Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

“Touching from a Distance”: Touch and Intimacy in the Work of Jane Austen

Supervisor: Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde” by Olivia Malfait

2007-2008 Malfait 1

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;

Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

(W.H. Auden)

In every touch more intimate meanings hide

(Rupert Brooke) Malfait 2

Acknowledgements

First of all, I wish to thank my parents, who gave me the chance to embark on this academic adventure, and were always there for me throughout the years, trusting yet subtly encouraging me when I needed it.

To my dear friends, I owe a great amount of gratitude for being my patient soundboard, and for putting up with a friend who had her head in the nineteenth century for half the time.

Most indebted am I, to Professor Marysa Demoor: for her incessant enthusiasm and close guidance along the way, for thinking with me on every aspect of this dissertation and for relentlessly providing heartening comments and insightful suggestions.

Finally, but certainly not unimportantly, I wish to thank a lady who lived over two hundred years ago, who never married yet wrote of love, who died before her time yet lived a life filled with wit and humour. Many thanks to Jane Austen, whose “little bits of ivory” are still very much alive in collective memory today, and will no doubt continue to be so in years, decades, centuries to come. Malfait 3

Abbreviations

In this dissertation, Austen’s letters and canonical works will be referenced as follows:

Jane Austen’s Letters = Letters

Northanger Abbey = NA

Pride and Prejudice = P&P

Sense and Sensibility = S&S

Emma = Emma

Mansfield Park = MP

Persuasion = Persuasion Malfait 4

Contents

Acknowledgements ...... 2

Abbreviations ...... 3

Contents ...... 4

Introduction ...... 6

1 Defining Touch and Intimacy ...... 11

2 Touch and Intimacy in Austen’s Personal Life ...... 18

3 Touch and Intimacy in Recreation ...... 29

3.1 The Importance of Dancing ...... 30

3.2 Staging a Play ...... 45

3.3 Riddles and Romance ...... 50

4 Touch and Intimacy in Appearances and Objects ...... 54

4.1 The Gaze ...... 55

4.2 Paleness and Blushing ...... 61

4.3 Keepsakes and Portraits ...... 68

5 Touch and Intimacy in Conversation ...... 77

5.1 Gossip and Secrets ...... 78

5.1.1 Gossip ...... 78

5.1.2 Secrets ...... 84

5.2 Letters ...... 90

5.3 The Discourse of Love ...... 98

5.3.1 Flirtation ...... 98

5.3.2 Betrothal Scenes ...... 105

Conclusion ...... 118

Works Cited ...... 120 Malfait 5

Introduction Malfait 6

Introduction

In 1928, over a century after Jane Austen’s death1, the feminist author and critic

Rebecca West reacted against the misconception – present in many readers of Austen – that her novels are anxiously considered with keeping matters buttoned up, stressing the ignorance of Austen’s unmarried heroines:

There are those who are deluded by the decorousness of her manner, by the fact that

her virgins are so virginal that they are unaware of their virginity, into thinking that

she is ignorant of passion. But look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences,

joined together with the bright nails of craftsmanship, painted with the gay varnish of

wit, and you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love, whose

delicate reactions to men make the heroines of all our later novelists seem merely to

turn signs, “Stop” or “Go” toward the advancing male. (West, qtd. in Fowler 269-270)

West rightly refutes the claim that Austen is “ignorant of passion”: too many critics have dwelt on the fact of her spinsterhood, quick to project a presumed lack of experience on her novels. As a consequence, Austen’s oeuvre has long been perceived – and is often still regarded as such to this very day – as the epitome of restraint, foreshadowing the Victorian era in its insistence on propriety and its condemnation of all matters of a sexual nature in the public sphere. However, to support such a notion is to deny the fact that, between “the lattice-work of her neat sentences”, Austen has craftily constructed instances of intimacy, desire and even erotic tension (not to mention the direct inclusion of such scandalous issues as elopement and adultery in her stories). True, these aspects are at times well-hidden underneath layers of irony, mediation and metaphor: Austen may have deliberately coated

1 Jane Austen was born in 1775, and died in 1817. Malfait 7

them in a cloak of concealment, thus allowing for her novels to be published in a world where direct sexual references in a literary work were still severely frowned upon, especially in a book written “by a Lady” (which was the alias under which her novels were anonymously published). Therefore, it is often between the lines, in the blank spaces where the reader’s imagination has free play, that the characters reach out to each other.

What I set out to achieve in this dissertation, is to bring to the fore those instances in

Austen where touch and intimacy play a vital part in the interaction between the protagonists. I will indicate that – contrary to what many critics would readily believe – occurrences of this nature are the rule, rather than the exception: once the surface layer is removed, scenes of intimate contact between the various players in Austen’s game are abundant.

The idea for dealing with this subject was first suggested by Professor Demoor, who drew inspiration from Santanu Das’s work, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, in which Das researches occasions of intimacy between soldiers in the trenches, and how these are reflected in the writings of the War Poets. Since I have long taken an interest in

Jane Austen’s oeuvre, and in view of the fact that I have written my BA paper on Pride and

Prejudice2, the discussion of touch and intimacy in her work seemed both a logical continuation of my previous efforts, and an interesting new angle from which to approach her writings. Given that the space allotted for my research is confined, I decided to limit my treatment of the subject to the six canonical novels: Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice,

Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion.

2 In “Looking for Lizzie: The Representation of Elizabeth Bennet in Recent Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice”, I discussed how contemporary filmmakers reinterpret Austen’s heroine for a modern audience. Malfait 8

As I pointed out before, many reviewers overlook instances of touch and intimacy in

Austen’s work, dismissing it as reserved or detached. Feminist critics like Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their highly influential work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, have described Austen’s novels as relating “the taming not just of any woman but specifically of a rebellious, imaginative girl who is amorously mastered by a sensible man” (qtd. in Fowler 274) – thus seemingly agreeing with the general view that Austen’s novels are entirely submissive to patriarchal ideals. Indeed, her heroines are no mere ignorant virgins waiting for a man to transport them into married life: they are often headstrong young women, engaging as much in subtle acts of intimacy-enhancing contact, as the men do. Austen’s characters are not immune to external stimuli: they are made of flesh and blood, their bodies react to sudden impulses as intensely as those of people outside the realm of fiction. When they are touched, they feel it deeply. When they establish an intimacy with someone, it is never without meaning. John

Wiltshire, aware of the actuality of these bodies, has studied their workings in Jane Austen and the Body: the “Picture of Health”. However, his concern lies mainly with the mechanics of Austen’s characters, focusing more on matters like health and illness, than on sensations of touch and intimacy.

Critical writing on Austen has proven very popular over the last two centuries: in the past, a plethora of aspects of Austen’s oeuvre has been treated. The subject of touch and intimacy has on occasion been mentioned – especially in recent years – yet critics tend to do so only in passing, or without attributing the due importance to it. It appears that the themes of touch and intimacy itself have never been the focal point of a treatise on Austen.

This dissertation aims to fill the void, by uniting all facets relating to touch and intimacy, and Malfait 9

the different guises that it appears under in Austen’s oeuvre. I will research closeness as it exists or is created between men and women (a vital stage in the marriage plot), but also as it is present in relationships between women alone. Since Austen abstained from writing any scenes describing men on their own, a full discussion of male intimacy proves difficult – yet sometimes it is implicitly hinted at.

The method I have adopted in the course of writing this dissertation, consists of a close reading of the source material, in search of relevant passages with which to illustrate the various points made, combined with an eclectic use of theories that are applicable to the subject. The paper itself is subdivided into a series of sections. To begin with, I wish to establish a definition of “touch” and “intimacy”, and the different meanings that can be attributed to these concepts. Secondly, I briefly examine Austen’s biography to make out how touch and intimacy were present in her own life. A third chapter will look at the importance of recreational pursuits (like dancing, composing riddles or staging a play) in establishing a connection between the characters that inhabit Austen’s novels. The fourth section of this treatise is concerned with how intimacy is often reflected in appearances (i.e. looks, paleness and blushing) and even in inanimate objects (such as keepsakes and portraits). Finally, I will discuss how conversation in Austen often functions as either a catalyst, or as proof of deeper feelings – be it under the guise of gossip, secrets, letters or declarations of love.

In treating these various aspects, I aim to indicate that, rather than being the epitome of restraint, Jane Austen was a novelist who endowed her work with an abundance of instances where touch and intimacy are most definitely at play, albeit – to a greater or lesser extent – in a mediated, indirect or deliberately concealed manner. Malfait 10

1 Defining Touch and Intimacy

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1 Defining Touch and Intimacy

Santanu Das has described the sense of touch as “the most elusive and private of the senses” (6), which is not an unfair claim. Touch differs from the other senses, in that other senses are much more unambiguously definable: we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, speak with our tongue and smell with our nose. The sense of touch, however, is more difficult to pin down. It is both the most fleeting and the most intimate of the senses. As Das puts it, “*v+ision, sound and the material conditions all carry the body beyond its margins; tactile experience, by contrast, stubbornly adheres to the flesh. At once intense and diffuse, working at the threshold between the self and the world, touch can be said to open up the body at a more intimate, affective level” (6).

In many ways, touch also finds its reflection in language. As Das points out, language

is full of references to touch: all our words are in some way an attempt to reach out

to people. We speak of being ‘in touch’ with our friends or being in ‘safe hands’; we

refer ‘warmly’ to our loved ones, are ‘touched’ and ‘moved’ by people or

experiences, we ‘jump out of our skin’ in fright and some things get ‘under our skin’.

Fundamental to our ideas of the self, touch is almost impossible to express: that is

perhaps why the entry under touch is one of the longest in the Oxford English

Dictionary. (21)

The role taken up by touch in our daily discourse might indicate that it is the most important and expansive of the senses. As explained above by Das, touch does not just enter our lives under a strictly physical guise. Touch also has a figurative meaning that connects it with intimacy: when one is “moved” or “touched” by a person, this suggests that – often unwittingly – a connection is brought about between yourself and the other. This bond can Malfait 12

result from a positive encounter, but it can just as well be caused by a friction or comment that touches you in a negative way. Even though the instant of contact is not enjoyable, it will still have occurred: the result is a reluctant intimacy in which you carry a part of the other person – the part that has offended or even hurt you – within yourself. This is what happens after Darcy slights Lizzie at the Meryton Ball: the encounter is not a pleasant one, but nevertheless a connection has been established.

As Das further notes, contrary to other senses, touch is characterized by “the immensity of its reach: we get to know through touch alone – or at times in close conjunction with vision or sound – size, texture, temperature, weight, hardness/softness, viscosity, depth, flatness, movement, composition and space” (21). However, touch does not only work to define external characteristics of objects and people. To quote Das once more:

The cutaneous layers also point to what lies within. Kicking, kissing, clinging,

caressing, hitting, hugging, holding, shoving, stroking, soothing: changes in gestures

and dermal pressure alert us to the complexity of our emotional and affective life,

govern our relationship to other beings, both human and animal. (21)

This way, touch can convey to the other our inner state of being. It can be accompanied by words that express what we feel: words of anger or love, excitement or disappointment.

However, at times touch can also communicate emotions without having to verbalize the latter at the same time. Furthermore, instances of tactile contact are not always conscious: where an infatuation is growing, for example, the two people involved will have the unconscious desire to touch each other. In Austen’s age, the rules and regulations for social conduct were a lot stricter than they are now. As a consequence, it can be assumed that a lot of the impulses for touching were caught right before they would have occurred: people Malfait 13

were conditioned to avoid too overt a display of emotions. However, there were occasions where these impulses were allowed to slip between the mazes of the net, one of them being the dances at balls. I will discuss these occurrences in further detail in the following sections.

Thus, by means of touch, certain levels of intimacy are often established or expressed. While the skin can be regarded as the organ of touch, I would argue that language is an extension of touch, in that people “reach out” to each other through language. That way, the tongue may be seen as the second organ of touch: it is the tool that is used to establish touch in a figurative manner: we can touch others by means of words.

This way, intimacy is created. The analogy between language and tactile sensations is not a new one, as is exemplified by Roland Barthes’ words: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.

My language trembles with desire” (qtd. in Das vi). Next to touch in its strictly tactile sense, and the use of language, there are other means of experiencing intimacy. One that takes up a prominent place in Austen’s imagery, is the theme of looking, and by extension, a focus on eyes. If we consider the cliché that the eyes are the windows to the soul, it can be argued that instances of people looking at each other are indicative of what goes on beneath the surface, of the feelings they are experiencing. Many theories exist on the function of “the gaze”, some of which I will apply to Austen’s oeuvre further on in this dissertation.

The catalysts of intimacy listed above – touching, looking, speaking – are all occurrences that are essentially located at the surface. Touch, for example, is the contact of the cutaneous layers of one person with the cutaneous layers of another person. There is nothing more “superficial” to human beings than their skin; it is the border between inside and outside: beyond the skin there is only air, the exterior, the world. However, to limit the Malfait 14

scope of this research strictly to what happens on the outside, would mean ignoring what goes on beneath, what is informing these externalized instances of intimacy: the concept of sex.

The second definition given for “touch” in the Oxford English Dictionary already describes it as a euphemism for “sexual contact”. Sex is as old as existence itself, yet in the course of the centuries, it has increasingly been veiled in a cloak of mystery and taboo. Even today, talking about sex still suggests a conscious breaking of the rules imposed by traditional morality. The discourse of sex thus involves a deliberate transgression of boundaries. The French philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault saw a definite slide towards the “unspeakability” of sex from the seventeenth century onwards. In the first volume of his magnum opus, The History of Sexuality, he stated: “The seventeenth century...was the beginning of an age of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois societies, an age which perhaps we still have not completely left behind. Calling sex by its name thereafter became more difficult and more costly” (Foucault 17).

Increasingly, sex became something that could not be talked about, as if denying its presence in language could make the taboo-tagged act of sexuality disappear altogether.

Intercourse was confined to the marital bedroom, and what went on in that bedroom was not allowed to filter through into the world outside. Banned from proper conversation were also concepts like extramarital sex or sexuality in children – the latter of which would remain under wraps until the arrival of Sigmund Freud and his theories in the 1920s. Foucault described the veto on the discourse of sex as follows:

As if in order to gain mastery over it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate

it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the Malfait 15

things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.

And even these prohibitions, it seems, were afraid to name it. Without even having

to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able to ensure that one did not

speak of sex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one

another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence.

Censorship. (17)

Foucault delineates the issue of censorship with regard to sexuality in what he called his “Repressive Hypothesis”. He notes how, for a long time, “sex was associated with sin”

(Foucault 9). One of the main institutes to be held accountable for this was the Church, with its cautionary tales against fornication and sin. Another important factor, however, was the rise of a new class in society: the bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie brought with it a distinctly bourgeois mentality, centred on propriety and appearances. If an individual’s actions did not match the bourgeois set of norms, this would not go unnoticed. This way, “sex became a matter that required the social body as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals, to place themselves under surveillance” (Foucault 116). On a more intimate level, Foucault also indicates the family itself “as an agency of control” (120). It can be assumed that, should an individual show an inclination to stray from the proper path, its family would be the first to confront them with the error of their ways. Thus, sex became increasingly associated with

“refusal, blockage, and invalidation” (Foucault 11), leading to a culture of “defences, censorships, *and+ denials” (Foucault 12). However, this imposed suppression inevitably also made for a heightening of every sexual suggestion, an “incitement and intensification” of sex and its correlatives (Foucault 11). Malfait 16

The question that arises once we examine social conduct as it is so expertly displayed in Austen’s so-called “novels of manners” is: when does this sexual content filter through in her work? It is true that Austen never explicitly refers to intercourse, but at the same time it may be argued that sexual impulse often informs the actions and thoughts of her characters.

The main themes of Austen’s oeuvre – falling in love, marrying and starting a family – unavoidably imply the presence of sex in the world of Austen’s protagonists. The novels never describe scenes of a sexual nature: for the heroines, the story ends before they take place – breaking off the narrative after the wedding – or such “immoral” scenes unroll behind the scenes, as is exemplified by Lydia and Wickham’s elopement or the illicit pregnancy of Colonel Brandon’s ward. However, as is the case with the latter examples, sexual encounters are implied through the accounts given by other characters, in letters or private interviews: Lizzie is informed of her sister’s elopement by Jane, and it is Colonel

Brandon who informs Elinor of his ward’s seduction by Willoughby. Furthermore, it has to be assumed that when Austen’s protagonists fall in love, they too are partly and implicitly driven by their sexual desires, even if they do not act on them in as impulsive a manner as some of the secondary characters. Malfait 17

2 Touch and Intimacy in Austen’s Personal Life

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2 Touch and Intimacy in Austen’s Personal Life

In discussing the presence of such sexually laden concepts as touch and intimacy in the oeuvre of a novelist, the question of the relationship between writer and work inevitably arises. How did the tactile and the intimate affect Jane Austen’s daily life? To what extent were these notions present in her world? And, perhaps most importantly, how did they reverberate in her output as an author?

The most remarkable and most discussed episode in Austen’s biography, is the fact that she never married. She was engaged once, for the duration of an evening, to Harris

Bigg-Wither, a man who was five years her junior, an age discrepancy not uncommon at the time (for example, her own brother Henry married their cousin Eliza, who was ten years older than him). Harris was the brother of two girls Jane had befriended, Alethea and

Catherine Bigg. He proposed to her in 1802, when she was twenty-seven years old. In those days, reaching that age as an unmarried woman often meant that the marital ship had sailed, and the woman would live out her life as a spinster. Perhaps bearing in mind the fact that an offer of marriage might never be made to her again, Jane accepted. However, the very next morning she reconsidered. Almost two decades later, in 1814, she wrote to her niece, Fanny Knight: “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without

Affection” (Letters 280). This is a maxim that the heroines of her novels also abide by, as is exemplified in Elizabeth Bennet’s refusal of Mr Collins or Fanny Price withdrawing her acceptance of Henry Crawford’s proposal the morning after. That last example, it need hardly be pointed out, is a clear case of art imitating life. Certainly, Austen’s marriage to

Harris Bigg-Wither would have secured her own future, as well as that of her older sister

Cassandra. The latter never married after having lost her fiancé Tom Fowle, who died in Malfait 19

1797. However, Jane’s inauguration in family life, running a household and bearing children, could certainly have put a halt to her blossoming career as a writer. As was often the case with female authors in the nineteenth century – Mrs Gaskell being one of the exceptions – it was precisely her status as a spinster that allowed her to continue writing and revising her work.

There is enough evidence to presume that Austen fell deeply in love with a man at least once in her life. Jane had just turned twenty when she met Tom Lefroy. In the earliest preserved letter to Cassandra, dated 9 January 1796, she talks about how she danced with him at a ball, unable to keep her infatuation from slipping in between the words on the page. She already refers to him in the second sentence of her letter, remarking that “Mr Tom

Lefroy’s birthday was yesterday” (Letters 1). As Austen biographer Claire Tomalin notes,

“*a+fter this first mention, Tom Lefroy keeps putting in more appearances in Jane’s letter. In fact she can’t keep him out, this ‘gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man’” (115). It appears that the mutual affection that had grown between Tom Lefroy and herself took on such proportions, that they were willing to defy the upper middle-class climate they had both grown up in, with its rules and regulations about courting and marriage. She confesses to Cassandra: “I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together” (Letters 1). There is a distinct tongue-in-cheek quality to these words, but nevertheless they do bear witness to the great degree of intimacy that existed between Tom

Lefroy and the author of this letter. The exuberance which Jane describes to her sister, has led Tomalin to deduce that “*t+here must have been something more than dancing and sitting out together: kisses, at least, a stirring of the blood, a quickening of the breath” (120). Malfait 20

Jane describes how her and Tom’s mutual acquaintances have not failed to notice the two youngsters’ attraction to each other: “he *Tom+ is so excessively laughed at about me at

Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs

Lefroy a few days ago” (Letters 1). Jane adopts a tone of jesting congeniality, but underneath her witty phrasing a hint of serious attachment can be detected. She writes to Cassandra:

“he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded” (Letters 2). It can be surmised that to Jane, Tom Lefroy is really quite perfect. The colour of a morning coat is a matter of the greatest triviality, which Jane would probably not have been that preoccupied with at all. This “fault” is a little fancy she dreams up to make light of her infatuation to her sister.

Furthermore, the reference to Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones is quite remarkable.

Fielding’s book differs much from Jane’s own writing: it is “a novel which deals candidly and comically with sexual attraction, fornication, bastard children and the oily hypocrisy of parsons, and roundly states that the sins of the flesh are of little account, and much to be preferred to the meanness of spirit in sober, prudent people” (Tomalin 117). The fact that

Jane knows of Tom Lefroy’s preference for the novel, indicates that the two have discussed the work. This suggests not only that an advanced degree of intimacy existed between herself and her “Irish friend”, it also makes clear that talk of sexual matters at the time was perhaps not as strictly banned from middle-class conversation as Foucault would later claim it to be. Malfait 21

However, even if the young lovers were willing to shake off society and its norms, society did not let them get away with it. Soon their “ballroom flirtation” had become

“common knowledge” (Tomalin 118) and it was not appreciated by the Lefroy family. Mrs

Lefroy, a literate woman and close friend of Jane, was very much aware that the young Miss

Austen could not provide a large dowry. As was so often the case, pecuniary concerns had a prevalence over matters of the heart. Tom was sent away and married another woman a few years later. In a later letter to Cassandra, Jane writes: “At length the Day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over – My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea” (Letters 4).

During her little adventure with Tom Lefroy, Jane acted as “the heroine of her own youthful story, living for herself the short period of power, excitement and adventure that might come to a young woman when she was thinking of choosing a husband”(Tomalin 119).

This was a story that was rooted in reality, not in her imagination. For once in her life, she was “enacting instead of imagining” (Tomalin 119), experiencing the emotions that come with being in love: exhilaration, anticipation, innocent happiness. She wrote to Cassandra on

14 January 1796 about attending a ball where Tom Lefroy would also be present: “I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat” (Letters 3). Even if she undercuts the serious implications of the first sentence by ironically referring to Lefroy’s coat, it can still be assumed that, should he have made this offer, she would gladly have accepted him. Of course, Jane could not foresee then how her life would turn out quite eventually. At the age of twenty, she could not yet have imagined Malfait 22

that she would remain a single woman for the rest of her days; that her life’s path would be quite a different one: “Not marriage, but art”, as Tomalin succinctly puts it (119).

Some critics have claimed that Lefroy recuperated more easily from the infatuation than Austen did. John Halperin writes for example: “The available evidence suggests that he recovered more quickly than she from whatever disappointment there may have been. A major theme of Persuasion is that woman's love is more enduring than man's; it is likely that

Jane Austen never entirely forgot Tom Lefroy” (qtd. in O’Farrell 125). However, in old age

Tom Lefroy did confess to his nephew that he had once loved Jane Austen, although he dismissed it in hindsight as “boyish love” (O’Farrell 125). Indeed, in Persuasion (Austen’s last completed novel), Anne Elliot pronounces the words: “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!” (237). These words can be related to Austen’s supposedly continued love for Lefroy, or even to Cassandra’s never marrying after the death of her fiancé. However, as the story turns out, Captain Wentworth did not cease to love Anne after all, which means that Anne was partly wrong in her assumption that constancy in love was an exclusively female trait.

In any case, this painful episode in Austen’s life did rekindle her passion for writing. A few months after Lefroy’s departure, she started work on the manuscript for First

Impressions, which would later be published as Pride and Prejudice. One does not need to be an expert in the ways of the heart to assume that the romantic episode and its rather sad outcome contributed to the plot of Austen’s most popular novel. For example, the age of what Austen has professed to be her favourite heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, matches her own at the time of the Lefroy episode. They were both, to use Lizzie’s words in the novel, “not Malfait 23

one and twenty” (150). The despair felt by Lizzie when Darcy finds out about Lydia’s elopement can easily be channelled back to what Austen may have felt herself when she was faced with the impossibility of her relationship with Tom Lefroy: “Elizabeth felt how improbable it was that they should ever see each other again on such cordiality as had marked their several meetings in Derbyshire...she saw him go with regret” (246). By allowing

Darcy and Lizzie to be married after all, Austen may have sought a certain degree of comfort and redemption in granting her heroine the happy ending which she herself was denied.

The fact that Jane wrote to Cassandra to tell her about her adventure with Tom

Lefroy, is indicative of how dear the two sisters were to each other. Cassandra Austen, nearly three years older than Jane, was her closest friend and confidante. In Edward Austen-

Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen, the first account of Jane Austen’s life (published in 1870),

Anna Lefroy remembers her grandmother saying that “if Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate” (qtd. in Butler). Indeed, as Marilyn Butler notes in the ODNB entry for Jane Austen, “Mrs Austen almost always spoke of ‘the girls’ as a pair or, if forced to single out Jane, mentioned her attachment to her sister”. Stanford professor Terry Castle, in a 1995 essay for The London Review of Books, unambiguously titled

“Was Jane Austen Gay?”, even suggested that Austen’s love for Cassandra might have transgressed the boundaries of sisterly affection. Castle claimed that the letters written by

Jane to her elder sister were charged with an “unconscious homoerotic dimension”

(Luscombe 73). However, these allegations have been adamantly rejected by Austen scholars around the world, one of them stating that it was “about as likely that Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man” (Luscombe 73). While it is true that the two sisters were very close, lending their relationship a sexual connotation is pure Malfait 24

sensationalism. That the only two girls of the eight Austen children should develop a natural intimacy, was to be expected. Furthermore, Cassandra and Jane were educated together, first at home by their father, then at a boarding school in Oxford. Being alone together, removed from their family, they must have relied mainly on each other’s company. The two sisters appear to have shared a love of comedy and satire, as is exemplified in Cassandra’s illustrations for Jane’s parody on the History of England, which she wrote in 1791, at the age of sixteen. Cassandra is also the one who drew the only existing portrait of Jane during her life, even though it was said to be unflattering. When Cassandra had her “coming out” in society at the age of fifteen and a half, Jane – though only twelve at the time – came out as well. This is once more an indication of how the girls were an inseparable twosome, as their mother accurately noted. This pairing up in duos is also a striking feature of Austen’s work.

Austen seemed to have a preference for couples, not only in the romantic sense – as is the case with Darcy and Lizzie or Marianne and Willoughby – but also in other relationships. The novels present us with pairs of sisters – like Jane and Lizzie or Elinor and Marianne – or friends, like Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe, Emma and Harriet Smith or Lizzie and

Charlotte Lucas. The main example of male pairing is of course that of Darcy and Bingley, but the relationship between Wentworth and Benwick can equally be qualified as such.

Mr and Mrs Austen had eight children in total, which means that the family home would always have been a very busy place while Jane was growing up. One of her older brothers, George, was mentally handicapped, which presumably demanded a great deal of their parents’ attention. Still, the Austen family home was presented by Edward Austen-

Leigh as a “pastoral idyll” (Butler). He “evoked the big, rather shabby, three-storey house, the kitchen gardens, the farmyard, and a grassy bank down which children could roll” Malfait 25

(Butler). Jane’s father, George Austen, was a clergyman, and he had an important influence on his daughter’s early education. He “had a well-stocked librabry at Steventon which Jane and her siblings plundered. She devoured 18th-century authors, novels such as Henry

Fielding’s Tom Jones and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy providing her with early ideas for characterization” (Day 100). Jane was also an admirer of Dr Johnson and Samuel

Richardson, of whose Sir Charles Grandison she dramatized episodes for family performances at home. These private theatrical performances were just one mode of family entertainment:

In the evenings the parents joined their children in board games, card games, puzzles,

and charades. From time to time they entertained neighbours—and when the

boarders were absent, house guests—to dinner. Both adults and children enjoyed

dancing afterwards. When on their own they read aloud, often novels, to the circle

before bedtime...Mrs Austen and the two girls sewed dresses for themselves, shirts

for the brothers. (Butler)

With regard to Jane’s behaviour in society, Butler writes that “[o]bservers commented on her unpredictability in public”, of which her confessional letter to Jane about her frivolous behaviour with Tom Lefroy would provide further proof. She appeared to have exhibited a certain cynicism and dissatisfaction with some of the people in her social circle, as is exemplified in another letter to Cassandra: “Theo … came back in time to shew his usual, nothing-meaning, harmless, heartless Civility” (Letters 179). This is a character trait which can also be found in Marianne Dashwood’s intolerance for everybody who fails to show enough passion for life. In later years, however, it appears that Austen attached more and more importance to etiquette, especially with regard to conduct between men and Malfait 26

women. Malcolm Day writes: “In general Jane supported the conventions of her time that dictated the conduct of relationships between the sexes and was critical of those who did not obey them, because of the possible stress and humiliation that might be caused. It was certainly not normal to pay so much attention to a man as Jane did to Mr Lefroy without his first having proposed to her” (199). This caution towards exuberance is also reflected in

Austen’s novels, where frivolous conduct is generally frowned upon: Elizabeth Bennet condemns her sister Lydia’s elopement in Pride and Prejudice, while Marianne’s adventure with Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility is the subject of their acquaintances’ gossip and conjecture. This regard for proper conduct is also observed in Penelope Joan Fritzer’s work about Austen’s relation with the eighteenth-century “courtesy books”, which provided a series of guidelines for good behaviour in all areas of life. Fritzer writes:

That Jane Austen is generally in accord with the courtesy book advice and behavior is

unmistakable, as a close examination of the eighteenth-century courtesy book advice

with her works will strikingly show. Where there is deviation, it is always in the

service of “deep” manners, or social or individual good. Where a character adheres

completely to courtesy book guidelines but is still ignominious (i.e., Mr. Collins), it is

because he or she is too literal and cannot distinguish where behavior is appropriate,

where some deeper matter of character should preempt a rule that might otherwise

be sensible. It is not the courtesy books that Austen occasionally mocks, but the

characters who have no judgment or discernment. (6-7)

Since Austen is known to be an author who wrote what she experienced in her daily reality, it should not come as a surprise that events in her immediate surroundings are often reflected in the fictional world populated by her brainchildren. In the following sections of Malfait 27

this dissertation, I will explore these incidents of touch and intimacy in Austen’s oeuvre more thoroughly. Malfait 28

3 Touch and Intimacy in Recreation Malfait 29

3 Touch and Intimacy in Recreation

It has often been pointed out that the world of Austen’s novels is a very limited and hermetic one. She describes, to use the words of David Daiches, a “world in little”, presenting us with “an accurate model of the total social world” by focusing on the happenings in a confined society (qtd. in Fritzer 109). In this community, which often appears to be more or less sealed off from the rest of the world – occasional excursions to

London or other parts of England excepted – everyone knows everyone, and the arrival of a stranger is met with the greatest degree of excitement and curiosity. Thus, for example, the announcement of Mr Bingley’s coming to Meryton in Pride and Prejudice gives rise to all manners of speculation and anticipation.

The inhabitants of these close-knitted country communities were necessarily dependent on each other for their entertainment. Women could occupy themselves on their own by reading, learning foreign languages, doing needlework or perfecting their artistic and musical skills. However, when the sexes mingled, other forms of recreation were needed. A very important feature of social life were the balls, where men and women were given the opportunity to meet on the dance floor. A second means of filling moments of leisure was the theatre: as was the case in Austen’s own family home, people would sometimes amuse themselves by putting on a play for their family and friends. Finally, entertainment was also sought in composing riddles or charades for others to decipher. Malfait 30

3.1 The Importance of Dancing

In a society where young women spent most of their time at home with their family, balls were of paramount importance in the hunt for potential marital partners. As a consequence, attending a ball involved a great amount of preparation: dances had to be learned, dress fabrics were carefully picked out and possible hairstyles were meticulously discussed. These preparations were not taken up lightly. As Malcolm Day notes: “Dances were as subject to fashion as modes of dress. So important was it to be accomplished on the ballroom floor that all the latest moves could be learned at dance classes if you lived near a city” (166). A number of different dances were performed at the various balls, including “the hornpipe, cotillion, reels, country dance and, most majestic of all, the minuet, a difficult dance that often drew an admiring audience” (Day 197). The arrangement of an elegant dress was so essential that it could sometimes lead to despair, as Austen writes in a letter to

Cassandra in 1798: “I cannot determine what to do about my new Gown; I wish such things were to be bought ready made” (Letters 30). In Austen’s novels, young women pay attention to their appearance not only on account of the men, but also because of their preoccupation with the judgement of the members of their own sex, whose admiration is always sought, as is exemplified in Northanger Abbey:

[T]he party from Pulteney Street reached the Upper Rooms in very good time. The

Thorpes and James Morland were there only two minutes before them; and Isabella

having gone through the usual ceremonial of meeting her friend with the most

smiling and affectionate haste, of admiring the set of her gown, and envying the curl

of her hair, they followed their chaperons, arm-in-arm, into the ball-room, whispering Malfait 31

to each other whenever a thought occurred, and supplying the place of many ideas

by a squeeze of the hand or a smile of affection. (39)

Their whispers and squeezes of excitement reflect the anticipation felt by the two young women with regard to the ball and its opportunities for dancing. The same sentiment of exhilaration is described in Emma:

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of

young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of

any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;―but when a

beginning is made―when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though

slightly, felt―it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more. (204)

A great part of the thrill of dancing was caused by the fact that it provided a rare opportunity for young people to touch, albeit with the whole community watching.

However, the nature of the touching that occurred during these balls was rather complicated, as is reflected in the very characteristics of the so-called “country dances” that were performed at these occasions. To begin with, men and women were very much spatially opposed, forming two lines confronting each other. The dances themselves were often a game of advancing and retreating – touching for just a few fleeting seconds – only to let go again and increase the distance. Whatever words were spoken to establish an intimacy had to be chosen well, so as to fit in the restricted duration of the dance.

In her work Jane Austen and Eighteenth-Century Courtesy Books Penelope Joan

Fritzer states that “dancing, like reading, connects education with recreation. It is highly recommended by most courtesy books as a required skill as well as a pleasurable pastime, one that has social value” (33). However, despite their general approval of dancing, the Malfait 32

courtesy books also warn against immoderation: “tho’ Dancing of itself, be a very commendable genteel qualification...it may...be made sinful. And I hope most of both young and old Ladies in the Age, have too great a value for the education of their Heads, than to spend all their time in the Instruction of their Heels” (Brown, qtd. in Fritzer 34). The authors of the courtesy books advocate “proper Behaviour in Dancing, appearing from Head to Foot modest, light and easy” (Nivelon, qtd. in Fritzer 34). So while dancing is encouraged as a form of social interaction, it should be executed with moderation. Undoubtedly, the courtesy book authors would not have approved of Austen’s “most profligate and shocking” exhibitions while dancing with Tom Lefroy at the age of twenty.

This bout of exuberance, however, seems to have been exceptional for Austen, who generally agrees with the courtesy books that moderation should always be strived for. In her work, Austen cleverly uses the dances to advance the plot. As Langdon Elsbree puts it in

“Jane Austen and the Dance of Fidelity and Complaisance”: “In none of the novels does Jane

Austen devote her attention to the details of dancing per se. Rather, she is interested in the occasion for the dance, the people involved, and the events that result” (115). Dancing in

Jane Austen is never merely dancing: it is a means of establishing or underscoring the different personalities of her characters, whose true nature – which will often only be revealed in later stages of the novel – is frequently prefigured by their behaviour on the dance floor. The various protagonists in Austen’s work all show different approaches to dancing. In general, it may be asserted that “an aptitude and love for song and dancing are, to Jane Austen, signs of an admirable vitality – a vitality which, however, must be disciplined by sense if it is not to lead to the disaster of Lydia Bennet or the sorrows of Marianne

Dashwood” (Elsbree 117). Dancing serves to illustrate a character’s liveliness, a personality Malfait 33

trait for which heroines like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse are often praised. Of the character of Lizzie, Lionel Trilling writes: “No quality of the heroine of Pride and Prejudice is more appealing than her physical energy; her love of dancing confirms our belief that she moves gracefully” (qtd. in Elsbree, 118). However, lack of moderation on the ballroom floor is often symptomatic of a faulty character in Austen’s novels: Willoughby’s exuberant dancing is indicative of his general looseness, while Lydia’s flirtatious behaviour at various balls foreshadows her naive elopement with Wickham. Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, who are generally portrayed as each other’s opposites in both character and manners, also display contrastive behaviour on the dance floor: while Elinor, who is “neither musical, nor affecting to be so” (S&S 243), does not care much for dancing, Marianne puts her heart and soul into it. As opposed to the overzealous Willoughby, Sense and Sensibility’s other male protagonists, Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars, are quite disinterested when it comes to this particular form of amusement: “Perhaps in contrast to Willoughby, Edward Ferrars is never shown dancing. But Edward is the only Austen hero who does not dance, a circumstance that serves only the contrast with Willoughby, not an indictment of dancing itself” (Fritzer 36). It is this indifference to dancing that contributes to Marianne’s pronouncement of Edward’s manners as “spiritless” and “tame” (S&S 16). By contrast, Mr

Darcy and Mr Knightley, arguably Austen’s best-loved heroes, show a distinct talent for dancing: the former is commended by Sir William Lucas for his “superior dancing” (P&P 85), while the latter’s performance – though he does not dance until well into the novel’s second half – is judged by Emma to be “extremely good” (Emma 271). In Austen’s world, being a talented dancer generally argues the hero’s case: when, in the opening pages of Pride and

Prejudice, it is announced that the then still unknown Mr Bingley intends to be at the next Malfait 34

assembly ball, Austen comments upon the news with the somewhat ironically put maxim that “*t+o be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love” (P&P 7).

As argued above, dancing takes up a prominent role in Austen when it comes to advancing the plot. Since this plot is mostly driven by the question “Whom will the heroine marry?”, it need not surprise that dancing and marriage are closely linked. I would therefore agree with Daniel Segal and Richard Handler, who claim in their article “Serious Play:

Creative Dance and Dramatic Sensibility in Jane Austen, Ethnographer” that dancing can be regarded as “a metaphor of and for marriage” (322). They further observe that “dance is such a sure sign of courtship that it often stands for that process as a whole” (Segal &

Handler 324). It is through courtship that a man and woman become a couple; courtship is the bridge that carries a person from singlehood to marriage:

Courtship moves two people between two contrary ‘states’―from being unmarried

(and perhaps being strangers) to being married and intimately attached. The gap

between these two states is mediated not directly, that is, not by a simple, direct

offer of marriage, but through a provisional and playful domain of conventionalised

attentions, of which dancing is one of the most prominent. (Segal & Handler 324)

Austen herself also consciously introduces the metaphor of dancing for marriage in her work. The likenesses and differences between dancing and marriage are discussed by

Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. At one point, Henry insists on their similarity on the grounds that “in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal” (NA 65). The observation is made by a male character, but behind his words the voice of the female author clearly shines through. The simile stretches further still, as Mr Tilney remarks: Malfait 35

You will allow that...in both it is an engagement between man and woman, formed

for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively

to each other till the moment of the dissolution; that it is their duty each to

endeavour to give no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves

elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering

towards the perfections of their neighbours or fancying that they should have been

better off with anyone else. (NA 65)

When phrased like this, the resemblance between marriage and the dance seems undeniable. However, while the similarities are manifold, dancing and marriage cannot entirely be superposed: though the dance is marriage-like, it is never entirely marriage. In

Austen’s novels, the dance floor often literally serves as a testing ground for marriage, where a man and a woman can “play” at being a couple: “Because dance is marriage-like without itself being marriage, it can serve as part of the process of producing marriages, that is, a process of selecting and rejecting possible partners” (Segal & Handler 325). Dancing thus allows for a certain degree of freedom: young men and women can court freely without having the obligation of forming an immediate attachment: they have the possibility of changing partners and “trying them out”. Since the time spent together on the dance floor is limited to the duration of one or more dances, the connection is only a temporary one, dissolved again when the two partners part at the end of the dance. This restriction in time is commented upon by Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, in her attempt to contradict

Henry Tilney’s assertion that marriage and dancing are entirely similar: “People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance, only stand opposite to each other in a long room for half an hour” (65). Malfait 36

Dancing thus functions as a miniature play of marriage. However, Segal and Handler have added an important adjective to this “play”, stressing its “serious” undertones: the game of dancing can come with real-life consequences, both positive and negative. For young unmarried women, a ball was one of the rare occasions where they could present themselves on the marriage market. In order to be allowed to attend these balls, a girl had to be “out” in society. When a young woman had her “coming out”, it meant that she was available for marriage, and could thus enter the marital arena that was the dance floor.

Elsbree writes of the importance of the ball for the freshly “out” woman: “Dancing, particularly the ball, is for the young girl the formal announcement of her nubility – an obvious, traditional, and important function” (115).

In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price is at first not included in the dances that her cousins participate in, and does not perceive herself as having the right to take part: “As to her cousins’ gaieties, she loved to hear an account of them, especially the balls, and whom

Edmund had danced with; but thought too lowly of her own situation to imagine she should ever be admitted to the same, and listened therefore without an idea of any nearer concern in them” (34). Just like Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, Fanny Price takes up a position of isolation: both women observe the others, but do not take part in the dances themselves. Anne serves a further function of playing the piano, thus providing the others with an occasion for dancing while at the same time necessarily being excluded from participating herself. On the surface, her isolated position seems to be one that she has chosen herself, as is apparent in the following passage: “The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services, as usual, and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but Malfait 37

to be unobserved” (Persuasion 70). When Captain Wentworth asks one of the Musgrove sisters whether Anne ever dances, the former replies: “Oh, no! never; she has quite given up dancing. She had rather play. She is never tired of playing” (Persuasion 71). The two passages suggest that Anne is not at all happy while playing: sitting at the piano, she is a front row spectator to the Musgrove girls’ flirtation with Captain Wentworth. At the same time, however, one can assume that she does not feel entitled to dance with him, since she was the one who broke off their engagement years before – thus excluding herself from the kind of intimacy that dancing entails.

Contrary to Anne, who remains an outsider to the dances throughout the novel,

Fanny does get an opportunity to dance, when Sir Thomas Bertram decides on a whim to organize a formal ball in her honour. However, Fanny thinks too little of her own position to realize that this ball serves as her “coming out” and is thus oblivious to the connotations that the ball comprises: “Who could be happier than Miss Price? But Miss Price had not been brought up to the trade of coming out; and had she known in what light this ball was, in general, considered respecting her, it would very much have lessened her comfort by increasing the fears she already had, of doing wrong and being looked at” (MP 270). The ball is indeed not without its implications: it formally announces Fanny’s eligibility for marriage, a fact that does not go unnoticed by Henry Crawford, who is encouraged in his growing regard for Fanny. Only a few chapters later, he confesses to his sister Mary that he is “quite determined to marry Fanny Price” (MP 295).

The dance was governed by a set of more or less implicit rules. For instance, it had to be avoided that an unmarried lady was not asked to dance while all the others were. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, it is noted that “Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the Malfait 38

scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances” (9), allowing her to overhear Darcy’s notorious comment about her to Bingley: “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men” (9). It is this scene that at once establishes Darcy’s pride and instils in

Lizzie a profound prejudice towards him. Propriety would have required Darcy to invite

Elizabeth to dance, and it is this ignoring of the norms laid down by society that helps to build up his bad reputation among the members of the Meryton community. Another instance where a young woman is excluded from the dance is when, in Emma, Harriet is “the only young lady sitting down” during the ball at the Crown Inn (270). When Mrs Weston addresses Mr Elton with the words “*T+here is a young lady disengaged whom I should be very glad to see dancing―Miss Smith.”, a painful rejection ensues: “Miss Smith!―oh!―I had not observed.―You are extremely obliging―and if I were not an old married man.―But my dancing days are over, Mrs. Weston. You will excuse me. Any thing else I should be most happy to do, at your command―but my dancing days are over” (Emma 270-71). Emma, who has witnessed the snub, is struck with shock, until Mr Knightley – as becomes a proper

Austenian hero – steps in to rescue Harriet, despite his former reluctance to dance:

In another moment a happier sight caught her;―Mr. Knightley leading Harriet to the

set!―Never had she been more surprised, seldom more delighted, than at that

instant. She was all pleasure and gratitude, both for Harriet and herself, and longed

to be thanking him; and though too distant for speech, her countenance said much,

as soon as she could catch his eye again. (Emma 271)

The episode is an important one, both for Emma’s process of maturing and for her relationship with Mr Knightley. On the one hand, she comes to realize that her former Malfait 39

perception of Mr Elton was entirely incorrect, as she confesses to Mr Knightley later in the evening: “I do own myself to have been completely mistaken in Mr. Elton. There is a littleness about him which you discovered, and which I did not” (Emma 273). On the other hand, Mr Knightley’s dance with Harriet places him on the dance floor together with Emma, even though they are not yet dancing together. They are still “too distant for speech”, but that does not prevent them from being connected, even while dancing with other partners: during the dance, Emma “catch*es+ his eye” and “her countenance sa*ys+ much” – they are, in a way, touching from a distance. However, this distance is soon overcome when Mr

Weston encourages the young people to dance:

“Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley.

She hesitated a moment, and then replied, “With you, if you will ask me.”

“Will you?” said he, offering his hand.

“Indeed I will. You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really so

much brother and sister as to make it at all improper.”

“Brother and sister! no, indeed.” (Emma 273-274)

The scene is crucial for the two friends, who have before been almost like a brother and sister in their behaviour towards each other, and are brother and sister in effect through

Isabella Woodhouse’s marriage to John Knightley. Here, the brother-sister relationship is explicitly denied by both of them, thus clearing the path for Emma to arrive at seeing Mr

Knightley in a new light: as a husband, rather than as a brother. The dance that ensues, but is not recorded by Austen in the novel, provides the first occasion of close physical intimacy for the two future lovers: they are touching – and doing so no longer from a distance. Malfait 40

Mr Elton’s refusal to dance with Harriet appears to be unforgivable in the eyes of

Emma and Mrs Weston, since it is entirely uncalled for. Another case of rejection in Austen, occurs when Elizabeth – whose pride is still wounded by Darcy’s slight at a previous ball – declines Sir William Lucas’s suggestion that she and Darcy dance together:

“My dear Miss Eliza, why are not you dancing? – Mr Darcy, you must allow me to

present this young lady to you as a very desirable partner. – You cannot refuse to

dance, I am sure, when so much beauty is before you.” And taking her hand, he

would have given it to Mr Darcy, who, though extremely surprised, was not unwilling

to receive it, when she instantly drew back, and said with some discomposure to Sir

William,

“Indeed, Sir, I have not the least intention of dancing. – I entreat you not to suppose

that I moved this way in order to beg for a partner.” (P&P 22-23)

Elizabeth here follows convention by professing that she has no “intention of dancing”, rather than objecting to the specific partner that is proposed to her. To quote Segal and

Handler: “when a woman wishes to refuse an invitation to dance she must turn it down for a general reason rather than refuse a particular partner, and she must then give up dancing for the rest of the evening” (327). Elizabeth’s refusal is much more justifiable than Mr

Elton’s: it can be understood in light of Darcy’s previous discarding of her features as being

“not handsome enough to tempt *him+” (P&P 9). Indeed, after the snub, Elizabeth – who also possesses some of the pride that Darcy is generally charged with – declares to her mother: “I believe, Ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him” (P&P 16).

However, this is a promise that she cannot keep for very long. When Mr Bingley gives a ball at Netherfield Hall, Darcy comes over to invite her to dance: this time, the offer is no Malfait 41

longer mediated by the praising words of Sir William Lucas. Elizabeth is so baffled by Darcy’s initiative that “without knowing what she did”, she accepts him (P&P 83). Nevertheless, she is determined to enter into the dance with the greatest degree of unwillingness – prejudiced against Darcy by his earlier slight and Wickham’s unfavourable account of him. She consciously stresses her reluctance in the talk that takes place during the dance, distancing herself from the implications laid upon the act of dancing by the codes of courtship:

They stood for some time without speaking a word; and she began to imagine that

their silence was to last through the two dances, and at first was resolved not to

break it; till suddenly fancying that it would be the greater punishment to her partner

to oblige him to talk, she made some slight observation on the dance. He replied, and

was again silent. After a pause of some minutes she addressed him a second time

with

“It is your turn to say something now, Mr Darcy. – I talked about the dance, and you

ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of

couples.”

He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say, should be said.

“Very well. – That reply will do for the present. – Perhaps by and bye I may observe

that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones – But now we may be silent.”

“Do you talk by rule then, while you are dancing?”

“Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be entirely

silent for half an hour together*.+” (P&P 83-84)

Elizabeth endeavours to “punish” Darcy, by manipulating the function of the dance: whereas dancing normally serves as a means of enhancing the intimacy between two people – Malfait 42

granting them an opportunity to touch and be closer to each other than in any other form of social interaction – Elizabeth’s attitude during her dance with Darcy instead widens the rift between both partners. She consciously lays the focus on the conventions of dancing, conducting a meta-reflective discourse about the talk that ought to take place while dancing, rather than engaging in spontaneous dialogue. As Segal & Handler put it: “By commenting upon the social prescriptions for dancing partners, Elizabeth expresses her unwillingness to engage in the conventional first steps of courtship” (329). This passage is a rare instance where dancing in Austen does not bring with it “the felicities of rapid motion” (Emma 204), but rather leaves both partners with a sense of confusion and discontent. At the end of the dance, they part “on each side dissatisfied, though not to an equal degree, for in Darcy’s breast there was a tolerable powerful feeling towards her, which soon procured her pardon”

(P&P 86).

Two characters who do enjoy their intimacy on the dance floor, are Marianne

Dashwood and John Willoughby, the most explicitly impetuous lovers in Austen’s oeuvre.

Their relationship represents everything that the term “sensibility” stands for: it provides an abundance of acute feeling and grand romantic gestures, which are matched by the dramatic nature of its ending. Fritzer claims that “*i+n Sense and Sensibility Willoughby is attractive to Marianne partly because of his penchant for dancing” (35). When Sir John

Middleton gives an account of Willoughby as being an accomplished dancer, Marianne is delighted:

“I remember last Christmas at a little hop in the park, he danced from eight o’clock

till four, without once sitting down.” Malfait 43

“Did he indeed?” cried Marianne with sparkling eyes, “and with elegance, with

spirit?”

“Yes; and he was up again at eight to ride to covert.”

“That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits,

his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of

fatigue.” (S&S 43)

However, as Fritzer notes, Marianne’s excitement renders her blind to the dangers of

Willoughby’s character: “Although enhancing him in Marianne’s eyes, Willoughby’s great predilection for dancing is the kind of immoderation reproved by the courtesy book authors.

It is Austen’s first indication of Willoughby’s excessive love of pleasure, one that prefigures his later behavior, which is also immoderate in pursuit of other pleasure” (36).

Fritzer further observes that “the thread of dancing...runs throughout the first half of

Sense and Sensibility” (36). Indeed it does, and it appears to serve a purpose in doing so: especially in the development of Marianne and Willoughby’s relationship, dancing takes on a prominent role:

When he was present, she had no eyes for anyone else...If dancing formed the

amusement of the night, they were partners for half the time; and when obliged to

separate for a couple of dances, were careful to stand together, and scarcely spoke a

word to anybody else. Such conduct made them of course most exceedingly laughed

at; but ridicule could not shame, and seemed hardly to provoke them. (S&S 51)

The way Marianne and Willoughby throw courtesy book caution to the wind and indulge in frivolous dancing is reminiscent of Austen’s own youthful dalliance with Tom Lefroy.

Although, as Fritzer writes, dancing “allows for a degree of privacy in conversation between Malfait 44

the sexes in a society where that privilege was rare” (35), it should not be forgotten that along the fringes of the dance floor, the rest of the community sat and observed. As a consequence, the alleged “privacy” was a privacy that occurred within a very public framework. Therefore, the community inevitably took notice when a couple paid more attention to each other than usual: suspicions of a deeper attachment arose easily. Isabella

Thorpe is aware of this when she observes to Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey: “Only conceive, my dear Catherine, what your brother wants me to do? He wants me to dance with him again, though I tell him that it is a most improper thing, and entirely against the rules. It would make us the talk of the place, if we were not to change partners” (45).

Marianne and Willoughby, unlike Isabella, do not observe the rules for dancing laid down by society: as a consequence, people suppose them to have formed a secret engagement that would account for their frivolous behaviour. After Willoughby has left for

London – brutally cutting short their affair – the idea of dancing is positively abhorred by

Marianne: “’A dance!’ cried Marianne. ‘Impossible! Who is to dance?’” (S&S 96). She cannot picture herself dancing with anyone else but Willoughby, which suggests that she cannot imagine falling in love with another man either. Mrs Jenkins somewhat unsubtly hits the mark when she exclaims in response: “’What! you thought nobody could dance because a certain person that shall be nameless is gone!’” (S&S 96) Malfait 45

3.2 Staging a Play

In Mansfield Park, the Austen novel that arguably deals most candidly with amorality, a pivotal part is played by the young people’s decision to stage a play, in the absence of Sir

Thomas Bertram, the pater familias. The narrative, along with the novel’s heroine, seems adamant in its condemnation of the play. Daniel Segal and Richard Handler argue that “*t+he theatrical...is condemned because it represents an abandonment of the interpretation of the complexities of social messages and an over-confidence in the immediate appearance of things” (323). The players naively venture into an undertaking that they assume to be merely a form of amusement, while its impact will in fact prove to be much deeper. Enchanted by the superficial appeal of staging a play, they pay no heed to its sexual connotations. Hannah

More, a contemporary of Austen and author of an anti-theatrical rhetoric, warned against the possibly dangerous effects of the theatre on youngsters: “By frequent repetition, especially if there be a taste for romance and poetry in the innocent young mind, the feelings are easily transplanted from the theatre to the closet; they are made to become a standard of action, and are brought home as the regulators of life and manners” (qtd. in Lott

276). Already in the title of the play that is chosen, Lovers’ Vows, its influence on the residents of Mansfield Park is hinted at. As the numerous rehearsals for the play advance, the intimacy between the various players intensifies. The theatrical is of pivotal importance in laying the foundation for some of the dramatic episodes later on in the novel.

Tom Bertram is the one who first suggests the idea of staging a play, after he hears his friend Mr Yates’s account of a similar project in another company. Both Maria and Julia

Bertram, as well as Henry and Mary Crawford, are immediately enthused by the scheme, while Fanny and Edmund represent the absent Sir Thomas Bertram in their moral Malfait 46

disapproval of the plan. Lady Bertram, who seldom rises from the apathetic slumber that characterizes her throughout the novel, at this instance “d*oes+ not evince the least disapprobation” (MP 127). Edmund makes an attempt to dissuade his brother, stating that

“*i+n a general light, private theatricals are open to some objections, but as we are circumstanced, I must think it would be highly injudicious, to attempt anything of the kind. It would shew great want of feeling on my father’s account, absent as he is, and...it would be imprudent, I think” (MP 128). However, Tom swiftly waves away his brother’s arguments:

We mean nothing but a little amusement among ourselves, just to vary the scene,

and exercise our powers in something new. We want no audience, no publicity. We

may be trusted, I think, in chusing some play most perfectly unexceptionable; and I

can conceive no greater harm or danger to any of us in conversing in the elegant

written language of some respectable author than chattering in words of our own. I

have no fears, and no scruples. (MP 128-29)

Throughout Edmund’s discussions with his brother and sisters, as well as in his consultations with Fanny, “the objections to play-acting and theatrical production are stated in terms of conventional propriety, and the values which underlie this propriety are presupposed, rather than explored, by the characters” (Segal & Handler 333).

Nevertheless, Edmund is easily persuaded – stimulated by his increasing admiration for Mary Crawford – to abandon his scruples when he is asked to take on the role of the lover of the character played by Mary. Bereft of her only ally, Fanny – shy and taciturn by nature – is left to contemplate her concerns regarding the play in silence. When she picks up a copy of the play, she is shocked by its tawdry nature: Malfait 47

Her curiosity was all awake, and she ran through it with an eagerness which was

suspended only by intervals of astonishment, that it could be chosen in the present

instance, that it could be proposed and accepted in a private theatre! Agatha and

Amelia appeared to her in their different ways so totally improper for home

representation...that she could hardly suppose her cousins could be aware of what

they were engaging in[.] (MP 140-41)

However, Fanny’s doubts are never voiced aloud and she can do nothing but sit and observe while the preparations for the play proceed.

Segal and Handler observe a similarity between acting and dancing, stating that

“*t+he amateur theatrical, like dancing, allows intimacy among unmarried ladies and gentlemen...Furthermore, the young people select a play that intensifies the metaphoric association between the intimacy of acting together and the intimacy of courtship: they play at ‘Lovers’ vows’” (334). Lovers’ Vows requires the actors in it to perform scenes of love- making, which serves only as an incentive for the already smouldering sparks of intimacy between various members of the Mansfield Park household: Henry Crawford’s illicit flirtation with the engaged Maria Bertram flourishes, while her fiancé Mr Rushworth is left out in the cold. In the meantime, Edmund is strengthened in his admiration for Mary Crawford, since

“they must act scenes of love that make the ambiguities of their feelings for each other painfully manifest” (Segal & Handler 334). Julia Bertram – at first disappointed and jealous of

Henry Crawford’s attention for her sister – stirs the interest of Tom Bertram’s friend, Mr

Yates. Fanny – the only one who refuses to act, despite the supplications of the others – is left alone, stressing once more her isolated position among the inhabitants of Mansfield Malfait 48

Park. Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, she is reduced to being the silent witness of Edmund’s flirtation with Mary Crawford.

Soon the theatrical, with its many rehearsals, becomes the main activity for the young people. The mistake made, is that “the Bertram sisters and their partners do not communicate with (and about) the conventions of courtship. Rather, they abandon those conventions for the superficial appearances of the play – and, equally, the superficial appearance that the play is just a play” (Segal & Handler 334). They fail to see – or feign to do so – that the production entails a breaching of the boundaries between persons, necessarily bringing them in closer contact with each other: “Henry, Julia and Maria insist that the playacting is nothing more than a play, and thus a harmless diversion. They deny that it has a metaphoric impact on their lives outside the play and, specifically, on their love affairs” (Segal & Handler 334). The increased intimacy between the players sows the seeds for future developments in the novel: it prefigures Maria Rushworth’s infidelity with Henry

Crawford and Julia Bertram’s elopement with Mr Yates. Contrary to the opportunities of intimacy provided by dancing, they remain unobserved by older members of the community: thus, there is an absence of the kind of social control that might otherwise have inspired restraint. Paradoxically, the players “insist that the play is insignificant because it is only a play, while, at the same time, they are carried away by the romantic attachments performed within the frame of the play” (Segal & Handler 334). Judging by the further developments of the novel, it can safely be concluded that the play was never “only a play”: its ramifications echo far beyond the duration of its rehearsals. As Anna Lott observes in her article “Staging a

Lesson: The Theatricals and Proper Conduct in Mansfield Park”, while the play itself is abruptly brought to an end with the unexpected return of Sir Thomas Bertram, “*t+he Malfait 49

improper acting continues only somewhat clandestinely after Sir Thomas stops the play, until Maria and Julia are irrevocably caught in improper matches, and Edmund is on the verge of echoing his sisters' imprudence by marrying the shallow Mary Crawford" (277). Malfait 50

3.3 Riddles and Romance

A final recreational pursuit that increases intimacy between its participants in one of

Austen’s novels, is the game of charades. Nowadays, charades is an activity in which one person silent mimics a word for others to guess. In the early nineteenth century, however, the term was also used to denote the (often rhyming) riddles that one individual would write down for another to decipher. Austen herself much enjoyed this form of diversion, as she wrote to Cassandra in 1813: “We admire your Charades excessively, but as yet have guessed only the 1st. The others seem very difficult. There is so much beauty in the Versification however, that the finding them out is but a secondary pleasure” (Letters 202). It is clear that

Austen paid even more attention to the way the riddle was worded than to its solution.

In “Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text in Emma”, Joseph Litvak remarks on the deeper meaning of word games in Emma, stating that “[w]henever characters in Emma seem merely to be playing with words, the stakes are in fact much higher” (764). In the novel, Harriet Smith undertakes the composition of a book of riddles: “*T+he only literary pursuit which engaged Harriet at present, the only mental provision she was making for the evening of life, was the collecting and transcribing all the riddles of every sort that she could meet with, into a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper, made up by her friend and ornamented with cyphers and trophies” (60). Emma, in her role of matchmaker, seizes the opportunity to bring Harriet and Mr Elton closer together, by asking the latter to contribute a riddle for the book. After a few moments of reflection, he “rather sentimentally recite*s+” a “well-known charade...that they had transcribed ...some pages ago already” (61). His first offering is thus not an original one, but Emma, unwilling to give up, insists on his composing a new puzzle.

At first, there is some hesitation on his part concerning his writing abilities. However, he calls Malfait 51

on Emma the next day to offer her a piece of paper containing a charade. It is this “amorous riddle” that will supply Emma with “an irresistible opportunity for creative misreading”

(Litvak 768), a characteristic that typifies the heroine throughout the novel. Mr Elton presents the riddle as being one addressed by a friend to a young lady, and for that reason he does not mean for it to be included in Harriet’s book – which is open to the public eye – but he suggests that perhaps Emma “may not dislike looking at it” (61).

Nevertheless, Emma is convinced that Mr Elton is hiding behind propriety, meaning to present the riddle to Harriet after all, in this indirect manner: “’Take it,’ said Emma, smiling, and pushing the paper towards Harriet – ‘it is for you. Take your own.’” (Emma 62).

Together, the two young women decipher the charade, the solution of which turns out to be

“courtship”, setting the final two lines in a particular light:

Thy ready wit the word will soon supply,

May its approval beam in that soft eye! (Emma 63)

Thus, the riddle serves as a means for Mr Elton to make his intentions implicitly clear, hidden underneath several layers of mediation. Furthermore, he hopes the reader of his riddle will

“approve” of its theme. Emma is thrilled at the implications concealed within Mr Elton’s words: “A very proper compliment! – and then follows the application, which I think, my dear Harriet, you cannot find much difficulty in comprehending. Read it in comfort to yourself. There can be no doubt of its being written for you and to you” (Emma 63-64).

The great irony in this scene is of course that Emma, in her well-meant efforts as a matchmaker, fails to see that Mr Elton’s intentions are in fact directed towards herself, not towards Harriet. The latter appears to be less sure, asking Emma: “Could it really be meant for me?”, but her doubts are dispelled by Emma’s reply that she “cannot make a question, or Malfait 52

listen to a question about that. It is a certainty” (Emma 64). The riddle entirely misses its romantic mark, a fact of which both its writer and receiver are unaware: Mr Elton is mistaken in his conviction that he has conveyed his intentions to Emma, while Emma misinterprets the charade in Harriet’s favour. The misunderstanding helps contribute to the little drama that ensues when, six chapters onwards, Mr Elton proposes to Emma. When

Emma, confused and abhorred, cries out that his attentions have all been for Harriet, he bluntly replies: “Oh Miss Woodhouse! who can think of Miss Smith, when Miss Woodhouse is near!” (Emma 109). Malfait 53

4 Touch and Intimacy in Appearances and Objects

Malfait 54

4 Touch and Intimacy in Appearances and Objects

In the world of Austen, intimacy is not only reflected fairly directly in instances of recreation – as described in the previous section – or conversational episodes – as will be discussed in the next chapter –, but it is also expressed in less direct ways.

Firstly, a person’s appearance can betray or enhance intimacy. In some of Austen’s novels, a great deal of attention goes to the eyes of the protagonist, or the implications inherent in a look or gaze. Furthermore, examples of paleness and blushing are abundant in

Austen: this way, the body works as a canvas for the involuntary display of emotions that characters might otherwise wish to hide.

Secondly, intimacy is associated with certain objects, that carry more symbolic importance than their purely material existence suggests. Examples of such items are the keepsakes that lovers carry with them or the portraits that inhabit part of Austen’s oeuvre. Malfait 55

4.1 The Gaze

In the previous section, I have described Emma’s look of appreciation at Mr Knightley when he steps on the dance floor with Harriet as a form of “touching from a distance”.

Indeed, it is my belief that the gaze can bring about a form of virtual touch: it establishes a connection between two people, stirring up various kinds of emotions. When two persons lock eyes in a room filled with people, they are connected in a way that separates them from the rest of the company. In this manner, looking is a way of touching without physically bridging the distance between the ones that do the looking.

As Daniel Chandler remarks in his “Notes on the Gaze”, the rules of looking are very much culturally conditioned:

in “contact cultures” such as those of the Arabs, Latin Americans and southern

Europeans, people look more than the British or white Americans, while black

Americans look less...In contact cultures too little gaze is seen as insincere, dishonest

or impolite whilst in non-contact cultures too much gaze ('staring') is seen as

threatening, disrespectful and insulting3.

In Western culture, gazing means prying open the gate that marks the boundary of another person’s private space. Making a look last for just a few seconds too long can be experienced by the object of the gaze as off-putting or offensive. In the initial chapters of Pride and

Prejudice, for example, Lizzie is thrown off guard by Darcy’s frequent staring, which starts during a visit to Longbourn – the Bennet family home – and intensifies when Elizabeth comes to Netherfield Hall to care for her sister Jane, who has fallen ill. Lizzie is quite puzzled

3 Chandler, Daniel (1998): 'Notes on "The Gaze"', http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze.html, consulted 29th April 2008 Malfait 56

by Mr Darcy’s sudden attention – especially since she overheard his previous slight of her – and perceives his gaze as one of discontent, rather than as a sign of appreciation. In a conversation with her friend Charlotte Lucas, she remarks : “He has a very satirical eye, and if I do not begin by being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of him” (P&P 20).

Darcy’s stare as described in this episode, appears to be the quintessential example of what has traditionally been called the “male gaze”, a concept which can be applied to all manners of looking that occur in art. For a long period of time, artists were predominantly male, which meant that they imposed upon their works a male point of view: women were depicted as they were perceived by men. According to Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema, “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed” (11).The patriarchal gaze is not only present in paintings and sculptures of idealized female beauty, but it can be found in literature as well: Samuel Richardson’s

Pamela, for example, functions as the epitome of female propriety – it is a man’s perception of ideal female conduct.

Darcy’s staring during the first part of Pride and Prejudice (up to his first proposal to

Lizzie) could be labelled as “scopophilic”, in that it is “*i+nquisitive and possessive” (Aragay &

Lopez)4. In “Inf(l)ecting Pride and Prejudice: Dialogism, Intertextuality and Adaptation”,

Mireia Aragay and Gemma Lopez define this kind of gaze as “a source of pleasure and power for the onlooker in its commodification of its object. In a patriarchal culture such as Austen's, men are usually the bearers of the scopophilic gaze, while women are its passive recipients”5. Indeed, Austen literally describes how Elizabeth becomes “an object of some

4 Online edition at http://bridgetarchive.altervista.org/inf(l)ecting.htm, consulted 29th April 2008

5 idem Malfait 57

interest” to Darcy (P&P 20), stressing the scopophilic nature of the gaze and its reifying effect on women. Remarkably, the feature that initiates his stare is the “beautiful expression of her dark eyes” (P&P 20): thus, it is Lizzie’s eyes that attract those of Darcy, as he later confesses to Miss Bingley: “I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow” (P&P 23). Miss Bingley, in love with

Darcy herself, reacts to this by “immediately fix*ing+ her eyes on his face” (P&P 23): it is clear that in this novel, deep-felt affection is betrayed by the way the characters look at each other. Similarly, Elizabeth at first expresses her disinterest in Darcy, by merely “glancing” at him (P&P 21). Elizabeth does not meekly submit to Darcy’s stare. As is exemplified in the passage quoted above, she uses her wit to joke about his impertinence to Charlotte.

Jane Austen was obviously not part of the long tradition of “scopophilic” male writers. In her work, she describes instances of men regarding women, but she does not prevent women from doing the same: the “female gaze” is definitely present. In Pride and

Prejudice, for example, she makes clever use of focalization in a scene where she at once describes female and male spectatorship. While Elizabeth is staying with Charlotte Lucas, now married to Mr Collins, Mr Darcy is visiting his aunt, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, of whose estate the Collins’ parsonage forms part. Austen describes how Charlotte watches Darcy watching Lizzie:

She watched him whenever they were at Rosings, and whenever he came to

Hunsford; but without much success. He certainly looked at her friend a great deal,

but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but

she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it

seemed nothing but absence of mind. (P&P 164) Malfait 58

The reader’s perception of the protagonist is thus triply mediated: Darcy’s look is observed by Charlotte Lucas, who is again described by the narrator. We also learn how a gaze – in this instance that of Darcy – can easily be misinterpreted by onlookers.

The Austen novel in which looking by ladies is most prominently figured, is

Persuasion. From her position of silent isolation, Anne Elliot is a constant spectator to the actions of Captain Frederick Wentworth, her former great love. The Captain soon becomes the object of Anne’s “female gaze”: Austen thus reverses the traditional roles, turning the woman into the scopophilic viewer. As Jill Heydt-Stevenson observes in her essay “’Slipping into the Ha-Ha’: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels”: “In Persuasion

Austen inverts the power relations of courtship by pivoting the male gaze on itself, as we watch the narrator frankly acknowledge the pleasures that a woman can take in visualizing the male body” (332). Anne’s gaze sexualizes Wentworth’s body, and she projects her erotic feelings on others, as is the case when she watches her friend Lady Russell observing

Wentworth:

She could thoroughly comprehend the sort of fascination he must possess over Lady

Russell’s mind, the difficulty it must be for her to withdraw her eyes, the

astonishment she must be feeling that eight or nine years should have passed over

him, and in foreign climes and in active service too, without robbing him of one

personal grace! (Persuasion 178)

Clearly, Lady Russell’s supposed enchantment with Wentworth is here a mere reflection of what goes on in Anne’s own mind. Indeed, another description of Wentworth in the novel shows that Lady Russell is all but delighted with his appearance: Malfait 59

Such confidence, powerful in its own warmth, and bewitching in the wit which often

expressed it, must have been enough for Anne; but Lady Russell saw it very

differently. His sanguine temper, and fearlessness of mind, operated very differently

on her. She saw in it but an aggravation of the evil. It only added a dangerous

character to himself. (Persuasion 25)

Heydt-Stevenson justly remarks that, rather than being aroused by Wentworth’s manliness – as Anne is – Lady Russell is “clearly terrified of his sexual potency and masculine vigor” (335).

The two ladies’ opposing views are thus concentrated in the object of their gaze:

“Wentworth’s body becomes the site of Lady’s *sic+ Russell’s resistance and Anne’s subsequent loss and rekindled desire” (Heydt-Stevenson 336).

Persuasion is not the only Austen novel where the female gaze is given free rein. The same can be said of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price: while to a certain extent, she is the object of the male gaze – her figure is repeatedly admired by men such as Henry Crawford and Sir

Thomas Bertram – she resists submission to the expectations inherent in it, as appears from her refusal to marry Henry. Furthermore, she herself exercises the female gaze by watching the object of her affection, Edmund Bertram, albeit in secret: she never voices her regard for him to anyone. Fanny is the ultimate spectator: she observes all the goings-on at Mansfield

Park without getting involved in them herself. She cherishes her invisibility, always

“shrinking from notice” (MP 10) and hiding in her room. As Douglas Murray writes in

“Spectatorship in Mansfield Park: Looking and Overlooking”: “Fanny fears visibility more than cruelty” (14): when Mrs Norris scorns her, she does not react to her acerbic words, but only feels discomfort “*t+o be called into notice in such a manner” (MP 153). Malfait 60

In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby is subjected to the gazes of the Dashwood women when he enters their cottage, valiantly carrying the wounded Marianne: “the eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration which...sprung from his appearance” (40). Both Mrs Dashwood and her daughters are swept away by his “manly beauty” which is “instantly the theme of general admiration” (S&S 41). Again, Austen describes in no uncertain terms how her female characters take pleasure in watching members of the other sex.

Malfait 61

4.2 Paleness and Blushing

If it is one thing to control your gaze, it is another to control your skin colour. True, young ladies can pinch their cheeks to achieve a faux-rouge effect, but this measure only works for a few seconds. Mostly, the colouring of the skin is consequential to an entirely involuntary impulse. Thus, the body can betray emotions that would otherwise have been kept hidden. The blush is of paramount importance in linking the body to society: a person’s face is the threshold between the self and what lies beyond, the “other”. As John Wiltshire observes in Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health”, the blush is “not a straightforward phenomenon of the body” (18). A face is not always an open book: its appearance can be deceiving: “The blush is no unequivocal guide to emotion, and may be misread – indeed more often than not is misread – to ironic effect” (Wiltshire 19). Since a blush can bear more than one meaning – it can be an outer sign of embarrassment, but also of love, pride, desire or anger – it is prone to being misinterpreted by the people that witness it.

In Austen’s novels, the shade of a character’s skin is often described: the accounts of cheeks reddening are abundant. However, the paleness of a face can bear an equally great amount of meaning. The ideal complexion is described at the beginning of Emma, where its heroine is portrayed as “the picture of health” (34). Her counterpart can be found in the character of Jane Fairfax, who is always defined in terms of her frailty and paleness. John

Wiltshire calls her the “shadow-heroine” (139), stating that “Jane Fairfax is the shadowy background, the obscured antithesis to the heroine, and her story contributes much to the chiaroscuro of this picture of health” (135). This way, Jane Fairfax is brought into play as a means of laying emphasis on Emma’s beauty and health. However, it need not be forgotten Malfait 62

that during most of the novel, the reader observes Jane as seen through the eyes of Emma, who looks at her with no small amount of latent jealousy, keen to note her defects. Towards the end of the novel, we get another view on Jane from Frank Churchill, after their secret engagement has been made public:

Did you ever see such a skin? – such smoothness! such delicacy! – and yet without

being actually fair. – One cannot call her fair. It is a most uncommon complexion,

with her dark eye-lashes and hair – a most distinguishing complexion! – So peculiarly

the lady in it. – Just colour enough for beauty. (Emma 391)

This praise is quite different from Frank’s previous joking comments to Emma about Jane’s paleness, which were presumably meant to cover up his real feelings for her.

However, even before their engagement is announced, there are a number of instances where Jane’s seemingly characteristic paleness is conquered by a hint of red.

These are mostly moments when Frank Churchill, making some sly remark that alludes to their secret affair, causes his betrothed to flush. For example, during a party at which Jane is playing the piano, he hints at the time they spent together at Weymouth, where their engagement initiated:

She played.

“What felicity is it to hear a tune again which has made one happy! – If I mistake not

that was danced at Weymouth.”

She looked up at him for a moment, coloured deeply, and played something else.

(Emma 201, my italics)

Austen here consciously provides the observing reader with a clue that more may be going on beneath the surface. Exactly what that is, she will only reveal at the end of the novel. Malfait 63

Emma herself is not free from blushing either. When Mr Elton slights Harriet at the ball, Austen describes how her heroine colours in shock: “Her heart was in a glow, and she feared her face might be as hot” (Emma 271). As has often been stated, Emma is to a great extent a novel of education: its protagonist, rather conceited at first, comes to a greater insight of herself and the world, realizing the error of her ways. A pivotal scene in the novel is when, at the Box Hill picnic, Emma openly ridicules Miss Bates, a poor spinster and incessant talker. Afterwards, while she is waiting for her carriage, she is reprimanded by Mr

Knightley. While her friend speaks with decided force of her thoughtlessness, Emma

“blushe*s+”, “ke*eps+ her face averted”and feels “anger against herself, mortification and deep concern” (Emma 309-10). For the first time, Emma is halted in her dangerous snobbery by the man who loves her most, here acting as the traditional educating male. The blush indicates Emma’s acknowledgement of her mistake, and is soon followed by “tears running down her cheeks” (Emma 310), the quintessential sign of repentance.

When, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet mentions Mr Wickham during her dance with Darcy, the latter goes red with anger. However, the text – focalizing the reader’s perception of Darcy through the eyes of Lizzie – tells us that “a deeper shade of hauteur overspread his features” (P&P 84). This episode shows how Elizabeth misreads Darcy’s blush, falsely attributing his resentment of Wickham to improper pride. Only afterwards, when she hears the real account of the history between the two men, will she realize her mistake.

Despite her decided self-assurance, Elizabeth’s cheeks redden on occasion as well.

Her blushes are mainly blushes of embarrassment: they appear at moments where her confidence takes a blow. She blushes for the foolish behaviour of others, like Mr Collins, her mother or her two youngest sisters. For example, when Mrs Bennet cries out her indignation Malfait 64

with Darcy at a ball – while the object of her scorn is standing within hearing distance –

Elizabeth “blushe*s+ and blushe*s+ again with shame and vexation” (P&P 91).

Elizabeth’s blush appears to represent the blush of propriety: her embarrassment is that which ought to be felt by any person aptly conditioned by social conventions. By allowing her protagonist to colour, Austen indulges the contemporary reader’s expectation that improper behaviour will be condemned by the observers. Consequently, when she reads Jane’s account of Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, Elizabeth feels the embarrassment which they should feel: “Lydia – the humiliation, the misery, she was bringing on them all, soon swallowed up every private care; and covering her face with her handkerchief, Elizabeth was soon lost to every thing else” (P&P 245, my italics). Austen here projects the shame that should tint Lydia’s cheeks on the face of her more honourable heroine. Elizabeth – reading the letter in the company of Mr Darcy – tries to draw a curtain of privacy, but the handkerchief is instead all the more proof of her mortification. This display of embarrassment felt for the folly of her sister is repeated when the Wickhams, now married, pay a visit to Longbourn: “She blushed, and Jane blushed; but the cheeks of the two who caused their confusion, suffered no variation of colour” (P&P 279).

Mary Ann O’Farrell observes in her article “Austen’s Blush” that the blush can play a part in laying bare a character’s true feelings: “In the plotting of marriages, the involuntary blush exceeds the voluntary smile in uncovering a truth yielded against one’s well-behaved will” (127). When Jane Bennet speaks to her sister about her feelings for Mr Bingley, it is a blush that contradicts her words: “‘You doubt me,’ cried Jane, slightly colouring; ‘indeed you have no reason. He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my acquaintance, but that is all” (P&P 123, my italics). Even while verbally denying it, the colour in her cheeks Malfait 65

betrays that she does, in fact, love Mr Bingley. It is her blush that induces Lizzie to feel even more for her sister, since “she can love and praise Jane the more for the ineptitude with which she masks her continuing attachment” (O’Farrell 128).

Mansfield Park’s heroine, Fanny Price, is initially described as a girl possessing “no glow of complexion” (10) – and indeed, Fanny’s paleness and ill-health are often alluded to in the novel. However, during the absence of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, she undergoes some definite changes – something which Sir Thomas soon remarks upon his return. In a conversation with Fanny, Edmund seemingly reports his father’s newfound appreciation of her beauty, but underneath, Austen has buried the suggestion that Edmund might not be reporting solely on the views of his father, but also his own. As proof of Fanny’s positive evolution, he comments on the change in her skin colour: “Your complexion is so improved!”

(199). Fanny has come closer to approaching the “picture of health” that is embodied in

Emma Woodhouse, and has thus become worthy of notice to the men in her life. Henry

Crawford grows aware of the change in Fanny as well: “I used to think she had neither complexion nor countenance; but in that soft skin of hers, so frequently tinged with a blush as it was yesterday, there is decided beauty” (MP 231). It is this change in colour that awakens Henry to Fanny’s eligibility for marriage. The gaining of colour can thus be connected with a young woman’s increasing sexuality: the pale girl becomes the blushing woman. While the blushes of a young woman were traditionally connected to her “virginal naïveté,…thought to symbolize sensibility and innocence” (Takei 694-95), here they may function to betray Fanny’s dawning sexual longing, which finds its object in her cousin

Edmund. As Wiltshire observes, the topos of the blush, as used here by Austen: Malfait 66

conveys the presence of desire, and especially of female desire, whilst dramatising it,

precisely, as propriety. It declares sexuality in the very form of its denial, and thus

makes obeisance to decorum whilst simultaneously heightening whatever erotic

tensions may be latent in the conversation or interchange in which it occurs. (18)

In Sense and Sensibility, one of the most important turns in the novel comes about when Elinor discovers the secret engagement between Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele.

However, before their affair is revealed to Elinor, Austen gives the reader a hint that Edward is hiding something. She again uses the blush as a mode of suggesting that more is going on beneath the surface. When Marianne discovers that Edward is wearing a ring with a lock of hair set in it, she comments on it:

“I never saw you wear a ring before, Edward,” she cried. “Is that Fanny’s hair? I

remember her promising to give you some. But I should have thought her hair had

been darker.”

...He coloured very deeply, and giving a momentary glance at Elinor, replied, “Yes, it

is my sister’s hair. The setting always casts a different shade on it, you know.” (S&S

95)

Edward here blatantly lies, claiming that the lock of hair is his sister’s. Yet, his “momentary glance at Elinor” betrays his motivation for lying. The blush is what will excuse his lie to the reader in hindsight, once all has been revealed.

It need not surprise that the two most tempestuous lovers in Sense and Sensibility,

Marianne and Willoughby, also have their fair share of colouring to do. Already on their first meeting, when he picks her up after she has taken a fall off a hill, “her face” is “crimsoned over” (S&S 41). After a short season of happiness however, Willoughby is forced by his aunt Malfait 67

to choose between Marianne and his fortune. When Elinor and Mrs Dashwood happen upon him after he has brought Marianne the news of his departure for London, the embarrassment he feels is acute: he “colour*s+” and – upon declining Mrs Dashwood’s invitation to come visit them again soon – “his colour increase*s+” even more (S&S 73). The blush may here be said to offer a certain degree of integrity to Willoughby, who is generally professed to be the villain of the story, seducing Marianne and then walking out on her.

However, his coloured cheeks suggest that he does love Marianne, and is aware of the pain he causes her, but cannot bring himself to sacrifice his fortune. Malfait 68

4.3 Keepsakes and Portraits

Intimacy, inasmuch as it denotes a certain closeness between people, is strongly connected with emotion, feelings and the proximity of bodies. However, intimacy can also be symbolized by inanimate objects: when a sentimental meaning is transferred to them, they come to act out more than the mere utilitarian function that has been assigned to them. Articles such as these acquire a deeper layer of meaning, a significance that is often only known to the two people that the item connects by means of its existence.

A keepsake is an object given by one person to another, acting as a reminder of the one that bestows it. In Austen’s work, there are a few instances where such a memento comes into play. The novel where the keepsake is especially prominent, is Sense and

Sensibility. In this work, the object that plays a double role in symbolizing a secret attachment is a lock of hair, which reappears in two instances. The first occurrence is related by Margaret, the youngest of the Dashwood sisters. After having been alone with Marianne and Willoughby for a while, she tells Elinor:

“I am sure they will be married very soon, for he has got a lock of her hair.”

“Take care, Margaret. It may be only the hair of some great-uncle of his.”

“But, indeed, Elinor, it is Marianne’s. I am almost sure it is, for I saw him cut it off.

Last night after tea, when you and mama went out of the room, they were

whispering and talking together as fast as could be, and he seemed to be begging

something of her, and presently he took up her scissors and cut off a long lock of her

hair, for it was all tumbled down her back; and he kissed it, and folded it up in a piece

of white paper, and put it into his pocket-book.” (S&S 58) Malfait 69

The cutting of a lock of hair as it is described here, accompanied by the lovers’ whispers, becomes a symbolic, erotic act: it is Willoughby who begs Marianne for her hair, takes up the scissors and cuts off the lock. His possessing something of her seems to be equal to his conquest of her, in both a romantic and a sexual sense. It is an act of intense intimacy, and not without serious implications: Elinor silently agrees with the assumption voiced by her little sister, that a secret engagement must exist between the protagonists of this scene.

When matters between Marianne and Willoughby go awry, and she is snubbed by him at a ball in London, the lock of hair reappears once more to fulfil its symbolic function.

Where it was once proof of their deep attachment, it now becomes the object to seal their separation. A heartbroken Marianne writes to Willoughby: “If your sentiments are no longer what they were, you will return my notes, and the lock of hair which is in your possession”

(S&S 181). In his reply, Willoughby describes himself as “returning...the lock of hair which you so obligingly bestowed on me” (S&S 176), playing down the insistence with which he begged the lock of hair from her. Yet, at the end of the novel, while Marianne is very ill and confined to her bedroom, Willoughby pays a visit to Elinor. What follows is a scene of confession, where he recounts how his new wife – then still his fiancée – is the one who dictated the letter to him, after having made the discovery of Marianne’s letters and lock of hair. From his testimony, it appears that he really did love Marianne, and was sorry to part with these objects:

“I copied my wife’s words, and parted with the last relics of Marianne. Her three

notes – unluckily they were all in my pocket-book, or I should have denied their

existence, and hoarded them for ever; I was forced to put them up, and could not

even kiss them. And the lock of hair – that too I had always carried about me in the Malfait 70

same pocket-book, which was now searched by Madam with the most ingratiating

virulence, – the dear lock – all, every memento was torn from me.” (S&S 322)

Marianne’s lock of hair finds its double in the lock of hair that is set in Edward’s ring.

This keepsake leads to a series of wrong assumptions, made by both Marianne and Elinor. As

I mentioned above, Edward lies about the origin of the lock of hair, claiming that it is his sister’s. Later on in the novel, it will become apparent that the lock is actually Lucy Steele’s, to whom he is secretly engaged. However, at this point in the narrative, Elinor is still unaware of Lucy’s existence, and assumes that the lock of hair must be hers:

That the hair was her own, she instantaneously felt as well satisfied as Marianne; the

only difference in their conclusions was, that what Marianne considered as a free gift

from her sister, Elinor was conscious must have been procured by some theft or

contrivance unknown to herself. (S&S 95)

Nevertheless, truth will out, and it is with no small amount of shock that Elinor listens to

Lucy Steele’s declaration about her secret engagement to Edward. Lucy, ignorant of the effect her words have on Elinor, tells the latter about the lock of hair:

“I gave him a lock of my hair set in a ring when he was at Longstaple last, and that

was some comfort to him, he said...Perhaps you might notice the ring when you saw

him?”

“I did,” said Elinor, with a composure of voice under which was concealed an emotion

and distress beyond anything she had ever felt before. She was mortified, shocked ,

confounded. (S&S 132) Malfait 71

By means of this scene, the symbolic connotation of the lock of hair is transferred from

Elinor to Lucy Steele: whereas before, it acted as a sign of Edward’s secret admiration for the former, it now becomes the incontestable proof of his attachment to the latter.

Another recurring and meaningful presence in Austen’s oeuvre is taken up by the portraits she includes, which she allows to bear special significance to her characters.

Probably the most well-known appearance of a portrait in an Austen novel, is the painting of

Darcy at Pemberley, to which estate Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle pay a visit during their tour of Derbyshire. Their visit to Darcy’s manor – and his unexpected arrival – are of pivotal importance to the change that is taking place in Elizabeth’s feelings for him. Elizabeth, already quite impressed with the beauty of the house, is stopped in her tracks before the painting of its owner:

At last it arrested her—and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr Darcy, with such

a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked

at her. She stood several moments in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again

before they quitted the gallery…There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s

mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the

height of their acquaintance…Every idea that had been brought forward by the

housekeeper was favorable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas, on

which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard

with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered

its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression. (P&P 221-22)

While looking at the picture, Elizabeth has the illusion – an effect which paintings often have

– that Darcy himself is present, “fix*ing+ his eyes upon herself”. While she has been quite Malfait 72

irritated by his look in the past, the effect of the Darcy gazing at her out of the picture is a positive one. As Alexander Bove observes in “The ‘Unbearable Realism of a Dream’: On the

Subject of Portraits in Austen and Dickens”, “*t+he illusion of presence captured in the mimetic image…both supplement*s+ and supplant*s+ the memory of the original” (662).

When Austen describes how her protagonist “th*inks+ of his regard”, the narrative language leaps from the straightforward meaning of looking to the figurative meaning of Darcy’s

“regard”: his esteem for Elizabeth. The heroine remembers Darcy’s proposal, which was once so offensive to her because of its explicit acknowledgement of her social inferiority, and tones down his negative comments in her mind, influenced by the pleasing likeness before her. As Bove puts it: “the image on the canvas “soften*s+” not Darcy’s facial expression but the harsh memory of his proposal as a way of touching up a gap or flaw in his character” (662). The picture, along with the praise of Darcy she hears from his housekeeper, contributes to the alteration in Elizabeth’s feelings for the master of

Pemberley. At the same time, the painting also anticipates the arrival of the flesh and blood

Darcy, who will unexpectedly appear just a few moments later.

In Emma, another portrait plays a significant role in the representation of the characters’ romantic feelings. As was the case with Mr Elton’s riddle, the picture again turns out to be the cause of a series of romantic misconceptions. The painting comes about when

Emma, who is admired for her drawing skills, proposes to paint Harriet’s likeness – an idea which immediately finds approval with Mr Elton:

“It would be such a delight to have her picture!”

“Let me entreat you,” cried Mr. Elton; “it would indeed be a delight! Let me entreat

you, Miss Woodhouse, to exercise so charming a talent in favour of your friend...” Malfait 73

...”Well, if you give me such kind encouragement, Mr. Elton, I believe I shall try what I

can do.” (Emma 38)

Emma, in her role of matchmaker, decides the matter for Harriet, insisting on drawing her, while Mr Elton looks on. On its completion, the latter is in raptures about the result, exclaiming: “Oh, it is most admirable! I cannot keep my eyes from it. I never saw such a likeness” (Emma 42). Mr Elton then insists on taking the picture to London to have it framed, an initiative which only serves to strengthen Emma’s conviction of his love for Harriet. Upon his return with the framed portrait, he cannot cease to admire it:

The Picture, elegantly framed, came safely to hand soon after Mr. Elton’s return, and

being hung over the mantle-piece of the common sitting-room, he got up to look at

it, and sighed out his half sentences of admiration just as he ought; and as for

Harriet’s feelings, they were visibly forming themselves into as strong and steady an

attachment as her youth and sort of mind admitted. Emma was soon perfectly

satisfied of Mr. Martin’s being no otherwise remembered, than as he furnished a

contrast with Mr. Elton, of the utmost advantage to the latter. (Emma 60)

Little does Emma know, that the “half sentences of admiration” “sighed out” by Mr Elton are a display of his regard for the artist, not the subject. Later – when she is in a state of shock after Mr Elton’s unexpected proposal to her – she thinks again of the painting, and how it had encouraged her belief that he was in love with Harriet: “The picture! – How eager he had been about the picture! – and the charade! – and a hundred other circumstances; – how clearly they had seemed to point at Harriet” (Emma 112). The canvas, which – like the charade – had become an emblem of Mr Elton’s infatuation with Harriet in Emma’s eyes, Malfait 74

now turns against the heroine in acting as further proof of his attachment to her: it is her artistic skills that he was paying tribute to, by praising Harriet’s likeness.

A final example of portraiture and its link to the marriage plot can be found in Sense and Sensibility. There, a small picture of Edward Ferrars functions at once as a portrait and a keepsake. It is in the possession of Lucy Steele, given to her in secret by her fiancé. When

Miss Steele reveals her four year engagement to Elinor, she proves the attachment by showing her confidante the portrait:

*T+aking a small miniature from her pocket, she added, “To prevent the possibility of

mistake, be so good as to look at this face. It does not do him justice, to be sure, but

yet I think you cannot be deceived as to the person it was drew for. I have had it

above these three years.”

She put it into her hands a she spoke, and when Elinor saw the painting, whatever

other doubts her fear of a too hasty decision or her wish of detecting falsehood might

suffer to linger in her mind, she could have none of its being Edward’s face. She

returned it almost instantly, acknowledging the likeness.

“I have never been able,” continued Lucy, “to give him my picture in return, which I

am very much vexed at, for he has been always so anxious to get it! But I am

determined to sit for it at the very first opportunity.” (S&S 128)

The miniature here becomes at once a symbol of the joys of love and the pains of heartbreak. Whereas Lucy cannot hide her excitement from Elinor, in talking about her secret betrothed and the memento he has bestowed on her, Elinor can hardly look at the miniature, since it confirms his attachment to another woman. In an automatic reaction, stemming from her love for him, she makes herself believe that the picture “might have Malfait 75

been accidentally obtained”, that “it might not have been Edward’s gift” (S&S 131). This is idle hope, however, which is easily crushed when Lucy provides further evidence by producing one of Edward’s letters, and telling Elinor about the lock of hair she has given him. Malfait 76

5 Touch and Intimacy in Conversation Malfait 77

5 Touch and Intimacy in Conversation

The different forms of intimacy that have been discussed in the two previous sections of this dissertation all provide instances where an existing or developing bond between two of Austen’s characters is indirectly indicated, be it by means of fleeting bodily contact, through inanimate objects that take on a special meaning, or by a person’s outward appearance.

However, arguably the most direct manner of establishing or expressing a connection between two individuals, is by means of conversation. Through talk, people’s personality is displayed, and their intentions towards one another are laid out in not necessarily unambiguous terms. In Austen’s oeuvre, dialogue is of pivotal importance in sketching a person’s nature – not only as it appears to the reader, but also in the way it is interpreted by the other fictional characters inhabiting the novels.

There is a whole array of forms in which conversation can take place. A first instance is its occurrence under the guise of gossip, an act especially performed by the female

Austenian characters. Gossip is accompanied by another variety of talk that usually takes place in the realm of hushed whispers, i.e. secrets, which occasionally play an important part in advancing the plot.

A second type of communication, is talk as it appears in its written form: Austen, who was an avid letter writer in her personal life, does not neglect to attribute an often crucial role to the letters that her characters send each other.

Finally, conversation is of paramount importance to the courtship plot. Not only is it employed as a means of flirtation: when courtship is taken to its climax, dialogue is also the tool of declarations of love and betrothal scenes. Malfait 78

5.1 Gossip and Secrets

5.1.1 Gossip

As I asserted in the introduction to this chapter, gossip in Austen’s novels at first glance appears to be an exclusively female pastime. Nevertheless, it need not be forgotten that Austen – not wanting to write about that which she did not know – intentionally left out all scenes in which conversation took place between men alone. Thus, it is not implausible that Darcy, for example, in dissuading his friend Bingley from pursuing Jane Bennet, would have spoken badly about the behaviour of her siblings. However, Austen never explicitly mentions such scenes, so the reader cannot know for certain what goes on behind the screens of male intimacy.

Penelope Joan Fritzer describes gossip as a form of talk that was disapproved of by the courtesy books, since it was a sign of little refinement, and even coarseness:

In Austen’s time much social life consisted necessarily of visits and talk, and one’s

conduct and conversation were of significant consequence. The courtesy writers

almost unanimously cite the importance of a polite tongue, particularly as regards

unkind gossip…Obviously, the courtesy writers think malicious conversation reflects

more upon the talker than upon the object of malice; hence, they are united in their

caution against such talk. (52)

Gossip functions as a catalyst of intimacy, in that a bond is created between the two people that do the gossip, by defining and condemning the object of their scorn as “other”. Gossip thus generates a rather negative form of closeness, but closeness nonetheless.

In Austen’s work, there is an obvious concurrence with the views of the courtesy writers: when one of her characters talks derogatorily about another character, this is often Malfait 79

an indication of a deeper immorality or lack of goodness in their nature. However, as Fritzer notes, there are instances where one of the protagonists who is inherently “good” in spirit and intention, will censure another – but these occurrences are often explained by an underlying intention that is ultimately well-meant, or a naïve lack of subtlety in the heroine that has yet to be eradicated:

Jane Austen agrees with the courtesy writers: none of her characters who speaks

deleteriously in public about another is admirable or heroic. It is true that on

occasion a “good” character does criticize someone, but in those cases, the character

is speaking privately (as Elizabeth Bennet speaks to Jane about Darcy), speaking to

save someone from the machinations of a “bad” character (as Colonel Brandon

speaks to Elinor about Willoughby and Darcy speaks to Elizabeth about Wickham) –

or, in fact, speaking because she has not yet achieved the morality destined for her

(as Emma Woodhouse speaks before she changes into a better person). (Fritzer, 53)

Two of Austen’s characters that are most fierce in their ruthless gossiping are the Bingley sisters, who take on every possible opportunity to slant Elizabeth Bennet and her family. As

Fritzer observes: “The only way the reader knows the Bingley sisters is through their conversation, which clearly indicates their true worth – every time they speak, they are cutting (about the Bennets) or ingratiating (to Darcy)” (55). A striking display of their venomous tongue is given in the scene where they deride Elizabeth Bennet’s appearance when she arrives at Netherfield Hall, after having walked three miles through the rain to be with her ill sister, Jane. Their remarks are obviously designed to ridicule Elizabeth to Darcy:

“I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild.” Malfait 80

“She did, indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very nonsensical to

come at all! Why must she be scampering about the country, because her sister has a

cold? Her hair so untidy, so blowsy!”

“Yes, and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am

absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to hide it, not doing its

office.”

...“To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ancles

in dirt, and alone, quite alone! what could she mean by it? It seems to me to shew an

abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to

decorum.” (P&P 31-32)

By means of these speeches, that occur early on in the novel, Austen establishes the characters of the Bingley sisters as utterly snobbish and superficial, lacking any kind of deeper sense of morality. They are installed as two archetypical “shrews”, whose function it is to thwart the heroine in her quest for happiness (in the second part of the book, this role will be taken on by Lady Catherine – yet ultimately, all three shrews will fail in their attempts).

A second case of female gossiping can be found in the opening chapters of

Northanger Abbey. The heroine, Catherine Morland, has just arrived in Bath with her chaperone, Mrs. Allen, who is immediately attributed by Austen with the character traits of simplicity and superficiality. As a consequence, her main concerns are observing the appearance of others, enlarging her acquaintance and getting a dancing partner for

Catherine, as is exemplified in her comments in the scene when Catherine and the Allens first enter the Upper Rooms in Bath: “I wish I had a large acquaintance here with all my Malfait 81

heart, and then I should get you a partner. I should be so glad to have you dance. There goes a strange-looking woman! What an odd gown she has got on! How old-fashioned it is! Look at the back” (NA 10-11). Mrs Allen’s comment in Northanger Abbey, Austen’s first novel, finds its echo in her last completed one, Persuasion. There, the excessively vain and self- centred Sir Walter Elliot gives his judgement of the women of Bath without any scruples whatsoever:

The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that

there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion.

He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be

followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on

Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without

there being a tolerable face among them. (Persuasion 139)

In Sense and Sensibility, the act of gossip is brought in as a means of flirtation, helping to advance the growing intimacy between Marianne and Willoughby. The object of their slight is Colonel Brandon, Marianne’s other admirer. In indulging Willoughby’s urge to criticize the Colonel, the young heroine not only increases her bond with Willoughby, whom she favours, but at the same time widens the distance between herself and Colonel

Brandon. The Colonel, in the young lovers’ censure of him, is established as being entirely

“other” from themselves, and thus powerless to win Marianne’s heart:

“Brandon is just the kind of man,” said Willoughby one day, when they were talking

of him together, “whom everybody speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all

are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.”

“That is exactly what I think of him,” cried Marianne. Malfait 82

…”I consider him…as a very respectable man, who has everybody’s good word and

nobody’s notice; who has more money than he can spend, more time than he knows

how to employ, and two new coats every year.”

“Add to which,” cried Marianne, “that he has neither genius, taste, nor spirit. That his

understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice no expression.”

(S&S 48-50)

Willoughby’s gusto for gossip is an early pointer for the reader that his nature is one of volatile sensationalism: as is the case with other Austenian characters (such as Mary and

Henry Crawford, for instance), his tendency to scrutinize others is indicative of an inner morality that is not entirely good. Marianne, rapidly falling in love with her passionate interlocutor, temporarily deviates from the deep manners that she has been taught, to join in with the object of her affection in scorning Brandon.

Two examples of characters that are not fundamentally bad, but indulge in malignant gossip because they have not yet found their just moral integrity, are Emma Woodhouse and

Frank Churchill. The latter, in a bid to hide his secret engagement to Jane Fairfax, engages

Emma in mocking his fiancée. He comments upon the paleness of Jane’s complexion and the unattractiveness of her reserve. Moreover, he instils in Emma the notion of a secret affair between Miss Fairfax and a certain Mr Dixon, a man who Frank and Jane both knew during their mutual stay at Weymouth (where their engagement was formed). However, the most vicious incident of Frank and Emma conspiring against a third person occurs during the picnic at Box Hill, where Emma is spurred on by a game of Frank’s invention and led to slight the poor spinster Miss Bates in a most cruel way: Malfait 83

“Ladies and gentlemen – I am ordered by Miss Woodhouse to say, that she waves her

right of knowing exactly what you may all be thinking of...she only demands from

each of you either one thing very clever, be it prose or verse, original or repeated – or

two things moderately clever – or three things very dull indeed, and she engages to

laugh heartily at them all.”

“Oh! very well,” exclaimed Miss Bates, “then I need not be uneasy. ‘Three things very

dull indeed.’ That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things

as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I?...Do not you think I shall?”

Emma could not resist.

“Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me – but you will be limited as to

number – only three at once.” (Emma 305-306)

The conversation at the time continues as though no harm has been done, but later scenes show that Miss Bates is truly hurt, avoiding Emma when she comes to visit at the Bates’ house. Furthermore, Emma’s speech has deeply disappointed Mr Knightley, resulting in his well-known private reprimand of Emma at the end of the Box Hill picnic. Slowly, Emma begins to see the error of her ways, until at the end of the novel she realizes her own past foolishness and confesses to it to Mr Knightley. Frank Churchill too, takes back his harsh remarks about Jane Fairfax, once their engagement has been made public and he can openly admit his love for her.

Malfait 84

5.1.2 Secrets

A thorough perusal of Austen’s oeuvre will show that the novels contain a remarkable amount of more or less well-hidden secrets. Often crucial to the advancement of the plot is the sudden revelation of such a secret. However, before the truth is made known to the entire world, it is at times divulged – by the one burdened with the secret – to one of the other characters, who is thus chosen as a confidante. Sharing the secret necessarily connects the ones in the know, consequently creating an unavoidable form of intimacy: they are united in the possession of a knowledge that is kept hidden from the rest of the community.

The Lady’s Preceptor, one of the courtesy books discussed by Penelope Joan Fritzer advices that:

There is nothing in the commerce of the World more commendable than the

religiously keeping of whatever Secret may be committed to us...Should a friend

therefore, from the Esteem she has of you, intrust you with one at any time, don’t

imagine, Madam, that under any pretext you may impart it to another friend, who

may not perhaps keep it better than yourself. This would not only be Treachery to

the former, but a Discovery of your weakness at the same time to the latter, who will

take care, if she have any Prudence, of ever placing Confidence in you. (Ancourt, qtd.

in Fritzer 59)

Austen, adhering – as she does on most accounts – to the spirit of the courtesy books, employs the ability to keep a secret as an indicator of the integrity of her characters. Malfait 85

In Sense and Sensibility, Lucy Steele singles out Elinor Dashwood as her friend and confidante, on account of their both knowing Edward Ferrars. Clearly eager to make her secret engagement known to the latter, she blurts it out to an incredulous Elinor:

“Mrs. Ferrars is certainly nothing to me at present – but the time may come – how

soon it will come must depend upon herself –when we may be very intimately

connected.”

She looked down as she said this, amiably bashful, with only one side-glance at her

companion to observe its effect on her.

“Good heavens!” cried Elinor, “what do you mean? Are you acquainted with Mr.

Robert Ferrars? Can you be?”

And she did not feel much delighted with the idea of such a sister-in-law.

“No,” replied Lucy, “not with Mr. Robert Ferrars – I never saw him in my life; but,”

fixing her eyes upon Elinor, “with his elder brother.” (S&S 125-126)

The intimacy created between the two women by Lucy’s insistence to share her secret is of an involuntary kind – Elinor is forced into the union against her own volition. Furthermore, though she is heartbroken by the news which her new “friend” so excitedly divulges, she has to conceal her real emotions, not only from Lucy, but also from the rest of the world. Since the secret is not hers, Elinor feels she has no right to tell anyone, not even her sister

Marianne. Thus she is left to contemplate the loss of Edward in solitude. In keeping Lucy’s secret, despite its causing her great suffering, Elinor “is the perfect example of courtesy book good manners” (Fritzer 60). However, not all characters exemplify courtesy book manners as well as Elinor does: Lucy’s own sister, Anne Steele, is the one who inadvertently blurts out Malfait 86

the truth to Edward’s sister – causing the Steele sisters to be thrown out of their hostess’s household at once.

Pride and Prejudice provides an example of a character deliberately sharing a secret with another character, in order to inspire pity in the latter, and consequently create an intimacy. This is Wickham’s intention in divulging his shared past with Darcy to Elizabeth.

Wickham talks of the injustice done to him by his former friend , the son of the landowner for whom his own father worked as a steward: he relates how Darcy refused to grant him the living that was promised to him by the late Mr Darcy. Little does Elizabeth know that this so-called secret is in truth a faulty version of the past conflict between the two men

(revolving around Wickham’s attempt to elope with Georgiana Darcy), conjured up by

Wickham to blacken Darcy in his interlocutor’s eyes, and gain favour with her himself.

Already prejudiced against Darcy because of his earlier slight of her at a ball, she willingly believes Wickham’s story, causing her distaste for Darcy to strengthen. As Elizabeth’s connection with Wickham intensifies, so does her aversion for Darcy, resulting in a very fierce refusal of Darcy’s offer of marriage later on in the novel. For the jilted Darcy, feeling the necessity to defend himself from the false accusations – of “having injured Mr Wickham”

(P&P 179) – laid at his door, Lizzie’s refusal prompts the need to reveal his own secret, and he does so by writing to her. His scruples about telling the true story of Wickham’s seduction of his sister are clearly laid out in the letter: “I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to forget myself, and which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold to any human being” (P&P 181). Darcy’s struggling to reveal his secret proves his deep manners and adherence to courtesy book propriety. He only divulges the truth when it serves a greater purpose – a quality which typifies most of Austen’s “good” characters. The Malfait 87

revelation of his secret also brings about a change in Elizabeth’s relation to him, her dislike gradually making way for understanding, respect and eventually love. In trusting her with that which he has most eagerly hidden from the world, a bond of intimacy is necessarily established.

Darcy’s secret knowledge of Wickham’s true nature finds its double in another

Austenian novel, i.e. Sense and Sensibility. There, it is subtly hinted at on a few occasions that Colonel Brandon is preoccupied with something. In the end, the Colonel reveals his secret to Elinor. He tells her about the sudden disappearance of his ward, Eliza, and how she has been discovered after months of absence. As it turns out, she had eloped with Mr

Willoughby – before the latter’s acquaintance with the Dashwood sisters had taken place – and been left by him, pregnant with his child. As was the case with Darcy, Colonel Brandon proves his moral integrity by not publicly denouncing Willoughby. He only confides in Elinor with a view on making Willoughby’s true character known to Marianne, in the hope that this information might relieve some of her grief for his betrayal of her: “*H+ad I not seriously and from my heart believed it might be of service, might lessen her regrets, I would not have suffered myself to trouble you with this account of my family afflictions, with a recital which may seem to have been intended to raise myself at the expense of others” (S&S 204). After his revelation, Colonel Brandon leaves Elinor “full of compassion and esteem for him” (S&S

205), a sentiment which Marianne will ultimately grow to share and surpass.

Quite often in the development of the typical marriage plot in Austen’s novels, there are instances of secret love. Often these sentiments are shared among sisters or friends (as is the case with Elinor’s confession to Marianne that she loves Edward, for example, or

Harriet’s revelation of her regard for Mr Knightley to Emma), but at times the protagonists Malfait 88

keep their feelings hidden in their own breast. Most striking in their secret desire, are the heroines of Mansfield Park and Persuasion: both Fanny Price and Anne Elliot conceal their devotion for years. Fanny, feeling unworthy of her cousin’s regard, loves him from a distance for a very long time, meekly observing his infatuation with Mary Crawford. Anne, on the other hand, is confronted with the man she has unwillingly refused – but has never ceased to love – after an absence of eight years. Having entirely forfeited her claim on him when she broke off their engagement (persuaded by her friend Lady Russell of the imprudence of the match), she is forced to love him in silence and from a distance. Only at the very end of the novels do the true sentiments of these two heroines come to the fore, when their respective objects of affection declare their love for them. Fanny Price and Anne Elliot are the two most isolated Austenian heroines, and in both cases, they bear their secrets alone.

The main secret in Emma is the concealed engagement between Frank Churchill and

Jane Fairfax. These two lovers do not intentionally confide in anyone else, yet Frank is not very adept at hiding the truth. He tries to cover up his attachment to Jane by engaging in a prolonged flirtation with Emma, during which he even tries to gain the latter’s favour by joking about his own fiancée. Nevertheless, on a few occasions, he threatens to slip up and reveal the secret affair. He anonymously buys Jane a piano, giving rise to all kinds of speculation among the people of Highbury about its possible sender. Furthermore, he blunders when he alludes to a certain piece of information which he could not have known, had Jane not written about it to him in one of her secret letters. His mysterious behaviour arouses Mr Knightley’s suspicion that more might be going on between Frank and Jane, the more so when he spells out the word “blunder” for Jane in a puzzle game: Malfait 89

Frank Churchill placed a word before Miss Fairfax. She gave a slight glance round the

table, and applied herself to it...The word was discovered, and with a faint smile

pushed away...Harriet, eager after every fresh word, and finding out none, directly

took it up, and fell to work. She was sitting by Mr Knightley, and turned to him for

help. The word was blunder; and as Harriet exultingly proclaimed it, there was a blush

on Jane’s cheek which gave it a meaning not otherwise ostensible. (Emma 287-288)

Jane’s smile, together with the reddening of her cheeks in reaction to the word “blunder” provide further evidence for Mr Knightley that, underneath this child’s puzzle game, a deeper game is at play between Frank and Jane. However, as a man of discretion, Mr

Knightley keeps the thought to himself, and the affair is only made public when the two lovers openly announce their engagement. Malfait 90

5.2 Letters

As is demonstrated by the ample collection of Austen’s correspondence that has been preserved to this day, she was an avid letter writer in her private life. Fritzer points out that “*l+etter-writing was an important skill in Austen’s time because of the distances separating people, especially outside the cities” (72). A correspondence by mail was the only way of conveying news to friends and relatives from whom one was sometimes separated by a journey of several days. Consequently, as Lucy Steele testifies in Sense and Sensibility:

“Writing to each other…is the only comfort…in such long separations” (131). Austen’s main confidante and correspondent was her sister Cassandra, to whom she related all kinds of information, ranging from trivial concerns about dresses, over accounts of the balls she attended – and the people present at them – to news about their family and acquaintance.

Austen’s zest for writing transpires even in her everyday letter-writing, since these are often spiced with witty comments and ironic reports of her experiences. As an author wishing to write about the world as she knew it, she must have realized that letter-writing formed an intrinsic part of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century daily life. Consequently, the role played by letters in her oeuvre is far from negligible: it is even suspected that Pride and

Prejudice was initially conceived as an epistolary novel, just like two of her early writings,

Love and Friendship and Lady Susan, were.

As is the case for some other aspects of Austen’s novels that have been discussed in this dissertation, letter-writing too often serves as a marker for a person’s character, as is observed by Fritzer:

Austen gives letter-writing an important place in her novels, and she imbues it with

meaning beyond the simple content of the letters themselves. There is a definite Malfait 91

correspondence between the behaviour of her characters and their ability and desire

to write letters for pleasure and duty. The admirable characters write well-crafted,

informative, often important letters; those less admirable write desultory, inferior

letters. (79)

An example of poor letter-writing can be found in Mr. Collins’s un-spontaneous letters, which are described by Lizzie as possessing “something very pompous”, while her father attributes them with “a mixture of servility and self-importance” (P&P 58). Also in Pride and

Prejudice, Lydia Bennet’s infrequent and very short letters are indicative of her generally flighty behaviour. Darcy’s writing skills, on the other hand, are the subject of praise: consistent with his general conduct, Darcy takes great care in producing a letter: he professes that he “write*s+ rather slowly” (P&P 42) and that his letters are “generally long”

(P&P 43). In Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford is said to be a poor correspondent, which indicates a flawed character. His sister Mary, though an accomplished letter-writer, lacks propriety in her letters to Fanny Price, in that she permits her brother Henry to add a few lines to them, thus allowing for a correspondence between an unmarried man and woman to take place, even though “*p+erhaps the most important social rule of letter-writing was that one could not write to a person of the opposite sex unless that person were a close relative” (Fritzer 72). This way, she exposes Fanny to possible speculation about a deeper attachment between herself and Henry. In Emma, the heroine is forced to have a better opinion of Robert Martin, Harriet’s suitor, upon perceiving the quality of the letter containing his proposal:

The style of the letter was much above her expectation. There were not merely no

grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; Malfait 92

the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it

conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good

sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling. (44)

Emma, rooted in her snobbish belief that Robert Martin is not good enough for her friend, convinces Harriet to refuse him. Only at the end of the novel does she see the error of her ways, applauding the marriage between Harriet and Robert Martin after all.

Since the most direct way of being informed of events that take place elsewhere is through written correspondence, sudden revelations in the novels are often made by means of a letter, which sometimes functions to abruptly advance the plot. For example, it is Jane’s letter to Elizabeth about Lydia’s elopement with Wickham that sets in motion the final act of the novel, including Darcy’s chivalrous rescue action and Lizzie’s acceptance of his second proposal. In Northanger Abbey, it is another letter – from Catherine Morland’s brother

James – that informs the heroine of the latter’s broken-off engagement with Isabella Thorpe.

Marianne’s unanswered notes to Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, sent upon her arrival in

London, indicate to the reader the extent of his abandonment of her – while his final, cold letter of rejection completes her heartbreak. Finally, it is a letter from Mr Collins that first informs Mr Bennet of the possibility of an attachment between his daughter Elizabeth and

Mr Darcy, a notion which he heartily laughs at.

However, the two letters that arguably bear most significance of all the correspondence that has been included by Austen in her novels, are Darcy’s letter to

Elizabeth after her refusal of his first proposal, and Wentworth’s note to Anne Elliot, declaring his love for her. These two instances of letter-writing both stand out, not in the least because they break one of the main rules laid down by the courtesy books, namely that Malfait 93

it is deemed highly improper to write to a member of the opposite sex, unless one is related to them by blood or marriage. It is this very regulation that strengthens Elinor’s belief of a secret engagement between her sister and Willoughby, since Marianne sends him private letters, and such a violation of propriety could only be explained if a mutual agreement existed between the young lovers. However, as Fritzer notes, the motivation of both Darcy and Wentworth is strong enough to allow for a bending of the rules:

Certainly, no heroines ever flagrantly break the rule, but they do sometimes receive

letters from the men when there is a very good reason: a pending engagement or a

bit of vitally important information to be transmitted. Regarding correspondence, as

with so many of her matters of conduct, Austen sticks to the spirit of the courtesy

books, if she does not always stick to the letter. (79)

Darcy’s letter is situated at the very centre of the novel, just after the first proposal scene. It is pivotal in explaining his past behaviour, and largely redeems him for displaying his so- called improper “pride”. His explanation sheds a new light on more than one past event.

Aware of his breaking the rules by writing to Elizabeth, he begins his letter by asking her to

“pardon the freedom with which *he+ demand*s+ *her+ attention” (P&P 177). The first accusation laid at his door by Elizabeth – that of ruining Jane and Mr Bingley’s happiness by separating them – is refuted by Darcy on account of his sincere belief that Jane did not feel as much affection for Bingley, as the latter did for her. Once he was aware of Bingley’s deep attachment to Jane, he closely observed her behaviour towards his friend, concluding that

[h]er look and manners were open, cheerful and engaging as ever, but without any

symptom of peculiar regard, and I remained convinced from the evening’s scrutiny,

that though she received his attentions with pleasure, she did not invite them by any Malfait 94

participation of sentiment...I did not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it;

- I believed it on impartial conviction. (P&P 178)

Darcy’s belief here calls to mind Charlotte Lucas’s comment to Lizzie at the beginning of the novel about the danger in Jane’s serene nature: “*I+t is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him” (P&P 18). Elizabeth, at first feeling only indignation at Darcy’s presumptions, on a second perusal of his account, recalls Charlotte’s comments and is obliged to admit to herself that, to a stranger, Jane might indeed have given an impression of relative indifference. Darcy further states that he considered the union between Jane and Bingley to be a “most unhappy connection” (P&P 178), not only due to the coolness in her manners, but also because of the “total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by [your mother], by your three younger sisters, and occasionally even by your father” (P&P 178). Elizabeth cannot possibly contradict this observation, since she herself has frequently felt ashamed of the improper conduct of her relatives. Darcy’s final revelation – of the truth about Mr Wickham – is perhaps the most important of the letter: not only does it concern Elizabeth personally (because of her apparent attachment to Wickham), it also has an impact on the heroine’s – and the reader’s

– perception of Wickham, whose image of cheerful martyr was built on the lie which he told

Lizzie at the beginning of their acquaintance. Elizabeth’s initial reaction is one of total disbelief, thinking to herself: “This must be false! This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!” (P&P 183). However, in the following pages, it is described how Lizzie reads the letter a second time, and gradually comes to the conclusion that she has been utterly mistaken in her perception of the two gentlemen concerned: “She grew absolutely ashamed Malfait 95

of herself. – Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” (P&P 186). Darcy’s revelations leave the heroine in a state of perturbation: she “c*an+ think only of her letter” (P&P 188) and the “change so sudden and so important” (P&P 187) that it has brought about. It is this letter, sitting at the actual core of the book, that function as the axis of the novel: it constitutes a turning-point, not only in the events of the story, but also – and more importantly – in Elizabeth’s feelings, forcing her to drop her prejudices and gradually preparing her to fall in love with Darcy.

Darcy himself, though in the role of jilted lover, does not address Elizabeth bitterly: on several occasions in the letter, he expresses regret at the possibility of causing her pain by what he relates. Furthermore, in contrast to her family’s occasional impropriety, he praises her for the integrity in her conduct. Finally, he concludes his letter with the words “I will only add, God bless you” (P&P 182), proving that his last thought goes out to her.

Wentworth’s declaration of love differs much from Darcy’s letter in tone and form: whereas the latter’s is a long, distinguished and poised epistle, the former’s is a hastily scribbled down, passionate note. When Wentworth – sitting at a desk writing a letter to

Captain Benwick – overhears Anne’s conversation with Captain Harville about men and women’s capacity for constancy in love, he is increasingly overcome by emotion. No longer able to keep his regard for Anne to himself, he “seize*s+ a sheet of paper, and pour*s+ out his feelings” (Persuasion 243). His writing to Anne is clearly inspired by the anxiety that he will have no other chance of telling her how he really feels, as Malcolm Day notes: “Various complications prevent [Wentworth] from openly asking his real love Anne Elliot for her hand and in his desperation to declare himself to her before he has to leave on naval duty he breaks *a+ code of etiquette by hastily conveying his message in writing” (199). As was the Malfait 96

case with Darcy’s letter, a gentleman again violates the rule that prevents him from writing to a single lady – yet, once more, Austen justifies the act by letting it serve a greater good: the realization of the marriage plot. The tone adopted by Wentworth in his note is urgent and passionate, and at times seems almost erotic, a feeling which is underscored by the fact that – when he secretly passes the letter to Anne – he briefly looks at her with “eyes of glowing entreaty” (Persuasion 238): “I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul” (Persuasion 238, my italics). When an astonished Anne receives the letter, its importance is stressed: “On the contents of that letter depended all which this world could do for her” (Persuasion 238): the letter can bring her either future bliss, or enduring heartache. This feeling of insecurity is echoed in

Wentworth’s postscript to the note: “I must go, uncertain of my fate” (Persuasion 239). Like

Darcy making his bold first proposal to Elizabeth (only to be refused), Wentworth takes the risk of laying bare his feelings to the same woman that once jilted him. A remarkable difference is that Wentworth’s declaration is executed by means of a letter, which is unusual in view of his being a confident marine officer – as John Pikoulis observes in “Reading and

Writing in Persuasion”: “That someone like him should turn to literature at the crisis of his life is…both surprising and mysterious. A distinguished sailor, hungry for results, sublimates his energies and finds that relief comes to him not from the tongue but the tip of his pen”

(36). However, his resort to writing is most probably caused by the setting: Anne and

Wentworth are in the company of their friends and relatives, who are unaware of their previous attachment: Wentworth cannot address the heroine directly, and is thus forced to convey his message by means of this secret letter. Nevertheless, the note, in all its urgency, does not fail to express the same passion that a direct confrontation might have done: here Malfait 97

Austen proves once more the power of letter-writing and its importance in her novels.

Anne’s reading of the note is followed by “the usual outdoor walk to resolve all differences”

(Fritzer 77): she goes after him and the matter is sealed. Malfait 98

5.3 The Discourse of Love

5.3.1 Flirtation

The role of courtship in Austen’s novels has by now been proven to be of unassailable importance. Michael A. Winkelman, in his article “Flirtation; or Let Us Sport Us While We

May: An Assay and Manifesto”, has described courtship as “the unwritten yet formal staging ground for flirtation” (67). Indeed, the act of flirting greatly serves the marriage plot, as it is often handled by Austen as a strategy to bring two young people together in an amorous context. However, introducing flirtatious behaviour in a novel is a precarious undertaking, since the concept is a flighty one: flirtation is a balancing act that involves giving subtle hints, while still remaining seemingly detached from any serious kind of commitment. As

Winkelman puts it:

Flirtation exists only when discerned yet unacknowledged. Its baseline characteristics

are generally understood, but it evades restrictive definitions, for it is solely by

sneaking across boundaries and disguising itself as other things that it

survives...Though dalliance can serve serious purposes and lead to adult outcomes

(e.g., love, marriage,…), it should be played as if absolutely inconsequential, no more

than a moment’s diversion. (Winkelman 56-57)

In Austen, the stress is laid on these “adult outcomes”: when she describes her characters’ indulgence in “coquetry”, one or both of them will mostly have a further motive on their mind. Consequently, though the intimacy created between flirting partners is apparently

“inconsequential”, the opposite is often true: flirtation frequently functions as a stepping stone towards matrimony, or at least a marriage proposal. To quote Winkelman once more, it constitutes “a socially sanctioned mechanism for arranging good matches, for binding Malfait 99

couples solidly and covalently within a communal matrix” (71). In Austen’s time, interaction between men and women was always a public act, in the presence of at least one chaperone on the lady’s side, but often also friends, family or even strangers. Thus society had to provide a collectively approved instrument for potential partners to initiate a deeper connection: flirtation offered such a means.

Austen’s oeuvre provides ample instances of flirtation. These dalliances often lead to further attachments, yet Austen does not shy away from including scenes of failed flirtation, or one-way flirtation. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, the rather pompous Mr Collins prides himself on being “happy on every occasion to offer those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable to ladies” (62). However, his attentions have but little positive effect on Elizabeth, the lady of his choice: rather than return his addresses, she seeks to escape his company as best she can. In the same novel, the vicious Miss Bingley is tragically in love with Mr Darcy, attempting to impress him with her snobbish comments about

Meryton society, yet she is met with stubborn disinterest on his part. Indeed, her observations often only serve as a catalyst to lure from Darcy’s lips a remark in praise of her rival, Elizabeth. In Persuasion, Captain Wentworth is accosted by both Henrietta and Louisa

Musgrove (though the former is promised to her cousin Charles Hayter), in the race for his attention. Though he responds kindly to their advances, he never means to engage them in a romantic way – since his heart remains true to Anne – and is subsequently taken by surprise, when society expects him to ask Louisa Musgrove for her hand. Finally, in Northanger Abbey,

John Thorpe’s attempts at seducing Catherine Morland early on in the story all fail, since she is in serious doubt of “his being altogether completely agreeable” (55) and feels a much greater inclination towards the more pleasant and poised Henry Tilney. Malfait 100

Accordingly, Catherine Morland’s interaction with Mr Tilney provides a first example of successful flirtation, though the naïve heroine herself is not aware of being engaged in the act of flirting: “He *Mr Tilney+ talked with fluency and spirit, and there was a archness and pleasantry in his manner which interested, though it was hardly understood by her” (NA 12-

13). The two lovers-to-be conduct a playful conversation, in which Mr Tilney takes the lead by ironically commenting upon what are considered to be the “proper attentions of a partner” (NA 13) and teasing Catherine about what she should write in her journal that evening:

“Shall I tell you what you ought to say?”

“If you please.”

“I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal

of conversation with him; seems a most extraordinary genius; hope I may know more

of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to say.” (NA 14)

This flirting vein in their dialogue is continued on a later occasion, when they talk about the implications of dancing (a scene which I have already discussed in the third section of this dissertation). The dalliance ultimately bears fruit, since Catherine and Henry are married at the end of the novel.

The most explicit example of flirting in Austen, is Marianne Dashwood’s extended flirtation with Mr Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. From their very first meeting – romantically set in the rain – when Willoughby picks up the wounded Marianne and carries her back to the Dashwood cottage, a fire is kindled on both sides. The attachment is continued in such a manner as to create the general conviction that the two youngsters are engaged to be married: they have passionate conversations conducted in hushed whispers, Malfait 101

Willoughby begs a lock of hair off Marianne, takes her out riding and even shows her

Allenham, the estate of his aunt that is expected to be his one day. Few of Willoughby’s conversation is directly reported in the novel, but the effect on Marianne is quite apparent, as in the scene (discussed in the previous section) where he secures her affection at the expense of Colonel Brandon: she enthusiastically joins in criticizing the Colonel – implicitly stressing her approval of Willoughby, on account of his being so different to Brandon. The flirtation seems to lead to the logical conclusion of matrimony, yet – though Willoughby’s attentions eventually turn out to have been sincere – their union is prevented by

Willoughby’s aunt, who upon hearing of her nephew’s seduction of Colonel Brandon’s ward withdraws her support of him. As a consequence, Willoughby – averse to living a life of relative poverty – abandons Marianne and goes to London in search of a woman with a sizeable dowry.

Frank Churchill’s dalliance with Emma Woodhouse is entirely built on pretence: it is a game invented by him to hide his secret engagement to Jane Fairfax. Nevertheless, the flirtation, though false, is only known to be so by Frank himself – and Jane, who is understandably ill-pleased with her fiancé’s conduct. By Emma and the rest of Highbury society, his teasing attentions are perceived as stemming from a sincere interest in the heroine. Frank exhibits a similarity to Willoughby in his flirting, in that, on occasion, it is also achieved at the expense of another member of the party. His continued banter of his fiancée, by speculating to the oblivious Emma about Jane’s supposed secret lover, is one such example. But Emma’s censure of Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic, can be said to be a result of Frank’s influence as well: it is his flirtatious call for a game to amuse Miss

Woodhouse that results in Emma’s harsh words to her old friend. Also at the Box Hill picnic – Malfait 102

where Emma and Frank are the obvious centre of attention – and again at the expense of

Jane, is his joking request to Emma to find him a wife:

“Well, I have so little confidence in my own judgment, that whenever I marry, I hope

somebody will choose my wife for me. Will you? (turning to Emma.) Will you choose

a wife for me? – I am sure I should like any body fixed on by you. You provide for the

family, you know, (with a smile at his father). Find somebody for me. I am in no hurry.

Adopt her, educate her.”

“And make her like myself.”

“By all means, if you can.”

“Very well, I undertake the commission. You shall have a charming wife.”

“She must be very lively, and have hazle eyes. I care for nothing else. I shall go abroad

for a couple of years – and when I return, I shall come to you for my wife.

Remember.” (Emma 308)

His appeal for a wife, and moreover, one that resembles Emma in her “lively” manners and

“hazle eyes”, can only be hurtful to the one that has secretly promised to take on that role – even though Frank is playfully unaware of this.

The most interesting form of flirtation in Austen occurs in Pride and Prejudice, where the interaction between Darcy and Elizabeth can be described as flirtation under the guise of conflict – even though initially both parties, and later especially Elizabeth, are unaware of it.

The stage for their enduring discord is set in the very first pages of the novel, when Lizzie is slighted by Darcy at the Meryton assembly dance. Her prejudice against Darcy is decided then and there – her dislike of him strengthened by Wickham’s tale – and determines her conduct towards him for the entire first half of the book. Darcy, on the other hand, soon Malfait 103

adjusts his initial judgement of Elizabeth, growing in his regard for her. As a consequence of their different dispositions, “some serious fighting” occurs, to use Winkelman’s words (64).

Nevertheless, on most occasions, this “fighting” is masqueraded by the proper terminology of polite society, as is the case when they discuss the merits of an “accomplished young lady” during Lizzie’s stay at Netherfield:

“I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen *ladies+, in the whole range of my

acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”

“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.

“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an

accomplished woman.”

“Yes; I do comprehend a great deal in it.”

“Oh! certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really esteemed

accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must

have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern

languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain

something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and

expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.”

“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something

more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”

“I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather

wonder now at your knowing any.”

“Are you so severe upon your own sex, as to doubt the possibility of all this?” Malfait 104

“I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application,

and elegance, as you describe, united.” (P&P 35)

Here, Darcy is implicitly complementing Elizabeth – whose zest for reading has just been discussed – whereas Lizzie only finds further confirmation of his condescension towards others. Nevertheless, though the dialogue is acerbic in undertone – especially on Lizzie’s part

– it does establish a connection between the two future spouses: indeed, for most of the novel, Darcy is uppermost in Elizabeth’s mind, as she is in his. In Darcy’s case, his thoughts of her are almost from the start a result of his admiration. Lizzie’s frequent dwelling on his character and behaviour is initially spurred by her irritation of him, yet in the second part of the novel her feelings take a turn in the opposite direction. At that point, their past quarrels serve the purpose of having established a definite intimacy between the two protagonists – albeit at first undesired by the lady: thus, their conflict can be interpreted as a form of flirtation on a deeper level, paving the way for an eventual union. Malfait 105

5.3.2 Betrothal Scenes

In dealing with a series of novels in which the marriage plot carries a vast amount of importance, the focus on betrothal scenes is great indeed: these are often – though not always – the passages that form the climax of the story. However, Austen’s typical ironic disposition will not allow for an unambiguously romantic love fest: instead, she often undercuts these scenes of union by means of distancing strategies and hints of satire. Of definite consequence to the resolution of the love story that the heroine has been encapsulated in for the duration of the novel, is the setting of these episodes: strikingly,

Austen shows a decided preference for the outdoors.

It may appear that the unions orchestrated by Austen in the six canonical novels are often fairytale-like, and the headstrong nature of her heroines when it comes to choosing a partner could be described as unrealistic. Nevertheless, it should be noted that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century – the time of the bulk of Austen’s literary activity – there was more freedom when it came to finding spouses. As Mary Waldron observes in her article on Emma, “Men of Sense and Silly Wives: The Confusions of Mr. Knightley”:

The ideal of the companionate marriage was well established by the time the novel

was written; arranged and dynastic marriages were rare, especially among the

“middling sort;” people were expected to make “sensible” marriages, but there was

plenty of room for maneuver, and also for social mobility in both directions. (143)

Waldron’s view is seconded by Winkelman, who notes that “*p+arental consent and dowries still mattered a great deal, but verbally astute maidens had limited freedom to choose or reject, within socially accepted patriarchal limits” (68). Indeed, prejudice against

“imprudent” marriages, on account of differences in class or fortune, persists mainly in Malfait 106

members of the aristocracy (such as Pride and Prejudice’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh) or extremely conservative minds (like that of Mr Collins). The best example of the “verbally astute maiden” referred to by Winkelman, is Elizabeth Bennet. She rejects Mr Collins’s offer of marriage, despite the financial relief it might bring her family – and, notably, is supported in her refusal by Mr Bennet, who defies his wife in doing so. Yet, Austen will never let the heroine throw herself away on an emotional whim (hence, Lydia’s elopement is severely frowned upon). To quote Segal and Handler: “In Austen's texts, the 'good marriage' is conventionally understood in terms of a number of closely related principles. Marriage should unite romance and utility – the partners should 'fall in love' and should possess a suitable degree of rank and wealth” (329). A “good marriage”, according to Austen, therefore unites deep personal feeling with social and financial comfort. Conveniently, though her heroines choose from the heart, their heart is always engaged by a man who can provide for them in their future lives.

The act of proposing itself was no mean feat, and occurred according to certain rules, as Malcolm Day writes:

When it came to the crunch time of proposing marriage, a man had two options: the

verbal ‘sudden-death’ approach, or the more formal method of writing it in a letter.

To propose verbally, the man would have to do some manoeuvring to be alone with

the woman of his choice, something which in itself would betray his intentions. The

proposal would need to establish the suitor’s credentials, including whatever means

he could offer to support her, but financial negotiations, including the size of her

marriage portion, would be conducted later with her father if the outcome was

positive. Should the man be rejected, the woman was bound to keep the matter Malfait 107

under wraps. Such secrecy did allow a gentleman to try his luck again were

circumstances to change for the better. (202)

Austen seems to have preferred the “verbal ‘sudden-death’ approach”, since most proposals in her oeuvre are of this nature, with the exception of Wentworth’s outpouring of feeling in his secret note to Anne, and Robert Martin’s first proposal to Harriet Smith by letter. The fact that a woman who had rejected a man was bound to secrecy, is not unimportant: it explains the ignorance of Anne Elliot’s friends about her previous engagement to

Wentworth, and provides Darcy with a second chance to propose to Elizabeth. The problem of finding a moment alone for the offer of marriage to take place, is at times solved by an aiding ally, as is the case when Mrs Bennet arranges for Elizabeth to be left alone with Mr

Collins. However, the most common solution that Austen opts for, is the outdoor walk: it is the setting of engagement scenes in Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey,

Persuasion, and it provides Edward Ferrars with the “encouragement and fresh air” that he needs for his proposal in Sense and Sensibility (354). Remarkably, an outdoor proposal even seems to warrant greater success, as is exemplified by the failed indoors proposals of Mr

Collins, John Thorpe, and Darcy. Austen has thus retrieved the classical locus amoenus (or

“pleasant place”) for her betrothal scenes: when it comes to giving amorous sentiments free reign, open nature and fresh air are favoured above the cramped and artificial environment of houses and parlours.

Northanger Abbey, written first yet published only posthumously, provides the earliest example of such an outdoors proposal. After Catherine Morland has been turned out of the Abbey by General Tilney, upon discovering that she is not rich (like John Thorpe had made him believe), Henry Tilney visits her at her parents’ house in Fullerton. The matter of Malfait 108

marriage is settled while on their way to visit Mr and Mrs Allen. Since the climax of the story is most definitely the General’s angry eviction of Catherine, the proposal takes place in the aftermath of the main events – as is also the case in Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield

Park. Remarkably, the proposal scene is conducted in quite a businesslike manner, and it is told by the narrator, rather than reported by means of direct dialogue – thus widening the gap between the events on the page and the reader, as well as symbolizing the education of

Catherine, who has evolved from a naïve reader of romances, prone to fancy, into a more mature heroine deserving of marriage to a man of sense. The latter is also commented upon by Kathleen Lundeen in “A Modest Proposal? Paradise Found in Jane Austen’s Betrothal

Scenes”: “Inasmuch as Catherine’s re-entry into the actual world constitutes the pivotal moment of the novel, the unromantic, low-keyed betrothal is fitting. Had this scene even a whiff of romance in it, her emergency from fantasy to reality would have been suspect” (67).

Moreover, the event is summarized in the passive voice, so that it seems even more remote:

“She was assured of his affection; and that heart in turn was solicited” (NA 227). Austen here ironically undercuts the romance of the scene, preventing the reader from empathizing entirely with the happy couple. She pushes the effect even further, by immediately adding a rather untraditional comment on the origin of Henry’s affection:

I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude; or, in

other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of

giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and

dreadfully derogatory of a heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the

credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own. (NA 227) Malfait 109

It is this clear note of irony, to a greater or lesser extent present in all of Austen’s betrothal scenes, that undercuts the conventionality of her endings, as Karen Newman notes in her article, “Can This Marriage Be Saved: Jane Austen Makes Sense of an Ending”: “Austen’s irony in treating her romantic endings contradicts their conventional claims for the happily- ever-after. These contradictions are not artistic failures or ‘muddle’; they allow us a view, from a critical distance, of English society and the position of women in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (700).

In Sense and Sensibility, “*a+n emotionally charged, drawn-out betrothal between the heroine and her lover would be highly inappropriate, given the moral thrust of the novel, the tempering of sensibility by sense” (Lundeen 67). Furthermore, since Edward has been engaged once before, to Lucy Steele, a sentimental outpouring of emotions would necessarily call to mind his previous, impulsive proposal – thus potentially corrupting the current scene. Edward needs to be shown as having come to his senses, and consequently sense should guide the betrothal scene. Again, Austen decides against an immediate account of the proposal, summarizing the event in a few sentences:

How soon he had walked himself into the proper resolution, however, how soon an

opportunity of exercising it occurred, in what manner he expressed himself, and how

he was received, need not be particularly told. This only need be said: ― that when

they all sat down to table at four o’clock, about three hours after his arrival, he had

secured his lady, engaged her mother’s consent, and was not only in the rapturous

profession of the lover, but in the reality of reason and truth, one of the happiest of

men. (S&S 354) Malfait 110

Once more, Austen defies the traditional expectations instilled in the reader by romance literature: she does not allow her public immediate access to the betrothal scene – which is indeed entirely omitted from the novel. Instead, the narrative jumps forward three hours, to the moment when all possible excess of sentiment has made way for composed happiness.

The final novel where the betrothal scene takes place in the dénouement following the culmination of the story, rather than functioning as the climax itself, is Mansfield Park.

As is the case in the two novels discussed above, the episode is again characterized by a decided omission of detail. In this case, the anti-climactic proposal can be explained in light of the nature of Fanny and Edmund’s relationship: as opposed to the other Austenian lovers

– who do not meet each other until they have reached adulthood – the lovers of Mansfield

Park have grown up together like brother and sister. As Lundeen observes, “*s+ince their marriage blossoms out of a strong familial attachment to each other, a high-pitched romantic climax would seem unnatural, and it would also usurp the emphasis laid on friendship as the foundation of their union as lovers” (68-69). The narrator relates how

Edmund’s feelings are transferred from Mary Crawford to Fanny, deliberately refraining from situating the event in time – thus enhancing the vagueness of the episode:

I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to

fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of

unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only

entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it

should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford,

and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire. (MP 475-76) Malfait 111

The ease with which the engagement is fixed, as a consequence of the natural consent of their hearts, stands in stark contrast with Henry Crawford’s wearisome persecution and repeated proposal to Fanny, which encompasses several chapters of the novel. In the end,

Henry’s elopement with Maria Rushworth functions as a deus ex machina event, brought in by Austen to remove both Henry and Mary Crawford, clearing the way for the union between Fanny and Edmund.

In Emma, where the betrothal scene does constitute the climax of the novel (as is the case in Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion), the episode is not summarized – as was the case for the three previously discussed novels – but instead rendered by means of direct dialogue. Nevertheless, the scene is still not entirely free from Austen’s usual zest for romance-undercutting omission. Mr Knightley proposes during the customary outdoors walk, but before the narrative reaches the point of the betrothal itself, the climactic tension swells to a point of culmination. To quote Lundeen: “A long prelude to the proposal builds anticipation, and the couple’s misreading of each other heightens the tension of their encounter” (70). The scene is undercut by a series of Shakespearean misunderstandings

(Knightley believes Emma to be in love with Frank Churchill, while Emma suspects Knightley of entertaining feelings for Harriet Smith). When, in the end, Knightley does confess the truth, his hesitant insecurity – standing in sharp contrast to his previously exhibited confidence – affects the very syntax of his speech, resulting in “a series of fragmented non sequiturs”, that reveal “his vulnerability in responding to Emma as her lover instead of as a surrogate father” (Lundeen 70). When Knightley entreats Emma to let him tell her what’s on his mind, she fears a confession of his love for Harriet. Reluctant at first, she at last agrees to Malfait 112

hear him “as a friend”, causing Knightley to cry out at her choice of words, and reveal the truth:

“As a friend!” – repeated Mr. Knightley. – “Emma, that I fear is a word – No, I have no

wish – Stay, yes, why should I hesitate? – I have gone too far already for

concealment. – Emma, I accept your offer – Extraordinary as it may seem, I accept it,

and refer myself to you as a friend. – Tell me, then, have I no chance of ever

succeeding?”

He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes

overpowered her.

“My dearest Emma,” said he, “for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of

this hour’s conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma – tell me at once. Say ‘No,’

if it is to be said.” – She could really say nothing. – “You are silent,” he cried, with

great animation; “absolutely silent! at present I ask no more.” (Emma 352-53)

Emma’s silence at this point is telling: it is quite contrary to the verbal confidence she has exhibited up to this moment. As Lundeen puts it, “*h+er inability to articulate her response to

Knightley’s offer in a smooth, eloquent manner proves the depth of her feelings” (70).

When, eventually, she does speak, the exact reply is once more omitted from the text: “She spoke then, on being so entreated. – What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. – She said enough to show there need not be despair – and to invite him to say more himself” (Emma 354).

The betrothal of Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice carries all the more importance, because it constitutes at once a parallel and a contrast to Darcy’s earlier, failed proposal. The shift in location, from the indoors to the outdoors, symbolizes the change in Malfait 113

the connection between the protagonists: “The relationship between the two has expanded from narrow prejudices to generosity, corresponding to the shift in physical setting from confined parlour to the open air” (Lundeen 71-72). In this pastoral “Eden of the heart”, the two future spouses “relate to each other with more ease and freedom” (Lundeen 72).

Strikingly different is Darcy’s behaviour: the urgency with which he made his first declaration of love – “In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you” (P&P 171) – has made way for a calm, humble and composed disposition. When Elizabeth warmly expresses her gratitude to him for his chivalrous role in bringing about the marriage between Lydia and Wickham (thus reducing the shame of their elopement), he replies:

“If you will thank me,...let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness

to you, might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not

attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe, I

thought only of you.”

Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause, her

companion added, “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still

what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are

unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on the subject for ever.” (P&P

325)

The alteration in both Darcy and Elizabeth is apparent: Darcy does no longer exhibit the arrogant confidence – or inappropriate pride – of being successful in his request, as he did during his first proposal. Furthermore, he expresses respect for Elizabeth’s family, whose behaviour was previously the object of his censure. Elizabeth, on her part, has exchanged Malfait 114

her feelings of insolent anger – which previously induced her to claim that “*she+ had not known [him] a month before [she] felt that [he was] the last man in the world whom [she] could ever be prevailed on to marry” (P&P 174) – for embarrassment and admiration. Like

Emma, the usually loquacious heroine is temporarily silenced by the weight of her emotions, and the realization of her previous misplaced prejudice. When Elizabeth “force*s+ herself to speak” (P&P 325), Austen again refrains from conveying her answer by means of direct speech: “immediately, though not very fluently, [she] gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances” (P&P 325). Aware of the harsh words that they both pronounced during the first proposal scene, the two protagonists are thus humbled into placid and affectionate submission to each other.

Persuasion’s betrothal scene differs from the others, in that its catalyst is not a verbal confession, but Wentworth’s passionate outpouring of feeling in his hastily scribbled down, secret note to Anne. However, the usual outdoor walk – though this time taking place not in nature, but in the city – is again present, since Anne rushes after Wentworth to make her shared sentiments known. Yet again, as she did in Emma, Austen heightens the reader’s feeling of expectancy by slowly building up the climax: “*T+he union of the lovers produces greater relief at the end of this novel than at the close of Austen’s other novels. The drama of Wentworth’s letter, the anticipation of his hearing her response, and the excitement at their fortuitous meeting, appropriately lengthen the climax of this long-awaited reunion”

(Lundeen 74). Since Persuasion boasts the most estranged pair of lovers in the whole of

Austen’s oeuvre – contact between Anne and Wentworth throughout the story is minimal – it is only logical that their union, by contrast, offers the most passionate climax of all. Typical Malfait 115

of the Austenian hero, Wentworth has remained silent throughout the novel, granting the reader no access to his inner life. Only now, in his letter and the ensuing long conversation he has with Anne, does his character and constancy of feeling for Anne come to the fore.

Though Wentworth conveys his renewed offer of marriage in a letter, the proposal is no less passionate than should it have been pronounced aloud: in his postscript, he adds that “*a+ word, a look, will be enough” for him to understand Anne’s response (Persuasion 239). The unlucky presence of Charles Musgrove while Anne runs after Wentworth, forces her to do just that – her answer is reflected in her countenance:

They were in Union Street, when a quicker step behind, a something of familiar

sound, gave her two moments’ preparation for the sight of Captain Wentworth. He

joined them; but, as if irresolute whether to join or to pass on, said nothing, only

looked. Anne could command herself enough to receive that look, and not

repulsively. The cheeks which had been pale now glowed, and the movements which

had hesitated were decided. He walked by her side. (Persuasion 241)

Conveniently, Charles Musgrove then takes his leave, entrusting Anne in Wentworth’s care and allowing the conversation that will seal the betrothal to take place. The narrator here takes the stance of a distant onlooker, preferring summary over mimesis:

There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once

before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many, many

years of division and estrangement. There they returned again into the past, more

exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected;

more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth,

and attachment[.] (Persuasion 242) Malfait 116

Austen does not portray the union by means of direct discourse: instead, she keeps a distance from the events. By purposely representing the engagement in such vague terms, she avoids stooping to the level of melodrama, and achieves instead a picture of determined happiness, appropriate to the maturity and past experience of the two protagonists. Malfait 117

Conclusion Malfait 118

Conclusion

In decades past, Austen critics have been keen to interpret her work as typified by restraint, boasting a cast of often ignorant heroines that need to be taken under the wings of a patrician hero. Perhaps departing from the notion that – being a spinster herself – Austen did not have the necessary experience to talk of matters of intimacy in her work, these commentators have often overlooked the true depth of the novelist’s oeuvre.

Indeed, as I have endeavoured to prove in this dissertation, instances of touch and intimacy are abundant in Austen’s writings. I believe that these scenes do not appear in the novels by chance, but are the result of deliberate orchestration on the author’s part. She may never have married, but still she was obviously aware of the ways of the world, enough so to incorporate them in her books in subtle and ironic ways.

As I have discussed, intimacy in Austen emerges under a variety of guises, ranging from dances, over coloured cheeks, to passionate confessions of love. Austen may have been concerned with describing reality, focusing on issues of money and superficiality – yet, underneath, deeper meanings are always hidden. A look is never just a look, a touch is seldom merely that, and a word often entails a series of connotations that are frequently not discerned at first glance.

Joseph Conrad once wrote to H.G. Wells: “What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her? What is it all about?” (qtd. in Fowler 266). I conclude that there is much more

“in her” than one would at first expect: Austen is wit, irony, social satire, and happy endings

– yet she is also love, desire, eroticism and secrecy. She is surface and depth, sadness and joy, silliness and solemnity. It is these oxymoronic qualities, all present in one writer, that make her into one of the most important writers in Anglo-Saxon literary history. Malfait 119

Finally, I wish to turn once more to the words of another, in reproducing Rudyard

Kipling’s appraisal of Austen, which he offered in the epigraph to his work “The Janeites”:

Jane lies in Winchester – blessed be her shade!

Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!

And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,

Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane. (qtd. in Fowler 268) Malfait 120

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