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INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adverselyaffect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. U-M-I University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. M148106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9325040 Her subject's voice: Articulating the "1" in the novels of Jane Austen Middleton, Linda Charlene, Ph.D. University of Hawaii, 1993 V·M·I 300N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor,MI48106 HER SUBJECT'S VOICE: ARTICULATING THE "I" IN THE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN .A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH MAY 1993 By Linda C. Middleton Dissertation Committee: Craig Howes, Chairperson James Kastely Nell Altizer Mary-Elisabeth Fowkes Tobin Elaine Hatfield iii @ Copyright 1993 by Linda C. Middleton IV DEDICATIONS to myfamily for their support to Alan for his spirit to The M. G. core for their esprit de corps v ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on Jane Austen's representations of women in her five principal novels. I associate Austen's delineations of women as subjects with her own changing sense of identity as she become an author of a certain popularity and confidence, although unidentified throughout her career. I begin with Austen's attempts to work within eighteenth-century aesthetics and genres which were for the most part founded on sentimental representations of women that privileged the visible, or specular, dimensions of their subjectivity. Following Austen's movement through the discursive tields determined by the various traditional genres--the history or bildungsroman, the gothic, the romance, and the novel of psychological realism--I approach each novel as a fairly fresh negotiation of a given generic form. I suggest a "progress," though not necessarily a teleology, in her aesthetic innovations and strategies of women's representation. My critique traces narrative patterns and motifs that refer the reader back to a notion of the woman writer emerging from anonymity into authority. Austen's movement away from positing women's subjectivity based on specular and social identity in her novels, toward a more mutable, t1uid paradigm of "self," was coincident with her personal sense of "authority" as a writer. The increasing sureness of her own writerly "I" coincided with her renovation of an aesthetic based on the "eye," and her discovery of generic fields more friendly to the representation of the many dimensions of women's identities, including "body" as more than a specular icon, and "voice" as a phenomenon incorporated in the text as "body." vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract v Introduction Eye to "I": Articulating the Terms 1 Chapter One The Anxious Aesthetic of Northanger Abbey: Catherine Morland's "Unpractised Eye" 10 Chapter Two "Pictures of Perfection": The Specular Dialectic in Pride and Prejudice 38 Chapter Three Mansfield Park: The Heroine in History . 71 Chapter Four The Subject of Desire: Emma 118 Chapter Five Her Subject's Voice? The Case of Anne E. 159 *** Notes 187 Works Cited 236 INTRODUCTION Eye to "I": Articulating the Terms A critique of how an author works through her fictions to articulate a subjectivity may seem an outdated project, or at least a nostalgic one, in a period when the integrity of the subject is being actively contested. Such projects are usually forgiven however, when the "subject" or author in question is, like Jane Austen, writing at a historical distance from the modern (or post-modern) crises of identity. Most canonical Austen criticism comfortably addresses her technique in representing coherently articulated subjects, and even praises or takes her to task for her various efforts. Thus, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot receive general applause, though Elizabeth Bennet is typically the favorite. By critical consensus, Catherine Morland is too early and parodic a sketch of a heroine; Elinor and Marianne Dashwood appear to be a strangely fractured version of one. And Fanny Price, almost without fail, is condemned as a thoroughgoing disappointment, hardly believable as being Austen's creation. Updating these classical critiques alters these judgments somewhat--most notably those concerning Fanny, which have become more favorable as critics have become more liberal about what is acceptably "Austenian." What underlies all of these critical responses. however, is an unstated concept of Austen herself, My own examination of Jane Austen as a woman writer who answers the challenge of self-articulation in representing all of her heroines leans heavily on a 2 notion of Austen as well. I would like however to distinguish my work from biographical criticism, per se, in both its Freudian forms--although I do at times deploy Freudian analysis--and the current materialist and historicist agendas. Austen's life, her social, economic and family circumstances, are of interest; but even now details on her efforts to write and be published are almost inaccessible. The early drafts of her novels, her writing habits, or correspondence about her notions of fiction-writing are virtually nonexistent. 1 I am therefore concentrating on the skeletal records of her publishing activities, consisting mostly of a few of her own or her family's letters, and the relevant speculations of biographers, supported somewhat with recent historical research on women's authorship during Austen's time. I will argue that Austen's sporadically successful, and disappointing, forays into print do seem to correspond to the varied character of each novel's articulation. As Austen struggled to get herself published and read, the novels themselves seem to shift slowly in their aesthetics, but also in the nature of the "solutions" provided for each heroine at novel's end. These shifts are of course not purely personal. While describing Austen's move from eighteenth-century mimesis, primarily specular.' to nineteenth-century psychological realism, intlected by Romanticism and representations of interiority, I ani obviously echoing a number of time-honored accounts of this period of literary history. However, it is a commonplace that Austen negotiated these movements in a highly specific manner, with some critics celebrating her "individuality" or "genius" so adamantly, that they paradoxically depersonalize her as they seem to free her from the contingencies of 3 historical/social context or contemporary constructs of gender.' Contemporary criticism has often countered this "modernist" Austen, with a degree of "contextualizing," or grounding that eclipses any account of the specific aesthetic innovations that cannot be explained through appeals to the techniques' of other contemporary women novelists, or as mere parodic responses to masculine texts. In Austen's case, the famous feminist byline, "the personal is the political" can be further qualified by saying that "the personal is the aesthetic." Though the sketchy dating of the "originals" and "revisions" of her three earliest novels is unsettling, it is possible I believe to explore the changing "fields" of Austen's experiments in women's representation without insisting on a teleology of her artistic growth. When working in a predominantly 18th-century mimetic vein, Austen struggles to "ground" her heroines in something distinct from their specular identity. In Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, she plays off the specular in a way that betrays her consciousness of how inadequate that mode is for the representation of woman's subjectivity. In this light, Elizabeth Bennet is perhaps the quintessential Austen heroine because she seems to avoid being defined by her appearance or specular identity, to master the talent of the specular herself, and to make it her vehicle for "apprehending" and "appropriating" the beautifully ordered universe of Pemberley and its specularly-impressive master. Elizabeth's specular contest is, however, not quite this self-evident. Even at this early stage, Austen in her way notably juxtaposes beauty and wit, the visible and the vocal, and the ground of the body and the ground of property, but further complicates matters 4 by considering these oppositions in con-text-vthe literal "text" which represents the limits of a writer's representation. The ultimate "field" for Austen's experimentation is mapped out in her manipulations of genre. Commonly discussed as parodic gestures, these shapings are also part of Austen's explorations of different "grounds" or "fields" for the articulation of women's subjectivity. Many critics see Norrhanger Abbey, for instance, as an early "comedy of manners" invaded or flawed by the alien form of the Gothic. My analysis of Northanger draws on recent feminist criticism which discusses the long-maligned Gothic as a politically-relevant genre with special connections to the themes of victimage and the repression of women.