Gossip Economies: Jane Austen, Lady Susan, and the Right to Self-Fashion

European Romantic Review

ISSN: 1050-9585 (Print) 1740-4657 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gerr20

Lise Gaston

To cite this article: Lise Gaston (2016) Gossip Economies: Jane Austen, LadySusan, and the Right to Self-Fashion, European Romantic Review, 27:3, 405-411, DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2016.1163799 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2016.1163799

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gerr20 EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW, 2016 VOL. 27, NO. 3, 405–411 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2016.1163799

Gossip Economies: Jane Austen, Lady Susan, and the Right to Self-Fashion Lise Gaston Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, California

ABSTRACT Lady Susan’s dangerously entertaining heroine reads her world through systems of economic exchange, but must compete via circulations of gossip. Though gossip is frequently theorized as a feminine discourse, capable of subversive power, here it remains mediated by a male public. The epistolary style and narrative conclusion complicate textual authority, which becomes located in a broader discursive network that constitutes the characters. Thus despite the novella’s subversive potential, only women who give up their right to write themselves can succeed. Ironically, however, the text sustains a material disruption of the discursive control Austen’s family tried to exert over their famous Aunt Jane.

The adulterous, scheming, and dangerously entertaining protagonist of Lady Susan offers us an atypical experience in Jane Austen’s body of work. The epistolary novella, not published in Austen’s lifetime, begins when the recently widowed Lady Susan announces her stay at her brother-in-law’s house, leaving her previous residence with the Manwaring family because of the affair she has begun with Mr. Manwaring. The plot then follows Lady Susan as she negotiates the suspicions of her sister-in-law, Catherine Vernon, seduces Mrs. Vernon’s brother, Reginald De Courcy, and attempts to marry her own daughter Frederica off to the ridiculous Sir James Martin – all while trying to present herself as a decorous widow, and despising almost everyone. The letters that comprise most of the novella up until its brief narrative conclusion, circulate as private texts staged by the author for public (or reader) consumption; the information they contain is derived from the systemic circulation of gossip. Jan Gordon argues that “gossip depends for its efficacy upon the circulation and speculation (hence its existence as a kind of alternate ‘currency’) of that which cannot be verified or ‘owned,’ but which floats about the culture” (59). Thus gossip performs via what Michel Foucault describes as “a regime of [power’s] exercise within the social body, rather than from above it”– power in its “capillary form of existence” (39, original emphasis). Patricia Spacks therefore offers the optimistic possibility that through gossip “people utterly lacking in public power may affect the views of figures who make things happen in the public sphere” (7); subsequently, gossip has been mobilized as a theoretically feminine mode of discourse, a

CONTACT Lise Gaston [email protected] © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 406 L. GASTON potential intervention of women’s power. A woman and a widow, Lady Susan pushes at the limits of female participation in property-based economies, but knows she only stands to obtain mastery over her social situation through this circulation of gossip. However, this paper argues that, though women are its most susceptible victims, gossip in Austen’s novella remains a discourse mediated through a male-dominated public that always already constitutes the exchange of personal correspondence between women. Reading the discourse of gossip in Lady Susan within and against the material circulation of letters shows us how the stated efforts of the eloquent and manipulative “heroine” could never succeed. Despite its scandalous content and subversive potential, Lady Susan actually and perhaps paradoxically presents a social system in which the women who do not attempt to self-fashion through text, or to write themselves, are allowed to succeed. This view is complicated further when we consider the novella’s role in the reception history of Austen’s writing, and the material text’s actual disruptive influence on the familial discourses that imagined and refigured the public presentation of Austen herself. Lady Susan reads her social world through systems of economic value and exchange. Her control of her late husband’s property is suggested by her use of the singular pronoun: “I am sometimes half disposed to repent that I did not let Charles buy Vernon Castle when we were obliged to sell it” (J. Austen 9). Accordingly, she is hesitant to remarry if it will limit her economic participation: “a state of dependence on the caprice of Sir Reginald, will not suit the freedom of my spirit” (63). Lady Susan understands that even female discourse and friendship are subject to an economic system controlled by men; she acquiesces when her good friend Alicia Johnson writes: “I would ask you to Edward St but that [Mr. Johnson] once forced from me a kind of promise never to invite you into my house. Nothing but my being in the utmost distress for Money, could have extorted it from me” (60). Women can enter into the circulation of the mar- riage market through the socially prescriptive economy of female “accomplishments,” skills that Lady Susan views as purchased commodities to be used as instruments for social exchange (6); she considers it “throwing time away” to become proficient in the “Languages of Arts & Science,” for example, and does not expect that her daughter’s “acquirements should be more than superficial” (13). Lady Susan’s very vocabulary pos- itions people as objects of speculation and exchange: she writes to her sister-in-law of her “dear little Children, in whose hearts I shall be very eager to secure an interest” (3, emphasis added). In speaking of her daughter, she says she “shall deposit her under of the care of Miss Summers of Wigmore Street” (6, emphasis added). Gossip, as a discourse of speculation and public circulation, is also, according to Spacks, “at least metaphorically an economic transaction” (171). Lady Susan notes when people have managed successfully to negotiate this gossip economy, saying: “Mr Johnson with all his faults is a Man to whom that great word ‘Respectable’ is always given” (J. Austen 5). She is familiar enough with the functions of gossip to use it as a tool of manipulation; trying to keep Reginald away from London, she writes: “We have been hurried on by our feelings to a degree of Precipitance which ill accords with the claims of our Friends, or the opinion of the world” (64). Lady Susan’s desire for discursive control is evident in the style of her letters; while Mrs. Vernon’s relate dialogue and narrative mimesis, Lady Susan’s letters are mediated performances of descriptive summary. In one instance only does she provide quoted speech – and it is her own, offered as a piece of valuable rhetoric to EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW 407 her correspondent: “Here I concluded, & I hope you will be satisfied with my speech” (57). Lady Susan’s anxiety for discursive command suggests the real risk for women becoming unwilling objects of gossip, a risk emphasized by Reginald when he appeals to his father “to do justice to the character of a very injured woman” (26). This sentence could also be rephrased, “to do justice to the very injured character of a woman.” The ability to exchange the meaning here, however, shows how much “general Character” comprises – and com- promises – the woman herself (7). In Lady Susan the plot is impelled not by questions of whether the gossip that circulates is true (the reader, positioned by the letters as confidant, knows it is), but rather by how Lady Susan attempts to convince characters otherwise. The initial letters of her first antag- onists, Reginald and Mrs. Vernon, epitomize what Gordon calls gossip’s “anonymous con- sensuality where things are ‘said to be’” (60). Mrs. Vernon presents Lady Susan’s “general Character” as known fact, and will never allow actual experience to supersede the stories she has heard, writing, upon first meeting her: “her countenance is absolutely sweet, & her voice & manner winningly mild. – I am sorry it is so, for what is this but Deceit? – Unfor- tunately one knows her too well” (J. Austen 7, 11). Mrs. Vernon’s assessment signals the gossip economy that has already constituted Lady Susan as discursive object and from which she will not be able to escape. Mrs. Vernon also locates her brother in a long history of circulation, saying, “Reginald has long wished I know to see this captivating Lady Susan” (7). Situated both as object of gossip and its primary means of circulation in the narrative, Reginald operates almost entirely within the gossip economy, thus under- mining the conventional positioning of gossip as “a peculiarly female vice” (Bander 119). Deborah Kaplan describes the discourse in Lady Susan as a fantasy in which “women writing and speaking to one another are doing and becoming” (165). In its repeated ges- tures to the economic and social systems that overlay the individual letters, the novella highlights that this form of women’s agency can only be fantasy, even in the narrative itself. Lady Susan subscribes to the belief that women are the functionaries of gossip, and frequently accuses Mrs. Vernon of influencing Reginald’s opinion: but it is “open-hearted” Reginald who tells stories to Mrs. Vernon (J. Austen 75). His first letter contains only gossip. His male informer, aptly named Mr. Smith, never materially appears in the narrative; he fulfills what Spacks calls the “symbolic function as voice of ‘the world’–the amor- phous social organization that enforces its own standards and disciplines those who go astray” (7). Mr. Smith is allegedly a witness to Lady Susan’s intrigues: “he was a fortnight in the house with her ladyship, and ...istherefore well qualified to make the communi- cation” (J. Austen 8). Reginald will soon become an object of speculation himself, circulating in the larger public sphere: from London, Mrs. Johnson notes Manwaring’s jealousy of him, without explaining their source of information. Reginald will end as he began, as a subject explicitly constituted by discourse: “talked, flattered & finessed into an affection” for Frederica (77). Thus Kaplan argues that Reginald will “always be a captive of women’s discourse” (164) – but it is the male gossip, Mr. Smith, who first determines Reginald’s views, to which he will in part return. In the interim, however, and unlike his sister, Reginald is swayed by his experience of Lady Susan; when articulating his opinion, however, he can only repeat her own manip- ulations of the discourse around her. Though Reginald composes the most direct warning against a belief in gossip, he never ceases being its primary point of circulation. Defending 408 L. GASTON himself to his father against (true) accusations he has fallen in love with Lady Susan, he writes: “how little the general report of any one ought to be credited, since no character however upright, can escape the malevolence of slander” (J. Austen 25). In the same para- graph in which he blames himself “severely for having so easily believed the scandalous tales invented by Charles Smith to the prejudice of Lady Susan” (26), Reginald slips back into maliciously phrased gossip that appeals to an unnamed discursive world that can never be located (Spacks 8): “It is well known that Miss Manwaring is absolutely on the catch for a husband, and no one can therefore pity her” (J. Austen 61). When Regi- nald is re-convinced of his initial perception of Lady Susan, which had been entirely constituted by story, and breaks with her, one can almost hear her exasperation when she responds: “What can you now have heard to stagger your esteem for me?” (69, emphasis added). In replying, “my Understanding is at length restored, & teaches me . . . to abhor the Artifices which had subdued me” (70), Reginald merely reconfirms in the primacy of story over experience. The ultimately ungovernable circulation of gossip in the novella is reinforced through the uncontrollable circulation of letters: ostensibly private texts, these letters are repeatedly called upon to perform public discursive functions within the narrative. David Wheeler observes that in this period letters “are, by no means, intended to be private matters,” but serve as substitutions for visits, and, if well written in content or style, as objects of praise to circulate further (37). Austen’s family understood these public possibilities: her sister Cassandra destroyed a large part of their correspondence, carefully pruning and selecting the letters that have since survived, aware of her ultimate lack of control over the material objects if or when they would begin to circulate. In Lady Susan, however, Austen’s characters mistakenly intend their letters to be private exchanges. Mrs. Vernon’s letter to her mother is read by her father, and both are “excessively vexed that Sir Reginald should know anything of a matter which we foresaw would make him uneasy” (J. Austen 23–24); even after this incident, Mrs. Vernon still writes to her mother as if the contents will remain only “between ourselves” (27). Lady De Courcy subsequently shares Reginald’s letter with Mrs. Vernon, though he did not intend his sister to see it (61). The inability to secure the reception of letters prefigures the final uncontrollable circulation of discursive bodies in Mrs. Johnson’s drawing room that exposes Lady Susan’s schemes to Reginald (66). If, as Kaplan asserts, “the letter form is in Lady Susan the terrain of women’s networks and their power,” then the novella’s narrative conclusion “undermines the subversive vision that the epistolary form made possible” (167, 169). However, in the context of the larger economy of gossip in which the letters circulate independently of their writers’ intentions, this narrative conclusion can be read as a symptom of that discourse of the “World” that must “judge” (J. Austen 77), a discourse that has arguably already negated the possibility of any such “subversive vision.” To believe in the possibility of female subversion in Lady Susan is to align oneself with the protagonist (as the text perhaps seductively asks us to do): confident in her ability to manipulate circulation, just as she redirects letters to her married lover “under cover” to her friend (11), Lady Susan does not understand how much she is an already constituted object within that discourse. Gordon says that Lady Susan’s essential question is “whether or not gossip can be used to immunize one against becoming its victim” (71), but in her own proliferation of stories, Lady Susan forgets that she has already been made its victim – EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW 409 as the first handful of letters shows us, she has been rendered as such before the novel began. She has been written, and though she manages to edit temporarily, the text con- tinues to circulate. Trying to account for Sir James’s arrival at Churchill, she writes: “I told my story with great success to Mrs. Vernon who, whatever might be her real sentiments, said nothing in opposition to mine” (J. Austen 42). This point is where Lady Susan reveals her crucial misreading: her definition of success is too narrow. She ignores those “real sentiments,” and does not account for discourses that may – and will – proliferate before and after the fact of her speaking. Mary Poovey notes that in “the laissez-faire competition the epistolary Lady Susan permits, the reader will identify with whatever character dominates the narration” (178); the authority in such a system then becomes, I argue, the unnamed but persistent broader circulation of discourse, here made material through the figure of the letter, which both contains and constitutes the characters, and from which they can never fully escape. Accordingly, those who succeed best within this system are those who allow themselves to be passively articulated by it. Unlike her mother, Frederica is able to change the discourse around her permanently by maintaining a primarily silent subjectivity. In not attempting to control, or even to participate in, the economies of accomplishments, gossip, or property, she allows herself to be the discursive object of others. Though Lady Susan views her daughter as rhetorical competition, saying, “I trust I shall be able to make my story as good as her’s [sic]” (J. Austen 30), Frederica succeeds precisely because she tells no story at all. Thus in Lady Susan gossip does not function as an instrument of female subversion, but rather as an instrument of control (Spacks 172), a performance within a text that, paradoxically, has been seen as a subversive tool in dismantling the discursive control Austen’s own family tried to maintain over the image of their famous relative. Mindful of growing public interest in their aunt since her death in 1817, and also of the competing narratives of “Aunt Jane” latent in other branches of the Austen family (Suther- land xxii–xxvii), her eldest nephew, James Edward Austen Leigh, and his sisters compiled their inherited resources to produce in 18701 a guarded Victorian portrait of a woman with “the moral rectitude, the correct taste, and the warm affections with which she invested her ideal characters” (Memoir 1871, 2). Austen Leigh’s approach follows the family rhetoric that had surrounded Austen since her death, when her brother Henry famously wrote a biographical notice that described her as follows: “Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget” and she “never dispatched a note or letter unworthy of publication” (139, 141). Ironically, perhaps, such statements would only complicate Austen’s “faultless” image in the later nineteenth century, when the public began to clamber for these so-called publicly worthy notes and letters – and, significantly, the few unpublished manuscripts. Austen’s relatives did not want to expose Lady Susan to public reception; their private correspondence, as well as their public statements (and that division has become increasingly blurred), show that the text was perceived as a material threat to their figure of Aunt Jane, and invoke the very economy of discursive speculation that Lady Susan tries to control in the novella. Austen’s niece Caroline referred to Lady Susan as one of her aunt’s “betweenities,” wherein “the nonsense was passing away, and before her wonderful talent had found it’s [sic] proper channel” (C. Austen 186). In assuming that “it would be as unfair to expose preliminary processes to the world, as it would be to display all that goes on behind the curtain of the theatre before it is drawn 410 L. GASTON up” (Austen Leigh, Memoir 1870, 61), Austen Leigh and his sisters indicate their belief in separate spheres of discourse – and their important roles as curators, a curation which the text itself would challenge. Lady Susan was finally published as an appendix to the second edition of Austen Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt, in 1871,2 54 years after Austen’s death, and about 75 years after the likely date of the novella’s composition.3 On publication, Austen Leigh’s concerns contin- ued; to a friend, he wrote, “‘I felt some anxiety how these minor works might be received by the public, & a fear lest I might have lowered, rather than extended our Aunt’s fame by the publication of them’” (qtd. in Todd and Bree xxxix).4 Despite what I am reading as women’s ultimate inability for real social subversion in the narrative, Austen Leigh’s fears were justified: the anomaly of Lady Susan’s characterization and the scandalous nature of its subject matter did present the novella as a problematic insertion into these very discourses that were circulating around the “genteel” female writer. Some initial reviews described Lady Susan as “thoroughly unpleasant in its characters and its details” (“Early Writings” 164) and “crude and hard, with the usual hardness of youth” (Farrer 15). The Spectator condemned the title character as “feline, velvet-pawed, cruel, false, licentious” (Hutton 891), while R. Brimley Johnson would later echo Austen Leigh’s concerns, noting: “Miss Austen would have refused to publish, even if desired, so cold a picture, above all of a woman and a mother” (Johnson 110). Subsequent biographical and contextual readings of Lady Susan that link its protagonist to Austen’s cousin Eliza de Feuillide (Leavis 89), family acquaintance Mrs. Craven (Austen-Leigh 100), or to de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Bradbook 75), show how even later critics appear disinclined “to credit Jane Austen with the conception of such brisk immorality as Lady Susan reveals” (Todd and Bree l). Through its material and critical history, therefore, the text itself has been arguably more successful than its protagonist at contributing to a sustained shift in this speculative conversation.

Notes

1. Austen Leigh was 19 when Austen died; his half-sister, Anna Lefroy, was 24. The last family member of Austen’s generation, her brother Admiral Francis Austen, had died in 1865. 2. In his preface to the edition, Austen Leigh claims that this content did not appear in the ﬁrst edition because “much of it was either unknown to me, or not at my command, when I ﬁrst published” (Memoir 1871 vi), though his was rather a moral reticence rather than a material inability. 3. The date of composition is unknown. Many critics, though not all, follow Austen Leigh in agreeing it was likely around 1794–1795 (Memoir 1871, 201). Austen made a fair autograph manuscript copy some time during or after 1805. 4. Letter of 16 August 1871, possibly to Rev. George Austen junior. Letter currently in a private collection. See Todd and Bree.

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