Austen's later subjects.(Jane Austen)(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 22-SEP-04

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In her 1925 essay on Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf spends some time discussing Austen's early work The Watsons and suggests that it, though "in the main [an] inferior story," contains "all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness":



The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself. (1)

While the current climate of Austen criticism--with its emphasis on politics, historicism, ideology--would seem to worry about stripping the narrative down to this last level of "the more abstract art" in order simply "to enjoy it ... for itself," this essay seeks first to do precisely that with two of Austen's later novels, but also to suggest, however briefly, that the fruits of an investigation at the level of the "abstract art"--that is, the discovery of a self-reflexivity in Austen's representations of the subjects--can, in fact, further our understanding of the representational depth of recent political reinterpretation.

Of the three novels that Austen composed in the second decade of the nineteenth century, Mansfield Park and Persuasion posed particular demands for her narrative technique that were quite new. The heroines are neither impertinent nor remarkably self-deluded, and so Austen rejects in them, as A. Walton Litz has said of Fanny Price, "the principle of growth and change which animates most English fiction." And he writes of Persuasion. "The drama of self-deception and self-recognition which holds our interest in the earlier novels is almost totally absent ... and without it the field for irony is greatly reduced." (2) While Emma, the novel written in the years between these two, is of course the "drama of self-deception and self-recognition" par excellence, in Mansfield Park and Persuasion, that "surface animation"--to borrow Woolf's words--would seem already dismissed. Austen's putting aside of "the principle of growth and change," I suggest, facilitates her focusing, through these heroines, on the abstract stuff of her art, the very medium of narrative in its spatial and temporal capacities to represent mental life.

Mansfield Park's problems in style and structure have long been observed, often amounting to a critique of the perceived disconnect between the plot's triumph of conventional morality over art and the style in which that triumph is rendered. (3) In this discussion, however, attention to issues of subjectivity comes to rest upon a particular moment in Mansfield Park that oddly narrates the novel's own representational limits, specific to spatiality. Austen foregrounds a spatially conceived subjectivity in Mansfield Park and then moves to a temporal subjectivity in Persuasion--her ultimate, if not last, expression and exploration of narrative temporality. (4) The "historical sequence" of the two novels' composition, then, bears some significance, insofar as the discovery of a limit to the spatial representation of the earlier novel, Mansfield Park, points to a particular beyond, which is made the center of Persuasion, given full play in the temporal mode foregrounded in Anne Elliot's subjectivity. (5) This aesthetic movement from spatial subjectivity in Mansfield Park to temporal subjectivity in Persuasion will be plotted--that is to say, illuminated--through a Freudian model, while Jacques Lacan's reading of Sigmund Freud will provide a theoretical insight to help account for the radical epistemological uncertainties informing Persuasion. Each novel is aesthetically self-reflexive in that the heroine's subjectivity appears as an expression of the novel's favored representational mode.

That the favored mode in Mansfield Park is spatial is perhaps now obvious, given Edward W. Said's discussion of "Jane Austen and Empire" in Culture and Imperialism. (6) Said finds Fanny's spatial movement between Portsmouth and Mansfield Park politically charged, for instance, in its correspondence with Sir Thomas's movement between Mansfield Park and the plantations in Antigua. He claims, moreover, that "We must not admit any notion ... that proposes to show that [William] Wordsworth, Austen, or [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge, because they wrote before 1857, actually caused the establishment of formal British governmental rule over India after 1857. We should try to discern instead a counterpoint between overt patterns in British writing about Britain and representations of the world beyond the British Isles. The inherent mode for this counterpoint is not temporal but spatial." (7) In Mansfield Park, two distinct spatial modes work to create meaning: first, there are the movements of characters across space that most concern Said; and second, there is the use of architectural spaces.

Architectural spaces particularly deliver us into issues of subjectivity not discussed by Said. Descriptions of rooms, for instance, point to the question of Fanny's subject position. When Fanny first arrives at Mansfield, after some debate Mrs. Norris advises Lady Bertram to "put the child in the little white attic ... Indeed, I do not see that you could possibly place her any where else.'" (8) Her room in the house is not so much chosen for her clearly belonging there as for her clearly not belonging anywhere else. Fanny is neither immediate family nor servant, precisely. And the question of her room is also that of her subject position--a question literalized in the desire of various characters to locate her spatially: "Edmund, looking around, said, 'But where is Fanny?'" (3:71); "Sir Thomas was at that...

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