Austen S Case Against the Letter

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Austen S Case Against the Letter

Austen’s case against the letter

In "Sense and Sensibility: the Letter, Post Factum," Mary Favret argues that in Sense and Sensibility Austen manipulates “the letter” to make a case against epistolarity as a source of self-expression, demonstrating instead that an intact and independent interiority arises from a free indirect style while the directness of epistolarity leads to vulnerability.

Favret develops her argument first by restating and extending her thesis:

For Austen, the letter is no longer an effective means of telling a story. It “no longer represents or expresses (safely) the interior freedom which her heroines seek” (374). Austen, Favret says, recontextualizes the letter in a new realism that emphasizes society’s claims and renders the letter significant not for its content but for its appearance. (374). Through a close reading of the early London scene in which Marianne writes her first letter to Willoughby, Favret shows Austen’s indirect method at work creating an interiority for Elinor while showing Marianne’s letter writing as a remnant of lawless romance, keeping her inaccessible to her sister and to the reader. The appearance of the letter operates in the fiction, but the content is not accessible. Furthermore, in Austen’s practice, “the pragmatics of letter writing [or Austen’s “insistent materialism”] . . . signals an obstacle to the

‘inner life’ of her characters” (375). In fact, the letters in her early novels are opaque, available only through the narrator’s help” (376). Not just for Austen,

Favret, suggests does the letter lose its status as a form of direct affective communication. For other novelists, too, the letter is becoming opaque.

1 Favret then suggests that in Austen’s novels, unlike Richardson’s, the material letter (the “physical artifact”) is necessarily misleading because it cannot express the “changing and adapting” heart (377). Austen’s practice coincides with the analysis of epistolarity by modern critics, who perhaps learned their lessons of analysis from Austen. Her practice perhaps also coincides with historical changes

“in the way readers perceive and interpret the written word” (377). Austen treats the letter not as a form appropriate for expressing “personality,” but as “an emblem of empty convention” (378). The status of the letter has so changed that it operates on the side of propriety rather than feeling, leading Elinor, for example, to think that Marianne must be engaged since she is writing to Willoughby.

Austen uses the letter “to clarify not only the break between inner meaning and outer form, . . . but also [the break] between human beings. Austen saves

Marianne from the threat of the letter while also saving Elinor from “self-disclosure and public censure” (381). “Austen replaces the interiority of the epistolary novel with a ‘safer,’ less constraining mode of narration,” but “she cannot replace the social connection, the personal correspondence which the letter once promised.

She creates the “completely independent world” that Lukacs sees as the distinction between 19th c. and earlier novels, but the self within that world exists with an awareness of being circumscribed by the social world.

In my view, Favret's most interesting points are the claim that Austen somehow defeated the letter’s threatening creation of interiority and replaced it with an interiority created indirectly, an interiority not in conflict with the society that had its claims on her heroines. She was thereby creating a “new privacy.”

2 Although Favret's article is thought-provoking and generally persuasive, I do have some criticisms. In using the language of “wrestling” and “victory,” she suggests that Austen was uniquely fighting a battle and winning some new territory, but she then suggests that Austen’s practice was simply part of larger historical change. There also seems to me to be a slight contradiction between saying that the letter in Austen is a sign of romantic lawlessness, dangerous to women, and also that the letter had a “tendency to defend propriety against the claims of feeling.” (378). I can see my way around this problem, but she requires readers to work it out. Did all letters align with propriety against feeling, or does

Austen set it up that way. Is it that the letter that Marianne writes is a sign of a romantic lawlessness, requiring her to be secretive to her sister (and to the reader) about her inner life. But Austen is converting the letter to mere appearance, readable only as a sign of propriety.

Furthermore, Favret doesn’t face up to a simple, literal question: Why didn’t

Austen just show us the letter. Then opacity would not have been a problem. Is

F. really saying that Austen lived at a time when the fully self-expressive letter was regarded as lawless, impossible to fit into a socially governed group of inner lives? So it was just too dangerous to write letters? Or is she saying that Austen had found a better way to represent an intact, independent interiority? Social questions (it’s dangerous to express interiority through letters, so indirect style is better) seem to get mixed up with technical questions (free indirect style builds an interiority better than the direct expressiveness of the letter does).

3 This problem is productive for my thinking. Is it that Austen found a way to negotiate the claims of an interiorized individual and the society of which she is a part by using the very social claims to which she must be responsive as the source of her (Austen’s) technical achievements.

I will take away from Favret's article the implication that Austen builds interiority from constraint. The fact that Elinor must keep a secret means that there must be an interior space to hold it. Other characters’ not knowing of her knowledge or how it affects her creates an irony that becomes an opportunity to create interior space for Elinor. They say things that lead us to her interior life because we know that she experiences them in a way that she cannot express and often in a way that the speaker cannot know.

Holding something within provides technical opportunities for creating within-ness. Expressing everything leads not inward but outward. Interiority loses.

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