A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen's Persuasion/ Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man
Jocelyn Harris and Michael Kramp share an interest in the way Jane Austen responded to other writers, especially her contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Differing dramatically in all other respects, the two books indirectly complement each other. Both are well researched, capably written, and illuminating.
At a time when one finds few new books devoted even to a single author, it is a pleasure to read a sustained, multilayered study of a single novel, especially a novel as rich and beloved as Persuasion. Harris does not offer a new interpretation, nor does she engage in depth with recent critical debates. Instead, her meticulous study of “the contexts and intertexts of Persuasion” (194) broadens and multiplies the frames within which the novel can be read and understood. Though occasionally repetitive, Harris’s prose is clear and engaging. The book will be invaluable to anyone embarking on a study of Persuasion, and has much to offer other readers as well.
A highlight is Harris’s careful explication, in Chapters 2 and 3, of Austen’s sixteen surviving manuscript pages. Harris devises her own system for representing Austen’s changes, which allows her to show the temporal order in which changes were made. She gracefully interweaves manuscript excerpts with illuminating commentary on Austen’s composition and revision process. Equally strong are the discussions of Lyme Regis and Bath (Chapters 8 and 9). Here, Harris synthesizes information drawn from contemporary guidebooks, Austen’s letters, and other archival sources to enrich our understanding of the way these settings function in the novel. For example, the construction of Camden Place caused landslides: Sir Walter is living on unstable ground (164). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 stem from a clever premise that Persuasion contains, at least elliptically, the “History of Buonaparte” and “Critique on Walter Scott” Austen claimed she should have written to “stretch out” Pride and Prejudice (73). Like other sections devoted to “contexts,” Harris’s chapters on Austen’s understanding of the Napoleonic Wars and the British Navy are vivid and detailed, lending depth of field to the novel’s references. However, the chapter on Scott runs into problems that haunt many of Harris’s discussions of “intertexts.”
This aspect of the study continues the project of her earlier book, Jane Austen and the Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). Essentially, Harris hears echoes of other texts in particular scenes or sentences, and examines the manner in which Austen altered the source. She often finds patterns of “inversion and expansion” (118) that highlight Austen’s socio-political consciousness. In relation to Scott, for example, Harris concludes: “where he advances assumptions about inherent nobility and the inferiority of women, she challenges notions of inherited status in both men and women” (128). Cumulatively, this connective process paints Austen as a writer steeped in literary history and contemporary politics, rather than simply a perceptive observer of domestic life. The two are not mutually exclusive: in Chapter 1, “Origins for Persuasion,” Harris argues that like the other novels, Persuasion grew “from a fruitful combination of life and reading” (35).
However, as Harris acknowledges, confirmation of Austen’s reading is often unavailable. Much of the chapter on Scott rests on the uncertain supposition that Austen read Guy Mannering: the argument is, as Harris puts it, “circumstantial” (129). Throughout, Harris is forced into such formulations: “If Austen did indeed purloin Goldsmith’s anecdote” (34); “Perhaps Austen read Robinson’s The Natural Daughter” (225 n. 14). Were the textual echoes more exact, biographical confirmation would not be needed. However, they are not exact (part of Harris’s point is that Austen modified sources). Sometimes Harris is able to amass enough evidence to make the connection plausible. In the appendix, for example, she makes a convincing case for The Memoirs of Mary Robinson as a source for the Mrs. Smith subplot. At other times, the connections feel too speculative. When they rest on a single word or relatively common sentiment, they feel loose even if Austen’s familiarity with the source is not in doubt.
Harris’s attempt to situate Austen as a Romantic (Chapters 7 and 8 ) is problematic in a different way. Elsewhere, Harris shows Austen modifying her sources; here, imprecise echoes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron serve instead to align Persuasion more straightforwardly with their poetry. Yet if, as Harris claims, Austen’s description of Pinny echoes “Kubla Khan” (155), the differences are surely more striking than the similarities. The argument Harris makes to show that Persuasion matches, point for point, excerpts from Romantic poetry (and M.H. Abrams’s taxonomy) ends up distorting the political and aesthetic project of the Romantic poets, and leaves out imagination, a concept more central than feeling to British Romanticism. In fact, the intertextual literary imagination Harris claims for Austen sharply contrasts Romantic notions of originality and the creative primacy of imagination.
Still, Harris’s methodology is provocative and raises questions about the status of such “intertexts.” In the final chapter of Jane Austen and the Art of Memory, Harris rejects the terms “’allusion, ‘influence,’ and ‘source’” as well as “’sub-texts,’ ‘adjacency,’ and ‘intertextuality,’” concluding that “’layering’ is finally the only helpful term” (220). In the present volume, she very briefly argues for an expanded definition of “intertext,” noting that Austen “does not expect the reader to recall [Scott] in order to flesh out her ‘meaning.’ Rather, by swerving silently away from his agendas, his ideology, and his cultural codes, she consolidates some of her most important ideas” (129). Unfortunately, this interesting line of thought is often short-circuited by Harris’s investment in proving Austen’s superiority. Her analyses routinely culminate in impressionistic judgments: “As usual, however, Austen improves upon her source” (25); “Austen radically improves on Scott’s scene” (113); “Persuasion’s proposal scene is far more elaborate and satisfying” (126). Insisting on Austen’s aesthetic superiority seems less useful and timely than showing, for example, how Austen revises Scott’s social hierarchies. Nonetheless, the introduction frames the book as a defense of Austen from detractors who see her achievement as limited. Since the most frequently cited detractor is Reginald Farrer, who wrote in 1921, this motif makes the book feel anachronistic, though in substance it is not.
Michael Kramp begins his book by pointing out that where studies of Austen’s heroines (or her constructions of femininity) abound, little attention has been devoted to the men in her novels (or her constructions of masculinity). Indeed, this blind spot has sometimes led critics to “[disregard] the symbiotic and complex processes of gender formation in Austen’s narratives” (4). To correct this situation, Kramp sets out
to study the masculinity modeled by the men of Austen’s novels—men who attempt to achieve sexual and social security amid the insecurity of the post-Revolutionary period. The men of her tales respond to diverse and conflicting cultural standards for male identity and behavior generated by England’s volatile discursive response to the Revolution. They are well-managed men who are capable of becoming active members of the modern English nation because they monitor their desires. (x)
In the preface, introduction, and conclusion, Kramp links this thesis to the popularity of Austen’s work in the late twentieth century, another moment of crisis over masculinity. While it is clearly not meant to supersede feminist readings, his book has the remarkable effect of making one feel that Austen’s novels are really all about men.
In contrast to Harris, Kramp “[treats] Austen’s novels as a collection of cultural documents that exposes both a social anxiety about masculinity and a social response to this anxiety” (10). Foucault’s work productively informs Kramp’s endeavor to trace plural struggles along multiple vectors; it also helps him make admirably tight connections between conflicts over masculinity and England’s political situation. In addition, Kramp employs Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of love as a destabilizing, desubjectivizing force, and their concept of de- and re-territorialization. I wanted more discussion of what Kramp thinks Foucault meant by “the aesthetics of existence,” since the phrase is not unambiguous and Kramp relies on it heavily. On the whole, though, his use of these theorists is cogent, consistent, and substantive: one can envision applying his model in studies of other writers. The book is systematically organized and includes an impressive range of references. Kramp’s prose is clear, though less animated and engaging than Harris’s.
The first chapter maps debates over masculinity in the 1790’s. Three concerns emerge: “(1) the utility of chivalric manhood in modern society, (2) the correct balance of rationality and masculine sentiment, and (3) the manner and quality of relationships between men and women” (21-22). Kramp argues that Burke’s writing “produced a complicated social desire . . . . for a proper man of feeling who upholds the authority of traditional systems of power” (28). Wollstonecraft and other Enlightenment thinkers “wanted men to dismiss the dynamic emotions and turbulent malleability of love in favor of a physically strong and focused sexual status,” contributing to a more general “discursive endeavor to banish the male lover,” who came to be perceived from various angles as culturally dangerous (33). As Kramp proceeds to show, most of Austen’s men must discipline amorous passions, which precludes “experiencing the multiplicity and instability of Deleuzian love” (55). Kramp’s repeated assertions that Austen’s marriages exclude Deleuzian love sound odd, as though he were saying, “this orange does not taste like peppermint.” However, Deleuzian love serves as a foil that helps define what is excluded from the masculinities these novels construct.
In Chapter 2, Kramp examines the juvenilia and Northanger Abbey. Henry Tilney emerges as “a hegemonic man whose social/sexual security helps to secure the future of the English nation” (36). Chapter 3, on Sense and Sensibility, argues that Brandon and Willoughby invoke an older model, the man of feeling; they must both learn to “regulate their emotions” (56), and do so in divergent ways. Chapter 4 presents Darcy as “a disciplined man who is virile yet genteel, romantic yet responsible” (74); he remains, even today, “an archetype of romantic masculinity” (87). Yet his exceptional status within the novel signals the impossibility of imitating him; his aristocratic Burkean masculinity is literally dying out. Bingley and Gardiner, by contrast, are men of trade; they belong to the class from which “England must now garner important civic contributions” (88). Despite Darcy’s attempts to tutor him, “Bingley orders his aesthetic of existence around the pursuit of pleasure” (75), and cannot be brought to assume civic responsibility. Kramp’s reading of Gardiner as a character who attempts to assume the part of the chivalric hero, but cannot quite accomplish it because of limited resources and the overshadowing figure of Darcy, is especially compelling.
The next chapters show coherent evolutions in Austen’s constructions of masculinity. Mansfield Park “dramatizes how England’s post-Revolutionary culture exposed contradictions in Burke’s model of aristocratic masculinity” (89). Edmund must save the aristocracy by adopting Burke’s model, but this requires repudiating his attraction to “modern sensations and experiences” (90). Emma “dramatizes Knightley’s attempt to maintain qualities of Burke’s ideal of aristocratic English masculinity while directing the maturation of a modern community and its young women and men” (109). Maintaining this structure requires Knightley to rationalize his emotions and discipline his sexuality, as reflected in his rather paternal relationship with Emma. Only in Persuasion does Austen permit her hero to “dismiss conventional modes of masculinity developed by Burke and Enlightenment thinkers in favor of a malleable sexuality that embraces . . . Deleuzian love and desire” (125).
In his chapter on Persuasion, Kramp shows that Wentworth serially rehearses different models of masculinity, but finally allows love to disrupt these regulated structures. This part of the chapter, like the earlier chapters, is very well argued and carefully supported with textual evidence. Indeed, Kramp’s paradigm often sheds fresh light on familiar textual moments. At the end, however, Kramp claims: “Anne and Wentworth achieve … separation from the reterritorializing forces of modern capitalism and post-Revolutionary nationalism” (141). In this instance, his interpretation seems to distort the text. When discussing the nomadic “mobility of the sea” (140), he seems to forget that the boats belong to the British Navy, which was obviously a key player in both capitalism and nationalism. Harris’s analysis of Wentworth, which rests on her account of Austen’s knowledge of the navy, is a useful corrective. Harris also sees Austen as constructing, in Wentworth, “a new kind of English masculinity” (105), but for her Wentworth blends the qualities of “a distinctly Nelsonian war hero” (97) with “sensibility and domestic affections” (108).
Though one cannot call it an omission, Kramp’s map of the cultural discourses of masculinity raises questions about what happens when the Romantic poets reconfigure masculine ideals, and whether Austen’s construction of Wentworth (especially in relation to Benwick) responds critically to this reconfiguration. Both books invite further consideration of Austen’s relation to Romanticism; both also constitute valuable contributions to the distinguished body of Austen scholarship.
