outside a painting. As forming the painting’s outer limits, the frame attaches itself to the canvas and hence becomes part of the composite being, the painting. Yet the frame is also attached to the wall and mediates between inside and outside. Derrida insists on the negative correlative (“Neither … nor”) because he thinks of the parergon as a source of tension and disturbance rather than reconciliation or mediation; parergonality, undermining the borders of the work, also jeopardizes its wholeness and claim to autonomy. In Marian Hobson’s analysis, the parergon “does not point to an outside transcending the picture, but to a push-and-pull relation between interior and exterior. In what is framed there is something lacking, something inviting outside pressure” (2001, 147). To conceive the parergon as both inside and outside would take for granted that one can clearly distinguish the inside and the outside, and would thereby underestimate the parergon’s “thickness,” which makes the edges of works “incomprehensible” (Derrida 1987, 60). We could perhaps say the parergon is both not-inside and notoutside. Barbara Johnson concludes that, in Derrida’s analysis, “The frame thus becomes not the borderline between the inside and the outside, but precisely what subverts the applicability of the inside/outside polarity to the act of interpretation” (1980, 128). Yet in order to subvert the polarity, a work has to invoke it; subversion is not abstinence or transcendence. As this chapter will show, Emma repeatedly constructs inside/outside polarities only to pull them inside out. Derrida suggests that it may be impossible for interpreters to avoid such polarities altogether: “Discourses on painting are perhaps destined to reproduce the limit which constitutes them, whatever they do and whatever they say: there is for them an inside and an outside of the work as soon as there is work” (1987, 11). As David Carroll sees it, The problem becomes, then, how to take a position in terms of an exteriority which is necessary to the interior integrity of the work— necessary because the interior lacks something in its interior and needs to be set off from an outside it cannot really do without. How is it possible to determine, in such a situation, what truly belongs to the inside and what does not? (1987, 138)

Emma’s “Schemes in the In-Betweens”

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Inside/outside polarities are prominent in Austen’s narratives. According to John Wiltshire, “It’s in the garden that Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Catherine can speak frankly to each other, and lovers propose, without fear of being overheard” (2014, 141). Especially in Austen’s early novels, the interior of a house becomes the realm of superficiality, of insincere or inhibited public speech, while the exterior is the realm of private confession and psychological interiority. This chiasmus is one example of what Adam Potkay, following Romanticists like M. H. Abrams, calls “a central topos of … Romantic writing—its ongoing dialectic of the external and the internal, the eye and the I” (2000). Yet in Emma the “Neither … nor” logic of the parergon stymies the “dialectic.” The novel’s most conspicuous movement outward, the trip to Box Hill, results in cruel playacting and amounts to “a strange parody of the constraining conditions of Jane Austen’s rooms” (Wiltshire 2014, 141). The working out of Knightley’s love of Emma involves similar regressions. Wiltshire notes that it is Mr. Woodhouse’s indoor talk with Mr. Perry that enables the proposal scene outdoors to take place: a triumph over that repression or denial that has organised Mr Woodhouse and his daughter’s life so far: counterpointing the indoors and the outdoors, the confinement to habit and the capacity for growth, the chapter picks up the crucial polarities around which this novel is constructed. (1992, 145) By giving and receiving a proposal outdoors, Knightley and Emma reveal their inner desires and appear to transcend the inside/outside distinction, following a pattern similar to that of Elizabeth and Darcy. But the immediate upshot is renewed secrecy: Mr. Woodhouse, whose “indoor consultation” facilitates their proposal, must remain in the dark. It is only the lovable absurdity of Mr. Woodhouse that prevents us from noticing the great scandal of Emma: that Mr. Knightley, its proponent of “openness” and condemner of secrets, ends the novel by keeping his prospective father-inlaw out of the know: Poor Mr. Woodhouse little suspected what was plotting against him in the breast of that man whom he was so cordially welcoming, and so anxiously hoping might not have taken cold from his ride.—Could he have seen the heart, he would have cared very little for the lungs. (Austen 1816c, 254) Here two modes of interiority, metonymized as organs within the same ribcage, jostle for dominance, raising the question, “Is Mr. Knightley’s plot against Mr. Woodhouse in his breast the same way that a cold could be in

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his lungs?” Since the answer is “of course not,” the spatial metaphor of secrecy as interiority malfunctions. Mr. Knightley has to go outside in order to be frank with Emma about his desire for her; but, returning to the Woodhouse interior, he becomes more Frank than frank: habitual shyness has yielded to calculating duplicity (a disturbing form of “growth”), while Mr. Woodhouse, the axis of the new couple, remains unchanged. Mr. Knightley may have overcome his erotic shyness, but he has not overcome the regime of Mr. Woodhouse. Instead of dialectically overcoming inside/outside or open/closed polarities, Emma suffers a recurrent “relapse” (Austen 1816a, 293). Lorraine Clark notes that the couple ends up practicing what Knightley has long and Emma has recently scorned: Faced with Mr. Woodhouse’s obstinacy against marriage, they keep their engagement at first a secret from him while they try to figure out a way to break it to him gently. Then, when they do break the news, they defer the marriage, a deferral that could go on indefinitely, like Frank and Jane’s engagement, until Mr. Woodhouse, like Mrs. Churchill, dies. (2016, 63–64) What brings on the marriage is not the emotional or ethical improvement of anyone involved, but an unexpected interference: thieves steal Mrs. Weston’s turkeys (Austen 1816c, 361). Colin Jager concludes that “this is a world whose most important events are contingent on the unknown land beyond the shrubbery. And thus the novel’s foregrounding of boundaries between inside and outside … is constantly undercut” (1995, 43). To have an effect on the world of Emma, the “unknown land beyond the shrubbery” must in some sense be inside it. Poaching raises the problem of borders, and the problem is raised near the end of the last chapter, a border, of the book if not of the text. The poachers are neither in the text nor out of the text: they inhabit a parergonal space between what the text directly shows and what it implies.8 The gypsies, the usual suspects of the turkey theft, are the novel’s most obvious personifications of the parergon. 9 They are, at first glance, complete outsiders. Laura Mooneyham White cautiously describes the gypsies’ ambivalent status, noting the importance of their “historical identity as putative invaders, outsiders who are understood as having no respect for English laws or class structure,” and who, “as non-racially English, must be understood as operating beyond all usual cultural constraints” (2008, 310). The phrase “putative invaders” casts doubt on the invasion, while “nonracially English” leaves open the possibility that they are English. Indeed, Austen’s spare narration of the gypsies minimizes their exoticism, implying that “They are the familiar exotic.”10 Though socially marginalized, “Gypsies were a common sight in the English countryside” (White 2008, 313) and have as legitimate a claim to Englishness as anyone else in the novel.

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According to Galperin, “the alterity signified by the gypsies is arguably the last place in Emma where otherness takes on a dangerous manifestation or threatens in any way the controls administered by a civil society” (2003, 45). Mrs. Elton symbolically domesticates the gypsies, proposing that she and Jane go to Donwell Abbey in “a sort of gipsy party” (Austen 1816c, 87), a vulgar whim that pushes her farther out of Knightley’s orbit of good taste. The gypsies go some distance to suggest that “the extrinsic always intervenes, like the parergon, within the scene” (Derrida 1987, 271).

Parergonal Lack The comic abruptness of the gypsies’ interventions—their “deus ex machina” quality (White 2008, 311)—may cause us to imagine that the gypsies are dispensable, detachable from Emma: Austen could have imagined some other way to make Emma think that a romance between Harriet and Frank is in the works; the novel simply needs a decoy to keep Emma’s attention diverted from Harriet’s erotic interest in Mr. Knightley. But the gypsies, like many of Emma’s other parerga, manifest what Derrida calls “ill-detachable detachment” [détachement mal détachable] (1987, 59; 1978, 67). Parerga, seemingly extrinsic, result from a lack immanent to the work. Derrida ponders why Kant designates the clothes on a statue or the columns around a temple parerga: It is not because they are detached but on the contrary because they are more difficult to detach and above all because without them, without their quasi-detachment [quasi-détachement], the lack on the inside of the work would appear; or (which amounts to the same thing for a lack) would not appear. What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon. Without this lack, the ergon would have no need of a parergon. The ergon’s lack is the lack of a parergon, of the garment or the column which nevertheless remains exterior to it. (1987, 59–60; 1978, 69) If people add parerga to works, they must do so for a reason—whether or not they know what the reason is. There must be something lacking in the work to prompt the parergon; but the existence of the lack and the possibility that a parergon could compensate for it suggest that the work is not a completed whole—or that it is not entirely itself. So wherever we find parerga, we should ask to which lack they correspond. If Austen’s gypsies are parergonal figures, what is “the lack in the interior” of Emma that they dissimulate? One possible answer is erotic inertia. There is no gypsy-free version of Emma to which Austen added gypsies.11 Nonetheless, the gypsies

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mark an apparent detachability: their status as a deus ex machina. Their detachability is a symptom of other people’s underperformance. Austen’s “main” characters lack the autonomous desire (or erotic need) that would permit them to resolve their marriage plot without outside interventions. Fittingly, Austen depicts the gypsies as needy subjects. Jane and Frank’s secret engagement notwithstanding, the biggest mystery in Emma is why Knightley is not “in want of a wife.” While the sublime is incompatible with parerga, “The beautiful, on the contrary, in the finitude of its formal contours, requires the parergonal edging all the more because its limitation is not only external” (Derrida 1987, 128). Emma is the attractive namesake of what many consider an outstandingly beautiful—though unsublime—novel. She owes much of her charm to a peculiar lack welldescribed by Nancy Armstrong: “If early on Emma speaks of herself as a most complete individual, Austen writes this speech as the lack of a lack, the absence of Emma’s awareness that she is missing something as a female.” Armstrong highlights the negations in Emma’s account of her desire not to marry; these negations create “deficiency” at the very moment Emma is explaining why she has everything a woman could want (1998, 137–38). Without the incursions of gypsies or turkey-thieves (or gypsy turkeythieves), there is nothing in the novel to stir Emma from her abstemious plenitude. While Emma will be, at least for a moment, content to look at “nothing,” Emma is not content: it must advance a heteronormative love story without acknowledging the drive to do so. The text cannot satisfy its audience’s desire for pre-conjugal fantasy if it confesses what it is doing, since it would thereby reveal the artificiality with which it overcomes its heroes’ beautiful inertia.12 In Marxist terms, there is a tension between Emma’s nostalgia for agrarian self-sufficiency and the “commodity lust” that novels are supposed to gratify (Jameson 1981, 90). Emma is a great work of realism not because it accurately describes things, or because Austen leashes her narrative to the plausible, but because Emma’s concatenations of parerga mimic the supplementary play of reality—of the general text, a network of lack. This is a parergonal realism, rather than a demiurgic verisimilitude. Of course, verisimilitude happens in Emma. Austen strove for accuracy, but the results are less important than criticism generally asserts. Linda Slothouber contends that Emma mentions “virtually all of the elements that transformed British agriculture in the latter half of the eighteenth century … . What these references, individually minute, add up to can be captured in one word: realism” (2015, 39). If this is all, however, that Emma’s realism amounts to, then later nineteenth-century novels must have rendered it obsolete, since they are much more industrious in accumulating minutiae. Indeed, a certain wariness characterizes Austen’s treatment of details—a wariness whose interruption makes the Portsmouth scenes of Mansfield Park so striking. Andrew Elfenbein shows that the major “developments in eighteenth-century culture” would lead one to expect a much more detailed narrative than Pride and Prejudice; he

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persuasively argues that Austen shares Samuel Johnson’s distaste for “the minuter discriminations.” Unlike Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, who “stake a claim to realistic representation on the precise accumulation of detail,” Austen “does without one of traditional realism’s hallmarks, the pile-up of verisimilar particularities” (2016, 333, 335).13 Though Emma is more detailed than Pride and Prejudice (in part, a function of greater length), its style is not radically different. What matters is not the quantity of details, but the way Emma deconstructs the concept of the detail, which presupposes a whole to which the detail is both subordinate and unnecessary (a detachable detachment). In Emma everything (even, at times, the protagonist herself) can suffer demotion to a detail, and the pervasiveness of this demotion demystifies the whole, which does not exist as a clearly bordered container. Emma’s parergonal realism differs from the sensory vividness of Mansfield Park’s Portsmouth chapters. The notion that Austen’s realism is parergonal may be counterintuitive, since critics have associated literary parerga with the unrealistic genre of the Gothic novel. Skimming, for instance, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, a novel Emma mentions, we find epigraphs guarding the thresholds of chapters. These obvious parerga counterpoise the easily detachable verses that Adeline, the novel’s heroine, composes within the chapters.14 Dispensing with epigraphs, advertisements, introductions, footnotes, frame narratives, and other parergonal apparatus, Austen would seem to be an antiparergonal author. Clayton Carlyle Tarr argues that “Frame narratives were already spectacularly employed by Radcliffe, but Austen denied their formal force, choosing instead a style we now consider an unimpeachable adherence to real life” (2013, 32–33). Radcliffe insists on enframing her fictions and putting them at a safe distance from English readers: Adeline’s adventures take place in seventeenth-century France, where the ancien régime is neither threatened nor threatening (at least, to the English). Radcliffe’s parerga are closer to Kant’s example of “finery”—her epigraphs, citing high culture, “commend” her novel “for our perusal,” like a “gold frame” added to a painting. The epigraphs are an obvious response to a lack within the text: an anxiety about the literary value of novels (or romances). Emma, a novel written for and about English people, a novel that does not supplement itself with poetic epigraphs, would seem simply to forego parerga. Cronin and McMillan report that “Austen does not follow the fashion for epigraphs, and this is symptomatic of a wider refusal to associate her novels with poetry” (2005, xliii). In fact, Austen’s novelistic methods radicalize, rather than renounce, parerga. Though Austen usually omits the most noticeable forms of literary parerga (epigraphs, for example), she installs parergonality into the ergon: major objects and subjects in Emma serve as parerga. Indeed, Austen’s parerga are more powerful, though subtler, than Radcliffe’s—subtler because “the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at

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the moment it deploys its greatest energy” (Derrida 1987, 61). What is striking about the narrative of The Romance of the Forest is its lack of parergonality. By chance (or Providence), almost everyone Adeline meets is intimately connected to her story: the marquis who tries to seduce her turns out to be her uncle; the Savoyard vicar who shows her hospitality turns out to be the father of the man who saved her from the evil marquis. The very efficiency of the novel—its remorseless sublimation of contingencies—is unrealistically implausible. Emma, by contrast, multiplies superfluous characters and repeatedly stages parergonal situations. Carroll notes that A too visible frame detracts from the work and destroys its integrity; a frame that is not visible enough produces a lack of differentiation between inside and outside, thereby having the same effect. Thus, working the frame and making the frame work constitute a critical approach to art that originates neither inside nor outside art. (1987, 139) The metaphor “working the frame” aptly describes Emma’s parergonal realism. Rather than attaching parerga to the work (by, say, placing epigraphs at the head of chapters), Austen delights in discovering them “in” her narratives. Take, for example, Mr. Woodhouse’s preference for the parergon of dinner to the dinner itself. He “loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth; but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see any thing put on it” (Austen 1816a, 44). If this creates an effet de réel, it is not because it accurately describes any person who might have lived or because it is unusually plausible, but because it stages the friction between parergon and ergon: the refusal of details to submit to a subordinate role.

Parergonal Verse/Parergonal Prose Though Emma has no poetic epigraphs, it includes a few poems. Unlike Radcliffe’s, Austen’s verse makes little claim to literary greatness or even to gild Austen’s prose.15 But while Adeline’s poetic outbursts are usually extrinsic to the plot, Emma’s poems become intimate with its narrative. Most of them appear in Volume I. Emma and Harriet decide to collect riddles, and their riddle book is “ornamented with cyphers and trophies” (Austen 1816a, 146). Litvak points out that “the ciphers on the cover of Harriet’s book cover the ciphers inside, which turn out to represent not ultimate truth but merely more covering” (1985, 768). The “cyphers and trophies” on the cover are parerga, decorative figures marking the book’s borders.16 We might conclude that the homonymy of “cypher” (“ornamental initial”) and “cypher” (riddle or charade) collapses the difference between interior and exterior, contents and cover, ergon and parergon, neutralizing their oppositions. But a closer look at the way the riddles function in the

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story testifies to the ongoing “push-and-pull relation between interior and exterior.” Emma compares the riddles to literary parerga. She is certain that Mr. Elton’s charade was intended for Harriet: “It is a sort of prologue to the play, a motto to the chapter; and will be soon followed by matter-of-fact prose” (Austen 1816a, 156).17 Emma imagines Mr. Elton’s charade as an epigraph heralding a marriage proposal; added together, epigraph and prose (parergon and ergon) would form his completed courtship of Harriet, and “courtship” is the solution to the charade. Alas, Emma is wrong: Mr. Elton is really courting her, not Harriet. Nonetheless, subsequent events partially vindicate Emma’s parergonal understanding of flirtation. Emma aligns Mr. Elton with verse and his supposed rival, Robert Martin, with prose. Even Emma has to admit that the latter’s epistolary prose is “very good” (Austen 1816a, 103). Once Emma persuades Harriet that Mr. Elton wrote the charade for her, Harriet blushingly opines: It is one thing … to have very good sense in a common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this. (1816a, 160) Hence, Mr. Elton = verse, and Mr. Martin = prose. These characters become personifications of the text’s basic formal constituents—not unlike Wickham and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. And it turns out that Harriet’s pseudo-romance with Mr. Elton will become a prologue/motto to her future marriage to Mr. Martin (“will be soon followed by matter-of-fact prose”), since she will later accept his love. Emma’s referents are wrong, but her parergonal intuition is right. Mr. Elton’s charade also demonstrates that the parergon can split itself into parerga, further complicating distinctions between inside and outside: To Miss ————. CHARADE. My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings, Lords of the earth! Their luxury and ease. Another view of man, my second brings, Behold him there, the monarch of the seas! But, ah! united, what reverse we have! Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown; Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone. Thy ready wit the word will soon supply, May its approval beam in that soft eye! (Austen 1816a, 150)

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The charade’s stratified form is commonplace, but nonetheless striking: dedication, title (or generic label), stanzas. Emma tells Harriet to transcribe the charade without the last two lines, which she thinks are about the transcriber: The best [lines] of all. Granted;—for private enjoyment; and for private enjoyment keep them. They are not at all the less written you know, because you divide them. The couplet does not cease to be, nor does its meaning change. But take it away, and all appropriation ceases, and a very pretty gallant charade remains, fit for any collection. (Austen 1816a, 161)18 Is the couplet a parergon to the charade proper, or vice versa? Which is extrinsic, which intrinsic? Formally, the couplet is detachable from the rest of the poem: its indentation distinguishes it from the preceding quatrains, and the quatrains themselves form a complete charade. One could say the couplet is a supplement, a parergon arising from a lack in the charade itself: the charade’s inability to move from the third person to the second person, to convert “woman, lovely woman” into a particular woman, a “you” or “thou.” Emma sees the couplet as the part of the charade that refers to Harriet: “Soft, is the very word for her eye” (Austen 1816a, 151). Ironically, “soft” could apply to any human’s natural eye (including Emma’s): though divided by indentation and rhyme scheme from the rest of the poem, in its clichéd rhetoric the couplet is very much of a piece with the quatrains. Which part of the parergon is more detachable depends on the context. If the context is the language game of the charade, then the couplet is detachable, since it cannot function as a charade on its own, and the charade can function without the couplet. But if the context is Mr. Elton’s courtship of a “lovely woman,” then the quatrains are more detachable than the couplet, since the charade is only an excuse for delivering erotic compliments to the beloved, and the couplet is the part that addresses her. In yet another context, the beloved herself is a parergon: the poet intends to address the charade to Emma rather than Harriet; but after Emma rejects him, he will quickly turn his attention elsewhere, and it is easy to imagine him giving the charade to Augusta Hawkins, a lover of clichés. The poem’s association with any particular “lovely woman” is ornamental; one woman’s eye is just as soft as another’s. The parergonal alignment of the charade morphs from context to context, and it would be arbitrary to claim that one of these contexts is the correct one. Since multiple contexts are in play, detachability becomes ill-detachability. In this episode, the novel reflects on the composition, reception, and transcription of a literary text, and the episode’s erotic contents allegorize the formal divisions of a literary work (“motto … prose”). But these metafictional qualities do not detract from Emma’s parergonal realism. What Emma stages is reality— at least, reality as we know it: the play of contingencies, the irreparable friction between contexts.

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Confronting Front Matter Before processing the tales Emma tells, readers may examine the book’s non-narrative parerga—most notably, its title and dedication. Derrida asks: What is the topos of the title? Does it take place (and where?) in relation to the work? On the edge? Over the edge? On the internal border? In an overboard that is re-marked and reapplied, by invagination, within, between the presumed center and the circumference? Or between that which is framed and that which is framing in the frame? (1987, 24) The titles of paintings function like the titles of literary works, though paintings usually maintain a more obvious heterogeneity between picture and title, image and letters. Critics have noted that Emma is the only book published by Austen whose title names a person (Tanner 1986, 195). Emma names the whole text and also an important part of it, Emma. Not only is the book entitled after a character, but the first sentence begins with the titular name: “EMMA Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich … ” (Austen 1816a, 1). Consequently, the title, like the pun on “cypher,” seems to collapse the difference between book and subject, thereby erasing the distinction between container and contained, outside and inside (name on the cover, character dominating the pages within). Bruce Stovel thinks the title identifies the whole with its leading part: “the action of the novel takes place within the heroine herself” (2007). Reginald Farrer considers Emma justly so named, with Jane Austen’s undeviating flair for the exact title. For the whole thing is Emma; there is only one short scene in which Emma herself is not on the stage; and that one scene is Knightley’s conversation about her with Mrs. Weston. (2007, 75) Emma permeates Emma: even when she is not there (in person), she is there (in conversation). John Wiltshire is more circumspect: for the most part the narrative voice of Emma … is overwhelmingly the style of Emma, youthful, confident, presumptive, witty, dogmatic, commanding, assured. … Sometimes one can catch the narrator assuming Emma’s viewpoint deliberately to trick the reader. … In each of these cases, Emma’s view of motives is allowed to tease the reader, to appear as if it is the book’s. (1997, 66–67) Since, in Wiltshire’s account, the narrator’s imitation of Emma is intermittent, some discontinuity must arise between them. It is uncertain whether

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the narrator functions as a frame around the consciousness of the characters or is herself one of the characters and inside their world, which she imperfectly understands. According to Derrida, “The law of the parergon … perverts all the links between part and whole” (1987, 343). Emma’s title is perverted and perverting. Brownstein comments on the first sentence: The significance of beginning with “Emma” is clear: repeating the title, the first word insists again—insists a little too much, therefore ironically—on the heroine’s primacy and on the kind of novel (about a woman, about a love story) to come. (1999, 232) Brownstein notes the many Emmas that Emma’s first readers might have recalled from earlier novels, poems, and historical events: for a Regency audience, it would have been a name loaded with associations (1999, 225).19 The homonymy of Emma and Emma would seem to close the novel in on itself; yet because the name was common in novels, it points beyond Austen’s Emma, courting literary antecedents, ventilating self-enclosure and selfadequation. The part becomes the whole but then exposes the incompleteness of the whole, whose dominant part points outside of the supposed limits of the novel. Indeed, since the novel develops in time, Emma obtains likeness with its protagonist at the cost of unlikeness. Casey Finch and Peter Bowen argue that “Emma’s agenda is clear: the heroine must renounce her manipulative tendencies so that the novel itself can realize its own manipulations” (1990, 11). Since Emma changes, so too must Emma’s relation to Emma. Though title and protagonist nominally duplicate each other, they increasingly resist identity. Is the title “Emma” inside the novel Emma? In the first edition, what distinguishes the title from the protagonist is the capitalized and bold print of “EMMA”; yet the first words of the first chapter are “EMMA Woodhouse.” The title, a parergon, here achieves a literal “thickness”: its letters are wider than those of the first word of the first sentence of the first chapter. Putting the first word of the first chapter in all caps marks a transition between the titular typography and the “normal” typography that presents the name as “Emma.” Of course, Austen did not control these typographical conventions, but they are nonetheless in play; and by naming her novel after the protagonist and beginning the first chapter with her name, Austen has accentuated parergonal traffic. Readers might think the title merely identifies the protagonist. But they can also discern tension between the title’s Emma (any Emma, Emma as a common and hence somewhat generic name) and the first chapter’s “Emma Woodhouse” (a specific example of an Emma). Tanner finds that the Emma of the title “has no title, no place, and refers to an unsocialised individual” (1986, 195). By contrast, the individuals in the story are nothing if not socialized. If the title is a parergon, and if parerga

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respond to a lack in the work, we could say that Emma’s title compensates for its protagonist’s failure to preserve the status of a protagonist. The would-be celibate protagonist often pursues an oddly eccentric relationship to the story told by the novel that bears her name, a novel one would expect to center resolutely on her. Between the title and the first chapter appears another parergon, the dedication. Austen dedicated her juvenilia to various friends and family, but Emma is her only published novel bearing a dedication page. And what a page: TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE REGENT, THIS WORK IS, BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S PERMISSION, MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S DUTIFUL AND OBEDIENT HUMBLE SERVANT, THE AUTHOR. (Austen 1816a) Austen does not owe her literary fame to this dedication. Peter Sabor calls it “one of the worst sentences she ever committed to print.” Floating a subversive hypothesis, he comes to the rescue of her dignity: With the clunking triple repetition of “His Royal Highness” and the formulaic presentation of herself as the Prince Regent’s “Dutiful And Obedient Humble Servant”, Austen composed what amounts to an antidedication, clearly indicating her lack of enthusiasm, if not her contempt, for its subject. (2015, xi)

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We know that before she wrote Emma, Austen disapproved of this subject (Murray 2007, 137),20 lending some plausibility to Sabor’s interpretation. But if Austen’s brush with royalty transformed contempt into obsequiousness, then she would not have been the first writer to so demean herself, and the fawning rhetoric of the dedication is not unusual for the genre. Sprinkled with the phrase “Your Majeſty,” Frances Burney’s dedication of Camilla to the queen is just as repetitive and formulaic, though its addressee might have conducted herself better than the Prince Regent. While Austen is merely a “DUTIFUL / AND OBEDIENT / HUMBLE SERVANT,” Burney subscribes herself a “Moſt obedient, moſt obliged / And moſt dutiful ſervant” (1796, iii–v). Austen’s obsequiousness is not extraordinary, and her dedicatory reluctance is by no means self-evident. The critical preoccupation with what “THE AUTHOR” intended distracts us from the parergonal agency of the dedication, which kneads the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic. Austen probably never thought of dedicating the novel to the Prince Regent before she finished it. The prince’s librarian could not have known that Emma’s narrative would be appropriate to his patron. But the contingencies of history have made the extrinsic intrinsic. The dedication is an apt excrescence: it unwittingly responds to a conspicuous lack in the text. Whatever the degree of her desire to comply, when the prince, George Augustus Frederick, mediated by his librarian, asked Austen to do something, to dedicate the novel to him, she said yes. Though Highbury has no prince, it has a regent of sorts, George Knightley, principal landowner and magistrate. At the romantic climax of the book, when Mr. Knightley asks Emma to marry him, Austen interrupts with one of her most famous lacuna: “What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does” (Austen 1816c, 248). While the narrator merely invokes the properness of a lady’s compliance, the dedication performs it. Readers curious about what kinds of things a lady ought to say need look no farther than the novel’s dedication page. Just as the proudly celibate Emma accepts Mr. Knightley’s proposal with a disconcerting precipitancy, so the author who wrote that she hated the Prince Regent in 1813 ended up dedicating a book to him in 1815.21 The wording of the dedication underscores its parergonal status. The titles of royalty resemble the titles of books. Prince Regent and Royal Highness are parerga added to the featherless biped who became George IV. Austen, like most of her English contemporaries, no doubt bemoaned the ill-detachability of these parerga: just when it needed a great monarch who could give the lie to the Jacobins, England was saddled with a madman and his libertine heir. Even “Royal Highness” disaggregates into parerga: apparently “Highness” is not high enough, requiring a supplement. The need to multiply such parerga testifies to a lack extrinsic to the work but intrinsic to the prince: the moral inferiority that made him incapable of effective leadership, even as a figurehead.

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Sex and Citationality The ergon of Emma contains an oblique reference to this figurehead. In one of the great discoveries of recent Austen scholarship, Colleen A. Sheehan (2006) proposes an alternative answer to Mr. Elton’s “courtship” riddle: “Prince [of] Whales.” Sheehan notes that Charles Lamb wrote a whale poem lampooning the Prince Regent, and both quatrains of Austen’s charade feature acrostics with the letters L-A-M-B. Emma’s dedication spells out “THE PRINCE REGENT,” which the main text of the novel adduces through the metonymy Lamb, a metonymy that itself appears only as a shuffled acrostic. The name Lamb is an allusive citation. Citations—like quotations and allusions—perform a parergonal “push-and-pull” between inside and outside. An individual citation points outside the text to another text; the citing text cannot wholly contain the cited text, and the citation forms a boundary, an area of overlap between two texts. But collectively citations undermine textual boundaries, suggesting that individual texts are merely parts of a continuous whole, the macro-text of literary history. Through citation, quotation, and allusion, literary texts become less like autonomous fictional worlds and more like the contents of an archive. The better readers know the cited text, the more intense the “push-and-pull” operation becomes: the more similarities one finds between texts, the more opportunities one has to parse their differences. In Emma, two of the most important literary citations involve sex, a topic the novel cannot directly countenance. The biological implementation of sexual desire is the most conspicuous lack in Austen’s marriage plots, though Austen’s other novels sneak peeks at it. Pride and Prejudice offers Lydia’s elopement and Darcy’s admiration of Elizabeth’s body after her walk to Netherfield.22 In Sense and Sensibility we find Mrs. Jennings’ innuendo and the sordid tale of the Elizas; in Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford’s arousing equestrianism, her uncle’s keeping a mistress, and her brother’s adultery with Maria; in Persuasion, the maneuvers of Mrs. Clay. With the possible exception of Northanger Abbey, Emma is Austen’s least libidinal book. Efforts to discern lesbian love in Emma’s relationship to Harriet have been unpersuasive, and though Emma thinks Harriet should be enticing to men, no man except the largely absent Robert Martin takes any erotic interest in her (Mudrick 1968, 191). The infrequent references to Mrs. Weston’s pregnancy are the closest the novel comes to acknowledging sex, and how Mr. Woodhouse sired two daughters is a bit of a mystery. Though the Eltons are kindred spirits (snobs), they do not kindle any erotic sparks. Emma sometimes suggests that Emma’s speculations about Jane’s affair with Mr. Dixon are scandalous, but these bland daydreams are unlikely to turn anyone on—including Emma. Despite its abstinent narrative, Emma boasts some of Austen’s most prurient literary citations. Mr. Woodhouse is fond of a particular riddle, but he can only recall “the first stanza”:

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Emma’s Parergonal Realism Kitty, a fair but frozen maid, Kindled a flame I yet deplore, The hood-wink’d boy I called to aid, Though of his near approach afraid, So fatal to my suit before. (Austen 1816a, 165)

The sinister tone of the stanza is jarring even for readers entirely ignorant of the original source. An examination of that source opens Emma up to a world of obscenity. As Jill Heydt-Stevenson explains, “the solution to the riddle is that the ‘Cupid’ … is a chimney sweep, and, like the ‘kiss’ at the end of the riddle, ‘chimney-sweeping’ was also eighteenth-century slang for sexual intercourse” (2008, 165). The poem encodes the appalling belief that having sex with a virgin would cure venereal disease. It is difficult to imagine even Mary Crawford joking about such vile exploits. Emma “raises the ludicrous and hilarious possibility … that the asexual Mr. Woodhouse might have been a libertine in his youth and now suffers from tertiary syphilis”; indeed, some of his peculiarities approximate the symptoms of this disease (163). Curiously, Emma tells her father that she has already “copied” his riddle “from the Elegant Extracts,” and she notes that its author is Garrick (Austen 1816a, 165). But this riddle is not in the Elegant Extracts, “a most conservative publication” (Heydt-Stevenson 2008, 162). Emma’s mis-citation of the text marks her sexual innocence: by placing the riddle in the context of an innocuous anthology, she unknowingly demonstrates that smut is alien to Hartfield, but she also confirms her own “frozen” status. Catherine Kenney points out that “Mr. Woodhouse’s seemingly nonsensical riddle … can be seen on reflection to be charged with meaning; he does not realize it, but this is a good description not only of Jane Fairfax, but of Emma herself, until the end” (1991, n16). Chatting with Jane Fairfax, Mrs. Elton also truncates a verse quotation: “I forget the poem at this moment: / ‘For when a lady’s in the case, / ‘You know all other things give place.’ / Now I say, my dear, in our case, for lady, read—mum! a word to the wise” (Austen 1816c, 296–97). Mrs. Elton is alluding to the secret engagement between Jane and Frank, which she wrongly thinks Emma does not know about. Stafford observes that the poem in question is one of Gay’s Fables, in which a bull talks about his imminent servicing of an expectant cow (1996, xviii). The phrase “a lady in the case” appears elsewhere in Emma (Austen 1816a, 143), and Cronin and McMillan argue that it was “already proverbial” (2005, 548n14), but Mrs. Elton cites the couplet as part of a “poem,” as part of a specific text. The bawdiness of these texts is, at least for my purposes, less interesting than the discrepancy between their parergonal sexuality and the asexuality of the narrative proper. The discrepancy supports Derrida’s claim that the parergon signals the incompleteness or lack of or in the ergon.

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Emma’s Headers and Footers Parerga patrol the presumed borders of many kinds of writing. Mr. Woodhouse reminisces about a letter Frank sent to the Westons: “it was written from Weymouth, and dated Sept. 28th—and began, ‘My dear Madam,’ but I forget how it went on; and it was signed ‘F. C. Weston Churchill.’—I remember that perfectly” (Austen 1816a, 203). Mr. Woodhouse does not recall the body of the letter, only its date, return address, salutation, and signature; in other words, he recalls the letter’s parerga instead of its ergon. But his recollection of the signature is not as redundant as it seems, because it marks the first appearance of Frank’s “C.” Though Mr. Woodhouse does not want his daughter to see the sea (213), he has seen the “C.” He also perceives Frank’s lack of probity: “not quite the thing!” (Austen 1816b, 210). When Austen later supplies the text of Frank’s long letter, it bears the signature “F. C. Weston Churchill” (1816c, 274), verifying Mr. Woodhouse’s memory. Mr. Woodhouse shares knowledge, but the knowledge (“C.”) is of little or no usefulness. The novel reveals Frank’s hidden engagement but never reveals what “C.” stands for. When Frank is involved, a twist of the plot will never entirely abolish ignorance. In repairing Mrs. Bates’s spectacles, he helps her to see, but deprives her of sight for the duration of the repairs, which blind Emma to his involvement with Jane Fairfax. One could dismiss Mr. Woodhouse’s discernment of “C.” as emblematic of the trivia that have disgruntled many of Emma’s readers. Nonetheless, the novel’s trivia often concern the parergon, an aesthetic problem with non-trivial philosophical implications. Mr. Woodhouse absorbs the parerga of Frank’s long-ago letter into the body of the narrative while casting the letter’s body into irretrievable anteriority, prefiguring the reductive afterlife of Emma in some of its reader’s memories.23 Like other parerga, a letter’s salutation, return address, and signature (its head and feet) usually receive less scrutiny than the body. So too with longer texts. Few people can honestly say that they have read a whole book, including all the details of its copyright page, acknowledgements, and index. Who makes a point of reading every page number? Chapter headings are among the most under-read elements of novels. These headings (permissions to rest) are parerga in the Kantian sense because they are ornaments that make for a slightly more convenient reading experience but are not necessary. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews emphasizes readerly comfort and discretion: “those little spaces between our Chapters may be looked upon as an Inn or Resting-Place” (1999, 76). A novelist does not have to divide her work into chapters; and if she does, a single blank space would suffice to mark transitions, though even such a blank would be a parergon. Easily detachable (or ignorable), a chapter break would seem to be what Harvey calls an “extrinsic appendage” (1989, 68). Emma differs from other Austen novels: here, on at least two occasions, she plays with the passage between chapters, rendering it an “ill-detachable detachment,” a parergon in the Derridean sense.

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One example occurs at the end of a scene narrating Emma’s annoyance with Jane Fairfax. D. A. Miller notices the repetition of “Emma could not forgive her” which appears in Volume II as the last clause of Chapter 2 (Austen 1816b, 35) and the first clause of Chapter 3. This repetition initially strikes Miller as an “unprecedented technical malfunction in shifting gears” between chapters (2003, 63). But he proceeds to defend it as a shift in perspective: By virtue of repeating the same formula (truly magical), we move from free indirect style—for all its irony, always grounded in an intimate identificatory relation to the image of a person—to mere omniscient narration, more remote in its detachment, and less engagé in its impersonality. (Miller 2003, 65) This defense is ingenious but unpersuasive. Austen’s narrators are not omniscient (Nelles 2006, 119), and Emma, through the parergonal space of the chapter break, problematizes the distinction between free indirect discourse and normal third-person narrative. If a reader spots free indirect discourse at the end of Chapter 2, there is no reason why she cannot do so at the beginning of Chapter 3. If a reader takes a break between chapters, she might be less likely to spot free indirect discourse at the beginning of Chapter 3, but such a wellrested reader would also be less likely to remember that Chapter 2 ended with the same clause.24 If one reads as closely as Miller recommends, it would be arbitrary to exclude free indirect discourse from either instance of the “formula,” though the stuttering effect of the chapter break could impair our certainty that we know free indirect discourse when we see it. Read even more closely, the repetition of the sentence is not as exact as Miller claims. Though Chapter 2 ends with “Emma could not forgive her,” Chapter 3 begins with “EMMA could not forgive her” (Austen 1816b, 36). The publisher set the first word of each chapter in all caps, a practice that Austen might not have been conscious of when she wrote her manuscript. But, as we saw in our analysis of the dedication, the extrinsic becomes intrinsic through parergonality. The “EMMA” at the beginning of Chapter 3 matches the allcaps “EMMA” on the original title page, creating a new interpretive possibility: the novel Emma “could not forgive her.” Who, then, would be the speaker or thinker of “Emma could not forgive her”? Not Emma, who is unaware that she is a character in Emma. The sentence would correspond neither to free indirect discourse nor to detached third-person narration, since Emma’s narrator has hitherto betrayed no awareness that she is narrating the novel Emma. It is nonetheless possible to read this sentence as a metafictional disruption of storytelling protocols. Such an interpretation might sound implausible, but the “unprecedented” stuttering between chapters invites unusual interpretive effort. Compounding semantic confusion, the “her” of “EMMA could not forgive her” could point as much to Emma as to Jane: Emma “could not forgive” Emma. This interpretation chimes with the practice of mainstream Austen

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critics, who, as Sedgwick memorably points out, often enjoy reading her novels as exercises in heroine-punishment (1991, 833). Instead of averting the “undecidable,” as Miller argues (2003, 65), the chapter-break parergon multiplies it.25 Another manipulation of chapter breaks occurs in Volume II. Here is the end of Chapter 9: Miss Bates had just done as Patty opened the door; and her visitors walked up stairs without having any regular narration to attend to, pursued only by the sounds of her desultory good-will. “Pray take care, Mrs. Weston, there is a step at the turning. Pray take care, Miss Woodhouse, ours is rather a dark staircase—rather darker and narrower than one could wish. Miss Smith, pray take care. Miss Woodhouse, I am quite concerned, I am sure you hit your foot. Miss Smith, the step at the turning.” (Austen 1816b, 190) Here is the beginning of the next chapter: “THE appearance of the little sitting-room as they entered, was tranquility itself” (191). On rereading, one suspects that the scene only appears tranquil. The passage up the “dark staircase” counterpoints the obfuscation practiced by Frank and Jane in the room above. Wiltshire seems to have been the first to remark on this effect: The little movement that is created by the shift of the reading eyes across from the end of one chapter, through the break, through the new chapter heading, to the resumption of the text, replicates the movement up the staircase, through the turn, and into the parlour where the characters are performing in that space. The brief time this takes also mimics in miniature the pause, the few moments of warning that gives the lovers time to adopt their apparently innocent positions. (2014, 138) The readers’ passage between chapters coincides with the characters’ passage upstairs (Wiltshire 1997, 69). Readers, normally outside of the action framed by the novel, now move through the novel the way its characters move through the house.26 As so often in Emma, the parergon here responds to an erotic lack in the text. According to Marjorie Garson, it is only on a second reading that we realize with delight that Frank’s refusal to follow Emma has left him alone in the house with Jane, chaperoned only by her grandmother, who is deaf and, as long as he holds onto her spectacles, blind as well. (1997, 89) Another critic giddily takes this observation a step further:

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Emma’s Parergonal Realism With Mrs. Bates asleep, he and Jane have had a few rare moments of intimacy as they try to steady the pianoforte by wedging paper under one leg, a job requiring them to work in such close proximity that physical contact is surely inevitable! (Bell 2007)

Yet such exclamations reveal more about the critic than the text. The emptiness of the chapter break drops a white curtain on whatever erotic play Jane and Frank were able to mobilize, and the emptiness is also a metaphor of the novel’s erotic lack. We will never know exactly what they did; we can only speculate. Perhaps Frank innocently devoted himself to repairing spectacles. Austen’s play with chapter breaks reminds one of the metafictional capers of Tristram Shandy. 27 This is surprising, since Emma is frequently considered Austen’s highest achievement in realism, a literary mode at odds with Shandean metafiction. This idea, however, becomes less surprising if we appreciate Emma’s parergonal realism: the novel is not interested in metafiction for its own sake, but it relishes parergonal objects, including its own material features, the devices that organize its physical layout.

Horrors of Finery Among the various items of material culture referenced by Austen’s texts, clothes have the greatest capacity for stimulating parergonal interest. As we have seen, Kant mentions “drapery on statues” [Gewänder, “garments”] as an example of a parergon. Ruminating on this detail in Kant, Derrida asks: If any parergon is only added on by virtue of an internal lack in the system to which it is added … what is it that is lacking in the representation of the body so that the garment should come and supplement it? (1987, 57–58) Statues do not need clothes to keep them warm; nor do figures in paintings. Real clothing, however, is not always parergonal: humans in temperate climates like England’s need clothing to survive. Such clothing is not mere ornament, but it could be parergonal in the Derridean sense—an “illdetachable detachment.” Most humans spend most of their time clothed, so it is arbitrary to regard clothing as a supplement to a normal state of nakedness. Yet most characters in Austen’s novels are naked in the sense that Austen never explains what, if anything, they wear. Interrupting characters’ default but untitillating nakedness, descriptions of clothes function as embellishments and as occasions to explore the parergonal effects of Austen’s textuality, her weaving of words. According to Elizabeth Wilson, “clothing marks an unclear boundary ambiguously, and unclear boundaries disturb us. … It is at the margins

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between one thing and another that pollution may leak out. … Dress is the frontier between the self and the not-self” (2003, 2–3; cited in Heydt-Stevenson 2008, 107). But ornamental aesthetics, rather than the control of pollution, motivates the references to clothing in Emma. The novel’s chief theorist of ornament is Mrs. Elton, who discusses her “gown”: “How do you like it?—Selina’s choice—handsome, I think, but I do not know whether it is not over-trimmed; I have the greatest dislike to the idea of being over-trimmed—quite a horror of finery. I must put on a few ornaments now, because it is expected of me. A bride, you know, must appear like a bride, but my natural taste is all for simplicity; a simple style of dress is so infinitely preferable to finery. But I am quite in the minority, I believe; few people seem to value simplicity of dress,—shew and finery are every thing. I have some notions of putting such a trimming as this to my white and silver poplin. Do you think it will look well?” (Austen 1816b, 327–28) One of the joys of reading Emma is remembering this inane speech when one comes to the end and finds Mrs. Elton disapproving of Emma’s marital rites because of their lack of “finery”: “Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! — Selina would stare when she heard of it” (Austen 1816c, 362). Gabrielle D. V. White points out that “Maple Grove has broken its promise to visit the newly married Eltons, and Mrs Elton, in trying to cling on to the wealthy connection, involves herself in hypocrisy for the comedy of the concluding paragraph” (2006, 72).28 The literary judiciousness of this comedy is not immediately apparent. Thorell Tsomondo notes that it makes for a strange ending: in naming Mrs Elton and emphasizing her absence, and in invoking her “never seen” Selina, the final paragraph of the novel brings Mrs Elton, her finery and parade into relief so sharply that she threatens to obscure the bride. Her voice echoes too in the very language that insists on her absence. (1987, 80) Austen’s choice to devote some of the novel’s last moments to Mrs. Elton’s ideas about finery seems less strange if one recognizes that the novel has been as much preoccupied with the problems of ornamentation, or the parergon, as with those of marriage. Mrs. Elton, like the finery she laments, is excluded from the wedding, but included in the final paragraph. Austen ends the novel not with an epithalamium but by demonstrating how the extrinsic becomes intrinsic. Though readers may think themselves extrinsic to Emma, its ending does not entirely exclude them. As Rosmarin observes,

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Emma’s Parergonal Realism reading that “The wedding was very much like other weddings,” we cannot but conjure white finery; reading further—“where the parties have no taste for finery or parade” … we cannot but be chastened, reprimanded one last time for imagining what we have been invited to imagine. (1984, 336)

Readers are most inside the novel when they think themselves outside— when they feel superior to its protagonist or when they think they know what she will do. The novel, trapping us into imaginary malfeasance, makes us resemble its “imaginist,” Emma.

Framing “Nothing” Though Emma lacks statues, it does contain an image of a clothed figure: Emma’s portrait of Harriet Smith. The portrait episode, despite its visual priorities, stems from a verbal metaphor. Reviewing her efforts to improve Harriet, Emma tells Mr. Elton that she has “perhaps given” her young friend “a little more decision of character”; he replies: “Exactly so; that is what principally strikes me. So much superadded decision of character! Skilful has been the hand” (Austen 1816a, 84–85). The metaphor “Skilful has been the hand” gives Emma the idea to make an actual portrait of Harriet.29 In her previous attempts at portraiture, Emma achieved most success with parerga. Describing her depiction of a nephew, she says: I took him, as he was sleeping on the sofa, and it is as strong a likeness of his cockade as you would wish to see. He had nestled down his head most conveniently. That’s very like. I am rather proud of little George. The corner of the sofa is very good. (Austen 1816a, 91) Emma depicts the accessories of the figure better than the figure itself— especially, the French sense of figure, “face,” which the nestling of the “head” presumably hides.30 Her portrait of Harriet puts more emphasis on its human model. Yet Emma’s portrait episode devotes almost as much attention to the frame as to the portrait itself. After Emma completes it (so to speak), the need arises for someone to go to London and “get the picture framed.” Mr. Elton volunteers for the task (Austen 1816a, 98–99). In order to get the frame, he has to go beyond the frame of Emma’s focalization: Austen does not describe his journey. Nonetheless, the extrinsic becomes quasi-intrinsic through Emma’s false speculations. She tells Harriet: “At this moment, perhaps, Mr. Elton is shewing your picture to his mother and sisters, telling how much more beautiful is the original” (115). Elton’s mother and sisters, presumably residing in London, are outside the frame, but Emma’s fantasy

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brings them inside. Harriet later transmits second-hand reports of Mr. Elton’s efforts (142–43). At last, “The Picture, elegantly framed, came safely to hand soon after Mr. Elton’s return, and being hung over the mantel-piece of the common sitting-room, he got up to look at it, and sighed out his half sentences of admiration just as he ought” (144).31 In a community where Frank’s trip to London for a haircut amounts to a scandal, Mr. Elton’s trip to get a frame goes unquestioned. The London frame would give the provincial picture cultural legitimacy. Tara Ghoshal Wallace speculates that Local craftsmen who presumably serve the more quotidian needs of the neighborhood lack the skill (or the cachet) to produce an appropriately distinguished setting for Emma’s art, nor is amateur mounting by the artist herself adequate. The absolute and uncontested assumption that Emma’s picture must be framed in Bond Street attests to refined tastes that can be catered to only in the metropolis. (2007, 74) If the parergon responds to a lack, Emma, published by John Murray, does not lack metropolitan cachet, and its portrait episode shrewdly narrates the supplementary movement of cultural capital. Harvey notes: “the ergon is never fully complete, never fully finished, never fully independent, but rather entails an inner lack which calls forth (in an atemporal sense) the parergon to complete it” (1989, 70). Emma’s inability to finish her earlier artistic projects is telling (Austen 1816a, 88); without a frame, even a finished picture, like “The Picture,” would be less than “fully finished.” Yet a frame is a mechanical obfuscation of the unfinishability of the ergon: it is like a tag added to the picture, reading “I’m finished!” Austen brilliantly incorporates this artistic problem into her narrative. The Picture receives a frame, but the framed picture is not an end-in-itself but a parergon to a matchmaking project that will abort when the truth of Mr. Elton’s desire becomes undeniable. With the painting episode, Austen “works the frame” [travaille, fait travailler, laisse travailler le cadre] (Derrida 1987, 12; 1978, 16). Yet this is not the only material frame that appears in Emma. On her brief visit to the Martins, Harriet reencounters the “wainscot by the window” on which Robert had measured her height (Austen 1816b, 74). Peter Knox-Shaw observes: “While the much notched window-jamb punches a perspective into the past, it frames a real and ever-continuous world that lies beyond the fitful grasp of ‘pencilled marks and memorandums’” (2004, 215). Austen here narrates a literal writing on the frame. A much more familiar passage also involves architectural framing: Emma and Harriet’s visit to Ford’s shop. The whole scene is ornamental, a parergon in the Kantian sense. Indeed, one of the items Harriet buys is an ornament, a “ribbon” (Austen 1816b, 180). Miller observes that

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Emma’s Parergonal Realism The episode is hardly crucial to an understanding of Emma. The ribbon and the gown never reappear … . And what the episode tells the reader about Harriet’s character is redundant … . Yet in the playful quasigratuitousness of the episode, one might see a teasing and trivialized allegory of the mechanisms of textual production and closure. (1981, 7)

The word “quasi-gratuitousness” is another way of indicating the parergon’s “ill-detachable detachment.” While Harriet takes her sweet time over “a purchase,” Emma went to the door for amusement.—Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office door, Mr. Cole’s carriage horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer. (Austen 1816b, 175–76) Although this is one of the most widely cited moments in Emma, critics have paid too little attention to the fact that it offers a picture in a (door) frame. Unlike the frames for paintings and drawings, the frames of doors and windows are structurally necessary rather than ornamental. But it is not necessary for Austen to frame Emma’s view of the street with a literal frame. Kay Young seems to be the only Austen scholar who has remarked on the importance of this framing: At the top of the passage, like the top of the door’s frame itself, Austen writes: “Emma went to the door for amusement.” Emma looks out the door at the objects it frames because it holds the possibility of her delight. (2010, 30) The scene puts another sort of frame to work: Harriet’s dawdling over her purchase leads Emma to look out at a series of objects that concludes with “a string of dawdling children,” who gather at the edge of another frame, the baker’s window. The passage permits us to follow Emma’s gaze through a frame and out of one building. But the gaze terminates at other gazers gazing through a frame into another building. The frames of doors and

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windows are usually symmetrical structures, and Austen structures the scene with a meticulous symmetry culminating in a verbal chiasmus: “do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”32 We should pause to wonder what this “nothing” is. The scene knots together multiple negations without losing its cheerful tone. Emma earlier admitted that “in a legal sense” Harriet “may be called Nobody” (Austen 1816a, 129), and at Ford’s shop, having bought nothing, Emma looks at “nothing” while waiting for “Nobody.” Sensitive to Emma’s lack of major incidents, Marshall Brown claims: “Austen comes close to Flaubert’s ideal of writing a novel about nothing” (2014, 23).33 If so, this may be Emma’s most Flaubertian moment. But we should not take this “nothing” too literally. We cannot decide whether “nothing” is litotes or hyperbole—an understatement or exaggeration—since exaggerating nothingness understates being. Nonetheless, the “nothing” seems to mean more than nothing: after all, Emma has just beheld many things. The nothings in this chiasmus amount to what Edmund Bertram might call “the nothing of conversation.” The first occurrence of “nothing” primarily means “nothing important”; one could classify it as a metonymy. The second “nothing” primarily means “no particular thing.” Really seeing nothing, nothing tout court, would entail blindness, which does not seem to be Emma’s condition here (at least, not optically).34 Austen characterizes seeing multiple things as “seeing nothing.” Jager notes that this is odd. He goes on to argue that these things are nothing, not in the sense that they do not exist, but in the sense that they are purely literal: Women, children, dogs, a dusty street: these do not point anywhere, or mean anything beyond themselves. They simply are. They do not exist for Emma apart from this single moment—but in this moment they are all that exists. This is everyday life … . Emma’s triumph is that she realizes this; for once, she is simply content to experience, rather than to understand. (1995, 44) Yet if Emma is content with mere being, it would perhaps be unwise to imitate her. In fact, the passage suggests that she is not as content as she thinks (or as the narrator thinks). Emma “knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door.” The repetition in “amused enough; quite enough still” implies that one “enough” is not “enough”; so too, the chiasmus of the last sentence suggests redundancy (one thinks of the redundancy in the dedication to the Prince Regent). But is the wording Emma’s or the narrator’s? Perhaps what is enough for Emma is not enough for the narrator.35 The fact that the passage involves at least two thinking subjects is “enough” to undermine the claim to selfsufficiency.

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Emma’s omitting to interpret the things she sees does not nullify their meanings. A reader of Derrida should ask, to which nothing (lack) does this parergonal scene of “seeing nothing” respond? A straightforward answer emerges: Emma’s view of the street points at the more-than-human realm of digestion and death, legible in “Mr. Cole’s carriage horses … an obstinate mule … the butcher with his tray … two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone.” By far the most vivid image is that of the “two curs” and their “dirty bone.” What Emma confronts here is its own anthropocentrism. Elsewhere in the text, humans use nonhuman animals for transport or discuss consuming them, but only here do we see nonhuman animals consuming for themselves. While no sane person would read this moment as a homage to nonhumans, here anthropocentrism briefly staggers, and we get a glimpse of the nonhumans intersecting and enabling human traffic.36 While Emma’s other parerga respond to a lack, this passage supplies the lack, provides what was hitherto absent from the novel. Yet, as though to retract the difference, the novel calls the undone absence “nothing” and ratifies the negation by turning away from it. We will never find out which cur got the bone.37 In one of her wittiest sentences, Austen reports Mrs. Churchill’s death: “Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame” (Austen 1816c, 155–56). Nothing to do but die—that is, from a human perspective, to become nothing, to negate the social effects of one’s existence; but from another perspective, it means to become food for nonhumans and to requite the trans-corporeal realm of material circulation.38 The bone marks death, something that can only happen beyond the frame of the story proper (Mrs. Churchill, Mrs. Fairfax, Lieut. Fairfax, Mrs. Woodhouse). So the “nothing” framed by Ford’s doorway is Emma’s nothing, the lack hollowed by its anthropocentrism. But Emma’s gaze returns to human consumption (“children … eyeing the gingerbread”). Emma does not delight in “nothing” when she is in the street, but only when she views the street from the doorframe. The literary parergon of the frame allows the novel’s lack to appear; when she leaves the door, Emma stops amusing herself with “nothing.” Though Emma cannot sustain her nihilistic contentment, the novel is not done with nothing. Ironically, in the next chapter, Emma will see nothing again (blindly): entering the Bates’s apartment, she will notice nothing of Jane and Frank’s affections— and neither will first-time readers who see nothing in the movement between Chapters 9 and 10. Emma and most first-time readers, distracted by marriage plots or Miss Bates, forget the “nothing,” but Emma remembers. One could read the view from Ford’s as just another ironic undermining of the protagonist. Patricia Meyer Spacks considers it an example of “Emma’s characteristic compensatory self-congratulation” (1989, 196). Olivia Murphy quips: “a spectator who sees ‘nothing that does not answer’ is probably seeing only what they want to see, which may be more than is really there” (2013, 108). Emma, who is here content to contemplate everyday minutiae, is less

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serenely patient in her meetings with Miss Bates. Perhaps one reason she dislikes Miss Bates’s discourse is because it is unframed, an amorphous verbal sequence that has no definite contours save the arbitrary edges of margins and paragraphs—which Emma cannot see. But more is at stake than Emma’s impatience: Emma’s impatience. Emma would not be Emma—would not be a work, an ergon—if it did nothing but quote Miss Bates.39 If Austen ever wrote such a work, it would never be published in her lifetime. The scene at Ford’s is perhaps the moment when Emma comes closest to confessing its own lack; but it cannot dwell on its lack without ceasing to be an ergon, without forfeiting all claim to completeness. The meticulous framing of the episode (doorframe, window frame, chiasmus) exemplifies the logically deficient but aesthetically compelling effort of the realist novel to contain its would-be content.

Notes 1 Michael Giffin produces an allegorical reading of Fanny as Christ (2000, 19, 24). 2 Brian Southam, who argues for 1812–13 as the dates of the novel’s major events, stresses the distance of those events from the 1807 Abolition Act (1998, 494–97). Though he condemns Southam’s reading of Sir Thomas, John Wiltshire does not outright reject Southam’s dates: “Mansfield Park … is explicitly set in the years after the abolition of slavery in 1807, and possibly at the same time as its composition” (2003, 305). J. A. Downie favors the years 1808–9 (2014, 430). 3 According to Mandal, a preference for “parochial locales” characterized the Regency’s “moral-domestic” fiction (2007, 111). 4 Emma’s concern with confinement must have something to do with land enclosure (Kelly 2010; Tobin 1990, 252–53). 5 According to Lynch, “the Austen novel’s penultimate chapter often features a vaguely giggly conversation between the newly engaged couple in which” they undertake “reading their own story and repeating passages from it in the way Anne Elliot ‘repeats’ elegiac verse” (1998, 218). In Emma, the process of rereading begins before the penultimate chapter and involves the literal reading of a text, Frank’s letter. 6 Barchas pinpoints the carriage as “the site of the heroine’s most claustrophobic confrontation” (2007, 331). 7 Of course, “Since the first translation of the Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1838, after her death, Austen may never have heard of Kant. Nonetheless, these two thinkers are trying to work out in her century the problem she has set herself narratively” (Kenney 2016, 74). 8 Danielle Spratt notes that “poaching … was an ever-increasing problem after the enclosure acts had disenfranchised many working poor farmers and tenants” (2015, 205). 9 Another personification is Frank Churchill, who “was one of the boasts of Highbury, and a lively curiosity to see him prevailed, though the compliment was so little returned that he had never been there in his life” (Austen 1816a, 28). Frank is the insider-outsider. 10 White also notes that Austen’s account of the gypsies lacks the “colorful details” of most literary gypsy descriptions (2008, 314). 11 Of course, if one adds a parergon to a literary work, the work is no longer the same work. Harvey explains that “The ergon is not simply prior (temporally or

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Emma’s Parergonal Realism historically) to the parergon. Rather, they ‘come into existence,’ or are ‘given’ simultaneously. It is this simultaneity, however, that within the structure of parergonality presents itself as a temporal contingency of before and after which thus entails a certain attachability and in turn a detachability of parergon to an ergon already fully formed” (1989, 69). Mansfield Park, the least loved of Austen’s novels, has paid a price for the metafictional frankness of its last chapter. Galperin surely exaggerates when he claims that Emma nearly buries “its narrative under an avalanche of detail” (2017, 89). If the mere accumulation of detail were the criterion of Austen’s realism, then her letters would be her greatest realist achievement. But Galperin rightly argues against reducing Austen’s realism to a mere conformity to the probable (99). Radcliffe confesses the detachability of these verses in the novel’s “Advertisement”—itself a parergon: “It is proper to mention that some of the little Poems inserted in the following Pages have appeared, by Permission of the Author, in the GAZETTEER” (1998, xxxii). Northanger Abbey, published posthumously, is the only Austen novel bearing an advertisement. In a backhanded compliment, Armstrong considers Mr. Elton’s charade “the more brilliant for being composed entirely of clichés” (1998, 132). Cronin and McMillan explain that “cyphers are ornamental initials, and trophies are ornamental devices of any kind” (2005, 549n5). Cronin and McMillan associate Emma’s “motto” with Radcliffe’s epigraphs (2005, 551n10). Mr. Woodhouse’s poetic faculty instances a similar textual division. He “can only recollect the first stanza” of “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” which he quotes, and whose first line he later repeats (Austen 1816a, 165). By reproducing the poem as a fragment, he gives greater emphasis to “fair but frozen” than the original poem does. Of course, Austen was not the first writer to name a novel after the protagonist; Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda comes to mind. See Austen’s February 16, 1813 letter to Martha Lloyd (2011, 216–17). Many critics have doubted the genuineness of Emma’s attraction to Mr. Knightley; see especially Martin 2000, 21–22. Claudia Johnson characterizes the “rapport” between Darcy and Elizabeth as “racy” (1988, 90). Consider, for instance, Maria Edgeworth’s assessment of the novel: “there was no story in it except that Miss Emma found the man whom she designed for Harriets lover was an admirer of her own—& he was affronted at being refused by Emma & Harriet wore the willow—and smooth, thin water-gruel is according to Emma’s father’s opinion a very good thing & it is very difficult to make a cook understand what you mean by thin water gruel” (quoted in Galperin 2017, 89). The first edition minimizes the possibility that readers who rest between chapters will notice the repetition, since Chapter 2 ends on a recto while Chapter 3 begins on its verso (Austen 1816b, 35–36). Frances Ferguson has downplayed the significance of chapters as formal units in Austen’s novels (2007, 313n5). But Emma’s playful chapter breaks resist Ferguson’s argument. As Wiltshire puts it, “the arrangement of the text, together with the sly and duplicitous first sentence of chapter ten – ‘appearance’ being interpretable in more than one sense – connives with the trickery it designates” (2015, 111). J. M. Q. Davies argues that “Emma in its playfulness is her most Shandean work” (1992, 77). According to Park Honan, “There is good evidence that she knew Tristram Shandy as minutely as the seven volumes of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison” (1984, 163). Honan argues that Sterne taught her to notice

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29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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“each uncritically accepted device of fiction,” including the chapter (164). Volume IV, Chapter X of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy might have led her to associate chapter breaks with staircases (1983, 225). In the novels of Regina Maria Roche, “Finery, the trashier the better, is for a heroine’s foil” (Lynch 1998, 155). Emma, which alludes to Roche’s Children of the Abbey, also links the heroine’s foil to finery, but Mrs. Elton knows the convention: the novel’s venting of her sartorial airs is both utterly plausible and metafictional. Wendy S. Jones unpersuasively argues that Emma “points to art, not literature, as its predominant metaphor for perception and interpretation” (2008, 319). In fact, the theme of “art” emerges from literary rhetoric, Elton’s metaphor. Once framed, Emma’s portrait becomes “The Picture” (Austen 1816a, 144), and the capitalization suggests it is an allegorical and hence irremediably literary artifact. This is not to deny Emma’s engagement with the visual arts. Literature is a hybrid medium—a representation of speech and a visible field of inscribed pages. Emma is the most anagrammatical of Austen’s books, and “The idea of the anagram returns us to the aesthetic or graphic in language, the painterly if you wish, for it has letters dancing before our eyes, words taking on new shape and form” (Wills 2002, 116). Emma’s anagrams draw attention to the visual space of letters, but the novel becomes no less literary for that. Juliet McMaster observes: “the best parts of this sketch are his cockade and the corner of the sofa, rather than his face” (1992, 64). Julia Prewitt Brown argues that major eighteenth-century novels “provide a metaphysical frame for the action,” but “The frame disappears in Jane Austen” (1979, 5). The metaphysical frame falls away, but material frames obtrude. Juliet McMaster intuits the chiastic form of this phrasing when she compares Emma’s ability to “do with seeing nothing” to Satan’s wish to “make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” (2007, 26–27). Bree remarks on how Emma is uneventful even by Austen’s standards (2009, 134–35). This is not Emma’s only brush with nothingness. Mr. Elton addresses his charade “To Miss ———” (Austen 1816a, 150). For a magnificent riff on Miss Blank, see Litvak 1985, 769. Brownstein notices the uncertainty of point of view (1999, 230). A writer who respected dogs probably would not label them “curs,” which strikes Bharat Tandon as “a slightly incongruous note” (2016, 127). Perhaps the word dogs would sound too domesticated: curs is a derogatory term designating dogs for themselves, not for humans. Though she does not mention the curs, Barbara K. Seeber has made what is probably the best contribution to Austenian animal studies. Seeber notes the class implications of meat consumption, and she connects Mansfield Park to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century vegetarian discourses (2002, 276–77). Seeber regards Austen more as a critic than a perpetuator of anthropocentrism: “Throughout her work, Austen subjects anthropocentrism to feminist analysis: those who dominate nature and animals also oppress those lower in the social hierarchy” (2013, 128). Curiously, the association of nothing with the nonhuman inflects other passages in the novel. Harriet tries to decode the charade and confronts the absence of a solution. Failing to surmount the cognitive nothingness imposed by her stupidity, Harriet’s imagination proliferates nonhumans: “Can it be Neptune? / Behold him there, the monarch of the seas! / Or a trident? or a mermaid? or a shark? Oh, no! shark is only one syllable” (Austen 1816a, 152). In an earlier representation of cognitive breakdown, Laura, discovering her dead husband, multiplies nonhuman non sequiturs: “Talk not to me of Phaetons … Give me a violin—. I’ll play to him and sooth him in his melancholy Hours—Beware ye gentle Nymphs of Cupid’s Thunderbolts, avoid the piercing Shafts of Jupiter—Look at that Grove

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of Firs—I see a Leg of Mutton—They told me Edward was not Dead; but they deceived me—they took him for a Cucumber” (Austen 2006, 130). 38 For the concept of “trans-corporeality,” see Alaimo 2010. 39 Murphy argues that the view from Ford’s attains a “level of realism … too extreme to sustain in such a novel and, once she has made her point, Austen rapidly returns to the narrative” (2013, 108).

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Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge. Johnson, Barbara. 1980. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson, Claudia L. 1988. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Wendy S. 2008. “Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain.” ELH 75 (2): 315–343. doi:10.1353/elh.0.0004. Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Edited by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kelly, Helena. 2010. “Austen and Enclosure.” Persuasions On-Line 30 (2): www.ja sna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/kelly.html. Kenney, Catherine. 1991. “The Mystery of Emma … or the Consummate Case of the Least Likely Heroine.” Persuasions 13. www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/num ber13/kenney.htm. Kenney, Theresa. 2016. “Benevolence and Sympathy in Emma.” Persuasions 38: 66–80. Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2004. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1993. The Subject of Philosophy. Edited by Thomas Trezise. Translated by Thomas Trezise et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Litvak, Joseph. 1985. “Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text in Emma.” PMLA 100 (5): 763–773. doi:10.2307/462096. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. 1998. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. 2000. “Social Theory at Box Hill: Acts of Union.” In Re-reading Box Hill: Reading the Practice of Reading Everyday Life, edited by William Galperin. Romantic Circles. www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/boxhill/lynch/lynch.html. Mandal, Anthony. 2007. Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, Maureen M. 2000. “What Does Emma Want? Sovereignty and Sexuality in Austen’s Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Feminisms 3: 10–24. McMaster, Juliet. 1992. “The Children in Emma.” Persuasions 14: 62–67. www.ja sna.org/persuasions/printed/number14/mcmaster.pdf. McMaster, Juliet. 2007. “Emma: The Geography of a Mind.” Persuasions 29: 26–38. Miller, D. A. 1981. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, D. A. 2003. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mudrick, Marvin. 1968. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murphy, Olivia. 2013. “Rethinking Influence by Reading with Austen.” Women’s Writing 20 (1): 100–114. doi:10.1080/09699082.2013.754261. Murray, Douglas. 2007. “Jane Austen’s ‘Passion for Taking Likenesses’: Portraits of the Prince Regent in Emma.” Persuasions 29: 132–144. Nelles, William. 2006. “Omniscience for Atheists; Or, Jane Austen’s Infallible Narrator.” Narrative 14 (2): 118–131. www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/austen/nelles.pdf.

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Potkay, Adam. 2000. “Leaving Box Hill: Emma and Theatricality.” In Re-reading Box Hill: Reading the Practice of Reading Everyday Life, edited by William Galperin. Romantic Circles. www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/boxhill/potkay/potkay. Radcliffe, Ann. 1998. The Romance of the Forest. Edited by Chloe Chard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosmarin, Adena. 1984. “‘Misreading’ Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History.” ELH 51 (2): 315–342. doi:10.2307/2872948. Royle, Nicholas. 1988. “Telepathy: From Jane Austen and Henry James.” Oxford Literary Review 10 (1–2): 43–60. www.jstor.org/stable/43973690. Sabor, Peter. 2015. “Preface.” In The Cambridge Companion to Emma, edited by Peter Sabor, xi–xiv. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1991. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Critical Inquiry 17 (4): 818–837. www.jstor.org/stable/1343745. Seeber, Barbara K. 2002. “Nature, Animals, and Gender in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Emma.” Literature Interpretation Theory 13 (4): 269–285. doi:10.1080/ 10436920290095776. Seeber, Barbara K. 2013. Jane Austen and Animals. London: Routledge. Sheehan, Colleen A. 2006. “Lampooning the Prince: A Second Solution to the Second Charade in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line 27 (1). www.jasna.org/persuasions/ on-line/vol27no1/sheehan2.htm. Slothouber, Linda. 2015. “‘The Holders of Hay & the Masters of Meadows’: Farmers in Jane Austen’s World.” Persuasions 37: 29–42. Southam, Brian. 1998. “The Silence of the Bertrams.” In Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen, 493–498. Edited by Claudia L. Johnson. New York: W. W. Norton. Southam, Brian. 2008. “Jane Austen’s Englishness: Emma as National Tale.” Persuasions 30: 187–201. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1989. “Women and Boredom: The Two Emmas.” Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (2): 191–205. Spratt, Danielle. 2015. “Denaturalizing Lady Bountiful: Speaking the Silence of Poverty in Mary Brunton’s Discipline and Jane Austen’s Emma.” The Eighteenth Century 56 (2): 193–208. doi:10.1353/ecy.2015.0015. Stafford, Fiona. 1996. “Introduction.” In Emma, by Jane Austen, vii–xxii. London: Penguin. Sterne, Laurence. 1983. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Edited by Ian Campbell Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stovel, Bruce. 2007. “The New Emma in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line 28 (1). www. jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm. Tandon, Bharat. 2016. “‘Labours Not Her Own’: Emma and the Invisible World.” Persuasions 38: 116–130. Tanner, Tony. 1986. Jane Austen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tarr, Clayton Carlyle. 2013. “The Force of a Frame: Narrative Boundaries and the Gothic Novel.” PhD diss, University of Georgia. https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/ta rr_clayton_c_201305_phd.pdf. Tobin, Beth Fowkes. 1990. “The Moral and Political Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (3): 229–254. doi:10.1353/ ecf.1990.0000. Tsomondo, Thorell. 1987. “‘Emma’: A Study in Textual Strategies.” English Studies in Africa 30 (2): 69–82. doi:10.1080/00138398708690840.

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Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. 2007. “‘It Must Be Done in London’: The Suburbanization of Highbury.” Persuasions 29: 67–78. www.jasna.org/assets/Persuasions/No.-29/wa llace.pdf. White, Gabrielle D. V. 2006. Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition: “A Fling at the Slave Trade.” Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. White, Laura Mooneyham. 2008. “Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in Austen’s Emma.” Papers on Language & Literature 44 (3): 305–327. Wills, David. 2002. “Derrida and Aesthetics: Lemming (Reframing the Abyss).” In Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, edited by Tom Cohen, 108–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 2003. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Wiltshire, John. 1992. Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiltshire, John. 1997. “Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion.” In The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, 58– 83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiltshire, John. 2003. “Decolonising Mansfield Park.” Essays in Criticism 53 (4): 303–322. doi:10.1093/eic/53.4.303. Wiltshire, John. 2014. The Hidden Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiltshire, John. 2015. “The Heroine.” In The Cambridge Companion to Emma, edited by Peter Sabor, 105–119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Kay. 2010. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Zionkowski, Linda. 2016. Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Burney, Austen. New York: Routledge.

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Many of Austen’s local ironies depend on readers’ familiarity with, and at least momentary acquiescence in, traditional moral standards. Such ironies present few serious interpretive challenges, and if we need a theory to explain them, Wayne Booth’s account of “stable irony” may suffice. To illustrate this concept, he quotes the letters at the beginning of Austen’s Lady Susan. In the first, Lady Susan addresses her brother, lavishing affection upon him and his family. In the second, addressed to her confidante, she describes flirting with a married man and contradicts many of the claims made in the previous letter. Booth doubts that anyone can “miss the basic irony here; the self-portrait in letter 1 simply cannot be harmonized with the self-portrait in letter 2, and even the most inexperienced reader will recognize that Jane Austen is calling Lady Susan a hypocrite behind her back” (1974, 65–66). Austen does not call her “a hypocrite”; yet the sheer juxtaposition of letters implies that she is a hypocrite, thereby fulfilling one of the commonest functions of irony: conveying the unsaid through the said. Although some readers may delight in this hypocrite, in order to find her hypocrisy noteworthy, and in order for it to become the object of pleasure or indignation (or pleasant indignation), readers have to be aware of the belief that hypocrisy deserves reproach. Otherwise, the change in attitude from Letter 1 to Letter 2 would be as insignificant as a character’s feeling cold one day and hot the next. The irony in the opening letters of Lady Susan is stable. The text nowhere invites us to doubt Susan’s hypocrisy, or to question its orientation: after reading Letter 2, no one would judge that she was sincere in the first letter but hypocritical in the second; the unfolding of the plot would, in any case, compel a reader to retract that judgment. Claire Colebrook finds that “It is the speaker who is thoroughly at home with conventions and platitudes who is the easiest target of irony” (2002, 40). In Austen’s writings, the most famous of such easy targets is probably Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins, a hypocrite like Lady Susan, though bereft of her intellectual resources; while she exuberantly dispatches “conventions and platitudes” to manipulate others, he is the butt of his own conformist stupidity. From Chaucer to Austen, religious hypocrites have provided the readiest fodder for stable irony: even those readers who do not assent to the

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religious norms violated by the hypocrite can recognize the deceptiveness (or self-deceptiveness) of the violation; the exoteric familiarity of religious norms makes their violation all the more legible (the lecherous monk, the greedy parson). In Booth’s account, stable irony, though requiring a more elaborate decoding procedure than literal statements, furnishes meanings on which readers can rely. Most theoretical studies since Booth’s repose less confidence in the smooth functioning of stable irony. Though Derrida did not write much on the topic of irony, Colebrook finds that [His] deconstruction insists on looking at the way in which any text has a force to disrupt what we take to be stable and decided. All meaning is potentially ironic. It is always possible to ask of any text or utterance: what is it really saying (regardless of intent or origin)? (2004, 79) This conception of language seems to invalidate stable irony. Readers who have persevered to this chapter will in all likelihood expect it to affirm Colebrook’s Derridean approach. But while the potential irony of every utterance is cogent in theory, such a totalizing understanding of irony threatens to encumber with doctrinaire second-guessing the reading of actual texts. We can always ask of a text “What is it really saying?” But should we? One could doubt the benefits of such an interminable line of questioning. Actualizing the potential irony of all language would be onerous; and the indiscriminate questioning of what every utterance really means would presuppose—and leave unquestioned—the value of questioning itself. Though all of Austen’s meanings can be questioned—including the meanings of her apparently stable ironies—there is often no compelling reason to do so. One could, for example, question her ironic treatment of Mr. Collins: perhaps Austen actually admires pompous, hypocritical, and misogynist clergymen. But nothing in the novel calls for repealing Mr. Collins’s status as the butt of stable irony; doing so would destroy much of the fun of the book and give little in return. Absent the discovery of hitherto overlooked historical evidence, a revisionist exoneration of Mr. Collins could only sustain itself on a faith in questioning for questioning’s sake. It is not wrong to insist on ubiquitous semantic instability, but it would hinder appreciation of much of Austen’s wit. In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy, goaded by Sir William, asks Elizabeth Bennet “with grave propriety” to dance, and “‘Mr Darcy is all politeness,’ said Elizabeth, smiling” (Austen 2006d, 29). Elizabeth has not forgotten how he recently insulted her by rejecting a similar opportunity: Darcy said, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men” (12). This is why, in the later scene, Sir William fails to persuade her to dance: “Elizabeth was determined” (29). Mr. Darcy is certainly less than “all politeness”; Elizabeth

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knows it, and Darcy must know that she knows it. As the novel continues, Elizabeth will come to appreciate Darcy’s manners, yet that development does not erase the irony of “Mr Darcy is all politeness”; nor does it render the irony unstable. He may redeem himself after his early rude comments, but he cannot undo them. “Mr. Darcy is all politeness” is a textbook instance of stable irony. Readers would gain little from questioning the stability of the irony, from wondering whether Elizabeth has for a moment forgotten his previous conduct and is “smiling” out of sheer gratitude; if this were the case, why would she refuse to dance with him? Even if we argue that Elizabeth’s statement and her smile are automatic reflexes, Austen would still be inviting us to note the incongruity between “all politeness” and Darcy’s recent discourteous conduct.1 Northanger Abbey also features stable ironies. When Catherine Morland admits she has not read Camilla, John Thorpe replies: “You had no loss I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not.” The narrator comments: This critique, the justness of which was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine, brought them to the door of Mrs. Thorpe’s lodgings, and the feelings of the discerning and unprejudiced reader of Camilla gave way to the feelings of the dutiful and affectionate son. (Austen 2006b, 43–44) A reader can notice the irony here even if she has less familiarity with Camilla than John does. Perhaps we should not take Austen’s exalted praise of Camilla at face value (Austen 2006b, 31); but it is simply untrue that Burney’s five-volume novel only contains “an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin.” One must have low standards of critical competence to agree with the narrator’s claim that John Thorpe is a “discerning and unprejudiced reader of Camilla.” If Austen believed in the “justness” of his remarks and in the misfortune that Catherine cannot understand them, she must have been suffering from a bout of illiteracy. It is much more probable that she was using irony here to mock John Thorpe. To argue that because stable irony is impossible it is therefore impossible to understand this passage would require defending the potential viability of John Thorpe’s literary criticism—no easy task. Discussing Booth’s work, de Man detects “in irony something very threatening, against which interpreters of literature, who have a stake in the understandability of literature, would want to put themselves on their guard” (1996a, 167). To readers familiar with Austen’s stable ironies, de Man’s report of a threat could seem hyperbolical.2 Linda Hutcheon claims: “all ironies, in fact, are probably unstable ironies” (1995, 195). But not all ironies are equally unstable (just as not all metaphors are equally arbitrary). A reader who could not distinguish between more and less stable ironies

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would be at a significant disadvantage. It is helpful to think of stability as a relative term. A concrete foundation is not absolutely stable (earthquake or erosion will eventually intervene), but it is less unstable than a pudding foundation. There are, however, ironies in Austen’s work that destabilize themselves and present real challenges to “understandability.” There are moments when her novels contradict their ironic contradictions. These instabilities, however, are parasitic on stable irony—an indispensable concept. Austen’s stable ironies sometimes occasion unstable (or Romantic) ironies, which contradict but cannot annul their occasion. Kevin Newmark points out that The negativity of irony has need of something else on which it might produce its negative effects. That would be the occasion for irony. If irony happens, then it can happen only on occasion, only by means of an occasion thanks to which its negativity is allowed in this or that singular manner to exercise itself ironically. (2012, 8) To follow the course of Austen’s unstable stable (or unromantic Romantic) ironies, one should supplement Booth’s insights with the extensive theoretical work on irony, including Colebrook’s and de Man’s, that has accumulated in recent decades. Equally useful is a consideration of the major Romantic (or antiRomantic) theorists of irony: Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Schlegel. Though linguists and literary theorists working on irony often cite Austen, Austen scholars have rarely taken much interest in the wider world of irony research.3 To research irony is to confront negation. Irony differs from other common tropes (such as metaphor) since it demands the negation of a literal statement. Though readers of metaphors (especially, of clichés) generally prioritize the tenor, they need not always deprecate the vehicle. “But in stable irony,” Booth notes, “the superiority of the new meaning is an aggressive or competitive superiority—the rejected meaning is in some real sense a rival or threat” (1974, 40). Once readers intuit that Austen does not esteem John Thorpe’s literary judgment, they have rejected her literal praise of it. In a metaphor like “All the world’s a stage,” the existence of the world and the existence of stages are not contradictory, though the world is not really a stage. In irony, by contrast, the non-literal meaning does not merely differ from but actively contradicts or negates the literal. The text says that the “justness” of John’s review of Camilla “was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine.” Austen almost certainly means the opposite: John’s review was not just, and Catherine was fortunate (or, at least, was not unfortunate) in not understanding it. Yet the classic definition of irony as meaning one thing and saying the opposite cannot account for all ironic occasions. Northanger Abbey begins with the following statements: No one who had seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character

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of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. (Austen 2006b, 5) Booth points out that, in reading this passage, No simple inversion of anything will quite do—for example, it makes nonsense if one turns the first sentence upside down and says that anyone who knew Catherine in her infancy would have thought her destined to be a heroine. Yet one cannot accept it as it stands. And in the second sentence, we finally arrive at a kind of “opposite”. (1974, 130)4 The vagueness of Booth’s phrase “a kind of ‘opposite’” registers the genuine slipperiness of many ironies. Hutcheon notes that the traditional understanding of irony as “semantic inversion” inadequately “conflates irony … and antiphrasis” (1995, 61–62). As we will see, determining the “opposite” of Austen’s ironic statements can be extremely difficult. Even for the most stable ironies, the negation that occurs is not a complete annihilation of the literal meaning. According to William Empson, “An irony has no point unless it is true, in some degree, in both senses; for it is imagined as part of an argument; what is said is made absurd, but it is what the opponent might say” (1935, 56). When Austen puts an absurd speech in the mouth of John Thorpe, for example, she is clearly inviting us to reject its meaning, but she is also inviting us to affirm the mimetic value of the speech: what he says is untrue, but it is true that a rattle like him would say something like it.5

From Comic to (German) Romantic Irony The German Romantics—notably, Friedrich Schlegel—theorized unstable irony. Stable ironies are generally comic. Though they do not always result in laughter, they make fun of real buffoons or imagine fictional buffoons; the pleasure comic ironies produce is the moral self-satisfaction readers take in the (real or imagined) distance between themselves and the buffoon. One tendency of Romantic irony is to collapse the distance between readers and the buffoon. Colebrook reviews Schlegel’s ironic imperative: If humour often relies on a feeling of superiority or elevation above life’s misfortunes, irony recognises—but never fully realises—the implication of all life in this chaos. The ironic attitude must not just take a delight in seeing the clown slip on a banana skin … . It must recognise that we are all part of this falling; we are always dupes and effects of a life with a power well beyond our control and recognition. (2004, 37)

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Schlegel multiplies paradoxes: “In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden. It originates in the union of savoir vivre and scientific spirit, in the conjunction of a perfectly instinctive and a perfectly conscious philosophy” (1971b, 156). While comic ironies allow readers to relax, at least momentarily, in moral satisfaction, Romantic irony is restless: It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary. (Schlegel 1971b, 156) Romantic irony promises both exhilarating liberation and exhausting suspension—outcomes metaphorically depicted by Kierkegaard: The ironist lifts the individual up and out of immediate existence. This is his liberating function, but thereafter he lets him float like Mohammed’s coffin, which, according to legend, floats between two magnets— the one attracting and the other repelling. (1989, 48n) One of the lingering side-effects of Romantic irony is the claim that irony is different from comedy. Hegel, a stern critic of Schlegel, makes this distinction. He faults Schlegelian irony for its emphasis on the ego (Fichte’s ich), which prevents any serious consideration of content. Irony and comedy both engage in “annihilation.” But while “comedy,” which Hegel values, targets “what is inherently null which manifests itself in its hollowness,” Schlegel’s irony targets “equally everything inherently excellent and solid.” What Schlegel presents as the infinite exploration of paradoxes, Hegel presents as an “inner artistic lack of restraint” (1975, 160). Though much more sympathetic to Schlegel, de Man enforces an even starker cleavage between irony and comedy: “Irony is not comedy, and theory of irony is not a theory of comedy.” While comedy’s “distance” procures an enlightening pleasure, irony, for de Man, “is disruption, disillusion” (1996a, 182). Remarks like these lead Hutcheon to observe: “One of the misconceptions that theorists of irony always have to contend with is the conflation of irony and humor” (1995, 5). Identifying irony with comedy or humor would no doubt impoverish understanding of these terms; nonetheless, completely separating them can also breed “misconceptions.” Frederick Garber notes that “Romantic irony, however different in its operations from the rhetorical mode, is based on the same sort of divergence between seeming and being” (1988, 294). As Caroline Franklin suggests, “The assumption that there is always a clear-cut

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distinction between ‘Augustan’ irony, relying on shared moral standards, and philosophical ‘Romantic irony’ perhaps needs re-examining” (2007, 175).6 The historical distinction (Augustan/Romantic) corresponds to a rhetorical one: comic (stable) versus Romantic (unstable) irony. This chapter will examine moments in Austen’s novels when it becomes difficult to distinguish comedy from irony. Though many of Austen’s ironies are as stable as irony can be, her works now and then splice unstable ironies into stable ones. There is something coercive about de Man’s sundering of irony from comedy.7 One of the most important of Schlegel’s aphorisms, discussed by de Man himself, correlates irony with buffoons: There are ancient and modern poems that are pervaded by the divine breath of irony throughout and informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery. Internally: the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue, or genius; externally, in its execution: the mimic style of an averagely gifted Italian buffo. (Schlegel 1971b, 148) De Man connects the buffo to Schlegel’s statement: “Die Ironie ist eine permanente Parekbase” (Schlegel 1963, 85). As Anne Mellor explains, The parabasis in Greek Old Comedy was an interruption of the action, usually in the middle of the play, in which the author’s spokesman addressed the audience directly, often either speaking of the author’s personal circumstances or attacking the faults of various contemporary personages. (1980, 17) De Man identifies Schlegel’s buffo with “the disruption of narrative illusion”: The technical term for this in rhetoric, the term that Schlegel uses, is parabasis. Parabasis is the interruption of a discourse by a shift in the rhetorical register. It’s what you would get in Sterne, precisely, the constant interruption of the narrative illusion by intrusion, or you get it in Jacques le Fataliste, which are indeed Schlegel’s models. (1996a, 178)8 David Greenham argues that Austen cultivates a mode of irony similar to that of the German Romantics. This mode differs from “the mere curiosity of coincidence, the dissimulation of saying one thing while meaning another, and the invention of elite shibboleths allowing membership in a particular clique” (2005, 164)—a bundle of literary devices that would include what

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Booth calls stable irony. These traditional ironies (unlike Romantic ironies) “are meant to be understood” (Greenham 2005, 164). Greenham concurs with de Man that irony is not comedy, in part because “Comedy … is redemptive,” providing instruction about moral or social conduct that can help characters or readers overcome their deficiencies (170).9 While stable or comic irony allows us to reconstruct an authoritative position (for example, “Austen disapproves of men like John Thorpe”), Romantic irony creates unrelenting contradictions. Greenham argues that Romantic irony emerges in Emma through a clash of gender stereotypes: the juxtaposition of the feminized Mr. Woodhouse with his “independent” daughter, who has “masculine traits.” The juxtaposition is not a mere joke, but a struggle between the serious and the comic (166). As Greenham sees it, “In Emma, masculinity and femininity are reversed but held onto; the paradox is sustained. That is its romantic irony” (169). Such irony plays on our imaginative limits: “To see Emma as a woman is all the reader can do, but to know that the very category being referred to has been undermined prevents anything but a self-created stability in our reading practice” (170). Greenham’s explanation of Austen’s Romantic irony is unpersuasive because it presupposes an essentialist understanding of gender. Arguably, all women have “masculine traits,” all men feminine traits. Though the Woodhouse ménage may be particularly amusing, the chiastic arrangement of gender traits is not unique to Emma and cannot account for what is distinct about Austen’s work. If Romantic irony involves continual, unresolved opposition, then what triggers the Romantic irony that occurs in Austen’s novels is not the opposition of themes (such as femininity and masculinity), but the opposition of modes of irony. As almost any reader of Austen learns, comic or stable ironies frequently interrupt Austen’s narrative lines. Such interruptions usually take one of two forms: 1) the narrator (or Austen, if you like) asserts something, but readers detect that she means something else, perhaps the opposite; 2) a character asserts something that goes unquestioned by the text, but readers intuit that Austen probably disapproves. Less frequently, however, Austen’s narrative line ends up interrupting a stable irony: in such cases, the narrative seems to redeem the original object of ironic scorn. But only seems. The interruption of the interruption does not definitively annul the authority of the first ironic interruption. Rather than transporting us to a higher state of understanding or exhilarating us with creative dynamism, the interruption of the interruption imposes dispiriting doubt—what I call unromantic Romantic irony. The text leaves readers unsure which interruption to endorse: the first interruption or the interruption of the interruption. The text also denies us the means of brokering a compromise between these modes of irony.

Theorizing Parabasis: Fichte, Schlegel, and de Man To speak of ironic interruption is to speak of parabasis, and before investigating specific examples from Austen, we should review de Man’s theory of

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parabasis. Like Hegel, de Man underscores Schlegel’s debt to Fichte’s philosophy. De Man summarizes how judgment operates in Fichte’s system of knowledge. The importance of de Man’s argument necessitates lengthy quotation: Judgments … proceed according to two patterns—either as synthetic judgments or as analytical judgments. Synthetic judgments are judgments in which you say that some thing is like another. Following Fichte … whenever you do that, every entity which is like another must be unlike it in at least one property … if I say that A is like B, it supposes an X in which A and B are distinct or different. If I say that a bird is an animal, this supposes a distinction between animals, that there are differences between animals which allow me to make this comparison statement, between animals in general and birds in particular … . That’s a synthetic judgment, which thus postulates differences, assumes differences, when a similarity is being stated. Or, if I make an analytic judgment, a negative judgment, if I say that A is not B, then it supposes a property X in which A and B are alike. If I say, for example, that a plant is not an animal, it supposes a property that plants and animals have in common, which in this case would be the principle of organization itself … . You see that, in this system, every synthetic judgment always supposes an analytical judgment. If I say that something is like something, I have to imply a difference, and if I say that something differs from something, I have to imply a similarity. (1996a, 174; internal citations omitted) So far, so good.10 But de Man shifts to admittedly precarious ground: Now this structure (and this may not be convincing, I don’t know, but I’ll just announce it as a statement), this particular structure which is here being described—the isolation and the circulation of properties, the way in which properties can be exchanged between entities when they are being compared with each other in an act of judgment—is the structure of metaphor, the structure of tropes … . This is the epistemology of tropes. This system is structured like metaphors—like figures in general, metaphors in particular. (1996a, 174) De Man claims that Fichte’s whole system, as I have begun to sketch it out here, is first of all a theory of trope, a theory of metaphor, because … the circulation of the property (Merkmal) described in the act of judgment here is structured like a metaphor or a trope, is based on the substitution of properties. It’s structured like a synecdoche, a relationship between part and whole,

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Austen’s Unromantic Romantic Ironies or structured like a metaphor, a substitution on the basis of resemblance and of differentiation between two entities. The structure of the system is tropological. (1996a, 176)

In de Man’s account of Fichte, a slippage between likeness and identity occurs: “the act of judgment here is structured like a metaphor or a trope … . The structure of the system is tropological.” De Man’s claim that the system is tropological is, in Fichtean terms, a synthetic judgment: “Fichte’s judgments are tropes,” “a bird is an animal.” But, according to the Fichtean logic de Man has just endorsed, an analytic judgment must also be possible: what de Man neglects to point out is that Fichte’s system of judgment is also not the system of tropes, though they have something in common. Contrary to de Man’s reduction of judgments to tropes, one could just as well say that the structure of judgments makes tropes possible. On this reading, judgment would not be tropological; tropes would be linguistic applications of judgment.11 It seems that de Man’s goal here is to establish that when Fichte is talking about the self or its cognition, he is really talking about tropes or language; de Man reads Fichte’s science of knowledge as an allegory of rhetoric. This goal is in keeping with de Man’s belief that his earlier essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” had erred by treating irony as a psychological dilemma, rather than a linguistic effect (1996a, 169–70). Elsewhere, he claims that Irony comes into being precisely when self-consciousness loses its control over itself. For me, at least, the way I think of it now, irony is not a figure of self-consciousness. It’s a break, an interruption, a disruption. It is a moment of loss of control, and not just for the author but for the reader as well. (2014, 148) There is, however, an undeniable (though ironically appropriate) arbitrariness to de Man’s linguistic reading of irony. De Man claims that Fichte identifies the “I” with language, but his quotations of Fichte do not directly connect the “I” or self to language (1996a, 172–73).12 De Man foists his own linguistic concerns on Fichte, and “The Concept of Irony” thereby becomes vulnerable to the aporia of judgment it discusses. Fichte’s system of judgment exposes the drawbacks of de Man’s redefinition of irony. Narrative, in the last phases of de Man’s career, is the product of a self’s dialectic; irony, by contrast, is the disruption of narrative. De Man ponders Schlegel, whose buffo is a parabasis or an anacoluthon, an interruption of the narrative line … . Irony is not just an interruption; it is … the ‘permanent parabasis,’ parabasis not just at one point but at all points, which is how he

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defines poetry: irony is everywhere, at all points the narrative can be interrupted. Critics who have written about this have pointed out, rightly, that there is a radical contradiction here, because a parabasis can only happen at one specific point, and to say that there would be permanent parabasis is saying something violently paradoxical. But that’s what Schlegel had in mind. You have to imagine the parabasis as being able to take place at all times. (1996a, 178–79) To illustrate this paradox, de Man examines a notorious chapter from Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1971b, 118–21). The chapter’s philosophical jargon seems to allude to sexual intercourse: “the philosophical argument at all times is brutally interrupted when you see that it corresponds to something completely different, to an event which has nothing to do with the philosophical argument” (de Man 1996a, 179). Following Fichte’s logic more closely than de Man does, one could say that the parabasis is permanent not because it can disrupt a narrative line “at all points,” but because it has always disrupted itself. If disruption involves positing a difference in a supposed likeness, then disruption converts a Fichtean synthetic judgment into an analytic judgment: things that seem alike become unlike. But since, for reasons de Man paraphrased, every synthetic judgment presupposes an analytic judgment (and vice versa), the original synthetic judgment already presupposed its analytic conversion, and the analytic conversion in turn reasserts synthetic judgment. A slower reading of the passage from Lucinde reveals that the play of synthetic and analytic judgments is less brutal, though no less disorienting, than de Man claims. When we first notice that Schlegel’s obscure philosophical argument can also be a description of fucking, we may be shocked, since philosophy and fucking are “completely different.” But, on second thought, we may conclude that fucking and philosophy are not “completely different” after all. Though Kierkegaard might blush and Hegel scowl at the notion, philosophy is like fucking in some ways. At the very least, they are strenuous, potentially embarrassing, and not always productive activities in which only one person may actually be enjoying himself. In a cynical, but not preposterous, synthetic judgment, Schlegel implies that both sex and philosophical reflection are a “petty game” (1971b, 118). According to Fichtean logic, the subject and predicate of an analytic judgment (A is not B) can almost never be “completely different.”13 In a first-order irony, Lucinde solicits an analytic judgment: what you thought sounded like a philosophical discussion was really a discussion of fucking. But then a second-order irony may intervene, reasserting synthetic judgment: actually, philosophy is like fucking. Some readers—perhaps most—fail to notice the second-order irony; but the second-order interruption has already taken place regardless of the reader’s response, since every synthetic judgment entails an analytic, and every analytic, a synthetic.14

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The parabasis of Romantic irony is permanent, not because it recurs infinitely or everywhere but because it has always already happened: the permanent parabasis is always—whether we become aware of it or not—a parabasis of parabasis, an interruption of the interruption. A normal parabasis (a non-permanent parabasis, a stable or comic irony) would separate a demystified present from a mystified past.15 For example, first-time readers of Lady Susan might take the opening letter seriously and think that the eponymous protagonist is a demure widow—until they read the second letter and recognize their mistake, a recognition that constitutes stable irony. In permanent parabasis, by contrast, the text discloses the moment of demystification as a possibly mystified moment. The parabasis is permanent because it has always already happened—in both a synchronic and diachronic sense of “always”: 1) it has always already happened because analytic and synthetic judgments are logically coimplicated; 2) it has always already happened because although readers experience the text and process its ironic moments as a diachronic sequence, the text as a material object precedes this sequence, so the demystification of demystification awaits readers, who lag behind the composition and publication of the text. De Man maintains that There is no narration without reflection, no narrative without dialectic, and what irony disrupts (according to Friedrich Schlegel) is precisely that dialectic and that reflexivity, the tropes. The reflexive and the dialectical are the tropological system, the Fichtean system, and that is what irony undoes. (1996a, 181) But in the parabasis of parabasis, every undoing is also a re-doing. This redoing (the interruption of the interruption, the reassertion of the interrupted narrative line) may look redemptive. But it redeems nothing. De Man’s “permanent parabasis” is more reassuring. If you agree with de Man that “irony undoes” Fichte’s “tropological system,” you can be confident that wherever there is irony it will disrupt the narrative line “at all points.” As a consequence, though the reader might not be able to understand any particular ironic text, she can nonetheless understand what irony does in texts. The text becomes undecidable, but its undecidable condition becomes decisive. Is Schlegel’s chapter about philosophy or fucking? We will never know—but de Man teaches us that we can know we will never know. By contrast, if we think of Romantic irony as parabasis of parabasis, if we recognize that every undoing is a re-doing (and vice versa), even negative confidence becomes impossible; the best we can do is alternate between a disruption of narrative and disruption of the disruption. The alternation is not a dialectic in the Hegelian sense: it does not lead anywhere, let alone toward the absolute. Nor does it provide the negative consolations of de Manian or Socratic irony, the understanding that one does not understand:

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one’s subsequent doubts notwithstanding, perhaps one did understand. The interruption of the interruption is still an interruption: rather than healing the original wound, it aggravates it. The first-order irony could have been premature, but the second-order irony could have been an idle afterthought; the reader could have been more right than she will have known. In the last words of Allegories of Reading, de Man declares: Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding. As such, far from closing off the tropological system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration. (1979, 301) While de Man’s system must remain open, at least it remains a system. In this respect, parabasis of parabasis is both like and unlike de Man’s conception of irony. Parabasis of parabasis is an “undoing”; but the undoing is not “systematic,” because it interacts in an uncontrolled way with a re-doing that is no less disruptive for being contingent. Unromantic Romantic irony might not occur in every Austen text, and the occurrences discussed below are unpredictable rather than “systematic.”

Parabasis of Parabasis in Emma My account of the parabasis is probably not what Schlegel had in mind, but it explains the workings of some of Austen’s most intricate ironies. While de Man thinks he can distinguish between comedy and irony, Austen’s novels destabilize (synthetic judgment) and re-stabilize (analytic judgment) the difference. Such ironies have caught the attention of a few critics. As Emma’s ending approaches, Harriet Smith—finally known to be the illegitimate daughter of a mere “tradesman”—marries a farmer instead of the gentleman Emma projected. The narrator, perhaps using free indirect discourse to track Emma’s thoughts, marvels at Highbury’s good luck: “what a connexion had she [Emma] been preparing for Mr. Knightley—or for the Churchills—or even for Mr. Elton!—The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed” (Austen 2005a, 526). This passage prompts Tony Tanner to ask: what kind of society is it that regards rank and money as necessary and sufficient “bleach” for an unlucky draw in the lottery of birth? The answer of course is, all too many societies; but we can see in such perfectly cadenced passages as this how Jane Austen could be – indirectly but quite lethally – bitingly subversive of the mores of her class and society. Of course, reducing or equivalising – through metaphor – rank and money to a common household object such as bleach, and relating

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But Tanner, unlike many critics content with revealing subversive ironies, notices a twist—what I would call a second-order irony or an interruption of the interruption: it is Jane Austen who confers upon Harriet her money and minimal “respectability”. Making Harriet just about respectable enough to be – just about – acceptable might seem to reveal a Jane Austen colluding with the very mores and requirements of her class and society which she elsewhere ironises or seriously undermines. But who can be sure where the ironies stop! (1986, 185) The suspicion of interminable irony results from the alternation of analytic and synthetic judgments. The initial comic irony, mocking Emma for her inveterate snobbishness, seems stable when one thinks through the absurd implications of the bleach metaphor; the comic irony posits a difference between what the narrator, imitating Emma, says and what Austen probably believes. Yet the larger narrative line, which validates snobbery in various ways, interrupts the interruption, raising the possibility that Austen does think like the narrator (or Emma) and that there is no significant ideological difference between them—at least, on the subject of Harriet Smith’s marital destiny. The second interruption, however, does not entirely undo the subversion performed by the first-order irony. How do we know that the narrative line itself is not ironic? And how do we know that Austen is “colluding with” snobbery rather than simply representing it? Perhaps Harriet’s fate is the novel’s concession to plausibility rather than the author’s endorsement of social “mores and requirements.” Moving back and forth from analytic to synthetic judgments, we open a void. Another comment from Emma incurs parabasis of parabasis: It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;—but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more. (Austen 2005a, 266) The first-time reader of the first sentence might overlook the possibility of irony. Overlooking irony becomes less probable in reading the second sentence, an unduly emphatic effort to rebut an interlocutor who holds the silly

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opinion that dancing is necessary; the seriousness with which the narrator responds to a frivolous proposition is amusing. Comic irony interrupts the apparent seriousness. But if we read the passage carefully enough to recognize the interruption, we can also interrupt the interruption. As Robert M. Polhemus notes, Humanity may be able to do without dances, but we can’t be very sure, since the race seems seldom to have tried. Dancing is as permanent and as old as warfare. … All dances are essentially mating dances, and the end, as well as the means, of dancing is the felicity of rapid motion. … A conventional ironist might find balls trivial … but the ironist of genius may discover that dancing is even more significant than anxious dancers can imagine and that just as a dance may be much more important to a particular woman than a Napoleonic war, so might the fact of dancing be just as significant to the human race as the face of battle. (1986, 67) What seems “trivial” becomes serious. Perhaps it is appropriate that the narrator takes dancing so seriously, even if she is wrong to deny its necessity. Austen herself “seems seldom to have tried”: all her novels include at least one ballroom scene. Polhemus tactfully outlines a sexual joke that resembles the pornographic chapter of Lucinde: what looks like a discussion of dancing might really be a discussion of sex (“felicities of rapid motion”). While Polhemus characterizes the second-order irony as “deeper” than the first one, it is unclear which has epistemological priority. The fact that the human species has rarely abstained from dancing might not indicate the impossibility of dispensing with it: perhaps humans are stupid conformists, who do not realize that they can give up dancing rituals. Another comic irony, a pun on “heavy,” interrupts the second-order irony: are dance-resistant people too serious or too fat?16 Comic irony subverts seriousness, and Romantic irony reasserts a claim to seriousness; the narrator pretends to take something that is trivial seriously, but Polhemus finds that maybe the trivial is not trivial, in which case the narrator’s pretense would cease to be a pretense. The “heavy” pun casts doubt on such renewed seriousness, but the semantic ambiguity of the pun (“serious” or “fat”) prohibits the doubt from annulling seriousness. The apparent gap between the narrator’s serious tone and the triviality of the topic becomes the object of an analytic judgment, and comic irony arises; Polhemus shows that the analytic judgment can dissolve into a synthetic judgment. I would add that the synthetic judgment can become analytic again, either through reflection on human conformity or through noticing the pun. Choreographing such interpretive pirouettes, the dancing passage can serve as an emblem of unromantic Romantic irony. Elsewhere Emma achieves similar effects through narrative reticence. Hutcheon investigates how irony emerges “between the said and the unsaid”

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(1995, 60). Emma produces a said unsaid that renders the idea of the unsaid ironic. After Knightley makes his marriage proposal, the narrator speaks for Emma: “What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does” (Austen 2005a, 470). This “imperturbable catechism” (Mudrick 1968, 227) has prompted decades of explicative efforts. Surveying these efforts, Wolfgang G. Müller argues that we should not attribute the “restraint” of this passage to Austen’s “coyness” or to “the belief that emotions can hardly ever be expressed adequately”: “the discrepancy between the overall emotionality of the scene and the surprising dryness at its climax is too great to be explained other than as an ironic intervention” (2018, 51). William Walling describes the ironic vertigo of the truncated proposal scene: “in no way can we be certain of the real direction of Austen’s irony, and in that respect her unfathomable tone approximates the interrogation of irony itself that we’ve seen in the past quarter century or so.” But after briefly comparing Austen’s “interrogation of irony” to Booth’s and de Man’s, Walling shies away from theoretical research: “to venture any farther into this area is to participate too passively in another kind of anachronism, the inescapable one implicit in Croce’s maxim long ago that ‘all history’ (not to mention all criticism) ‘is contemporary’” (2000). Walling thinks it is an “anachronism” to study ironic instability in earlier periods of literature; critics cannot avoid this anachronism entirely (it is “inescapable”), but they should have the good sense to curtail it. This notion of anachronism motivates much of the avoidance of theory in Austen studies. The notion provides a historicist excuse for not engaging with the historical evidence offered by literary texts. The best one can say for Walling is that perhaps his unwillingness “to venture any farther” is an ironic imitation of Emma’s refusal to report the details of what Emma said. The narrator’s intrusion demands a close reading. Although the always in “A lady always does” could mean “in every marriage proposal,” it could also mean “every time she speaks”; it could have a temporally restricted or unrestricted meaning. If we opt for the restricted meaning, we have no way to verify the narrator’s statement, since she refuses to tell us what Emma said; one “lady” (the narrator or the “LADY” who appears on the title page of Sense and Sensibility’s first edition) vouches for another, but what Emma ought to say is not necessarily true. If we opt for the unrestricted meaning of always, then we may remember occasions when Emma apparently did not say what she ought to have said—during the Box Hill incident, most notably, where she flirts with Frank and insults Miss Bates. According to Joel Weinsheimer, The obligation to conceal is not a duty much discussed in criticism of Emma, but it is precisely this social rule that is applicable at Box Hill. Emma’s nasty quip is both true and sincere, but it is hardly beautiful and it should have been repressed. (1983, 269)

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If Emma is a lady, and if she did not always say “just what she ought,” then the narrator is wrong, increasing the possibility that there is an ironic gap between the narrator and Austen (or between Austen’s momentary pretense and what she really believed). But since lady does not mean woman, it is possible that Emma, a woman, was not a lady on Box Hill. Perhaps she becomes a lady only during her post-Box Hill contrition—or only becomes a lady in the proposal scene when her discourse slips away from us. The word lady is in danger of becoming a tautology: whenever a woman says what she ought, she is a lady—or, whoever bears the title lady can say anything, since whatever it is, it is bound to be proper (like the 45th U.S. President, who said that because he is president, anything he does is legal). One could speculate that Emma, a long-established lady, temporarily loses her ladyhood on Box Hill, but Knightley’s rebuke helps her regain it. If a lady, however, can lose and regain her ladyhood like a wind-tossed bonnet, then it is silly of the narrator to invoke the term lady to justify Emma’s unreported speech. In a comic irony, Emma’s linguistic transgressions (her not saying “what she ought”) disrupt the narrator’s claim that she said what she ought. Memory of these transgressions invites readers to make an amusing analytic judgment. The “what she ought” example differs from the “stain of illegitimacy” example, in which recalling the narrative line permits a synthetic judgment. The end result, however, is a similarly undecidable alternation between analytic and synthetic judgments. Further reflection on the narrative line interrupts the interruption. Perhaps Emma is a lady on Box Hill and ought to mock Miss Bates. It would be callous to ignore the economic and social difficulties she suffers, but the garrulity of Miss Bates is not innocuous. She reports that her mother “was rather disappointed” that Mr. Woodhouse sent back the asparagus, “but we agreed we would not speak of it to any body, for fear of its getting round to dear Miss Woodhouse, who would be so very much concerned!” (Austen 2005a, 357). Yet here she is speaking of it—not unlike Wickham’s slandering Darcy while claiming that he will not publicize Darcy’s bad deeds. If Emma deserves a lesson about tact, so does Miss Bates. Isobel Grundy finds that the latter, the most garrulous person in Austen’s novels, “stops talking well before” Emma ends (2002, 51). This could be because the plot is drawing to a close, further marginalizing marginal characters; but perhaps Miss Bates speaks less after her Box Hill humiliation because Emma has actually influenced her. If Emma, however painfully, causes Miss Bates to become less loquacious, that would actually be a good thing—not just for the annoyed citizens of Highbury, but for Miss Bates herself. One could read the narrator’s truncation of the proposal scene as a stable irony, as a humorous criticism of a moral or intellectual fault. The stable irony would perform at least three functions: 1) mild ridicule of Emma, whose language is not always ladylike (at least, by Mr. Knightley’s standards); 2) mild ridicule of the presumably ladylike narrator, who

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complacently vouches for her heroine’s linguistic rectitude; 3) mild ridicule of an implied reader, perhaps male, who through a misguided chivalry is too quick to defer to the supposed decorum of ladies. But to read the statement as stable irony, one must temporarily check the parabasis of parabasis at work in the statement, the tendency for the ridicule to morph into justification and back into ridicule. Emma’s meddling—performed almost entirely through speech acts—has earned her much disapprobation inside and outside the novel. But by the end of the novel, things turn out more or less happily for the major characters. Maybe Emma was a lady, and maybe it is not absurd to claim of this novel that its leading lady always says what she ought. Since Austen withholds not only what Emma said in the proposal scene but also the precise criteria for being “A lady,” we can never transform “maybe” into “certainly.” But the “maybe” tempts us to convert the analytic judgment into a synthetic judgment: what the narrator says about the unsaid is not absurd and does not necessarily differ from Austen’s belief—at least, her belief about the linguistic propriety of ladies in the fictional universe of Emma. 17 Alternating synthetic and analytic judgments, Austen’s unromantic Romantic ironies involve what Schlegel calls “irony of irony” (1971b, 266– 67). Schlegel affirms “irony’s relentless tendency to regress into higher-order ironies” (Roy 2009, 109). Roy contends that there are “three basic coordinates in Schlegel’s theory of irony: the two first-order ironies of enthusiasm and skepticism and the second-order irony of irony, which oscillates continually between the first-order ironies” (110). Austen plots different coordinates. Instead of enthusiasm, the starting point is comic (stable) irony, which already demands skepticism, a resistance to taking a statement at face value. Then there arises a “second-order irony of irony,” a skepticism about the skepticism. But the second-order irony does not eliminate or transcend the first: the initial comic irony does not relinquish its claim to truth.

Tracing Austen’s Irony: “The History of England” The persisting tension between first- and second-order ironies discredits Lionel Trilling’s influential reading of Mansfield Park as an anti-ironic novel. Trilling claims: “we cannot say that the novel is without irony—we must say, indeed, that its irony is more profound than that of any of Jane Austen’s other novels. It is an irony directed against irony itself” (1998, 431).18 For Trilling, the novel’s irony of irony is a labor of earnestness that readers should take seriously, even if they disagree with Fanny’s ideas. Yet Trilling “does not notice the self-contradictory force of” using irony to attack irony (Rasmussen 1993, 139). If “Austen” attacks irony, then Irony fights back (to an apparent draw). But how was it possible for Austen to involve herself in such vertiginous ironies? Is it merely a coincidence that some of her ironies resonate with the ideas of the German Romantics, whose works she did not read? David

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Simpson claims that “Although there are extraordinary correspondences” between the German Romantic ironists and their English contemporaries, “the connections do not seem to have been those of direct influence; indeed, so little was this the case, that it has been assumed that there is no place for a concept of Romantic irony in English Romantic literature” (1979, 189). Yet the causal link between these writers is not a mystery. Austen and the German Romantics share a set of key influences—notably, Shakespeare’s plays and eighteenth-century English novels. We have already noted de Man’s recognition of Sterne’s influence on Schlegel, who discusses Sterne in Gespräch über die Poesie and goes so far as to claim that “The humor of a Swift, of a Sterne, I mean to say, is the natural poetry of the higher classes of our day” (1971a, 446; 1978, 204).19 Austen’s most obviously Sternean works are the metafictions of her juvenilia. In the 1790s, both the young German critic and the young English parodist were thinking through the philosophical and rhetorical implications of an English literary tradition. Among Austen’s teenage works, the “The History of England” reveals the most about the development of her irony. While Tristram Shandy is a ridiculously longwinded attempt at writing one man’s life, which takes several volumes to get the man born, Austen’s “The History of England” is a ridiculously laconic attempt to write a kingdom’s past. As commentators often point out, Austen parodies Oliver Goldsmith. Peter Sabor reconstructs her process: On 26 November 1791, Jane Austen dedicated her “History of England” to her sister Cassandra. Before then, in all likelihood, and probably earlier in 1791, she wrote over a hundred marginal comments on a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume History of England. (2006, 316) The marginalia alternate apparently earnest indignation with sarcasm. In these jottings, Austen obtained the self-consciousness essential to German Romantic irony, a self-consciousness that would blossom into “The History of England,” the first major work of one of literature’s greatest ironists. Devoney Looser warns: “It would be foolish to see this short piece—undertaken apparently to amuse and entertain family members—as the groundwork for the rest of her fiction” (1998, 42). This chapter will dare such foolishness. The buffo abides. A preference for the Stuarts and hostility toward Goldsmith seem to prompt many of Austen’s marginal comments. At one point she writes “a lie” (Sabor 2006, 337). Knowing what we know about the complex ironies of Austen’s mature writings, we should wonder: how does she know that something Goldsmith says is false? We might even suspect that Austen is mocking herself (for her brother’s amusement?), imitating an indignantly ignorant response to a disagreeable text. But while Austen’s later unromantic Romantic ironies permit the narrative line to interrupt local interruptions, the necessary brevity of marginalia forbids recursive action. Perhaps the teenage annotator is just

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venting spleen or expressing blind partisanship. Instead of an irony of irony or parabasis of parabasis, Austen’s marginalia present more mundane indeterminacies. Sabor notes that Most of Austen’s observations on the Civil War reinforce Goldsmith’s mildly pro-Stuart stance, but on occasion she rebukes him for complicity with Cromwell’s party. An account of Cromwell’s military conduct in Ireland provokes an indignant “Detestable monster!” … Similarly, when Goldsmith claims that in an encounter with Scottish royalists, Cromwell “did not lose above forty men in all,” Austen interjects “It is a pity there were not forty one” … the forty-first presumably being Cromwell himself. (2008, 221) In her marginalia, we find sarcasm and even some wit, but none of Austen’s distinctive urbanity. Her act of “vandalising Goldsmith” (Spongberg 2011, 57), her revenge on a textbook, is the kind of revenge that ordinary students take to this day. A few marginal comments are more distinctive. In response to Goldsmith’s description of the Old Pretender, Austen exclaims: “Sensible! Oh! Dr Goldsmith Thou art as partial an Historian as myself!” (Sabor 2006, 337), a reference to Goldsmith’s complacent belief that “the reader will admit my impartiality” (Sabor 2008, 223). This could be a moment of self-knowledge: her passionate rebuttals of Goldsmith’s arbitrariness might have finally alerted Austen to her own arbitrariness. Peter Knox-Shaw argues that though Austen’s “The History of England” has attracted attention with its resistance to Whig history and male ignorance, “its satiric concern with fanatical one-sidedness has escaped notice” (2004, 122).20 Resistance to the one-sided is a major element of Romantic irony, as Hegel knew: “irony implies the absolute negativity in which the subject is related to himself in the annihilation of everything specific and one-sided” (1975, 160). “The History of England” simultaneously advances and retards Austen’s political cause, the defense of the Stuarts. Its passion turns against itself— not unlike German Romantic irony. According to Colebrook, “As transcendental buffoonery, Romantic irony is a form of self-creation that is at one and the same time self-destruction” (2002, 132). “The History of England” champions the Stuarts, especially Mary Queen of Scots, and reviles the Tudors. But Austen’s candid (or ironic) admission of her total partisanship undermines that partisanship. Laura Mooneyham White observes that Austen’s “fanatical and romantic devotion” to Mary Queen of Scots is “satirized by Austen even as it is expressed” (2011, 118). Irony informs her rendering of even the most tragic moments of Stuart history. Beth Kowaleski Wallace describes Austen’s depiction of Charles I: “the narrator’s tone both conveys the possibility of real sympathy for Charles and, through persistent irony, undermines the very possibility that one might feel for this Stuart king”

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(2012, 162). Irony also inflects her stylistic choices. Southam notes that, parodying the epistemological confidence of popular historians, Austen’s “The History of England” for the most part “writes of sovereigns and great men with an air of careless familiarity, as if they were figures of her own time”; but As a foil to this slangy colloquialism, in writing of Mary Stuart Jane Austen adopts an elevated mock-formal style with rhetorical appeals to the reader, in striking contrast to the rest of the work, where in general the tone is jaunty, the manner inconsequential, with a purely verbal appearance of cause and effect. (1964, 28) The “slangy colloquialism” violates historiography’s generic norms (formal language and respect for the alterity of the past). But then Austen violates her violation, shifting to “an elevated mock-formal style.” The immediate purpose of this stylistic idiosyncrasy might have been ad hominem attack: Austen’s casualness mocks Goldsmith’s complacent narrative. But the shift to a formal style in the description of Mary is perhaps the earliest example of Austen’s unromantic Romantic irony. It can be read as a moment of earnestness, a disruption of irony that temporarily restores historiographical business as usual. Alternatively, the earnestness, coming from a writer whose stated goal is to defame the Tudors, could undermine itself—expose itself as propagandistic artifice. If “slangy colloquialism” announces that the historian is writing from the perspective of the present, then the shift to a formal style implies that the sentiments expressed thereby are not of the present and may not be what the present writer believes. The abruptness, moreover, with which she changes styles could draw attention to the fact that there is no necessary link between style and conviction—let alone historical accuracy. Yet we can never exclude the possibility that Austen drops the “slangy” mode in order to express sincere admiration for the beloved Stuart martyr. The text leaves readers suspended. But the suspension has consequences. The arbitrariness of Austen’s rhetoric further compromises her defense of the Stuarts, since the chief objection to them was their supposedly despotic rule. Governing her text with the violent arbitrariness that Whigs ascribed to the Stuarts, Austen confirms the Whigs’ complaints even as she mocks their teleological concept of history.21 Austen’s adoption of the Stuart cause must owe something to her own family history. Christopher Kent points out: “She had extensive family associations with the Stuarts, significantly on the female side” (1989, 64). Austen’s “History” is a family affair in another sense: it includes her sister Cassandra’s portraits of kings and queens. Having consulted “experts in the separate fields of odontology and geomatics,” Annette Upfal and Christine Alexander demonstrate that these portraits refer to members of Austen’s family, and thereby enrich royal history with a parallel set of meanings.

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Cassandra portrays “her sister Jane as Mary, Queen of Scots.” Equally significant is “Cassandra’s portrait of her mother, Mrs. Austen, aged fifty-two, as Queen Elizabeth,” a portrait that “shows an ugly, even grotesque woman, dressed formally in the style of the early 1790s.” The illustrations enable us to uncover “a second and hidden meaning of the text as a subversive history of the Austen family” (Upfal and Alexander 2010). In other words, the literal narrative provided by the text, a historical account of England, can function as an allegory, pointing to animosities in the Steventon parsonage. If an autobiographical matrix of Austen’s irony is recoverable, it may be in this allegory. Though Goldsmith’s textbook is drab and derivative, its material engaged Austen.22 “The History of England” serves at least two satiric purposes: 1) to mock Whig historiography; 2) to mock Austen’s own family, particularly her mother. Austen’s maternal connection to the Stuarts, a source of pride in a rank-conscious era, is a leading motivation for her Stuart sympathies; but her hostility to her mother shapes her representation of Elizabeth I. Linking Jane Austen to Mary Queen of Scots, Upfal and Alexander permit us to read the “The History of England” as a Freudian family romance in which the young historian humorously fantasizes that her mother is not her mother—only an older, less attractive, cousin. Yet since the text, by defending the Stuarts, also defends the maternal line, the “The History of England” reasserts the origin it would allegorically undo. One could say that Austen’s distinctive irony originates in an ironic disavowal of her origin. Attempting to trace the history of Austen’s irony could be a futile endeavor—even if it leads back to a “History.” De Man admits that “Irony and history seem to be curiously linked to each other” (1996a, 184), but he also suggests that irony and history are incompatible. Ironists frequently oppose “the claim to speak about human matters as if they were facts of history. It is a historical fact that irony becomes increasingly conscious of itself in the course of demonstrating the impossibility of our being historical” (1983, 211).23 De Man is right to be suspicious. Historical writings assert continuity. The project of writing a history of England, for example, presupposes that the identity of England persists over time, that the England of Henry IV was younger than but substantially the same as the England of Charles I. It is possible that historiography cannot accommodate an essentially disruptive trope, such as irony, except as a local stylistic ornament. But what if history, the subject matter of historical writing, is essentially disruptive, like irony? This is what “The History of England” asserts.24 Austen does not write all of English history, of course. The few stories she chooses to tell are emblematic of what counts as history for the young Austen, and what counts is disruptive. As Spongberg notes, Austen’s History begins with the reign of Henry IV and ends with the execution of Charles I, a period that frequently marked the crucible of English liberty in eighteenth-century British historiography. In Austen’s

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hands, however, this critical juncture in the history of England becomes a raucous tale of usurpation, imposture, and regicide. (2011, 57) Spongberg recalls that Henry IV was … most famous for beginning the history of usurpation to the throne of England (being the first Lancastrian to take the throne, and not the primogenitary heir) … . Even Whig hacks like Goldsmith, who considered the reign of Henry IV critical to the evolution of English liberty, believed that he was a usurper. (2011, 66) Consequently, by “Beginning her History with the reign of Henry IV and concluding with the death of Charles I,” Austen represents precisely that which Burke sought to repress in his account of the evolution of English liberty. Austen’s History is devoted explicitly to subverting the ordered and hierarchical network of relations that he imagined accounted for the history of the English state … . Paternity and heredity are in question throughout Austen’s History of England, when they are not rendered entirely absurd. (Spongberg 2011, 68) Framed by usurpation, deriding patrilineal succession, “The History of England” is no more disruptive than its subject matter. Austen reveals that history (at least, royal history) is irony—parabases of parabases. In other words, Austen is not just pouring historical narrative into an ironic mold: she discloses the synthetic judgment that history is irony. Traditional historiography (Whig or not) glosses over the basic irony of royal legitimation: rulers derive their legitimacy from the past, but the past leads to their ancestors’ illegitimate usurpation of a previous ruler. And the paradox of royal legitimacy was more than a literary toy. Austen wrote her “History,” we should recall, in 1791, the year of the French Constitution. Few human events are more dramatic than a monarch’s overthrow. Some years before the Schlegels’ Athenaeum theorized the buffo, “The History of England” linked irony to theatrical transition. Not only does Austen appeal to the historical authority of Shakespeare’s dramas, she also alludes to The Tragedy of Jane Shore (Austen 2006a, 179). Absurd as a historiographical method, the reliance on drama is nonetheless appropriate, since politics (especially royal politics) is theatrical. The theatricality is most obvious in the case of the imposters Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel (179); but if the Lancastrians and the Tudors were usurpers, then they also were impersonating the role of king: Warbeck and Simnel were Bolingbrokes who failed. By presenting English history as Shakespearean history, Austen mixes

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genres and highlights parabasis.25 The shifts between monarchs are like the exits and entrances of actors on stage, a similarity abetted by Cassandra’s illustrations, which provide an analogue to the visual experience of theater. The hilariously anachronistic illustrations reinforce the parabases: they remind us, like a chatty Sternean narrator, that the past we are reading about is an unreliable product of the present.

Closing the Ironic Opening of Pride and Prejudice One could, like Looser, doubt the relevance of the “The History of England” to Austen’s mature writing. But parabasis of parabasis happens in her most canonical works. As you may have heard, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 2006d, 3). Almost every reader would admit that some irony is at play in this sentence, to which I will henceforth refer using the acronym IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW. This sentence may seem a perfect example of stable irony. It seems stable because the narrative context reinforces the suspicion of irony. The narrator soon yields the floor to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. Once we become acquainted with the latter and regard the first sentence as an expression of her worldview, a feeling of stability arises: we think we understand: “Masquerading as a statement of a fact—if not about all unmarried men, then certainly about a community that collectively assumes it to be true—this sentence actually tells us more about Mrs. Bennet than anyone else” (Poovey 1984, 204). One of the things it tells us is that Mrs. Bennet’s desire shapes her understanding of reality. Karen Newman explains how the narrative detracts from IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW’s apparent confidence: “Neither of the young men in possession of a fortune in the novel seems in want of a wife” (1983, 696). Comparing IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW to a similar moment in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Booth asserts: “the central irony is read identically by every qualified reader. It is simply unthinkable that later on we will discover that Jane Austen and Chaucer really believe what those words, on their surface, ‘say’” (1974, 235). This chapter will upset IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW’s legibility and wrinkle its “surface.” It will become more difficult to believe in Austen’s disbelief. Before examining how IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW fits into the larger context of the novel, we should recognize the sentence’s extraordinary semantic complexity, a complexity which undermines the idea that every “qualified reader” is able to decode it.26 IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW has become perhaps the most commonly quoted literary example in academic studies of irony (and not just by Austen scholars). Rosmarin argues that the sentence “has proven mimetically admirable” because “surface meaning seems so transparently deceptive and ‘real’ meaning so perfectly envisioned that truth appears less abused than served, less obscure than ‘light, and bright, and sparkling’” (1984, 320). Yet the sentence contains many obscurities. If irony is

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saying one thing but meaning the reverse, then IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW would fit the bill—if only we could pin down what counts as its reverse. One commentator finds IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW “ironic in the Johnsonian sense of saying the contrary to what is meant.” For it is not Darcy and Bingley, single men in possession of good fortunes, who are in want of wives; what is at stake, rather, is the future of the Bennet and Lucas daughters, whose lack of any fortune puts them much in want of husbands. (Furst 1984, 49) But there is more than one “contrary” to what the sentence says. Here are some candidates: It is a falsehood universally acknowledged … It is a truth nowhere acknowledged … It is a falsehood nowhere acknowledged … … that a single woman … in possession of a bad fortune … … must not be in want of a wife. Does the sentence really mean: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”? The heteronormative pressures of the marriage plot and the economic distress of the Bennet daughters may exclude this possibility. As Müller observes, “Many critics maintain that the irony of” IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW “is established via the context, i.e. the dialogue of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet that follows on this sentence” (2018, 50). Context, however, is not so efficient. While context may enable us to exclude some outlandish interpretations, no context can exhaust the polymorphous negativity of the sentence. If, for example, we posit “a single man in possession of a bad fortune” as the contrary of “a single man in possession of a good fortune,” then IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW forecasts Wickham’s predicament—something Mrs. Bennet’s nerves have yet to detect. IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW contains other semantic complications. Fludernik discerns “the ambiguous meanings of must,” a verb which could be “deontic or epistemic” (2007, 16). But the most problematic part could be the phrase “in want of,” which does not mean “desire,” though it is often read that way (Brownstein 1988, 64). The OED glosses “in want of” as “In need of; not having, or having in insufficient measure” and lists IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW as one example.27 But since, by definition, a “single man” cannot have a wife, the first sentence could be ironic in an unusual sense: not because it says the contrary, but because it says the same—“single man” = someone “in want of a wife.” Austen ironically implies that generalizations amount, at best, to vapid tautologies. This

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irony, however, would disrupt the aesthetic perfection often attributed to the sentence. D. A. Miller enthuses that “no one who writes with such possession can be in want of anything” (2003, 34), but the avoidance of redundancy is a basic stylistic requirement the sentence, if tautological, would fail to meet. Julia Prewitt Brown long ago observed that Austen’s “irony can always be read in several ways, her voice heard in several tones” (1979, 27). One could dispute the adverb: how many different ways can one read John Thorpe’s literary opinions? But though the irony of Pride and Prejudice’s opening sentence is almost universally acknowledged, the complexity of the irony remains underappreciated—because, I would argue, it flirts with an awkwardness whose acknowledgement would disrupt aesthetic admiration. Awkwardness is a symptom of the “loss of control” de Man associates with irony, which can thwart as well as consecrate an author’s literary competence. Despite its exemplary status, IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW is, from one perspective, an example of bad writing. But even if one brackets the considerable semantic complexity of IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW and reads it as a stable irony, the narrative line will come to disrupt it, marking a parabasis of parabasis.28 Readers have noticed that the end of Pride and Prejudice vindicates at least one of the possible meanings of the opening sentence. If the purpose of IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW is to mock the belief that all rich bachelors need wives or to mock people like Mrs. Bennet who wish it were true, then Mr. Darcy’s and Mr. Bingley’s marriages retroactively undermine the mockery. Barbara M. Benedict discovers that “the social truth of the novel’s opening sentence is proved true: since these men did marry, they must have wanted to do it” (2002, 129; see also Raff 2014, 55). Paul H. Fry makes a similar observation: “the plot of the novel confirms the ‘truth’ of its first sentence, even though it is a truth that we seem not to be intended to endorse.”29 Fry claims that this situation reveals the limited usefulness of irony as a literary concept: “We need Bakhtin’s help to see that the ascription of irony is too blunt an instrument for reading Austen” (2012, 215). Were we in want of Bakhtin’s help, we could still use the instrument of irony if we honed it into parabasis of parabasis: the novel begins by making an absurd statement that disrupts the authority usually granted to third-person narrators, but the narrative line—the outcome of the marriage plot—disrupts the disruption.30 Nonetheless, the ending of the novel cannot altogether invalidate the opening irony. The sentence echoes the wishes (though not the crude style) of Mrs. Bennet, an irremediably ridiculous character: the first sentence is right to mock her, even if her wishes come true. And the ending of the novel is suspicious precisely because it is an ending. As Trollope observes, “There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel” (1963, 263). That is to say, happy endings in English novels always exert at least a residual irony.31 Although the ending of Pride and Prejudice supports the opening sentence, this support does not necessarily void the initial comic irony: the end is not epistemologically superior to the beginning (at least, not in Austen novels).

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The presumptuous adverb “universally” gives IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW much of its ironic force. Colebrook argues: “We know the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice is ironic because it is not a universal truth that a man in possession of good fortune is in need of a wife” (2002, 23). But if the narrator expresses Mrs. Bennet’s worldview, and if she is a fictional character in a fictional universe, then from which universe does the narrator speak? Perhaps the first sentence is true within the fictional universe of the novel, however untrue it may be in Austen’s (or our) universe. If I tell you, “I saw an elf today,” you might assume that I am joking; but if a character in The Lord of the Rings says the same sentence, it might be a non-ironic factual observation. If a novel can create a fictional person like Mrs. Bennet, why can’t it create fictional universal truths?32 Ironic readings of IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW generally presuppose that it is a statement about the real world, not about a fictional world alone. The presupposition is plausible, since IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW resembles a maxim or an aphoristic generalization about life. IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW differs in this respect from a typical instance of fictional narration, such as “Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley” (Austen 2006d, 6). No sophisticated reader would confuse this last quotation with a statement about the real world outside the book. IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW might seem to be a prime example of what Lubomír Doležel, a leading theorist of fictional worlds, designates as “imaging digressions (I-digressions)”: Imaging digressions are embedded in the fictional text but express opinions (beliefs) about the actual world. In this respect, they are clearly different from fictional commentaries, which pertain to the entities of the fictional world … . The semantics of these digressions is determined by the fact that they claim validity in the actual-world; consequently, they are subject to the truth-conditions of the I-text. The reader or interpreter (who usually feels that these digressions express the author’s own opinions) has the right to ask whether they are true or false in the actual world. (1998, 27) Sarah Raff explores a similar theory: Because of their broad reference to objects that appear not just in fiction but in the real world as well, generalizations conspicuously subject themselves to the true/false distinction, a distinction from which narrative and descriptive sentences, which usually signify fictional objects, are for the most part exempt. … Precepts undermine standard distinctions between belief in fiction and real-world belief and thus invite the confusion of fiction with reality that plagues the quixote. (2014, 15–16)

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Unlike “fictional commentaries,” imaging digressions apply to actual as well as to fictional worlds. Yet IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW confuses the distinction between imaging digressions and fictional commentaries. Though Mrs. Bennet could never write such a sentence, IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW is more likely echoing her wishes than communicating Austen’s “opinions (beliefs) about the actual world.” IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW could be free indirect thought. Yet the sentence turns out to be true, though only within the fictional world of Pride and Prejudice: by the end of the novel, all the rich single men in its fictional universe have married. The vindication of the sentence’s truth potentially fictionalizes that truth. We are unsure what to conclude: are Mrs. Bennet’s ideas reasonable after all, or are they only reasonable in the universe of Pride and Prejudice, a restriction that makes them all the more absurd when they are applied to our universe? IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW’s validity as a generalization depends on its irrelevance to “the actual world.” Yet, as Raff notes, fictional and non-fictional worlds can also be difficult to distinguish. The destiny of IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW reveals some of the consequences of the mixture of fictional and non-fictional worlds. IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW may be irrelevant to the actual world as a factual statement about that world; nonetheless, it could be relevant as discursive gambit. Brownstein points out that the sentence “may be operatively true when people act as if it’s true,” and the sentence could attest to “The power of discourse to determine action,” a fact of history (1988, 64). This operational truth was particularly true in Austen’s actual world: In a society ruled by the gentleman’s code requiring that if it is generally supposed that a man will marry a particular, willing woman, he is honor-bound to propose to her, power to make matches goes to anyone who can persuasively articulate universal opinion, as the narrator here proves that she can do. (Raff 2014, 42) Using the terminology of speech-act theory, we could say that IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW looks like a constative statement, but it turns out to be a performative that has the retroactive perlocutionary effect of making the sentence both constative and, in a sense, true (Austin 1975). Fake it till you make it: a maxim for our sad actual world.

Mr. Bennet: Being Ironic The changing fortunes of IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW do not exhaust Pride and Prejudice’s ironies. Toward the end of the novel, Mr. Bennet says to Elizabeth: “I admire all my three sons-in-law highly … . Wickham, perhaps, is my favourite; but I think I shall like your husband

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quite as well as Jane’s” (Austen 2006d, 420). Booth tells a story about one of his graduate students, who did not notice that Mr. Bennet’s statement was ironic. Booth uses this anecdote to introduce the key concept of his book: “Here we seem to have a specific kind of literary fixity, a ‘stable irony’” (1974, 1, 3). According to Booth, “Either Mr. Bennet and Jane Austen are playing with irony or they are not; there are no two ways about it, and if you and I elect an ironic reading, we shall prove either both right or both wrong” (16). Since the publication of A Rhetoric of Irony, Mr. Bennet’s statement has become one of the most frequently mentioned literary examples of the trope. There are good reasons for thinking that Booth was correct and his student wrong. Furst enumerates the multiple clues to the correct reconstruction of the irony: contextual clues, such as Mr Bennet’s mordant turn of phrase throughout, his special affection for Elizabeth, the daughter closest to him, his demonstrated scorn for Wickham; and also stylistic clues in the phrase itself: the exaggeration of “admire highly”, which is palpably not possible in the case of Wickham, the understatement of “I think” and “quite as well”, and finally the element of doubt introduced by “perhaps”, that invites us to reconsider too. (1984, 58) Mr. Bennet ironically praises Wickham elsewhere: He is as fine a fellow … as ever I saw. He simpers, and smirks, and makes love to us all. I am prodigiously proud of him. I defy even Sir William Lucas himself, to produce a more valuable son-in-law. (Austen 2006d, 365) Monika Fludernik draws attention to the “antonymy ‘prodigiously proud’ (note the alliteration),” which she thinks is “a term of abuse (we know that Bennet hates him like the plague)” (2007, 17). Wickham has almost disgraced and impoverished the Bennet family—an outcome avoided through the efforts of Darcy, a better candidate for the title favorite son-in-law. Yet a closer reading of Mr. Bennet’s remarks and a reflection on the narrative line will destabilize this apparently stable irony. Furst argues that it “is palpably not possible” to admire Wickham highly. But the ambiguousness of admire unsettles the stable irony that the word prompts. As a transitive verb, admire originally meant “To regard with wonder, astonishment, or surprise; to marvel at.” The OED quotes an 1814 installment of the AntiJacobin Review: “It is impossible sufficiently to admire the madness which has seized the people of the United States, in thus early embarking in schemes of conquest.”33 Though the most common meaning of admirable now is “Worthy of admiration or praise … excellent, very good, pleasing,”

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the earliest meaning, one still in use in Austen’s time, was “Exciting wonder, to be marvelled at; wonderful, remarkable, astonishing, surprising.”34 Mr. Bennet himself uses the adjective. Amused by Mr. Collins’s letter, which imparts the absurd intelligence that Darcy plans to propose marriage to Elizabeth, Mr. Bennet exclaims at her: “Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in his life! It is admirable!” (Austen 2006d, 402). Here “admirable” most likely means “astonishing,” not “meritorious,” though “It” could refer to the whole situation, which Mr. Bennet may regard as “pleasing.” Though Mr. Bennet perhaps considers Elizabeth’s husband greatly “worthy of admiration or praise,” he may, by contrast, greatly “marvel at” Wickham, the twists and turns of whose career have been at the very least “surprising.” It is possible, however, that Mr. Bennet also esteems the “excellent” cunning that enabled Wickham to get so many concessions from his foe, Darcy (admiration does not always require moral approbation).35 Another important word in Mr. Bennet’s statement is “perhaps.” The word could mark simulated hesitation, bolstering the stable irony (“Of course Wickham is not my favorite son-in-law”). But perhaps “perhaps” marks a non-ironic uncertainty. Who really is Mr. Bennet’s favorite? If he were a normal parent, this question would be easy enough to answer. But Booth, Furst, and Fludernik overlook the fact that Mr. Bennet is not just any character: he is Austen’s most salient ironist (with the possible exception of the Crawfords). Wickham could actually be Mr. Bennet’s “favourite.” In order to determine his criteria of favor, we have to determine Mr. Bennet’s identity. Is he at heart a decent father whose multiple ironic utterances are side-effects of his unhappy marriage, or is he an ironist to the core? It is difficult to say, since the novel does not focalize him. Although Elizabeth makes ironic remarks, we can tell that she is not essentially ironic, because the narrator shows, largely by means of free indirect discourse, her earnest commitments. The novel does not grant such insights into Mr. Bennet. To conclude that Wickham is not Mr. Bennet’s favorite, we must presuppose that Mr. Bennet is not essentially ironic—that he really cares about Lydia’s welfare, that he takes more satisfaction from Darcy’s virtues than from Wickham’s vices, that despite his mockery of his wife and daughters, he retains normative beliefs (scandalous sons-in-law deserve less favor than non-scandalous ones). But some of his words and deeds call Mr. Bennet’s normality into question. He asks, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” (Austen 2006d, 403). He could just be joking here, or he could be expressing his belief that mockery is the meaning of life. If we assume that Mr. Bennet’s question about life is a rhetorical question, how seriously should we take it? The rhetorical question could be a sincere (non-ironic) expression of Mr. Bennet’s ironic attitude toward life, or it could be a bitter man’s self-defensive hyperbole. If we adopt the former interpretation, Wickham should be Mr. Bennet’s favorite, since he has

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provided ampler material for “sport” than Darcy or Bingley. Wickham has also freed Mr. Bennet from his most annoying daughter, Lydia. It is not a simple task to judge how ironic Mr. Bennet’s irony is. Even in his most unguarded interval, he preserves ironic self-detachment. Returning home from his search for Lydia, “he had all the appearance of his usual philosophic composure” (Austen 2006d, 329). But later in the day, he seems to abandon his irony. He asks Elizabeth: “Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it.” Austen, however, complicates the anti-irony with irony. When Elizabeth says, “You must not be too severe upon yourself,” her father replies: You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough. (2006d, 330) He wishes to feel the pain of his error, knowing it will pass—and it does. Mr. Bennet’s irony embellished the paternal neglect that seems at this point to have ruined his children’s future. Instead of sincerely repenting his irony, he regards his own mortification with aesthetic detachment and is able, in a way de Man should have appreciated, to derive ironic satisfaction from the temporality of suffering. Incertitude about Mr. Bennet’s character makes it more difficult to interpret his statement about his sons-in-law. In other words, his uncertain ontological status destabilizes his local ironies. There is no doubt that Austen is playing with irony, but—despite Booth’s admonitions—there are “two ways about it”: 1) stable irony, which negates a literal statement; and 2) the negation of stable irony, negation of the negation. By marrying the daughter who most resembles Mrs. Bennet, Wickham will have a marriage that most resembles Mr. Bennet’s.36 In addition, Mr. Bennet may resent Darcy for taking away his favorite daughter, Elizabeth; he may also resent the gratitude he owes him for saving Lydia from iniquity. We cannot be sure whether Austen wants us to negate the negation. Austen tempts us to do so, but we cannot do so with a clean conscience. Nor does she allow us to have it both ways: “Wickham is perhaps my favorite” is the negation of “Wickham is perhaps not my favorite.” In order to discern stable irony, readers have to notice that Wickham is the potential anti-favorite, the least-liked, and the story has provided ample (though not conclusive) evidence in his disfavor, evidence no parabasis of parabasis can expunge. It was ironic that Booth’s student failed to perceive irony in Mr. Bennet’s remark: the student was attempting to persuade Booth that “the whole book is ironic” (1974, 1). Mr. Bennet’s remark indicates the impossibility of total irony.37 If the remark is ironic, he is not essentially (totally) ironic because he retains a sincere (though unstated) commitment to cultural norms. By

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contrast, if the speaker is essentially ironic, then the remark is sincere (not ironic): in that case, Wickham really is his favorite. This aporia links Austen’s work to one of the major Romantic developments in the understanding of irony. For more than a millennium, irony was understood as an isolated trope, but the German Romantics, inspired by Socrates, represented irony as a mode of being (Colebrook 2004, 5). In a passage we have already touched upon, Schlegel distinguishes rhetorical irony from the kind he admires most. He admits the existence of a rhetorical species of irony which, sparingly used, has an excellent effect, especially in polemics; but compared to the sublime urbanity of the Socratic muse, it is like the pomp of the most splendid oration set over against the noble style of an ancient tragedy. Only poetry can also reach the heights of philosophy in this way, and only poetry does not restrict itself to isolated ironical passages, as rhetoric does. (1971b, 148) The poetry he has in mind engages in “transcendental buffoonery” (1971b, 148). Colebrook ruminates on the implications: German Romantic irony explored a potential in Socratic irony that had, by and large, been neglected: irony as a style of existence rather than a rhetorical figure. Irony for the Romantics was the only true mode of life. To live as if one were a fixed self who then used language to represent a world would be to deny the flux and dynamism of life. It would also be a mode of subjectivism: positing some ground—the subject—that could act as the basis for judgements and predications. Irony transforms subjectivism: the subject is no longer a ground that precedes and underlies judgements. The subject “is” nothing other than an ongoing process of creation. (2004, 38) Though Colebrook here performs a solid reading of Schlegel, it is by no means certain that irony can be an “attitude to” or “style of existence.” Indeed, the attempt to counteract the “fixed self” by positing irony as “the only true mode of life” reintroduces a “fixed self” in the form of a sustained commitment to “flux and dynamism.” Colebrook thinks that It cannot be possible to achieve a position of irony, for subjectivity or synthesis is that which posits or gives itself position. The only way out of this predicament of subjective reification is through the performance of continual self-distancing, a “transcendental buffoonery” always aware of the gap between the subject and persona. (2002, 127)

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But the words “continual” and “always aware” announce a relapse into the reified subject position that the Romantic ironist, in Colebrook’s reading, tries to avoid. Self-consciousness is not a “way out.” Roy offers the best description of the unsustainability of Schlegel’s project: his “approach to handling the dilemma seems plagued by an infinite regress, for the subject position of the ironist can in turn be ironized only from a still-higher subjective standpoint that remains unironized” (2009, 109). Kierkegaard anticipates the problems Colebrook confronts in her attempt to make sense of Romantic irony. He devotes most of his dissertation to Socrates, yet pivots to the Romantics near the end: “heretofore we have more or less viewed irony as a momentary manifestation and thus in all these instances are still unable to speak of pure irony or of irony as a position” (1989, 253). Kierkegaard takes seriously the idea that “pure irony” is possible. The case of Mr. Bennet, by contrast, suggests that irony cannot be a “pure” or a sustained “position.” If the praise of Wickham is ironic, then the father-in-law’s position cannot be purely ironic, since he must subscribe to some normative values, must take certain moral conventions seriously. By contrast, if Mr. Bennet’s position is purely ironic, then his praise would be sincere; but such a consequence would invalidate its condition, since a purely ironic being must always praise by blame, not praise by praise.38 Both of these interpretations are unsatisfying, and the novel does not provide us with sufficient evidence to choose between them: we cannot determine whether Mr. Bennet is a realistic representation of an eccentric father or a self-contradictory personification of irony. Is Mr. Bennet a plausible portrait of a self-caricaturing man, or is he just a caricature? Colebrook discusses those who see irony as a way of life, embodied in the figure of Socrates who refused to present virtue and the good life as a fixed ideal that could be known. Irony—the continual questioning or distance from fixed norms—is the possibility of politics as praxis: as engaged activity achieved through dynamic speech and collective participation. (2004, 32–33) Irony, however, is not intelligible as “a way of life.” The constant “questioning or distance from fixed norms” is a fixed norm—an ingenious norm in Socrates’ Athens, but an all-too commonplace pretense today and one not unknown to Austen’s contemporaries.39 Mr. Bennet is clearly more than a casual ironist. Yet it might be going too far to say that his self, attitude, or way of life is ironic. Whether we interpret “Wickham is perhaps my favorite” as ironic or non-ironic, we commit ourselves to an impure concept of irony.40 Though de Man claims that irony demonstrates “the impossibility of our being historical,” the ironies produced by Mr. Bennet suggest the impossibility of our being ironical. Irony is an inhuman effect that language has on humans, who can appreciate, occasion, and utter it but cannot be it. Austen gives no hope that a subject can, through willful paradox, become a

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transcendental buffoon, though ordinary buffoonery is always an option. Unlike Schlegel, Austen does not present irony as something salvific.

Irony and the Sublime Though she probably was a pious Anglican, Austen’s irony is secular. In this regard, she differs from Schlegel, who invests irony with religious enthusiasm. In Schlegel, irony ceases to be a mundane occasion for or manifestation of wit. He defines irony as “the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (1971b, 247). Quoted out of context, this may not seem particularly religious. But reading Schlegel’s fragments in sequence, one will often find literary criticism fused with religious prescriptions. “Poetry and philosophy,” he tells us, “are, depending on one’s point of view, different spheres, different forms, or simply the component parts of religion. For only try really to combine the two and you will find yourself with nothing but religion” (245). If irony is consciousness of infinity, then it is a religious experience: “Every relation of man to the infinite is religion; that is, man in the entire fullness of his humanity” (248). The “Beautiful is what reminds us of nature and thereby stimulates a sense of the infinite fullness of life. Nature is organic, and whatever is most sublimely beautiful is therefore always vegetal, and the same is true of morality and love” (248). Mellor sums up the goals of the Romantic ironist: Having ironically acknowledged the fictiveness of his own patternings of human experience, he romantically engages in the creative process of life by eagerly constructing new forms, new myths. And these new fictions and self-concepts bear with them the seeds of their own destruction. They too die to give way to new patterns, in a never-ending process that becomes an analogue for life itself. (1980, 5)41 Yet life is not never-ending. And only a tiny portion of nature is organic. Schlegel’s infinity is a vitalist dogma. Irony allures Schlegel because it intimates an infinity that he regards as the sole validation for human life: “Only in relation to the infinite is there meaning and purpose; whatever lacks such a relation is absolutely meaningless and pointless” (1971b, 241). Though the kind of religion the young Schlegel imagines is by no means sectarian, his sweeping value judgments recall the sophistry of Christian apologetics (just substitute the word God for “the infinite” in the last quotation). Kierkegaard, despite his discomfort with Romantic irony, agrees with Schlegel that it is a matter of “infinitude” (1989, 125). For Kierkegaard, irony is the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is

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absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not. (1989, 261) But outside the realm of philosophical conjecture, is infinite absolute negation possible? Austen’s irony is virtually infinite: she sometimes creates aporia that suggest endless interpretive vicissitudes, but the suggestion is only a mirage created by the reader’s inability to resolve the aporia. Roy seeks in Hegel an alternative to the “infinite regress” triggered by the German Romantics: As soon as this absolute subject is itself subjected to irony, irony emerges in its truth as a dialectical moment that ultimately supersedes itself—that is, as Hegel puts it in his Aesthetics, the necessary moment of “infinite absolute negativity” … Ironically enough, it is Schlegel who expresses this Hegelian view of irony as a self-sublating moment years before Hegel comes on the scene. In a private notebook dated around the time of his Athenaeum contributions, Schlegel observes with startling honesty, “Perfect, absolute irony ceases to be irony and becomes serious.” (2009, 118) But there is no good reason why irony, having become serious, could not become un-serious again. Austen shows that irony cannot be perfect or absolute: its incommensurability is inoperable. In other words, irony is intrinsically parasitic and therefore incapable of the absolute: negation always requires something to negate; it cannot be autonomous or unconditioned, and any subject that identifies itself with irony will thereby become parasitic and forfeit any claim to self-identical being—even a claim to being ironic.42 Unlike Schlegelian Romantic irony, Austen’s unromantic Romantic ironies do not entice readers to embark upon an infinite process of selfcreation: they make readers conscious of their finitude, their epistemological constraints. Austen invents ironies as vertiginous as anything Schlegel could imagine, but she does not spice them up with the religious sublime, the jargon of infinity. Indeed, one of the most ironic moments in her novels targets the sublime for ridicule. The sublime is rare in Austen, but it makes at least one appearance. The desire to write Jane Austen and Literary Theory arose when, during a first reading of Mansfield Park, Volume I came to its magnificent conclusion. Bullied into participating in the theatricals, Fanny “was left to the tremors of a most palpitating heart” (Austen 2005b, 201), a heart that may become the reader’s own: They did begin—and being too much engaged in their own noise, to be struck by unusual noise in the other part of the house, had proceeded some way, when the door of the room was thrown open, and Julia

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Austen’s Unromantic Romantic Ironies appearing at it, with a face all aghast, exclaimed, “My father is come! He is in the hall at this moment.” (Austen 2005b, 202)

Austen imbues a banal homecoming with the thrill of divine judgment. Yet, in the next chapter, she ruthlessly demystifies the sublime emotions she had just stirred.43 Crucial to this demystification is Yates, who, declaiming his lines apart from the other players, is unaware of the patriarch’s return. Yates loves the theater because he loves to rant—which leads Mary Crawford to remark: “What a difference a vowel makes!—if his rents were but equal to his rants!” (Austen 2005b, 456). “Rant” is Austen’s pejorative term for the high points of the English sublime. Think of the harangues of Milton’s Satan or the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and villains. Though the narrative of Paradise Lost, notably Satan’s journey from Hell to Earth, features sublime exploits, the epic’s most sublime passages are speech acts. Such literary examples justify Burke’s conviction that words can surpass the sublimity of pictures (2015, 137–40).44 While the unexpected homecoming of Sir Thomas at the end of Volume I is the most sublime moment in Austen’s writings, the first chapter of the next volume ironizes the sublime, forcing the menacing patriarch to confront his own usurper, the would-be sublime Yates. When Sir Thomas wants to visit his own room, his namesake cannot stop him and has no time to explain that they had illicitly transformed it into a theater—and no time to explain who Yates is: To the Theatre [Tom Bertram] went, and reached it just in time to witness the first meeting of his father and his friend. Sir Thomas had been a good deal surprized to find candles burning in his room … . Some one was talking in there in a very loud accent—he did not know the voice—more than talking—almost hallooing. He stept to the door, rejoicing at that moment in having the means of immediate communication, and opening it, found himself on the stage of a theatre, and opposed to a ranting young man, who appeared likely to knock him down backwards. At the very moment of Yates perceiving Sir Thomas, and giving perhaps the very best start he had ever given in the whole course of his rehearsals, Tom Bertram entered at the other end of the room; and never had he found greater difficulty in keeping his countenance. His father’s looks of solemnity and amazement on this his first appearance on any stage, and the gradual metamorphosis of the impassioned Baron Wildenhaim into the well-bred and easy Mr. Yates, making his bow and apology to Sir Thomas Bertram, was such an exhibition, such a piece of true acting as he would not have lost upon any account. It would be the last—in all probability the last scene on that stage; but he was sure there could not be a finer. The house would close with the greatest eclat. (Austen 2005b, 213–14)

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In a masterpiece of comic irony, Austen mocks the foibles of both Yates and the suddenly powerless patriarch, who beholds his own sublimity in a diminished form. The scene even dramatizes dramatic irony: Tom, as the spectator who understands what Yates and Sir Thomas do not, figures the reader’s position of epistemological superiority. Just after she demonstrates she can do the sublime, Austen ironizes it. Yet since the sublime evokes the immeasurably large or powerful, what cannot be contained, Austen’s containment of her own sublime becomes a meta-sublime: the ease of her conversion of the sublime into comic irony manifests a genius, a literary power—the Kantian dynamic sublime—superior to its local sublime effects.45 Austen transgresses her limits. Having achieved a supposedly masculine rhetorical effect (the sublime), she writes an all-male scene, which mocks male characters.46 She exerts the power of Schlegel’s alternation between self-destruction and self-creation, which demonstrates her superiority to her male characters, but she dispenses with Schlegel’s religious posturing. As far as the plot is concerned, the scene is non-dialectical: none of the participants emerges substantially enlightened; Thomas père and fils will pursue their old follies to more destructive ends. In creating this scene, however, Austen achieves something dialectical. Comic irony subverts the sublime, but the performance of this subversion is itself sublime.

Notes 1 To defend the stability of Elizabeth’s remark is not to deny the sociological complexity of the scene. As William Empson, discussing a different text, notes, “all politeness has an element of irony” (1935, 230). To argue that many of Austen’s ironies are stable does not deny the instability of their political significance: if we agree that Mr. Collins is the frequent target of Austen’s stable irony, we may disagree about whether she is attacking him in order to criticize a patriarchal and corrupt Church or whether she is defending the ideals of the Church by ridiculing his deviancy from them. We may agree that Austen uses irony to portray Lady Susan but disagree about whether she is a villain or a feminist hero. If stable irony is possible, that does not mean that it is impossible to misunderstand it. Lilian R. Furst claims that Austen’s irony “is as strictly delimited in its extent as in its means; the ambiguity is kept firmly under control in both the stylistic and the ontological sphere” (1984, 60). Positing such a degree of control idealizes Austen’s authority. But “The subtler the irony, the greater the risks. There is no such thing as a fail-safe diagnostic of irony … . The communicator’s intentions cannot be decoded or deduced, but must be inferred by a fallible process of hypothesis formation and evaluation” (Wilson and Sperber 1996, 271). 2 Melissa Schaub faults several commentators who, under the apparent influence of de Man, have exaggerated the ambiguity of Northanger Abbey; Schaub, however, is not persuasive when she reduces the novel’s ironies to one “overt political message (tyranny is as common in England as in Gothic novels)” (2000). 3 Though they continue to use the word irony, Austen scholars since Booth have been reluctant to theorize it, perhaps because it was one of the favorite tropes of New Criticism, against which newer historicists wanted to distinguish themselves.

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4 According to Deresiewicz, the first sentence of Northanger Abbey “induces an ontological vertigo from which we never recover” (2004, 16). 5 Since irony compels readers to take an active role in interpreting, Rosmarin argues: “More directly than any other way of meaning, irony flouts the fundamental commitments of mimesis: to a reality independent of text and reader; to a medium transparent to that reality” (1984, 320). Rosmarin’s polemic against mimesis blinds her to the considerable overlap between the tropes. Newmark finds a subtler way of dividing irony from mimesis: “Irony does not imitate anything, it is not part of the metaphysical system of mimesis … . Irony is not mimetic, but it seems capable of producing mimesis as an aftereffect.” Arguably, however, any perception of mimesis is an aftereffect, and in this sense irony is no different from non-ironic signs that imitate an object. Newmark concedes that “the only access we have to understanding irony is through both mimesis and subjectivity” (2012, 54). One of the major linguistic theories of irony, the “echoic mention” theory developed by Wilson and Sperber, identifies irony with a form of mimesis (1996, 260–79). Yet Fludernik shows that not all literary examples of irony are echoic (2007, 16). 6 Franklin rejects the idea that Romantic irony takes place in Sense and Sensibility, but she detects something closer to Romantic irony in Persuasion (2007, 176, 185). 7 It is important to keep in mind that de Man’s “The Concept of Irony” is not an essay but a posthumously edited transcription of an incomplete tape recording of a lecture (1996a, 163). The text is brilliant but lacks de Man’s famous rigor. Some of the glib or underdeveloped parts of de Man’s argument likely resulted from the constraints of oral performance. 8 Eric Miller argues that de Man exaggerates the negativity of Schlegel’s irony. According to Miller, the self-destructive component of Romantic irony is merely a pretense, “an apparent self-negation behind which hides the infinite potential of the paradox. Schlegel’s irony is not the destruction of illusion, but rather the illusion of destruction” (1997, 379). But Miller exaggerates the coherence of Schlegel’s thought. Schlegel’s tone seesaws between witty flippancy and religious pathos. The Selbstvernichtung Schlegel advocates might sometimes be more than a ruse. In Miller’s interpretation, by contrast, the “artist” obtains “sovereign power” over the “artwork” by means of the mere appearance of Selbstvernichtung (379). This suggests that being an ironist is a subject position an individual can securely occupy—a mask one can don and doff at will. But Schlegel was aware that irony undermines the would-be ironist. Ayon Roy describes Schlegel’s theoretical predicament: “any description of the ironist seems haunted by the self-contradiction that such an account requires smuggling in a stable subject position that goes unironized” (2009, 109). 9 Greenham discusses the Box Hill episode as a redemptive comedic moment in Emma (2005, 170). 10 J. G. Fichte argues: “There can be no antithesis without a synthesis; for antithesis consists merely in seeking out the point of opposition between things that are alike; but these things would not be alike if they had not first been equated in an act of synthesis. … And conversely, too, there can be no synthesis without an antithesis. Things in opposition are to be united: but they would not be opposed if they had not been so by an act of the self, which is ignored in the synthesis, so that reflection may bring to consciousness only the ground of connection between them” (1982, 112). 11 De Man’s sudden preference for synthetic judgment (or his weakness for simile) coheres with Fichte’s larger philosophical project: “There have to be syntheses, so from now on our whole procedure will be synthetic … every proposition will contain a synthesis.” Since, however, “no synthesis is possible without a preceding antithesis,” the theoretical section of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge will

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consist of ferreting out oppositions (latent analytic judgements) and transforming them into synthetic judgments “until we arrive at opposites which can no longer be altogether combined” (1982, 113). Fichte’s synthetic preference is a self-conscious philosophical method; de Man’s synthetic preference in “The Concept of Irony” seems to be contingent on his desire to read Fichte’s system as a system of tropes. Austen, who is not pursuing a science of knowledge, need not (and does not) indulge a prejudice for synthetic or analytic judgments; in her unromantic Romantic ironies, she pits these judgments against each other. Fichte argues that the intuition of one’s self is irreducible to reason (1982, 38). Roy accuses de Man of ignoring Fichte’s and Schlegel’s emphasis on intuition, Anschauung (2009, 112–13). But since Schlegel’s notion of Anschauung is a deadend (according to Roy himself), ignoring Anschauung does not compromise de Man’s theory of irony. The real problem with de Man’s reading of Schlegel in “The Concept of Irony” is that it depends on a one-sided interpretation of Fichte’s system of judgment. Fichte says, “there are no things whatever that are flatly opposed and alike in no respect at all, save the finite and the infinite” (1982, 192). If one concurs with Fichte that every synthetic judgment entails an analytic judgment, then one may doubt whether stable irony is possible. I am not prepared to judge whether Fichte is correct on this point, though I think explaining why de Man is wrong about Fichte illuminates important features of irony. Perhaps stable irony is possible in literary texts because literary characters, constructed out of finite strings of words, need not function like other entities. If all we knew about plants and animals were the words plant and animal, then we would have no reason to find any likeness between these things; we could accept the statement “A plant is not an animal” at face value. Empirical knowledge, however, of plants and animals reveals many points of similarity: they are both living organisms. If Lady Susan were a real person, it might be more difficult to conclude whether she were a hypocrite or not (mitigating factors would probably crop up). But we do not experience Lady Susan the way the novel’s besotted men do: rather, we experience her as a literary character, and the conventions organizing the text ease the way for the synthetic judgment that “Lady Susan is a hypocrite,” thereby repressing the analytic alternative and permitting relatively stable irony—though, ironically, in this case the predicate of the synthetic judgment, “hypocrite,” designates unlikeness between appearance and being. This is one way that de Man had earlier glossed Schlegel: “Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it” (1983, 222). Persuasion exhibits Austen’s unfortunate tendency to mock large people (2006c, 73–74). The truncation of the proposal scene resembles what Booth designates as “Unstable-Overt-Local” irony (1974, 246). For a more erudite, though not more convincing, version of Trilling’s argument, see Neill 1998. Elsewhere, Neill performs a less tendentious reading of the novel’s irony (1999, 90). Peter Firchow links Schlegel’s parabasis to Sterne (1971, 29). Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy discuss how the German Romantics “speculated … on the figure and the operation of the literary abyss, which they encountered, among other places, in the eighteenth-century English novel” (1988, 3). According to Christopher Kent, Austen “brashly inverts the Whig view of history, the convention within which most history is presented. … In this triumphal progress the Stuarts were not just out of step, but headed in the opposite direction” (1989, 64). Freya Johnston explains how Austen’s anachronisms parody Whig historiography (2010, 115).

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21 Johnston describes Austen’s method: “Abruptly coercing her reader into agreement or submission, she plays the authorial equivalent of Charles I, insisting on the divine right of historians to rule their audiences – to supply or deny information as she sees fit; to pre-empt and pre-judge their responses” (2010, 104). It is appropriate that Austen’s irony would gain distinction in a text concerned with power and violence, since “irony and wit are the names we must give to resentment and sarcasm to find them charming—that is, to misrecognize the violence of a social order that, barring women from the exercise of power, grants them the authority of a ‘style’ that can only keep biting the hand that doesn’t feed it” (Litvak 1997, 54). 22 History has not been kind to Goldsmith’s History. According to Knox-Shaw, its “selective plagiarism of Hume’s work is so slanted as to exemplify parochial history at its worst” (2004, 122). 23 Edelman notes the complex contradictions in this passage; he characterizes de Man’s argument as “playful” (2016), but it might be better characterized as (willfully?) confused. Newmark seems to endorse de Man’s argument (2012, 11). 24 As Johnston puts it, “The History of England” “is determined to explode” the “division between the way that history is told and its raw materials” (2010, 111). 25 Johnston addresses Shakespeare’s influence on “The History of England” (2010, 107). 26 Claudia Brodsky Lacour performs a subtly dialectical reading that accounts better than most commentaries for the complexity of IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW (1992, 607–10). 27 OED Online, s.v. “want, adj. and n.2”, accessed April 3, 2019, www.oed.com/ view/Entry/225526?rskey=vF6WkE&result=2&isAdvanced=false. 28 One could protest that waiting for the narrative line to interrupt a statement is unsuitable to irony, a rapid trope. Booth claims: “Perhaps no other form of human communication does so much with such speed and economy”; he notes cases in which the “swift communion of meanings” makes “the reader himself feel clever for seeing so much in so little” (1974, 13, 205–6). But irony does not always flatter readers; indeed, Austen’s unromantic Romantic ironies are more likely to rebuke readers for their precipitancy. Some ironies are only recognizable belatedly, on a more-than-first reading. Consider, for example, Frank Churchill’s claim: “One cannot love a reserved person” (Austen 2005a, 219). 29 Likewise, George Justice claims that when we reread Pride and Prejudice, “we are left with a statement that amuses us because it is both true and not true” (2012, viii). 30 Though Booth uses IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW as an example of stable irony, his excellent reading of the opening passage of Tom Jones explains its retroactive instability (1974, 182). Had Booth read Austen the way he reads Fielding, he might have arrived at conclusions similar to those of the present chapter. 31 Newman warns us to avoid giving too much weight to endings: “By reading an Austen novel as a unity with romantic marriage as its final statement, we impose a resolution on her work that makes it conform to the very expectations for women and novels that Austen’s irony constantly undermines” (1983, 694). 32 Austen did not invent IIATUATASMIPOAGFMBIWOAW’s truth: “Richardson successfully introduced into fiction the highly fictional proposition that a prosperous man desired nothing so much as the woman who embodied domestic virtue … . On this basis, it is fair to say that a novel like Pride and Prejudice began where Pamela ended” (Armstrong 1998, 122). 33 OED Online, s.v. “admire, v.,” accessed April 5, 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/ 2571?rskey=7S1AdB&result=2&isAdvanced=false. 34 OED Online, s.v. “admirable, adj., n., and adv.,” accessed April 5, 2019, www. oed.com/view/Entry/2555?redirectedFrom=admirable.

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35 Dutoit emphasizes Wickham’s triumph: “Wickham entirely programs, ventriloquizes, Darcy’s actions in all of Volume III, that include guaranteeing a lifetime revenue for Wickham” (2007, 85). 36 Mudrick regards Mr. Bennet as a character who “succumbed” to sexual attraction: “It is, in fact, easy to imagine that when Mr. Bennet calls Wickham his favorite sonin-law … he is not merely indulging in habitual paradox, but ironically recognizing the painful contrast between Wickham’s awareness, however directed, and his own self-delusion, in the same emotional circumstance” (1968, 113). 37 In response to Richard Rorty’s celebration of irony, Colebrook argues: “A speech act of irony could not occur in a fully ironic context, could not occur if all meaning were, as Rorty suggests, ironic” (2002, 30). 38 There is at least one point where Kierkegaard seems to recognize the impossibility of irony as a position (1989, 281). Newmark ponders the misalignment of the linguistic and subjective aspects of irony (2012, 52). 39 In a discussion of Montaigne, Byron remarks: “So little do we know what we’re about in / This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting” (2000, 682). 40 Newmark defines irony as “the non-pure identity of the subject and its language, thought, and action. And this nonidentity will necessarily affect every attempt to regain control over it by narrating, and thus understanding, it retrospectively” (2012, 219). 41 De Man’s metaphor of the “asymptote,” taken from Fichte, is an attempt to secularize Schlegel’s infinite (1996a, 175; Fichte 1982, 113–14, 115). Eric Miller faults de Man for reducing Schlegel’s irony to a negative process: “Where de Man sees only ‘unrelieved vertige’ … Schlegel sees joyous, vital richness. Where de Manians see nothing but loss of autonomy (the writer’s, the reader’s), Schlegel sees potentially infinite empowerment” (1997, 377). Though de Man might have misunderstood Schlegel’s theory of irony, his theory is superior to Schlegel’s to the extent that de Man does not gloss over the reality of finitude and death. Colebrook argues that “Romantic irony works by contrasting all the speech we may utter about the absolute and infinite with the meaning or feeling of the absolute” (2002, 135). But what if this “feeling” is an anthropocentric delusion? 42 Colebrook calls irony “parasitic” because it “shows that there is no position outside our ways of speaking at the same time that our ways of speaking seem to demand just such a position” (2002, 76). 43 Benedict discusses how “circulating fiction—lent by the volume” encouraged novelists to end volumes “with a dramatic ‘hook’”; she mentions Sir Thomas’s return as “Perhaps Austen’s finest example” (2002, 135). Awareness of this convention mildly ironizes the sublime ending of Volume I. 44 Burke suggests that “the sublime is produced by the labour of language rather than of the psyche or the body” (Furniss 1993, 102). Hegel also connects the sublime to the word; see de Man 1996b. 45 Part of the scene’s genius is the supple mobility of its narration. Galperin remarks on Sir Thomas’s discovery of Yates: “If there is a locus classicus of free indirect discourse, it is here, in this passage, which morphs effortlessly, like Yates, from Sir Thomas’s point of view to the narrator’s and finally to Tom’s” (2017, 88). 46 One of the most persistent myths of Austen criticism is that she “never describes a scene when men alone are present” (Tanner 1986, 59; Normandin 2020). It is fitting that one of this woman writer’s few all-male scenes is also a deflation of the sublime, since the sublime is an aesthetic mode often characterized as male— most famously by Burke, who, opposing the sublime to the beautiful, strongly associates the latter with women (2015, 93–94). Simpson reads the sublime as a way for male writers to protect themselves from feminization (1993, 127). Austen’s Sanditon repeatedly mocks sublime aesthetics and links it to foolish male characters (2008, 308–9, 321, 322, 326–28).

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Index

acting see theater agency xxiv, 6, 98 allegory xiv, xxxn29, 1, 11, 13–14, 84, 94, 107, 112–13n29, 140; and Paul de Man 41–43, 45n21, 50–72, 81, 128, 131; of media 25–26, 29–31, 41–43; see also irony; metaphor; metonymy; personification; symbol; synecdoche anagrams see letters Anglicanism xxiv, 57, 64, 74n28, 152 animals 53, 108–10, 127 anthropocentrism 19n13, 19n15, 59, 109–10, 159n41 anti-theoretical discourses xi, xvi–xvii, xxixn1, xxixn14 aporia 14, 45n25, 84, 128, 150, 153; see also irony; undecidability arche-writing 26, 35, 39–43, 46n27; see also differance Austen, Cassandra 137, 139–40, 142 Austen, Jane: Emma xiv, xx, xxii–xxvi, xxx–xxxin30, 17–18n5, 19n20, 27–28, 33, 81–118, 126, 131–36; “Evelyn” 1–23; family history 15, 139–40; “The History of England” xxxin34, 1, 136–42; juvenilia xiv, xxv–xxvi, xxxin34, 1–2, 10, 137; Lady Susan xxxn29, 45n15, 119, 130, 155n1, 157n14; Love and Friendship xxi–xxii, 1, 12, 113n37; Mansfield Park xi, xii, xiv, xviii, xx, xxvi–xxix, 3, 17–18n5, 18n6, 50–82, 90–91, 99, 111n2, 111n12, 136, 153–55; Northanger Abbey x, xv, xvii, xx, xxixn11, 99, 121–23, 155n2; Persuasion xi–xii, xxi, xxiv, 18n11, 99, 156n6, 157n16; Pride and Prejudice xiv, 24–49, 61, 90–91, 93, 99, 119–21, 142–52; Sanditon xxi, xxxn25, 159n46 Austin, J. L. 146

Bakhtin, Mikhail 144 balls see dancing Barthes, Roland xix, 20n31 Baudelaire, Charles 1, 65 Bennet, Elizabeth xxxn28, 24–25, 87, 99, 120–21; and Mr. Bennet 146–49; and phonocentrism 29–43 Mr. Bennet 24, 145, 146–51 Mrs. Bennet 142–46, 149 Bertram, Sir Thomas xi, xxviii, 3, 18–19n12, 54, 56–57, 59–60, 66, 71–72, 73n10, 111n2; homecoming 57, 154–55 the Bible 40, 52–53, 57, 61–62 Booth, Wayne 119–20, 122–23, 126, 134, 142, 147, 148, 149, 157n17, 158n28, 158n30 Bourdieu, Pierre 20n36 Burke, Edmund: aesthetics 154; politics xvi, 15, 54–57, 70, 75n43, 141 Burney, Frances 17n3, 44n11, 91, 97, 121 capitalism 2, 15–17, 20n29 character xix, xxi, xxixn5, 4, 5, 26, 31, 33, 43, 44n11, 46n27, 60, 64, 84, 90, 92, 93, 103, 104, 106, 126, 135, 145, 149, 157n14; and change 37–39; and heroine 95–96, 122–23; and randomness 11–13; and theatricality 67–71 charades 91–92 Charles I of England see the Stuarts Churchill, Frank 19n20, 83, 88–90, 100–1, 103–4, 106, 110, 111n5, 111n9, 134, 158n28; and his “dream” xxii-xxiii Civil War, English xxxn14, 138 class 18n5, 44n12, 54–55, 60, 88, 105, 113n36, 131–32, 137; see also money; royalty; snobbery

Index clergy see Anglicanism cliché 94, 112n15, 122 clothing 85, 89, 104–5 Colebrook, Claire 119–20, 122–23, 138, 145, 150–51, 159n37, 159n41, 159n42 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor xvi, xvii, 51–58, 62–64, 70, 73n10, 74n33 Mr. Collins 24, 27, 33, 75n38, 119–20, 148, 155n1 colonialism xviii, 20n29, 82 comic irony see irony, stable conversation see speech country house 4, 8–9, 13, 37, 54–57, 59, 61–62, 83, 85 Cowper, William xxii–xxiv, xxvi, 20n35 Crawford, Henry xx, xxviii, 3, 60–64, 68–70, 74n35, 75n46 Crawford, Mary xxixn2, 57–60, 62–69, 74n21, 74n25, 99, 100, 154; and sodomy xxvi–xxviii dancing 30, 35, 120–21, 132–33 Darcy, Fitzwilliam xxxn28, 61, 87, 93, 99, 135, 143–44; and Mr. Bennet 147–49; and rudeness 120–21; and writing 24–25, 30–40, 43 death xxviii, 7–8, 14, 15, 18n11, 29, 31, 64, 73n8, 75n41, 88, 141, 152, 159n41; and anthropocentrism 109–10 de Bourgh, Lady Catherine 29, 33, 39–41 deconstruction xiv–xviii, xx–xxi, xxviii–xxix, xxixn6, 45n21, 85, 120, 131; see also Colebrook, Claire; de Man, Paul; Derrida, Jacques; Johnson, Barbara; Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe dedications 10, 94, 95, 97–98, 137 de Man, Paul xii, xvii, xix, 46n34, 144, 149; “The Concept of Irony” 121, 124–31, 137, 140; “The Rhetoric of Blindness” 29, 43; “The Rhetoric of Temporality” 41, 50–52, 59, 61–62, 65–67, 81, 140, 151 Derrida, Jacques xii, xvi–xvii, xix, xxxn17, xxxin33, 75n37, 120; Given Time, 1–5, 8–10, 12, 14–17; Of Grammatology, 25–26, 29, 35, 37, 39, 40–41, 53–54; The Truth in Painting 52, 82, 84–86, 89–92, 95–96, 100, 104, 107; see also deconstruction differance 3; see also arche-writing; iterability Dolar, Mladen 44n10

165

Doležel, Lubomír 145 drama see theater dreams xxii–xxiv ecophobia 8–9, 14, 52 écriture see writing Edgeworth, Maria 91, 112n23 Elizabeth I of England 140 empiricism xxiii, 26, 32, 42, 56, 65, 72n1, 157n14 Empson, William 123, 155n1 enclosures 18n7, 84, 96, 111n4, 111n8 England xi, xviii, xxiii, xxvii, xxxin34, 11, 44n12, 46n35, 88, 91, 98; and Edmund Burke 55–57, 154; and “The History of England” 137–42 Englishness see England the Enlightenment 2, 17, 59, 72n3 epistolary fiction 28–29, 42; see also letters estates see country house the Eucharist 53, 55, 57 The Faerie Queene see Spenser, Edmund Fairfax, Jane xxii, 33–34, 84, 100–1, 110 femininity see gender feminism xxixn6, 1, 113n36, 155n1; see also gender Fichte, J. G. 124, 127–30, 159n41 Fielding, Henry xxi, xxviii, 46n33, 71, 101, 158n30 Flaubert, Gustave 108 Fludernik, Monika 143, 147–48, 156n5 France 17, 55–56, 70–72, 91, 73n9, 141; and Francophobia xiv–xviii free indirect discourse xv, xxi–xxii, xxiv, 19n21, 34, 46n27, 66, 101–2, 131, 146, 148, 159n45 the French Revolution see France Freud, Sigmund xxiv, 140 Garrick, David 100 Gay, John 100 gender xiii, xxi, 44n6, 53, 68, 98, 100, 126, 134–36, 155; see also feminism genre x, xii, xxi, xxii, xxvii, xxxin33, 27, 28, 91, 97, 141–42 the gentry xxvii, 15 gifts x, xii, 27, 31, 60, 63; and “Evelyn” 1–21 Gilpin, William 4–5, 12 Godwin, William 27 Goldsmith, Oliver 110, 137–41

166

Index

Gothic fiction 14, 91, 155n2 graphocentrism 25, 28–29, 34, 45n16; see also phonocentrism; writing Hegel, G. W. F. xix, 159n44; and allegory 53, 55, 72n5; and irony 122, 124, 127, 129, 130, 138, 153 historicism xiii, xvii–xx, xxiv, xxviii, xxxn15, 134, 155n3; see also historiography historiography 1, 136–42; see also historicism humor see irony, stable illustration see painting Inchbald, Elizabeth see Lovers’ Vows indeterminacy see undecidability the inhuman xxi, xxiv, 151 Ireland 138 iterability 36–37, 39, 41; see also arche-writing; differance irony xi, 14, 17, 19n21, 29, 33–35, 40, 45n16, 50, 57, 64–67, 75n47, 81, 96, 110; Romantic irony 122–55; stable irony 119–22, 124–26, 131–33, 135–36, 142, 144, 147–48, 155; see also allegory Jacobinism xi, xvi, 54, 56, 70, 98 James, Henry xxiv James I of England see the Stuarts jewelry 18n6, 63 Johnson, Barbara xix, xxxn19, 52, 86 Johnson, Claudia L. x–xi, xiii, 71 Johnson, Samuel xvii, xxi, 19n14, 28, 46n31, 91 Joyce, James xxiv Kant, Immanuel 44n3, 82, 84–85, 89, 91, 101, 104, 107, 155 Kierkegaard, Søren 122, 124, 129, 151–53 kingship see royalty Knightley, George 27–28, 33, 83, 87–90, 95, 98, 112n21, 131, 134–35; and the signifier xxii–xxvi Kotzebue, August von see Lovers’ Vows Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 67, 82, 157n19 ladyhood see gender letters: alphabetical marks xxiii–xxiv, xxvi, 29, 31, 36, 43, 96, 98, 113n29;

correspondence xxviii, 7, 11, 13, 14, 18n6, 20n32, 24–25, 27, 29, 31–40, 83, 93, 100–1, 111n13, 112n20, 119, 130, 148; see also writing Lévi-Strauss, Claude 55 logocentrism see phonocentrism love xxii, xxxn28, 6, 19n20, 35, 38, 87, 90, 93, 99, 144, 152, 158n28; and symbol 55–56, 59–60, 62–64, 66, 68–70 Lovers’ Vows 67–71 madness xvi, 9, 12, 98 Marxism 20n37, 90 Mary Queen of Scots see the Stuarts masculinity see gender Mauss, Marcel 1, 16–17, 18n10, 19n18 metafiction 2, 94, 102, 104, 111n12, 112n28, 137 metaphor xxiii–xxiv, xxvii, 26, 82, 88, 92, 104, 106, 121–22, 127–28, 131–32; as allegory or symbol 51–57, 62, 70–71; see also allegory; metonymy; personification; symbol; synecdoche metonymy 43, 55, 87, 98, 109; see also allegory; metaphor; symbol; synecdoche Miller, D. A. xviii–xix, xxvii, xxxn15, 33, 42, 60, 67, 101–2, 107, 144; and style xx–xxii, xxiv–xxv Milton, John 113n32, 154 mimesis see realism money 9–10, 17, 18n9, 20n32, 31, 45n21, 131–32; see also class Morland, Catherine xx, 121–23 narratology xiv; see also Bakhtin, Mikhail; Booth, Wayne; Doležel, Lubomír; Fludernik, Monika; free indirect discourse; narrators narrators xvii, xxi, xxixn8, 11, 14, 19n21, 46n27, 61, 62, 95–96, 98, 102, 109; and irony 64–67, 121, 126, 131–36, 138, 142, 144–46, 148 nature 6–10, 13–14, 51, 57–59, 62, 113n36, 152 necklace see jewelry new historicism see historicism orality see speech painting 6–7, 10, 20n28, 58; and Cassandra Austen’s illustrations 139–40; and parergon 85–86, 91, 95,

Index 104, 106–7, 108; and the portrait of Darcy 37–39; see also the picturesque parabasis see irony, Romantic Paradise Lost see Milton, John parergon 18n6; and allusions 98–100; and chapter breaks 101–4; and clothing 104–6; and frames 106–11; and front matter 95–98; and lack 89–92; and letters 100–1; and the outside 87–89; and philosophy 84–86; and textual borders 82–84; and verse 92–94 personification 37, 60, 75n43, 88, 93, 151; see also allegory phonocentrism 25–32, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 53–54 the picturesque 4–5, 9, 12–14, 60 Plato see Socrates play see puns; signifier; theater plot xx, xxi, xxvi, 7, 11, 19n20, 43, 61, 90, 99, 119, 135, 143, 144, 155; and the picturesque 12–14 politeness 5, 7, 28, 120–21 portraits see painting poststructuralism xiv–xv; see also deconstruction Price, Fanny xiv, xxvii–xxviii, xxixn2, 3, 18n6, 27, 136; and acting 71–72, 153; and metaphorical language 57–66, 68–69; at Portsmouth 81 the Prince Regent, George Augustus Frederick 97–98; see also the Regency puns xiv, xxii–xxviii, 7, 10, 13, 33, 42–43, 65–66, 95, 133; see also style Radcliffe, Ann 91–92 realism xiii–xv, xxv, 12–13, 30, 36, 38, 41, 43, 50, 61–63, 67–68, 72n1, 75n39, 81; and irony 123, 151, 156n5; and parergon 90–92, 94, 104, 111 Reflections on the Revolution in France see Burke, Edmund the Regency xi, 51, 57, 64; see also the Prince Regent, George Augustus Frederick rereading 13–14, 19n20, 35, 83–84, 103, 158n28, 158n29 resistance to theory see anti-theoretical discourses Richardson, Samuel xx, 28, 32, 42, 112n27, 158n32 Roman de la Rose 61–62 Romanticism xvii, 50–54, 57, 70, 87, 122–26, 136–38, 150–53; see also

167

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Schlegel, Friedrich; Wordsworth, William Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 16, 19n16, 29, 61–62 royalty 56, 97–98, 138–41 Said, Edward xviii, 59, 81 Schlegel, Friedrich 122–25, 127–31, 136–37, 141, 150–53, 155 Scott, Walter 29 Sedgwick, Eve xviii, 102 sex xxvii–xxviii, xxxn21, 44n11, 129, 133, 159n36; and allusions 98–100; and metaphorical language 62–63, 68, 70 Shakespeare, William xix, xxiv, 27, 28, 75n46, 137, 141, 154 Sheridan, Thomas 26–27 signifier xx–xxix, 26, 30, 52; see also puns slavery xviii, 19n16, 81, 111n2 Smith, Adam 16 snobbery 8, 34, 99, 131–32 Socrates 34, 37, 130, 150–51 sodomy xxvii–xxviii space x, xviii, xxiv, 10, 13, 37, 57, 59, 113n29; and parergon 81–82, 84, 88, 101–4 spatiality see space speech xxviii, 9, 61, 69, 75n38, 87, 95, 111n5, 113n29, 146, 151, 154, 156n7; of a proper lady 134–36; versus writing 24–32, 34–41, 43, 53–54 Spenser, Edmund 52–54, 57 Stein, Gertrude xx Stendhal 50, 67 Sterne, Lawrence xxviii, 46n33, 104, 125, 137, 142 the Stuarts xxxin34, 137–40 style xv, 28, 31, 91, 95, 105, 139, 140, 144, 150, 158n21; and free indirect discourse 101–2; and wordplay xx–xxii, xxiv–xxv; see also free indirect discourse; puns the subject xxixn4, 36, 65–66, 75n37, 109; and gifts 2–6, 8–9; and irony 138, 150–53, 156n5, 156n8; see also character subjectivity see the subject the sublime 90, 150, 152–55 symbol 50–59, 62–65, 67–72, 81; see also allegory; metaphor; metonymy; synecdoche synecdoche xvi, 6, 55–58, 127–28; see also allegory; metaphor; metonymy; symbol

168

Index

temporality see time theater 27, 28, 67–72, 141–42, 153–55 time x, xviii, xxv, 5, 10–11, 13–14, 17, 31, 38–39, 81, 96, 103, 111n11, 129–30, 134, 140, 149, 154; and allegory 41–43, 51, 58–62, 66–67, 70 titles 82, 85, 94–98, 102, 135 trace see arche-writing; differance; iterability Tristram Shandy see Sterne, Lawrence typography 45n16, 96, 102; see also letters the unconscious xxiv, 42 undecidability xv, xxiv, 9, 50, 67, 102, 130, 135; see also aporia; irony

Whigs 1, 138–41 Wickham, George 93, 135, 143; and Mr. Bennet 146–51; and speech 25, 30–39, 41–43 Woodhouse, Emma xxii–xxvi, 19n20; and irony 126, 131–32, 134–36; and parergon 83–85, 87–103, 105–111 Mr. Woodhouse xxiii–xxiv, xxvi, 83, 87–88, 92, 99–101, 112n18, 126, 135 wordplay see puns; signifier Wordsworth, William xvii, 59 writing 10, 14, 19n17, 137, 139–40, 144; and parergon 82, 100–4, 107; versus speech 24–43, 53–54; see also arche-writing; letters