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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Iowa
"An Englishman's home is his castle." By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century this castle-home becomes the axiological sign standing for an entire system of social and personal values, which, when mapped out, look conspicuously like the blueprint of a middle-class house and simultaneously like a feudal system of fortifications. The vulnerable core and inner sanctum of that hard and inviolable edifice is the sister's chamber. The family romances of the period depict the sister figure as the most pure, selfless, innocent and vulnerable--and therefore, most valuable--member of the English family. It is she who is the true angel in the house, as only she remains sexually untouched and neutral, and therefore only her dedicated service to the family (and particularly to her siblings) endures uncompromised. Sororal love is self-evident and requires no explanation; it rationalizes all other acts and emotions, and its rejection demands recrimination and retribution. In other words, its abuse provides the motive for plots. The family is organized around the sister's innocence as a defensive system and its protection justifies the family, just as much as the rest of society--including its bellicose commercial, imperial and colonial practices--is justified by virtue of its function as protector of the family.
Yet, a close scrutiny of the representation of siblings in nineteenth-century British literature discloses a dialectic of sororal desire which--like all dialectics--involves as much destructive power as it does creative force, as the pressure placed upon the sister figure in the form of moral demands, surveillance, constriction, mediation and channeling of desire reveals that the inner sanctum of the castle, the sister's chamber, is also its dungeon. It thus becomes a site of rebellion, subversion and sororal rage. This action manifests itself in a system of metonymical links, displacement of emotions and identities, and dissolutions of familial and social boundaries which record on the part of author and audience alike a distinct fascination with and dread of the destructive possibilities of unleashed sororal desire. If Florence Dombey's sweetness, innocence and selfless devotion maps out all the dimensions of English familial ideology, Edith Skewton, Florence's figurative sister (as she is clearly so designated by Dickens) is an angel of destruction, threatening all familial and social values. If George Eliot never questions the inexplicable intensity of Maggie Tulliver's sororal love, its internal logic must necessarily lead to an incestuous necrophilia. If passion in Wilkie Collins's No Name is deepest, most dedicated and most altruistic in the sororal love between Madeleine and Nora Vance, no force is more destructive. If no love is as all-encompassing as Catherine Earnshaw's for her new brother, none is ultimately so corrosive. (1)
This Victorian dialectic of sororal desire may be partially an aftereffect of a somewhat cruder novelistic formula employed in the eighteenth century using pairs of sisters--one good and one bad--to explore feminine identity. (2) But the first sophisticated use of the dialectical ideology that would dominate in the nineteenth century is already evident in Richardson's Clarissa, where we see the disastrous effects of a family's failure to appreciate and protect sororal love, and where we also see that same love initiate a series of discursive and epistolary performative acts whose ultimate effect is the erasure of all familial lines of identity. (3)
If such a continuity exists between Richardson in the eighteenth century and nineteenth-century writers like Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and even Edgar Allan Poe, it should surely appear in the works of Jane Austen, for no great novelist is more famous for her depictions of sororal relations than she. Indeed, the most well-known and perhaps most beloved of all sisters in English fiction are her creations. Yet, such is not the case: Austen neither engages in the nineteenth-century self-indicting cultural mystification of sisterly love, nor does she display either indignation or rage over the encasement of sororal desire. She reflects neither the formulaic patterns of mid-eighteenth-century sororal typology nor does she act as a bridge between it and the nineteenth century's contradictory sororal perfection and potential subversions.
But she certainly had something to say about sisters. Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion all contain sisters as central figures. And, even though neither Northanger Abbey nor Emma can be called sibling novels, their stories are told with constant allusions to and contexts determined by relations between brothers and sisters. Michael Cohen has written of Pride and Prejudice that it "insists that all its women are sisters." (4) Commenting on Austen's metaphorization of the sister figure, Cohen writes: "Austen has embraced the idea of using sisters so enthusiastically that she will not stop with the five daughters in the Bennet household but will construct relationships that imitate those of sisters among all women in the book." The novel, he says, "finally ... asserts universal sisterhood" (111). But the problem with universal sisterhood is that, if all women are sisters, no woman is a sister. If all similarities, differences, loves, hates, agreements and disagreements are sisterly in nature, then, like the zeroes on both sides of an equation which cancel each other out, sisterhood has lost its explanatory force. Moreover, we seem suddenly to be doing scant justice to Austen's uncanny psychological perspicacity. Austen indeed peoples her novels with sisters, but of so many shades, hues, intensities, complexities and moral qualities that sisterhood often seems to become mere sisterhood--i.e., only one category among many. Cohen might have seen this for himself. Summarizing the moral of Pride and Prejudice, he says:
We are left with marriages that seem to occur as they must. with as little (Lydia-Wickham) or as much (Jane-Bingley) expectation for happiness as the world ever offers, and a marriage (Elizabeth-Darcy) that shows us not that prudent choices lead to happiness but that the prudent are happy choosing prudently. If there is moral judgment in the book, it has come before any plot events, in rating the capacity of each character for happiness. (115)
In startling contrast to so many of the novels which follow later in the century, and even that of Richardson's Clarissa, in Austen's world the capacity for happiness is not generated by sisterhood, nor is it ultimately limited by it.
Austen's novels all have at their center one or two principal young female figures--where there are two, they are sisters, as in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice---and their eventual love objects, who, though usually flawed are ultimately perceptive, reasonable, clever, considerate, dutiful and capable of self-sacrifice. These principal figures are surrounded by a swarm of characters that are either shallow and indifferent, or foolish, egotistical, manipulative, self-seeking, deceitful, obtuse, and spiteful, taking joy in the misfortunes of their competitors. These, the great majority of characters in Austen's fictional world, are intentionally conceived as maddeningly stupid and pretentious-prying, gossipy, preening individuals of both sexes and of varying ages. Toward the latter, Austen's narrators exhibit a scathing contempt, usually expressed in humorous, ironic tropes, but sometimes in vicious cynicism (as in the account of the death of "poor Richard" Musgrove in Persuasion). (5)
A similar dichotomy can be drawn concerning the sibling relationships in Austen's novels. The few that are "true" are flawed and open to development--a development that will eventually bring them close to the formula for sibling love that will dominate much of the literature of the nineteenth century. But unlike so much of that literature, Austen's use of that formula (involving absolute devotion, service to the point of servitude, self-sacrifice and open transparency) is sparingly applied only to those few siblings who, through natural talent and struggle, prove themselves meritorious of the high honor that the designation of "sister" or "brother" automatically bestows elsewhere. These elect are surrounded by a gaggle of dull, indifferent sibling groups, or stupid, insipid, nasty, opportunistic brothers and sisters who far outnumber the worthy sibling characters and their worthy (sibling-like) lovers. (6)
A principal formula in the logic of English domestic ideology involves the selfless sister dedicated to her brother's service. Although Austen wrote no sister-brother novels as such, brothers of varying significance and character do abound in her works. (Of the major novels, only Persuasion contains no sister-brother relationships.) The two books in which sister-brother bonds are most significant are Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park. In Northanger Abbey, Austen's earliest novel, family ties are visible but not overwrought. We are told almost nothing about eight of the heroine's ten siblings. The bulk of the story takes place in Bath, to which Catherine Morland has been dispatched with a send-off so lackadaisical that the narrator says that it suggests "unpromising auspices." (7) Following suit, the relation between Catherine and her older brother James, though important in the plot, rarely reaches an intense pitch. Only after he has tried to intimidate her into participating, against her better judgment, in a foolhardy scheme that might further his romance with the dreadful Isabella Thorpe, and only after Isabella has broken his heart, does he write to his sister, "You are my only friend; your love do I build upon" (202).
There are two other sister-brother groupings in the novel. The dashing but villainous Captain Tilney and the charming but problematic Henry Tilney (Elizabeth's love object and eventual husband) are siblings of Eleanor Tilney (Catherine's friend and eventual sister-in-law). Eleanor's brothers are "very affectionate" (180) when they are at home, but unfortunately they are usually away. She is particularly pained by Henry's absence (212) ; but, when he is home, Henry is "a great comfort to [his] sister" (28). There are hints here of the kind of sibling ideal that will come to dominate later in the century, but none of this achieves the moral status that is demanded in the Frankenstein family, or in the village of Deerbrook, or at Wuthering Heights, or in the Dombey and Nickleby households, or at the Tulliver hearth--where it is so intense that its betrayal is always diabolically punished.
The most interesting sister-brother relationship in the novel is that depicted in the small sub-plot revolving around the Thorpe family. John Thorpe, Catherine Morland's grating, obnoxious, lying, self-serving suitor, insults first his mother ("where did you get that quiz of a hat, it makes you like an old witch"), and then proceeds to insult his sisters. "On his two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly" (49). Twice he refuses to allow his sisters into his carriage: "I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters about" (48, 99). But the manipulative, social-climbing Isabella stays "loyal" to her brother, seeing in his marriage to Catherine a definite advantage to herself. She tries to convince Catherine that, in urging her to attend to John's protestations of love, she is not thinking of her brother's happiness, but of Catherine's--"What I say is, why should a brother's happiness be dearer to me than a friend's" (146)when in fact it is only her own happiness that is dear to her. No one, certainly not a brother, will stand in the way of that.
In Mansfield Park (the plot of which, incidentally, is motivated from the first moment by the bitterness of the three squabbling Ward sisters) we come the closest to finding anything like the "formulaic" sibling relationship in Austen's works. The curious and much-debated heroine Fanny Price, has five siblings, though the novel only develops in any detail her relationship with her brother William and her younger sister, Susan. Even Susan is a late arrival in the story. She is not mentioned by name until the last fifth of the novel, when Fanny is sent away from Mansfield Park and returns to the chaos of her childhood home in Portsmouth. There, after years of absence, she reunites with Susan. Fanny's emotions move from initial shock at Susan's brazenness, to respect and admiration for her fearlessness and independence of thought. The...
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