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Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England. - book reviews
Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Jill Heydt-Stevenson
by Roger Sales. New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. 304. $79.95.
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In 1979, The Norton Anthology of English Literature described Jane Austen as "the only important author who, untouched by the political, intellectual, and artistic revolutions of her age, stayed serenely within the culture and the literary traditions of the neoclassic past" (19). Fourteen years later, the most recent edition (1993) does not deny that statement, but merely equivocates: now, Austen "is the only important author who seems to be untouched" by those revolutions 916, my emphasis). Despite this equivocation from one major textual foundation of American undergraduate teaching, the emerging concensus among Austen scholars is that they cannot remain and, on the whole, no longer do remain untouched by the evidence that Austen was not serene, that she did not stay within the neoclassic past, and that she was influenced by politics--no "seeming" about it. Though coming to different conclusions, careful scholarship (Duckworth, Butler, Kirkham, Johnson, etc.) has uncovered Austen's connections to the political and literary issues of the 1790s. Now, Roger Sale's new book, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England, extends (but does not attempt to replace) her historical connections from the 1790's to the Regency itself in his discussions of the letters, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Sanditon. Although Sale's projected audience is the undergraduate reader, this is a well written, carefully researched study that both the student and the scholar will find illuminating.
Victorian and modern readers have often missed or misunderstood Austen's complex relationship to the Regency. Asserting that Austen is "a more openly Condition-of-England writer than is generally recognised," (xxi) Sale's goal is to place her Regency novels "within a more obviously material and politicised social history" (xviii). Examining both early and modern evaluation of her, he uncovers" Austen's changing cultural status" (xiv). He first surveys the Austen family's deification of her as a domestic angel in the house, and although this is not, of course, a new story, the thoroughness with which he historically contextualizes those biographies' agendas--in short, a total renovation of her character--makes for an engaging narrative, especially for the undergraduate reader. Demonstrating that the biographies are inscriptions of history, he carefully contextualizes their biases within the framework of their ambivalence toward Regency values and specifically their trepidation tht she evinces traces of Regency courseness in her letters (James Edward Austen-Leigh suppressed her references to such unspeakables as "fleas, naked Cupids, and bad breath" [10]). He then turns to the contemporary deification of Austen in modern Britain (specifically in popular culture), analyzing how both Austen and the Regency have now, ironically, become affirmative transferrential templates for what defines "Englishness." Indeed, one writer he quotes claims that because Chawton "'is the sort of house that every civilised man in England now covets,' Austen could not possibly have been unhappy there"(2).
Sales sees the letters as an important literary text and a historical source for the period and refuses to dwell merely on what is missing (i.e. the alleged annihilation of the most significant letters). Not only do the existing letters provide information about the Regency, but they also reveal the Regency's influence on Austen. Skeptical of psychoanalytic explanations that look for camouflaged meaning, Sales finds that the "impatient" and sometimes "abusive" (34, 35) tone in the letters arises out of the historical conditions and economic pressures under which they were written. Thus, the letters are not a celebration of the self because letters of this period constituted a public sphere, more like newspapers than private documents (33); and their highly theatrical qualities reveal an "open-ended, or continuous Regency drama" (45). From a feminist point of view, he argues that "social situations that she did not control" forced her to be abusive, (43) and acting "both the imperious playwright and the star performer . . . she often gained this power over her characters by abusing them when they were on stage and then by . . . contemptuously dismissing them . . . from her regal presence" (45-46). This last point of view, though historically contextualized in an arresting way is, perhaps, less subtly argued than are his discussions of the novels, where he finds Austen continually changing her narrative "countenance."
Indeed, one strength of this book is his overall opinion of Austen as an author who continuously "keeps and loses her countenance" (31)-alternadvely, this book could have been titled "The Varying and Contradictory Countenances of Austen and Regency England." What he means by this is that she is a writer who does not offer a fixed, conservative positron on any one debate, but instead creates texts that are "open, genuinely dialogic and unresolved" (145). He shows how Austen "celebrates confusion and secrecy in the very act of exposing and condemning them" (144); presenting at least two countenances in any given text (155), she "play[s] an intricate game with [her] readers," putting them in "contradictory position[s]" (165). Although these quotations are taken from his chapter on Emma, they seem to me to characterize his overall assessment of Austen's narrative stance. The historical documentation, the detailed close readings and a materialist/feminist outlook make this approach to Austen extremely convincing.
