William Deresiewicz

by Unknown

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  35. For the marriage of Fanny and Edmund as narcissistic, see Smith, ” `My Only Sister Now,’ ” Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 98, and Handler and Segal, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture, p. 83 n., who cite a number of studies. Incestuous energies are found, of course, throughout English Romantic poetry. See Peter L. Thorslev, “Incest as a Romantic Symbol,” Comparative Literature Studies 2 (1965): 4158; and Alan Richardson, “The Dangers of Sympathy: Sibling Incest in English Romantic Poetry” SEL 25 (1985): 737754. For a defense of the novel’s investment in incestuous feeling as in line with what we find in Wordsworth and other British Romantic authors, see Ruoff, “Sense of a Beginning,” pp. 183184. 36. For other discussions of this blurring of conjugal and fraternal impulses, see Hudson, Sibling Love and Incest, p. 17, Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, pp. 116120, and Ruoff, “Sense of a Beginning,” pp. 183184. We will see a great deal more of this and other kinds of blurring in discussing Emma’s “ambiguous relationships.” 37. For “Tintern Abbey” as a poem of crisis, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 92, and Bloom, “To Reason with a Later Reason,” in Ringers in the Tower, p. 17. 38. For an illuminating discussion of these matters, see Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, pp. 9297. 39. This is not to say that substitution never occurs in Austen’s other novels: Mr. Collins’s replacement of Elizabeth by Charlotte, Emma’s of Mrs. Weston by Harriet, and Anne’s of her mother by Lady Russell are all examples; a less obvious but more important one is Miss Bates’s whole approach to life, which as I noted in chapter 2 in discussing Emma’s manipulation of the word “happy,” involves exactly the kind of making-do we are calling by that term. The difference between these examples and what we find in Mansfield Park is one of pervasiveness or pattern: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion may contain isolated instances of substitution, but none of those novels is governed by that mechanism in the way that Mansfield Park is. 40. Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 133.

  chapter 4 : Emma: Ambiguous Relationships

  1. Handler and Segal note that Emma quasi-incestuously replaces her mother (Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture, pp. 4142). 2. Hudson also notes this multiplicity of roles (Sibling Love and Incest, p. 50). 3. As has been pointed out by Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, p. 196, and Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature, p. 277. The observation is based, in part, on Knightley’s remark to Mrs. Weston that “you were receiving a very good education from her, on the very material matrimonial point of submitting your own will, and doing as you were bid; and if Weston had asked me to recommend him a wife, I should certainly have named Miss Taylor” (33; emphasis in the original). 4. In Persuasion, as Handler and Segal note, Elizabeth Elliot also quasi-incestuously replaces her mother (Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture, p. 42). 5. As discussed by Ruoff, “Sense of a Beginning,” p. 184, who cites examples from Wordsworth (“The Mad Mother” and The Prelude), Coleridge (“Dejection”), Percy Shel—

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  ley (“Epipsychidion”), and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). For an extended discussion of the way Wordsworth’s several “loves” for Dorothy, for Coleridge, and for nature and the objects of nature blend together in The Prelude, very much along the lines of the kind of ambiguity I am tracing here in Austen, see Sabin, English Romanticism, pp. 3347. 6. For a discussion of Emma’s playfulness, see Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1986), p. 199. 7. I am indebted to Karl Kroeber for this insight. 8. Robert Brain, Friends and Lovers (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 1516. 9. Brain, Friends and Lovers, p. 258. 10. For the movement from vertical ties toward horizontal ones—from “filiation” to “affiliation,” in his terms—see Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (2nd ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. xiiixiv. Franco Moretti also speaks of “the strengthening of bonds within generations” as characteristic of modernity (The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture [London: Verso, 1987], p. 5). For the movement from strong, stable social structures toward looser, more temporary ones, see my article on “Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Transformation of Community,” Raritan 20 (fall 2000): 7172. 11. For a discussion of the “spectrum of relationships designated in the eighteenth century as `friendship,’ ” see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 167ff. Tadmor reviews the historiographic literature on these various types of relationships (pp. 169170), then goes on to provide a detailed case study of their appearance within the life of the eighteenth-century shopkeeper and diarist Thomas Turner (pp. 171236). 12. Richard Simpson, in his famous appraisal of 1870, notes that “in her idea love was only an accident of friendship, friendship being the true light of life, while love was often only a troublesome and flickering blaze which interrupted its equable and soothing influence” (in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. Southam, p. 246), an idea implicit in Scott’s remark, in his review of Emma, that “at Highbury Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn, instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire” (in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, p. 67). For Allan Bloom, the “expectation of [Austen’s] novels is that one’s beloved will be one’s best friend or that marriage is itself the essential friendship” (Love and Friendship [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993], p. 196). 13. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 15001800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Stone’s chronology has the Open Lineage model in play from 1450 to 1630, the Restricted Patriarchal from 1550 to 1700, and the Closed Domesticated from 1640 to the end of the period covered by his study. 14. For an example of such criticism, see Alan Macfarlane’s review of The Family, Sex, and Marriage, History and Theory 18.1 (Feb. 1979): 121122, one of the most important critiques of Stone’s work. Macfarlane also cites Stone’s qualifications of his chronology (p. 121). 15. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 5. Tadmor also discusses this sense of the word (Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 167168) as well as citing earlier studies that take it up (pp. 169170). 16. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 98. See also Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 167 and 169.

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  17. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 98. His citation from the 1820s, which has “friends” in the plural, “is evidence,” Stone says, “of how long the old usage persisted, long after `friend’ in the singular had taken on its modern meaning” (p. 98). But the singular usage also appears in Sense and Sensibility, as we will see. The OED is even more behindhand, dating its latest citation for “friend” (sense 3): “kinsman or near relation,” to 1721. 18. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, pp. 221ff. Again, Stone has been roundly criticized for arguing that affection scarcely existed as a factor in English social relations before the eighteenth century (Alan Macfarlane, review of The Family, Sex, and Marriage), but the concept of affective individualism doesn’t stand or fall on that question, but rather on the centrality of the affections to an individual’s self-conception. Macfarlane convincingly argues that both affection and individualism existed in England before the eighteenth century, but an increasingly strengthened and increasingly important ideology of the individual, increasingly centered on the affections, did emerge during that century and through the period we have come to call the Romantic era, as evidenced in part by the material from Shaftsbury, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth that I discuss below. In these writers and others, and especially in Austen, the affections come to be regarded, for the first time, as the principal ties that bind individuals in society as well as the principal way that individuals define themselves. This, as we will see, is what sets us on the road to the situation in which, as Brain says, “We are friends with everyone” (Friends and Lovers, p. 258). 19. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marri
age, p. 97. Stone is quoting Johnson’s dictionary. Again, we must hedge Stone round with qualifications. Not only is Johnson’s definition a too-simple characterization of the word’s modern semantic complexity, as we are saying, it also can’t in any sense be called exclusively modern (being present, as we will see, as far back as Aristotle). Still, the definition is useful in denoting the term’s meaning within the system of values Austen champions here, one that is presented as nascently modern. 20. As Tadmor argues, the same two notions of friendship struggle, in something like the same way, in Clarissa (Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 265268). We can mark the half-century’s distance between the two novels by noting that it is only in the later work that the idea of friend-as-intimate, championed by both writers, can win. 21. According to A History of Private Life, “no historian and few anthropologists before Robert Brain have studied friendship for itself” (ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989], III:450), and again, “[h]istorians have paid too little attention to friendship” (ed. Michelle Perrot, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990], IV:562). The History itself does only a little to redress the omission, devoting less than twenty-five pages to the topic in the first cited volume, only four in the second, and none at all in the work’s final volume (vol. 5, eds. Antoine Prost and Gérard Vincent, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991]). Brain himself notes that any number of Western thinkers have written treatises on friendship, including “Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Cicero, St. Francis, Bacon, Montaigne, Thomas More, Descartes, Pascal, Jeremy Taylor, and Adam Smith,” but “[m]ost of these literary attempts to portray, explain, or analyze friendship … are necessarily ethnocentric … We have studies by Freud and Malinowsky, Havelock Ellis and Kinsey on sex, a host of volumes on kinship and marriage, several scientific and not so scientific studies of aggression, refined analyses of romantic

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  passion, and delicately wrought accounts of amity in the androgynous Bloomsbury set. But we have no modern theorist of love and friendship” (Friends and Lovers, p. 12). While Tadmor, as noted, cites a number of studies in which friendship is discussed, none is a study of friendship. Her book, of course, begins to redress this gap. 22. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 328. 23. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 13001840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 154159. Many of Macfarlane’s sources express this ideal in the language of friendship, as do many of Stone’s. 24. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 30ff. 25. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 328. 26. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: Morrow, 1981), p. 91. 27. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 329. Macfarlane, for once, concurs, noting that “[e]ven the French, within the European marriage pattern, found the system odd” and citing to this effect not only the same passage from the Duc de La Rochefoucauld but also ones from Taine and Cobbett (Marriage and Love in England, p. 156). 28. Sabin, English Romanticism, pp. 2324, 3539. Sabin contrasts the definitions of love given in the Encyclopédie and Johnson’s Dictionary. 29. Sabin, English Romanticism, p. 26. Her translations are those of the Penguin edition (trans. J. M. Cohen). 30. Sabin, English Romanticism, p. 28. 31. Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship, p. 147 (the words are Bloom’s). But see Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 7879, for a discussion of the friendship between Julie and Claire in the latter work, a bond that “threatens to overshadow the very passionate heterosexual relationships in the story” (p. 78). The two positions can be reconciled with Faderman’s observation that, while eighteenth-century society distrusted strong expressions of friendship between men as evidence of or a prelude to homosexual involvement, they had no such corresponding fears about female friendships—women were presumed to be able to control themselves—and indeed often approved of them as evidence that the young women would be equally passionate and loyal in marriage (p. 75). I consider such romantic friendships below. 32. She quotes a string of La Bruyčre’s maxims to this effect, including “Love and friendship exclude one another” (Sabin, English Romanticism, p. 25). 33. A History of Private Life III:450. 34. For discussions of the classical tradition, see Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship, pp. 401428, and Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 6567. For friends as neighbors, see also Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England, p. 169. 35. Leading examples of the latter include Achilles and Patroklos, Socrates and Alcibiades, and Virgil’s Nisus and Euryalus. Allan Bloom sees Falstaff and Hal as a comic version of the same paradigm (Love and Friendship, pp. 399428). The friendships mentioned in Cicero all involve adults, as does Montaigne’s with Etienne. 36. “Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue … Love and friendship therefore are found most and in their best form between such men. But it is natural that such friendships should be infrequent; for such men are rare” (1156b;

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  Nicomachean Ethics VIII.3; Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Modern Library, 1947], p. 475). The complete discussion occupies Books VIII and IX. 37. Cicero, de Amicitia, section 21 (Two Essays on Old Age and Friendship, trans. E. S. Shuckburgh [London: Macmillan, 1927], pp. 188189). 38. Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship, p. 411. For Socrates’s refusal of sexual contact, see Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), pp. 6871 (217a219d). 39. “Of Friendship,” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 136. 40. This is consistent with what we saw above about the strict separation of friendship and sexual love in the French tradition. Rousseau, of course, reverses Montaigne and the rest of the classical tradition’s valuation of the former over the latter. To Allan Bloom, this is a crucial step in the history of friendship: “For Aristotle, the exchange of speeches, logoi, is the ground of friendship and, at the same time, it grows out of man’s natural spirituality, which is reason. But for Rousseau all meaningful speeches refer back to ultimately bodily sentiments or feelings … This is the source of the enduring modern problem of explaining friendship, and perhaps even of practicing it” (Love and Friendship, pp. 147148; emphasis in the original). 41. Montaigne, Essays, p. 136. 42. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 6573. 43. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 7475. 44. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 7684, 103ff. 45. Faderman notes that the literature of romantic friendship itself sometimes made a point of distinguishing between true and false manifestations, those based on genuine sentiment and those merely based on the fashion for lofty expression (Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 8184). 46. Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, p. 107. 47. Byron’s early poems on friendship include “To E—,” “To D—,” “Epitaph on a Beloved Friend,” “The Cornelian,” “Childish Recollections,” “To George, Earl Delawarr,” “The Episode of Nisus and Euryalus,” “The Death of Calmar and Orla,” “To Edward Noel Long, Esq.,” “To the Duke of Dorset,” “To the Earl of Clare,” “To a Youthful Friend,” and “L’Amitié est L’Amour sans Ailes,” not published until 1832. But the pairing of love and friendship as life’s two supreme experiences—the love of women and the loving friendship of men—can be found throughout his early verse. 48. See Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 7181, for the question of whether any of his “fervid schoolboy friendships” involved sexual activity (p. 75). Crompton’s discussion relies on Faderman’s delineation of the nature of romantic friendships. 49. He even goes so far, in his paraphrase of Virgil’s episode of Nisus and Euryalus, as to turn Nisus, as well, into a youth. Euryalus is still the younger man, but Nisus is referred to as “the Dardan boy” and addresses Euryalus as “the comrade of my youth,” which suggests a rough equality of ages (ll. 38, 58). So much did Virgil’s story possess Byron’s imagination
that he rewrote it twice, the second time in a prose version in imitation of “Ossian,” “The Death of Calmar and Orla,” that makes the denouement even more