Love and Pedagogy

Abstract

“Your lessons found the weakest part,” Vanessa complained to her tutor Cadenus, “Aim’d at the head, and reach’d the heart.” Swift and Vanessa weren’t the first couple, not yet the last, to discover that the master-pupil relationship can be a highly aphrodisiac one.² From Heloise and Abelard to Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, history and literature produce recurrent examples of relations that evolve from the academic to the erotic. And Jane Austen’s novels afford in themselves a range of possibilities in the operations of teaching and learning as an emotional bond. As Lionel Trilling points out, Jane Austen “was committed to the ideal of ‘intelligent love,’ according to which the deepest and truest relationship that can exist between human beings is pedagogic. This relationship consists in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct, in the formation of one person’s character by another, the acceptance of another’s guidance in one’s own growth.”³

This was first published in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1975).