Abstract
Jane Austen’s relationship to Laurence Sterne, like her relationship to other eighteenth-century predecessors, is at once intimate and also quite cornplex. Biographer Park Honan briefly notes the connection to Sterne, and Austen’s letters as well as a direct reference in Mansfield Park—Maria Bertram’s invocation of the caged starling from A Sentimental Journey—provide some clear evidence ofhis influence.2 Occasionally critics acknowledge a stylistic affinity between the two as comic writers, seeing elements of “Shandyism” in Austen’s most capricious moments, especially in her juvenilia.3 Since textual examples such as these span the course of Austen’s life and writing career they cannot be dismissed as the vagaries of youthful literary taste, although it still might be possible to object to them as scant references of scarcely more than anecdotal interest. In fact, there is no indication that Austen’s taste for Sterne was something she outgrew, as I shall argue in more detail in the pages to follow. And to be sure, as most undergraduates who have seen a Norton Critical Edition of Austen can attest, seemingly fleeting references like this one have served as central considerations for scholars interested in the cultural and political context of the novels, especially in the case of Mansfield.4 It would be fair to say that the relatively narrow focus of these earlier critical investigations, however, is inadequate for establishing the significant degree to which Austen is indebted to Sterne’s work.
[T]he ropes which tighten the structure … are all rooted in the heart.
Virginia Woolf1
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. II (London: Hogarth Press, 1966) 75. The quote derives from Woolf’s discussion of Pride and Prejudice in the essay “Phases of Fiction,” but is a perfect fit for all of Austen’s novels.
See Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987). The quote, “I can’t get out!” comes from the episode “THE PASSPORT [:] The Hotel at Paris,” Sentimental Journey (New York: Oxford UP, 1984) 71. For an excellent discussion of the moral implications of this reference,
see Jill Heydt-Stevenson, “‘Slipping into the Ha-Ha’: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 55.3 (2000) 309–39. Heydt-Stevenson’s otherwise perceptive speculations do not connect Sterne’s more obvious bawdiness with Austen’s, an absence even more notable in her stimulating Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
One of the clearest examples of such significance would be the well-known debate over Austen’s interest (and by extension, her complicity) in contemporary attitudes toward slavery and British imperialism. This ongoing dialogue usually takes Mansfield Park as its point of departure, often beginning with a decontextualized reference to Sterne’s starling. The most widely cited and significant work is Edward Said’s chapter on Austen in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) 80–96, an argument he restates in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 64.
See also Susan Fraiman’s important response, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism,” Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 206–23 (originally published in 1995 in Critical Inquiry).
Earlier “exposures” include Moira Ferguson’s “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender,” Oxford Literary Review 13.1–2 (1991): 118–39;
Joseph Lew’s “‘That Abominable Traffic’: Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery,” History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens: U Georgia P, 1994) 271–300. For a corrective rejoinder to this veritable cottage industry in “colonial Austen,”
see John Wiltshire’s “Decolonising Mansfield Park,” Essays in Criticism 53.4 (2003): 303–22.
This curious phenomenon includes less satisfying or underdeveloped chapters in otherwise outstanding books as different in subject as Johnson’s classic Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, which is stronger on all the other Austen works it discusses; Penny Gay’s Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), which seems stymied by the potential “theatricality” of only this novel (interestingly, Paula Byrne’s identically titled monograph of the same year ignores the novel completely);
Clara Tuite’s Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), which features a brief but thought-provoking fivepage discussion of the novel;
William Galperin’s The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: U Penn P, 2003), which devotes a mere 22 out of 244 pages to a remarkably convoluted discussion of the work;
and D.A. Miller’s stunning Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), where 7 pages (out of 108) explore a “vulnerability” in the novel’s style that devolves upon a heavy biographical imperative.
Peter Knox-Shaw’s recent Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004) struggles rather considerably to place the novel in a “post-Enlightenment” context (227). For a more extensive discussion of Gay’s book, particularly her treatment of Persuasion, see my review essay in Comparative Drama 38.2 (Spring 2004): 128–33.
See Tuite, Romantic Austen 1–22. A fairly well-established line in Romantic circles claims Austen comfortably as their own, in opposition to scholars who seem equally ready to reabsorb her into the late eighteenth-century literary tradition. In addition to Tuite, Galperin’s Historical Austen; Clifford Siskin’s The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change 1700–1830 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), as well as his earlier The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford UP, 1988);
and James Thompson’s Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen (University Park: Penn State UP, 1988) all provide arguments in favor of a decidedly Romantic Austen.
Perhaps the most extreme position on this matter is that of Janet Todd, who claims that “the main motivator of Austen, beyond any party political purpose, is her opposition to sensibility in all its forms” (Gender, Art and Death [New York: Continuum, 1993] 141). More recently, John Wiltshire’s Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) still assumes “Austen’s own dislike of sensibility, of the late eighteenth-century cult of feeling that was premised on ‘natural affection’” (10–11). Tuite’s Romantic Austen follows in this long-standing tradition by reading Sense and Sensibility as the site of Austen’s “critique” and “attack” on the cult of sensibility (see especially the Introduction and Chapter 2). Compare each of these positions with Todd’s earlier suggestion in The Sign of Angellica (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), which argues that “by the time these women [turn-of-the-century writers like Wollstonecraft, Burney, and Austen] came to write they were inevitably heiresses of the centrality which the sentimental modes and signs had given to women. And even they, with all their mockery, could not entirely escape the fantasy” (191). Though wary of assuming “mockery,” I find this assessment more nuanced and convincing. I am intentionally avoiding a reiteration of the old debate over Austen’s politics as Whiggish or Tory-committed, since both positions tend to reduce the complex artistic accomplishment of the author to reductive ideological gamesmanship.
See Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (New York: Oxford, 1975) and Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel for representative, opposing perspectives on Austen’s politics. As perceptive critics like Johnson have noted, Sensibility was used for quite diverse ideological purposes. On this matter, see also her Equivocal Beings (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995)
and Chris Jones’ Radical Sensibility (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Two particularly astute and useful recent works also merit note: Paul Hamilton’s Metaromanticism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003) complicates the ways in which Austen might be considered “conservative” in a more sophisticated and historically specific sense; and J.A. Downie makes a fresh and convincing case for Austen’s own “genteel” but decidedly not “bourgeois” perspective (“Who Says She’s a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen’s Novels,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40.1 [2006]: 69–84).
See Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984). For an excellent history of critical responses that presume Austen’s safety and stability, see Claudia Johnson, “The Divine Miss Jane,” Janeites 25–44. Significantly, even studies tracing Austen’s “rebellion” (usually in her early writings) still come to similar conclusions about such exuberance ultimately being “tamed” in the mature novels; see, for example,
D.W. Harding’s classic “Regulated Hatred,” Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963);
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979);
Margaret Doody’s “Introduction,” Catharine and Other Writings (New York: Oxford UP, 1993); and Tuite’s Romantic Austen, particularly Chapter 1. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to counter the long history yoking Austen’s practice to social regulation is Galperin’s Historical Austen, which, despite its studied oversubtlety and concomitant lapses in clarity, provides a provocative attempt to tease out the significance of Austen’s “silences.”
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) provides an instructive mid-century barometer of the difficulties inherent in separating these two categories; see in particular his lengthy entry for “sense,” which includes ten distinct uses, ranging from “sensation” and “sensibility” to “reason” and “moral perception” (ed. Jack Lynch [NY: Walker Publishing Co., 2003] 460–61). In The Philosophy of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1951), Ernst Cassirer argues that for eighteenth-century philosophers, reason is no longer the sum total of “innate ideas” … [but] the original intellectual force which guides the discovery and determination of truth … The whole eighteenth century understands reason in this sense; not as a sound body of knowledge … but as a kind of energy. (13) Drawing on this crucial passage, R.F. Brissenden asserts that the century “deserves to be called the Age of Reasoning rather than the Age of Reason”; see Virtue in Distress (London: Macmillan, 1974) 51, emphasis in original. More recently, Wendy Motooka’s The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Routledge, 1998) draws from Brissenden’s examples and adds the complicating third term of “quixotism”; her related reading of Sterne argues usefully that he “acknowledges that rationality and sentimentality are not opposites,” though I disagree with her claims for his “anti-sentimentalism” (184, 189).
In Historicity Siskin discusses the usefulness of preserving Romanticism as “a valuable label” and “as a norm rather than a period” (143, 131). For related discussions, see Marlon Ross, Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1989);
James Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998);
Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).
For a study that places Austen in a specifically Regency rather than Romantic context, see Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (New York: Routledge, 1996).
This perspective was first articulated in the nineteenth century, following Austen’s death and biographical apotheosis in 1817, and given fresh life through James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir in 1870; for a survey of illustrative responses, see Joanne Wilkes, “‘Song of the Dying Swan’?: The Nineteenth-Century Response to Persuasion,” Studies in the Novel 28.1 (Spring 1996): 38–56.
Twentieth-century critics have often followed suit: Harold Bloom claims that in this novel “Austen never loses dramatic intensity” (The Western Canon [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994] 256); more indulgently,
Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992), imagines “the reader of the final pages is in tears” (182); Susan Ridgeway’s “Thoroughly Modern Jane Austen” provides a characteristic fan response, referring to “Austen’s last complete and—in the eyes of many—the perfect and most satisfying of all the novels,” while asserting its timeless appeal, as the title suggests (JASNA News 20.1 [Spring 2004]: 1); Miller’s Jane Austen provides a notable exception in response to this sentimental favorite—a shift from his own earlier reading of pathos-suffused narrative “purity” (Narrative and Its Discontents [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981] 104)—casting the novel as a stylistic “false step” that risks “the retraction of her great world-historical achievement” (68, 75). Again, Woolf anticipates most later responses to Austen, in whose works generally she sees a “peculiar intensity which she alone can impart,” while nonetheless holding that Persuasion exhibits both “a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness,” suggesting both a lapse and a fresh departure for this work (“Jane Austen,” Women and Writing [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979] 113, 118).
See John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) and “Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion,”
Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997);
Juliet McMaster, Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (New York: Palgrave, 2004), especially 172–73. Rather astonishingly, Thompson claims “emotion itself is something idealized by Austen, for emotion must always remain something of an abstraction … and it has nothing to do with the body. It remains an entirely dematerialized phenomenon” (75, my emphasis).
Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body 192–93. Mary Waldron’s recent Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) contributes to this problem by claiming that “this novel is not a new, late celebration of sensibility, a ‘Woman of Feeling’” (136). Similarly, Tuite reduces Austen’s “project” to “outdating sentiment as a symptom of fashion” and the “outdating of sensibility as a stock of social and cultural capital” (Romantic Austen 60). Both readings miss the mark completely, failing to do justice either to Austen or to her influences.
In a different context, Waldron refers to Wentworth’s “instinctive intimacy” with Anne, which is wholly characteristic of many moments in the novel (Fiction of Her Time 145). Perhaps the most common (and most libidinally fraught) opportunity for physical touch would be dancing, but Anne’s steadfast avoidance of the activity makes this option impossible. Austen’s early letters reinforce the visceral excitement of dance (and prospective partners) for a young, unmarried woman, a theme treated by Alison G. Sulloway’s Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia: U Penn P, 1989) 138–59. Cheryl A. Wilson argues that the novel’s structural and thematic elements draw from contemporary dance manuals and other customs of the age (“Dance, Physicality, and Social Mobility in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” Persuasions 25 [2003]: 55–75).
Jan Fergus makes an excellent case for this kind of intimacy being virtually omnipresent throughout Austen’s work. See “Sex and Social Life in Jane Austen’s Novels,” Jane Austen in a Social Context, ed. David Monaghan (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981) 66–85. Related points about the “sexual atmosphere” of the novels are made in Sulloway (Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood 223 n. 3) and Julia Prewitt Brown’s Jane Austen’s Novels (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979).
This visual language of the eyes is one of the oldest of Sensibility’s tropes. See, for example, Martha Sansom’s poem, “To Cleons’s Eyes” (1720): “The love you dare but look I find: / The eyes speak best the lover’s mind. … In looking wondrous magic lies, / Oh! there is poetry in eyes.” This tradition is also filtered through conduct literature of the period, especially when addressing courtship, as in Wetenhall Wilkes’ A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740): “We look upon a woman’s eyes to be the interpreters of her heart. … The language of the eyes is very significant” (see Vivien Jones, ed. Women in the Eighteenth Century [NY: Routledge, 1990] 32). On the use of typographic conventions in works of Sensibility, see Janet Todd’s Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986). For a brief, useful summary of the use and debates over “the Shandean dash,”
see Frank Felsenstein’s “Aposiopesis and After,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.4 (2004): 673–77.
For an elaboration of a “counterperformative” logic in the writing of one of Austen’s contemporaries, Elizabeth Hands, see Ira Livingston, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997) 54–57. Emily Auerbach makes a related claim regarding Austen’s reference to Scheherazade in the novel (Searching for Jane Austen [Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2004] 256).
See S. Candace Ward, “‘Active Sensibility and Positive Virtue’: Wollstonecraft’s ‘Grand Principle of Action,’” European Romantic Review 8.4 (Fall 1997): 409–31. Wollstonecraft still suffers from terribly reductive and inaccurate critical assessments that claim her as a simple opponent of Sensibility. Janet Todd’s richly detailed recent biography, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), provides a valuable corrective; see also her brief comparative treatment of Godwin’s representation of Wollstonecraft with Austen’s Marianne Dashwood (Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen 59). In contemporary writings that receive less attention than Wollstonecraft’s, Maria Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) and Practical Education (1798) and Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) make similar points about this necessary balance between reason and feeling.
For two very different studies exploring the ways women could be enabled and even empowered by the literature of the period, especially through the novel, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) and Mellor, Mothers.
Devoney Looser’s British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000) provides an important addition to this debate. Looser makes clear that any notion of “quietness” or “restraint” also must take into account Austen’s substantive—and at times even “combative”—engagement with the genre of history, especially in her early writings.
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© 2007 Christopher C. Nagle
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Nagle, C.C. (2007). The Social Work of Persuasion: Austen and the New Sensorium. In: Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609327_5
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