Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism. - book reviews

Siskin declares that Austen's failure even to attempt to contribute, much less to participate, in the prodigious periodical publication of fiction in her era argues for a conscious decision on her part to opt for Literature: "What this comparative judgment [her much quoted defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey] and her publication decisions-whatever the other factors that influenced them -- point to is Austen's apparent participation in the historical transformation of the two-tier market into a hierarchical system of what we now know as high versus low culture -- a hierarchization that in narrowing the range of proper writing ushered in the disciplinary advent of the new category of Literature" (56). Several implications emerge here. First, the comment, "whatever the other factors that influenced them," seems a qualification that might potentially derail the entire argument but that is barely acknowledged. However, probably of more moment in terms of the thesis is the imputation that Austen is reborn as a critic in the same fashion that the opening quote by Gardiner accomplishes. Moreover, she is even become, following this same of reasoning, virtually a prototypical Modernist before her time -- opting for the elite standards of a restricted readership -- if not as a partisan in the self-conscious studies overseen by English Departments which the term "discipline" in the argument suggests. Moreover, but also, perhaps more to the point, the commentary endeavors to tell us her motivation. That is to say, we have an example, it appears, of the intentional fallacy. This is what Austen meant to do or to say. We understand what she does because we declare why she did it. The context supplies meaning and motivation at once.

Similarly, Anderson's essay interprets in a new way the uneasiness that Fanny Price in Mansfield Price feels in the presence of Mary Crawford, which generations of readers surely assumed derived from Fanny's knowledge that not only did both of them love the same man, Edmund, but that also, most probably, Mary was his beloved rather than Fanny. For those same generations Fanny's discomfort and unhappiness were satisfactorily accounted for as both envy and jealousy, I presume. However, under the new dispensation they are identified as sexual attraction. In fact, they turn out to constitute the love that cannot be named, in fact, the love that Austen could not name. Anderson writes, "These unwritten plots include the suppressed or interrupted narratives of Mansfield Park that were incompatible with its plot and with social convention. Austen breaks her silence to attempt to tell the story of the 'I' [the interpolated narrative voice], which is the 'desire for another logic of plot' that cannot fit in the story or its ideology. Perhaps it is the story of a woman's desires and their multifaceted forms that were edited post humously by her sister Cassandra down to what Janet Todd called the 'harmless residue, of Jane Austen's life" (182). Thus, we are informed that both Jane and Cassandra deliberately chose to conceal a lesbian story, and that that indeed was the truth all along. In other words, to be blunt, a text can be willfully misread via a twentieth-century feminist construct and then attributed to the author herself and to her nineteenth-century family. If this is so, then truly the possibilities of criticism are inexhaustible, if not infinite. There are truly no limits when we discount contemporaneous culture.