The Child and the Return

Abstract

David Selwyn’s account of the child in the work of Jane Austen has been introduced, with a difference set up between his project of drawing attention to a child that is too often forgotten or overlooked, and my own interest in returning the child to the text as a disruptive ‘return of the repressed.’ This initial chapter will begin to introduce some of the complexities that can attend this return through an analysis of Austen’s Persuasion, a novel widely understood to be concerned with romance and iteration, and having little or nothing to do with childhood. In my reading, the child is certainly constructed as marginal within Austen’s narrative, yet it can also be understood in terms that repeat those of the romantic couple, a repetition that, in itself, would seem to place the child at the novel’s heart. It follows that I am not so much interested in recognising the central importance of the child in Austen than in problematizing the notion of a stable material structure such centrality entails. As such, this chapter can be understood to repeat moves made in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal reading of repression in Austen criticism, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’.¹ For Sedgwick, repression can be conducted in ‘anti-repressive’ readings as much as those that are explicitly ‘normal and normalising’ as long as they validate the discrete and visible ‘identity’ of the heterosexual subject as the necessary focus of critical interest, and resist reading all that such a focus requires to be forever ‘dropping out of sight’.²