Introduction: The Persistence of Jane Austen’s Romance

Abstract

If the English eighteenth century is understood as a period of social and material reform on an unprecedented scale, characterised by discourses of individual ‘rights’ and ‘egalitarianism’, of ‘rationality’ and ‘liberty’, wrought through struggles between traditionally oppressive social structures and emergent forms of individual consciousness, then Jane Austen seems a rather arbitrary literary expression of English enlightenment. To receive her six famous novels from this perspective, we would expect to find tropes that herald the great political, social, material, philosophical and economic changes taking place in her lifetime, and the lifetime of her narratives; echoes or displaced imprints of the calls for — or resistances to — freedom from accrued tradition, and increased demand for liberty of thought. One of the most overwhelming facts about these six novels, however, remains their overt indifference at the level of content in the great social, economic, political or material events forming their immediate context. This has always been an interesting absence, given the author’s credentials as an intelligent and literate woman. The absence becomes more visible when we remember the naval brothers who had seen action against the French, chased real pirates, carried bullion for the East India Company, and just missed the Battle of Trafalgar; or the cousin married to a French aristocrat guillotined in 1794.²⁴

Every universalizing approach, whether the phenomenological or the semiotic, will from the dialectical point of view be found to conceal its own contradictions and repress its own historicity by strategically framing its perspective so as to omit the negative, absence, contradiction, repression, the non-dit, or the impensé. To restore the latter requires that abrupt and paradoxical dialectical restructuration of the basic problematic which has often seemed to be the most characteristic gesture and style of dialectical method in general, keeping the terms but standing the problem on its head.

Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act²¹

A critique of ideology has thus to proceed in two moves. First, of course, it has to follow Jameson’s well-known injunction ‘Historicize!’, and to discern in an apparently universal unchangeable limitation the ideological ‘reification’ and absolutization of a certain contingent historical constellation. … The second move then, in a kind of reflective turn, compels us to conceive this explanatory reference to concrete historical circumstances itself as a ‘false’, ideological attempt to circumvent the traumatic kernel of the Real (the death drive, the non-existence of sexual relationship), to explain it away and thus render invisible its structural necessity.

Slavoj Žižek, ‘There is no Sexual Relationship’²²

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older — the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.²³

Jane Austen, Persuasion