Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Sleep and the Novel pp 37–74Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘The Yawns of Lady Bertram’: Sleep, Subjectivity and Sociability in Jane Austen

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

  • 316 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter considers the position of sleep in the work of the novelist of wakefulness par excellence. First, it explores the recurring disciplinary fantasy in Austen of a girl being sent to bed, banished from the world of adult sociability by an unsleeping patriarchal authority. Second, it examines the figure of the ‘sociable sleeper’ in Austen—the somnolent married and/or older person nodding complacently on the fringes of her social worlds whose slumber personifies a status quo that could scarcely be more at ease with itself. Both privileged and peripheral, the sociable sleeper can be understood as a paradoxical embodiment of the disembodiment of Austen’s narrator.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Terry Castle, ‘Sister-Sister’, London Review of Books, 3 August 1995. Castle’s follow-up letter appeared in the LRB, 24 August 1995.

  2. 2.

    John Mullan, ‘Do Sisters Sleep Together?’ in What Matters in Jane Austen? 20 Crucial Puzzles Solved (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 24–38.

  3. 3.

    Notable interventions on Austen and the body include: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 818–37; John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: ‘The Picture of Health’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robyn R. Warhol, ‘The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of Persuasion’, Novel 26, no. 1 (Autumn, 1992): 5–19; Anita G. Gorman, The Body in Illness and Health: Themes and Images in Jane Austen (New York: Peter Lang, 1993); Alan Richardson, ‘Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion’, Poetics Today 23, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 141–60; Mary Jacobus, ‘Jane Austen in the Ghetto’, Women: A Cultural Review 14, no. 1 (2003): 63–84; Kay Young, ‘Feeling Embodied: Consciousness, Persuasion, and Jane Austen’, Narrative 11, no. 1 (January 2003): 78–92; Kathleen Anderson, ‘Lounging Ladies and Galloping Girls: Physical Strength and Femininity in Mansfield Park’, Women’s Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 342–58; Antonina Harbus, ‘Reading Embodied Consciousness in Emma’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 51, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 765–82; Erin Wilson, ‘The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Literature and Medicine 30, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 276–91; John A. Dussinger, In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen’s World (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2015). Sedgwick (822–23) and Jacobus (72–73) both comment briefly on the significance of bedroom scenes in Austen, but aside from that the sleeping body has largely escaped the attention of even Austen’s most embodiment-centred readers.

  4. 4.

    Francis R. Hart, ‘The Spaces of Privacy: Jane Austen’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3 (December 1975): 305–33 (324).

  5. 5.

    Alex Woloch, The One vs The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 53. See also Michael Parrish Lee, ‘The Nothing in the Novel: Jane Austen and the Food Plot’, Novel 45, no. 3 (2012): 368–88, for a discussion of Hurst’s secondariness in relation to his enthusiasm for food and eating.

  6. 6.

    Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  7. 7.

    Sasha Handley, ‘Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660–1760’, History 98, no. 329 (2013), 79–104. For Handley’s brief discussion of sleep in Austen, see Sleep in Early Modern England, 181–82.

  8. 8.

    Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process [1939] (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 138–42 (140).

  9. 9.

    Handley, ‘Sociable Sleeping’, 95.

  10. 10.

    D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 44.

  11. 11.

    Miller’s Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style probes the gap between ‘Austen Style’, a ‘truly out-of-body voice’ (1), godlike in its detached anonymity, and all-too-embodied subject positions, such as spinster and old maid, that her style transcends.

  12. 12.

    Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63–132 (66).

  13. 13.

    See Woloch’s extensive discussion of the minor characters in Pride and Prejudice in The One vs The Many, 43–124. For Woloch, in a process that he describes as the ‘derealization of minor characters’ in Austen, ‘minor characters exemplify certain traits or ways of thinking that the protagonist must learn to discard’ (55). In his Woloch-inspired article ‘The Nothing in the Novel: Jane Austen and the Food Plot’, Lee contends that Austen’s fiction ‘naturalizes an economy of attention in which subjects who don’t have food on their minds are positioned as complex and interesting in contrast to subjects who are flattened through fixations on eating’ (370). Much the same might be said of the contrast between complex insomniacs and uncomplicated sleepers in Austen; it is as though a certain alienation from bodily appetites and dispositions is the price of three-dimensional subjectivity in her work.

  14. 14.

    Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 57.

  15. 15.

    Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 474. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  16. 16.

    Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Janet Todd and Antje Blank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 322. Anne Elliot’s period of sleepless arousal occurs in the cancelled chapter 10 of Persuasion (1818), which is to say that her sleep is doubly sous rature in Austen’s text.

  17. 17.

    Scarcely visible in Austen are the sleep lives of the serving classes. It would take another novel, Jo Baker’s ‘subquel’ Longbourn (London: Doubleday, 2014), which reimagines Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the serving classes, to recover the everyday/everynight life of this sleep-deprived community.

  18. 18.

    Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deidre Le Faye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 121. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  19. 19.

    See especially Levinas on insomnia and what he calls the il y a or ‘there is’—the bare fact of impersonal existence going about the business of existing whether we like it or not—in Existence and Existents, 61–70.

  20. 20.

    Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 833.

  21. 21.

    See Barry Schwartz, ‘Notes on the Sociology of Sleep’, The Sociological Quarterly 11, no. 4 (Autumn 1970): 485–99 (497).

  22. 22.

    Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 96. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  23. 23.

    Robert Hopkins, ‘General Tilney and Affairs of State: The Political Gothic of Northanger Abbey’, Philological Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1978): 213–24, speculates that Tilney is engaged by the government to read seditious tracts by subversives and revolutionaries.

  24. 24.

    Tilney’s suspicions do, however, resonate intriguingly with a comparable narrative of sleep, hospitality and matrimony in Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennet effectively engineers a sleepover for two of her daughters at Netherfield when Jane is obliged by illness to spend the night and Elizabeth quickly follows to nurse her sister—a sleepover which foreshadows the time when Mrs Bennet’s eldest will occupy a bedroom at Bingley’s not as an ailing guest but in her capacity as the lady of the house. In this regard, there is nothing passive at all about Jane’s sleep at Netherfield, given that the act of sleep unconsciously stakes out new socio-economic territory both for her and for the Bennets in general. You might say that Jane, according to the terms of her mother’s somewhat risky but undeniably successful plan, will fall asleep as Miss Bennet and wake up as Mrs Bingley, mistress of Netherfield. The sleeper, in this sequence, is something a bit closer to the sleeper of espionage—an undercover operative secretly waiting to be activated in a new and powerful role.

  25. 25.

    Juliet McMaster’s chapter on hospitality in Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays Past and Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996), 47–58, provides a wide-ranging discussion of the topic but surprisingly omits General Tilney from its rogues’ gallery of bad hosts in Austen. See also James A. W. Heffernan, Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), for a reading of Pride and Prejudice as ‘the first major novel about hospitality and mating in nineteenth-century England’, 213–21 (213).

  26. 26.

    Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

  27. 27.

    Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (New York: Viking Books, 1955), 210–11.

  28. 28.

    Sarah Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003); see 101–11 for Jordan’s reading of Emma.

  29. 29.

    Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 143. On the meanings of Fanny’s passivity, see also Anne-Lise François’s chapter on Mansfield Park in Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 218–68, which, though its concerns do not extend into somnolence and tiredness, offers a wonderfully rewarding and subtle meditation on the ‘habitual meditative “stuckness”’ (258) and gently self-effacing ‘ethos of “non-ado”’ (267) of Austen’s heroine.

  30. 30.

    ‘I define “sleep-piety”…as any sleep-related practice or ritual that was inspired, at least in part, by religious beliefs and that formed part of Christians’ daily efforts to fit their bodies, minds and souls to receive God’s favour.’ Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 69.

  31. 31.

    Tanner, Jane Austen, 60.

  32. 32.

    Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002), 116 (emphasis in original).

  33. 33.

    Even some critics have grown tired of Fanny’s tiredness. Kathleen Anderson, for example, registers exasperation at the ‘more-feminine-than-thou fatigue’ of Mansfield Park’s heroine. Anderson, ‘Lounging Ladies and Galloping Girls’, 353. For an altogether more sympathetic discussion, which argues that Fanny’s tiredness is misread both by other characters in the novel and by the critics, see Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, 71–76.

  34. 34.

    Levinas, Existence and Existents, 25.

  35. 35.

    Tanner, Jane Austen, 152.

  36. 36.

    Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 98.

  37. 37.

    John Lauber, ‘Jane Austen’s Fools’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 14, no. 4 (Autumn 1974): 511–24 (519).

  38. 38.

    Trilling, The Opposing Self, 228.

  39. 39.

    Trilling, The Opposing Self, 230.

  40. 40.

    Martha F. Bowden, ‘What Does Lady Bertram Do?’ English Language Notes 30:2 (1992): 30–33 (32).

  41. 41.

    McMaster, Jane Austen the Novelist, 98.

  42. 42.

    Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, 102.

  43. 43.

    Warhol, ‘The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of Persuasion’, 12.

  44. 44.

    ‘What defines a nonnarratable element’, says Miller, ‘is its incapacity to generate a story. Properly or intrinsically, it has no narrative future.’ Happily married life is the obvious example. Narrative and Its Discontents, 5.

  45. 45.

    See especially Jan B. Gordon’s discussion of Austen in chapter 2 of Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo’s Economies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996).

  46. 46.

    Harrison, ‘In the Absence of Practice’, 1004.

References

  • Anderson, Kathleen. 2009. Lounging Ladies and Galloping Girls: Physical Strength and Femininity in Mansfield Park. Women’s Studies 38 (3): 348–358.

    Google Scholar 

  • Austen, Jane. 2005a. Emma. Edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2005b. Mansfield Park. Edited by John Wiltshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006a. Northanger Abbey. Edited by Barbara M. Benedict and Deidre La Faye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006b. Persuasion. Edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006c. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Pat Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006d. Sense and Sensibility. Edited by Edward Copeland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Jo. 2014. Loungbourn. London: Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barthes, Roland. 2002. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowden, Martha F. 1992. What Does Lady Bertram Do? English Language Notes 30 (2): 30–33.

    Google Scholar 

  • Castle, Terry. 1995. Sister-Sister. In London Review of Books, August 3.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cixous, Hélène. 1986. Sortiees. In The Newly Born Woman, ed. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément and trans. Betsy Wing, 63–132. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dussinger, John A. 1990. In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen’s World. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Elias, Norbert. (1939) 2000. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • François, Anne-Lise. 2008. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, Jan B. 1996. Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo’s Economies. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gorman, Anita G. 1993. The Body in Illness and Health: Themes and Images in Jane Austen. New York: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Handley, Sasha. 2013. Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660–1760. History 98 (329): 79–104.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. Sleep in Early Modern England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Harbus, Antonina. 2011. Reading Embodied Consciousness in Emma. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 51 (4, Autumn): 765–782.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, Paul. 2009. In the Absence of Practice. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 987–1009.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hart, Francis R. 1975. The Spaces of Privacy: Jane Austen. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (3 (Dec.): 305–333.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heffernan, James A.W. 2014. Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hopkins, Robert. 1978. General Tilney and Affairs of State: The Political Gothic of Northanger Abbey. Philological Quarterly 57 (2): 213–224.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacobus, Mary. 2003. Jane Austen in the Ghetto. Women: A Cultural Review 14 (1): 63–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Claudia L. 1990. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jordan, Sarah. 2003. The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lauber, John. 1974. Jane Austen’s Fools. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 14 (4, Autumn): 511–524.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, Michael Parrish. 2012. The Nothing in the Novel: Jane Austen and the Food Plot. Novel 45 (3): 368–388.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 2001. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McMaster, Julie. 1996. Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays Past and Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, D.A. 1981. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2003. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mullan, John. 2013. Do Sisters Sleep Together? In What Matters in Jane Austen? 20 Crucial Puzzles Solved, 24–38. London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richardson, Alan. 2002. Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion. Poetics Today 23 (1, Spring): 141–160.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schwartz, Barry. 1970. Notes on the Sociology of Sleep. The Sociological Quarterly 11 (4, Autumn): 485–499.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1991. Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Critical Inquiry 17 (4, Summer): 818–837.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tanner, Tony. 1986. Jane Austen. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Trilling, Lionel. 1955. The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Warhol, Robyn R. 1992. The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of Persuasion. Novel 26 (1, Autumn): 5–19.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, Erin. 2012. The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century. Literature and Medicine 30 (2, Fall): 276–291.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wiltshire, John. 1992. Jane Austen and the Body: ‘The Picture of Health’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Woloch, Alex. 2003. The One vs The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, Kay. 2003. Feeling Embodied: Consciousness, Persuasion, and Jane Austen. Narrative 11 (1, Jan.): 78–92.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Michael Greaney

Authors
  1. Michael Greaney
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Greaney, M. (2018). ‘The Yawns of Lady Bertram’: Sleep, Subjectivity and Sociability in Jane Austen. In: Sleep and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75253-2_2

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation