Of Rears and Vices: Queering Jane Austen

Of Rears and Vices: Queering Jane Austen

In the first task for this assignment I gave a speech arguing that Emma Woodhouse was gay and that if Jane Austen had written Emma in 2014 she might have married Harriet Smith rather than Mr Knightley. This essay continues the queer theme drawing from Kenneth Burke’s theories on rhetoric and suggesting that Jane Austen’s novels include a form of rhetoric that is ‘not wholly deliberate, yet not wholly unconscious.’[i] On the surface it may seem that ‘Austen’s characters overwhelmingly exemplify heteronormative notions of time and space, preoccupied with reproductive futurity and estate legacies.’[ii] However, I argue that the rhetoric in Austen’s novels destabilizes nineteenth-century notions of heterosexual relationships and challenges simple binary definitions of gender. I also argue that Austen anticipates the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler’s notions of performative identity and her ‘influential analysis of gender as intrinsically troubled and unstable.’[iii]

In support of my arguments I examine the ‘triangles of desire’ between Darcy, Bingley and Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice and Fanny Price, Mary Crawford and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park together with the sister–to-sister erotic love between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and construction of gender in Northanger Abbey.

Although Jane Austen may have written ‘without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman’[iv] and despite the fact that ‘the rules of polite society are the staple of her subject matter’[v] she is also the author who Jill Hedyt-Stevenson suggests wrote a scene in Pride and Prejudice where Mr Darcy was engaged by Miss Bingley in ‘a powerful metonymy of phallic power’[vi] when she said ‘I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well’[vii] and that Mr Darcy’s answer ‘thank you – but I always mend my own’[viii] ‘playfully invokes auto eroticism.’[ix] Hedyt-Stevenson argues that Austen’s humour ‘serves to provide an outlet for her hostility towards ideologies that dominate women’[x] and ‘complicates current debates about late-eighteenth-century assumptions regarding women’s sexuality.’[xi]

While I would not presume that Jane Austen was ‘an undercover ideological terrorist, as the would-be destroyer of the values she appears to uphold’[xii] it is safe to assume that Austen was not as innocent or as lacking in passion a some readers may think. ‘Although it is true that the “homosexual” and the “heterosexual” did not exist as identity categories in Austen’s time, sexual practices were understood and judged as normative and non-normative – natural and unnatural, procreative and indulgent - and these categories of sexual practice existed in anxious tension with each other.’[xiii] We know that Austen had brothers in the navy but even so there is a surprising example of risqué humour in Mansfield Park referring to the Royal Navy’s reputation for homosexual activity where ‘[m]ale homosexuality is explicitly referred to by Miss Crawford in [Fanny’s] presence, shortly after Fanny explains that her brother works in the navy’[xiv]; ‘[c]ertainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.’[xv] Austen’s ‘bawdy allusions – while simultaneously outrageous and funny – protest against patriarchal privilege and address contemporary historical notions of masculine and feminine identities.’[xvi] Moreover, Kozaczka states: ‘[n]ot only was Austen aware of the tension between normative and non-normative sexual practices, she used the word “queer” to label the latter.’[xvii] When Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park questions why Fanny Price appears sexually uninterested in him he says: ‘What is her character? – Is she solemn? – Is she queer? – Is she prudish.’[xviii] Kozaczka suggests that ‘it seems fair to speculate that Austen may have been using the term “queer” to connote non-normative sexual behavior.’[xix] In addition, in Northanger Abbey Henry imagines that Catherine will describe his ‘camp performance’[xx] in her journal as ‘a queer, half-witted man.’[xxi] E. J. Clery explains that the word “queer” ‘[i]n the early nineteenth-century lexicon carried the sense of an impropriety verging on the antisocial including, explicitly, a resistance to heterosexual norms.’[xxii]

My first example of same-sex desire comes from Pride and Prejudice where the narrator explains that ‘[b]etween [Bingley] and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of a great opposition of character’[xxiii] and where at times Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy’s attachment to each other appears more important than their attachment to women. For example, at the Netherfield ball Mr Bingley dances with all the girls and ‘made himself acquainted with all the principal people in the room.’[xxiv] However, this behavior was in marked contrast to his best friend Darcy who ‘danced only once with Mrs Hurst and once with Mrs Bingley.’[xxv] It is important to note that despite being so occupied at the dance Bingley has obviously been observing Darcy intensely and notices that his friend isn’t dancing. Bingley takes the trouble to leave the dance and entreats his friend to join in: ‘[c]ome Darcy….. I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance.’[xxvi] Darcy’s response is cross, resentful and possibly jealous: ‘I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner…’[xxvii] Darcy is, of course, ‘particularly acquainted’ with Bingley. Darcy’s final comment to Bingley is ‘[y]ou had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.’[xxviii] Any idea that Darcy and Bingley could dance together was of course impossible, as they had to conform to what was expected of them without raising any suspicion that they might be anything more than friends. As Sedgwick explains:

the paths of male entitlement, especially in the nineteenth century, required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most reprobate bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I am calling male heterosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement.[xxix] 

Moreover, it is no coincidence that the only girl Darcy was interested in, who Darcy describes as ‘the only handsome girl in the room,’[xxx] was Jane Bennett who was Bingley’s dance partner. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men describes how René Girard ‘traced a calculus of power that was structured by the relation of rivalry between two active members of an erotic triangle.’[xxxi] Sedgwick went on to say: ‘the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved.’[xxxii] The rivalry between Darcy and Bingley for Jane, with Jane positioned between them, creates a potent ‘triangle of desire’ and, as Darcy fails to gain either Jane or Bingley, it is not surprising that Darcy becomes the main obstacle to Bingley marrying Jane.

My second example considers the relationship between the sisters in Sense and Sensibility that Martha Vicinus suggests ‘portray[s] intensely eroticized sisterly love.’[xxxiii] In August 1995 Terry Castle wrote a controversial review of the letters between Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra where she stated: ‘one cannot help but sense the primitive adhesiveness – and underlying eros – of the sister-sister bond.’[xxxiv] The ‘sister-sister’ bond between Jane and Cassandra is mirrored in the relationship between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility where Sedgwick suggests: ‘they are sisters, and the passion and perturbation of their love for each other is, at the very least, the backbone of this powerful novel’[xxxv] and Edmund Wilson in 1945 stated that ‘heterosexual pursuits are of less interest to Elinor and Marianne Dashwood than each other’s company.’[xxxvi]There is a bedroom scene at the beginning of chapter twenty-nine in Sense and Sensibility when Elinor wakes and watches Marianne ‘only half-dressed’[xxxvii] writing to Willoughby ‘as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her’[xxxviii]. The fact that the sisters name the absent man (Willoughby) ‘both marks this as an unmistakably sexual scene, and by the same gesture seems to displace its “sexuality” from the depicted bedroom space of same-sex tenderness, secrecy, longing and frustration’[xxxix]which,Sedgwick suggests, is both a hetero and homoerotic moment.

My third example, from Northanger Abbey, shows how Austen depicts gender as performative and anticipates the existentialist feminist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir’s view that ‘l’existence précède l’essence’[xl] and her well-known observation: ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one.’’[xli] Catherine Morland is introduced to readers when she is ten years old and described as being ‘fond of all boys’ plays, and greatly prefer[ing] cricket not merely to dolls’ and ‘lov[ing] nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.’[xlii] However, Catherine not only has to prepare to be the main character in the book, she has to gain an education and learn ‘the techniques of personal grooming that constitute gender identity amongst the adolescent girls of the propertied classes.’[xliii] As the narrator explains, Catherine has to learn how to become more feminine and ‘from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine.’[xliv] Thus, Austen appears to preempt Judith Butler’s suggestion that gender is culturally constructed and becoming a woman is an ‘ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.’[xlv] However ‘Austen does not leave the matter of gender constructions and their artificial nature’[xlvi] to Catherine; Henry Tilney’s performance as her first dance partner unravels the ‘painstakingly achieved fabric of gender distinction’[xlvii] that is his masculinity.

My final example comes from Mansfield Park where I suggest there is a subtext that sets out an erotic triangle that revolves between Fanny Price, Mary Crawford and Edmund Bertram. While ‘the triangles Girard traces are most often those in which two males are rivals for a female’[xlviii] in Mansfield Park the two ‘active members of the erotic triangle’ rotate between Fanny and Mary and Edmund and Fanny.

When Fanny came to Mansfield Park her only friend was Edmund but Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka suggests that as soon as ‘Miss Crawford enters the narrative, her friendship with Fanny seems to be on the verge of becoming something else.’[xlix] Edmund and Fanny both admire Mary Crawford and the narrator states that Edmund’s admiration ‘might lead him to where Fanny could not follow.’[l] Mentxaka explains that ‘[t]his is a paralipsis, a rhetorical device by which attention is brought to something by (unnecessarily) dismissing it. The lesbian subplot shows that Fanny could and did follow Edmund’s lead.’[li] Stabler, in her introduction to Mansfield Park, suggests that ‘[c]onsidering the centrality of the relationship between Edmund and Fanny, therefore, the lesbian story line would appear to be no more than an amusing diversion, or perhaps a mischievous gift to the reader.’[lii]

The triangle of desire is first observed early in the novel when Edmund and Fanny both appear to desire Mary. They ask her to play her harp and she replies: ‘I shall be most happy to play to you both […] at least as long as you can like to listen; probably much longer for I dearly love music myself, and where the natural taste is equal, the player must always be best off, for she is gratified in more ways than one.’[liii] Mentxaka suggests that in this passage ‘the link between music and sex is clear.’[liv]

Later in the novel, when the Bertram’s father is away in Antigua, the young people decide to put on a play, Lovers Vows. A play that gives the Bertrams and their friends ‘a licence for what would normally be entirely improper such as physical contact …….. and a bold freedom of speech.’[lv] Mary, worried about playing the love scene with Edmund, comes to Fanny in the East room to ask for her help in rehearsing her lines for the play. Mary says : ‘[y]ou must rehearse it with me, that I may fancy you him, and get on by degrees. You have a look of his sometimes.’[lvi] As Fanny plays Edmund’s part ‘with looks and voice so truly feminine, as to be no very good picture of a man’[lvii] Austen sets up a highly charged erotic scene as the two women rehearse the love scene with Fanny making no attempt to act as a man - indeed quite the contrary - as Austen is at pains to point out that Fanny is ‘so truly feminine’. Edmund, who also comes to rehearse his lines with Fanny, interrupts this scene and, as Fanny watches Mary and Edmund together, she feels: ‘[s]he could not equal them in their warmth. Her spirits sank under the flow of theirs, and she felt herself becoming too nearly nothing to both to have any comfort in having been sought by either.’[lviii] Mentxaka suggests that ‘[t]his can not get much closer to an admission of bisexual yearning’.[lix]

Such is the importance of the rehearsal scene between Mary and Fanny that it is recalled some time later in the narrative when Mary takes Fanny to the East room to talk to her. Returning to this room, and remembering their rehearsal, has an emotional effect on the two girls. Mary embraces Fanny saying: ‘[g]ood gentle Fanny! When I think of this being the last time of seeing you; for I do not know how long – I feel it quite impossible to do anything but love you.’[lx] Mary’s declaration reduces Fanny to tears: she ‘cried as if she had loved Miss Crawford more than she possibly could; and Miss Crawford, yet farther softened by the sight of such emotion, hung about her with fondness.’[lxi] After this speech the narrator tells us that “the two girls sat many minutes silent, each thoughtful: Fanny meditating on the different sorts of friendship in the world.” It is not unreasonable to suggest a queer interpretation of the term ‘different sorts of friendship’ at such an emotionally charged moment between the two girls. Moreover, it is not just Fanny who had strong emotions about their relationship; Mary does too. As Mentxata suggests, ‘[w]hat Miss Crawford was thinking on her way to the East room she never tells, but we may remember that the idea of Fanny’s impersonation and the ‘feeling’ this inspired in Fanny were, in the narrator’s words ‘strongly calculated.’’[lxii]

In the East room we heard Mary comment on the physical similarities between Fanny and Edmund and earlier in the novel, when Julia and Maria, the Bertrams’ daughters, are describing Mary’s riding ability, there is a suggestion that Mary could be her brother Henry’s duplicate. ‘“I was sure she would ride well”, said Julia, she has the make for it. Her figure is as neat as her brother’s.” “Yes”, added Maria, “and her spirits are as good, and she has the same energy of character….”’[lxiii] Mentxaka points out that these comparisons are completely unnecessary to the heterosexual romantic plot but do ‘invite an alterative reading of entangled lesbian longings.’[lxiv]

In conclusion I have to agree with Virginia Woolf who described Jane Austen as ‘a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.’[lxv] In the critical commentary for this essay I suggest that Austen’s characters explore queer relationships prior to conforming to heterosexual norms and marrying. I would also suggest that, for Austen, marriage is not the central theme of her novels and my view would seem to concur with E.J. Clery’s suggestion that ‘[t]here is a sense that the closure in marriage is the point at which Austen concedes to the demands of audiences (then as now), and, for all her brilliance, risks being stupid’[lxvi] Moreover, the conclusions of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey have little to do with the fulfillment of romantic love. At the end of Mansfield Park Fanny marries Edmund, an almost incestuous relationship as they have been raised as brother and sister, to become the Bertrams’ daughter by both marriage and adoption - but nowhere do we hear if they lived ‘happily ever after’. In Sense and Sensibility the last sentence of the novel continues to emphasizes the relationship between the sisters Elinor and Marianne by pointing out that they are ‘living almost within sight of each other.’[lxvii] In Northanger Abbey the marriage of Henry and Catherine appears to be a foregone conclusion, just a loose end to be tied up rather than a particularly romantic ending. Moreover, Terry Castle notes that ‘in the novels so many of the final happy marriages seem designed not so much to bring about a union between hero and heroine as between the heroine and the hero’s sister’.[lxviii] For example, in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland’s delight at becoming sister-in-law to Henry’s sister Eleanor. Indeed, ‘Austen’s method for generating romantic ‘uplift’ seems to have been achieved out of a struggle with her own creative sensibility.’[lxix] Carol Shields explains that at the time Austen was writing marriage was ‘the only pledge a woman was capable of giving. She had one chance in her life to say ‘I do’ and these words rhyme psychologically with the phrase ‘I am, I exist.’[lxx] Despite this ‘Austen is careful to commit to no illusions about the apparatus of marriage or other institutionalized forms of gender difference.’[lxxi]

Mentxaka suggests ‘it is time we looked at Austen with new eyes, as a spirited, bold, hilarious, clever, cruel, historically aware, psychologically masterful, politically engaged, philosophically rich and profoundly unsettling writer of exquisite craftsmanship, who can be sexy too.’[lxxii]

Critical Commentary

In Jane Austen ‘we find at work one of the unquestionable masters of the rhetoric of fiction.’[lxxiii]

This commentary sets out how I interpret Kenneth Burke’s theories of rhetoric and how this is relevant to Jane Austen’s writing. Burke described the basic definition of rhetoric as ‘speech designed to persuade’.[lxxiv] The speech I made for Task One of this assignment, ‘Emma Woodhouse is gay get over it’, was a ‘speech designed to persuade’. My essay ‘Of Rears and Vices: Queering Jane Austen’ begins by stating that Jane Austen’s novels include a form of rhetoric that is ‘not wholly deliberate, yet not wholly unconscious.’[lxxv] My essay argues that despite the fact that, in the tradition of nineteenth century novels, Austen’s characters ultimately conform to heterosexual norms and marry, she challenges nineteenth-century notions of heterosexual relationships and definitions of gender. I also argue that Austen anticipates Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler’s work on gender and performative identity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler and Kenneth Burke are the influences in this essay.

In his book A Rhetoric of Motives Burke’s aim is to reclaim rhetoric, to extend rhetoric without overturning the classical tradition, to breathe new life into the subject and develop it ‘beyond the traditional bounds of rhetoric’[lxxvi]. For Burke rhetoric is a symbolic action and language is a symbolic cooperation that works well because man uses symbols to communicate. Burke describes man as a symbol using and mis-using animal. Rhetoric is more than just a resource that can be drawn upon, more than a set of tools to be learnt in order to present an argument and convince people that one’s argument is right. In Burke’s view rhetoric is equipment for living. Burke is skeptical about language and the insecurity of language; therefore he extends rhetoric beyond the idealized idea of language to the point where one can unpick the subconscious of a performative act to critique that act and pull it apart. My interpretation of Burke’s ‘unpicking the subconscious’ gives us the freedom to apply a queer reading to Austen’s work. He states that there is ‘an intermediate expression that is not wholly deliberate, yet not wholly unconscious. It lies midway between aimless utterance and speech directly purposive.’[lxxvii] It is at this ‘midway’ point we can discover the queer undertones of Austen’s work. In Jennifer Richard’s book Rhetoric she states that ‘one aim of A Rhetoric of Motives…. is to elucidate those persuasive acts of which we are barely conscious.’[lxxviii]  Burke’s rhetoric is not contrived, it is inclusive. It is not just persuasion, it is also identification. Burke challenges what we think of as rhetoric: he defines rhetoric as not just what is on the surface, not just obvious persuasion, but also the motive behind what is said. Moreover, he extends the range of rhetoric and broadens what we normally think of as rhetoric to include identifying one’s private ambitions with the good of the community or identifying with that community in order to put one’s point across. Additionally, and importantly in the context of this essay, Burke states that ‘a rhetorical motive is often present where it is not usually recognized or thought to belong’.[lxxix] Burke is concerned not just about who reads but how we are affected by what we read.

Writing at the time of the Cold War Burke reminds us that ‘persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man insofar as he is free.’[lxxx] Burke was referring to dictatorships but we have to remember that women authors in the nineteenth century such as Jane Austen were not free to write as they might have wished, nor were their readers free to read whatever they liked. For example ‘[i]n Northanger Abbey [Austen] had openly criticized sexist bias in literary works and in reviewers, and the novel had been suppressed by the publishing house to which she had sold it.’[lxxxi] Therefore when Austen wrote about non-normative sexuality or gender it had to be coded or disguised within bawdy humour or irony.

Taking the opening lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, James Kastely, in Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition, states that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when economic and social certainties were disappearing, ‘the old rules of life, for example that “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,”[lxxxii] now had to be read ironically.’[lxxxiii] When discussing Austen’s novel Persuasion Kastely states that Austen ‘seeks to defend rather than suppress a feminine discourse’ and argues that ‘the emerging liberal conception of society provoked Austen to reimagine the rhetorical paradigm for feminine speech.’[lxxxiv] However, I believe Austen goes further than this to include a subtle form of rhetoric that Burke would have recognized which encourages a queer reading of her work.

In defence of a queer reading of Austen’s work it is worth bearing in mind Massimiliano Morini’s suggestion that we ‘accept that Austen’s novels are somehow ‘ironic, either in the narrower sense of the rhetorical term – they say something but mean the reverse – or in its wider application – they say something but mean something else, they say something in an indirect way.’[lxxxv] Moreover, Edward Kozaczka suggests that ‘[i]n general queer theory can help us begin to make sense of the slippages between categories of sexual difference, and thereby help us better characterize the erotic identities of Austen’s characters.’[lxxxvi] Queer theory is ‘a species of poststructuralism and deconstruction…. [it] elaborates the implication of these insights and methods for an understanding of genders and sexualities.’[lxxxvii]

A queer reading of Austen’s work identifies just how incredibly brave Austen was in her writing. In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf sums up my feeling on Austen’s work: ‘what genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as [she] saw it without shrinking.’[lxxxviii]

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