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Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism. - book reviews
Criticism, Fall, 1996 by Laura Dabundo
Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser, is a collection of original essays designed to take the measure of current feminist thinking about Austen and to establish, as it were, a kind of feminist context for that thinking. In "Privacy, Privilege, and 'Poaching' in Mansfield Park," the penultimate essay, Ellen Gardiner observes that "One of the reasons that Jane Austen has remained part of the twentieth-century canon is ... [that], as omniscient narrator in various novels, she continues to convince scholars that she is not merely a writer but also a critic" (151). Indeed, a central element in each of the articles in this volume, as well as in the book as a whole, is to find the reason for Austen's perseverance in the canon in the face of a conceivable recalcitrance to twentieth-century concerns on the part of a late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century opus, to say nothing of the mission among those very scholars to justify as unique and necessary their own contributions to the profusion of Austen commentary. They and it must answer the question, What more remains to be said? And yet the fact remains that there are large and significant divergences and diversities of opinion about the author; despite all the ink that has been spilled, in large measure there is still a knotty stubbornness in her works that seems ultimately, and like the works themselves, courteously and quietly, to resist all attempts to penetrate and lay bare forever what she was about. On the one hand, the feminist context seems as if it would be exactly hospitable to studies of Austen; on the other hand, there is something inescapable and in definable, which leads to conflict and controversy among the critics.
- More Articles of Interest
- Jane Austen Criticism, 1951-2004.(Jane Austen and the Theatre)(Jane Austen on...
- Jane Austen's rejection of Rousseau: A novelistic and feminist initiation
- Jane Austen and the sin of pride
- Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees/The Postcolonial Jane...
- Jane Austen and the morality of conversation
For instance, in "Consolidated Communities: Masculine and Feminine Values in Jane Austen's Fiction," Glenda Hudson takes an unexpectedly resolute exception to the claims made by Claudia Johnson and others about the ending of Mansfield Park. Johnson is one of the two presiding, albeit absent, formative geniuses of the critical approaches in this collection; the other is Alison Sulloway, whose presence is more directly invoked by the book's dedication. Their influence, nonetheless, indicates the continued development of feminist critiques of Austen. It does seem a shame, though, that Johnson and Sulloway are not represented in this assembly since so much of the argument seems to stem from territory they initially staked. In any case, Hudson argues against Johnson's claim that the ending is not happy despite the fact that the form -- a marriage -- is appropriate to the typos -- a comedy ("But Austen's works reveal nothing of the sort" [109]). Hudson offers a compelling and interesting argument built on a carefully crafted edifice of congenial rather than the presumably more likely disquieting nature of incest, but in some ways the larger and more vexing question is, How can it be that supposedly attentive and scrupulous readers cannot even agree on whether or not the ending of a book is positive and restful? What hope is there for common ground and a level playing field if even the tone of the close of a book is in question? The feminist context, at the least, then, seems to be fraying here.
What Devoney Looser has undertaken, as she indicates in the introduction to this volume, is to display examples from "the thriving industry of Jane Austen criticism," where "the driving force is arguably feminist" (1). The two men and eight women whose essays she includes address varying aspects of "the workings of gender politics in her novels" (9). But that may well be the only common denominator as the critics range independently across issues of sociopolitics as an endowment of Anglican Enlightenment (Gary Kelly's "Jane Austen, Romantic Feminism, and Civil Society"); feminist rewriting of historiography in the juvenilia (Antoinette Burton's "`Invention Is What Delights Me': Jane Austen's Remaking of English, History"); Austen as developer of Literature with a capital L (Clifford Siskin's "Jane Austen and the Engendering of Disciplinarity"); aspects of the Gothic, probably the least innovative of the topics of this book (Diane Hoeveler's "Vindicating Northanger Abbey: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Gothic Feminism" and Maria Jerinic's "In Defense of the Gothic: Rereading Northanger Abbey"); and, perhaps inevitably, homoeroticism in the work of an unmarried woman (in Misty Anderson's "`The Different Sorts of Friendship': Desire in Mansfield Park"). What is apparent is that the dialogues or discourses in which these authors participate are not with one another since their subjects are, for the most part, so disparate. Even in the two essays on Northanger Abbey and the three in effect dedicated to Mansfield Park, including Hudson's which is located separately from the two in the identified MP section, the terms and contents of the arguments differ radically, finally. It is not so much that the critics talk at cross purposes as that they engage diverging agendas and operate on differently tilted planes. This certainly makes this assembly rich and provocative, and readers who consult most of these essays will be rewarded for their efforts, but it also simultaneously opens a gap at the center. Whom is the discourse of these learned experts with, then? Or, better, whom is the feminist discourse about Jane Austen with?
