Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  18 Stories about ordinary men and women in common life exacerbate the danger, but as fears about the harmful effects of fiction become more urgent

  224 Notes

  as a consequence of the absorptive reading encouraged by more realistic stories, those fears are also generalized to all kinds of fiction, and the attacks do not always discriminate between the older style of narrative and the new.

  19 See Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, and Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), for accounts of changes in the reading experience during the eighteenth century that encouraged sympathetic identification.

  20 Letters of Jemima, Marchioness of Grey, Lucas Collection: Beds. and Luton Archive, L 30/9/56/8, Hon Mrs Heathcote to Marchioness Grey, 25 November 1753. The French is a bit wobbly, but seems to mean ‘tender feelings lead further than you think’.

  21 Gisborne, p. 216.

  22 Gisborne, pp. 216–7.

  23 Gisborne, pp. 216–7.

  24 Gisborne, p. 214.

  25 In Licensing Entertainment, Warner attributes the kind of ‘absorptive reading’

  characteristic of Pamela to a different kind of dramatic effect, through the technique of masks and screens used ‘to project a new persona’ that, paradoxically, seems not to be performing for an audience: ‘Anonymous publication allows Richardson to publish his narrative in the form of naive familiar letters by throwing his voice into the mouth of a young girl’

  (p. 227). The dramatic technique of narrative that we are referring to here, however, is not specific to the sincerity-effect that Warner describes but associated more generally with the structure of narrative and its focus on a central character. When Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story was praised in an anonymous review as ‘truly dramatic’, for example, it is because the

  ‘rising interest is not broken, or even interrupted, by a constellation of splendid characters, as to make the reader at a loss to say which is the hero of the tale’ ( Analytical Review, X (1791): 101).

  26 Elizabeth Montagu, The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, with Some of the Letters of her Correspondents, ed. Matthew Montagu, 4 vols (1809; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1974), II: 87–88.

  27 Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela 2’, in Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson, ed. David Blewett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 90.

  28 Doody, A Natural Passion, p. 77.

  29 David Shuttleton notes that when Richardson asked Dr George Cheyne to report on the reception of Pamela 2 in Bath, Cheyne told him that ‘readers were finding it “defective in Incidents”’. Later, after another complaint that

  ‘the sequel lacked “moving Incidents” and the subject matter seemed “too barren of Distresses to excite our Pity,” Richardson replied that “an excellent Physician was so good as to give me a Plan to break Legs and Arms and to Fire mansion Houses to create Distresses; But my Business and View was to aim at Instruction in a genteel and usual Married Life”’ (‘“Pamela’s Library”: Samuel Richardson and Dr. Cheyne’s “Universal Cure”’, Eighteenth-Century Life 23.1

  [1999]: 72).

  30 Schellenberg, p. 90.

  31 Michael McKeon, quoted in Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travelers’, p. 85.

  Notes 225

  32 Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travelers’, p. 96.

  33 At the end of Pamela’s lecture, the Dean’s daughter draws the moral for the convenience of other listeners: ‘it behoves a prudent woman to guard against first impressions of favour, since she will think herself obliged, in compliment to her own judgment, to find reasons, if possible, to confirm them’ ( P2, IV: 432). The lesson on first impressions, whether of favour or disfavour, is one that Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet might well take to heart.

  34 Cf. Sigmund Freud’s discussion of ‘the phenomenon of sexual overvaluation’ in ‘Being in Love and Hypnosis ‘where he argues that ‘when we are in love a considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows on to the object

  … If the sexual overvaluation and the being in love increase even further, then … the ego becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The object has, so to speak, consumed the ego. Traits of humility, of the limitation of narcissism, and of self-injury occur in every case of being in love’ ( Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols [London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74], XVIII: 112–3).

  35 Scott Paul Gordon, ‘The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote’, Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900 38.3 (1998): 501.

  36 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols (1785; rpt. New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930), I: 68.

  37 Reeve, I: 67–8.

  38 Clara Reeve, Preface to The Champion of Virtue (Colchester: 1777).

  39 Duncan Isles, Appendix to The Female Quixote, ‘Johnson, Richardson, and The Female Quixote’, p. 426.

  40 Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 13. The looseness of the terms ‘rape’ and ‘ravishment’ can also be seen to encourage a blurring of the boundaries between rape and ‘forceful seduction’. ‘Figurative “ravishment”’ in a woman, as Catty points out, quoting the OED, ‘indicates “transport, rapture, ecstasy”; to

  “ravish” is thus “to transport with the strength of some feeling, to carry away with rapture; to fill with ecstasy or delight; to entrance”’ (14), so that signs of the woman’s figurative ravishment could be read as an invitation to physical ravishment. In Behn’s play, The Rover, for example, Antonio is certainly encouraged by the song he hears coming from Angellica’s rooms, the last verse of which ends:

  She gazed around upon the place,

  And saw the grove (resembling night)

  To all the joys of love invite,

  Whilst guilty smiles and blushes dressed her face.

  At this the bashful youth all transport grew,

  And with kind force he taught the virgin how

  To yield what all his sighs could never do. (II.i)

  (In Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd

  [London: Penguin, 1992], p. 180.)

  226 Notes

  41 ‘I cannot live without you and since the thing is gone so far, I will not!’

  ( P, p. 232); ‘I could curse my weakness and my folly, which makes me own, that I cannot live without you’ ( P, p. 244); ‘as I have often said, I cannot live without you; and I would divide, with all my soul, my estate with you, to make you mine upon my own terms’ ( P, p. 251); ‘spare me, my dearest girl, the confusion of following you to your father’s; which I must do, if you go on; for I find I cannot live without you’ ( P, p. 286).

  42 In Keymer and Sabor, 1: 13–14.

  Chapter 7

  ‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’: Saving

  Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

  1 For a discussion of the Cinderella parallel, see, for example, Henrietta Ten Harmsel, Jane Austen: A Study in Fictional Conventions (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), and for a discussion of parallels with Fanny Burney’s work, see Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  2 To our knowledge, the closest anyone comes to suggesting the possibility of Austen’s familiarity with Sidney’s work is Jocelyn Harris’s observation in Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) that, in relation to Northanger Abbey, ‘the two writers do look very alike’ in their defence of poetry/fiction (p. 28).

  3 Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 274.

&nbs
p; 4 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley and Frank W. Bradbrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 7, hereafter cited parenthetically ( P&P).

  5 Edward Neill in The Politics of Jane Austen (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1999) suggests that a similar symmetry structures Pride and Prejudice, in that Darcy ‘is to his amiable but weak-minded friend as the spirited Elizabeth is to her charming but insipid sister Jane’ (p. 65).

  6 Maurice Evans, Introduction to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, NA, p. 44.

  7 In some respects the parallels between Sidney’s and Austen’s sets of sisters are more inevitable than surprising, given that the feminine ideal has remained so constant and both sisters need to be virtuous yet different –

  which is a problem with the parallel between Marianne and Philoclea. We may know less of Jane’s feelings than Marianne’s or Philoclea’s, and Bingley’s fascination with her charms may find more subdued expression than Pyrocles’s, but, unlike Marianne, she bears her trials with quiet dignity and never becomes so absorbed in her own feelings that she is blind to the distresses of others.

  8 Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778– 1860 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 73.

  9 In public, Evelina spends a lot of her time in agonies of embarrassed silence, but on the page, recording her social disasters for her guardian or her friend Maria, her wit can be merciless.

  10 In an otherwise admirable three-part adaptation of Clarissa for television, for example, much of necessity was lost, but the greatest loss was Clarissa’s

  Notes 227

  ability to articulate the terms in which her experience was to be understood. Without the means of mediating through words between who she was and what was happening to her, she became much more of a victim than she ever was in the novel.

  11 Waldron, p. 49.

  12 For a somewhat different interpretation of the implications of this scene, see Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British

  “Bildungsroman” 1750– 1850 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), where Ellis argues that Elizabeth is experimenting with ‘the possibility of being both the subject and object of the gaze’, initiating Elizabeth’s development of control over ‘how she appears and how he perceives her’

  (p. 133).

  13 The other side of the coin is Mr Collins’s assessment of Darcy. Bingley may be everything a young man ought to be, but Darcy possesses, according to Mr Collins, ‘every thing the heart of mortal can most desire,—splendid property, noble kindred, and extensive patronage’ (p. 322).

  14 Kate Lock, ‘The Wait is Over’, Radio Times (5 July 1997), quoted in Virginia L. Blum, ‘The Return to Repression’, in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), fn. 38, p. 177.

  15 Austen may be having a sly dig at Mr Bennet. He fears that Elizabeth is enter-ing upon an ‘unequal marriage’, which he seems to understand as a marriage in which a woman does not look up to her husband as her superior.

  16 Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 186.

  17 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 27. The reference is to Richardson’s contribution to Johnson’s The Rambler 97

  (19 February 1751) where he declares: ‘That a young lady should be in love, and the love of the young gentleman undeclared, is an heterodoxy which prudence, and even policy, must not allow’ (Johnson, IV: 156).

  18 Interestingly, Sidney’s Philoclea is allowed the liberty of realizing in dreams desires that are repressed by day, so that in a sense she falls in love in her sleep: ‘dreams by night began to bring more unto her than she durst wish by day, whereout waking did make her know herself the better by the image of those fancies’ ( NA, p. 240). As we saw in Chapter 4, Melliora in Love in Excess vocalizes her desire in her sleep.

  19 The tone here is a worry: it suggests that someone is not taking these elevated aspirations very seriously, though whether the archness – the comic exaggeration of ‘the admiring multitude,’ the ponderous gravity of

  ‘connubial felicity’ – is the narrator’s or Elizabeth’s it is hard to tell.

  20 In one respect, Elizabeth’s revelation of her knowledge of Darcy’s intervention in Lydia’s affairs is itself an obstacle to the frank and open disclosure of feeling that Darcy seeks since Elizabeth could be understood as being constrained by obligation to the man whose largesse has rescued her family from disgrace. It is to Darcy’s credit that he has attempted to conceal his generosity, but it is also in his best interests if his object is to establish the true state of her heart.

  21 Waldron, p. 41.

  22 Waldron, p. 44.

  228 Notes

  23 Janet Todd, ‘Jane Austen, Politics and Sensibility’, in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 75.

  24 Kaplan, pp. 200–2.

  25 Kaplan, p. 183.

  26 It should be noted that the personal attributes on which Arabella would base her esteem are all concerned with a man’s suitability as a lover: the

  ‘Sufferings’ that he is prepared to endure for her sake and the ‘Fidelity’ and

  ‘Respect’ that he has shown her.

  27 Fielding, p. 235.

  28 Newton, p. 48.

  29 Robert M. Polhemus, Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 49.

  30 Polhemus, pp. 49, 51.

  31 Polhemus, p. 51.

  32 B. C. Southam, in Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), notes that Austen ‘wrote to Cassandra in 1807 that the Steventon household has been reading … [ The Female Quixote] for their “evening amusement; to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it”’ (p. 11). He also suggests that ‘the situation in “Edgar and Emma”, where the heroine, in search of a confidant, turns in desperation to the footman, is perhaps a memory of Mrs Lennox’s heroine, Arabella, who may also have been in Jane Austen’s mind when she was writing of Margaret Lesley in “Lesley Castle”’ (p. 12).

  33 Gregory, pp. 82–3.

  34 Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1990), p. 72.

  35 Handler and Segal, p. 72.

  36 Waldron takes a different slant on the problem: ‘If Darcy were behaving according to the conventions of fiction here he would hesitate – if we are to believe him sympathetic – to put Elizabeth under a financial obligation.

  Austen ignores this expectation and allows her aunt, her father and herself to accept his generosity with little demur. In another novel, Elizabeth would have to refuse him again out of “delicacy”’ (p. 59).

  Chapter 8

  Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance: Going All

  the Way with Jane Eyre?

  1 Barbara Milech, ‘Romancing the Reader’, in Literature and Popular Culture, ed. Horst Ruthrof and John Fiske (Melbourne: Murdoch University, 1987), p. 190n.

  2 Milton Viederman, ‘The Nature of Passionate Love’, in Passionate Attachments: Thinking about Love, ed. William Gaylin and Ethel Person (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. 7.

  3 Nancy Cervetti, Scenes of Reading: Transforming Romance in Brontë, Eliot, and Woolf (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 59.

  Notes 229

  4 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Michael Mason (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 412, hereafter cited parenthetically.

  5 Ellis, for example, talks of the ‘tension between the two aspects of Jane Eyre, its subversive portrayal of relationships filled with conflict and disguise and its more conservative emphasis on fated love and idealized self-fulfillment’
/>
  as being played out both within the novel itself and in Brontë criticism (p. 158). More famously, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw attention to

  ‘the oscillation between overtly “angelic” dogma and covertly Satanic fury’

  ( The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 314).

  6 ‘E. P.’ [Edwin Percy Whipple], ‘Novels of the Season’, North American Review 141 (October 1848), in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 97.

  7 Penny Boumelha, Charlotte Brontë (Hemel Hemstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 75.

  8 Elizabeth Rigby, Review of Jane Eyre, Quarterly Review 84 (December 1848), in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, p. 109.

  9 Ann Mozley, Christian Remembrancer 15 (April 1853), quoted in Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 162.

  10 Quoted in Gordon, p. 163.

  11 As John Gardner remarks in On Becoming a Novelist (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), most fiction can be reduced to a single plot: someone ‘wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including [his or her]

  own doubts)’, and either gets it or doesn’t (p. 54).

  12 In Russian Formalist terms, it is the desiring subject who ‘embodies the motivation which connects the motifs’ that he (or she) is the means of stringing together (Boris Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965], p. 90), though the status of protagonist is understood to be a function of plot rather than story, a distinction that we do not pursue here.

  13 When Jane proposes to ‘clean down’ Moor House as the first indulgence of her new wealth, St John exhorts her to ‘look a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys’, but Jane insists that they are ‘the best things the world has!’ (p. 436).