Wallace1995 Book JaneAustenAndNarrativeAuthorit

JANE AUSTEN AND
NARRATIVE AUTHORITY
Also by Tara Ghoshal Wallace
FANNY BURNEY'S 'A BUSY DAY'

WOMEN CRITICS 1660-1820 (as co-editor)
Jane Austen and
Narrative Authority
Tara Ghoshal Wallace
Associate Professor,
Department of English
George Washington University
M
St. Martin's Press
© Tara Ghoshal Wallace 1995
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from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-39200-1 ISBN 978-0-230-37294-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230372948
10987654321
04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95
First published in the United States of America 1995 by

Scholarly and Reference Division,
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
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ISBN 978-0-312-12236-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wallace, Tara Ghoshal, 1952-
Jane Austen and narrative authority / Tara Ghoshal Wallace.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-12236-2
1. Austen, Jane, 1775-1817-Technique. 2. Authority in
literature. 3. Narration (Rhetoric) 4. Fiction-Technique.
1. Title.
PR4038.T4W35 1995
823'.7-dc20 94-25483
ClP
In loving memory,
to U.K. Ghoshal and Allaire Wallace
Contents
Acknowledgemen ts ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Lady Susan's Progeny 1
1 Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody 17
2 Sense and Sensibility and Feminine Authority 31
3 Getting the Whole Truth in Pride and Prejudice 45
4 The Family Plot of Mansfield Park 59
5 Emma and the Inept Reader 77
6 Straight Talk in Persuasion 99
Notes 117
Select Bibliography 145
Index 151
vii
Acknowledgements
This project has reached completion because I have access to the

very best readers and advisers in the business. Jane and Michael
Millgate and Jim Maddox read every part of the manuscript and
offered extraordinarily productive suggestions. Sue Lanser trans-
formed both particular chapters and general fuzzy thinking with
surgically precise criticisms, and she provided wonderful conver-
sations about Austen. Margaret Soltan's advice about style influ-
enced both this work and my other writing. These people have
read all or parts of this book with an attentiveness to which I
owe anything that might be called grace or insight. The clunky
and naive here persist in spite of their efforts.
There are so many others who have enabled this project: G.E.
Bentley Jr, who first told me I had something to say about Austen;
Jerry Beasley, Leo Damrosch, Margaret Doody, Deborah Kaplan
and John Richetti, who all taught me how to think more deeply
about Austen; my graduate students who always teach me to
speak more clearly - I am particularly indebted to You-Me Park
and Caroline Eisner; and my friends inside and outside the acad-
emy, who patiently listened to yet another reading of Austen -
D'Vera Cohn, Emmeline Diener, Connie Kibler, Judy Kimball,
Cece MacVaugh and Claire Sponsler all not only endured but
initiated long talks about Austen.
Earlier versions of the chapters on Northanger Abbey and Sense
and Sensibility appeared in Studies in the Novel 20 (3), © 1988,
University of North Texas, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (2),
© 1992 McMaster University. I thank the editors for permission
to reproduce the pieces. A timely grant from the George Wash-
ington University as well as reduced teaching loads allowed me
to complete this project; I thank my Chairs Christopher Sten and
Judith Plotz for their support and encouragement. Charmian
Hearne at Macmillan and Anne Rafique provided much under-
standing and help throughout.
IX
X Acknowledgemen ts
I want to acknowledge my debt to H. Scott Wallace for his

support. Finally I thank my daughter Astra Judith Wallace for
her patience and wit. She demonstrates every day that Austen's
brand of intelligent irony lives on.
Abbreviations
All references to Austen's novels are taken from The Novels of

Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 5 vols, 3rd edn (London: Oxford
University Press, 1932-4) and Minor Works, ed. R.W. Chapman
(London: Oxford University Press, 1954).
LS Lady Susan
NA Northanger Abbey
SS Sense and Sensibility
PP Pride and Prejudice
MP Mansfield Park
E Emma
P Persuasion
MW Minor Works
XI
Introduction:
Lady Susan's Progeny
This book offers a reading of Jane Austen's examination of her
own narrative authority, and, by implication, of the authority of
all narrators of fiction. I argue that each of Austen's finished
novels interrogates the claims of authoritative narrators and that
the Austen canon as a whole articulates a range of anxieties and
strategies having to do with authorship and authority. The six
novels experiment in different ways with possible sources and
ultimate failures of authority, always returning to the compro-
mised figure of the fallible narrator. At the same time, Austen's
novels are far more than artefacts of self-reflexivity: they chal-
lenge and enable readers to move beyond a deconstructive dis-
mantling of her texts toward an effective theory of narrative
interpretation. As readers encounter Austen's careful exploration
of authorial anxiety, they engage in a complex negotiation be-
tween narrator and audience; pressed to recognize ways in which
texts both claim and disavow authority, readers begin to develop
interpretative strategies that can account for narrators' manip-
ulations as well as their anxieties.
Inevitably, some of these anxieties are connected to gender,
with the result that Austen constantly confronts the duality in-
voked in her role as modest woman and empowered author.
Especially in my discussions of Lady Susan and Sense and Sensi-
bility, I consider ways in which Austen both empowers women
and critiques women's assumption of power. Authorship liberates
as well as compromises Austen's desire for feminine power, lead-
ing her to construct an assertive narrative voice which is at the
same time a refracted voice, subject to irony and criticism. On
the other hand, Austen's examination of narrative authority tran-
scends gender-based strategies. The problematics of authorship
1
2 Jane Austen and Narrative Authority
encoded in her work are as pertinent to male-authored texts

as to her own. For example, her questioning of the dichotomy
between romance and realism in Northanger Abbey, her rejection
of persuasive moral discourse in Mansfield Park, her scrutiny of
competing systems of interpretation in Pride and Prejudice and
Emma, and her bold collapsing of narrative distance in Persuasion
are as helpful for a reading of Fielding or Scott as they are for
understanding Burney or Wollstonecraft. Austen's novelistic
output, thematizing as it so persistently does the problems of
narrative authority, alerts readers to authorial manipulation and
invites them to construct their own flexible methodologies of
interpretation.
The following chapters approach a reading of Jane Austen's

exploration of narrative authority through a reading of each of
her novels. I have chosen to begin my discussion with Lady Susan,
fully acknowledging that her other early testings of narrative
possibilities exercise their own power and fascination. After all,
when an author's early experimentations are as various, sophis-
ticated, and provocative as Jane Austen's are, it is possible to
light on any one of them as the generative text, the one that
seems to explain, in some particularly cogent way, the power
and complexity of the mature work. When, moreover, each of
the later works speaks to the others, so that, in Juliet McMaster's
words, the 'opus is a totality,'1 it is perhaps too easy to detect in
the early texts unfinished business taken up in subsequent pro-
ductions. Even narrowing the focus to the issue of narrative au-
thority, as this book does, allows for a number of foundational
texts: Love and Freindship openly raises the spectre of the lying
writer; The History of England challenges the whole notion of
narrative objectivity in a discourse which relies on impartiality
as the source of authority; The Watsons introduces a heroine whose
views may be congruent with the narrator's but who consistently
reminds herself and readers that her knowledge, and therefore
her authority, is limited.
I choose to enter my argument through a reading of Lady
Susan because this work represents as explicit a treatment of the
intersection of gender, language and authority as any text in the

Austen canon. Lady Susan connects feminine desire for power
with the art of linguistic manipulation, exposing at the same
time the anxieties and difficulties that lie behind that desire and
its formulation in artistic language. And when Lady Susan shifts
from the epistolary to the omniscient-narrator mode, it marks
not only the point at which Austen lights on the narrative form
most congenial to her, but also the moment when she clearly
introduces the limitations of that form, granting to the narrative
voice very little more privilege than can be claimed by the com-
peting voices inscribed in the letters. Seen in this light, Lady Susan
is not the anomaly that some readers have considered it to be,
but, in some ways, the quintessential Austen text.2
What strikes one first about Lady Susan is the way women
claim and exercise power. While there are powerful and openly
aggressive women in the later works - Mrs Ferrars in Sense and
Sensibility, Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice for
example - they are generally relegated to the margins of the text,
their assertiveness mitigated by their inability to control the re-
sponses of main characters or of readers. Lady Susan, on the other
hand, places such women at the very centre of the text, allowing
them to manipulate other characters and readers. As Mary Poovey
puts it, '[i]n the laissez-faire competition the epistolary Lady Susan
permits, the reader will identify with whatever character domi-
nates the narration or most completely gratifies the appetite for
entertainment. In Lady Susan this character is, of course, the
dangerous heroine.'3 Identification may be too strong a term for
the reader's engagement with Lady Susan, but she undeniably
fascinates, precisely because of her unabashed assertion of self
and power. When she writes to Alicia Johnson, 'I am tired of
submitting my will to the Caprices of others - of resigning my
own Judgment in deference to those, to whom I owe no duty,
and for whom I feel no respect. I have given up too much' (308),
the reader applauds such an explicit rejection of feminine defer-
ence even as she is astonished by the lie. We assent to Lady
Susan's complaint about lack of power in part because we are
alert to patriarchal oppression of women and in part because we
agree with her about the caprices of Frederica and the Vernons,
who singularly fail to win our sympathy. At the same time,
remembering how little Lady Susan has exhibited submission,

resignation and deference, we resist her characterization of her-
self as the passive victim of lesser intellects. In this dual response
lies, I believe, one of the crucial points about Jane Austen and
narrative authority: Austen's works simultaneously assert and
undermine the authority claimed by a narrative voice. In the
chapters that follow, I argue that this doubled authorial voice,
here directing our mixed response to a character's authority, enters
into the narrative mode of each later novel.4
Lady Susan anticipates some of the complex negotiations, vis-
ible in later texts, between overt patriarchal power and covert,
perhaps subversive, feminine authority. Patriarchal power, it
shows, is inherently self-limiting. As Deborah Kaplan points out,
'[although wealth and property ought to make men command-
ing, inheritance practices alone severely limit their power.
Reginald has hardly any authority because he does not come
into possession of his father's estate until his father dies. His
father has little authority over his son because the estate is en-
tailed; it will pass to his son regardless of what his son does.'5
Extending Kaplan's point, I would suggest that when patriarchal
practice subverts patriarchal authority, other kinds of authorita-
tive exertions must be deployed. Sir Reginald de Courcy, like Sir
Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, attempts to influence his fam-
ily through an unstable combination of exhortations to duty and
appeals to the heart. In his letter, he reminds Reginald of his
social responsibility as the 'only son & the representative of an
ancient Family' (260), much as Lady Catherine de Bourgh calls
upon Elizabeth Bennet to remember Darcy's 'respectable, hon-
ourable, and ancient' family (PP 356). Like Lady Catherine, too,
who imagines that Elizabeth's 'arts and allurements . . . may have
drawn [Darcy] in' (PP 354), Sir Reginald fears that his son 'may
be drawn in' by Lady Susan to 'a Match, which deep Art only
could render probable' (260-61). In both cases, the speakers claim
the right to interdict an undesirable match by evoking social
propriety, but unlike Lady Catherine, Sir Reginald combines such
absolutism with an affective approach, speaking of 'a Father's
anxiety', his 'Years & increasing Infirmities', and his dependence
on his son's 'Sense & Affection' (260-1). Sir Reginald thus antici-
pates the way in which Sir Thomas Bertram tries and fails to
sway his family, sometimes by asserting his patriarchal status as

a source of authority, sometimes by insinuating an emotional
right to be obeyed.
In his letter, Sir Reginald rehearses for his son all that they
know to the detriment of Lady Susan's character, information
imparted in part by Mr Smith. He adds, T should be glad to hear
your reasons for disbeleiving [sic] Mr Smith's intelligence; you
had no doubt of it's [sic] authenticity a month ago' (261). Indeed,
Reginald de Courcy had had no doubts, writing to his sister
about 'the most accomplished Coquette in England', who 'does
not confine herself to that sort of honest flirtation which satisfies
most people, but aspires to the more delicious gratification of
making a whole family miserable' (248). His source for such a
judgement, he says, is 'a Mr Smith', with whom he has dined
twice, and who is 'well qualified to make the communication'
because he has spent a fortnight at Langford with Lady Susan
and the Manwarings (248). This same Charles Smith has told
Reginald that Frederica Vernon 'has not even Manners to recom-
mend her, a n d . . . is equally dull & proud' (248).
I want to make explicit some of the problematics of episte-
mology and authority inscribed in this part of the narrative. Sir
Reginald and his son confer narrative authority on Mr Smith
both because he has met Lady Susan and because he is, however
tangentially, a part of their elite social circle. As readers, we deny
authority based on such flimsy grounds. On the other hand,
having already heard, in her own voice, some of Lady Susan's
plots and opinions, we must credit this mysterious witness with
some perspicuity and wonder how he, unlike Manwaring, Sir
James Martin and Reginald, manages to avoid falling under the
spell of Lady Susan's 'bewitching powers' (248). If, however, we
are inclined to ascribe to Mr Smith particular powers of percep-
tion which enable him to penetrate facades, we must account for
his facile and inaccurate reading of Frederica. Sketchy though
it is, the portrait of Mr Smith as problematic narrator, on the
one hand 'well qualified' to judge and on the other engaged in
disseminating 'scandalous tales . . . totally his own invention'
(264), anticipates not only later purveyors of mixed narratives
(Wickham's scandalous tales about the Darcy family include an
accurate representation of Lady Catherine, and Emma's inventions
about Jane Fairfax correctly assume a romantic secret) but also

the central issue of narrative authority. That is, a narrator can
convey the truth without having any legitimate grounds for
having discovered it, and his credibility in one instance is no
guarantee of authority in another. When Lennard J. Davis speaks
of 'the contradiction we have agreed to in relation to novelists',
he refers to the way in which readers regularly confer broad
authority upon 'a person who spends a good deal of his or her
life making up stories'.6 In Austen's texts, this contradiction is
both thematized and further complicated by the fact that on
occasion, and for no predictable reason, even the most arrant
spinner of tales can be absolutely right.
When he finally breaks off with Lady Susan, Reginald de
Courcy resurrects Mr Smith's version of her, 'which had reached
me in common with the World in general, & gained my entire
beleif [sic] before I saw you, but which you by the exertion of
your perverted Abilities had made me resolve to disallow' (305).
In other words, Reginald had known a 'truth universally ac-
knowledged' until Lady Susan had distorted it through her art.
In formulating his capitulation to Lady Susan in these terms,
Reginald grants her enormous power, monstrous though it may
be. His formulation echoes James Thomson's warning against
woman's 'enticing smile, the modest-seeming eye, /Beneath whose
beauteous beams, belying Heaven,/Lurk searchless cunning,
cruelty, and death' (Seasons, Spring, lines 990-2). Reginald con-
strues Lady Susan as Eve or Duessa - women who use sexual
and linguistic power to beguile and destroy men. What he fails
to articulate, of course, is that men are vulnerable to this kind of
manipulation because of their sexual desire. Lady Susan can
ensnare the minds of Manwaring, de Courcy and Sir James in
part because they desire her body. Even the gouty and moral Mr
Johnson participates in this male desire, having married a young
wife who submits to his directives but plots to deceive him when-
ever possible: as Lady Susan says, 'since he will be stubborn, he
must be tricked' (249). Alicia Johnson, free from any desire for
her husband, can happily anticipate 'true enjoyment' (296) in his
absence, while he, constrained by both propriety and desire,
expends considerable energy keeping her under surveillance.
Lady Susan makes clear that a woman's power is connected not
only with evoking desire in men, but with successfully suppress-

ing her own. Writing of Frederica's visible affection for Reginald
de Courcy, Lady Susan says, T never saw a girl of her age, bid
fairer to be the sport of Mankind. Her feelings are tolerably lively,
& she is so charmingly artless in their display, as to afford the
most reasonable hope of her being ridiculed & despised by every
Man who sees her' (274). For a woman to harbour sexual pas-
sions and to act on them leads to disaster, as the cautionary tale
of the Manwarings proves. Acutely conscious of this social truth,
Lady Susan articulates her anxieties about her own passion for
Manwaring, who 'is so uncommonly pleasing that I was not
without apprehensions myself. I remember saying to myself as I
drove to the House, "I like this Man; pray Heaven no harm come
of it!"' (244). Her later confession to Alicia Johnson attests to the
depth of her feeling for Manwaring: T will not dissemble what
real pleasure his sight afforded me, nor how strongly I felt the
contrast between his person & manners, & those of Reginald, to
the infinite disadvantage of the latter' (299). Such sentiments from
a woman 'of absolute coquetry' (256) suggest real desire kept in
check only by a strong appreciation of consequences: as Lady
Susan says, 'Those women are inexcusable who forget what is
due to themselves & the opinion of the World' (269)7
On 'the opinion of the World' rests a woman's ability to exert
power, and Lady Susan's power derives in part from her skill in
manipulating that opinion. Lady Susan represents the struggle to
control representation, both of self and the world, and, as critics
have pointed out, her success depends on skilful deployment of
social rules. Leroy Smith ascribes Lady Susan's success to her
ability to cross gender lines: 'Being a woman in a patriarchal
culture means being inferior, restricted, in the control of some-
one else; but some women, instead of acceding to dependancy,
sustain their self-esteem by a compensatory striving for power
that takes the form of imitation of the dominant male. Lady Susan,
by assuming male values and denigrating femaleness, follows
this course.' Barbara Horwitz, on the other hand, argues that
Lady Susan acts precisely in accordance with feminine propriety:
'this anti-heroine does not simply behave in a manner directly
contrary to the way books say she should. Instead, she attempts
appearing to behave exactly as they recommend by using their
very words to justify her behavior.' Mary Poovey, too, refers to

Lady Susan's ability 'to manipulate others chiefly because she
knows that the use of language is an art capable of generating
plausible, internally consistent, but wholly malleable fictions -
just as the manners of propriety can'.8
These judgements point to one of the ways in which Lady
Susan accrues authority: she borrows its semblance by performing
the appropriate social and moral attitudes. Her first letter to her
brother-in-law strikes conventional poses: she cannot remain with
the Manwarings, she says, because 'their hospitable & chearful
[sic] dispositions lead them too much into society for my present
situation & state of mind' (243), a wholly formulaic articulation
of recent widowhood. Similarly, she employs the discourse of
troubled and tender motherhood to claim the right to choose a
husband for Frederica, who must be, she tells Mrs Vernon,
'endebted [sic] to a fortunate Establishment for the comforts of
Life' (277).
At this particular intersection of gender and authority, cred-
ibility depends on at least the appearance of feminine propriety
and sentiment, a propriety that to some extent consists of sup-
pressing hostile as well as sexual feelings. Like Elinor Dashwood
hiding her contempt for Lucy Steele, or Fanny Price screening
her resentment of Mary Crawford, Lady Susan disguises her
hostility toward Mrs Vernon by professing a sisterly regard, and
although her performance never quite convinces her sister-in-
law, it does impress. Mrs Vernon is forced to concede its power:
'if I had not known how much she has always disliked me for
marrying Mr Vernon . . . I should have imagined her an attached
friend' (251). Only previous knowledge and her own hostility
allow Mrs Vernon to resist Lady Susan's representation of her-
self as one who 'never had the convenient talent of affecting
sensations foreign to my heart' (277).
Catherine Vernon also articulates one of the themes of this
work as well as of later Austen texts: the inverse relationship
between linguistic facility and true feeling. Reporting to her
mother Lady Susan's supposed distress regarding Frederica, Mrs
Vernon says 'she talks vastly w e l l . . . I should say she talks too
well to feel so very deeply' (267). Lady Susan's skill at represent-
ing her feelings indicates, to her sister-in-law, the superficiality
of the feelings themselves. Recall Darcy's response when Eliza-

beth teases him about his reticence: 'You might have talked to
me more', says Elizabeth, to which he replies, 'A man who had
felt less, might' (PP 381). In fact, Lady Susan suggests that lin-
guistic ability argues not only lack of feeling, but also deliberate
distortion of truth. Mrs Vernon writes that Lady Susan 'talks
very well, with a happy command of Language, which is too
often used I beleive [sic] to make Black appear White' (251). Lady
Susan herself relies on her ability to manipulate truth through
language, confident that Frederica's version of the relationship
between mother and daughter will not be credited: T trust I shall
be able to make my story as good as her's [sic]. If I am vain of
anything, it is of my eloquence. Consideration & Esteem as surely
follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty'
(268).
In connecting 'command of Language' with manipulation,
Austen in Lady Susan denies moral authority to smooth narra-
tives. Indeed, coherent and plausible narratives become signs of
falseness here and in later novels. Wickham's detailed history of
his dealings with Darcy ('names, facts, every thing mentioned'
[PP 86]); Emma's dense and complex descriptions of Jane Fairfax's
romance with Mr Dixon; Mr Elliot's smooth rendering of his
past: all these narratives, linguistically proficient as they are,
become suspect precisely because of their verbal prowess. Even
Darcy's fluent letter of explanation requires from Elizabeth both
'a second perusal' (PP 208) and corroborative recollection before
it gains her assent. Lady Susan's representation of herself, coher-
ent and all-embracing - 'Have I not explained everything to you
with respect to myself which could bear a doubtful meaning, &
which the ill-nature of the World had interpreted to my Dis-
credit' (304) - is a linguistic construct, accruing authority only
from the gullibility of its audience and quickly dismantled by a
more authoritative account, in this case the combined narratives
of Mr Johnson and Mrs Manwaring.
In part, Lady Susan's dissimulations fail because they are false
- as Alicia Johnson says, 'Facts are such horrid things!' (303). For,
despite their speciousness and their power to deceive Reginald
de Courcy, the content of Lady Susan's narratives is also vague,
flimsy, and easily disproved. Look at her series of representations
to Reginald: she ascribes her earlier hostility to his sister to hav-

ing heard 'something... materially to the disadvantage' of that
lady; she claims to have left Langford 'in spite of Mr and Mrs
Manwaring's most earnest entreaties' (264-5); she professes ignor-
ance of Frederica's repugnance to Sir James Martin and vows to
abandon the match. All these lies are either difficult to credit or
liable to quick refutation. It needs only a meeting with Mrs
Manwaring for Reginald to discover one falsehood, as it would
need only the outcome of Lady Susan's continuing determination
'to complete the match between my daughter & Sir James' (294)
to uncover another. Lady Susan's fictions are dangerously vulner-
able. We need therefore to ask why a clever woman constructs
such flimsy narratives, and why a clever man believes them.
Lady Susan, much as she prides herself on her eloquence, in
fact desires a power based not on language but on emotional
commitment. This desire is evident in the fact that, from the
beginning of their association, she finds Reginald lacking in lov-
ing flattery, 'deficient in the power of saying those delightful
things which put one in good humour with oneself & all the
world' (258). Later, referring to Reginald's painstaking quest to
find justifications for her previous conduct, she voices her pref-
erence for 'the tender & liberal spirit of Manwaring, which im-
pressed with the deepest conviction of my merit, is satisfied that
whatever I do must be right' (269). Lady Susan's fury when
Reginald intervenes on Frederica's behalf attests to her rigid
requirement of absolute trust and loyalty:
He can have no true regard for me, or he would not have

listened to h e r . . . How dared he beleive [sic] what she told
him in my disfavour! Ought he not to have felt assured that I
must have unanswerable Motives for all that I had done! Where
was his reliance on my Sense or Goodness then; where the
resentment which true Love would have dictated against the
person defaming me, that person, too, a Chit, a Child, without
Talent or Education, whom he had been always taught to de-
spise? (282)
In this passage, which seems to me to contain the most candid of

her words, Lady Susan allows herself to expose her longing for
what neither she nor any narrator can ever have: absolute love
and trust, absolute credibility based not on how well she makes
her case but on faith beyond reason. Mary Poovey correctly
observes that 'Beneath Lady Susan's artful self-presentation
. . . lurk fears and desires she can neither conceal nor acknowl-
edge . . . her impatience with spontaneity cloaks her fear that its
real liability is just what she says it is: if one is not loved in
return, the lover may ridicule, despise, and make sport of a
woman's heart.'9 Poovey then shrewdly points to one consequence
of Lady Susan's conflict: she can either express desire or repress
it, but both courses invite unhappiness. At the same time, the
conflict explains one part of Lady Susan's failed authority. Be-
cause what she truly desires is absolute loyalty and love, she
consciously or unconsciously tests her lovers by constructing weak
narratives; since power ultimately derives from love rather than
command of language, authority based on narrative skill is be-
side the point, or at least merely compensatory.10
Yet if Lady Susan's narratives fail to engage her own deepest
allegiance, they still impose on Reginald, despite his early hostil-
ity and his apparent cleverness. As I have said, his credulity is
a result of his sexual desire, but also of his submission to Lady
Susan's linguistic manipulations. Jane Austen exposes the extent
and quality of his capitulation in a characteristically subtle form:
she has him pick up Lady Susan's style. Note, for example, the
distinctly feminine turn of phrase when he writes to his father
that 'Miss Manwaring is absolutely on the catch for a husband,
& no one therefore can pity her, for losing by the superior attrac-
tions of another woman, the chance of being able to make a
worthy Man completely miserable' (265). It is worth reiterating
the complex irony of this relationship between Reginald and Lady
Susan. She, while vain of her linguistic power, in fact fantasizes
about an emotional tie beyond the reach of language and about
a Reginald 'devoted to me, heart & soul' (302), a devotion which
will confer on her complete authority. He, on the other hand,
responds to Lady Susan's beauty and narrative facility, bestowing
authority on her only so long as he is influenced by her physical
presence and unchallenged narratives. At no time, whether in-
fatuated or disillusioned, does he really 'see you as you are'
(304); rather, he simply substitutes one verbal representation of
her for another, moving from cynicism to submission to rejection

in response to different narratives.
At one point, Reginald de Courcy approaches a truth about his
relationship with Lady Susan. Writing to break off all contact
with her, he says, 'My Understanding is at length restored, &
teaches me no less to abhor the Artifices which had subdued me,
than to despise myself for the weakness, on which their strength
was founded' (306). The weakness to which he alludes has as
much to do with desire for coherence as with desire for sexual
gratification, a yearning for an 'indisputable authority' which
produces 'an history' (304) rather than stories which must be
sifted for partial truths. He articulates his urgent quest for abso-
lute and closed signification in his penultimate letter to Lady
Susan - 'Langford - Langford - that word will be sufficient'
(304) - to which she uncooperatively replies, 'Believe me, the
single word of Langford is not of such potent intelligence, as to
supersede the necessity of more' (305). His moment of closure is
her point of departure to generate more texts, just as the 'Con-
clusion' of Lady Susan generates subsequent Austen narratives.
When the third-person narrator interrupts the story being told in

letters, she seems to bring to an abrupt close both the plot and
the narrative free-for-all in the epistolary text. Both Austen's shift
to omniscient narrator here and her subsequent avoidance of the
epistolary form have received a good deal of attention from crit-
ics. Margaret Drabble, in the introduction to the Penguin edition
of Lady Susan, argues that the form was uncongenial to Austen
because of its 'unreality . . . she must at times have felt amused
by some of the devices resorted to in order to keep the letters
flowing from correspondent to correspondent'.11 Other critics
emphasize the narrator's role in reasserting control and re-
establishing social and moral certainties which have been destabil-
ized by the multiple voices of the letters. Poovey says that: 'The
Conclusion of Lady Susan . . . suggests an impulse to contain even
momentary fantasies of unmitigated power within the twin con-
trols of aesthetic closure and social propriety.' Kaplan, referring
to Poovey's comment, extends the idea of fantasy from author to
reader: 'As long as the story is told in letters, most of them written
by the female characters, the reader has the opportunity to
identify with, to seem to be "inside," women's intersubjectivities.
The invention of an omniscient narrator - simply the narrator's
presence - diminishes this identification, for the narrator, situ-
ated outside of these intersubjectivities, distances the reader from
them too.' Susan Pepper Robbins argues for a more global sig-
nificance to the shift: 'The lost parental authority finds ample
compensation in the voice of the narrator whose tone of amused
tolerance in the conclusion to Lady Susan assures us that all is
well, if not right, in the new world presented in the book.
. . . Behind the astringence of irony in this conclusion are the
clear moral judgments. The narrative voice has indeed become a
source of order and value; it is the voice of the lost good parent
who speaks instead of writing letters/12
Still, while the narrative voice in Lady Susan and in other texts
inevitably claims more authority than any one voice in the mul-
tiplicity enacted in epistolary fiction, I argue that Austen rarely
allows readers sustained confidence in the narrator. To begin
with, the 'omniscient' narrator in Lady Susan gives us very little
information beyond what the letters have already provided: we
do not need her voice to understand that 'Mr Vernon... lived
only to do whatever he was desired' (311) or that Mrs Vernon
remained 'incredulous' (312) regarding Lady Susan's professions
of maternal tenderness. Nor can we be surprised by Lady Susan's
marriage to Sir James or the assurance of a match between
Reginald and Frederica, since both these eventualities are fully
predicted by the epistolary text. Moreover, the narrator explicitly
disclaims omniscience, declining the opportunity to read Lady
Susan's mind: 'Whether Lady Susan was, or was not happy in
her second Choice - I do not see how it can ever be ascertained
- for who would take her assurance of it, on either side of the
question? The World must judge from Probability' (313). As Susan
Sniader Lanser points out, this passage 'manifests one character-
istic strategy of Austen authoriality - an assertion that is also a
refusal.'13 Like the lacunae at the end of other Austen texts - the
amount of time required for General Tilney to forgive Henry or
for Edmund to marry Fanny, or the precise content of Emma's
reply to Knightley's proposal - this deliberate withholding of
information not only forces the reader to supply what the text
omits (thereby usurping, to some extent, narrative authority),
but also undermines the narrator's claim to omniscience in other
areas. If the narrator cannot provide information about Lady
Susan's happiness or Emma's language, how can she assert certi-
tude about Reginald's feelings or Jane Fairfax's truthfulness? And
if narrative authority derives at least in part from being able to
answer questions raised in the text, this narrator forfeits her claim
to such authority.14
One other point needs to be made about the narrative voice
that closes Lady Susan. As Robbins says, it does indeed articulate
'amused tolerance', but it is not at all clear to me that the toler-
ance and irony translate into moral or narrative authority. While
the narrator does pass judgement, albeit obliquely, on Lady
Susan's unseemly eagerness to jettison her daughter, she is con-
tent merely to mock genially the manipulation of Reginald de
Courcy, who is to 'be talked, flattered & finessed into an affec-
tion for [Frederica]' (313). And her last words are worthy of Lady
Susan herself: 'For myself, I confess that J can pity only Miss
Manwaring, who coming to Town & putting herself to an expence
[sic] in Cloathes [sic], which impoverished her for two years, on
purpose to secure [Sir James], was defrauded of her due by a
Woman ten years older than herself (313). Here is the voice, not
of one who objectively surveys, directs and judges, but of one
who fully participates in the worldly and cynical discourse of the
self-consciously sophisticated. In fact, the voice echoes Reginald's
language while under the spell of Lady Susan, raising the possi-
bility that the narrator herself has been corrupted by her heroine.
The narrator who shuts off the concatenation of unreliable voices
in the letters demonstrates, then, the same partial knowledge
and the same participation in wicked gossip that she has just
silenced. And this is the voice that Austen chooses when she
writes each subsequent novel.
* * *
Richard F. Patteson finds that this problematized narrative voice

'exposes the context of "truth" as a tissue of indeterminacy'. He
continues:
I have deliberately refrained from speaking of "the narrator"

of any Austen novel because the notion of a narrator suggests
a single individual, almost a character telling the story and
thus implies a degree of narrative consistency that Austen's
texts do not possess. There is no single, authoritative voice on
which the reader can fall back for assurance. The multiplicity
of narrative voice makes the reader's search for determinacy
even more difficult than the characters'. Those narrative voices,
moreover, often call into question the ontological status of the
text and hence, the reader's sense of what is "real".15
While Patteson's articulation of narrative indeterminacy is con-

gruent with my discussion about the problematics of narrative
authority and truth, my argument traces the way Austen
thematizes the problem of narrative authority throughout her
novels. She seems, indeed, to move systematically through a series
of positions that would appear to generate authority, in order to
exhibit and analyse their weaknesses. Northanger Abbey takes a
position of knowing superiority, exposing and parodying the
dubious satisfactions of romantic fiction, only to subvert both
parodist and the hierarchy which privileges realism over romance.
Sense and Sensibility presses us to trust the patient and insightful
heroine, and then provides a dark reading of feminine endur-
ance and propriety. Pride and Prejudice, deservedly the favourite
of most non-academic readers of Austen, demonstrates the diffi-
culty of evaluating plausible but conflicting representations of
reality. In Mansfield Park, Austen aims at what may seem to
twentieth-century readers an overly obvious target - authority as
embodied in patriarchal family structure; she provides, however,
an analysis which moves well beyond a critique of patriarchal
voice, exposing the energetic competition for authority at all lev-
els of family and community. Emma returns to an issue raised in
Pride and Prejudice - the grounds for belief in narrative - and
demonstrates the ways in which systems of interpretation rely
on unreliable hierarchies of value. In Persuasion, her last com-
pleted work, Austen moves, as so many critics point out, in a
new direction. For the purposes of my argument, it is less impor-
tant to decide whether she has finally accepted the Romantic
movement than to note that she begins to construct a new site of
authority: the authority of a narrative voice that has discarded

distancing devices and claims trust because of its limitations. To
have omitted Sanditon from this discussion may seem an act of
bad faith, but it seems altogether too sketchy to provide even
tenuous evidence as to Austen's intentions. Whether she was to
return to careful subversions of narrative authority or whether
she was to claim boldly an authority based on human fallibility,
we cannot know. What we do know is what Austen has be-
queathed to all her readers: an honest directive to practise what
modern critical discourse calls the hermeneutics of suspicion,
and what Mrs Vernon articulates more baldly - beware of nar-
rators 'with a happy command of Language', for they may 'make
Black appear White'.
1
Northanger Abbey and the
Limits of Parody
Northanger Abbey opens by positing two kinds of readers and
two kinds of texts: the naive readers of romance who would
expect a heroine to be an orphan and to engage in 'the more
heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a
canary-bird, or watering a rosebush' (13); and the more sophis-
ticated readers who reject romance and who know a parody when
they see one. Readers of the first type will find that this work
disorients or disrupts their expectations, but the second type can
apparently enter a comfortable world of shared beliefs.1 In
Northanger Abbey itself, however, Austen does more than invite
her reader to join in a collaborative effort to debunk the conven-
tions of sentimental novels, more even than to witness the emer-
gence of a new kind of novel based on probabilities and
psychological realism.2 She mocks and undermines her own cho-
sen method - parodic discourse - so that both narrative and
reader are kept off-balance. In working towards her own concep-
tion of what constitutes novelistic discourse, Austen makes the
reader a participant, now perhaps colluding with, now perhaps
resisting the narrator's evaluation of her own novel. The reader
thus becomes not only a partner in the unfolding of the narra-
tive, but also, to some extent, an opponent who struggles with
the narrator for control over the text.
Nowhere is this struggle and instability of response clearer
than in the narrator's treatment of Henry Tilney. Austen begins
by allowing the reader to feel that Henry speaks for her. By the
time he appears, even the most obtuse reader is prepared to
encounter a hero who will collaborate with the narrator in disa-
busing the heroine of her romantic, girlish fantasies, thereby
weaning the reader away from an addiction to romance novels.
The reader, recalling earlier literary models, might anticipate
17
either a hero who is a self-conscious mentor, like Edgar Mandle-

bert in Frances Burney's Camilla (1796), or a hero who is a pro-
saic illuminator of truth, like Robert Stuart in Eaton S. Barrett's
The Heroine (1813). Since neither of these models precludes the
possibility of wit - see, for example, Mr Glanville in Charlotte
Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) - the entrance of Henry Tilney
as ironic commentator does not seem particularly novel or sur-
prising. If anything surprises, it is the fact that the narrator shows
her hand so openly. The first conversation between Henry and
Catherine is a set-piece display of the parodist's techniques. When
Henry Tilney mocks Bath conventions, he does so by adding not
new language but new intonations: a 'set smile', an 'affectedly'
soft voice, a 'simpering air' (26); he assumes surprise at an
unsurprising remark, and calls attention to social conventions
which are otherwise unremarkable. But the reader's complacent
acceptance of Henry as hero/mentor, Henry as the embodiment
of the narrator's values, begins to erode once Catherine's response
to his parody uncovers the discomfort elicited by mockery. Hen-
ry's methods destabilize Catherine's acceptance of social conven-
tions but fail to replace them with unquestioning assent. Parody
evokes mirth, but the laughter is not wholehearted unless the
audience shares the narrator's contempt for the parodied subject.
As Catherine 'turn[s] away her head, not knowing whether she
might venture to laugh' (26), we can picture Pamela's admirers
smirking uncomfortably at the opening chapters of Joseph An-
drews. Austen, in this brief dialogue, shakes the reader's confi-
dence in the narrator's stance; and the commitment to parodic
discourse is undermined by the awareness that readers may not
automatically share the cynicism of the parodist.
Austen's refusal to stand behind her hero's parody of Bath
conventions is apparent a few chapters later, when Eleanor Tilney
and Catherine engage in precisely the sort of threadbare dia-
logue that Tilney has mocked. Their conversation consists of 'the
first rudiments of an acquaintance', exploring nothing more pro-
found than their opinion of Bath and their accomplishments on
piano and horseback (56). The reader's judgement of this encoun-
ter is informed not by Henry's characterization of Bath conven-
tions but by the sudden intimacy of Catherine and Isabella Thorpe.
In the context of that forced and false intimacy, the kind of
Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody 19
conventional dialogue parodied by Henry seems both genuine

and mature, especially in comparison with the hyperbolic en-
dearments preferred by Isabella. Henry's opinion thus fails to
influence the reader's judgement; on the contrary, the exchange
between Catherine and Eleanor serves as a retroactive commen-
tary on Henry, undermining his authority as an arbiter of social
exchange. And if by chance a reader has failed to perceive this,
Austen explicitly states her approval of the exchange:
they continued talking together as long as both parties remained

in the room: and though in all probability not an observation
was made, not an expression used by either which had not
been made and used some thousands of times before, under
that roof, in every Bath season, yet the merit of their being
spoken with simplicity and truth, and without personal con-
ceit, might be something uncommon. (72)3
We need not insist upon an ideology of accommodation to find

a reading for this episode; Austen is not, I believe, exposing how
social conventions constrain or distort the conversation of two
sensible and unaffected women. Rather, it is possible to see this
episode as acutely specific auto-criticism: the narrator's commen-
tary on the limitations and falsities of parodic discourse.4 Henry
Tilney's targets - social conventions, obsessions with clothing -
are either too familiar or too trivial to engage the sustained com-
mitment of the narrator, and the narrative's resistance to its char-
acter's parody forces the reader to revaluate the entire strategy
of parodic discourse as employed in the text.
When Tilney mocks the empty conventions of social discourse,
he is, of course, criticizing the vocabulary of such discourse, and
much has been said about Tilney's acute sensitivity to language.
Joseph Wiesenfarth, for example, argues that 'When Henry is
looked at with respect to his concern for language, he is seen to
be totally aware of reality because he is perceptive and also
because he is thoroughly aware of the use and abuse of the speech
medium through which reality is interpreted.' Katrin Ristkok
Burlin explicitly connects Tilney's linguistic ability with narra-
tive authority: 'Henry has come close to usurping his author's
role of teaching the importance of precise language'.5 But does
Henry's aggressive precision of language carry quite this moral

force? Henry's famous criticism of Catherine's sloppy diction -
her use of 'amazingly' and 'nice' (107) - does not possess as
much authority as it first appears to have. For one thing, Cathe-
rine's language is not the sort of novelistic cant that Austen
deprecates when she objects to Anna Austen's 'vortex of Dissi-
pation';6 nor is it on a hyperbolical par with Isabella's 'ten ages'
and 'an hundred things' (39). Participating as it does in the li-
censed vagueness of ordinary colloquial speech, which commun-
icates quite clearly the speaker's intention, her statement that
The Mysteries of Udolpho is the 'nicest book in the world' puzzles
neither the Tilneys nor the reader. Catherine is seeking after all
not to make a precise aesthetic judgement, but simply to record
her pleasure; she really has been more enthralled by Udolpho
than by any of her previous reading. Henry's lecture, therefore,
takes on the quality of pedantic officiousness, and he proves
himself to be, as his sister playfully (and parodically) puts it,
'more nice than wise' (108).
We do not find equally intelligible Catherine's subsequent
misuse of language - her account of 'something very shocking'
to come out of London, something 'horrible' and 'uncommonly
dreadful', including 'murder and everything of the kind' (112).
This is mysterious indeed, at least to those who are ignorant of
Catherine's reigning obsession. Eleanor, given the most recent
context of Henry's 'disquisition on the state of the union', quite
naturally thinks of political upheavals. Henry, more attuned to
Catherine's idie fixe, equally naturally takes pleasure in making
the two women understand each other under his tutelage. But
commending Henry's penetration tends to obscure the issue of
his own language. Describing Eleanor's fears, Henry relates her
vision of
a mob of three thousand men . . . the streets of London flowing

with blood, a detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons, (the
hopes of the nation), called up from Northampton to quell the
insurgents, and the gallant Capt. Frederick Tilney, in the mo-
ment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his
horse by a brickbat from an upper window. (113)
This language, parodically riddled as it is with cliche and hyper-

bole, does not serve to critique Catherine's false conflation of
imagined and real horrors; on the contrary, it ascribes to Eleanor
a fevered imagination hardly less extravagant than Catherine's.
In so doing, the language flattens the disparity between the impact
of literary and political horrors, making the 'reading' of both the
target of parodic intent. Since there can be no doubt in the read-
er's mind that a political riot and a new publication require dif-
ferent responses, Henry's collapsing of the distinction through
parodic language calls into question either his judgement or the
value of parodic discourse itself as a tonic for shallow or illusory
modes of thinking.
Once we see this episode as a way to focus on Henry as a
problematic surrogate narrator, it restores to us a pre-parodic
vision which does not reflexively admire mockery; it also prophe-
sies Henry's failure as ironist and mentor. Looking back to Hen-
ry's first conversation with Catherine, we discover a new reading
of his parodic characterization of ladies' journals. His reductive
and inaccurate description - his fictional journal describes only
'various dresses', 'the particular state of your complexion', the
'curl of your hair' (27) - while superficially attractive in its glib-
ness, is a generalization quite at odds with the journals and let-
ters of such real and fictional eighteenth-century women as Mrs
Thrale, Frances B u r n e y . . . and Clarissa Harlowe. Moreover, if
we look for the pedagogic value of such satire, we encounter
only Tilney's derivative and banal formulation, 'In every power,
of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly di-
vided between the sexes' (28). It is important to note here too
that Henry merely restates, in more stately language, what
Catherine has already said, albeit haltingly: 'I have sometimes
t h o u g h t . . . whether ladies do write so much better letters than
gentlemen! That is - I should not think the superiority was al-
ways on our side' (27). It is even possible to speculate that
Catherine's suggestion leads to Henry's articulation of the aphor-
ism, that he is appropriating her insight in order to lend depth
to what is otherwise mere playfulness. If this is so, we have
another complaint against the parodist as pedagogue: far from
having a didactic purpose, he lights on targets and morals
opportunistically and at random. 7
Henry Tilney's subsequent parody of gothic romance is even

less susceptible to the search for moral value. Katrin Burlin has
astutely remarked that Henry is 'unable to resist taking advan-
tage of the novelist's power to control - even to infatuate - his
audience' and that this manipulation 'involves his heroine in
perplexities he has not foreseen',8 namely, her scandalous specula-
tions about General Tilney. But how has he manoeuvred Catherine
to such a point that she will accept even his most outrageous
parodies? Her capitulation cannot be attributed solely to 'the
influence of that sort of reading' she had begun at Bath (200).
Gothic literature produces in her an enthusiasm for 'ancient
edifices' and 'traditional legends' (141), but it does not cause her
to expect gothic adventure in her own world. The credit for trans-
forming Catherine from a reader to a heroine of romances be-
longs in large part to Henry, the same Henry who later asks
'What have you been judging from?' (197).
From the beginning of their acquaintance, Henry Tilney has
been hard at work shaping Catherine's response to experience,
even as the narrator has been trying to manipulate the reader's
expectations. And in both cases the aggressive manipulations
have led to doubts, instability and lack of confidence. Just as
Catherine doesn't know 'whether she might venture to laugh' at
Henry's mockery of Bath conventions (26), so the reader is un-
sure of the intended effect of the narrator's sonorous statement
'Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disap-
pointed love' (33).9 Similarly, Catherine's rude awakening to
Henry's real opinion of ladies' journals reflects the reader's
disorientation at finding, in the middle of literary satire, a spir-
ited and apparently sincere defence of novels. The fact that this
defence is presented as the author's direct discourse complicates
our response, for we are accustomed to hearing truth from such
a source. Perhaps we need to read this encomium in light of
Tilney's two contradictory characterizations of the journals - the
'faultless' style versus a 'general deficiency of subject, a total
inattention to stops, and a frequent ignorance of grammar' (27).
Tilney, as I have said, subsequently follows Catherine's lead in
choosing a middle ground, rejecting a 'general rule' about whether
women or men write better letters. The problem is that not one
of these three stances seems deeply felt; Tilney chooses whatever
rhetorical stance suits him at the time - parodic, critical or meas-

ured. It may be that Austen provides polarities - explicit com-
mendation of novels versus implied criticism through parody -
in order to alert the reader to the dangers of generalization. On
the other hand, she may be manifesting the same kind of uncom-
mitted, playful outlook that Henry exhibits. Whatever the inten-
tion, the effect of this passage is to disrupt the reader's expectation
of sustained mockery.
Catherine opposes her own view of the world to Henry's when
she rejects, although she cannot refute, Henry's analogy between
a country-dance and marriage. In spite of his well-wrought ex-
planation, she resists the analogy on the wholly practical ground
that 'People that marry can never part, but must go and keep
house together. People that dance, only stand opposite each other
in a long room for half an hour' (77). Although Catherine admits
that what he says 'sounds very well', she 'cannot look upon
them at all in the same light, nor think the same duties belong to
them'. He has shaken her confidence, but not her conviction. The
reader, torn between capitulating to the elegant logic of the one
and endorsing the instinctive resistance of the other, remembers
another analogical treatment of the ballroom: the Upper Rooms
as the arena for heroic endeavour, where Catherine and Mrs
Allen must exercise 'unwearied diligence' and 'strength and in-
genuity' to reach the 'eminence they had so laboriously gained'
- that is, the benches at the furthest end of the room (21). This
poses a problem for the reader: either the dance is nothing but
a dance, and the narrator's mockery of those who grant it greater
significance is warranted, or a dance is susceptible to metaphori-
cal reading, and the narrator's earlier parodic language is incor-
rect and mean-spirited. Whether readers choose to endorse one
of these two views or to suspend judgement, they are still left
with an incomplete reading of the text.10
While the novel's reader thus struggles to place narrative and
narrator, inside the text Catherine begins to succumb to Henry's
reading of the world. Although she is baffled by the Tilneys'
taste in landscape - 'it seemed as if a good view were no longer
to be taken from the top of an high hill, and that a clear blue sky
was no longer a proof of a fine day' (110) - she quickly assimi-
lates and parrots back Henry's assessment of what constitutes
'the picturesque'. Nor is this all; in accepting Henry's authority,

she discards the kind of implicit criticism she had articulated
earlier. She puts forward no rejoinder, however feeble, to Hen-
ry's flippant depreciation of 'the understanding of women': 'In
my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find
it necessary to use more than half (114). The evaluation of him-
self that Tilney had asked for earlier - as 'a most extraordinary
genius' rather than 'a queer half-witted man' (26-7) - has at last
been achieved; Catherine is ready to interpret as Henry dictates.
Catherine's capitulation to Henry's rhetoric coincides with her
encounter with two puzzling 'texts': Isabella Thorpe and General
Tilney. Isabella's behaviour, which had earlier given Catherine 'a
most pleasing remembrance of all the heroines of her acquaint-
ance' (119), becomes unintelligible once Isabella begins her deter-
mined pursuit of Captain Frederick Tilney. As Catherine tries to
make sense of her friend's inconsistencies, she turns to Henry to
provide an authoritative interpretation. Henry, of course, obliges,
but not with the truth or even what he believes to be true. In-
stead, like a paternal or at any rate patronizing narrator, he gives
Catherine an explanation that will ease her anxiety. He explains
away with an aphorism Isabella's repudiation of her earlier reso-
lution not to dance: 'To be always firm must be to be often ob-
stinate. When properly to relax is the real trial of j u d g e m e n t . . . I
really think Miss Thorpe has by no means chosen ill in fixing on
the present hour' (134). He is equally quick to deflect Catherine's
apprehension about Isabella's subsequent 'unsteady conduct' and
'wilful thoughtlessness' (149). Far from alerting her to Isabella's
character, he soothes away her fears:
be as little uneasy as you can. You have no doubt of the mutual
attachment of your brother and your friend; depend upon it,
therefore, that real jealousy never can exist between them; de-
pend upon it that no disagreement between them can be of
any duration. Their hearts are open to each other, as neither
heart can be to you; they know exactly what is required and
what can be borne; and you may be certain, that one will never
tease the other beyond what is known to be pleasant. (152)
The absolute, authoritative language of this speech Cyou have no
doubt', 'depend upon it', 'you may be certain') is wholly at odds
both with the truth of the matter as we perceive it and with

Henry's expressed urging, 'let us all guess for ourselves. To be
guided by conjecture is pitiful' (151-2). Yet against all her own
instincts, Catherine is convinced; his speech 'carried her captive'
because 'Henry Tilney must know best' (153). The language of
struggle and capitulation here demonstrates the power an au-
thoritative narrator can exercise over an insecure reader, who
may 'contend' and 'resist' but is eventually made captive to the
narrator's will. But the triumph of the narrator does not guaran-
tee truth, nor is it permanent. Isabella's character and Henry's
real opinion of it, clear to the reader from the beginning, become
visible to Catherine as soon as she discovers how Isabella has
betrayed James. Far more significant than Catherine's new in-
sight into Isabella's 'shallow artifice' (218), however, is her con-
tinuing faith in Henry as truth-teller. Confronted with his obvious
contempt for Isabella, Catherine not only fails to question his
earlier rhetoric of comfort, but she also continues to take seri-
ously his mocking rhetoric about blighted friendship.
General Tilney is another matter. Catherine fails to read this
text because she chooses to see an opposition between all the
Tilneys and all the Thorpes, much as a reader of the novel might
choose to find in them a romance pattern of contrasting charac-
ters. In fact, not only the General's 'selfish greed', but also his
style of discourse resembles that of the Thorpes. 11 He too in-
dulges in hyperbole. His invitation to Catherine might contain
such p o m p o u s u n d e r s t a t e m e n t s as his attempt 'to make
Northanger Abbey not wholly disagreeable', but it also includes
such flights of rhetoric as 'Can y o u . . . be prevailed on to quit
this scene of public triumph?' and 'you will make us happy
beyond expression' (139-40). His conceit and pride in posses-
sions, from his Staffordshire china to his fruit trees, are hardly
less aggressive than John Thorpe's boasts about his horse and
curricle, although they are conveyed largely through indirect
discourse: 'without any ambition of that sort himself - without
any solicitude about it - he did believe them [his gardens] to be
unrivalled in the kingdom. If he had a hobby horse, it was that.
He loved a garden' (178). Compare this to Isabella's more direct
vaunts: 'There is nothing I will not do for those who are really
my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not
in my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong'

(40).12
Catherine, of course, critically fails to see these parallels. All
she knows is that the General's behaviour makes her uneasy. But
even more than with Isabella, she mistrusts her instincts and
retains her preconception that he must indeed be amiable:
That he was perfectly agreeable and good-natured, and alto-

gether a very charming man, did not admit of a doubt, for he
was tall and handsome, and Henry's father. He could not be
accountable for his children's want of spirits, or for her want
of enjoyment in his company . . . the latter she could only as-
cribe to her own stupidity. (130)
As the General appears in an increasingly unamiable light at

Northanger, Catherine casts about for explanations for his oddi-
ties. Unable to perceive his selfishness and conceit - his desire to
walk when and where he pleases, and to impress Catherine with
his important involvement in 'the affairs of the nation' - she
looks for 'some deeper cause' (187). She locates it in her gothic
fantasy about a wife murdered, or at least immured in some
remote corner of the Abbey. As she speculates about the General,
Catherine deliberately intensifies her own feelings, so that the
sight of Mrs Tilney's epitaph 'affected her even to tears' (190).
(We remember that other self-constructed heroine, Isabella
Thorpe, working herself 'into a state of real distress' [121] in
anticipation of the Morlands' response to her engagement.)
Moreover, Catherine relies not on empirical evidence (however
misconstrued) but on theory which defies observation: it 'seemed
wonderful' to her that the General, stained as he must be with
guilt, could 'maintain so elevated an air, look so fearlessly around'
in the church (191). Even the sight of Mrs Tilney's bright and
modern room, so different from what she had imagined, is not
enough to disabuse her; she may momentarily feel 'grossly mis-
taken', but can take comfort from deducing that 'whatever might
have been the General's crimes, he had certainly too much wit to
let them sue for detection' (193-4).
The immediate provocation for these stubborn and outrageous
speculations is the work not of Mrs Radcliffe but of Henry Tilney.
To his parodic tale of terror, Catherine offers some token resistance
- twice she asserts 'it cannot really happen to me' (158-9) - but
her belief in his rhetoric is such that it overcomes her common
sense. Having swallowed his previous assertions as incontro-
vertible truths (the elements of the picturesque, the strength of
Isabella's affections), she is prepared to find gothic adventure
wherever he has situated it.13 Through his narrative power, the
'featureless and unmeaning' Abbey14 becomes imbued with the
potential for romantic, even monstrous events. When Henry's
specific prescriptions for adventure (the chest, the ebony cabinet)
come to nothing, the creative energy released by his rhetoric
must locate its inventions elsewhere, in the person of the enig-
matic and awesome General Tilney.
Now readers confront a new problem. We may reject, either
through intuition or through a better understanding of General
Tilney's character, Catherine's gothic inventions; we may per-
ceive, as she does not, his obsession with wealth and posses-
sions. But the General remains a puzzle. His aggressive courtship
of Catherine is as much a mystery to us as it is to his children.
While Catherine, baffled by his inconsistencies, looks for an ex-
planation for his darker side, we try to uncover a motive for his
kindness to her. Both searches, however, are hampered by inten-
tional narrative lacunae and misdirections. Henry, perhaps from
motives of filial loyalty, provides Catherine no help in interpret-
ing his father's behaviour, and Austen, similarly, withholds from
us the crucial point about the General's gullibility. Nothing in his
characterization hints at a man foolish enough to believe so
wholeheartedly the blustering lies of John Thorpe - after all,
even Catherine is suspicious of Thorpe's integrity. This picture
of a mercenary and credulous old man is hardly consistent with
the vigorous, arrogant patriarch we have encountered, whose
idiosyncrasies have so dominated the imaginations of both hero-
ine and reader. Like Henry Tilney, Austen has created an expec-
tation, evoked an atmosphere, that is at odds with her ostensibly
parodic motif.
* * *
The collision of genres in Northanger Abbey has interested a

number of critics.15 In the commentary on these collisions, how-
ever, there seems to be an implicit hierarchy of value: parody is
better than romance because it exposes the excesses of romance,

and the 'realistic' novel is superior to both not only because it is
a synthesis emerging from the struggle (thereby marking
'progress'), but also because it takes for its material the events
and attitudes of common life and deals with 'human nature' and
'probabilities'. On this scale, then, characters who behave like the
Morlands, feeling no untoward 'presentiments of evil' and suf-
fering no 'romantic alarm' (18, 234), are to be valued above those
who behave like romantic heroines or villains. The superiority of
the prosaic seems to be asserted towards the end of the novel
with the aggressive re-entry of the parodic narrator, who op-
poses the romantic convention of the heroine's return to her own
heroine's ignominious retreat. Catherine Morland's 'solitude and
disgrace' and the consequent 'humiliation of her biographer in
relating it' are neatly juxtaposed to the bright welcome accorded
to her in the 'joyfulness of family love' (233). Absurd expecta-
tion, exploded through parody, has been displaced by domestic
happiness, and the reader can once more begin to feel in control
of the text.
This confidence, however, is short-lived, for Austen immedi-
ately launches a subversive attack on the comfortable, unimagina-
tive world of the Morlands. Their affectionate observation notes
Catherine's 'ill-looks and agitation' but connects them to only
'the natural consequence of mortified feelings, and of the unu-
sual exertion and fatigue of such a journey' (235). The narrator's
mocking dismissal of any other interpretation - 'They never once
thought of her heart, which, for the parents of a young lady of
seventeen, just returned from her first excursion from home, was
odd enough!' (235) - does not quite deflect the reader's aware-
ness of familial obtuseness. It is odd, and one wonders if the
guileless Catherine could have had enough discretion or art to
remove from her correspondence all traces of her infatuation
with Henry. Catherine's continuing despondency elicits no greater
insight or even interrogation from her mother, who counters he
daughter's 'silence and sadness' (240) with a lecture on the evils
of discontent supplemented by the second-hand advice of The
Mirror. Mrs Morland demonstrates a distinctly non-maternal
obtuseness when she cannot even interpret 'the glowing cheek
and brightened eye' of a Catherine reanimated by Henry's visit
(242). When unromantic, down-to-earth people manifest such

insensitivity, the reader must question the value of the prosaic
point of view. When that view is juxtaposed to Henry's roman-
tic, heroic behaviour - his defiance of his father is irresistibly
reminiscent of Edward Lindsay's noble declaration 'No! Never
shall it be said that I obliged my Father' (Love and Freindship, MW
81) - we may well wonder about 'the tendency of this work'
(252).16
That the tendency is in part parodic admits of little doubt.
Austen clearly intends to devalue sentimental literature, and the
laughter evoked by Northanger Abbey shows that she succeeds.
But parody is itself revealed as shallow and manipulative in its
choice of targets and methods, while the putative ideal - the
unromantic, reality-oriented viewpoint - is shown to be dull and
insensitive. Each stance is trapped within its own self-created
limitations. The sentimentalism of Isabella bends everything to
its selfish will; the parodic discourse of Henry distorts in order
to amuse, but also to assert superiority; the prosaic domesticity
of the Morlands excludes the force of feelings. Alert and agile
readers can perhaps shift their expectations about the nature of
the text, but at no point can they confidently assert that this is the
real tendency of the work, or this the author's final intention.
Like Roland Barthes' ideal text, in which 'everything is to be
disentangled, nothing deciphered',17 Northanger Abbey refuses to yield
a stable vision, either moral or aesthetic. What it does yield, what
it insists upon, is an awareness of the reader's participation in
narrative strategies.18 Like Tilney urging Catherine 'to use her
own fancy' in finishing his gothic tale (160), Austen asks the
reader to provide part of the story. In the last pages of Northanger
Abbey, she issues an open invitation to readers to resist her au-
thorial control. We are to 'determine' when and how Catherine
learned the truth about the General (247); we are to supply from
our imaginations the description of Eleanor's lover, 'the most
charming young man in the world' (251); we are to speculate as
to what will bring the story to a happy conclusion, 'what proba-
ble circumstance' could induce the General to relent (250). Austen
says of her closure: T have united for their [the readers'] ease
what they must divide for mine' (247). In dividing what the
author has united, readers must disentangle the various threads
of the novel and repossess the narrative power they normally

yield to the author. If the narrator disclaims the responsibility for
shaping readers' views of the world, of books, or even of this
book, readers must assume the burden of making rather than
simply finding meaning in texts. To do this is to understand that
Northanger Abbey contains within it a critique of all the forms it
takes, that parody and realism are as vulnerable to the narrator's
irony as is the rhetoric of sentimentalism.
2
Sense and Sensibility and
Feminine Authority
For almost two hundred years, readers of Sense and Sensibility
have been occupied in discussions about Jane Austen's allegiances
or ambivalences regarding the value of proper conduct versus
inner-directed behaviour, but such discussions have tended to
obscure another ideological issue in the novel - the issue of femi-
nine authority and power.1 While readers debate whether the
narrator is drawing rigid lines between sense and feeling, they
may overlook the book's attitude towards female power, an at-
titude which is negative, cautionary, devaluating. I want to ar-
gue that Sense and Sensibility is a text that reveals Austen's anxieties
about female authority, and that seen from such a perspective it
is descriptive of struggles and tensions rather than of ideological
serenity.
The most straightforward way to begin is to assert that Sense
and Sensibility is an enactment of Austen's failure to legitimate
feminine authority. It is Austen's most anti-feminist book, a book
inhabited by monstrous women and victimized men, a book
which, in spite of its tepidly bracing last words ('and among the
merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be
ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living
almost within sight of each other, they could live without disa-
greement between themselves ...' [380]), seems to deny all pos-
sibility of sisterhood. At the same time, as feminist critics such as
Patricia Meyer Spacks and Deborah Kaplan have shown, Sense
and Sensibility articulates a critique of patriarchal values and prac-
tices.2 This dichotomy between fear of feminine authority and
desire for it occupies Austen's novelistic imagination and informs
her narrative strategies in Sense and Sensibility.
One anti-feminist strategy that Austen consistently invokes
is that of diversion. The sins of a man, while not ignored or
31
excused, are overshadowed by an emphasis on the despicable

behaviour of a woman. This technique is pervasive, manifested
in nearly every male/female relationship in the novel. For exam-
ple, although Elinor moves away from blaming Charlotte Palmer
for her husband's rudeness (112), the dialogue following her
revaluation demonstrates not the husband's ill breeding, but the
wife's foolishness. What the reader experiences, through Elinor's
conversation with Mrs Palmer, is the difficulty of responding
politely to vulgarity and mindless chatter. No comparable experi-
ence of Mr Palmer is offered; instead, we have a report of Elinor's
mixed feelings:
She found him, however, perfectly the gentleman in his behav-

iour to all visitors, and only occasionally rude to his wife and
her mother; she found him very capable of being a pleasant
companion, and only prevented from being so always, by too
great an aptitude to fancy himself as much superior to people
in general, as he must feel himself to be to Mrs Jennings and
Charlotte. (304)
Not only does this evaluation point back to women's inadequa-

cies, but Elinor's judgement is itself problematized. We learn
that her mild resistance to Mr Palmer is connected to her 'remem-
brance of Edward's generous temper' (305), which personalizes
and renders less authoritative her evaluation; Mr Palmer emerges
relatively unscathed by either Elinor's criticisms or Austen's.3
More significantly, the text allows the irresponsible or self-
centred actions of John Dashwood and his great-uncle to become
peripheral. The famous dialogue between John Dashwood and
his wife obscures the patriarchal insensitivity of the old man and
shades the cold selfishness of the young one. What remains promi-
nent in the reader's mind is Fanny Dashwood's aggressive ma-
nipulation of her husband's irresolute desires. John himself
formulates his decision in language that gives Fanny credit for it:
T believe you are perfectly right. My father certainly could mean
nothing more by his request to me than what you say. I clearly
understand it now, and I will strictly fulfil my engagement by
such acts of assistance and kindness to them as you have
Sense and Sensibility and Feminine Authority 33
described' (12). He cedes agency to her, and thereby abrogates

responsibility for his conduct to his sisters. Fanny wins; but so
does John, for he projects his meanness on to his wife.
Another small example can help to establish the pattern. When
Sir John Middleton's rampant hospitality leads him to invite the
Steele sisters to his home, 'Lady Middleton was thrown into no
little alarm... by hearing that she was very soon to receive a
visit from two girls whom she had never seen in her life...'
(118). But rather than let the reader ponder the sensitivity and
sense of a man who would so casually foist house-guests on his
wife, the narrative quickly (by the end of the paragraph) jumps
to the punishment Sir John must suffer for his lapse: 'As it was
impossible however now to prevent their coming Lady Middleton
resigned herself to the idea of it, with all the philosophy of a
well-bred woman, contenting herself with merely giving her
husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times every
day' (118). Male insensitivity is overshadowed by female retribu-
tion, and Sir John becomes the victim of a nagging, unreasonable
wife.
Edward Ferrars and John Willoughby are the primary benefi-
ciaries of Austen's diversionary tactics. Edward, from the begin-
ning, is presented as the passive victim of monstrous women -
his mother, his sister, and Lucy Steele. The cold ambition of his
family not only presses him towards a mercenary marriage but
also prevents him from doing anything with his life. Their pref-
erence for 'great men or barouches' is opposed to his desire for
'domestic comfort and the quiet of a private life' (16), and in
such a dichotomy there is no question as to the right side. Muted,
however, is Edward's own participation in his aimless life and
his willingness to blame mother and sister for it. Although he
admits to being unable to 'resist the solicitations of his friends to
do nothing' (103), his passivity seems downright virtuous com-
pared to their aggressive urgings to be 'smart', 'genteel', 'dash-
ing and expensive' (102-3). He ascribes even his entanglement
with Lucy to his family. He falls in love with her because 'in-
stead of having anything to do, instead of having any profession
chosen for me, or being allowed to chuse any myself, I returned
home to be completely idle', a home, moreover, that 'my mother
did not make . . . in every respect comfortable' (362). Edward's
lack of energy and agency, then, is explained away by the

aggressive manipulations of others - and especially of women.
Elinor's acceptance of the way Edward construes his aimless-
ness is a crucial moment in the tension I see in the novel. Elinor,
like others in the book, blames Mrs Ferrars for all that is mys-
terious or disappointing in Edward (just as the inhabitants of
Highbury are eager to blame Mrs Churchill for Frank's incon-
siderateness). She charges his coldness 'to his mother's account;
and it was happy for her that he had a mother whose character
was so imperfectly known to her, as to be the general excuse for
every thing strange on the part of her son' (101). Such conviction
allows her to absolve Edward and 'to turn for comfort to the
renewal of her confidence in Edward's affection' (102), just as
later she can be 'consoled by the belief that Edward had done
nothing to forfeit her esteem' in becoming engaged to Lucy Steele
(141). Actually, Elinor offers more than forgiveness; she turns
away from her own feelings of hurt and betrayal and concen-
trates on Edward's misery: 'if he had injured her, how much
more had he injured himself; if her case were pitiable, his was
hopeless She wept for him, more than for herself,' (140). She
constructs, in effect, a hierarchy of victims and villains: Edward's
'imprudence' has hurt him more than it has her, and his is a
venial sin compared to the evil machinations of Mrs Ferrars and
Lucy Steele.4
Now it seems to me clear that Austen does not expect the
reader to accept Elinor's reading as definitive. Indeed, there is
sufficient irony in the passages quoted above to alert us to Elinor's
evasions. But the discovery and discussion of Elinor's disingenu-
ousness is, in fact, yet another red herring, more subtle and more
successful than Elinor's own wishful excuses. If we expend suf-
ficient energy and acuity in analysing and exposing Elinor's self-
deluding justifications, we are the more likely to be diverted
from remembering that Edward has in fact contracted an en-
gagement which he is too weak to fulfil or to repudiate, and that
he has, while thus encumbered, raised expectations in another
woman. If Austen can shift the emphasis from the man's external
inconsistencies to the woman's internal contradictions, she can
mitigate the condemnation or at least the profound doubts that
his behaviour might elicit.5
Certainly, Elinor's blind spot about Edward has been noted;

equally certainly, her eventual sympathy for Willoughby has
elicited both admiration and derision.6 Beyond emphasizing how
once again the focus of discussion shifts to Elinor, there seems
little to add to the discussion of Elinor's response to Willoughby.
I want rather to look at some less frequently discussed connec-
tions between Edward and Willoughby, and some ways in which
Austen evades commentary on crucial aspects of Willoughby's
confessional narrative.
Mrs Dashwood, it turns out, was partially correct in ascribing
to the wishes of Mrs Smith Willoughby's precipitate departure
from Barton. She has indeed 'exercised the privilege of riches
upon a poor dependant cousin' (75). But, as we learn later, this
is not because of a suspected engagement with Marianne but
rather because of his seduction and abandonment of Eliza
Williams. Moral Mrs Smith is clearly no mercenary Mrs Ferrars,
but the profound distinction is blurred in the text, left without
comment.7 Willoughby's own account of the confrontation ex-
poses much about him. He tells Elinor:
The purity of her life, the formality of her notions, her igno-
rance of the world - every thing was against m e . . . . She was
previously disposed, I believe, to doubt the morality of my
conduct in general, and was moreover discontented with the
very little attention, the very little portion of my time that I
had bestowed upon her, in my present visit.... By one meas-
ure I might have saved myself. In the height of her morality,
good woman! she offered to forgive the past, if I would marry
Eliza. That could not be - (323)
The pejorative tone he uses to describe Mrs Smith's morality is

left unchallenged by both Elinor and narrator, made irrelevant
by the wonder of this man's willingness to speak openly and
emotionally, to reveal 'my whole heart to you' (319). Such a
spectacle of male candour and introspection clearly deserves some
reward - that of glossing over his actual behaviour and its effect
on others. Both Elinor and Austen seem to replicate the response
of Sir John Middleton, that 'good-natured, honest, stupid soul'
whose 'heart was softened in seeing mine [Willoughby's] suffer'
(330). Willoughby is granted the same dispensation that Edward

gets: because he is visibly miserable, the misery he Causes others
is less harshly judged. Marianne, on the other hand, earns no
such grace; one reason her overpowering grief is perceived as
self-indulgent is precisely because she makes others aware of it.
Oddly, there is no discussion of Willoughby's assertion that it
'could not be' that he should marry Eliza. Presumably, Mrs
Smith's forgiveness would have included continued financial
support, so the hindrance cannot be fear of poverty. Eliza's ille-
gitimacy is certainly a factor; if Harriet Smith is too tainted for
an Elton, then Eliza might well be an impossibility for a
Willoughby. Eliza's status, however, unlike Harriet's, seems not
to be generally known (Brandon's story tells us that there is
speculation but no certainty about her), and Mrs Smith's support
would certainly be a step towards general acceptance. In the
absence of other compelling justifications, the reader is forced
back to the notion that a fallen woman is no proper match for a
gentleman. Elinor, though she condemns Willoughby's 'indiffer-
ence' to and 'cruel neglect' of Eliza (322), at no time endorses
Mrs Smith's position. Even Colonel Brandon, who fights a duel
with Willoughby, doesn't suggest that Willoughby make repara-
tion by marrying Eliza. Eliza's taint excludes her from society
forever, and Austen's silence as to her fate implies that such
expulsion is necessary and appropriate. Such absolute punish-
ment contrasts with Austen's later treatment of fallen women.
Her contempt for Lydia Bennet, for example, does not prevent
her from allowing Lydia back into society - in fact, the narrative
explicitly rejects Mr Collins's ungenerous view of 'Christian for-
giveness' (PP 364). In Mansfield Park, Maria Rushworth is indeed
exiled, but her adultery ranks higher in the taxonomy of sexual
crimes than Eliza's loss of chastity. Moreover, Austen makes an
explicit statement about gender inequality, marking the contrast
between Maria's 'retirement and reproach, which could allow no
second spring of hope or character' (MP 449) and Crawford's
'vexation': 'That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace,
should in a just measure attend his share of the offence, is, we
know, not one of the barriers which society gives to virtue. In
this world, the penalty is less equal than could be wished...'
(MP 468).8
Willoughby, like Edward, wants to shift responsibility from

himself to others - specifically, to the women who actively ma-
nipulate him. He urges Elinor to remember that Eliza is not
without guilt, that he was in part victimized by 'the violence of
her passions' (322). He blames the 'unlucky circumstance' (321)
of exposure and the unreasonable morality of Mrs Smith for his
failure to propose to Marianne. Finally, he is able to slough off
responsibility for what Elinor considers his cruellest act - the
'infamous letter' to Marianne (325). The vulgar cruelty of the
letter turns out to be his wife's. As Willoughby tells Elinor, 'I had
only the credit of servilely copying such sentiments as I was
ashamed to put my name to. The original was all her own - her
own happy thoughts and gentle diction' (328). Poor Willoughby!
So reduced, so unmanned by a shrewish woman that even the
capacity to write his own story is taken away. Sophia Grey's
'passion - her malice . . . must be appeased' (321), and appeased
by Willoughby's complete capitulation to her will; she will write
a character for him, will be like a novelist creating a villain.
Willoughby is so powerless in the face of Sophia's 'ingratiating
virulence' that he must cede both words and fetishes - he is
'forced' to give up 'the last relics of Marianne. Her three notes
. . . [her] lock of hair... all, every memento was torn from me'
(329). The towering potency of Sophia diminishes Willoughby's
claim to villainy.9
To some extent, Marianne joins this trio of powerful women
who manipulate Willoughby. In order to rehabilitate him (how-
ever partially), the narrative must blame her. She is chastised by
Elinor, by the narrator and by some readers, for creating a false
relationship and a false image of Willoughby.10 Like Emma, she
has tried to be a controlling artist-figure, and we are allowed to
feel that Willoughby has merely gone along with her authorita-
tive characterization of their romance. He is led by her taste and
her emphatic opinions - 'If any difference appeared . . . it lasted
no longer than till the force of her arguments and the brightness
of her eyes could be displayed' (47). Even their intimacy, their
affection for each other, has apparently been created by
Marianne's agency: as Willoughby tells Elinor, 'To have resisted
such attractions, to have withstood such tenderness! - Is there a
man on earth who could have done it! - Yes, I found myself, by
insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her ...' (321). Willoughby's

language here describes his sense of being a passive, even resist-
ing partner (note also how he generalizes in order to distance
himself - 'Is there a man on earth'), and the narrative allows his
language to stand without challenge, whereas Darcy's similar
sense of being trapped by Elizabeth's attractions is, on the con-
trary, explicitly criticized (PP 190).11 There are so many women
who inscribe their desires on Willoughby, who assert authority
over him, that his own desire, his very self, becomes muted and
blurred.
In Sense and Sensibility women try to bend others to their will -

and often succeed. From Fanny Dashwood's manipulation of John
to Lucy Steele's seduction of Robert Ferrars, we see women ex-
erting power, sometimes directly and sometimes covertly. This
novel seems to belie Spacks's contention that '[wjomen who
openly express aggression, who make apparent their desire to
control the behavior of others, occasionally achieve short-term
success, but always fail in the long run.'12 But those who succeed
in the narrative are punished by the narrator. No other novel by
Austen is so replete with demonic, wilful women. The destruc-
tive egoism of Fanny Dashwood, Lady Middleton, Lucy Steele,
Mrs Ferrars, and Sophia Grey make abundantly clear what sort
of woman seeks authority and tries to make the world conform
to her image of it. No woman in her right mind would take for
a model the imperious or designing women who achieve success
in Sense and Sensibility; if feminine power is linked to these
characteristics, women and men do right to keep women
unempowered, marginal, silent.
But this position presents a problem for Austen the writer:
how can she keep inscribing, in novel after novel, her own desire
for control? How can she manipulate characters and readers if to
do so connects her with the monstrous women she has depicted?
I don't think Austen finds a solution in Sense and Sensibility; rather,
I believe that she constructs a careful vindication and criticism of
the right-thinking authoritative woman by projecting authorial
anxieties on to the figure of Elinor Dashwood.
Adrienne Rich has written that a woman who succeeds in a

patriarchal society is often appropriated by its values, so that she
becomes caught up in her own specialness and thereby indif-
ferent to the lives of women who have not joined the fraternity.13
There occurs among such successful women a loss of imagina-
tion, an inability to conceptualize and problematize the lives of
less fortunate sisters. In Sense and Sensibility, this phenomenon
declares itself in the narrator's silence about a number of lives:
the loneliness of Mrs Smith who grants 'voluntary forgiveness'
(367) to Willoughby, or of Mrs Ferrars to whom Lucy becomes
'as necessary... as either Robert or Fanny' (365); the disappoint-
ment of Sophia Willoughby, married to a man who values her
only for her money and who abandons her shortly after mar-
riage in order to seek Marianne's forgiveness; the helpless anger
of Lucy Steele, always on the watch to improve her social posi-
tion, always required to be servile and insincere in order to be
accepted.14 It may seem irrelevant or even stubbornly wrong-
headed to demand interiority in relatively minor characters (this
isn't, after all, Middlemarch), but such consistent suppression of
the inner lives of aggressive women argues an urgent desire to
distance narrative authority from the authority claimed by ag-
gressive female characters.
A much safer place to situate feminine authority is in the fig-
ure of Elinor, who seems to have the narrator's unqualified sym-
pathy.15 That sympathy derives in part from her role as victim,
and Kaplan explicitly states that for Austen 'authority belongs to
the self-consciously powerless'.16 Moreover, Elinor's claims to
authority are similar to those of her creator - a clear eye and a
lively sense of the realities of life.17 But Austen finds ways to
subvert the authority of this admirable heroine. She shows that
Elinor's propriety sometimes veils sarcasm and contempt for
others, and what lurks behind the sarcasm is the painful resent-
ment arising from feeling marginalized. If Elinor's pain and frus-
tration save her from being a prig, they also make her susceptible
to diagnostic readings, which in turn undermine her authority.
Elinor reserves most of her sarcasm for Marianne and Wil-
loughby, taking pleasure in deflating their romantic excesses.
When Willoughby waxes sentimental about the perfections of
Barton Cottage,' "Iflattermyself," replied Elinor, "that even under
the disadvantage of better rooms and a broader staircase, you

will hereafter find your own house as faultless as you now do
this"' (73). And when Marianne is transported by a vision of
Norland in autumn,' "It is not every one," said Elinor, "who has
your passion for dead leaves'" (114). Irritating though the ele-
ments of self-indulgence and hypocrisy in Willoughby and
Marianne's rhapsodizing certainly are, they hardly seem to call
for such blighting ripostes. In Elinor's swift critical responses,
we see a version of the hasty, unvarnished irritation articulated
in Persuasion's account of Mrs Musgrove's 'large fat sighings'
(P 68). The novelist's own impatience with unseemly displays of
sentimentality, treated with self-conscious lightness in Northanger
Abbey, is here projected on to Elinor, and made to seem un-
generously critical.
If Marianne replicates novelistic activity in her construction of
a romance hero, Elinor exhibits a different kind of authorial prac-
tice: observation and analysis. Like her creator, she is better at
dissecting behaviour than at contriving an exciting plot. More-
over, like a novelist, she shares her observations, sometimes in
ways that defy propriety. Inserting herself into a conversation
between Marianne and Edward, she takes pleasure in showing
how Marianne's stated indifference to wealth masks expectations
of a high income (91). When Edward seems to approve of
Marianne's gaiety, Elinor leaps in with a corrective version: T
should hardly call her a lively girl - she is very earnest, very
eager in all she does - sometimes talks a great deal and always
with animation - but she is not often really merry' (93). To Col-
onel Brandon's appreciation of Marianne's 'amiable prejudices',
Elinor opposes a critical view: 'There are inconveniences attend-
ing such feelings as Marianne's, which all the charms of enthu-
siasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her systems
have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at
naught...' (56). The reader, in spite of the narrator's silence here,
might question the propriety of Elinor's propensity to provide
hostile analysis of her sister. It may be appropriate to note the
errors and deficiencies in those around us; it is a much more
problematic, even dangerous, proposition to make them the
subject of public discourse - in conversations or in novels. The
risk that Elinor takes in making public her observations and
evaluations neatly replicates the danger facing the female writer:

the reader may find her to be accurate, perceptive, even witty, but
at the sametimejudge her to be crabbed, unlikeable, unfeminine.18
To rescue Elinor from this plight, the narrative turns not to
an indisputable system of ethics but to the typically novelistic
strategy of examining motivation and feeling. Austen knows, to
use Bakhtin's language, that 'images of official-authoritative
truth . . . have never been successful in the novel'.19 She therefore
moves to the discourse of psychology and invites us to locate the
source of Elinor's desire for authority; and we discover that
Elinor's calm superiority conceals a profound sense of frustra-
tion. Her amused contempt for the behaviour of Mrs Ferrars and
Fanny, her claim that 'it was not in Mrs. Ferrars's power to dis-
tress her', mask the double pain of losing Edward and being
'pointedly slighted' by his family (232-3). Her anger and disap-
pointment express themselves indirectly, in a hostile (albeit accu-
rate) assessment of Mrs Ferrars and a grim determination to
depress Lucy's sense of triumph. Even some of Elinor's repres-
sive sarcasm toward Marianne can be ascribed to her disap-
pointment in Edward: Willoughby and Marianne's open devotion
to each other throws in higher relief Edward's 'coldness and
reserve' (89), and the pain of such a contrast can find relief in
censorious judgements about the impropriety of public displays
of affection.
Baulked expectations regarding Edward merely add to Elinor's
well-established sense of frustration. The demon that drives
Elinor, that leads her to embrace rigid self-control and to judge
others' lack of propriety, is the knowledge that within her own
family her superiority is generally unacknowledged and her
authority consistently denied. Painfully aware that Marianne will
brook no interference or even inquiry from herself, she resorts to
indirect supervision - spying on Marianne and urging Mrs
Dashwood to exert the authority denied to herself. But Marianne
insists on a 'privacy which eluded all her watchfulness' (167)
and Mrs Dashwood refuses to follow Elinor's sensible advice.
All that Elinor can do is pass judgement: 'common sense, com-
mon care, common prudence, were all sunk in Mrs Dashwood's
romantic delicacy' (85). Elinor's irritability here expresses more
than specific disappointment; it results from a long experience of
being marginalized in her own family. Elinor may prevail in the

matter of deciding the number of servants to take to Barton but
in more important areas she is ignored. Mrs Dashwood, valuing
Marianne's 'young and ardent mind' (54) more than Elinor's
prudence and propensity to 'doubt where you can' (78), does not
disguise her preference; as Elinor knows, 'Whatever Marianne
was desirous of, her mother would be eager to promote - she
could not expect to influence the latter.. / (155). Maternal ener-
gies in the Dashwood family are firmly centred on Marianne, to
the extent that Elinor seems absent from her mother's conscious-
ness. There is something undeniably pathetic in Elinor's early
sense of exclusion from shared family grief; she tells Marianne
that '[Edward] and I have been at times thrown a good deal
together, while you have been wholly engrossed on the most
affectionate principle by my mother' (20). There is pathos as well
as bitterness when she later witnesses Mrs Dashwood's identifi-
cation with Marianne:
Marianne continued to mend every day, and the brilliant cheer-

fulness of Mrs Dashwood's looks and spirits proved her to be,
as she repeatedly declared herself, one of the happiest women
in the world. Elinor could not hear the declaration, nor witness
its proofs without sometimes wondering whether her mother
ever recollected Edward. But Mrs Dashwood, trusting to the
temperate account of her own disappointment which Elinor
had sent her, was led away by the exuberance of her joy to
think only of what would increase it. (335)
This passage precisely describes Elinor's dilemma. Because she

doesn't express her grief, she is denied the consolation and atten-
tion she deserves. Instead of being admired for her fortitude,
instead of having others look beneath her placid surface, she is
ignored. Her continuing composure in the face of such indiffer-
ence can be interpreted in terms of an absolute system of ethics,
as Elinor herself wants to see it - in explaining her calmness, she
uses unemotional, legalistic language: 'duty', 'owed,' 'betraying,'
'acquit' (262-3).20 But Elinor's composure is simultaneously a
punishment and a defence, allowing her to retreat from her own
pain to a position of judgement on others. At times, the gains are
direct and obvious: confronted with Elinor's stoicism, Marianne

can only 'hate myself for ever', thus enabling Elinor to '[obtain]
from her whatever promise she required' (264). At other times,
Elinor wins a much more indirect and painful victory. Immedi-
ately after the paragraph quoted above, she finds herself alone
with her mother, who promptly embarks on a recital of
Marianne's happy prospects. Baulked of an opportunity to dis-
cuss her own situation, denied commendation for having had
doubts about Willoughby, Elinor can take comfort in noting her
mother's foolishness. When Mrs Dashwood describes Colonel
Brandon's feelings, 'Elinor perceived, - not the language, not the
professions of Colonel Brandon, but the natural embellishments
of her mother's active fancy, which fashioned every thing de-
lightful to her, as it chose' (336). In this dialogue, Mrs Dashwood
seems much more foolish and self-centred than she has before;
her claim that 'There was always a something, - if you remem-
ber, - in Willoughby's eyes at times, which I did not like' (338)
is a piece of egregious self-deception worthy of Mrs Bennet.
Elinor's silent criticism of her mother is her revenge for the way
in which her feelings and opinions have been discounted. Nar-
rator and character collude, one in revising a previously sympa-
thetic character, the other in despising the belittled version.
However justified Elinor may be in her opinions, however much

evidence the narrator provides in her support, we cannot over-
look the painful feelings that precede the judgements. To be right
in one's judgements is not to be free of anguish or even of preju-
dice. Nor is judging a particularly enabling activity. Rather, the
process of judging at all, of situating oneself in a place of author-
ity, is open to critical scrutiny. In Elinor Dashwood, Austen seems
to have inscribed a set of doubtful motivations and strategies
that undermine her right to authority. Elinor is subjected to a
diagnostic reading: there are so many clues about her disap-
pointments, her thwarted desire for influence, her anger at those
who ignore or trivialize her pain, that the reader must interpret
rather than accept her view of the world. This is not to claim that
Austen does not agree with Elinor's assessments, or that she
does not identify with Elinor's values and evaluations. On the

contrary, she is only too self-consciously aware that Elinor's
problems are her own. The lack of imaginative empathy for
aggressive women, the tendency to be critically observant and
judgemental, the desire to voice opinions and have them taken
seriously are problems that confront the author as well as the
heroine of Sense and Sensibility. The 'double-voiced discourse' in
this novel is not a device to distance character from author but
rather to encode a female author's difficulties about her own
desire for authority. Far from showing how 'the writing subject
cancels out the signs of his particular individuality',21 Sense and
Sensibility displays the writing subject's struggles with author-
ship. These struggles can have no happy ending, which is per-
haps why so many readers have detected a note of dysphoria at
the conclusion of the novel. If female desire for a voice can be
expressed only pathologically - by enslaving men or by adher-
ing to rigid codes that in repressing pain simultaneously perpetu-
ate patriarchal power (recall that Elinor 'presumed not to censure'
Colonel Brandon's need to fight Willoughby [211]) - then it is
forever trapped. The best a woman writer can do is to describe
her dilemma in a work that offers no solutions. And that, in an
act of courage as well as of despair, is what Jane Austen does in
Sense and Sensibility.
3
Getting the Whole Truth
in Pride and Prejudice
Of all Jane Austen's novels, Pride and Prejudice ends most se-
renely. The marriage that will perfectly balance Elizabeth Bennet's
'ease and liveliness' with Fitzwilliam Darcy's 'judgement, infor-
mation, and knowledge of the world' (312), the stability of
Pemberley and the capitulation of even Miss Bingley and Lady
Catherine all point to a closure which eliminates ambiguities and
achieves coherence. Impediments (the Bennet family's vulgar-
ities, for example) become irrelevant, and mysteries (such as Mr
Bingley's inconsiderate behaviour) are cleared up.1 Looking back
at the narrative, however, I locate three puzzling moments not
adequately explained or contained by the text's impulse towards
clarity and closure. And in attempting to 'solve' the mysteries of
these moments, I discover not only their resistance to my efforts
to fix meaning but also a general epistemological uncertainty.
Pride and Prejudice thematizes a narrative problem: it exposes the
inadequacies alike of careful reticence, of ambiguity, and of ab-
solute assurance, demonstrating how each of these strategies
serves to block access to the 'whole truth' in narrative.
The first of the baffling but provocative moments describes a
reaction to one of Mrs Bennet's many mindless assertions. To
Elizabeth's generalization, 'people themselves alter so much, that
there is something new to be observed in them for ever', Mrs
Bennet adds, 'Yes indeed . . . I assure you there is quite as much
of that going on in the country as in town'. Then follows narra-
tive commentary on the effect of her statement: 'Every body was
surprised; and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment, turned
silently away. Mrs Bennet, who fancied she had gained a com-
plete victory over him, continued her triumph' (43). There is no
explanation as to why this innocuous inanity should give rise to
so much surprise, silence and triumph.
45
The second instance is even more baffling. In March, on her

way to Hunsford, Elizabeth visits the Gardiners in London. 'On
the stairs were a troop of little boys and girls, whose eagerness
for their cousin's appearance would not allow them to wait in
the drawing-room, and whose shyness, as they had not seen her
for a twelvemonth, prevented their coming lower' (152). We are
to understand, then, that the Gardiners did not take their chil-
dren to join the family Christmas celebration at Longbourn. This
seems very odd, given the Gardiners' roles as exemplary family
members. (Note that, in Persuasion, the Harvilles send their chil-
dren away at Christmas only to provide a quiet home for the
recuperating Louisa Musgrove.) Finally, in a sentence less puz-
zling than ambiguous, we hear the text's last statement about
Lydia: 'in spite of her youth and her manners, she retained all
the claims to reputation which her marriage had given her' (387).
Here, there is a question of deciding the focus of irony. Is Austen
mocking the social respectability that marriage inevitably con-
fers? Or is she pointing out the fatuity of such claims by some-
one whose reputation is permanently tainted by her belated and
purchased marriage?2
These moments of indeterminacy are worth noticing, because
the questions they raise are thematized in Pride and Prejudice.
Mrs Bennet's victory over Darcy is part of the text's irresolute
attitude toward silences, conversations and, ultimately, writing
itself. The odd behaviour of the Gardiners illustrates a motif in
Pride and Prejudice - how to reconcile apparent inconsistencies of
character as well as narrative. And the ambiguous irony regard-
ing Lydia points to an indeterminacy that subverts the textual
closure asserted by the absolutes and superlatives of the ending:
'With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms.
Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were
both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons
who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of
uniting them' (388; my emphases).
Silences in Pride and Prejudice are never neutral. Some, like
Darcy's in response to Mrs Bennet's outburst, express contempt
or hostility. Darcy frequently resorts to this kind of anti-verbal
communication, for example in his 'silent indignation' while
others dance at Lucas Lodge (25), his 'silent contempt' for the
Bennets at the Netherfield ball (102), and his initial resolute
Getting the Whole Truth in Pride and Prejudice 47
silence in the face of Miss Bingley's criticisms of Elizabeth (271).

Mr Bennet, too, uses silence as a defence against the demands
of his wife and daughters, while Miss Bingley uses it to snub
Elizabeth, and Elizabeth herself, though she more often breaks
than initiates silences, uses unresponsive silence to rebuff Lady
Catherine's imperious commands. The text, however, does not
endorse such repressions of speech; with different degrees of
subtle irony, it comments on self-imposed rejection of talk.3 At
the level of plot, we learn that Mr Bennet's quiet disengagement
(which takes the form of both silence and satire) has damaged
his family. At the level of character, we see that Miss Bingley's
refusal to talk demonstrates her pettiness.4 More indirectly, Austen
debunks silent judgement in the scene at Lucas Lodge. Darcy's
'silent indignation' is provoked by 'such a mode of passing the
evening [dancing], to the exclusion of all conversation' (25). Since
Darcy doesn't talk, won't talk to strangers, his indignation is clearly
in bad faith. It is an expression not of a thwarted wish for con-
versation but of a desire for better society.
Elizabeth's hostile silences are relatively exempt from narra-
tive criticism because they are enforced and temporary. She is
silent after Darcy's first proposal because he is talking - in two
paragraphs of fluent, controlled prose, the text provides, in the
form of free indirect discourse, a persuasive replication of Darcy's
overpowering rhetoric - and Elizabeth does speak as soon as she
can. Lady Catherine imposes silence on Elizabeth (and others) by
her own relentless talk - 'I will not be interrupted. Hear me in
silence' (356) - so that Elizabeth has no choice. But even imposed
silences are problematized in Pride and Prejudice. Who takes the
responsibility for Darcy's lack of response to Mrs Bennet's ag-
gressive and inane remark? Is he a victim of her assertiveness or,
like Mr Bennet, a culpable practitioner of cynical reticence? Since
his silence releases further and more extreme inanities from her,
is he indirectly to blame for allowing vapid speaking to triumph?
Perhaps we can posit an analogy here: the triumph of Mrs
Bennet's foolish discourse replicates the proliferation of the kind
of writing that gave novels a bad name in the late eighteenth
century.5 In the context of the struggle for mastery over the read-
ing public, the silence of a sensible, critical authority becomes
culpable capitulation.
If Darcy's voluntary defeat in this example shows one danger
of silent retreat, his struggles with Miss Bingley indicate two

other kinds of risky silences. Early in the novel, he cedes to her
the same freedom that he grants Mrs Bennet; when, at Lucas
Lodge, Miss Bingley teases him about his admiration for Eliza-
beth, '[h]e listened to her with perfect indifference, while she
chose to entertain herself in this manner, and as his composure
convinced her that all was safe, her wit flowed long' (27). When
he does speak, at Netherfield and then at Pemberley, he silences
her as thoroughly as Mrs Bennet had silenced him, so we know
that her contemptuous and mean-spirited talk depends on his
ostensible receptivity. At Netherfield, Miss Bingley continues
her attack on Elizabeth, but this time Darcy responds, albeit
aphoristically: 'Undoubtedly . . . there is meanness in all the arts
which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation.
Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable' (40). The nar-
rator's understatement - 'Miss Bingley was not so entirely satis-
fied with this reply as to continue the subject' - encodes a good
deal of information. Darcy's reply reminds Miss Bingley that she
risks being judged by him, that he may be talking about her
mean arts, and that she has just been guilty of the very device
she accuses Elizabeth of employing. Moreover, she senses that
continuing the dialogue might expose submerged issues and
anxieties, thereby endangering her fantasy about attaching Darcy.
Since her desire for Darcy requires the fiction that he likes her,
or at least that she is likeable, she cannot tolerate a conversation
that destabilizes her hopeful illusions. The ensuing silence re-
establishes their collusive contract; she will back off from behav-
iour that provokes his potent critical voice, and he will allow her
to reconstruct her fantasy about their relationship, present and
potential. Their fictional alliance will continue, bolstered by their
joint project of detaching Bingley from Jane Bennet and by their
suppression of talk that could clarify their own desires.
By the time Elizabeth gets to Pemberley, the contract between
Darcy and Caroline Bingley has lost its force. Darcy has appar-
ently recognized his own dishonesty or vulnerability in collud-
ing to maintain Miss Bingley's false romance. And she, terrified
of being abandoned, has lost the ability to censor herself. No
longer able to displace truth with silence, she desperately turns
to speech to revitalize her fictitious world. Dissatisfied with
Georgiana's quiet resistance to a negative characterization of Eliza-

beth, she turns to Darcy for confirmation: 'When Darcy returned
to the saloon, Miss Bingley could not help repeating to him some
part of what she had been saying to his sister' (270). This time,
his unreceptive silence provokes in her 'a determination to make
him speak'; significantly, in order to do so, she reproduces ma-
terial from a previous text on which they had collaborated, a
conversation dating from their early contract: 'I remember, when
we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all were to
find that she was a reputed beauty; and I particularly recollect
your saying . . . "She a beauty! - 1 should as soon call her mother
a wit"' (271). But she has strained the false relationship too far,
and Darcy, 'who could contain himself no longer' (271), ends his
silence, breaking forever their shared fiction of amity. His si-
lence, which had allowed the building of her illusions in the first
place, eventually goads her into speech, which in turn provokes
in him the language by which those illusions are finally shattered.
The silence of contempt and disagreement, then, is problem-
atic because it generates the wrong sort of narrative - Mrs Bennet's
nonsense or Miss Bingley's delusions. What about the silence of
discretion or tact? When Jane and Elizabeth conspire to suppress
information about Wickham, they give characteristic reasons for
their silence: Elizabeth declares that she is not 'equal' to the
exertion of changing Meryton's opinions, and looks forward to
the day when 'it will be all found out, and then we may laugh
at their stupidity in not knowing it before', while Jane worries
that '[t]o have his errors made public may ruin him forever'
(227). The narrative voice supplies no dissenting opinion, but
again the event proves the danger of silence - because the sisters
do not speak, Wickham can safely contract more debts and se-
duce more women. Indeed, the Bennet sisters replicate Darcy's
discretion here; because Darcy is too dignified to provide a cor-
rective opinion of Wickham - Miss Bingley knows 'that he can-
not bear to hear George Wickham mentioned' (94) - Wickham is
free to invent a self and a history as attractive as his features.
Darcy subsequently blames Lydia's elopement on his own si-
lence, and although we may, with Mrs Gardiner, 'doubt whether
his reserve, or anybody's reserve, can be answerable for the event'
(324), we can at least acknowledge that Wickham's deceptions
flourish in the space that others' discreet silences make available.

Just as Darcy and Miss Bingley manipulate Jane's reserve in order
to create the fiction about her indifference to Bingley, so Wickham
uses Darcy's silence to lend credibility to his own narrative.
Finally, there is the seemingly unassailable silence generated
by affectionate consideration. Elizabeth withholds from Jane her
newly-acquired knowledge of Bingley's innocence and sincerity
because she believes the information 'might only grieve her sis-
ter further' (218). Her motive may be laudable, but her language
reveals the cost of self-censorship: 'The liberty of communication
cannot be mine till it has lost all its value!' (227). Informative
speech is a precious but depreciable commodity, and to restrain
communication is to court frustration. Moreover, in choosing
silence, Elizabeth also decides what is best for Jane, and thus
comes perilously close to re-enacting Darcy's confident directing
of Bingley's life. Silence, even when generated by sympathy, ex-
erts power.
Elizabeth does at least tell Jane about Darcy and Wickham,
but, in one of the more puzzling because unexplained episodes
in Pride and Prejudice, she does not confide equally in Mrs Gardin-
er. Elizabeth's intimacy with her aunt has been clearly estab-
lished in their conversations about Bingley and Wickham, so it
seems inconsistent that Elizabeth should keep Mrs Gardiner ig-
norant of Darcy's proposal and his narrative about Wickham.
Even at Pemberley, after the Gardiners suspect a romance be-
tween their niece and Darcy, Elizabeth is resolutely discreet: Mrs
Gardiner and Elizabeth 'talked of all that had occurred . . . except
of the person who had mostly engaged their attention. They talked
of his sister, his friends, his house, his fruit, of every thing but
himself; yet Elizabeth was longing to know what Mrs Gardiner
thought of him, and Mrs Gardiner would have been highly grati-
fied by her niece's beginning the subject' (271-2). This elaborate
evasion does not seem adequately accounted for by what Julia
Prewitt Brown calls 'a world of unexplained attitudes and re-
striction', a taboo unintelligible to modern readers.6 It seems to
me that Elizabeth's silence here is self-protective; she does not
want to expose her newly-awakened desire for Darcy until she
gains the object of her desire, and therefore cannot begin even to
discuss Wickham, since such a narrative would inevitably require
reference to her source. Indeed, she confesses to Mrs Gardiner

later, explaining her silence in the face of her aunt's happy specu-
lations about Darcy's attachment, that she 'was too cross to write.
You supposed more than really existed' (382). Elizabeth has no
wish to be publicly crossed in love, subject to all the pity and
derision that Jane has suffered. Her silence keeps her safe from
belittling sympathy elicited by displays of her own anxiety.7 Al-
though it may seem simply a manifestation of social decorum, it
in fact screens her emotional vulnerability.
If silence encodes inappropriate detachment, anger, delusion
and fear, then speech must be preferable. There must be some
social good derived from expressing disagreement and desire,
whether in conversation or in writing. But one doesn't have to
look very far in Pride and Prejudice to find a critique of speech.
Talk in this text belongs, after all, to Mrs Bennet, Lydia, Collins
and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The problem cannot be resolved
by neatly distinguishing between good and bad talkers. Norman
Page's valuable book on Austen's language quite rightly calls
conversation in Pride and Prejudice 'a major social activity', but
when he says that 'the ability to talk - to anyone, about any-
thing, or nothing - becomes highly prized' in this novel, he doesn't
account for the difficulties inherent in privileging good talk. Page's
own examples demonstrate the problem when he points out that
'The Bingley sisters are characteristically endowed with the gift
of speech as a social asset... [and] Elizabeth's favourable first
impressions of Wickham owe something to his skill as a conver-
sationalist.'8 Yes, we can discover and devalue foolish speech,
but when the speaker is gifted and skilful, how do we know that
the speech is false? How do we distinguish Wickham's 'happy
readiness of conversation - a readiness at the same time perfectly
correct and unassuming' (72) from the way 'Colonel Fitzwilliam
entered into conversation directly with the readiness and ease of
a well-bred man' (171)? The identical descriptions imply that we
can't, or at least not without a good deal of 'extra-textual' infor-
mation, any more than we can discriminate between the silences
of Georgiana Darcy and Ann de Bourgh without narrative mark-
ers to point the way. When a society elevates conversation to an
art, particularly an art which can be mastered through practice
(precisely what Elizabeth asserts when she makes an analogy
between conversation and musical skill [175]), then the truly

talented and the merely diligent become equivalent. Moreover,
the ability to talk well no longer provides a clue to character or
breeding: conversational facility can be acquired, so that, as James
Thompson points out, 'as with all commodities language becomes
alienated from traditional social relations'.9 Since speech and
character are not necessarily congruent, a novel which sets out to
reveal character through language embarks on an impossible
project.10
Worse yet, the novelist who claims value for her work because
of its avoidance of 'novelistic slang' or its use of the 'best chosen
language' (NA 58) is guilty of misleading the reader. Arguably,
the best-bred character in Pride and Prejudice is Georgiana Darcy,
whose voice we never hear,11 and the most dangerous character
is Wickham, whose formidable powers of conversation empower
him to injure others. The problem of interpretation remains:
Georgiana's silence and Wickham's talk both allow the prolifera-
tion of false readings.
* * *
Since it is largely plausible but untrustworthy talkers who in-

habit the linguistic world of Pride and Prejudice, audiences have
to be particularly alert and hard-working; again and again, char-
acters and readers need to puzzle out the truth from a mass of
inconsistent data and to examine their grounds for belief. And
because there is no clear congruence of character and speech,
those who attempt to evaluate the actions of others do so not by
scrutinizing individual characters but by appealing to general,
immutable truths - to moral values and communal standards.
When Jane and Elizabeth discuss Charlotte Lucas's willingness
to marry Collins, neither attempts to psychoanalyse Charlotte;
instead both press towards the abstract and the social. Jane urges
Elizabeth to 'make allowance enough for difference of situation
and temper', to 'consider Mr Collins's respectability, and Char-
lotte's prudent, steady character', to '[rjemember that she is one
of a large family', and to 'be ready to believe... that she may
feel something like regard and esteem' for Collins (135). The
series of mild imperatives - make allowance, consider, remember,

be ready to believe - all posit a stable, intelligible social frame-
work within which Charlotte's behaviour can be understood. Jane
presents Elizabeth with a coherent narrative, one which makes
sense of Charlotte's choice.
To this, Elizabeth opposes a view which insists upon 'the incon-
sistency of all human characters' (135), but the binary opposi-
tions she sets up present an equally coherent picture: 'You shall
not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of prin-
ciple and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me,
that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of clanger, security
for happiness' (135-6). Neither account allows for real inconsist-
ency - that Charlotte can be prudent as well as selfish, that an
eligible match can also be a dangerous one. Nor do they posit a
world in which moral absolutes and pragmatic choices coexist in
permanent conflict; both insist upon ontological certainties which
are always available as measures of judgement. Both explana-
tions, therefore, proceed from partial and confining systems of
belief, necessarily inadequate in the search for the whole truth.
In turning to a consideration of Bingley's desertion, Jane and
Elizabeth again run into troubles generated by fixed values. Jane's
generous reading of the Bingley sisters derives not from her
knowledge of their characters but from her belief in deductive
logic based on absolutes: 'They can only wish his happiness, and
if he is attached to me, no other woman can secure it', and Eliza-
beth participates in this abstract level of discourse by challenging
the formal argument - 'Your first position is false', she claims
(136). Elizabeth's cynical evaluation of the Bingley women owes
less, I believe, to 'a judgement... unassailed by any attention to
herself (15) than to a more generalized 'knowledge' about selfish-
ness and hypocrisy, the same knowledge that impels her admi-
ration for Jane: '[a]ffectation of candour is common enough; -
one meets with it every where. But to be candid without osten-
tation or design... belongs to you alone' (14). While Jane pro-
tests that by reading the Bingleys cynically, 'you make every
body acting unnaturally and wrong' (137), Elizabeth sees noth-
ing unnatural in selfishness or weakness. Elizabeth's disappoint-
ment in Bingley comes from another treasured certainty: her belief
in personal autonomy. Just as she rejects Colonel Fitzwilliam's
contention that a 'younger s o n . . . must be inured to self-denial

and dependence' (183), she cannot 'for a moment suppose that
[Caroline Bingley's] wishes, however openly or artfully spoken,
could influence a young man so totally independent of every
one' (120).
Elizabeth's conviction that a wealthy man is beyond coercion
or influence is closely connected to her certainty that even a poor
woman like Charlotte (and herself) can claim autonomy and
personal desire. Because Elizabeth's version of the world accom-
modates behaviour inconsistent with established norms, it seems
to us less fixed than Jane's world of naturalness and Tightness;
but in its seeming inclusiveness, it asserts a kind of authoritative
certainty that excludes the inexplicable. In Elizabeth's coherent
world, baffling behaviour can be explained by '[thoughtlessness,
want of attention to other people's feelings, and want of resolu-
tion' (136), so that it is no longer baffling.12 But where in this
confident and judgemental world is there an explanation for the
Gardiners? Without doing violence to the text, we cannot say
they are bad because they abandon their children at Christmas;
without doing violence to my own feelings as reader and parent,
I cannot pretend that the lapse is understandable. With more real
confusion than Elizabeth feels, I have to borrow the words she
uses about Charlotte's behaviour: 'It is unaccountable! in every
view it is unaccountable!' (135).
Jane Austen is too meticulous a reviser to have overlooked
unwittingly even so small a point as the unaccountable behavi-
our of the Gardiners. In showing us that even the Gardiners act
in ways that defy comprehension, she shows us, I think, the
futility of ontological certainties, the slipperiness of grounds for
belief. Yet she is unwilling or unable to embrace fully the impli-
cations of her own problematized text. She therefore goes the
route that Thomas Pavel urges on modern authors who, he says,
have the option of building worlds that resist the radical work-
ings of indeterminacy. In order to construct fictional systems
accounting for the difficult ontological situations in which we
find ourselves, we do not need to opt for maximizing incom-
pleteness or indeterminacy. An important choice left to
contemporary writers is to acknowledge gracefully the difficulty
of makingfirmsense out of the world and still risk the invention

of a completeness-determinacy myth.13
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen locates the determinacy myth in

the competing narratives of Darcy and Wickham. Pride and Preju-
dice explicitly asserts that Darcy's and Wickham's stories not only
compete with but exclude each other. When Jane casts about for
some way to exonerate both men, Elizabeth responds, 'You never
will be able to make them both good for any thing. Take your
choice, but you must be satisfied with only one. There is but
such a quantity of merit between them; just enough to make one
good sort of man...' (224). One man's credit must annihilate the
other's, and one narrative must displace the opposing one. In
order to maintain the binary opposition and to authorize its own
discovery of the truth, the text turns to a sustained examination
of grounds for belief. Atfirst,partisans on both sides seem equally
prejudiced. If Elizabeth's reasons for believing Wickham are
unconvincing - she bases her belief on circumstantial detail
('names, facts, every thing mentioned without ceremony') and
on his physical attractiveness ('there was truth in his looks' [86])
- the Bingleys' faith in Darcy is also dismissable, since Miss
Bingley bases her opinion on class prejudice and Bingley has
only vague recollections of the relationship. What is significant
here is not that Elizabeth is wrong, but that Austen so carefully
stacks the deck against her. It is hardly necessary here to re-
hearse the points about her superficial attraction to Wickham
and her much deeper anger at Darcy's perceived indifference. I
would merely point out what has not been so often noted, that
Elizabeth is guilty of exactly the same credulity she ascribes to
Bingley: 'Mr Bingley's defence of his friend was a very able one
I dare say, but since he is unacquainted with several parts of the
story, and has learnt the rest from that friend himself, I shall
venture still to think of both gentlemen as I did before' (96).
By the time we read Darcy's letter, we are thoroughly pre-
pared to find that Wickham is a scoundrel and Darcy a true
gentleman. Wickham's superficial amiability does not stand a
chance against Darcy's sincere and troubled affection for Eliza-
beth, and we, well ahead of Elizabeth in our evaluation of the
two men, merely wait for character to catch up with reader.14
The problem is that if we were to apply to Darcy's account the

same standards of proof that we do to Wickham's, we would
find ourselves not far beyond Elizabeth's own initial perplexity
- 'On both sides it was only assertion' (205). Darcy's fluent pen
has no more inherent credibility than Wickham's smooth tongue,
and he, too, mentions 'names, facts, every thing'. The appeal 'to
the testimony of Colonel Fitzwilliam' (202) could be seen as a
calculated risk, like Wickham's when he depends on Darcy's
silence in Meryton. To a truly impartial and unengaged reader
(and I freely admit the impossibility of locating one), 'truth' is
still elusive.
Of course the text gives us more than Darcy's letter; it gives us
Pemberley and the evidence of Mrs Reynolds. But even here,
Austen has not forgotten that testimony can be tainted. Although
Elizabeth is wholly converted to Mrs Reynolds's view - 'What
praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?'
(250) - Mr Gardiner is 'highly amused by the kind of family
prejudice, to which he attributed her excessive commendation of
her master' (249) and Mrs Gardiner speculates that 'he is a liberal
master... and that in the eye of a servant comprehends every
virtue' (258). We remember, too, that Wickham's account accom-
modates a view of Darcy as praiseworthy landlord; his pride,
Wickham has said, 'has often led him to be liberal and generous
- to give his money freely, to display hospitality, to assist his
tenants, and relieve the poor' (81). If Darcy's acknowledged public
virtues can coexist with and arise from selfish pride, then we are
again dangerously close to moral uncertainties.
Because Austen needs to ensure that no uncertainty remains
about Wickham's duplicity, she provides the comic melodrama
of Lydia's elopement and piles on evidence of Wickham's per-
fidy. Not only is he a seducer of maidens, he is also extravagant,
dishonest and addicted to gaming. In the post-elopement discus-
sions about Wickham, we have a reprise of earlier debates about
grounds for belief. Mr and Mrs Gardiner, like Jane and Elizabeth
earlier, appeal to large social and moral certainties as grounds
for their optimism. Mr Gardiner counts on Wickham's self-
interest and knowledge of the world - 'Could he expect that her
friends would not step forward? Could he expect to be noticed
again by the regiment, after such an affront to Colonel Forster?
His temptation is not adequate to the risk' - while Mrs Gardiner

applies immutable moral values: 'It is really too great a violation
of decency...' (282). Elizabeth, who has learned that what is
logical is not necessarily true, counters with specific readings of
Wickham and Lydia - he 'will never marry a woman without
some money' and she lacks a 'sense of decency and virtue' (283).
In other words, she turns to her knowledge of their characters
and history rather than to general truths. Elizabeth and the reader
have learned that a well-regulated society includes the illogical
and the anarchic, which can be contained only by the energetic
efforts of a reliable actor/narrator like Darcy. Darcy's generous
activity on behalf of Lydia finally validates his earlier narrative
and reassures us that we were right in crediting his words rather
than Wickham's.
The power and truth of Darcy's narrative are further demon-
strated in its ability to force concessions and revisions in
Wickham's false one. In their last dialogue, Elizabeth consistently
makes Wickham retreat from his former positions. He concedes
that Georgiana, whom he has described as 'very, very proud'
(82), has 'uncommonly improved within this year or two' (328);
and he is driven to claim lamely that his original narrative had
included information congruent with Darcy's version of the story.
His stammering repetitions - 'Yes, there was something in that;
I told you so from the first, you remember' and 'it was not wholly
without foundation. You may remember what I told you on that
point, when first we talked of it' (329) - attest to the fragility of
false narrative. Confronted by truth, Wickham loses fluency, and
the reader, together with Elizabeth, is 'pleased to find that she
had said enough to keep him quiet' (330).
We see, then, the usefulness of the narrative conflict between
Wickham and Darcy, the resolution of which powerfully denies
uncertainty and indeterminacy. Wickham's discomfiture proves
that Darcy has behaved consistently, that both Elizabeth and
reader have learned to discover truth in narrative, and that true
narratives will, in the end, silence false ones. The reader's abso-
lute conviction of Darcy's truth and Wickham's falsehood spills
over to the rest of the text, so that all anomalies seem to be
erased. As Elizabeth confidently looks forward to a serene future
at Pemberley, the reader comfortably looks back on a text that
makes sense. But such comfort is partial and temporary; as re-

cent readings have pointed out, there is something contrived and
manipulative about the serene closure.15 Austen knows the de-
bate about Darcy's or Wickham's truthfulness cannot really be a
model for a narrative as a whole and that slippage is inevitable.
Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine may visit Pemberley, but the
story they will tell others and themselves about Darcy's marriage
won't be the one we have just read; their version will emphasize
Elizabeth's 'arts and allurements' which 'have drawn him in'
(354). And who can doubt that Wickham, though banished to the
north, will resurrect the narrative that makes him out a victim of
Darcy's pride and envy? Those who are ignorant of the 'true
facts' of the case will believe these false narratives, just as those
who have missed being educated by Pride and Prejudice may still
judge badly - may still believe, for example, that true affection
arises 'on a first interview with its object, and even before two
words have been exchanged' (279). The triumph of true values as
asserted in Pride and Prejudice can be available only to those who
read it, and Austen knew her audience was limited. Even those
who have experienced the text have no objective evidence to
support its assertions, no absolute confidence that its narrative
resolves all inconsistencies, includes all truth, and silences all
falsehood. Unlike Darcy's letter, Pride and Prejudice will continue
to compete with other texts and other values; it will always be
susceptible to suspicious readings and reinterpretations; and it
will always contain in it baffling moments that dismantle its
coherence and provoke fresh inquiries. When Austen juxtaposes
her indeterminate narrative to Darcy's closed one, she acknowl-
edges authorial fantasizing. It would be pleasant to believe that
the truth of her story could be wholly validated, that the reader
could use it to construct a true vision of the world. But Austen
the author knows what the meta-narrator of Darcy's story denies
- that 'the apprehension of fictional texts can never be brought
to an end'.16 In leaving intact moments that elude comprehen-
sion, Austen consciously and conscientiously admits that her text,
in spite of its seamless surface, is neither coherent nor comprehen-
sive, that the indeterminacy that keeps it alive also kills its claims
to be truth.
4
The Family Plot of
Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park is in many respects a dark and alienating book. Its
dystopic effect has been variously ascribed to its moral rigidity,
to its rejection of wit, and to its personally unattractive heroine.1
These complaints have a certain validity, as does Claudia
Johnson's compelling characterization of Mansfield Park as
'Austen's most, rather than her least, ironic novel and a bitter
parody of conservative fiction.'2 The book's negative effect seems
to me, however, to lie in something even more powerful: its
horrifying picture of family life. Written on the threshold of nine-
teenth-century pieties about family love and at the end of a cen-
tury of attempts to set domestic life apart from political strife, it
explodes the myth of the apolitical home. In Mansfield Park, the
family is a site of competition and exploitation, of struggles for
power and vengeance that match the intensity of social and eco-
nomic class struggles. But in demonstrating the competitive hos-
tilities within families, Austen does not fantasize about a return
to an older social system; rather, she shows that the dynamics of
families, or of the '3 or 4 Families in a Country Village'3 are
essentially, permanently hostile, and that the new ideology of
bourgeois competition merely provides a useful vocabulary for
this hostility. Moreover, Mansfield Park shows that persuasive
rhetoric from authoritative sources cannot change the climate of
rivalry and resentment or ameliorate family strife; in so doing it
calls into question its own didactic manipulations, its own at-
tempts to provide moral education.4
* • *
Towards the end of the novel, we encounter Fanny's reading of

what the family circle at Mansfield Park had been. In her stunned
59
response to Maria and Henry's elopement, she characterizes it as

a sin against the family:
A woman married only six months ago, a man professing

himself devoted, even engaged to another - that other a near
relation - the whole family, both families connected as they
were by tie upon tie, all friends, all intimate together! - it was
too horrible a confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of
evil, for human nature, not in a state of utter barbarism, to be
capable of! (441)
Her horror derives not from the overtones of incest, but rather
from the culprits' attack on family peace and happiness. The
implication is that not only are Maria Rushworth and Henry
Crawford overturning social values but, more importantly, they
are introducing misery and discord where there had been 'pa-
rental solicitude . . . high sense of honour and decorum . . . upright
principles' (442). Fanny's catalogue of Mansfield attributes, how-
ever, omits (or suppresses) the jockeying for power, the self-
centred manipulations, the thoroughgoing competitiveness
readers have witnessed from the beginning of the novel.5
Like Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park begins with the money/
marriage connection, but the tone is strikingly different. In Pride
and Prejudice, determined vagueness about financial matters (from
the narrator's 'a fortune' to Mrs Bennet's 'four or five thousand
a-year, and very likely more' [PP 348]) allows both narrator and
reader to ignore possible tensions between sisters who marry
fortunes of different magnitudes. In Mansfield Park, specificity
and exchange value - Maria Ward has seven thousand pounds,
'at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim' to
Sir Thomas (3) - set the stage for sibling resentment. Miss Ward,
after waiting for her lucky match, finds herself 'obliged to be
attached to the Rev. Mr Norris' (3), thereby becoming an official
dependent of her younger sister, reminded daily of her lower
status. Her behaviour throughout the novel becomes compre-
hensible once we see it as compensation or vengeance for her
sense of undeserved inferiority.6 It is this sense of inferiority and
competition that motivates her to bring Fanny to Mansfield, not
only because someone else can be 'lowest and last' (221), but also
The Family Plot of Mansfield Park 61
because Fanny's arrival sustains for her a fiction of being equal

to the Bertrams. Through Fanny, Mrs Norris can imagine herself
a figure as powerful as Sir Thomas, conferring benefits on a less
fortunate relation.
Readers notice, of course, the way both Sir Thomas and Mrs
Norris tax Fanny with ingratitude, and the narrator underlines
the similarity of their attitudes when, after Mrs Norris has ac-
cused Fanny of having 'a little spirit of secrecy, and independ-
ence', Sir Thomas thinks 'nothing could be more unjust, though
he had been so lately expressing the same sentiments himself
(323-4). Less obvious but equally significant are Mrs Norris's
attempts to assert parity with Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram.
About Fanny's future, she reassures him, 'A niece of our's, Sir
Thomas, I may say, or at least of your's, would not grow up in
this neighbourhood without many advantages' (6). Here the
qualification is prompted by diplomacy rather than humility, but
whereas Sir Thomas congratulates himself indirectly on Fanny's
first dinner invitation - 'Mrs Grant's showing civility to Miss
Price, to Lady Bertram's niece, could never want explanation'
(218) - Mrs Norris explicitly takes credit for it: 'the compliment
is intended to your uncle and aunt, and me. Mrs Grant thinks it
a civility due to us to take a little notice of you' (220). The trip to
Sotherton, she says, should make Fanny 'very much obliged to
your Aunt Bertram and me' (105), and she considers the Price
children a drain on both aunts' resources: T dare say nobody
would believe what a sum they cost Sir Thomas every year, to
say nothing of what I do for them' (305)7
Fanny as an object of charity and exploitation serves as a de-
vice that Mrs Norris uses to assert equality with the Bertrams. If,
as a poor relation, Fanny can be employed in 'carrying messages,
and fetching', 'getting through the few difficulties' of carpet-work,
and making tea for Lady Bertram (20,126,219), she can be equally
useful to her other patron aunt. This becomes explicit in the
episode of the roses, when both aunts put Fanny to work and
each thinks the other might have caused Fanny's illness (71-4).
The episode is included, I believe, not to indicate Fanny's fragil-
ity and meekness (which have already been established) but rather
to show how Mrs Norris uses Fanny to work out her grievances
against her more fortunate sister.
Mrs Norris exhibits another symptom of jealous resentment:

believing herself to be unjustly deprived, she takes all she can
get from those who have more. Thus she wheedles plants, cheese
and eggs out of the servants at Sotherton, and thus the curtain
from the aborted theatricals and the 'supernumerary jellies' from
the ball (283) find their way to the White House. The very insig-
nificance of these objects indicates a larger motivation for such
aimless acquisitiveness, and the text suggests that, for Mrs Norris,
accumulation substitutes for procreation, 'as an object of that
needful solicitude, which there were no children to supply' (8).
Miserliness comes from a double sense of deprivation, and ac-
quisitiveness from a conviction that the rich should be fleeced.8
Even the much-debated play feeds her desire to exploit the
Bertrams: she welcomes it because she derives from it 'the imme-
diate advantage of fancying herself obliged to leave her own
house, where she had been living a month at her own cost, and
take up her abode in their's' (129).
Mrs Norris's resentful sense of inferiority also manifests itself
in her complicated attitude toward the servants at Mansfield Park.
Claudia Johnson points to the absence of 'talkative servants,
unpaid merchants' and other outsiders in Mansfield Park,9 but
servants are present, and it is usually Mrs Norris who brings
them into the family discourse and into the reader's conscious-
ness. Her awareness of their personal concerns and prerogatives
is intense. She knows that Nanny has a cousin, a saddler, in
London; she decides that Miss Lee the governess can add Fanny
as a third charge ('there can be no difference' [9]) but the ladies'
maid cannot; she organizes the lives of John Groom and the
dairymaid. On the one hand, she makes much of considering the
servants, doctoring the 'poor old coachman' (189) and fretting
about keeping him waiting. Even the jellies filched from the ball
supposedly nourish a sick maid. On the other hand, she's on the
watch for the slightest encroachment from labourers - trium-
phantly foiling ten-year-old Dick Jackson's alleged attempt to
cadge a free meal at Mansfield. Her attitude argues a double
identification. She sees in Dick Jackson a version of her own
desire to feed on the Bertrams and she also sees herself as a
Bertram protecting her own. Though forced to be dependent on
her sister's fortune, she consoles herself by displacing Lady
Bertram - as steward of the house, as mother to her daughters,

as wife /helpmate to Sir Thomas. As Patricia Meyer Spacks says,
'Self-designated organizer and expediter of Mansfield Park af-
fairs, she tyrannizes the helpless and indulges the privileged.
Her fantasies reassure her of her indispensable role.'10 But no
amount of aggressive manipulation can actually disguise her
lower status - she cannot, for example, hurry tea on her own
responsibility, though she can deny Fanny afire- so her activity
must be ceaseless, a constant, even hysterical endeavour to prove
herself her sister's equal or superior.
If sibling competition is in the Wards a subtext to be uncov-
ered, in the Bertrams it is explicit. Maria and Julia's sexual ri-
valry over Henry Crawford is notable not for the strength of
their desire for him, but for the intensity of their resentment of
each other. During the trip to Sotherton, Julia's visible pleasure
is 'a perpetual source of irritation' to Maria (81), and Julia learns
she is slighted not by interpreting Crawford's behaviour but by
reading Maria's face: 'Maria's countenance was to decide it; if
she were vexed and alarmed - but Maria looked all serenity and
satisfaction, and Julia well knew that on this ground Maria could
not be happy but at her expense' (135-6). The last part of this
statement argues a powerful hostility. Even the qualifying 'on
this ground' cannot screen the bitter dynamics of a relationship
in which the happiness of one sister depends on the misery of
the other. Later, the narrator seems to localize and so soften the
rivalry: 'the sisters, under such a trial as this, had not affection
or principle enough to make them merciful or just.' But when, in
the next sentence, the narrative moves from analysis to descrip-
tion, we see how inadequate the commentary is: 'Maria felt her
triumph, and pursued her purpose careless of Julia; and Julia
could never see Maria distinguished by Henry Crawford, with-
out trusting that it would create jealousy, and bring a public
disturbance at last' (163). A good part of Maria's triumph lies in
the suffering of her sister, and Julia's resentment is such that she
welcomes even a public scandal that will distress the whole fam-
ily, so long as it punishes Maria. Such strong hostility - abruptly
changing a sister into a 'greatest enemy' (162) - can scarcely be
ascribed to sudden exposure to even so practised a charmer as
Henry Crawford. Lydia Bennet does not resent Elizabeth's early
conquest of Wickham, and the Musgrove sisters remain very

good friends even while they vie for Frederick Wentworth's af-
fections. The kind of feeling that can be nourished by the pain or
disgrace of a sister cannot simply be a product of inadequate
affection or lack of principle. It is the result of long-standing
rivalry. Maria and Julia are, perhaps, the true heirs of Mrs Norris;
she has corrupted them, not with what Sir Thomas calls 'exces-
sive indulgence and flattery' (463), but with her own bitter
competitiveness.11
While the female Bertrams work out their hostilities in terms
of sexual jealousy, Tom and Edmund engage in a struggle for
patriarchal power. Though Edmund the virtuous hero cannot
articulate the resentment he feels as a younger brother, the nar-
rative can safely allow Mary Crawford to express what everyone
knows but no else would dare say - 'I put it to your conscience,
whether "Sir Edmund" would not do more good with all the
Bertram property, than any other possible "Sir"' (434). Of course
he would, in spite of the narrator's optimistic and dismissive
assertion about his reformation ('He became what he ought to
be, useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely
for himself [462]). But Edmund, who can 'supply [Sir Thomas's]
place in carving, talking to the steward, writing to the attorney,
dealing with the servants' (34), has no real power at Mansfield
Park - he cannot even add to his father's stable. Like Mrs Norris,
he must make indirect inroads, but Tom, unlike Lady Bertram, is
jealous of his prerogatives, and his curt dismissal of Edmund's
arguments against acting reveals an irritable consciousness of
competition: T know my father as well as you do I have
quite as great an interest in being careful of his house as you can
have Don't imagine that nobody in this house can see or
judge but yourself... don't expect to govern every body else'
(127-8). Tom's relation to the estate may be merely exploitative,
but he is unquestionably Sir Thomas's heir. And the disjunc-
tion between power and worth creates a permanent struggle for
primacy. As Henry Crawford is the occasion rather than the
original cause of the sisters' hostilities, so the theatricals pro-
vide the occasion for the brothers to focus their long-standing
frustrations.
At Mansfield, these family rivalries are muted or screened by
a shared determination to seem serenely united - as Edmund

says, 'Family squabbling is the greatest evil of all, and we had
better do any thing than be altogether by the ears' (128). At
Portsmouth, no such code restrains the free expression of com-
petition, so that while the Bertram sisters vie for the favoured
place in Crawford's carriage, 'meditating how best, and with the
most appearance of obliging the others, to secure it' (80), Susan
and Betsey quarrel openly about Mary's silver knife. David E.
Musselwhite constructs an ingenious connection between this
episode and the conditions which produced Mansfield Park, argu-
ing an equivalence between Mary Price and Mary Crawford, so
that the 'story of "little Mary" allows Jane Austen to mourn,
albeit briefly, that sacrifice of all gaiety that made Mansfield Park
possible'.12 It is possible to argue, however, that the episode cri-
tiques the very bourgeois ideology that Musselwhite uncovers.
The sisters' attitude towards the knife represents a conjunction
of sentimentality and brute acquisitiveness, in which the desire
for possession is camouflaged by emotional talk of death-bed
bequests, bringing to mind the comically horrifying dialogue be-
tween Mr and Mrs John Dashwood. Inheritance causes family
competition, and there is no solution to the conflict other than
external mediation. Fanny's purchase of a new knife instantly
ends the quarrel: 'a source of domestic altercation was entirely
done away' and Susan is 'pleased . . . to be mistress of property
which she had been struggling for at least two years' (397). Since
such fortunate intervention is rare - Mrs Norris waits in vain for
another titled landowner, there is only one Henry Crawford, and
only one Mansfield estate - other sibling competition continues
unabated. One wonders about the fate of Susan Price.
The struggles I have been describing take place between fac-
tions located among the lower orders of the family hierarchy and
in relation to what seems to be a fixed point of authority: Sir
Thomas. As Mrs Grant says, 'He has a fine dignified manner,
which suits the head of such a house, and keeps every body in
their place' (162). The problematics of Sir Thomas's moral claims
to authority have been discussed often enough: his repressive
dignity, his mercenary and political ambitions, and his connec-
tions to the slave-trade all compromise his authority in the eyes
of readers. But he is also drawn into participation in family power
struggles, encountering challenges to his authority from within.

Mrs Norris persistently vies for influence over his household,
and although he can overrule her (about Fanny's rights, for ex-
ample), she remains a constant contender. Tom's respect for his
father is shallow, as easily dismantled as Sir Thomas's 'own dear
room' (181). And Maria's motivations for marrying include not
only a generalized 'hatred of home' (202) but a specific ambition
- 'the enjoyment of a larger income than her father's' (38). This
last reason points again to the money/status connection already
alluded to, and to a competition unique to Mansfield Park. In no
other Austen novel does a child eagerly anticipate overtaking
her father. It is true that Catherine Morland and the Bennet sis-
ters leave their parents further behind financially, and that
Donwell is more important than Hartfield, but Maria's desire to
have more money than her father shows an impulse not toward
independence but toward winning, an interest not in escaping a
system of constricting values but in acquiring weapons of power
within that system.
In civilized societies, we like to believe, power struggles are better

resolved through negotiation and persuasion than through brute
force or trickery; theoretically, at least, we value summits above
wars and acts of terrorism. One reason Mansfield Park's tone seems
so bleak is that the novel depicts, over and over again, the failure
of persuasive language to change behaviour and opinions or to
resolve disputes.13 I agree with Howard S. Babb's observation
that 'Mansfield Park reads like a catalogue of misjudgments' but
not with his conclusion that its emblematic dialogues are 'an-
other proof of Jane Austen's need... to decide unequivocally
and uncompromisingly on questions of morality'.14 I suggest,
rather, that the dialogues represent Austen's sense of the futility
of persuasion and the impossibility of reaching moral consensus.
Mansfield Park thus foregrounds the problematics of its own en-
terprise and allows the reader to resist its moral authority.15 The
dystopian ending, the 'overpowering, unanswerable skepticism
of Mansfield Park',16 owes its intensity to our sense that in the
world of this particular novel family and cultural hostilities

cannot be resolved by authoritative or persuasive discourse.
Mansfield Park displays an array of persuasive strategies, each
of which fails to achieve its objective. Sir Thomas, for a start,
characteristically deploys a combination of logic, affective appeal
and absolute patriarchal power, which sometimes imposes the
desired behaviour but never produces real agreement. Look, for
example, at the language describing his influence over his wife:
[H]e was master at Mansfield Park . . . and now by dint of long

talking on the subject, explaining and dwelling on the duty of
Fanny's sometimes seeing her family, he did induce his wife to
let her go; obtaining it rather from submission, however, than
conviction, for Lady Bertram was convinced of very little more
than that Sir Thomas thought Fanny ought to go, and there-
fore that she must. (370)
The odd shifting from status-based authority to painstaking ethi-

cal persuasion to personal influence exactly replicates Sir Thomas's
unstable sense of his own authority - is he to be undisputed lord
or flexible father? Which role will give him more real power
within the family? When he berates himself for 'teaching them
[his children] to repress their spirits in his presence' (463), he
assumes the role that many readers want to assign him - the
principled but rigid patriarch whose unemotional and absolute
authority causes his children to rebel. Such a reading of Sir
Thomas ignores, however, the precisely relevant subtext, the
undercurrent of feeling and struggle that has always been part of
his discourse. Even his 'most dignified manner' in reproving Tom
cannot entirely disguise his fatherly disappointment, and as he
'earnestly tried to impress his eldest son' about Edmund's 'natu-
ral claims' (23), we detect an uneasy balancing of bullying and
entreaty.17 Neither reaches Tom, whose '1st... 2ndly . . . and 3dly'
(24) rationalize away his temporary discomfort.
Sir Thomas is equally double-voiced and equally ineffective in
responding to his children's acting project. The offended and
angry master is evident in his 'increase of gravity', his 'slight
bow', and his immediate dismantling of the project; but there is
pathetic appeal too in his speaking glances at Edmund and in his
resolution to bury the episode, to 'forget how much he had been

forgotten himself (184-7). Acknowledgement of the futility of
trying to influence his children's thoughts is implicit in his deci-
sion not to 'enter into any remonstrance with his other children:
he was more willing to believe they felt their error, than to run
the risk of investigation' (187). His retreat in the face of Mrs
Norris's aggressive evasions about the episode suggests the same
kind of emotional timidity; he would rather believe in her indul-
gent kindness than continue to press for agreement. If Sir Thomas
is 'Jane Austen's great figure of moral authority',18 her view of
moral authority is clearly problematized, since authority is com-
promised not only by moral errors but also by emotional vulner-
ability - and consequent failures to impose its will.
Sir Thomas's most spectacular failure lies, of course, with Fanny,
and readers have rightly examined the source and meaning of
her resistance.19 But the fissures in Sir Thomas's authority have
revealed themselves even before Fanny offers that overt resist-
ance. He begins by evading any discussion of how Mrs Norris
has usurped his domestic authority, 'not wanting to hear more'
(312) about how she has tormented Fanny. At the same time, he
distances himself from family/class hierarchies by transferring
to his sister-in-law the 'misplaced distinction' (313) from which
Fanny suffers, forgetting his own concern 'as to the distinction
proper to be made... to make her remember that she is not a
Miss Bertram' (10). The attempted dissociation cannot disguise,
however, his appeal to Fanny's generosity, an appeal made on
his own behalf as well as on Mrs Norris's: 'you will feel that they
were not least your friends who were educating and preparing
you for that mediocrity of condition which seemed to be your
lot... it was kindly meant' (313). His swift return to the patriar-
chal manner - 'I am sure you will not disappoint my opinion of
you, by failing at any time to treat your aunt Norris with the
respect and attention that are due to her' (313) - highlights the
emotional, pleading voice exposed earlier, and reminds us that
Sir Thomas makes affective as well as hierarchical claims upon
Fanny.
Establishing the doubleness of Sir Thomas's relationship with
Fanny allows Austen great flexibility in depicting their subse-
quent confrontation. As the dialogue about Crawford's offer
progresses, we see not only Fanny's steadfast resistance to au-

thority, but the slow erosion of authoritative discourse itself. Sir
Thomas begins confidently enough, using the kind of ethical
argument he routinely wields against Lady Bertram's inertia. But
when Fanny does not submit, he gradually turns to an increas-
ingly personal, emotional appeal. First he tells her she doesn't
know her own feelings (implying of course that he does), but
then tries, not very strenuously, to ascertain what they are. He
reassures himself that she does not love his sons, 'chusing at
least to appear satisfied' (316) as he had chosen to be content
with Mrs Norris's evasions and with Maria's calm determination
to marry Rushworth. Sir Thomas's characteristic reluctance to
probe too deeply suggests, I believe, a reluctance to test the
authority everyone assumes he has. If Fanny were to admit to
loving Edmund, what could Sir Thomas do? He could forbid her
to think of him and banish her from Mansfield, thereby incurring
'the embarrassing evils of a rupture, the wonder, the reflections,
the reproach' (201) that he fears most. The costs of exerting pa-
triarchal power are high; better to win acquiescence through
personal appeal. Sir Thomas's long scolding speech to Fanny,
though conveyed 'in a voice of authority' and 'a good deal of
cold sternness' (317-18), constitutes just such an appeal. It articu-
lates personal pique rather than offended authority. He reminds
her of his affectionate attentions to her 'from the period of my
return to England'; aligns himself with generalized victims of
her obstinacy - 'you can and will decide for yourself, without
any consideration or deference for those who have surely some
right to guide you'; projects his disappointment on to the Prices;
and finally admits that, had his daughters been as indifferent to
his influence, T would have been much surprised, and much
hurt' (318-19). These are not the tactics of absolute authority, but
the manipulations and accommodations of emotional appeal. His
failure to influence Fanny by argument leads him at last to
threaten her with loss of material comfort. In a brute display of
class-based power, he resorts to privation as persuasion.
Compromised authority as embodied in Sir Thomas allows
Austen to indulge in some characteristically sly mockery: she
turns Sir Thomas into Mr Collins. Like Mr Collins, Sir Thomas
enumerates the advantages of the offered match; like Collins, he
refuses to believe Fanny's negative; and, like Collins, he com-

bines, in this scene at least, pompous verbosity with professions
of silence. His false closures - 'Well, there is nothing more to be
said' and 'From this hour, the subject is never to be revived
between us' (316, 330) - hark back clearly to Mr Collins's re-
sponse to rejection: 'My dear Madam . . . let us be for ever silent
on this point' (Chapman 11.114). Ivor Morris's intriguing study of
Collins's omnipresence in the canon does not cancel the impres-
sion that to be reminiscent of Mr Collins is to be diminished.20 To
all the other factors eroding Sir Thomas's authority is finally
added the reader's laughter.
If patriarchal authority fails to impose or persuade, moral
suasion from a peer is equally ineffective. Edmund's inability to
dissuade his siblings from acting Lovers' Vows doesn't necessar-
ily compromise his future as a clergyman, but it does show that
preaching in the family doesn't work. His failure to curb Mary
Crawford's playful 'feminine lawlessness' (94), repeated in a more
sombre key at the end of the book, indicates that even the com-
bination of love and righteousness cannot touch 'a corrupted,
vitiated mind' (456), although this strong characterization of Mary
Crawford is itself compromised, of course, by its origin in
Edmund's bitter sense of frustration and loss.21 More tellingly,
Edmund cannot manage to rule Fanny's mind as he had 'ruled
her lines' (16), even though, '[h]aving formed her mind and gained
her affections, he had a good chance of her thinking like him'
(64). He cannot reconcile her to living with Mrs Norris, in part
because his zeal to influence her leads him to make inaccurate
statements, to the effect that Mrs Norris 'is behaving better al-
ready', that Fanny will gain importance by living at the White
House, and that Mrs Norris 'will force you to do justice to your
natural powers' (26-27). If it is by no means clear why Edmund
is so eager to convince Fanny of what she knows to be untrue
(perhaps he merely wants to feel his power), it is obvious enough
that he doesn't succeed; she regrets her obstinacy, wants to be-
lieve him, but 'cannot see things as you do' (27).
Fanny's desire to be persuaded by Edmund is strong enough
that she almost accepts his specious explanation of Crawford's
conduct toward the Bertram sisters. Crawford's dangerous atten-
tions to Maria, he says, are
more in favour of his liking Julia best... a man, before he has

quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or
intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of, more
than the woman herself. Crawford has too much sense to stay
here if he found himself in any danger from Maria; and I am
not at all afraid of her, after such a proof she has given, that
her feelings are not strong. (116)
Such a glib dismissal of reality resembles Henry Tilney's reassur-

ances about Isabella Thorpe and Captain Tilney, but unlike
Catherine Morland's capitulation - 'Henry Tilney must know
best' (Chapman V.153) - Fanny's assent is half-hearted: 'with all
that submission to Edmund could d o . . . she knew not always
what to think' (116). Nor is she convinced by his tortuous justi-
fication for taking part in the play - that it will prevent 'excessive
intimacy' with Charles Maddox, save Mary Crawford from em-
barrassment, and restore his own influence over the project (154-
5). These arguments have no effect on Fanny's jealous despair or
on his siblings' triumphant glee. Edmund's claims to influence
and authority are sharply negated by the resistance of those he
would persuade.
Edmund's strategies of persuasion, as these examples suggest,
consist of offering a multiplicity of arguments and depend on a
combination of psychological analysis and simple assertion. Be-
hind these objectifications, however, lies a hidden agenda -
Edmund, trying to persuade others, often seeks to comfort him-
self. His attempts to convert Fanny to his own valuation of the
Crawfords express his need for external validation, and his
eagerness to penetrate, or rather to construct, her consciousness
screens his desire to remake Mary's. Edmund and Fanny's dia-
logue over Crawford's proposal, ostensibly designed by Edmund
to analyse and comfort Fanny, is in fact a protracted and wishful
monologue on Edmund's anxieties regarding Mary. When he
begs Fanny to allow Henry to prise her loose from 'all your early
attachments, and habits' (347), we remember his hope that, much
as Mary has been accustomed to the pleasures of London life,
she might 'love him well enough to make them no longer essen-
tial' (255). His quick rejection of Fanny's use of the word 'never'
(347) recalls his earlier struggles with Mary Crawford's negatives:
'she never has danced with a clergyman she says, and she never
will' (268); 'in the never of conversation' she can assert that the
church is never chosen but as a last resort (92). When he makes
light of Fanny's doubts about Henry's morals or assures her that
under better tutelage Henry will reform, we think back to his
anxiety about Mary's character - 'She does not think evil, but she
speaks i t . . . that uncle and aunt! They have injured the finest
mind!' (269). Moreover, toward Fanny, Edmund can exercise 'the
kind authority of a privileged guardian' (355), telling her that in
refusing Crawford she behaves irrationally, impulsively, unkindly,
and against her own best interests - 'You forget yourself, he
assures her. Mary grants him no such authority, and he must
work out against Fanny's diffident resistance the feelings of
impotence that torment his relations with Mary. It is no wonder
that he cannot reach Fanny, that '[h]er feelings were all in revolt'
(354): she feels his disingenuousness and knows that his author-
ity is tainted by selfish desire.
This discussion of Mansfield Park has thus far construed Fanny

Price as a silent feminine object, lacking subjectivity and lan-
guage. It may be argued, of course, that in representing such a
deeply problematized system of power and discourse, Austen
celebrates the silent, unempowered female.22 There are, however,
two problems with this view: Fanny in fact does participate, and
not always passively, in the struggles and manipulations of fam-
ily life; and such privileging of inarticulate femininity cancels
the justification, or even the need, for a woman to write at all. If
Mudrick is right in asserting that Fanny elicits no sympathy
because 'The author arms her with righteousness, and she must
prevail',23 then there's not much point in telling her story; and
yet it is clear that Fanny Price, marginalized though she may be,
is very much part of the story of Mansfield Park.
In the struggles for prominence at Mansfield, Fanny is indeed
often a bystander, whether patiently waiting alone on the bench
at Sotherton or silently sympathizing with Julia during the play
rehearsals. But even without going as far as Nina Auerbach does
in characterizing Fanny's desire for power as monstrous and
cannibalistic, one can note how conscious she is of every tri-

umph, every defeat and every struggle. Herfirstdays at Mansfield
are doubly miserable because she remembers 'the brothers and
sisters among whom she had always been important' (14), and
she sets out, in her own way, to recover some of that importance
in her new home. For Fanny, significance is bought with service,
whether in doing errands for her aunts, in helping Tom evade
the demands of the card-table, or in showing interest in Sir
Thomas's stories about Antigua. Even to the Bertram sisters she
contrives to become 'a third very useful' in their activities, pos-
sessed 'of an obliging, yielding temper' (17). Fanny Price has
taken to heart the kind of advice that young women still get: if
you want to be liked, be mindful of others' needs, be a good
listener, be interested in others more than in yourself. She em-
bodies, as Mary Poovey has suggested, the principle that femi-
nine submissiveness is the road to power.24 To an extent, her
plan succeeds: Julia defends her against Mrs Norris's charges of
laziness, Lady Bertram determines she cannot do without her,
Edmund feels guilty every time he neglects her, and Sir Thomas
discovers her beauty. Her greatest triumph (though she must not
acknowledge it as such) is winning Henry Crawford when Maria
and Julia have failed, and winning him in part because he ad-
mires 'the deep interest, the absorbed attention' with which she
listens to her brother talk about himself (235).
The successes of feminine passivity are, however, limited. The
authority figures whom Fanny courts are not as strongly smitten
as she believes: Sir Thomas embraces her fully only after his own
daughters have thoroughly disappointed him, when she is part
of 'all that remained to him of domestic felicity' (471). Lady
Bertram finds adequate substitutes in Mrs Norris, Sir Thomas,
Edmund, Mrs Grant, and, eventually, Susan Price. Crawford's
defection is attributed, of course, to his own flaws, but it must
also raise questions as to the extent to which a woman like Fanny
'can attach a man of sense' (297). If Fanny Price embodies the
fantasy of quiet feminine power, she equally represents its failures.
In his biography of Austen, John Halperin asserts that 'Mansfield
Park is not nearly as complicated a book as so many have thought.
Fanny Price, looking on and listening... stands in for the novelist
here.'25 It seems to me that the identification is the complication,
and that Fanny Price tells us much about Austen's struggles with
authorship. Because 'looking on and listening' are not enough,
both Fanny and Austen turn to active engagement; both seek
authority through language, and both discover the limitations of
persuasive language. After the episode of the lost rides has taught
Fanny the inadequacy of silent suffering, she begins a gradually
increasing but by no means uniformly successful programme of
articulating desire. At Sotherton, she wants to walk with Edmund
and Mary, 'but this was not suffered' (96); at Mansfield, she re-
minds Edmund of their shared joy in 'star-gazing', only to be
abandoned in favour of Mary's singing; she speaks strongly of
her aversion to Crawford, but Edmund recasts her speech to
make it his own - 'You have now given exactly the explanation
which I ventured to make for you' (353). At Portsmouth, she
replicates her behaviour at Mansfield, with equally mixed re-
sults. By 'working early and late' she gains the respect of Sam,
who begins 'to be influenced by Fanny's services, and gentle
persuasions' (390-1). She wins Susan's gratitude by purchasing
the knife, and is rewarded, as Edmund had been, with 'a most
attentive, profitable, thankful pupil' (418). But she makes no mark
on her mother's querulous indifference nor on the vulgarity and
riotousness of her other relations, belying William's optimistic
anticipation of her effect: 'You will set things going in a better
way, I am sure. You will tell my mother how it all ought to be,
and you will be so useful to Susan, and you will teach Betsey,
and make the boys love and mind you. How right and comfort-
able it all will be!' (372). How right and comfortable indeed, for
both Fanny and Austen, if so much good could be done by one
right-minded person. Unfortunately, reality at Portsmouth and
in the text is at odds with William's comfortable hopes; Fanny
does not convert her family.
Fanny's failure to be a redemptive force at Portsmouth can, of
course, be read politically;26 but it belongs equally to another
trope in the novel - the failure of persuasive strategies. Neither
exemplary behaviour nor argument can change those who resist
change. Particularly within the confines of family life, long-
standing competition and resistance are impervious to either
authoritative or persuasive discourse. Change comes not from
external influence, but from personal disappointment, such as
Edmund and Sir Thomas suffer. Austen's project then, whether

it is to defend the old order (as Duckworth and Butler suggest)
or to subvert it (as Johnson and Evans argue), is equally compro-
mised. Her 'family' of readers cannot, like Lady Catherine de
Bourgh's dependents, be scolded 'into harmony and plenty' (PP
169). In the end, Austen aligns herself with both Mary Crawford
and Fanny Price. Like Mary, who says T do not pretend to set
people right, but I do see that they are often wrong' (50), the
novelist points out sources of guilt and misery without specify-
ing ways to avoid them. Like Fanny when she tells Edmund of
Mary's hopes regarding Tom's death, the novelist is 'at liberty to
speak openly' (459) only when resistance is gone. Mansfield Park
constitutes Austen's depressing recognition of authorial weak-
ness and audience intransigence: seeming at one level strongly
didactic and authoritative, it in fact articulates Austen's pessi-
mism about the power of right thinking and right saying to
generate right action.
5
Emma and the Inept
Reader
Emma is a story about reading and misreading, about textual
manipulations and readers' resistance, about false information
and puzzling event.1 In the twentieth century, critical agreement
about the riddling nature of the novel has allowed, even de-
manded, ongoing reinterpretations, responding, perhaps, to Vir-
ginia Woolf s famous formulation that 'while twelve readings of
"Pride and Prejudice" give you twelve periods of pleasure re-
peated, as many reading of "Emma" give you that pleasure, not
repeated only, but squared and squared again with each perusal,
till at every fresh reading you feel anew that you never under-
stood anything like the widening sum of its delights'.2 It is per-
haps not possible, in the 1990s, to recapture Woolf's sense of
progressive understanding any more than it is possible for a
critic to recover the experience of first reading Emma. In fact, the
'widening... delights' are apt to turn into increasing perplexi-
ties, until we begin to feel very much like inept readers.
Emma's dichotomies, paradoxes and uncertainties keep read-
ers on the watch, interpreting and reinterpreting this slippery
text, trying to get inside the narrative to understand what Jane
Austen 'meant', and to situate themselves in relation to a par-
ticularly evasive narrative voice. Grant I. Holly and John A.
Dussinger point to the tension (or play) between assertion and
subversion of narrative authority in Emma. Holly says that 'On
the one hand, the devices of riddle, charade, and word play,
access and support the symbolic order On the other, these
devices undermine that order by suggesting that it is an arbit-
rary system of mere writing.' Dussinger argues that this contra-
diction is both self-conscious and perhaps self-serving: 'A striking
quality of her narrative is its self-conscious undermining of the
artistic illusion to create a yet deeper impression of reality
77
Paradoxically, Austen gains authority in her narrative by seem-

ing to renounce any claim to it, allowing her characters to speak
for themselves and her readers to indulge in vicarious virtue or
naughtiness.'3
For me, narrative manipulation elicits loss of confidence as
reader. 'Why didn't I see this before?' often leads to 'Maybe it
isn't there', so that I careen from wild surmise to shamefaced
conviction that I'm overreading. My solution to this quandary,
and my argument in this chapter, is that Emma sometimes privi-
leges narrative authority, asking readers to trust what they are
told, and sometimes urges readers to resist, to read against the
grain, to challenge any voice that claims to be authoritative. I
work out my argument by focusing on Emma herself, first as a
text to be read by other characters, then as a reader and narrator
of fictions, and finally as a representative of authority in compe-
tition with other authoritative voices. Such a reading also be-
comes in some sense a defence of Emma herself, since it inevitably
justifies some of her notorious misreadings and fictions.
Emma has a clear conviction that she is a text being read by
her community. She sees herself as a public figure, the object of
gaze and gossip, for example when she notes the interest gener-
ated by her very public flirtation with Frank Churchill: 'Emma
divined what every body present must be thinking. She was his
object, and every body must perceive it' (220).4 Her conviction is
validated by the long dialogue between Mr Knightley and Mrs
Weston, during which they analyse her character and speculate
about her future, as well as by Miss Bates's characteristically
breathless reaction to Mr Elton's engagement to Augusta
Hawkins, a reaction that indicates how much Highbury talks
about Emma: 'Well, I had always rather fancied it would be
some young lady hereabouts; not that I ever - Mrs Cole once
whispered to me - but I immediately said, "No, Mr Elton is a
most worthy young man - but"' (176). Highbury has been match-
making for Emma, and though she cannot oblige her audience
with a marriage to Elton, she owes her public some romantic
intrigue, so Frank Churchill is chosen as an appropriate object of
speculation. Emma takes 'a sort of pleasure in the idea of their
being coupled in their friends' imaginations' (119), conferring on
Frank 'the honour, in short, of being marked out for her by all
Emma and the Inept Reader 79
their joint acquaintance' (206). The 'pleasure of the text' here is

the pleasure felt by the text in being a text, one which both enter-
tains and provokes criticism, as in letters sent off to Maple Grove
and Ireland, describing herflirtationwith Frank Churchill. Since
a good text must also be a carefully presented one, Emma takes
seriously her responsibility to perform appropriately. Thus when
Mr Weston drops broad hints about his hopes of a match be-
tween Emma and Frank, 'Emma could look perfectly unconscious
and innocent' (189), as a lady should; later, convinced of Frank's
growing regard for her, she calculates 'how soon it might be
necessary to throw coldness into her air' (212) so that he doesn't
misread her intentions. Even if Emma wants to screen some of
her real feelings, she has no ambition to be deliberately mislead-
ing, so she does her best to be fair to her readers.
But even when Emma tries to be transparent, people insist on
misreading her. Elton insists that she has encouraged his suit,
and although she 'was obliged in common honesty to stop and
admit that her own behaviour to him had been so complaisant
and obliging, so full of courtesy and attention' (136) that his
mistake might be justified, her confession does not cancel the fact
that he remains a stubbornly inept reader. Unwilling to abandon
his earlier misinterpretation, he responds to her momentary loss
of words (which follows a clear rejection) with a determined
misreading: 'allow me to interpret this interesting silence. It con-
fesses that you have long understood me' (131). Emma as text is
vulnerable to the self-serving, self-deluded reader who refuses to
acknowledge intentionality or alternate meanings. In other words,
although we may agree that her earlier gestures were ambigu-
ous, we note that her attempts at clarification are blocked by
Elton's self-absorbed delusions. According to Knightley, Frank
Churchill is another such reader of Emma, 'deceived in fact by
his own wishes' into claiming that Emma had 'fathomed his secret7
(445-6). Such solipsism cannot be imputed to Mrs Weston or to
Knightley himself, yet they too misread Emma in that both are
convinced, in spite of careful scrutiny, that she does indeed love
Frank. Emma performs her flirtation so well that gesture looks
like substance and parody like sentiment. Only by direct, au-
thoritative intervention can Emma cancel the misinterpretations
of even her most engaged and acute readers.
Emma also has, of course, two naive readers who don't even
try to look beyond or beneath her self-presentation. Harriet Smith
doesn't attempt to 'read' Emma at all - she simply accepts her.
In a way, Harriet is an author's ideal reader, neither analysing
nor questioning the nature of the text. To her, Emma is simply
the cleverest, kindest, most generous friend she can imagine.
Harriet, not clever herself but 'with the power of appreciating
what was elegant and clever' (26), sees nothing in Emma but
what she is told to find: unaware that she is being exploited as
a convenient companion, she simply accepts Emma's self-image
as altruistic mentor; unable to detect snobbery, she gratefully
acknowledges Emma's goodness in preventing a marriage that
would separate the two friends; unimaginative about motives
and manipulations, she takes Emma's matchmaking exactly at
face value. For Harriet, Emma is a text both aesthetically pleas-
ing and educational - 'How nicely you talk,' she tells Emma, T
love to hear you. You understand every thing' (76). Harriet takes
Emma as a kind of conduct book which can teach her right ways
to behave and think.
Such a naive and gullible reader also presents a problem. Emma
doesn't want to be obscure, but she does want, on occasion, to be
understood without having to be brutally explicit. But the kind
of inept reader that Harriet represents is in need of explicit in-
struction; when Emma forbears naming names, Harriet gives in
to her infatuation with Knightley, misconstruing his friendly
interest 'from the time of Miss Woodhouse's encouraging her
to think of him' (409). Readers without suspicion will misinter-
pret not because of personal or intellectual vanity, but because
their habitual faith in univocal texts denies them the power to
speculate.
Mr Woodhouse, another innocent reader, sees Emma as clever,
talented, popular, and entirely devoted to his comfort. No ink-
ling of her loneliness or self-doubt or desire ever reaches him;
nor does he have any access to the playful side of his daughter.
When, for example, she teasingly points to the discrepancy be-
tween his hostility to marriage and his insistence that a bride 'is
always the first in company, let the others be who they may'
(280), he cannot engage with her ironic mode. His obtuseness
eventually silences her because 'Her father was growing nervous,
and could not understand her' (280). Like Mrs Elton, who also
has no sense of humour, and therefore cannot appreciate Emma's
gentle irony about Mr Elton's representation of Highbury - 'I
hope you will not find he has outstepped the truth more than
may be pardoned, in consideration of the motive' (277) - Mr
Woodhouse fails to see even the most obvious (and harmless)
wit in Emma's speech. To read Emma properly, one must have,
minimally, the ability to appreciate a mild joke. The humourless
reader not only misses the point, but distorts the text and even-
tually silences the narrator. As Austen wrote to James Stanier
Clarke, T could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance
under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were in-
dispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing
at myself or other people, I am sure I would be hung before I
had finished the first chapter.'5
A consideration of Emma as text foregrounds the ways in which
the most closely scrutinized text can be liable to misinterpreta-
tion. Emma's readers, whether from ignorance or suspicion, from
vanity or solicitude, misconstrue, over and over again, what she
feels or what she means. Moreover, Emma concedes the power
of misreaders when she admits the grounds for Elton's misplaced
confidence, when she submits to Harriet's quoting back her own
words about unequal matches, when she confesses to Knightley
that she 'was very foolishly tempted to say and do many things
which may well lay me open to unpleasant conjectures' (414),
and when she suppresses her wit so as to avoid confusing her
father. Perhaps Emma exhibits such concern for her readers be-
cause she herself reads so enthusiastically and with such confi-
dence. Perhaps her pleasure in her own elaborate decodings
makes her sympathetic to those who would, like her, construe
texts to fit their own desires and preconceptions. A fellow-
traveller among misreaders, Emma has good reason to forgive
those who come to erroneous conclusions about her.
Emma's own misreadings are spectacular. From airy specula-
tions about Harriet's noble origins to exuberant misconstructions
about Jane Fairfax's private life, Emma's mistakes as reader call
forth strictures from herself and from readers of the text. Both
emphasize that her mistakes arise from insufficient attention to
'reality'. Joseph Wiesenfarth says that '[o]nce she allows the
totality of reality to dictate her conduct, she can put by fanciful

constructs and turn to accurate judgments'; Susan Morgan ar-
gues that 'For Emma, growing up is learning the limits of self: as
her domain shrinks the real world enlarges'; Juliet McMaster
specifies the cost of Emma's misreadings when she points out
that she 'constantly interprets reality, so as to make it conform to
her constructed version of it. In the realm of language, this activ-
ity takes the form of over-interpreting other people's speech. She
often assumes an innuendo, a secret message, that isn't there,
and while she is assuming a non-existent secret message, she is
likely to miss one that is there.'6 Such evaluations imply, of course,
that Emma could have, should have known better, and that we as
readers are better positioned to grasp the reality that Emma
misses. We might be more acute because we are not, as Bernard
J. Paris characterizes Emma, 'arrogant, self-important, and con-
trolling .. / too confident of her knowledge, judgement and per-
ception'.7 More likely, we have been manipulated by the text to
suspect Emma's interpretations.8 A heroine introduced as 'hav-
ing rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a
little too well of herself (5) inevitably evokes a matching dispo-
sition in readers to think themselves superior, to assume that
Emma's judgements are not only wrong but wrong-headed. As
Patricia Spades says, 'The novel consistently invites us too to
participate in acts of interpretation. Revealing again and again
Emma's interpretive mistakes, giving us the grounds to judge
them and her, it may lure us into believing ourselves more com-
petent than she to understand particularities.'9 In our self-
gratulatory, judgemental mode, we may forget to judge those
who have fed Emma's misreadings. Moreover, we may forget
that, like us, Emma functions within an epistemological system
that fashions (or at least limits) her range of available interpre-
tations. Emma, after all, enacts Michael Riffaterre's postulated
reader, whose 'expectations, logic, and choice-range... reflect
. . . the prevailing ideology or ideologies that may be mobilized
in assessing a situation or individual behavior. These mental
frames of reference, however, are not just habits of thought; they
constitute potential mini-stories, ready to unfold when needed
and ready for reference when alluded to.'10 Given a set of clues,
Emma responds with a limited set of decodings, or mini-stories,
based on the assumptions of her severely limited social context.

Furthermore, Emma misreads because the narratives presented
to her are confusing, incomplete, misleading, and sometimes
purely fictional.
Take, for example, her misreading of Mr Elton's aims. Emma
castigates herself severely for her mistake about him, notably
more for the pain it causes Harriet than for her own misinterpre-
tation. Although she blames herself for having 'taken up the idea
[of his courtship of Harriet]... and made every thing bend to it',
she follows this self-reproach with, '[h]is manners, however, must
have been unmarked, wavering, dubious, or she could not have
been so misled Who could have seen through such thick-
headed nonsense?' (134). She is right; even a rereader of Emma,
knowing the outcome, can empathize with her reaction to the
'jumble' (134) in Mr Elton's behaviour and can understand the
logic behind Emma's misreading. It is consistent with the read-
er's experience, for example, that the object rather than the artist
of a portrait should elicit the kind of romantic gallantry dis-
played by Elton - only a highly distanced, aesthetically inclined
audience feels passion for Leonardo while gazing upon La
Gioconda. Honest readers must also find themselves colluding
with another assumption behind Emma's lack of perception: Elton
is socially and intellectually beneath Emma, and therefore could
not be so foolishly misguided as to court her. We may squirm
uncomfortably when Emma articulates 'how very much he was
her inferior in talent, and all the elegancies of mind . . . he must
know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his supe-
rior' (136), but we must at the same time acknowledge the ra-
tionality of her position, a position validated by the previously
quoted response of Miss Bates.11 If Emma cannot conceive of a
match between herself and Elton, she is guilty less of personal
vanity than of employing 'the prevailing ideology . . . in assess-
ing . . . individual behavior'.
But, it may be objected, the Mr Knightleys see Elton correctly;
Emma herself is forced to concede 'that those brothers had pen-
etration' (135). The answer to this objection lies in gender rela-
tions. Knightley himself offers an explanation for his superior
knowledge of Elton - 'his general way of talking in unreserved
moments, when there are only men present' (66). In a social world
which prohibits frank talk between men and women, and also
considers vulgar any explicit discourse about money and ambi-
tion, Emma has no access to the 'real' Mr Elton. She can judge his
language only from limited experience, as a reader can judge a
text only by placing it in the context of previous reading. Note,
for example, how Emma ascribes to Elton feelings of delicacy
that reflect her own romantic views; when he offers his courtship
riddle, '[t]he speech was more to Emma than to Harriet, which
Emma could understand. There was a deep consciousness about
him, and he found it easier to meet her eye than her friend's'
(71). Furthermore, the Knightley brothers exhibit a kind of gen-
der loyalty in not considering significant the social gulf so clear
to Emma. When warning Emma to 'regulate your behaviour'
(112) toward Elton, John Knightley makes no mention of un-
equal status. Knightley, when he warns Emma of Elton's charac-
ter - 'He is as well acquainted with his own claims, as you can
be with Harriet's... I am convinced that he doesn't mean to
throw himself away' (66) - disputes neither those claims nor
Elton's right to marital ambition. Perpetuating the gender values
of their world, the Knightleys apparently believe that a hand-
some, sociable man can aim as high as he likes, even if 'the
Eltons were nobody' (136). Only the female 'nobodies', Harriet
and Jane Fairfax, are to be either censured for their fanciful ex-
pectations or congratulated for their luck. Emma's misreading of
Elton comes from her participation in and her rejection of pre-
vailing ideologies: she believes in class distinction, but denies the
power of gender hierarchies.
Emma's mistakes about Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax do
not require so detailed a defence as I provide for her misreading
of Elton. Certainly she is wrong in constructing the elaborate
fantasy of Jane's illicit passion for Mr Dixon, but critic after critic
reminds us that in this narrative, Frank Churchill is the manipu-
lative author and Emma the willing but innocent dupe.12 She
misunderstands Frank because he lies to her, but also because
she considers him and herself to be part of a narrative already
constructed. He has merely to act according to this narrative and
to help her enact her preconceptions: 'there was something in the
name, in the idea of Mr Frank Churchill, which always inter-
ested her He seemed . . . quite to belong to her' (118-19). His
behaviour toward her simply confirms communal expectations;

only a resistant, even hostile, reader such as Mr Knightley can
read against the grain and discover '[d]isingenuousness and
double-dealing' (348) and thereby approach the truth. Sympa-
thetic readers, or those accustomed to grant authority to familiar
narratives, necessarily fall into error.
Emma's error regarding Jane Fairfax's secret can be attributed
in part to Frank's mischievous manipulations, but it originates in
Emma's desire to understand mysterious behaviour. Jane's sud-
den and odd decision to come to Highbury, her 'smile of secret
delight' (243) in connection with the piano, and her insistence on
fetching her own letters all indicate, as Emma rightly surmises,
a guilty secret. Since Emma decodes each part of Jane's behavi-
our correctly, why does she come to such a wildly incorrect (and
degrading) conclusion? In part, she does so because of limited
choice-range. Jane's apparent indifference to Frank, together with
his enthusiastic participation in Emma's speculations, forecloses
the possibility that he could be the object of her affections (be-
sides, as I have just suggested, he belongs in a different narra-
tive), and Emma knows of no other young men in Jane's orbit,
'nobody that she could wish to scheme about for her' (168). So
Emma is left with Mr Dixon as the love-interest in Jane's story.
More significantly, I believe, she constructs this narrative be-
cause she is a romantic reader as well as a detector of romances,
and therefore construes Jane as a heroine of romance. A poor but
elegant woman, destined to a life of 'penance and mortification'
(165), obviously nursing some secret, must be a victim of doomed
passion. Depending on her current feeling about Jane, Emma
sees Jane either as an innocent lover, 'unconsciously sucking in
the sad poison' (168; note Emma's melodramatic language), or as
an immodest woman 'cherishing very reprehensible feelings' (243)
- either Fanny Price or Maria Rushworth. The point is that Emma
is trapped by her 'mental frames of reference', which force her
to construct a romance around Jane's mysterious behaviour, a
romance complicated by her own feelings about the heroine.
Whether Emma is being a romantic or a suspicious reader, she is
equally liable to misread Jane.
Emma's misreadings are bad enough, but her culpability, ac-
cording to her critics, increases as she adds misrepresentation to
misinterpretation, becoming a mediator of reality for others.

Jocelyn Harris, in a fairly representative remark, says that when
'Emma makes her ideas of what things are into notions of what
things should and will be, she exercises over other people an
unwarranted licence to change their lives'.13 I want to suggest
that Emma's authority over others, her power to influence belief
and behaviour, has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, I would
argue, Emma's attempts to exert authority are representations of
the difficulty even a powerful narrator faces when she sets out to
mediate reality. These attempts replicate the duality in eighteenth-
century fiction by women alluded to by Susan Sniader Lanser -
'what gets inscribed is not only the impulse toward authoriality
but the difficulty of sustaining it.'14
Emma has a good deal of difficulty sustaining the authorial
persona, and even when she seems successful, traces of the read-
er's resistance remain. Note, for example, what happens after
her horrified rejection of Mrs Weston's romantic speculations
about Mr Knightley and Jane Fairfax. Emma's own story about
Knightley's humane consideration for Jane as well as his thor-
oughly complete life - 'He is as happy as possible by himself;
with his farm, and his sheep, and his library, and all the parish
to manage' (225) - has been suddenly threatened by Mrs Weston's
alternative narrative, and she quickly moves to re-establish her
own version. But even as Emma energetically repudiates Mrs
Weston's position, her panic attests to its power, as does her
exhortation to Mrs Weston - 'Do not put it into his head' (225)
- and her determination to convince her friend of her error. Emma
seems to succeed in her endeavour: 'They combated the point
some time longer in the same way; Emma rather gaining ground
over the mind of her friend; for Mrs Weston was the most used
of the two to yield' (226-7). But clearly Emma has small confi-
dence in her victory, for she feels compelled, with Mrs Weston
as witness, to wring from Knightley a denial of any romantic
interest in Jane Fairfax. Even then, and even in face of Emma's
'triumphantly' confronting her with Knightley's expressed indif-
ference, Mrs Weston resists Emma's reading: 'Why really, dear
Emma, I say that he is so very much occupied by the idea of not
being in love with her, that I should not wonder if it were to end
in his being so at last. Do not beat me' (289). If even Mrs Weston,
accustomed to Emma's authority (Mr Knightley tells Mrs Weston,

'you were receiving a very good education from her, on the very
matrimonial point of submitting your own will, and doing as
you were bid' [38]), opposes Emma's asserted version of reality,
Emma's power must be limited indeed.
A seemingly more promising subject for Emma's authorial
interventions can be found in Harriet Smith, and I agree with
Tony Tanner's statement that Emma 'tries to "write", or rather
"rewrite", Harriet's life.'15 Indeed, in a number of ways, Harriet
is not only an ideal reader but also a cooperative character in her
own biography, rejecting Robert Martin at Emma's urging, be-
lieving Emma's version of Mr Elton's intentions, and even swal-
lowing without criticism radically altered scripts - the discovery
of Mr Elton's real object, Emma's revised notion of 'matches of
greater disparity' (406). But without jettisoning my own argu-
ment about Emma's influence over Harriet's reading of the world,
I want to foreground the surprisingly frequent resistance Harriet
opposes to Emma's authority.
Laura G. Mooneyham, discussing Emma as Harriet's ghost-
writer, says that '[s]uch linguistic control over another's pen
bespeaks the more inclusive control Emma wields over Harriet'.16
From the very beginning of their association, however, Emma
has had to work to overcome Harriet's own opinions. In their
first discussion about Robert Martin (28-34), Emma's assertive
denigrations elicit from Harriet a series of bleating 'To be sure's,
but they rarely win real assent. When Emma poses the non-
question 'He does not read?' Harriet corrects her with a quick
'Oh, yes!' before she modifies her response. She counters Emma's
conviction of the Martins' poverty with 'But they live very com-
fortably.' If the grain of the text did not make it so difficult to see
Harriet as a wit, one could even imagine that she plays with
Emma when, after Emma's warning that an imprudent marriage
would make Harriet vulnerable to 'people who would take pleas-
ure in degrading you', Harriet answers 'But while I visit at
Hartfield, and you are so kind to me, Miss Woodhouse, I am not
afraid of what any body can do.' Later, trying to convince Harriet
that Martin is beneath her, Emma has to resort to hyperbole -
she has to characterize him as 'clownish', 'awkward', and des-
tined to become 'a completely gross, vulgar farmer' (32-3). Even
such forceful language is insufficient; Emma eventually has to

shift ground and repeat 'some warm personal praise which she
had drawn from Mr Elton, and now did full justice to' (34), much
as a mother distracts a child bent on playing with the wrong toy
by extolling the superior attractions of a more appropriate one.
Distraction is a good tactic, but only temporarily effective.
Harriet's attraction to Mr Martin keeps erupting throughout the
narrative, and Emma must remain constantly vigilant, actively
intervening to repress such resurgences of Harriet's natural incli-
nations. Thus, when Martin's letter of proposal arrives, Emma
has to exert her authority 'as a friend, and older than yourself
(52) to combat Harriet's desire to accept the offer. Once again,
she has to resort to exaggeration - ' You confined to the society
of the illiterate and vulgar all your life' (54) - and substitute an
alternative, more attractive fiction: the romantic narrative of Mr
Elton sighing over Harriet's portrait. Harriet's prepossessions
can be countered only by presenting her with another romance,
and by exerting authority harshly, as when Emma contrives to
have Harriet insult the Martins with a fourteen-minute visit (186).
At the end, of course, all interventions become irrelevant as
Harriet returns to her original opinion: 'The fact was, as Emma
could now acknowledge, that Harriet had always liked Robert
Martin; and that his continuing to love her had been irresistible'
(481).
Read as a narrative about the reader's resistance to inappropri-
ate authorial manipulations, Harriet's story is reassuring. After
all, none of Emma's falsifications about the 'reality' of Robert
Martin's character and motives does permanent damage to him
or to Harriet. But together with this consolatory vision of the
eventual impotence of inappropriate authoritative manipulations,
Austen also gives us a cautionary tale about authorial interven-
tions and self-perpetuating power, power that slips beyond the
control of the author herself. When Knightley accuses Emma of
giving Harriet a 'sense of superiority' (63), he also points out the
danger of such false ambition: 'Nothing so easy as for a young
lady to raise her expectations too h i g h . . . . [I]f you encourage her
to expect to marry greatly, and teach her to be satisfied with
nothing less than a man of consequence and large fortune, she
may be a parlour-boarder at Mrs Goddard's all the rest of her
life' (64-5). Unlike those who see Emma as romancer, he casts

Emma as a writer of realistic fiction, the kind, according to Dr
Johnson, most likely to influence 'the young, the ignorant, and
the idle'.17 Knightley fears that Emma will feed Harriet's sense of
consequence, and this view is partially vindicated when Harriet
imagines herself to be good enough for him. But Austen con-
structs a narrative that allows an escape from this quandary,
compressing into a swift avowal the kind of awakening that earlier
novelists such as Charlotte Lennox or Eaton Stannard Barrett
explored at length; 'having once owned that she had been pre-
sumptuous and silly, and self-deceived' (481), Harriet quickly
abandons any notion of herself as Cinderella. Indeed, she has
never quite accepted Emma's fiction about herself, always doubt-
ing even as she hopes.
The real danger in Emma's authoritative fiction is not that
Harriet learns to think too highly of herself, but that she cannot
be retrained to think less highly of others, specifically of Mr and
Mrs Elton. Long before Mr Elton's proposal to her, Emma has
developed a kind of tolerant contempt for him, and one indica-
tion that she is not (as Knightley asserts) blinded by her 'infatu-
ation about that girl' (61) is that she thinks him good enough for
Harriet even though 'he does sigh and languish, and study for
compliments rather more than I could endure as a principal'
(49). She herself can endure Elton only briefly but happily con-
signs Harriet to a lifetime of his company: 'there was a sort of
parade in his speeches which was very apt to incline her to laugh.
She ran away to indulge the inclination, leaving the tender and
sublime of pleasure to Harriet's share' (82). Emma has been a
disingenuous narrator, deliberately presenting as hero a charac-
ter she herself despises. When her plot falls apart, when the
romantic hero turns out to be an ambitious snob, Emma discov-
ers the difficulties of undoing what she has created: 'Could she
but have given Harriet her feelings about it all! She had talked
her into love; but alas! she was not so easily to be talked out of
it' (183). The power of Emma's earlier, misleading narrative sur-
vives her own attempts to disabuse Harriet, whose impression-
able mind clings tenaciously to Emma's false characterization of
Elton, and even admires Augusta Hawkins. Emma experiences
the frustration of overly successful authority when she finds that
'it was heavy work to be for ever convincing without producing

any effect, for ever agreed to, without being able to make their
opinions the same' (267). Competing with her own fiction, Emma
discovers her limits as authority-figure. Only direct, unambigu-
ous experience has the power to dissipate romance; only the
Eltons' cruel humiliation of Harriet erases Emma's fiction:
Harriet's 'eyes were suddenly opened The fever was over'
(332). The monster that Emma has created is a gullible and ob-
stinate reader, susceptible not to the author's own clearer vision,
but only to the brutalities of personal experience.
If avowed partisans like Mrs Weston and Harriet Smith resist
Emma's authority, Mr Knightley, who 'will tell you truths while
I can' (375), actively contests it, and the text in large part vindi-
cates his view. Knightley proves to be right about Elton, right
about Harriet's probable ancestry, and right about Jane and Frank.
Of course, Austen levels some characteristic irony at this para-
gon, as in the superbly compressed description of his attitude
toward Frank Churchill: 'He had found her agitated and low. -
Frank Churchill was a villain. - He heard her declare that she
had never loved him. Frank Churchill's character was not des-
perate. - She was his own Emma, by hand and word, when they
returned into the house; and if he could have thought of Frank
Churchill then, he might have deemed him a very good sort of
fellow' (433). This kind of mockery serves to humanize Knightley,
perhaps to make his authority more palatable. But it also allows
the reader to look for less obvious (and less attractive) prejudices
in Knightley's character - prejudices that compromise his au-
thority as truth-teller and mediator of reality. Moreover, in sub-
verting Knightley's interpretative authority, Austen allows the
reader to question the authority of the narrative voice, for the
text frequently aligns itself with Knightley, even while exposing
the weaknesses in his ideology.
I have already alluded to Knightley's gender bias regarding
Harriet and Mr Elton, and to his sense that a good wife must
submit her will to her husband's. Indeed, he explicitly connects
marriage and servitude when he says 'Miss Taylor has been used
to have two persons to please; she will now have but one' (11).
To Mr Knightley, such inequality in marriage is so natural as to
require no commentary, and marriage itself so desirable that
unequal power involves no sacrifice. Marriage is desirable for a

woman because it provides security; Emma, according to Mr
Knightley, must be pleased at Miss Taylor's marriage because
'[s]he knows how much the marriage is to Miss Taylor's advan-
tage; she knows how very acceptable it must be at Miss Taylor's
time of life to be settled in a home of her own, and how impor-
tant to her to be secure of a comfortable provision' (11). In
Knightley's world, marriage is the only respectable situation for
a woman, so that Emma's declared choice of celibacy 'means just
nothing at all' (41). Such a conviction, I suggest, betrays lack of
imagination and perception; unlike Emma herself, Knightley fails
to distinguish between the single women already in possession
of 'Fortune . . . employment... consequence' (84) and Miss Bates
the old maid or Miss Taylor the governess.
Because spinsters are so pitiable, Mr Knightley patronizes them.
Miss Bates and Jane Fairfax are his pet charities, recipients of his
patriarchal interventions. Like most philanthropists, he romanti-
cizes the objects of his largesse, seeing them as deserving inno-
cents, incapable of calculation or duplicity. (In this, by the way,
he differs from Emma, who 'was very compassionate', but 'had
no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those, for
whom education had done so little' [86]). Thus he cannot enter-
tain a suspicious reading of Miss Bates as anything other than
simple and thoroughly good-hearted. I want, however, to offer a
counter-reading of Miss Bates's role in the Box Hill episode, ar-
guing that she is neither so simple, nor so candid (in Austen's
sense of the term) as Knightley's reading makes her, and that
Emma instinctively reacts to Miss Bates's performance of herself
when she humiliates her in public. In taking on Miss Bates, I risk
the accusation levelled at Emma by Alison G. Sulloway, who
sees her as 'ungenerously indulging herself in the national sport
of spinster-baiting', and oppose the critical position that Miss
Bates 'is constitutionally incapable of bending facts to her own
purposes She suggests reality itself Reality, the world -
in its bustling, garrulous, inartistic disorganisation'.18 But, with-
out claiming that Miss Bates is a reincarnation of Lucy Steele and
Mrs Norris, I suggest that she is more manipulative than a wholly
sympathetic reading might indicate. Miss Bates, accustomed to
playing the indulged fool, responds to Frank Churchill's game
with typical self-mockery: T shall be sure to say three dull things

as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan't I?'. The text parentheti-
cally adds that she does so 'looking around with the most good-
humoured dependence on every body's assent' (370). In fact, the
outcome shows that Miss Bates counts on every body's contra-
diction, or at least silence, for when Emma 'could not resist' her
opening, Miss Bates immediately turns to Knightley with a state-
ment guaranteed to put Emma in the wrong: T must make myself
very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an
old friend' (371). When Knightley later berates Emma for her
gibe, he recounts Miss Bates's 'candour and generosity. I wish
you could have heard her honouring your forbearance, in being
able to pay her such attentions . . . when her society must be so
irksome' (375). As a piece of rhetorical manipulation, Miss Bates's
strategy is brilliant. In forgiving Emma, in characterizing herself
as the injuring party, in praising Emma's tolerance, she achieves
exactly the opposite effect: both Knightley and Emma herself
intensify Emma's rudeness, describing her behaviour as 'unfeel-
ing', 'insolent', 'brutal', and 'cruel' (374-6). And Emma, of course,
resolves to be doubly attentive to her victim.
Obviously, such a reading of Miss Bates has to account for the
narrative endorsement of her. After all, she enters the story with
a good character reference: 'It was her own universal good-will
and contented temper which worked such wonders.... The sim-
plicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful
spirit, were a recommendation to every body and a mine of fe-
licity to herself (21). My point is not that this characterization is
false, but that it is falsely closed and authoritative, misleading in
its absolute fixing of Miss Bates. The reader who accepts this
authoritative view cannot really think about Miss Bates, because
there is nothing to think about, no complexity to detect and
unravel. Furthermore, accepting Miss Bates's happy innocence
paradoxically diminishes her because it obscures the practical,
material conditions of her life, a life necessarily requiring econo-
mies, privations, contrivances, a dependence that makes her 'most
come-at-able' (20), and an indebtedness that elicits 'dreadful grati-
tude' (380). When Miss Bates talks of Miss Wallis's graciousness
to her though 'it cannot be for the value of our custom' (237), we
need to see beyond her simple narrative and guess that such
attention from a woman who 'can be uncivil and give a very

rude answer' (236) is most likely bought with a high degree of
humble conciliation. Living 'in a very small way' (21), 'sunk from
the comforts she was born to' (375), Miss Bates must contrive to
remain an object of her neighbours' benevolence. Her transpar-
ent garrulousness, then, can serve as a screen for the irritation
evoked by eternal indebtedness as well as for the expression of
need, as when she lets slip to Mr Knightley that his gift of apples
needs replenishing (238-9); her 'simplicity and cheerfulness' can
be a strategy for maintaining both dignity and a full larder.
Reading Miss Bates sympathetically as Knightley does, in fact
denies the fullness of her complex and difficult life, just as read-
ing Emma as simple text about the awakening to reality of a
misguided heroine would deny the proliferating ironies.
Jane Fairfax presents a different kind of epistemological prob-
lem for the reader. If we take Knightley as our authority, we
forgive her for what Mrs Weston calls her 'one great deviation
from the strict rule of right' (400) and make her the heroine of a
different romance from the one that Emma had erroneously con-
structed. In this one, too, the heroine's overpowering love is the
central feature - Emma connects her with Juliet when she says
'Of such, one may almost say, that "the world is not their's, nor
the world's law"' (400). The basis for a quick forgiveness for 'a
system of hypocrisy and deceit' (399) is an essentialist reading of
Jane Fairfax's character and motives; Mr Knightley articulates all
of Highbury's attitude when he congratulates Frank on acquir-
ing 'the love of such a woman - the disinterested love, for Jane
Fairfax's character vouches for her disinterestedness . . . the pur-
ity of her heart is not to be doubted' (428).
But by what authority are we to accept this romantic reading
of Jane Fairfax? The general approbation of Highbury? Clearly
not, because Highbury isn't very good at reading character, as
we learn from its response to Mrs Elton: 'the greater part of her
new acquaintance, disposed to commend, or not in the habit of
judging, following the lead of Miss Bates's good-will or taking it
for granted that the bride must be as clever and as agreeable as
she professed herself, were very well satisfied' (281). Jane Fairfax's
world accepts self-presentation as truth, so its naive reading has
no authority. The narrator is silent about Jane's character - her
entrance into the story is unaccompanied by any character evalu-

ation other than the indirect and ambiguous comment that 'liv-
ing constantly with right-minded and well-informed people [the
Campbells], her heart and understanding had received every
advantage of discipline and culture' (164). We have, of course,
Jane's own words of self-accusation and apology, but even an
inept reader knows not to trust a character's own assessment of
self. Why then do we tend to accept Mr Knightley's confidence
in Jane's purity? I suggest that we do so because authoritative
statements turn us into passive readers, dependent on clear nar-
rative direction, waiting, like members of Highbury society, for
someone to lead us to an opinion.
This, however, Jane Austen declines to do, at least in the case
of Jane Fairfax. Instead, she provides material susceptible to dif-
ferent readings. We may choose to agree with Highbury (and
Donwell and Hartfield and Randalls), or we may choose a darker
interpretation. We can construct a narrative in which Jane Fairfax,
destined for the 'penance and mortification' (165) of life as a
governess but possessing 'superiority both in beauty and acquire-
menf (165), decides, like Charlotte Lucas, that she needs a hus-
band. If we want to, we can even accuse her of a degree of
self-dramatization worthy of Becky Sharp. In such a narrative,
Jane's speeches about her bleak future can be read as manipula-
tive performances, as when she characterizes employment agen-
cies as 'offices for the sale - not quite of human flesh - but of
human intellecf (300) and wonders whether slaves could be more
miserable than governesses. John Knightley's conventional gen-
eralizations about letters elicit from her a pathetic distinction: 'I
must not hope to be ever situated as you are, in the midst of
every dearest connection You have every body dearest to you
always at hand, I, probably, never shall again' (293-4). It is pos-
sible to read these remarks as self-conscious performances, espe-
cially since they come on the heels of a letter from Frank, a letter
which has given Jane 'an air of greater happiness than usual - a
glow of both complexion and spirits' (298), and has strengthened
her resolve to resist Mrs Elton's urgent attempts to find her a job.
In portraying herself as trapped in a life of deprivation, in a
future without prospects or hope, Jane Fairfax here replicates
Frank's deliberately misleading performance as Emma's lover.
Because Jane Fairfax has been construed as a romantic heroine

by Highbury and by the text, she is not held accountable for
these untruths. Nor is she blamed for her petty rudenesses to
Emma, Emma herself articulating an exoneration of Jane's con-
duct: 'In Jane's eyes she had been a rival; and well might any
thing she could offer of assistance or regard be repulsed... as
far as her mind could disengage itself from the injustice and
selfishness of angry feeling, she acknowledged that Jane Fairfax
would have neither elevation nor happiness beyond her desert'
(403). If we take as authoritative the text's stated view of Jane as
formulated by Knightley and ultimately by Emma herself, we
read her as almost unflawed; if, on the other hand, we choose to
do a less romantic reading of Jane, the text provides ample
material. Emma, as we have seen, trains the reader to be suspi-
cious; as Wayne C Booth points out, Emma 'works hard to alert
the careful reader to the need for a double vision - a combination
of joyful credulity about the love plot and shrewd sophistication
about the characters of men and women'.19 Booth's language
posits a happy ending for readers: that is, we will find a balance,
a middle ground that combines two opposing responses, and
that our double vision will somehow allow us to attain a fuller,
truer understanding of both text and world. We will be romantic
and cynical at the same time, and we will accept authoritative
mediation of reality even as we question authorial manipulations.
Emma, I suggest, disallows such a reassuring view of coopera-
tion between narrator and reader even as it asserts a kind of
authoritative closure. Contradictions and inconsistencies in the
last chapters point to continuing gaps even as the narrative tidily
pairs off lovers and explains mysteries. Emma may hope for a
thorough understanding between herself and Knightley, antici-
pating that the 'disguise, equivocation, mystery, so hateful to her
to practise, might soon be over' (475), but the narrative has point-
edly stated that '[s]eldom, very seldom, does complete truth
belong to human disclosure' (431), and the reader does have to
hope that Emma will not expose Harriet to Mr Knightley's won-
dering pity. And Emma, although she explains to herself part of
Harriet's reason for accepting Robert Martin, yet describes
Harriet's behaviour as 'unaccountable' and 'unintelligible' (481).
More significantly, contentment and closure come only by
repressing knowledge, by erasing or trivializing the past. Harriet

obliterates memories of her earlier infatuations; Jane Fairfax can-
not 'bear such recollections' (480) as will revive her past indiscre-
tions; Emma herself urges that she and Jane 'forgive each other
at once' (459) and watches Harriet wed 'with so complete a sat-
isfaction, as no remembrances, even connected with Mr Elton as
he stood before them, could impair. - Perhaps, indeed, at that
time she scarcely saw Mr Elton, but as the clergyman whose
blessing at the altar might next fall on herself (482-3). Such con-
venient amnesia may be necessary to 'the perfect happiness of
the union' (484), but it cannot serve as a model for reading be-
cause only the most inept reader forgets 'the system of hypocrisy
and deceit' practised by a narrator who holds all the cards.
To believe in Austen's tidy ending is to re-enact Harriet's naive
acceptance of Emma's romantic constructs, which erase social
realities like illegitimacy and fantasize about adulterous liaisons;
to deny the happiness of the three marriages is to reject the
authorial voice; and to claim a superior double vision is to flatten
and simplify a reading experience that has tended to fragment
rather than synthesize.20 The dilemma for readers of this text lies
in its very honesty, which exposes authorial manipulations and
readerly ineptitude at the same time that it asserts narrative
omniscience. Readers of Emma cannot help but implicate Austen
in Emma's shrewd characterization of Frank Churchill: 'I am sure
it was a source of high entertainment to you, to feel you were
taking us all in' (478). Perhaps it is not the taking-in that troubles
us; perhaps it is, rather, Austen's demonstration of the ways in
which a text does take us in. And when both our passivity and
our assertiveness as reader/interpreters lead us equally wrong
(or at least to equal confusion), we either create a fictional coher-
ence or express the kind of contemptuous anger articulated by
P.J.M. Scott: 'it seems fairly evident to me that the book has been
written to indulge, via identification with its heroine, exactly this
ugly fantasy, this craving for (after all, pretty base kinds of) ac-
ceptance and support by which all selves are assailed.'21 Perhaps,
with characteristic self-awareness and indirection, Austen was
referring to the narrative persona when she said of Emma: 'I am
going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much
like,'22 At the end of multiple rereadings of Emma, this reader
finds the best clue to reading the text on its first page: that is, to
stop depending on authorial interventions, 'highly esteeming
[Miss Austen's] judgement, but directed chiefly by [my] own'
(37).
6
Straight Talk in Persuasion
'Art' is an important word in Austen criticism. Used admiringly,
it turns up in almost all discussion of her work, its centrality
asserted in book titles from Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her
Art (1939) to Roger Gard's Jane Austen's Novels: The Art of Clarity
(1992).1 When writing about Jane Austen's art, critics generally
refer to her narrative control, her subtle indirections, her mastery
of refracted discourse. Emma is usually taken to represent the
apogee of this artistry, while Persuasion is often seen in slightly
different terms - sometimes as a shift to a new Romantic mode,
and sometimes as a draft which has yet to attain Emma's level of
polish.2 Of course, no reader of Persuasion argues that it is not
artful, and its subtleties are usually organized into three catego-
ries: control of viewpoint through a particularly reliable and
admirable heroine, use of indirect speech and physical gesture as
modes of communication, and careful layering of narrative voice
and characters' speech. My reading of Persuasion does not deny
any of these artistic techniques, but argues that even while Austen
deploys them, she simultaneously questions her own artful con-
structs, inscribing into her text interrogations and even subver-
sions of her own subtleties. Persuasion disavows some of Austen's
habitual narrative practices, making room for a voice that may or
may not be more romantic, but is certainly more apt to question
cool certainty and narrative distance. In Persuasion, I suggest,
Austen takes away the code book that had allowed readers to
interpret, in familiar ways, the subtleties of her text, forcing us to
acknowledge our own bemusement and to engage not with a
disembodied narrative voice, but with aflesh-and-bloodauthor.
* * *
Anne Elliot, that heroine 'almost too good' for her creator, is
unquestionably the centre of the novel, and, to some readers, the
99
infallible and dependable locus of authority.3 The narrator's en-

dorsement of Anne is strong and explicit, from the early descrip-
tion of her 'elegance of mind and sweetness of character' to the
comparison, in Chapter Twenty, between the two sisters' happi-
ness, 'the origin of one all selfish vanity, of the other all generous
attachment' (5,185). Along the way, Anne's virtue and authority
are demonstrated in a number of ways: in her dutiful exertions
at Kellynch, when she, rather than the official heads of the fam-
ily, undertakes the 'trying' task of 'going to every house in the
parish, as a sort of take-leave' (39), while Sir Walter merely pre-
pares 'condescending bows for all the afflicted tenantry and
cottagers who might have had a hint to shew themselves' (36); in
her services to all the Musgroves, from attending the injured
young Charles to hearing Henrietta's plans for marriage; and in
her loyal friendship to Mrs Smith. All these actions, as much as
narrative statement and representation of internal monologue,
attest to what Marilyn Butler characterizes as the 'the inference
. . . that Anne's inner life has an unassailable quality and truth'.4
Readers of Austen know, of course, that no character entirely
escapes Austen's ironic vision - not Jane Bennet, not Fanny Price,
not George Knightley, and decidedly not Anne Elliot. Anne's
romanticism, for example, is gently mocked in deflationary pas-
sages like the one following Louisa and Wentworth's dialogue
about love - 'Anne could not immediately fall into a quotation
again' (85) - or the narrative commentary after Anne becomes
convinced of Wentworth's returning heart: 'Prettier musings of
high-wrought love and eternal constancy, could never have passed
along the streets of Bath It was almost enough to spread
purification and perfume all the way' (192). I would suggest that
the irony directed against Anne is wider and deeper than is
encompassed in these moments, and that it has precisely to do
with 'high-wrought love and eternal constancy'.
Anne sees her feeling for Wentworth as permanent and inde-
pendent of time, place or outcome. That conviction surely lies
behind her declaration to Captain Harville that 'AH the privilege
I claim for my own sex . . . is that of loving longest, when exis-
tence or when hope is gone' (235). Distinguishing her love from
the situation-driven romances of the Musgrove sisters or of Mary
and Charles, Anne construes herself and Wentworth as a couple
Straight Talk in Persuasion 101
naturally made for one another. Thinking back on their first court-
ship, she claims that, 'With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral
and Mrs Croft... there could have been no two hearts so open,
no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so
beloved' (63-4). Anne's vision of a match made in heaven must
be read, however, against the narrator's more prosaic articula-
tion of the intimacy: 'He was, at that time, a remarkably fine
young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and bril-
liancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, mod-
esty, taste, and feeling. - Half the sum of attraction on either
side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she
had hardly any body to love' (26). In effect, the narrator depicts
the Anne/Wentworth romance in the same way that Anne char-
acterizes the intimacy between Louisa and Benwick - 'Where
could have been the attraction? The answer soon presented itself.
It had been in situation. They had been thrown together several
weeks' (166-7). In other words, Louisa and Benwick, whose en-
gagement elicits such general astonishment, have re-enacted the
first romance of Anne and Wentworth, thereby rendering the
earlier courtship less exalted and special than Anne imagines it
to be.
The corollary to high-wrought love, is of course, eternal con-
stancy, which both Wentworth and Anne claim. Wentworth's
assertion that he was 'never inconstant' (237) hardly demands
rebuttal; after all, he enters the text 'ready to fall in love with all
the speed which a clear head and quick taste could allow', with
'a heart, in short, for any pleasing young woman who came in
his way, excepting Anne Elliot' (61). Even if we interpret his
determination as resentful self-deception, it is still not constancy,
either of feeling or behaviour. Anne, on the other hand, seems to
be genuinely constant, nursing her hopeless love for more than
seven years. But how much of this constancy is due to her strong
immutable love?5 This is what the text says:
[T]ime had softened down much, perhaps nearly all of a pecu-

liar attachment to him, - but she had been too dependant on
time alone; no aid had been given in change of place . . . or in
any novelty or enlargement of society. - No one had ever come
within the Kellynch circle, who could bear a comparison with
Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. No second

attachment, the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient
cure, at her time of life, had been possible to the nice tone of
her mind, the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of
the society around them. (28; emphasis added)
The narrator, then, reminds us that Anne's constancy may be

externally imposed rather than internally motivated, a result of
'the small limits of the society around them', of 'the sameness
and the elegance, the prosperity and the nothingness, of... a
long, uneventful residence in one country circle' (9). For over
seven years Anne has inhabited one country circle that can ap-
parently offer only Charles Musgrove and Charles Hayter as
suitors for its young women; Anne's constancy, therefore, is a
contingent rather than an absolute quality, as she herself par-
tially acknowledges when she tells Harville that women 'live at
home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us' (232).6
Once Anne Elliot escapes the confined circle of Kellynch and
Uppercross, she exhibits, in spite of rekindled feeling for Went-
worth, a very healthy interest in other men, an interest not en-
tirely compatible with hopeless fidelity. Aware of the admiration
of the as-yet-unidentified Mr Elliot, Anne not only enjoys his
attention, but prompted by nothing more than his appreciative
look and gentlemanly manners, she 'felt that she should like to
know who he was' (105). Equally responsive to Benwick's inter-
est, she not only 'gladly [gives] him all her attention as long as
attention was possible' (109), but also turns Louisa's accident to
good account: 'united as they all seemed by the distress of the
day, she felt an increasing degree of good-will towards him, and
a pleasure even in thinking that it might, perhaps, be the occa-
sion of continuing their acquaintance' (115). In other words, even
while she is painfully attuned to Wentworth, Anne is able to feel
and articulate to herself her interest in other men, connecting her
improved looks to 'the silent admiration of her cousin' and 'hop-
ing that she was to be blessed with a second spring of youth and
beauty' (124). She eagerly anticipates a visit from Benwick, un-
able to 'return from any stroll of solitary indulgence... or any
visit of charity in the village, without wondering whether she
might see him or hear of him' (133). Such alertness to other men,
to potential admirers, demonstrates a receptivity which argues

against an absolutely committed heart.
Anne's desire to be loved and courted, to 'enter a state for
which she [Lady Russell] held her to be peculiarly fitted' (29)
and her equally strong desire for one particular lover jointly
inform the complex and shifting narrative of her relationship
with Mr Elliot. Although Anne assures Wentworth that she never
entertained the possibility of marrying her cousin, and though
she tells herself that she 'never could accept him' even to become
'what her mother had been' (160), her rejection is neither so cer-
tain nor so easy as these assurances imply. Seeing Mr Elliot again
at Bath, Anne is scarcely less besotted than her father and sister:
'He was quite as good-looking as he had appeared at Lyme, his
countenance improved by speaking, and his manners were so
exactly what they ought to be, so polished, so easy, so particu-
larly agreeable, that she could compare him in excellence to only
one person's manners. They were not the same, but they were,
perhaps, equally good' (143). Like Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot
instinctively compares two men who interest her - recall that
Elizabeth says of Colonel Fitzwilliam that she 'was reminded by
her own satisfaction in being with him, as well as by his evident
admiration of her, of her former favourite George Wickham' (PP
180). And like Elizabeth again, she is not as certain about her
own feelings as she would like to believe.
It may be objected that Anne clearly articulates, quite early in
their intimacy, suspicions about Mr Elliot's character and mo-
tives, but such suspicions do not entirely overcome her attraction
to this admiring and persistent wooer. Chapter Nine of the sec-
ond volume of Persuasion, which tends to remain in the reader's
mind as entirely devoted to Mrs Smith's revelations about Mr
Elliot, also exposes the shifting, confused state of Anne's emo-
tions. Anne begins the day with 'a great deal of good will to-
wards him', regretting that she must hurt him, and implicitly
acknowledges the possibility of marrying him: 'How she might
have felt, had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was
not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth' (192).
Then, after hearing Mrs Smith's narrative, Anne not only credits
every word her friend says, but asserts that Mrs Smith only
confirms what she already knew: 'you tell me nothing which
does not accord with what I have known, or could imagine.... I

have heard nothing which really surprised me' (207). In other
words, Anne seems to say, her opinion of Mr Elliot is already so
low that it can easily accommodate Mrs Smith's characterization
of him as 'black at heart, hollow and black!' (199). But if that is
indeed the case, how can she have contemplated being his wife,
or even his intimate friend? That she did so speculate is clear
from her sense of reprieve at the end of the chapter: 'Anne could
just acknowledge within herself such a possibility of having been
induced to marry him, as made her shudder at the idea of the
misery which must have followed' (211). Later, in the glow of
her renewed engagement to Wentworth, she can once again pity
Mr Elliot (245), as she had done before Mrs Smith's story had
cancelled all compassion, when she had felt 'There was no longer
any thing of tenderness due to him.... Pity for him was all over'
(212).
I enumerate these vacillations and inconsistencies not in order
to deny Anne's goodness or truth, but to make a point about the
pitfalls awaiting the reader of Persuasion. If the good and truthful
heroine falls into misrepresentations and self-deception, then how
can we trust her to guide us through the complexities of a text
full of the 'manoeuvres of selfishness and duplicity' (207)? Isn't
there, in fact, some duplicitous manoeuvring in Anne's interro-
gation of Admiral Croft as she tries to ascertain Wentworth's
feelings about Louisa's engagement to Benwick? When she ex-
presses her hope that 'there is nothing in Captain Wentworth's
manner of writing to make you suppose he thinks himself ill-
used by his friend' and adds that she would 'be very sorry that
such a friendship as has subsisted between him and Captain
Benwick should be destroyed' (172-3), Anne disingenuously
cloaks her selfish desire in disinterested concern. Because we
consider love a worthier motive than ambition, we do not fault
her for this as we fault Mr Elliot's careful surveillance of Sir
Walter. Because the text presses us toward admiring and loving
Anne, we overlook her solipsism in privileging her own sorrow
for a lost lover over Benwick's grief for a dead one (97). And
because we have shared her suffering through Wentworth's flir-
tation with Louisa, we even applaud her uncharitable specula-
tion, after Louisa's fall, about firmness of character - 'whether it
might not strike him, that, like all other qualities of the mind, it
should have its proportions and limits' (116). These lapses, like
the ironies surrounding Anne's constancy, remind us that once
again we are dealing with a fallible Austen heroine; at the same
time, all readers notice the extent to which we are dependent on
Anne's authority, an authority at least partially resting on claims
to objectivity. P.J.M. Scott alludes to this doubleness when he
says that 'so much of the narrative deals directly or indirectly
with her feelings that we seem locked into the se//-concern of a
heroine who after all is allegedly not egoistic. Her uprightness
becomes too self-conscious for us, her virtue the theme too much
of her vision.... [T]he issue which has to be dramatized and
brought to life for us is the quality of individual perception in a
world where knowledge is partial.'7 While agreeing absolutely
with the second part of this assessment, I would argue that the
problem of self-conscious virtue is not the crucial one. What is
crucial is Austen's representation of a problem having to do with
readers' expectations: that is, our habit of assuming that virtue
equals authority, and that a good heroine's point of view should
be unblemished by self-deception or misrepresentation. Anne
Elliot is indeed the most admirable of Austen's heroines, but she
is not a picture of perfection and cannot claim interpretive au-
thority from a position of wholly disinterested observation.
* * *
Perhaps, however, Anne can claim authority simply because she

is a subtle and careful reader, especially of obscure texts. Indeed,
as many critics have pointed out, Persuasion demonstrates the
importance of interpreting oblique, coded language and gesture.
Judy Van Sickle Johnson says that '[p]hysical gestures and ex-
changed glances are crucial to the reunion of Anne Elliot and
Captain Wentworth.' Laura G. Mooneyham and Tony Tanner
explain why this is so, Mooneyham arguing that '[s]ince only
indirect communication is allowed in the world of Persuasion,
Anne must learn to use language's potential for communicating
hidden meaning', and Tanner referring to the problem of 'pri-
vate communication in a predominantly public world in which
various taboos on certain forms of direct address between the
sexes are still operative'. Janis P. Stout offers an explanation

having to do with romance rather than propriety: 'certain kinds
of emotions have a quality of ineffability, putting them beyond
the representation afforded by everyday speech.'8 Whatever the
reason, Anne and Wentworth do indeed spend a good deal of
time decoding each other's indirect speech and gestures. How-
ever, even as Austen presents a courtship conducted through
indirect communication, she problematizes the whole enterprise,
in part by showing how other characters engage in the same
form of coded communication and in part by demonstrating the
ultimate inefficacy of indirection and subtle interpretation.
The first practitioner of indirect communication we meet is
that 'civil, cautious lawyer' (11) Mr Shepherd. Carefully manipu-
lating Sir Walter's impulsive threat to quit Kellynch Hall rather
than economize, he not only prepares his client for the sudden
and fortuitous appearance of a naval officer as tenant, but also
manages to rein in the baronet's arrogance, so that he is 'flattered
into his very best and most polished behaviour by Mr Shep-
herd's assurances of his being known, by report, to the Admiral,
as a model of good breeding' (32). Like Anne at Uppercross, Mr
Shepherd can 'listen patiently, soften every grievance, and ex-
cuse each to the other' (46). Sir Walter himself can master indi-
rection, as he does in response to Anne and Wentworth's first
engagement: 'without actually withholding his consent, or say-
ing it should never be, [he] gave it all the negative of great as-
tonishment, great coldness, great silence' (26), thus expressing
denial without direct speech. Indeed, readable gesture and indi-
rection seem to be universal in Persuasion, from Charles Hayter's
jealous reprimands to young Walter to the 'smiles and intelligent
glances... [of] two or three of the lady visitors, as if they be-
lieved themselves quite in the secret' (222) of Anne's romance
with Mr Elliot. Mr Elliot himself communicates with Anne indi-
rectly, as when he refers to Sir Walter's friendship with 'those
who are beneath him': 'He looked, as he spoke, to the seat which
Mrs Clay had been lately occupying, a sufficient explanation of
what he particularly meant' (151). Anne's other admirer, Benwick,
also reveals meaning through action and gesture, repeating, 'with
such tremulous feeling the various lines which image a broken
heart' and looking 'so entirely as if he meant to be understood'
that Anne feels compelled to warn him away from too much
poetry. Surrounded by coded gesture and speech, Anne is a
practised and generally self-assured interpreter.
The text to which she devotes the most attention is, of course,
Wentworth, and Anne often articulates her confidence as a reader
of his codes. She is particularly certain of his moments of hidden
contempt. His facial expression convinces Anne that he loathed
the unfortunate Dick Musgrove, though 'it was too transient... to
be detected by any who understood him less than herself (67);
his 'artificial, assenting smile, followed by a contemptuous glance'
(86) informs her that he despises Mary's snobbery toward the
Hayters; and the 'disdain in his eye', together with 'a momentary
expression of contempt' (226-7), convey to her his resistance to
the Elliots' belated social patronage. All this Anne knows, how-
ever, because 'she knew him' (226); that is, she can decode his
subtle gestures of contempt in the context of her previous knowl-
edge of him - knowledge gained, presumably, from earlier, di-
rect conversations about sailors or society. Anne replicates, in
other words, the kind of interpretative strategy commonly used
by readers of Persuasion. Readers 'know' Austen; twentieth-cen-
tury readers, especially, have access not only to the finished and
unfinished works but also to her juvenile writings and extant
letters, and base their interpretations on that knowledge. Suspi-
cion of the charm and general plausibility of Mr Elliot derives
from our acquaintance with Willoughby, Wickham and Crawford;
we know that the heroine who helplessly witnesses her belov-
ed's attentions to another woman will very likely win him in the
end; we know that Lady Russell's pleasure in Bath society is a
weakness, since the Austen sisters both disliked the town; 9 and
we know that Wentworth's determination not to marry Anne,
like Emma's resolution never to marry, 'means just nothing at
all' (E 41). In other words, we decode this text, uncover intention
and meaning, understand veiled judgements because of our pre-
vious knowledge of other Austen texts. Like Anne reading
Wentworth, we read Persuasion with a confidence generated by
earlier encounters with text.
But how accurate are Anne's readings of Wentworth? W.A.
Craik says 'Anne only once loses her judgment', when she ar-
gues that Wentworth should have known that she could no longer
be influenced by Lady Russell.10 Other readers have noted, how-

ever, that Anne does indeed misread Wentworth at other moments,
as when she construes his interventions on her behalf as disinter-
ested gestures of chivalry. Speaking of Wentworth's gallantry in
rescuing Anne from little Walter, or in securing her a place in the
Crofts' carriage, John Wiltshire attributes Anne's misinterpretation
of his gestures to the problem of acknowledging sexual desire;
James L. Kastely, referring to the first incident, argues that Anne's
desire is itself the cause of her mistake - 'in her misreading a
self-inflicted injury masquerades as a virtue. Unlike Wentworth,
she acknowledges her passion, but her openness to this passion
causes her to undervalue herself, to grant Wentworth an author-
ity he does not deserve, and to over-interpret his gestures.'11 It
seems problematic, however, to attribute to low self-esteem the
misreading of a heroine who notes the good fortune of the
Musgrove sisters but 'would not have given up her own more
elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments' (41).
How then to account for Anne's conviction at Lyme that to
Wentworth 'she was valued only as she could be useful to Louisa'
(116) and for her certainty that Wentworth and Louisa will marry:
'There could not be doubt, to her mind there was none, of what
would follow her [Louisa's] recovery' (123)? I suggest that Anne
does not misread Wentworth in the sense of failing to decode
signs; rather, she reaches wrong conclusions about his feelings
because he has given her misleading or incomplete information.
He has avoided talking with her, he has publicly courted Louisa,
and he has exclaimed 'Dear, sweet Louisa!' (116) in Anne's pres-
ence. Anne would have to be an ingenious reader indeed to
construe such behaviour as signs of his reviving passion for
herself. His later assertion that he 'had not cared, could not care
for Louisa' (242) may be true, but all his previous signals support
Anne's sad conclusion that Uppercross would soon 'be filled with
all that was happy and gay, all that was glowing and bright in
prosperous love, all that was most unlike Anne Elliot!' (123).12
If, then, Anne does not interpret Wentworth's behaviour at
Uppercross and Lyme as loving toward her, that is surely be-
cause nothing in it signifies love. She may know from past inti-
macy how to read his veiled contempt for others, but that
knowledge cannot help her to read his friendly concern as love.
She is a careful, intent and passionate reader of Wentworth's
every gesture and word, but she cannot uncover intentions and
feelings which are buried so deep that no sign of them is visible.
Anne's codebook on Wentworth allows her to decipher 'a certain
glance of his bright eye' as scorn for Dick Musgrove but it does
not translate 'Dear, sweet Louisa' as 'he had not cared, could not
care for Louisa'. The only way Anne can discover in Wentworth
a 'heart returning to her' (185) is through conversation with him,
including his direct articulation of 'Louisa Musgrove's inferiority'
(185). To discover it any earlier would be both wrong and em-
barrassing, an anticipation of romantic intentions prior to any
evidence of them. It seems to me that Austen alerts readers,
through Anne's experience of reading Wentworth, to beware
excessive confidence. Even experienced and sensitive readers, she
reminds us, cannot presume to know everything about the text,
cannot absolutely rely on previous encounters or on heightened
intuition. Interpretation will always depend on how much fac-
tual and specific information the author chooses to grant, and
readers who speculate too far or too certainly simply display
their own hubris.
The notion of inevitable misreadings is thematized in Persua-
sion, inscribed in almost every level of the narrative. Consider,
for example, Anne's complete ignorance of the intrigue between
Mr Elliot and Mrs Clay. Unlike her father and sister, Anne has
very early on uncovered the designing nature of Penelope Clay,
and she has suspicions about Mr Elliot's character. She has
watched both of them closely and has questioned their behav-
iour to her family, even comparing their different degrees of
hypocrisy. Yet she is so thoroughly convinced that the two are
antagonistic that she 'admired the good acting of the friend, in
being able to shew such pleasure as she did, in the expectation,
and in the actual arrival of the very person whose presence must
really be interfering with her prime object. It was impossible but
that Mrs Clay must hate the sight of Mr Elliot' (213). So confident
is Anne of her own understanding of that relationship that she
quickly accounts for their clandestine meeting as well as Mrs
Clay's discomfort when detected:
having watched in vain for some intimation of the interview

from the lady herself, she determined to mention it; and it
seemed to her that there was guilt in Mrs Clay's face as she
listened. It was transient, cleared away in an instant, but Anne

could imagine she read there the consciousness of having, by
some complication of mutual trick, or some overbearing au-
thority of his, been obliged to attend . . . to his lectures and
restrictions on her designs on Sir Walter. (228)
Why does Anne, knowing their duplicitous natures, seeing them

inexplicably together, noting the guilt on Mrs Clay's face, reach
such a spectacularly wrong conclusion? W.A. Craik argues that
Austen has bungled this part of her story, that '[t]he only hint of
[Mrs Clay's] intrigue with Mr Elliot is that she is once seen
meeting him in the street Jane Austen, who revealed so well
the underhand intrigue between Henry Crawford and Maria,
could certainly have done better with this.' Yasmine Gooneratne,
on the other hand, asserts that 'on looking back [the reader] will
discover that Jane Austen has scattered clues enough' and that
Anne and the reader fail to read them correctly because 'Anne's
attention is very far away from Mrs Clay and Mr Elliot, and so
is the reader's'.13 But Anne is sufficiently focused on the two to
interrogate Mrs Clay and to reach her own conclusions about the
secret meeting. The reason for Anne's (and the reader's misread-
ing), I believe, lies not in Austen's inept handling nor in inatten-
tion; it lies in excessive dependence on previous knowledge. We,
like Anne, have witnessed Mr Elliot's indirect communication of
distrust regarding Mrs Clay, as we have been privy to Mrs Smith's
account of the relationship: 'He thinks Mrs Clay afraid of him,
aware that he sees through her, and not daring to proceed as she
might do in his absence' (208). Anne, as Marylea Meyersohn
points out, 'believes Mrs Smith because she knew her before,
because Mrs Smith has palpably suffered, and because she is an
intelligent older woman.'14 For twentieth-century readers,
Austen's authority rests on similar claims: we feel we know her
well, we know she suffered even as she was writing Persuasion,
and we will always consider her an intelligent older woman, no
matter how far we outstrip her forty-one years. It is therefore
significant that the text shows that Mrs Smith's authority is flawed.
Not only is she ignorant of the relationship between Mrs Clay
and Mr Elliot, she also misinterprets and misrepresents the scraps
of information she has gathered.
Mrs Smith claims to read Arme's body just as Anne has read
Wentworth's. She tells Anne, on the morning after the concert,
'Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in com-
pany with the person, whom you think the most agreeable in the
world' (194). She is right, of course, but, ignorant of the existence
of any such person as Wentworth, and assured by Nurse Rooke
that Anne is to marry Mr Elliot, she simply names the wrong
man. She has relied on the authority of Mr Elliot's friend Mrs
Wallis and on 'finding how much you were together, and feeling
it to be the most probable thing in the world to be wished for by
every body belonging to either of you' (197). Her misreading,
then, occurs despite an accurate interpretation of Anne's feel-
ings, indirect testimony from a reliable source, and a sense that
the match is natural and inevitable. It occurs not because Mrs
Smith is a bad reader but because she lacks a crucial piece of
information that only Anne can provide, that is simply not avail-
able through indirect evidence, and that no careful decoding, no
attentive observation could possibly uncover. Having misinter-
preted, Mrs Smith then misrepresents: convinced that Anne will
marry Mr Elliot, she recommends him to her as a 'gentlemanlike,
agreeable man' and assures her that she will be 'safe in his char-
acter' (196). I need not rehearse here the exigencies that cause
Mrs Smith to lie; I want rather to point out that her misrepresenta-
tion is a direct result of her misreading, and that she eventually
tells the truth only in response to the directness of 'Anne's refu-
tation of the supposed engagement' (211).
Poor Lady Russell, the other intelligent older woman in Anne's
life, doesn't even begin to embody authority, since she has 'preju-
dices on the side of ancestry' (11), prefers the urban roar of Bath
to the domestic noise at Uppercross, and, most damningly, has
failed to see the worth of Wentworth. More significantly, for the
purposes of my argument, she is crucially uninformed of Anne's
sentiments. Because Anne and Lady Russell never talk about the
blighted romance, '[t]hey knew not each other's opinion' (29),
and their mutual ignorance remains even after they discuss the
accident at Lyme: Anne does not articulate her rekindled attach-
ment and Lady Russell does not express her 'angry pleasure'
(125) that Wentworth has lowered his romantic standards. Lady
Russell may be a 'truly sympathising friend' (42), but she is
remarkably in the dark about Anne's feelings. The odd scene in

Bath, in which Anne constructs a full narrative about Lady
Russell's 'fascination' with Wentworth only to find her friend
has been studying window-curtains (179), underlines the estrange-
ment between these two intimate friends; we note that while
Anne 'sighed and blushed and smiled' (179), she failed to tell
Lady Russell of the misunderstanding. Even when Anne pre-
pares to acquaint Lady Russell with her new knowledge of Mr
Elliot, she remains determined to keep back her blossoming ro-
mance: 'her greatest want of composure would be in that quarter
of the mind which could not opened to Lady Russell, in that flow
of anxieties and fears which must be all to herself (212). Between
these two friends there lies a massive misunderstanding simply
because Anne does not divulge her feelings and Lady Russell
does not ask. And the text shows how quickly open commun-
ication does away with error, for once she is informed, Lady
Russell finds Tittle hardship in attaching herself as a mother to
the man who was securing the happiness of her other child'
(249).
* * *
Open communication triumphs at the end of Persuasion: Lady

Russell accepts Wentworth, Mrs Smith has 'the comfort of telling
the whole story' (211) of her dealings with Mr Elliot, Anne and
Wentworth come together, enjoying 'moments of communica-
tion continually occurring, and always the hope of more' (246).
As Meyersohn says, '[conversation, which has been in some dan-
ger in Persuasion, grows strong again in the reconciliation', in
part, according to Kastely, because of Anne's 'generous passion':
'By the use of her language, a rhetor makes a self available to an
Other. And in a world in which community is often not available
because of self-regard or sentimentality, the rhetor's role is to
risk himself by giving that self generously to the Other to read.'15
It can be argued that in Persuasion Austen represents the value of
straight talk over artful discretion, the importance of risking
exposure of the authentic self. Such a reading needs, however, to
account for Austen's famous ironic mode, her use of refracted
speech and indirect discourse.
David Lodge, in an illuminating discussion of Austen's nego-

tiations between diegesis and mimesis, says that '[f]ree indirect
speech . . . allows the novelist to vary, from sentence to sentence,
the distance between the narrator's discourse and the character's
discourse, between the character's values and the "implied au-
thor's" values, and so to control and direct the reader's affective
and interpretive responses to the unfolding story.'16 Jane Austen's
masterful manipulation of such double-voiced discourse is of
course one of the reasons her novels are so admired. But we
need to note also that there are moments in all the works when
subtle shading between character and narrator leads to some
confusion. For example, the aphorism in Northanger Abbey that
'[friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disap-
pointed love' (NA 33) is ironized because of its context and ex-
aggerated language, but otherwise contains a perfectly reasonable
truth. The communal voice which opens Pride and Prejudice is
distinguished from the narrative judgemental voice at the end of
the chapter only because the communal or universal truth is
made specific and risible in the passage which follows it. Distinc-
tions between voices and values are sometimes difficult to un-
ravel, requiring a certain amount of careful narratological work.
In Persuasion, these confusions are further problematized because
the narrative voice frequently aligns itself with some of the
novel's least attractive characters, thereby changing once again a
code that readers habitually follow. Recall, for example, the
Wordsworthian formulation regarding Elizabeth Elliot's 'thirteen
years.... Thirteen winter[s]... thirteen springs' living in 'the
sameness and elegance, the prosperity and the nothingness, of
her scene of life' (6, 9). The language describing a stultifying life
is picked up later, when Anne regrets 'the elegant stupidity of
private parties' (180) at Bath and echoes Miss Bingley's charac-
terization of society at Lucas Lodge: 'The insipidity and yet the
noise; the nothingness and yet the self-importance of all these
people!' (PP 27). All three passages comment on the limitations
of a small social circle, yet surely our responses are meant to
differ. Surely we deplore sympathetically Anne's confinement,
acknowledge grudgingly Elizabeth's social dilemma, and con-
demn righteously Miss Bingley's snobbish intolerance. At the
same time, each passage must alter the way we read the others,
ultimately preventing us from reaching any definite conclusions

about Austen's real view of restricted society, and prohibiting
access to what Bakhtin calls 'unmediated equivalence of inten-
tionality'.17 A similar interweaving or blurring of voices and val-
ues occurs when Anne worries about Sir Walter's possible
entanglement with Mrs Clay: 'She did not imagine that her
father had at present an idea of the kind. Mrs Clay had freckles,
and a projecting tooth, and a clumsy wrist, which he was con-
tinually making severe remarks upon' (34). We can attribute the
brutal language to Sir Walter, but we cannot ignore the fact that
neither Anne nor the narrator modifies or comments on it, so the
description seems to have narrative endorsement. Such a conclu-
sion is validated, to some extent, by the famous passage about
Mrs Musgrove's Targe fat sighings' (68) and by the characteriza-
tion of her discourse on Henrietta's wedding as '[m]inutiae which,
even with every advantage of taste and delicacy which good Mrs
Musgrove could not give, could be properly interesting only to
the principals' (230).18
Based on the harsh language used about Mrs Clay and Mrs
Musgrove, one could speculate that Austen expresses in Persua-
sion a distaste for unattractive women. One could also accuse
Austen of gender disloyalty in the passage making Mary
Musgrove responsible for her husband's fatuousness - 'a more
equal match might have greatly improved him... a woman of
more real understanding might have given more consequence to
his character, and more usefulness, rationality, and elegance to
his habits and pursuits' (43). At the same time, however, we
need to note how carefully Austen points out gender inequities,
not only in Anne's well-known commentary on who holds the
pen, but in small moments throughout the text. When we learn
that Sir Walter's pride, 'the book of books' (the Baronetage), causes
Elizabeth pain, or that Mrs Clay has returned home 'after an
unprosperous marriage... with the additional burthen of two
children (15), then we know that Austen is attentive to the social
realities of women without secure establishments. When Admi-
ral and Mrs Croft justify their short courtship with her 'I had
known you by character' and his 'and I had heard of you as a
very pretty girl' (92), then we see the double standard at work
even among admirable characters. When Wentworth says that
the conviction of others that he loves Louisa makes him 'hers in
honour if she wished it' (242), while Anne considers herself en-
tirely at liberty despite similar expectations about herself and Mr
Elliot, then we have to rethink the relative freedom of men and
women in sexual relations. Persuasion's stance toward women's
place in society defies easy categorization because the text articu-
lates complex and even incompatible views, which seem to shift
with each current of the narrative.
Similar contradictions attach to the text's representation of
the navy. Anne's early praise of sailors 'who have done so much
for us' (19) prepares us for the narrator's closing celebration of
'that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its
domestic virtues than in its national importance' (252), and cer-
tainly the text repeatedly evokes the courage and brotherhood
among sailors. Still, no reader can miss Wentworth's reference
to a brutal admiralty who 'entertain themselves now and then,
with sending a few hundred men to sea, in a ship not fit to be
employed' (65), nor the pervasive tendency toward callousness
in the discourse of even the most worthy sailors. Note, for
example, Wentworth echoing the admiralty's attitude when he
describes his time on the Asp - 'taking privateers enough to be
very entertaining' (66) or his single-minded recollection of the
Laconia: 'How fast I made money in her' (67). Admiral Croft
extends this conjunction of violence and money into the domain
of sexual relations, arguing that Wentworth will become more
tolerant of women on ships '[w]hen he is married, if we have the
good luck to live to another war', and attributing his brother-in-
law's bachelorhood to 'the peace. If it were war now, he would
have settled it long ago' (70, 92). Even as the text sincerely praises
the virtues of sailors, it simultaneously exposes ways in which
the profession coarsens those sensibilities which the world
calls civilized - revulsion from violence and greed. Once again,
refracted voices produce values apparently in conflict, and the
reader is left to wonder how to decode narrative gesture.
* * *
My reading of Persuasion, like my discussions of the other

novels, has foregrounded ways in which Austen deliberately
compromises her own narrative authority and indeed questions
sources of any narrator's authority. Each novel approaches the
issue from a different perspective, from Northanger Abbey's re-

fusal to control plot to Emma's legitimation of competing inter-
pretations of narrative. In Persuasion, narrative authority seems
to be in disarray or even full retreat, rnatching the novel's por-
trait of a fragmented social world.19 How are we to depend on a
narrative voice which has uncovered inconsistencies in a pur-
portedly reliable heroine, has exploded the myth that intelligent
close reading together with previous reading experience leads to
correct interpretation, and has exposed its own ideological con-
tradictions and prejudices? How are we to read a text that chal-
lenges and destabilizes the interpretive codes on which we rely?
I suggest that the uncertainties in Persuasion gesture toward a
risky and aggressive narrative mode: Austen wants, I believe, to
return herself to the text, to reach beyond art to an open engage-
ment with the reader. To do so, she deliberately writes out (not
encodes) her personal ambivalences about fat or ugly women,
sailors, lower classes (remember the mob at Lyme, gathered to
'enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay two dead young la-
dies, for it proved twice as fine as the first report' [111]), the
virtuous heroine, and, especially, the author who effortlessly
controls viewpoint and voice. Persuasion is the c»nly Austen novel
which employs the present tense at its conclusion, prophesying
that 'a change is not very probable' for Elizabeth Elliot, and
speculating about Mr Elliot and Mrs Clay: 'She has abilities . . . and
it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning, or hers, may
finally carry the day' (250). The author, like the reader, cannot
know the world, but can speculate with authority because she is
the author.
Austen begins to reclaim, in Persuasion, the authority she had
earlier ceded, when she had decided, according to Susan Sniader
Lanser, 'that reticence made sense'.20 And the reader can trust
the authenticity of this authority precisely because it speaks di-
rectly, asserting the right to be inconsistent or even cruel, banish-
ing that careful, artful narrator who so carefully guarded her
identity and beliefs. We cannot do better, for once, than follow
Anne Elliot's lead: 'She felt that she could so much more depend
upon the sincerity of those who Sometimes looked or said a care-
less or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never
varied, whose tongue never slipped' (161).
Notes
INTRODUCTION: LADY SUSAN
1. Juliet McMaster, 'The Continuity of Jane Austen's Novels', Studies

in English Literature 10 (1970) 724. McMaster continues: 'Her nov-
els belong to each other, each being in some way a development
or a qualification of the last, a preparation for the next.' Dividing
what McMaster unites, Mary Lascelles points to the way Austen
concurrently worked on different manuscripts, able to 'project her
imagination into one or another of these fragile bubble worlds,
and let it dwell there' (Jane Austen and Her Art [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1939, rpt. 1974] 33). John Halperin, who finds
the Juvenilia only 'intermittently entertaining', nevertheless notes
that '[t]hey are chiefly interesting in illuminating for us Jane
Austen's first struggles to find a literary voice of her own'
('Unengaged Laughter: Jane Austen's Juvenilia', Jane Austen's
Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan, ed. J. David Grey, Fore-
word by Margaret Drabble [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989]
30).
2. Hugh McKellar ascribes to its moment of publication the charac-
terization of Lady Susan as an anomaly, arguing that readers in
1871 'were unlikely to open their arms to Lady Susan Neither
was James Edward the biographer to dispel the impression that
dear Aunt Jane once tried to depict a Bad Woman, but found the
task so distasteful that she quit half way through. For the peace
of mind of all concerned, Lady Susan had to be declared a cuckoo
in the Austen nest, with her existence explicable only on the as-
sumption that her creator had not yet put away childish things'
(Jane Austen's Beginnings 206).
3. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as
Style in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane
Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 178.
4. Bernard Harrison finds no such duality in Austen, arguing that
she in fact 'constrains our moral assent. Put generally, the tech-
nique by which she achieves this consists of the arrangement of
the fictional "facts" of the novel, so that whenever we endeavour
to put a moral construction on events different from the one Jane
Austen intends, we are driven back from it - unless we wilfully
refuse to see certain things which are "there" in the text - by the
remorseless pressure of "reality": that is, of the fictional reality
presented to us by the novel' (Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and
117
the Limits of Theory [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991] 148).
Lennard J. Davis, using Austen as example, questions this confla-
tion of successful novelist and credible moralist: 'The social real-
ity of publication automatically conveys with it the expectation
that a novelist is and must be a kind of authority on all subjects
The central myth here ... is that if one is able to write a novel
- to manipulate words into things - then one must be able to
understand things and thoughts better than most other people'
(Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction [New York: Methuen, 1987]
142). Davis finds that Austen's compact with readers evades this
issue; speaking of Pride and Prejudice, he says, 'It is simply ac-
cepted that these characters are fictional and that the practice of
novel reading is so established that no one needs to justify the
existence of fictional characters' (116).
5. Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992) 163.
6. Davis 143.
7. My reading of Lady Susan's feeling for Manwaring differs from
those of Beatrice Anderson and Roger Gard, who see no sexual
desire on her part. Anderson says '[s]he favors Manwaring for his
spirit and immorality which so resemble her own. A good match
for her in these traits, he carries on a flirtation with the beautiful
coquette in his own home before the notice of his own wife. But
Lady Susan does not love Manwaring. He is only a man, enough
like herself, to bring her amusement' ('The Unmasking of Lady
Susan', Jane Austen's Beginnings 197). Gard, after listing parallels
between Lady Susan and Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses, locates an
essential difference in Lady Susan's avoidance of sexuality.
Manwaring he says, 'sounds ideal. But the imagination glances
away at the idea of the substantiation of a real lover, a real adul-
terer. In spite of the fact that Lady Susan's beauty is described in
unusual detail for Jane Austen... there is no physicality and no
question of the bedroom ...' (Jane Austen's Novels: The Art of Clar-
ity [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992] 43).
8. Leroy W. Smith, Jane Austen and the Drama of Women (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1983) 52; Barbara Horwitz, 'Lady Susan: The
Wicked Mother in Jane Austen's Work', Jane Austen's Beginnings
184; Mary Poovey 175.
9. Poovey 176.
10. In downplaying Lady Susan's commitment to eloquence, I depart
somewhat from those who emphasize the text's exploration of
feminine discourse and power. Deborah Kaplan, for example, says
that '[a]t the heart of the novel lies the fantasy that the discourse
of one woman to another has magic power7 and that '[a]mbivalent
about her cultural allegiances and literary intentions, [Austen]
gave voice to and then attempted to muffle her woman's culture'
(165, 158). Deborah J. Knuth argues that 'it is only when we
Notes 119
assume that the heroine's fulfillment must be in uniting with a

worthy... man that Lady Susan's conclusion remains dissatisfy-
ing. In fact, Austen omits such a desirable man from her
narrative... but insists on the fervency of the frank partnership
between Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson' (' "You, Who I Know will
enter into all my feelings": Friendship in Jane Austen's Juvenilia
and Lady Susan', Jane Austen's Beginnings 96).
11. Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. Margaret Drabble (London:
Penguin, 1974) 9.
12. Poovey 179; Kaplan 167. Susan Pepper Robbins, 'Jane Austen's
Epistolary Fiction', Jane Austen's Beginnings 223. Robbins attributes
to Austen's narrator the same power articulated by Lennard Davis:
'The presence of the narrator is comforting and mature, and au-
thorizes the restoration of order, community, and communication
by his or her very presence' (138).
13. Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and
Narrative Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) 68.
14. My contention that Austen's works interrogate the omniscient
stance disagrees with P.J.M. Scott's statement that 'By not assum-
ing however fugitively, anything less than absolute omniscience
while speaking directly about her personages... this author be-
comes the most perspicuous of mediums' (Jane Austen: A Reassess-
ment [London: Vision Press, 1982] 172).
15. Richard F. Patteson, 'Truth, Certitude, and Stability in Jane
Austen's Fiction', Philological Quarterly 60 (Fall 1981) 465. His for-
mulation seems excessively determinate in its insistence on onto-
logical uncertainty and insufficiently calibrated to each of Austen's
separate, and, I believe, self-consciously different investigations
of narrative positioning.
CHAPTER 1: NORTHANGER ABBEY
1. See, for example, Karl Kroeber, who argues that there is agree-
ment between Austen and her readers 'as to the proper attitudes
of novelist and reader towardfictionalsubjects' (Styles in Fictional
Structure: The Art of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971] 44-5.
2. Several critics have commented on how Northanger Abbey is an
important turning point for both Jane Austen and the English
novel. See, for example, Stuart M. Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) 69: 'Expectations have
been revised, turned from the strangeness of surprise to the un-
derstanding of probabilities'; George Levine, 'Translating the
Monstrous: Northanger Abbey', Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (De-
cember 1975): '[the novel] sets out for us starkly the contradictions
Jane Austen and Narrative Authority
latent in moving from parody to novel' (337); Lloyd W. Brown,

Bits of Ivory: Narrative Technique in Jane Austen's Fiction (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973): 'the evolution of
Catherine's moral psychology coincides with the strategy of ironic
anticlimax which informs the novel's parodic form' (217).
Northanger Abbey therefore illustrates M.M. Bakhtin's thesis that
'the most important novelistic models and novel-types arose pre-
cisely during [the] parodic destruction of preceding novelistic
worlds' (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael
Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 309).
Jane Nardin is quite right in saying that far from mocking Eleanor
and Catherine, Austen 'congratulates them on the manner in which
they have spoken' (Those Elegant Decorums: The Concept of Propri-
ety in Jane Austen's Novels [Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1973] 68). See also Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in Eng-
land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 126: Catherine
and Eleanor's 'polite commonplaces seem almost rich with mean-
ing'. Nardin may, however, be claiming more than is possible
when she adds that '[t]he minor rules of propriety receive Jane
Austen's approval in Northanger Abbey because she believes them
to be based upon an understanding and an acceptance of the
restrictive realities of everyday life.'
Austen's critique of Tilney as satirist has been discussed by a
number of critics, including Kiely, 133; Karl Kroeber and Juliet
McMaster in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer (Athens,
Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1975) 39, 70-1; Alistair M.
Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's
Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971) 100; and
briefly but most explicitly by Darrell Mansell, The Novels of Jane
Austen: An Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1973), when he
queries whether Eleanor's advice to Henry to be more serious can
be applied to the 'author, who is already uneasy that her own wit
in the novel is but a silly, unreal aesthetic posture' (19).
Joseph Wiesenfarth, The Errand of Form: An Assay of Jane Austen's
Art (New York: Fordham University Press, 1967) 15; Katrin Ristkok
Burlin, 'The Pen of the Contriver: The Four Fictions of Northanger
Abbey', Jane Austen Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 105. See also Lloyd
Brown: 'he is the parodist who mimics Catherine's language...
and intellectual values in order to demonstrate their limitations
vis-a-vis the complexities of experience' (175); and Susan Morgan,
In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen's Fiction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): 'Henry's delight in
words and their precise use and misuse is the most important
way he communicates his sense of the variety and subtlety of the
familiar world' (58).
Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R.W.
Chapman, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) 404.
Notes 111
7. I am here drawing upon and extending Jan Fergus's thesis that

Tilney does not educate Catherine 'in anything but a greater con-
sciousness of convention', and that Northanger Abbey is a literary
tour deforce without a sustained didactic purpose (Jane Austen and
the Didactic Novel [Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1983] 11-38). My
argument, however, posits a greater self-consciousness and auto-
criticism on Austen's part: Tilney's lack of moral intent or effec-
tiveness reflects Austen's own doubts about the ameliorative value
of parodic discourse.
8. Burlin 100-1.
9. The context here - the lack of real intimacy between Isabella and
Catherine - provides the irony for what would otherwise be an
acceptable truism. It is not that Austen is disavowing the senti-
ment (though she may be mocking the language), but that she
is pointing out its inappropriateness to the situation she has
described.
10. Howard S. Babb, in fane Austen's Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue
(Columbus: Ohio State Univeristy Press, 1962), provides a close
analysis of this passage. His view that this dialogue is a way for
Henry 'to make known his affection for Catherine' (111) is not
necessarily at odds with my own reading. However, Henry's in-
tent does not in itself ennoble his discourse, which is here both
manipulative and artificial.
11. Brown 113. Brown points out that Catherine's mistake comes from
contrasting the understatements of the General with 'the hyper-
bolic styles which are preferred by both Isabella and John Thorpe'.
Catherine does indeed see a contrast, but it is one based on an
unexamined generalization about the Tilneys.
12. It is possible that Austen avoids giving the General a direct voice
because even Catherine ought then to be able to see how much he
resembles the Thorpes, and Austen does not want the reader, at
this point, to be excessively critical of Catherine's lack of acumen.
Mary Lascelles has pointed that a story-teller has one 'power at
his disposal... he is able to communicate with [the reader] indi-
rectly, by means of the consciousness of his characters' (174). By
the same token, it is possible for the narrator of fiction, unlike the
dramatist, to mute or diffuse the voice of a character in order to
withhold communication.
13. Burlin points out that '[u]nthinkingly, or perhaps because he is a
"novelist" of the commonplace after all, Henry furnishes his fic-
tional abbey with the chests and cabinets of the real Abbey' and
that this overlapping of real and fictional is in part responsible for
Catherine's fantasies (100-1).
14. Lascelles 179.
15. Nardin and Tave see clear distinctions between parody and novel.
Nardin finds it easy to separate gothic spoof from the story of an
'unformed young girl's education in the complexities of real life'
(62) while Tave sees a deficiency in Austen's technique, 'inconsistent
as it is in the use of the mock author and in the stitching together

of a story of unequal parts' (37). Kiely makes the parody a kind
of extra-literary bridge which 'pervades both worlds, romantic
and realistic, without totally rejecting either' (122). Others note a
greater self-consciousness on Austen's part. Duckworth finds that
die intrusion of the narrator, which emphasizes parody, 'is as
much wry self-criticism as a criticism of other fictional works . . .
her subjective vision is not necessarily any greater than that of the
very authors she has from time to time parodied' (102). Mansell
detects 'a dramatic unabsolutist willingness to conceive truth of-
ten, but not always, as a subtle interplay of various individual
points of view brought into suspension in her art' (32). Frank J.
Kearful, in 'Satire and the Form of the Novel: The Problem of
Aesthetic Unity in Northanger Abbey', comes closest to making this
mixture of genres reader-oriented when he points to the novel's
attack on the 'reader's overly facile distinctions between illusions
and delusions' and its attempt to make us aware of the paradoxical
nature of all illusion - even those illusions by which we master
illusion' (ELH 32 [1965] 526-7).
For another kind of mockery of the prosaic, we need only look at
Mrs Allen, whose world is entirely circumscribed by her passion
for clothing. Even Mr Allen, that 'sensible, intelligent man' (20),
won't venture an opinion about the weather without 'having his
own skies and barometer about him' (82). The latter is a neat
metaphor for the way in which the inhabitants of this novel are
limited by their own narrow horizons.
Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author/ Image/Music/Text, transl.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977) 147.
When Kearful says that 'the narrator as first person author ever
more and more openly asserts not only her presence in but her
absolute control of the action' (526), he tells, I believe, only half
the story. Lanser problematizes Austen's 'control' in Northanger
Abbey when she discusses the way Austen's 'reach for authoriality,
and for the literary attention it signifies, [is] both fragile and re-
markable' (67). Devoney Looser detects both control and indeter-
minacy: 'Although this novel does not give the reader definitive
ways to interpret what kind of writing it "is," Northanger Abbey
does offer dictates for what kinds of writing it is not' ('Remaking
History and Philosophy: Austen's Northanger Abbey', European
Romantic Review 4.1 [Summer 1993] 34).
CHAPTER 2: SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
Many critics, whether sympathetic or hostile to the code of pro-

priety, agree to locate the issue at the centre of the novel. Marilyn
Notes 123
Butler, for whom Elinor is 'an active, struggling Christian in a

difficult world', says that 'The entire action [of Sense and Sensibil-
ity] is organized to represent Elinor and Marianne in terms of
rival value systems ...' (Jane Austen and the War of Ideas [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975] 192; 184). Marvin Mudrick sees Austen
marshalling her defences against 'an insurgent sympathetic com-
mitting character like Marianne' (Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and
Discovery [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952] 91). Angela
Leighton, providing a feminist revision of Mudrick, notes that
'Elinor's Silences have Austen's approval; they signify heroic reti-
cence and control, and are contained by the language of Sense.
Marianne's Silences signify emotions which have escaped control,
and which are therefore in opposition to Austen's art' ('Sense and
Silences: Reading Jane Austen Again' in Jane Austen: New Perspec-
tives, ed. Janet Todd. Women and Literature, n.s. 3 [New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1983] 132).
Those who blur or reverse the conventional identifications re-
main convinced of the centrality of this issue. Howard S. Babb,
pointing to rhetorical evidence of overlapping, finds that '[t]he
argument remains utterly conventional, and Jane Austen's pur-
suit of it by tracing what might be called the double allegiance of
each sister makes the novel none the lessrigid...' (56). Jan Fergus,
reversing the dichotomy, argues that '[o]ne of Austen's major
interests in the novel is to define feeling and sensitive behaviour.
. . . This behaviour is what Elinor exhibits and Marianne violates
throughout the novel. It is Marianne who must learn to behave
feelingly, not Elinor' (40-1).
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagi-
nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), detect a tension
in the novel 'because Austen herself seems caught between her
attraction to Marianne's sincerity and spontaneity, while at the
same time identifying with the civil falsehoods and the reserved,
polite silences of Elinor, whose art is fittingly portrayed as the
painting of screens' (157). I believe that what Austen screens in
this novel is her discomfort with her own view of the role and
authority of women.
2. Spacks points to 'the varieties of female submission' in Sense and
Sensibility and shows how the novel exhibits the limited, con-
stricted life of women ('The Difference It Makes', Soundings 64
[1981] 356-7). Kaplan, whose aim of examining Austen's 'particu-
lar accommodation of femininity and authority' is similar to mine,
finds that Austen locates feminine authority in 'a trope not of
reproduction and resemblance but of revision and difference'
('Achieving Authority: Jane Austen's First Published Novel', Nine-
teenth-Century Fiction 37 [March 1983] 535-7). Their illuminating
readings differ from mine in being more optimistic about Austen's
intentions and achievements. Although my argument does not

consider sensibility a central issue, my stance is similar to Mary
Poovey's: 'Jane Austen... despite her recognition of the limita-
tions of social institutions, is more concerned with correcting the
dangerous excesses of female feeling than with liberating this
anarchic energy' (193).
3. Michael Williams and T.B. Tomlinson comment on Elinor's as-
sessment of Mr Palmer. Williams sees it as both a manifestation
of Elinor's growth and proof that Elinor is not always Austen's
surrogate (Jane Austen: Six Novels and Their Methods [London:
Macmillan, 1986] 41-2); Tomlinson connects it to the dark vision
of the novel, a vision which sees negative traits 'permanently
embedded in human nature' (The English Middle-Class Novel [Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1976] 44). While I don't disagree with these views,
they omit what I believe Austen wants readers to overlook: an
awareness of the way in which men escape castigation in this
novel.
4. Critics have been understandably uncertain and unhelpful in their
assessments of Edward Ferrars. Babb is one of the more sympa-
thetic readers when he says that Edward exhibits 'only his self-
distrust, not any doubts about the virtues he holds in view' (64).
W.A. Craik notes that Austen has to 'keep him in the background'
because '[a] man situated between two women as he is situated
between Lucy and Elinor can hardly avoid looking ineffectual, if
not ridiculous' (Jane Austen: The Six Novels [London: Methuen,
1965] 42), but she does not examine Austen's reasons for putting
Edward in such a situation. Mudrick's language shows his dis-
trust of Austen's strategy: 'The shadow of Mrs. Ferrars falls
early . . . the ogress herself does not appear until her malevolence
has been well established. When she appears at last, she is ready
in all her ill-nature to devour Elinor for her presumptuous atti-
tude toward Edward' (69-70). He does not, however, make ex-
plicit that his language criticizes a paranoid, almost hysterical
attitude towards a powerful woman. Martin Price does link strat-
egy and ideology when he says, 'Mrs Ferrars' fantasies are recog-
nized as her reality... since her will is almost matched by her
power; and the narrative quietly accepts her vision, by a method
that is akin to free indirect discourse' (Forms of Life: Character and
Moral Imagination in the Novel [New Haven: Yale University Press,
1983] 71). He too, however, fails to question the reasons for such
quiet acceptance. Marylea Meyersohn, in 'Jane Austen's Garru-
lous Speakers: Social Criticism in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and
Persuasion', notes that Edward is not very likeable because he
blames women for his foolishness; first, his mother for not pro-
viding him with a career, and then Lucy, for bewitching him when
he was at loose ends' (Reading and Writing Women's Lives 39).
5. Austen is generally successful in her attempt to deflect attention
Notes 125
away from Edward. See, for example, Zelda Boyd's 'The Lan-
guage of Supposing: Modal Auxiliaries in Sense and Sensibility':
'Elinor herself is, in private, less sensible than one might expect.
She is all too willing to construct arguments to rationalize Edward's
behavior, which she continually contrasts favorably with
Willoughby's. Looked at from the outside, it seems open to ques-
tion whether there is so sharp a division between the men as
Elinor makes Although she tries hard to separate the reality
from her own "wishes," she manages, against all internal warn-
ings about persuasion, to persuade herself of what she wants to
believe' (Jane Austen: New Perspectives 147). One of the few readers
who returns agency and focus to Edward is Jane Miller: 'He can
let himself be manipulated by his rich mother and he can tell lies.
He is still acceptable to Elinor' (Women Writing about Men [New
York: Pantheon Books, 1986] 63). Her insight, coded in her syntax
('he can let himself), slips past Austen's double defence - Edward's
passivity and Elinor's prejudice.
See, for example, Susan Morgan on Elinor's imaginative sympa-
thy for Willoughby (131) and Price on Elinor's 'reflux of pity' (83).
Among those who focus on the contradictions in the scene are
Mudrick (85); Kenneth Moler (Jane Austen's Art of Allusion [Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968] 72); and Poovey (186-7).
Babb is a notable exception and, significantly, is strongly anti-
Willoughby.
Williams seems to endorse Willoughby's version of his situation
when he says that in some ways Edward and Willoughby are
'bluntly and consistently matched, right down to the fact that
both depend for their fortunes on the whim of an elderly and
irascible female relative' (32). This kind of collapsing of distinc-
tion is due, I believe, to Austen's deliberate omission of narrative
commentary.
Mary Lascelles has said that there is a 'failure of power' when
Austen has to deal with Eliza's story, and that this failure has to
do with Austen's decision to 'keep out of reach of Eliza' (73).
Spacks, too, notes the distance between the main plot and the
Eliza narratives (353). I believe that such distance has less to do
with narrative skill than with Austen's uncomfortable acceptance
and perpetuation of an ideology that unequally punishes male
and female misconduct.
Joseph Wiesenfarth comments on the letter: 'the pressure of com-
plex motivation, while not excusing it, mitigates Willoughby's
conduct and makes more realistic the relationship between the
warmth of his person and the coldness of his deed' (43). Like
Elinor, Wiesenfarth is willing to explain away behaviour he can-
not condone.
See, for example, Stuart M. Tave, who says Marianne 'takes the
most superficial signs and uses them to satisfy her ideas of
perfection: Willoughby is all her fancy had delineated . . . and we

know, from their first conversation, that he is playing the part she
has given him' (84). Kaplan, presenting a much more sympathetic
assessment, finds that '[i]n a world in which women are chosen
by men, sensibility provides Marianne with fantasies of agency'
('Achieving Authority' 543).
11. Judith Wilt picks up Willoughby's language when she says: 'The
genuine love of a woman who believes herself to be genuinely
loved is irresistible, and creates its counterpart. This is a kind of
tentative "embodiment" for Willoughby and he values it. Tearing
Marianne out of his heart to go back to his plan to marry wealth
and station is exquisite pain for him' ('Jane Austen's Men: Inside/
Outside "the mystery"' in Men by Women, ed. Janet Todd. Women
& Literature, n.s. 2 [New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981] 69). Wilt
replicates Willoughby's own interpretation of his experience: lov-
ing Marianne was a passive act, leaving her a painfully active
one.
12. Spacks, 'Sisters' in Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists 1670-
1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cedila Macheski (Cambridge:
Ohio University Press, 1986) 139.
13. Adrienne Rich, 'The Antifeminist Woman', On Lies, Secrets, and
Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979)
82-83. Echoing Rich, Gloria Steinem confesses her own pride in
cracking the male code: 'This is the most tragic punishment that
society inflicts on any second-class group. Ultimately the brain-
washing works, and we ourselves come to believe our group is
inferior. Even if we achieve a little success in the world and think
of ourselves as "different," we don't want to associate with our
group. We want to identify up, not down...' ('Sisterhood' in
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions [New York: New Ameri-
can Library, 1986] 131).
14. Babb astutely sums up the conflict in Lucy, who 'is convinced
in her heart that she is the equal of anyone and jealously guards
her success with Edward as a token of her value. But she also
recognizes that society regards her as an inferior' (70). But such
attention to Lucy Steele's interiority has to be teased out of a text
which wants to keep her character ideologically functional rather
than interesting in itself. As Poovey points out, 'The harshness
with which Austen disposes of Lucy Steele exceeds the necessities
of the plot, but it is perfectly in keeping with her moral design.
. . . Austen wants to convince the reader that female nature is sim-
ply inexplicable and that propriety must restrain this natural,
amoral force' (190).
15. Elinor's goodness is a matter of general agreement. Even those
who don't see her as a prototype of the good Christian (see But-
ler, quoted in note 1) find her faultless. Bernard J. Paris includes
her among those who have 'little to learn' (Character and Conflict
Notes 127
in Jane Austen's Novels: A Psychological Approach [Detroit: Wayne

State University Press, 1978] 15), and Irvin Ehrenpreis excludes
her from the group of Austen's characters who have to learn to
know themselves (Acts of Implication: Suggestion and Covert Mean-
ing in the Works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Austen [Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1980] 113). Mudrick, though he certainly
does not accept the perfect heroine theory, is convinced that Austen
does so, and that she manifests her admiration through a 'delib-
erate protective exclusion of Elinor from the focus of irony' (74).
Neither Mudrick nor Paris detects irony in Austen's depiction of
Elinor as someone 'almost constantly engaged in a subtle kind of
self-congratulation and in an inward criticism of others' (Paris
185).
16. Kaplan, 'Achieving Authority' 547.
17. Barbara Benedict, in a subtle analysis of Austen's technique in
this novel, shows how Austen conflates objective and emotional
narrative voices, and argues that although Elinor 'adopts the lan-
guage of authoritative detachment', she is still 'a character impli-
cated in the action' ('Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility', Philological
Quarterly 69A [Fall 1990] 458, 461). Thus, Benedict argues, 'Austen
challenges the authority of narrative control itself, predicated as
this control is upon the convention of a single coherent mode'
(454).
18. In his recent biography, Park Honan accurately characterizes the
acute dilemma facing the fledgling writer: 'Nobody on record has
risked more than Jane Austen when she sought a "voice." with
which to address the public. She simply had to trust that the
Austens would find her agreeable and sisterly despite her polished
jokes and knowing airs' (Jane Austen: Her Life [New York: St. Mar-
tin's Press, 1978] 94). Some of her troubled hopes are unmistak-
ably inscribed in the character of Elinor.
19. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 344.
20. Jan Fergus endorses the ideological absolute when she says that
'Austen insists . . . that the consideration and self-command Elinor
shows are not any the less required of her for being invariably
misunderstood and unrewarded. They remain, absolutely and
imperatively, an obligation' (41). Such a view certainly matches
the confidence of Elinor's pronouncements, but it disallows dis-
cussion of motivation or even of psychic satisfactions gained by
proper behaviour.
21. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Ribinow (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984) 102-3. Austen's problematic relationship
to her text resembles that of earlier woman writers. Janet Todd, in
The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989) says: 'In the story of
women's fiction, the relation of author to authorial image and to
creations will vary extremely but it will never achieve the clarity
of men's relation to their ideas and creations, patented, signed

and alienated from themselves' (9). Austen adopts what Margaret
Homans describes as the characteristic strategy of nineteenth-
century women writers: 'by writing novels that represent the po-
sition of women in societies that do not accommodate their needs,
these authors thematize the position of women's language in a
culture that does not admit it' (Bearing the Word: Language and
Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986] 20). For a discussion of Austen's
sense of marginality within her own family, see John Halperin,
The Life of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984), especially 218-19, 237-8.
CHAPTER 3: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
So many critics have commented on the aesthetic or moral 'finish'

of Pride and Prejudice that I can point to only a few representative
remarks. Tony Tanner ends his chapter on the novel with an al-
lusion to its balance: 'in Pride and Prejudice [Austen] shows us
energy and reason coming together She makes it seem as if it
is possible for playfulness and regulation - energy and bounda-
ries - to be united in fruitful harmony, without the one being
sacrificed to the other' (Jane Austen [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986] 141. Joseph Wiesenfarth, analysing the plot
of the book, says that it 'ends not only with the total individual
development of each character but also with his total social devel-
opment, because personal love is satisfied in marriage and har-
monized with society' (83). Alistair M. Duckworth calls it 'this
beautifully balanced novel', the resolution of which 'beautifully
"closes" the plot' ('Prospects and Retrospects', in Jane Austen To-
day 9, 23). In the collection lane Austen: New Perspectives, we find
a similar judgement: 'Thus, as irony against her decreases . . . the
narrative perspective melts into Elizabeth's own. Heroine, reader,
narrator, and author finally share one unified vision' (Mark M.
Hennelly, Jr, 'Pride and Prejudice: The Eyes Have It' 204). Interest-
ingly, Marilyn Butler sees Pride and Prejudice as a flaw in Austen's
coherent vision; to her, 'in Pride and Prejudice the reader tends to
feel himself in a moral limbo . . . [it] can be accused . . . of exhib-
iting virtues and vices promiscuously mixed, and by this means
confusing good and evil' (217). The flaw for her, however, is one
of faulty execution rather than of ideological conflict.
Julia Prewitt Brown implicitly accepts the first view when she
says that, in Austen's world, 'A married couple... is allowed to
Notes 129
take responsibility for younger, unmarried persons . . . even though

Mrs Forster is as irresponsible as Lydia herself, her new status
allows her this authority' (Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and
Literary Form [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979]
78).
3. Angela Leighton makes silences the centre of her essay on Sense
and Sensibility. She characterizes Elinor's silences as 'those of re-
serve and integrity' and Marianne's silences as 'those of noncon-
formity and emotional powerlessness', asserting that Austen
approves of Elinor's silences (Jane Austen: New Perspectives 132).
In Pride and Prejudice, silences cannot be so neatly categorized, nor
can Austen's evaluation of them be easily deciphered.
4. Katrin Burlin offers a thorough analysis of the silent scene at
Pemberley, connecting it to Austen's use of the conventions of
paintings: 'Austen composes her artful characters into the art of
the conversation piece to show that, ironically, they have nothing
to say to each other. Silence, not art, is the inevitable absurd ter-
mination of their mutual linguistic designs, for the "degree of
rapport" in the "conversation" is imperfect' (' "Pictures of Perfec-
tion" at Pemberley: Art in Pride and Prejudice' in Jane Austen: New
Perspectives 163-4).
5. Recent critical recuperation of popular eighteenth-century novels
does not entirely negate the judgement expressed by J.M.S.
Tompkins: 'with the death of Smollett the line of great writers
ends The good work that was published bore no proportion
to the bad, and the bad was very bad indeed and infected the
reputation of the good' (The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800
[Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961] 3). Despite the fa-
mous defence in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen clearly shared this
modern judgement when she wrote to Anna Austen that a char-
acter in Anna's manuscript is patterned 'too much in the common
Novel style' and that an expression in it 'is such thorough novel
slang' (Jane Austen's Letters 403-4).
6. Julia Prewitt Brown 77. These taboos, according to Brown, are in
the service of protecting mating rituals and 'are clarified by the
acts that break them'. It is hard to see, however, how Elizabeth
would endanger rituals by confiding in Mrs Gardiner.
7. If my reading of Elizabeth's motivation is right, then Elizabeth
has not changed utterly in the second half of the book, has not
wholly come 'to understand the lesson of Hunsford, that a lively
intelligence is personal and engaged' (Susan Morgan 104). I agree
with Morgan that Pride and Prejudice teaches that detachment is
wrong, but I am not so optimistic that Elizabeth has thoroughly
learned that lesson. She is indeed more engaged in the world, but
she continues to protect herself from the curiosity and engage-
ment of others. At the end of the novel she still looks forward
'with delight to the time when they should be removed from
society so little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance

of their family party at Pemberley' (384).
8. Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1972) 25-6.
9. James Thompson, Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988) 92.
10. As Lady Susan demonstrates, a reader cannot judge character
by linguistic ability. Obviously, I cannot wholly accept Babb's
contention that 'In the case of a character... we are particularly
justified in interpreting the style as the man' (28) or Page's remark
that 'speech plays a major role in character-presentation' (25). Lloyd
W. Brown, coming to die issue from a different angle, says 'When
Steele, Swift, and Fielding... distinguish between external flour-
ishes and the good breeding of ideal conversation, they provide
Jane Austen with a kind of blueprint for the superficially graceful
address of defective characters...' (111). All three critics make
assumptions about the knowability of character through language
that I think the text subverts.
11. Katrin Burlin connects Georgiana's silence to Darcy's rigidity -
his 'highly designed notion of the truly accomplished woman has
kept her behind the pianoforte or easel, practicing with great in-
dustry everything but easy civility. She is stiff and shy, inhibited
by her awkward formality' (Jane Austen: New Perspectives 164).
She is also most vulnerable to the verbal attacks of others.
12. Even at the end of the novel, Elizabeth retains a coherent world
view. The lightness of her tone does not disguise her desire to edit
the troublesome past; when Jane reminds her of her former dis-
like of Darcy, she responds, 'That is all to be forgot. Perhaps I did
not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as
these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall
ever remember it myself (381). She recasts indeterminacy as dy-
namism; like the Augustans, Elizabeth possesses 'a security that
is always susceptible of revision and correction and which thus,
finding its own stability in change and correction, mirrors the
dynamic stability of the world to be known' (Frederick V. Bogel,
Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984] 10).
13. Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1986) 112. It must be acknowledged that Pavel's
argument, though complex and attractive, has something of a
rabbit-in-the-hat quality. Having shown the inadequacy of ana-
lytic philosophy or structuralism or speech-act theory to explain
or reject fictional worlds, he moves to a kind of arbitrary model
which relies disconcertingly on intuition. For example, discussing
metaphysical problems confronting those who 'aim at comparing
fictional entities and statements with their nonfictional counter-
parts', he finds that 'well-defined borders between these two kinds
Notes 131
of statements are counterintuitive when dealing with specific

fictional texts from an internal point of view' (16). Still, his notion
of the self-conscious narrator/mythmaker strikes me as a useful
approach to Austen's fiction.
Michael Williams finds a closer connection between Elizabeth and
reader: 'Elizabeth has already moved away from angry and con-
fident opposition, is far into new uncertainties. Then, because we
no longer have privileged access to Darcy's thoughts, we have,
exactly as Elizabeth does, to attempt an imaginative reconstruc-
tion, to guess and predict his meaning' (77). Reuben Brower
points out that the reader has no need to revise his view of Darcy:
'Since more kindly views of Darcy have been introduced through
the flow of witty talk, Darcy does not at that point have to be
"remade," but merely reread' ('Light and Bright and Sparkling:
Irony and Fiction in Pride and Prejudice' in Jane Austen: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1963] 71). Some of these views come not from dialogue, but from
'factual clues offered to the reader... privileged information to
which no human observer can have access (such as reliable inside
views of other character, notably Charlotte and Darcy)' (Meir
Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction [Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978] 152).
See, for example, Mary Poovey: 'in Pride and Prejudice Austen
substitutes aesthetic gratification . . . for the practical solutions that
neither her society nor her art could provide' (207). D.A. Miller
points out that in Austen novels there is always pressure towards
unifying closure because 'Ignorance, incoherence, or ambiguity
must never be enjoyed, but always submitted to as an enforced
evil' (Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Tradi-
tional Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981] 52). Julia
Prewitt Brown notes that a comic conclusion in Austen 'calls to
mind the memory of some incident of absurdity or insensibility
and in so doing, gently undermines the conspicuous gaiety of the
marriage' but then herself presses toward coherence when she
adds, 'It is as if the modes of resistance to the truth become part
of the truth itself (69). Martha Satz sees the problem as one of
authorial bad faith: 'the author herself, by foisting on her reader,
in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, a metaphysically and
morally certified view of knowledge, projects a supreme arro-
gance about what is true, thereby ultimately contradicting the
fabric of the entire novel' ('An Epistemological Understanding of
Pride and Prejudice: Humility and Objectivity', Jane Austen: New
Perspectives 183). Thomas R. Edwards sees in the novels Austen's
recognition of 'a problem about fiction itself We are asked in
some way to credit and care about untruth, to trust an illusion we
have good reason not to trust' ('Embarrassed by Jane Austen',
Raritan 7.1 [Summer 1987] 79).
Karlheinz Stierle, 'The Reading of Fictional Texts' in The Reader in

the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman
and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
97. Richard Handler and Daniel Segal emphasize the epistemo-
logical openness of Pride and Prejudice when they argue that
'Austen's narrative techniques privilege multiplicity in and of it-
self. But her use of multiplicity does not require unquestioning
acceptance of all opinions, nor a total relativism in which any-
thing that anyone says is true. Rather, it conveys a profound
conviction that among competing opinions, assessments, and ideas,
all possess significance because each force a rereading of any other'
(Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of
Social Realities [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990] 110).
CHAPTER 4: MANSFIELD PARK
Lionel Trilling's famous essay makes the most memorable case

for Mansfield Park as an articulation of moral intolerance, its
'impulse... not to forgive but to condemn' ('Mansfield Park' in
The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism [New York: Viking Press,
1955] 211). Marvin Mudrick and Darrel Mansell both point to the
novel's rejection of wit, Mudrick seeing this as a betrayal of
Austen's own instincts (164-9) and Mansell finding the novel a
culmination of long-standing misgivings 'about the propriety of
her irony and wit' (123). More recently, Nina Auerbach has con-
nected Fanny Price to monstrously destructive figures such as
Grendel and Frankenstein: 'there is something horrible about her,
something that deprives the imagination of its appetite for ordi-
nary life and compels it toward the deformed, the dispossessed'
('Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about
Fanny Price' in Jane Austen: New Perspectives 210).
Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988) 96. It will become clear that I am convinced
by Johnson's argument that Austen is engaged in cultural politics,
but I see a bleaker, more personally defeated vision than Johnson
does.
Letters 401.
Some recent scholarship has addressed the issue of family life in
Austen's work. Writing about the Juvenilia, Alison G. Sulloway
points out that '[f ]amilial and sexual violence of all sorts is coolly
accomplished and gloatingly contemplated. Theft, adultery, and
excessive drinking are equally coolly appraised as characteristic
modes of family life' (Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
[Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989] 99). Glenda
Notes 133
A. Hudson finds in the novels much the same 'jealousies and

rivalries, indolence and irresponsibility, cruelties and uncharit-
ableness' (Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen's Fiction [New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1992] 5) that I discuss, but argues that such
elements are deployed in the service of a conservative ideology:
'Austen regards conflicts between brothers and sisters as hazard-
ous, since they threaten the order of family life, which she sees as
analogous to the stability and harmony of society For Austen,
as for the Victorians, the exemplary home is a haven from outside
anxieties and commercialism threatening to adulterate society; it
is a bulwark against the upheavals of a new age' (5, 42).
5. Obviously, I cannot agree with Mary Poovey's statement that
'Austen alludes to but does not dramatize the complete disinte-
gration of the family, the institution upon which her ideal society
is based' (221). Indeed, I am arguing that Mansfield Park presents
an etiological view of family strife. Julia Prewitt Brown says that
Victorian readers liked Mansfield Park because of its depiction of
sanctified domesticity (87-8); I would argue that it is a text from
which sanctified domesticity is conspicuously absent.
6. Michael Williams points out that Mrs Norris's status as oldest
sister explains her enjoyment of Mansfield's comforts as well as
her 'decided preference for Maria Bertram' (88), but he does not
incorporate into his reading the envy and resentment which I
believe to be crucial clues to her behaviour.
7. Mrs Norris's 'reddening' at discovering Lady Bertram's largesse
to William (ten pounds to her one) can be ascribed to her jealous
anger that he should have so much, but it also reflects, I believe,
her shamed vexation at being reminded of the difference between
what 'something considerable' means to the Bertrams and to the
Norrises (305).
8. Susan Morgan correctly distinguishes between the fortune-hunt-
ing Thorpes and the heart-hunting Crawfords - 'part of the bril-
liance of Mansfield Park is its development of the attitude of
acquisitiveness from the simple materialism of Northanger Abbey
to the desire for conquest and possession of another's spirituality'
(137) - but one ought not to forget the literal acquisitiveness of
Mrs Norris, Maria Bertram, and even Mary Crawford.
9. Johnson 119.
10. Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century
English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 222.
11. Readers have noted, of course, how Fanny's happiness often re-
sults from the misery of others. Auerbach points out that 'Never
in the canon is the happy ending so reliant upon the wounds and
disappointments of others; though we leave Fanny ministering
avidly to these wounds, they will never heal' (215). P.J.M. Scott
connects Fanny's strength to her pleasure in others' weakness -
'this same process which makes her the only really perceptive
person in her social group is also an invidious one. It can, it must,

too easily fall over into a mode of revenge, vindication which is
also vindictiveness, of defining her own identity always at the
expense of others' (135). I shall later address Fanny's place in the
family struggles; for now, I want to emphasize that this formula
for happiness is not hers alone.
12. 'Return to Mansfield Park' in Partings Welded Together: Politics and
Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Methuen,
1987) 39. Musselwhite's New Left reading comes to same conclu-
sion as the conservative readings of Marilyn Butler and Alistair
M. Duckworth: that 'Portsmouth represents the threat to Mansfield
and its values' (39); see Butler, 244-5 and Duckworth, The Improve-
ment of the Estate 77-8. My emphasis on family behaviours
foregrounds cultural similarities rather than contrasts.
13. Actually, the failure to persuade extends also to those who are
'wrong'. Mrs Norris, for example, fails to counteract Sir Thomas's
desire to honour Fanny with a ball, and Mary Crawford is stunned
at Edmund's continuing determination to become a clergyman, a
determination which she interprets as indifference to herself: 'She
was very angry with him. She had thought her influence more
. . . he could have no serious views, no true attachment, by fixing
himself in a situation which he must know she would never stoop
to' (227-8).
14. Babb 168, 173.
15. Jan Fergus bases her study of Austen's early novels on Austen's
ability to manipulate 'her readers' responses to didactic and moral
ends' (6), while Butler begins and ends her chapter on Mansfield
Park with references to its clear and successful didacticism:
'Mansfield Park is the most visibly ideological of Jane Austen's
novels' (218) and thefirstvolume is 'a skilful dramatization of the
conservative case' (299). Jocelyn Harris, comparing Austen to
Richardson, says that 'The novel represents to them both... an
agent of moral change operating on a fictional world that then
doubles back into reality. Reformation is effected in both books
by means of education, the marriage choice, exhortation, and
example' (Jane Austen's Art of Memory [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989] 164). I am arguing that Mansfield Park
questions its own didactic impulses and possibilities.
16. Brown 80.
17. The tension between authoritarian patriarchy and sentiment is a
feature of many late eighteenth-century novels. See, for example,
Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House (4 vols. Introduction by
Gina Luria [New York: Garland, 1974. Reprint of 1793 ed.] 1.254-
5). Mr Somerive tries to end his son's imprudent attachment and
to prevent him from fighting a duel:
'Young man,' said Somerive, with more sternness than he

almost ever shewed towards Orlando before, 'you were once
Notes 135
accustomed to obey implicitly all my commands. At hardly

twenty, it is rather early to throw off all parental authority. . .
'There is no contending with you, Orlando,' said Mr Somerive,
bursting into tears; T cannot bear this!... do not... risk a life
so precious to us all.'
Smith, of course, presents the shift more abruptly than Austen

does, but both dramatize the instability of authoritarian discourse.
Obviously, I take issue with Babb's contention that Sir Thomas's
rhetoric fits 'the role that he always fancies himself to play: that
of an impartial judge moving in a world of fixed values' (151).
18. Mansell 129. Spacks argues, as I do, that 'Sir Thomas's domi-
nance, the most conventional and in some ways the most mani-
fest in the novel, proves repeatedly problematic Sir Thomas's
shifting position epitomizes an important pattern in the novel. To
trace the vocabulary of control as it figures in the text calls atten-
tion to the evanescence of every form of authority among the
residents of Mansfield Park' (219). Spacks stresses the relationship
between authority and rebellion, whereas I question the confi-
dence of the authoritative voice.
19. See, for example, Jane Burroway, who points to the irony of Fanny's
position: 'She is the embodiment of submission in a hierarchy in
which Sir Thomas is embodied authority, and she defies him'
('The Irony of the Insufferable Prig', Critical Quarterly 9 [1967]
128). Claudia Johnson politicizes this irony when she says that
'the resistance implies an assumption of self-responsibility that
challenges his authority, and he is alarmed' because he 'is alert to
revolutionary ideology' (104). Mary Evans also notes a class con-
frontation here, and finds a 'potentially radical message' to the
effect that 'the ownership of property is not in any sense a guide
to the moral worth of the individual' (Jane Austen and the State
[London: Tavistock, 1987] 28). Butler and Tony Tanner emphasize
the significance of the individual and the internal: Fanny has 'the
strength of someone who neither needs to seek advice nor to
vindicate herself, because she has a source of strength both within
and without' (Butler 240) and she is 'holding on strenuously to
standards and values which others all around her are thought-
lessly abandoning' (Tanner 156).
20. Mr Collins Considered: Approaches to Jane Austen (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1987). At several points Morris compares Sir Thomas
to Collins, and even notes their similar speech patterns: 'Another
eighteen years might go by, Sir Thomas warns, in tones that recall
those of Mr Collins, without her being addressed by a man of half
of Mr Crawford's estate...' (117). Since Morris's project is to es-
tablish the centrality of Collins, these parallels do not, for him,
compromise Sir Thomas.
21. Jane Spencer makes this point in The Rise of the Woman Novelist:
From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980):
'In Mansfield Park she attacks the whole idea of either good man
or good woman reforming the opposite sex through love and
guidance.... Jane Austen is deliberately undercutting the com-
placent belief in the power of love to reform' (173-4). Williams
takes an even broader view, saying that Mansfield Park 'becomes,
in fact, a means for considering the limitations of morality in
individual lives and in their mutual dealings' (86).
Several critics have commented on the issue of Fanny's passivity
as constituting authority. Butler and Mary Meyersohn sanctify
Fanny's silence, Butler by putting her in 'a long tradition of men
who have been wise in retirement' (228), Meyersohn by linking
her silence to morality - 'Silence here is chastity' ('What Fanny
Knew: A Quiet Auditor of the Whole' in Jane Austen: New Perspec-
tives 229). W.A. Craik and Paul Pickrel connect her passivity to
her social status: 'She is inferior socially to her cousins'; 'she is a
woman, an outsider, a person of no economic or social importance'
(Craik 97 'Lionel Trilling and Mansfield Park' SEL 27A [Autumn
1987] 616) while Bernard J. Paris speaks of the psychological effects
of her lower status: 'Both her feelings and her behavior are almost
always determined by strategic necessities. She is so frightened,
so anxious, so defensive, that she can hardly be aware of, much
less express, her own thoughts and desires' (38). Poovey questions
the success of Austen's strategy, but finds that 'simply by the
"comfort" [Fanny's] quiet example provides, she is able to arrest
the moral cancer that has spread from Sir Thomas's combined
neglect and indulgence' (219). And Paula Marantz Cohen sees a
dialectic in which 'Fanny's weakness becomes power in weakness,
Sir Thomas's power becomes weakness in power' ('Stabilizing the
Family System at Mansfield Park' ELH 54.3 [Fall 1987] 689).
Avrom Fleishman and Nina Auerbach, on the other hand, chal-
lenge the whole notion of Fanny's passive moral authority. To
Fleishman, 'Fanny is presented not as a paragon of virtue but as
a weak woman with self-defensive and self-aggrandizing im-
pulses ...' (A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967] 45). Auerbach,
discussing Fanny's relation to Lovers' Vows, speaks of her 'silent,
withering power over performance . . . fierce inactivity . . . silent
obstructive power... potent control over the action' (211).
Mudrick 160.
Poovey 217-18. Johnson alludes critically to the same principle
when she characterizes Fanny as 'a heroine ideologically and
emotionally identified with the benighted figures who coerce and
mislead her' (96). I agree with both readings, but see Austen as
presenting Fanny as both more self-conscious and more self-seek-
ing; she wants to embrace the system, 'to catch the best manner
of conforming' (Mansfield Park 17), because she wants to gain a
secure position in the Bertram family.
Notes 137
The Life of Jane Austen 235. In seeking parallels between life and
text, Halperin here makes his evidence do double duty. The work
must be autobiographical because Charles Austen is the 'obvious
model' for William Price, being generous and fond of dancing. In
the next couple of sentences, however, direct parallel gives way to
inversion - Austen's sailor brothers were neither as communica-
tive nor as generous as William, so the novel encodes 'wish-ful-
filment' and 'unspoken reproach' (236).
See, for example, Musselwhite 39-41 and Butler 244. Both see
Portsmouth as a representation of anarchic modernity, resistant to
the 'conservative' ideology of Mansfield Park.
CHAPTER 5: EMMA
A quick survey of recent scholarship demonstrates a critical con-

sensus on the nature of Emma as text. John A. Dussinger calls it
'a novel profoundly structured on the problems of discourse and
reading', 'most radically structured on a game theory, with a cha-
rade presented as the model of how people interact with each
other...' (In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen's
World [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990] 130,11). Ellen
R. Belton and Leland Monk connect Emma with the detective novel,
Monk even putting Frank Churchill on trial for the murder of his
aunt, and arguing that Austen is 'in many ways Frank Churchill's
accomplice in crime.... Austen, like her character, enjoys playing
games that mystify and deceive' (Belton, 'Mystery without Mur-
der: The Detective Plots of Jane Austen', Nineteenth-Century Litera-
ture 43 [June 1988]: 42-59; Monk, 'Murder She Wrote: The Mystery
of Jane Austen's Emma', Journal of Narrative Technique 20.3 [Fall
1990] 350). Grant I. Holly, in 'Emmagrammatology' asks 'how we
could see Emma as anything but continually underwritten, a kind
of palimpsest, by the anagrammatic possibilities of misreading
and rereading' (Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture vol. 19, ed.
Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock [East Lansing: Col-
leagues Press, 1989] 46).
Virginia Woolf in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870-1940, ed.
B.C. Southam, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987)
2.266.
Holly 47, Dussinger 98-9. Patricia Meyer Spacks echoes these for-
mulations when she says that 'Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott,
like their novelistic predecessors, reveal in their plots if not in
their stated doctrine the "wisdom of uncertainty" which, according
to Milan Kundera, constitutes "the novel's wisdom"' (Desire and
Truth 203). Susan Sniader Lanser characterizes such indeterminate
narratives, when they are written by women, as self-conscious
'fictions of authority': 'That is, as they strive to create fictions of

authority, these narrators exposefictionsof authority as the West-
ern novel has constructed it - and in exposing the fictions, they
may end up re-establishing the authority. Some of these texts
work out such dilemmas on their thematic surfaces, constructing
fictions of- that is about - authority as well' (8).
4. See Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985) on Emma's
'intense preoccupation with what might be said about her, with,
in fact, the gossip she may generate by her self-presentation as
well as by her imagination ...' (167).
5. Letters 452-3.
6. Wiesenfarth 138; Morgan 27; McMaster, 'The Secret Languages of
Emma', Persuasions 13 (December 1991) 121.
7. Paris 69.
8. This is the view of Marilyn Butler, who says of Emma: 'The
technical triumph is to employ the character-centred format, to
place the action almost wholly within the heroine's conscious-
ness, to enlist (as in the subjective tradition) the reader's sympa-
thy; and at the same time, largely through the medium of language,
to invoke the reader's active suspicion of unaided thought' (274).
Roger Gard echoes Butler when he discusses Emma's mistake
regarding Elton: '[T]he reader is already highly trained to develop
a sympathetic wariness as to her estimate of things around her
[W]e are enabled . . . to follow Mr Elton's courtship with appro-
priate skepticism and to experience some strict ironies - i.e. we
view the action from a different and superior position to that of
any of the participants' (161-2).
9. Spacks, Gossip 168.
10. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1990) 3-4.
11. Ivor Morris points out the similarity between Emma's and Mr
Knightley's conduct when he says that 'Mr Knightley has acted
honourably and in all innocence, but his behaviour has not been
notably discreet, for the simple reason that the thought of his
marrying Harriet can never have occurred to him Ironically,
through precisely the same cause she has been blind to similar
tokens in Mr Elton's conduct towards herself, and blundered into
a depth of indiscretion from which Mr Knightley, both as a man
and as someone of immeasurably greater social consequence than
Harriet, is preserved' (99). In other words, his gender and class
protect him from charges of inconsiderate blindness, while Emma
remains culpable.
12. Alistair M. Duckworth and Darrell Mansell both stress Emma's
lack of agency in the Churchill plot: she is 'a marionette in Church-
ill's more subtle show' (Duckworth 163), 'reduced... to a child
who has played for his amusement' (Mansell 173). W.A. Craik
and Warren Roberts point to Frank's deliberate manipulations,
Notes 139
'his own downright wrong actions causing deliberate and consist-

ent deceit' (Craik 148), his 'completely false' language and behav-
iour (Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution [New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1979] 39). Claudia L. Johnson puts Frank Church-
ill's manipulation of Emma in terms of alternative narratives:
'Much to her humbled bewilderment, Emma herself has gone from
considering herself the confident author of other people's stories
to realizing that she has instead been the hoodwinked and quite
powerless subject of another very stale o n e . . . of an eminently
flatterable provincial girl deceived by a duplicitous and mobile
man who is pulling all the strings she herself could not' (139).
Joseph Litvak and John Peter Rumrich connect Frank to Austen's
attitude toward social reality: Litvak says that '[h]is interpreta-
tions are flights of fancy, which she must read to produce her
little novels of error, to which he in turn takes a fancy, producing
additional fanciful interpretations. Austen is at her most subver-
sive, then, not in intimating the antisocial recesses of her heroine's
interiority but in locating Emma in this potentially endless circuit
of fiction, interpretation, and desire, with its dynamic and recip-
rocal relations between men and women' ('Reading Characters:
Self, Society, and Text in Emma', PMLA 100.5 [October 1985] 771).
Rumrich argues that Frank is the catalyst for events in the novel,
and that '[b]ecause of Churchill's authenticity and consequent
indeterminacy, we cannot help but wonder what he is about.
. . . Questions and paradoxes collect around Frank... because he
reflects, I believe, the author's own sense of wonder at the way
things happen' ('The Importance of Being Frank' in Jane Austen's
Emma, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1987] 96-7).
Harris 170. See also Susan Morgan: 'Emma's fault is not that sees
herself as a perceptive observer but that she considers herself a
creator and the people around her as expressions of her will' (28).
Lanser 48.
Tanner 183.
Laura G. Mooneyham, Romance, Language and Education in Jane
Austen's Novels (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988) 119. Donna
Landry conflates character and author and accuses both of class
snobbery: 'Emma patronizes Harriet without understanding her,
interprets Harriet's needs and desires to suit her own. Neither
Emma nor Austen credits the socially inferior Harriet with much
intelligence' (The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women's
Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990] 10).
Rambler 4, Samuel Johnson, Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer,
and Idler, ed. W.J. Bate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968)
11. Distinguishing mimetic fiction from earlier romances, Johnson
says 'when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world,
and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot
of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with
closer attention, and hope by observing his behaviour and success
to regulate their own practices ...' (11-12).
18. Sulloway 21; Mansell 168-9.
19. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 432.
20. This tendency of the text has been characterized in various ways.
Tony Tanner uses Bakhtinian terms in referring to 'the range of
speech habits displayed in the novel' (201) and connects language
to social change when he points to the 'dispersals' in the novel:
'the felicitous personal "union" here coincides with something
approaching social dissolution It would seem that Jane Austen
was growing distinctly more pessimistic about her society's abil-
ity to reestablish and renew its vital bonding and cohering power.
Society has not collapsed. But in this novel it has started to scat-
ter' (205-6). Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, in an ethnographic
study of Austen's novels, argue that 'Jane Austen's representation
of Emma's world suggest various competing views or models of
the Highbury social hierarchy, none of which is granted absolute
authority [N]o single character's actions and attitudes can tell
us what the social order really was' (58). Deborah Kaplan puts
these ambiguities in the context of authorial self-reflexivity:
'Austen's earliest, extant compositions suggest that she recognized
the courtship novel as a peculiar medium not only for flawless
heroines but also for perfectly didactic female friendships.. .. The
relationships served, in effect, as a textual emblem for the peda-
gogical relationships that novelists may have wished to have with
their readers. Focusing on the transmission of advice central to
the didactic friendship, Austen's parodies launch attacks against
such relationships' (Jane Austen among Women 142). I believe that
Austen's interrogation of the didactic novel survives well beyond
the Juvenilia - that it is, in fact, at the heart of her most carefully
constructed narrative.
21. Scott 77.
22. J.E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen in Persuasion, with A
Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. D.W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1965) 375-6.
CHAPTER 6: PERSUASION
1. See also Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen's Art of Memory (1989), which
continues the work of Kenneth Moler's Jane Austen's Art of Allusion
(1968), and Joseph Wiesenfarth, The Errand of Form: An Assay of
Jane Austen's Art (1967).
Notes 141
Virginia Woolf sets the tone for discussions of Persuasion as a new

departure: 'There is a new element in Persuasion She is begin-
ning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and
more romantic than she had supposed' (Jane Austen: The Critical
Heritage ii.282). Butler agrees that the novel is transitional, but
finds its uncertainties a weakness 'because it neither takes up an
intelligible new position, nor explicitly recants from the old one'
(291). Craik speculates that 'If she had lived to write more, and if
she did not intend to revise this novel into something more like
her others, Persuasion shows that Jane Austen was moving to-
wards a more introspective writing ...' (200).
Letters 487. Craik strongly asserts Anne's authority when she says
'Anne's view is the true one and there is nothing left for the
author to hint or the reader to guess There is no place here,
therefore, for that exquisite regulation of tone shown in Emma, for
those distinctions between what events seem to be and what they
are, and for whole situations to be distorted by what the heroine
thinks of them' (168-9). Moler finds that 'Anne is remarkably
clear-sighted throughout the novel' (219), and Paris locates the
difference between Fanny Price and Anne Elliot in the fact that
'Fanny is proved to be perfectly good, whereas Anne is proved to
be perfectly right' (167). Tanner, while compellingly arguing that
Persuasion represents the dissolution of community and therefore
of clear communication, says that 'Anne comes to embody what
we might call the conscience of language. She, and she alone,
always speaks truly, and truly speaks ...' (220). Ann W. Wastell
connects feeling and truth when she says that 'Anne's affections
increase, rather than limit, her powers of perception...' ('Anne
Elliot's Education: The Learning of Romance in Persuasion', Renas-
cence 40.1 [Fall 1987] 11). And John Wiltshire echoes this view:
'Anne's authority in the narrative is promoted by the self-
reflection that distinguishes the character's thoughts' (Jane Austen
and the Body: The Picture of Health' [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1992] 156.
Butler 278.
Harris argues that 'Anne's relationship with Wentworth is a con-
test in constancy' (208) and that both lovers are indeed constant.
Butler says that 'Anne's deep emotional commitment to her first
attachment pays unexpected homage to the truth and beauty of
private experience' (291). William A. Walling problematizes these
views when he suggests that Persuasion 'conveys to us at least
something of a peculiarly modern terror: that our only recourse
amid the accelerations of history is to commit our deepest ener-
gies to an intense personal relationship, but that an intense per-
sonal relationship is inevitably subject to its own kind of terrible
precariousness' ('The Glorious Anxiety of Motion: Jane Austen's
Persuasion', The Wordsworth Circle 7A [Autumn 1976] 336).
6. Anne's distinction between active men and constrained women

evokes a later and not so admirable heroine. Byron's Julia, con-
fined to a convent as punishment for her adulterous affair with
Don Juan, writes:
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,

'Tis a woman's whole existence; Man may range
The Court, Camp, Church, the Vessel, and the Mart;
Sword, Gown, Gain, Glory, offer in exchange
Pride, Fame, Ambition, to fill up his heart
And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
Men have all these resources, We but one,
To love again, and be again undone.
(Don Juan I.cxciv)
7. P.J.M. Scott 192.

8. Judy Van Sickle Johnson, 'The Bodily Frame: Learning Romance
in Persuasion', Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38.1 (June 1983) 45; Laura
G. Mooneyham 174; Tony Tanner 235; Janis P. Stout, Strategies of
Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa
Gather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1990) 60.
9. Writing to Cassandra of friends who have chosen to live in Clifton
rather than Bath, Austen says 'she is as glad of the change as even
you and I should be, or almost' (Letters 391). Park Honan appar-
ently does not overstate the case when he says the Austens' move
to Bath was, for Jane Austen, 'as bad as a naval disaster for Frank
might be' (166).
10. Craik 187. Other critics assert the readability and authenticity of
indirect communication. Gloria Sybil Gross says 'A word, a ges-
ture, a look, a tone of voice . . . are the clues to the deepest sources
of feeling' ('Jane Austen and Psychological Realism: "What Does
a Woman Want?"', Reading and Writing Women's Lives: A Study of
the Novel of Manners, ed. Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers
[Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990] 20). Keith G. Thomas
argues that Persuasion demonstrates the efficacy of non-verbal com-
munication: 'knowledge itself is as frequently reached by means
of gazing at the object, noticing who notices or talks about the
object, and noticing whether the object looks back or responds, as
by attending to the object's language . . . as if the return of percep-
tual attention were more significant in itself than the actual con-
tent of the looks or words exchanged' ('Jane Austen and the
Romantic Lyric: Persuasion and Coleridge's Conversation Poems',
ELH 54.4 [Winter 1987] 920).
11. Wiltshire 173; James L. Kastely, 'Persuasion: Jane Austen's Philo-
sophical Rhetoric', Philosophy and Literature 15 (1991) 81. Van Sickle
Notes 143
Johnson points out that Anne's certainties about Wentworth are

'qualified ... Anne's understanding is not so confident as the initial
words [about knowing Wentworth's state of mind] indicate. John
Hardy attributes this lack of confidence to the lapse of time and
closeness: 'Because of their long estrangement, she and Wentworth
can no longer occupy the kind of shared space or privacy that
presumably marked their earlier intimacy' (Jane Austen's Heroines:
Intimacy in Human Relationships [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984] 111).
12. Hardy says that '[t]hough not daring to admit it to herself
. . . [Anne] knows that Wentworth is not in love with either
Henrietta or Louisa Musgrove' (113). I argue that the questions of
Anne's knowledge or Wentworth's feelings are more complicated;
I agree with Keith G. Thomas's suggestion that Anne cannot
properly understand Wentworth 'unless Wentworth himself...
communicated his own intentions, making himself less remote,
less opaque. Ultimately, the object's responsive echo is arbiter of
whether an imagination proves wild or correct' (903).
13. Craik 175. Yasmine Gooneratne, Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1970) 180.
14. Marylea Meyersohn, 'Jane Austen's Garrulous Speakers: Social
Criticism in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion', Reading
and Writing Women's Lives 46.
15. Meyersohn 46; Kastely 82, 85.
16. David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1990) 126. Louise Flavin makes the same point in
her article 'Austen's Persuasion': 'Jane Austen is the first English
novelist to make extensive and sophisticated use of free indirect
discourse, a mode of speech or thought presentation that allows
a narrator the privilege of commentary and selection, while re-
taining the idiomatic qualities of the speaker's words or thoughts'
(The Explicator 47A [Summer 1989] 20). Both critics, of course,
employ Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogics, which at least partly
informs most recent studies of Austen. For the purposes of my
argument here, one passage from Bakhtin's work seems particu-
larly relevant. Rejecting traditional stylistic methodology, Bakhtin
warns against the impulse to unitary readings: 'Even when we
exclude character speech and inserted genres, authorial language
itself still remains a stylistic system of languages: large portions of
this speech will take their style (directly, parodically, or ironically)
from the language of others, and this stylistic system is sprinkled
with others' words, words not enclosed in quotation marks, formally
belonging to authorial speech but clearly distanced from the mouth
of the author by ironic, parodic, polemical or some other pre-
existing 'qualified' intonation' (The Dialogic Imagination 415-16).
17. Bakhtin 415.
18. Once again, we are reminded of Pride and Prejudice. Like Anne,
who hopes 'the gentlemen might each be too much self-occupied

to hear' (230) Mrs Musgrove's talk, Elizabeth Bennet vainly wishes
her mother's conversation about Jane and Bingley's marriage might
be kept from Darcy's hearing (PP 99-100).
A number of critics have commented on the loss of a stable centre
in Persuasion. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath alludes to its 'uncertainty
about the social bases for individual life.. . the apparently
unredeemable disorder of society' (Realism and Consensus in the
English Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983] 171).
Robert Hopkins says that 'Clearly Jane Austen is struggling in
Persuasion with the problem of moral judgement under uncer-
tainty' ('Moral Luck and Judgement in Jane Austen's Persuasion',
Nineteenth-Century Literature 42.2 [September 1987] 153-4). Glenda
A. Hudson points to the novel's 'wider critical view. Families are
in upheaval: the Elliots are divided, and the Musgrove household
is noisy and chaotic. The only families who seem to escape cen-
sure are those of the naval officers, but even they are not ideal-
ized' (93). Tony Tanner puts it most strongly when he notes in
Persuasion 'the absence of any real centre or principle of author-
ity all such potential sources of authority have gone awry,
gone away, gone wrong; they are absent, dispersed or impotent;
they have become ossified, stagnant or - worse - totally unreli-
able and misleading' (210), and Gene Koppel recommends a wholly
subjective response to a mysterious text: 'Each person must peer
into the shadowy middle ground of Persuasion's textual world
and the world of his own consciousness, and decide for himself
('The Mystery of the Self in Persuasion', Persuasions 6 [1984] 52).
Lanser 63. Although my conclusion differs from Lanser's argu-
ment that in Persuasion Austen attempts 'gradual authorization
through a nonironic, nondistanced free indirect discourse, of Anne
Elliot as wholly reliable focalizing consciousness' (77), I am deeply
indebted to her insight that Persuasion reaches towards 'overt
authoriality' (77).
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Index
Anderson, Beatrice, 118n.7 feminine, 21, 31, 33, 34, 37-8, 39,
Auerbach, Nina, 72, 132n.l, 133n.ll, 40, 41, 44, 72-3, 86-7
136n.22 and gender, 1, 7-8
Austen, Jane and judgement, 43-4
and authorial anxiety, 1, 38-9 and language, 11, 19-20, 21, 24-5
as critical observer, 40 moral, 70
diversionary tactics of, 31-4 of narrators, 3, 5, 12, 15, 21, 25,
and failure of language, 8-9, 66-7, 55-8, 78, 86, 88-90, 100, 101,
74-5 104-5, 110-11, 113-14: see also
and fallen women, 36 narrators
and feminine authority, 1, 31-2, 38, of observation and analysis, 40-1
44, 72-3 and omniscence, 3, 12-14, 96
and gender inequality, 36, 84, and parody, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 28,
114-15 29
and indirect communication, 106, and persuasion, 70, 71-2, 74-5
109, 112-13 of readers, 17, 22, 23, 29-30, 82, 90,
as intelligent older woman, 110 92, 94-7, 104-5, 107, 109, 110,
and irony, 34, 46, 47, 90, 100, 115-16
113 and silence, 39, 47-9, 51-2
and moral authority, 66, 68 social aspects of, 5
polarities in, 1, 2, 4, 23, 27-9, 44, and truth, 6, 8-10, 12, 24-5, 52-3,
113 55-8, 92-4
and reader participation, 17, 29-30, undermining of, 39, 43-4, 77-8,
90, 94, 96-7, 105, 107, 109, 110, 115-16
115-16 and virtue, 105
and romance vs. realism, 27-9 see also patriarchy; power
and Romanticism, 100
undermining authority, 39, 77-8, Babb, Howard S., 66, 121n.l0, 123n.l,
90, 115-16 124n.4, 125n.6, 126n.l4, 130n.l0,
view of families, 59-60 134n.l4, 135n.l7
view of society, 113-14 Bakhtin, M.M., 41, 114, 120n.2,
works by, see individual titles 127n.l9, 143nn.l6, 17
Austen-Leigh, J.E., 140n.22 Barrett, Eaton Stannard, 89
authority The Heroine, 18
and authorial manipulation, 2, 78, Barthes, Roland, 29, 122n.l7
116 Bath, parodies of conventions in,
and autonomy, 53-4 18-19, 22
of characters as readers, 79-81, 82, Belton, Ellen R., 137n.l
87, 107-10 Benedict, Barbara, 127n.l7
and communication, 111, 112 Bennett, Elizabeth (in Pride and
failures of, 1, 3, 4, 11, 14-15, Prejudice), 47, 48-9, 50, 52-4, 103
18-19, 21, 39, 41, 42, 65-6, 67, Bennet, Mrs (in Pride and Prejudice),
68-9, 70, 71-2, 74-5, 86-90, 45
115-16 Bertram, Edmund (in Mansfield Park),
and family rivalries, 59-60, 65-6 70-2
151
152 Index
Bertram, Sir Thomas (in Mansfield misreadings by, 107-8, 109-10
Park), 4, 65-6, 67-70 and Mr Elliot, 103-4
Bogel, Frederick V., 130n.l2 Emma, 15, 77-97, 116
Booth, Wayne C , 95, 140nl9 characters as readers in, 79-81, 82,
Boyd, Zelda, 125n.5 87
Brower, Reuben, 131n.l4 complexities in, 77-8, 93-4, 95-7
Brown, Julia Prewitt, 50, 128-9n.2, misreadings in, 79-83, 84-7, 88-90
129n.6, 131n.l5, 133n.5, 134n.l6 paradoxes and uncertainties in,
Brown, Lloyd W., 120nn.2, 5, 121n.ll, 77-8
130n.l0 and 'tidy' ending, 95-7
Burlin, Katrin Ristok, 19, 22, 120n.5, see also names of characters
121nn.8, 13, 129n.4, 130n.ll Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds, 144n.l9
Burney, Frances, Camilla, 18 Evans, Mary, 75, 135n.l9
Burroway, Jane, 135n.l9
Butler, Marilyn, 75, 100, 122-3n.l, Fairfax, Jane (in Emma), 93-5
128n.l, 134nn.l2, 15, 135n.l9, families
136n.22, 137n.26, 138n.8, 141nn.2, children in, 46, 54
4,5 and patriarchy, 4-5
Byron, Lord, 142n.6 problematic relationships in 67-8
rivalries in, 59-60, 61, 63-5
Camilla (Burney), 18 and social privilege, 4
Cohen, Paula Marantz, 136n.22 The Female Quixote (Lennox), 18
communication, 18-19 Fergus, Jan, 121n.7, 123n.l, 127n.20,
direct, 109, 111, 112 134n.l5
indirect, 105-6 Ferrars, Edward (in Sense and
Craik, W.A., 110, 124n.4, 136n.22, Sensibility), 33, 40-1
138-9n.l2, 141nn.2, 3, 142n.l0, Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews,
143n.l3 18
Flavin, Louise, 143n.l6
dance, as metaphor, 23 Fleishman, Avrom, 136n.22
Darcy, Fitzwilliam (in Pride and Foucault, Michel, 127n.21
Prejudice), 45, 46, 47-8, 55-8
Dashwood, Elinor (in Sense and Gard, Roger, 99, 118n.7, 138n.8
Sensibility), 34-5, 39-4 Gardiner, Mr and Mrs (in Pride and
as Austen's alter ego, 43-4 Prejudice), 46, 54, 56-7
as critical observer, 40-2 gender
Dashwood, Fanny (in Sense and and authority, 1, 7-8
Sensibility), 32-3, 41-2 biases, 90-1
Dashwood, Marianne (in Sense and disloyalty, 114
Sensibility), 37-8, 39, 40, 41, 42 inequality, 36, 114-15
Davis, Lennard J., 118nn.4, 6, 119n.l2 relations, 83-4
Drabble, Margaret, 12, 119n.ll values, 84
Duckworth, Alistair M., 75, 120n.4, see also men; patriarchy; women
122n.l5, 128n.l, 134n.l2, 138n.l2 Gilbert, Sandra M., 123n.l
Dussinger, John A., 77, 137nn.l, 3 Gooneratne, Yasmine, 110, 143n.l3
Gross, Gloria Sybil, 142n.l0
Edwards, Thomas R., 131n.l5 Gubar, Susan, 123n.l
Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 127n.l5
Elliot, Anne (in Persuasion) Halperin, John, 73, 117n.l, 128n.21,
as centre of novel, 99-100 137n.25
constancy of, 100-3 Handler, Richard, 132n.l6, 140n.20
and Lady Russell, 111-12 Hardy, John, 143n.l2
Index 153
Harris, Jocelyn, 86, 134n.l5, 139n.l3, and third-person narrator, 3, 12-14
140n.l, 141n.5 see also names of characters
Harrison, Bernard, 117n.4 Landry, Donna, 139n.l6
Hennelly, Mark M., Jr, 128n.l language
The Heroine (Barrett), 18 and authority, 19-20, 21, 24-5
Holly, Grant I., 77, 137nn.l, 3 and character, 20
Holmans, Margaret, 128n.21 failure of, 66-7, 74-5
Honan, Park, 127n.l8, 142n.9 and true feelings 8-9
Hopkins, Robert, 144n.l9 see also communication; speech
Horwitz, Barbara, 7, 118n.8 Lanser, Susan Sniader, 13, 86, 116,
Hudson, Glenda A., 132-3n.4, 119n.l3, 122n.l8, 137-8n.3,
144n.l9 139n.l4, 144n.20
Lascelles, Mary, 99, 117n.l, 121nn.l2,
inferiority, as motive for behaviour, 14, 125n.8
60-3 Leighton, Angela, 123n.l, 129n.3
interpretation Lennox, Charlotte, 89
of coded language and gestures, The Female Quixote, 18
79, 105-9, 110, 111 Levine, George, 119n.2
of intrigue, 110 Litvak, Joseph, 139n.l2
of ironic speech, 80-1 Lodge, David, 113, 143n.l6
of silences, 47-8, 49-51, 79 Looser, Devoney, 122n.l8
Love and Freindship (Austen), 29
Johnson, Claudia, 59, 62, 75, 132n.2,
McKellar, Hugh, 117n.2
133n.9, 135n.l9, 136n.24, 139nl2
McMaster, Juliet, 2, 82, l l l n . l ,
Johnson, Judy Van Sickle, 105,
120n.4, 138n.6
142n.8, 142-3n.ll
Mansell, Darrell, 120n.4, 122n.l5,
Johnson, Samuel, 139-40n.l7
132n.l, 135n.l8, 138n.l2, 140n.l8
Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 18
Mansfield Park, 15, 59-75
attitude toward servants in, 62
Kaplan, Deborah, 12, 31, 39, 118n.5, family rivalries in, 59-60, 61, 63-4,
10, 119n.l2, 123n.2, 126n.l0, 74-5
127n.l6, 140n.20 and feminine authority, 72-3
Kastely, James L., 108, 112, 142n.ll, inferiority in, 60-3
143n.l5 patriarchal power in, 64, 67
Kearful, Frank J., 122nn.l5, 18 see also names of characters
Kiely, Robert, 120nn. 3, 4, 122n.l5 marriage
Knightley, George (in Emma), 90-1, and inequality, 90-1
100 and irony, 46
Knuth, Deborah J., 118-19n.l0 and money, 60
Koppel, Gene, 144n.l9 men
Kroeber, Karl, 119n.l, 120n.4 behaviour of, 32-4
Kundera, Milan, 137n.3 see also patriarchy; women
Meyersohn, Marylea, 110, 112, 124n.4,
Lady Susan, 2-16 136n.22, 143nn.l4, 15
as epistolary narrative, 3, 12 Miller, D.A., 131n.l5
and feminine authority, 3, 4, 6-7 Miller, Jane, 125n.5
as generative text, 2 Moler, Kenneth, 125n.6, 140n.l,
and linguistic manipulation, 3, 6, 141n.3
9-10 money
and patriarchy, 4, 5 and marriage, 60
and social opinion, 7 and rivalries, 65, 66
154 Index
Monk, Leland, 137n.l patriarchy, 3-5, 32, 64, 67, 69
Mooneyham, Laura G., 87, 105, women and, 39
139n.l6, 142n.8 Patteson, Richard F., 14, 119n.l5
Morgan, Susan, 82, 120n.5, 125n.6, Pavel, Thomas, 54, 130n.l3
129n.7, 133n.8, 138n.6, 139n.l3 Persuasion, 15, 40, 46, 99-116
Morland, Catherine (in Northanger contradictions in, 101, 114, 115
Abbey), 21 and language, 105
capitulation to Henry Tilney, 24, misreadings in, 107-8, 109-10, 111
25 and the navy, 115
and General Tilney, 25-7 as Romantic novel, 99
and Isabelle, Thorpe, 24 and women's roles, 114-15
language of, 20 see also names of characters
reaction to parody, 18 Pickrel, Paul, 136n.22
as romantic heroine, 28 Poovey, Mary, 3, 8, 11, 12, 73, 117n.3,
Morris, Ivor, 70, 135n.20, 138n.ll 118n.9, 119n.l2, 124n.2, 125n.6,
Mudrick, Marvin, 123n.l, 125n.6, 126n.l4, 131n.l5, 133n.5,
127n.l5, 132n.l, 136n.23 136nn.22, 24
Musselwhite, David E., 65, 134n.l2, power
137n.26 feminine, 1, 3, 4, 6-7, 33, 34, 37-8
and linguistic manipulation, 3, 6, 8,
Nardin, Jane, 120n.3, 121n.l5 9-10, 11
narrators sexual, 6-7, 11
and conflicting narratives, 3, 5-6, see also authority; patriarchy
55-8, 101, 113 Price, Fanny (in Mansfield Park),
and feminine authority, 39, 44 59-61, 68, 69, 72-5, 85, 100
omniscient, 3, 12-14 Price, Martin, 124n.4, 125n.6
and sentimentality, 39-40 Pride and Prejudice, 3, 4, 15, 45-58, 60,
silence of, 39 113, 143-4n.l8
unreliability of, 13-14, 15, 21, ambiguities in, 45-6, 54-5, 58
110-11 competing narratives in, 52-3,
Norris, Mrs (in Mansfield Park), 61, 55-8
62-3, 64 morality in, 52-4
Northanger Abbey, 15, 17-30, 40, 113, silences in, 46-52
116 see also names of characters
collision of genres in, 27-9 propriety, 7-8, 18-19, 40-1, 52-4,
romance vs. realism in 2, 27-9 64-5, 70, 72
use of parody in, 17, 18-19, 21, 22,
23, 26-7, 28-9 reader participation, 17, 22, 23,
see also names of characters 29-30, 82, 90, 92, 94-7, 104-5,
107, 110, 116
The Old Manor House (C. Smith), Rich, Adrienne, 39, 126n.l3
134-5n.l7 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 18
Riffaterre, Michael, 82, 138n.l0
Page, Norman, 51, 130nn.8, 10 rivalries, see families, rivalries in
Pamela (Richardson), 18 Robbins, Susan Pepper, 13, 14,
Paris, Bernard J., 82, 126-7n.l5, 119n.l2
136n.22, 138n.7, 141n.3 Roberts, Warren, 138-9n.l2
parody romance, 28-9, 39-40, 85, 100-2, 108
of gothic romance, 22, 26-7, 28-9 and communication, 106
of ladies' journals, 21, 22 Romanticism, 99, 100
limitations of, 18-19, 21, 23, 28-30 Rumrich, John Peter, 139n.l2
see also Austen, Jane, and irony Russell, Lady (in Persuasion), 111-12
Index 155
Sanditon (Austen), 16 as unreliable narrator, 21, 22, 25
Satz, Martha, 131n.l5 and use of language, 19-20
Scott, P.J.M., 96, 105, 119n.l4, Todd, Janet, 127-8n.21
133-4n.ll, 140n.21, 142n.7 Tomlinson, T.B., 124n.3
Segal, Daniel, 132n.l6, 140n.20 Tompkins, J.M.S., 129n.5
Sense and Sensibility, 3, 15, 31-44 Trilling, Lionel, 132n.l
as critique of patriarchal values, 31
diversionary tactics in, 31-4
Vernon, Catherine (in Lady Susan),
women in, 32-4, 37, 38-9
8-9, 16
see also names of characters
Vernon, Lady Susan (in Lady Susan),
sentimentality, critique of, 39-40
7, 9-11
servants, 62
authority of, 8
silences, 39, 46-52 as dangerous heroine, 3
Smith, Charlotte, The Old Manor reputation of, 4, 5
House, 134-5n.l7
Smith, Harriet (in Emma), 80, 87-9
Smith, Leroy, 7, 118n.8 Walling, William, 141n.5
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 31, 38, 82, Wastell, Ann W., 141n.3
123n.2, 125n.8, 126n.l2, 133n.l0, Wiesenfarth, Joseph, 19, 81, 120n.l20,
135n.l8, 137n.3, 138nn.4, 8 125n.9, 128n.l, 138n.6, 140n.l
speech Williams, Michael, 124n.3, 125n.7,
and character, 52 131n.l4, 133n.6
critique of, 51-2 Willoughby, John (in Sense and
see also communication; language Sensibility), 35-8
Spencer, Jane, 135-6n.21 Wilt, Judith, 126n.ll
spinsters, 91 Wiltshire, John, 108, 141n.3, 142n.ll
Steinem, Gloria, 126n.l3 women, 31-4
Sternberg, Meir, 131n.l4 fallen, 36
Stierle, Karlheinz, 132n.l6 manipulative and aggressive
Stout, Janis P., 106, 142n.8 behaviour of, 32, 33, 34, 37-8
Sulloway, Alison G., 91, 132n.4, place of in society, 1, 39, 72-3,
140n.l8 114-15
power of, 3, 4, 6-7, 39, 72-3:
Tanner, Tony, 87, 105, 128n.l, see also authority, feminine
135n.l9, 139n.l5, 140n.20, 141n.3, and suppression of feelings, 6-7, 8,
142n.8, 144n.l9 11,39
Tave, Stuart M., 119n.2, 121-2n.l5, unattractive, 114
125-6n.l0 see also gender; spinsters
Thomas, Keith G., 142n.l0, 143n.l2 Woodhouse, Emma (in Emma)
Thompson, James, 52, 130n.9 and gender values, 84
Thomson, James, 6 as limited authority, 86, 87, 88-90
Tilney, General (in Northanger Abbey), misreadings by, 81-3, 84-7
character inconsistencies of, 25-7 misreadings of, 79-81
Tilney, Henry (in Northanger Abbey), as text read by other characters,
17,24 78-81
as ironic commentator, 17-18 Woolf, Virginia, 77, 137n.2, 141n.2

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JANE AUSTEN AND

FANNY BURNEY'S 'A BUSY DAY'

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995978-0-333-60727-5

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of

First published in Great Britain 1995 by

A catalogue record for this book is available

First published in the United States of America 1995 by

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction: Lady Susan's Progeny 1

1 Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody 17

2 Sense and Sensibility and Feminine Authority 31

3 Getting the Whole Truth in Pride and Prejudice 45

4 The Family Plot of Mansfield Park 59

5 Emma and the Inept Reader 77

6 Straight Talk in Persuasion 99

Select Bibliography 145

This project has reached completion because I have access to the

I want to acknowledge my debt to H. Scott Wallace for his

All references to Austen's novels are taken from The Novels of

encoded in her work are as pertinent to male-authored texts

The following chapters approach a reading of Jane Austen's

intersection of gender, language and authority as any text in the

remembering how little Lady Susan has exhibited submission,

sway his family, sometimes by asserting his patriarchal status as

about Jane Fairfax correctly assume a romantic secret) but also

only with evoking desire in men, but with successfully suppress-

very words to justify her behavior.' Mary Poovey, too, refers to

of the feelings themselves. Recall Darcy's response when Eliza-

to Reginald: she ascribes her earlier hostility to his sister to hav-

He can have no true regard for me, or he would not have

In this passage, which seems to me to contain the most candid of

her for another, moving from cynicism to submission to rejection

When the third-person narrator interrupts the story being told in

Richard F. Patteson finds that this problematized narrative voice

I have deliberately refrained from speaking of "the narrator"

While Patteson's articulation of narrative indeterminacy is con-

authority: the authority of a narrative voice that has discarded

either a hero who is a self-conscious mentor, like Edgar Mandle-

conventional dialogue parodied by Henry seems both genuine

they continued talking together as long as both parties remained

We need not insist upon an ideology of accommodation to find

Henry's aggressive precision of language carry quite this moral

a mob of three thousand men . . . the streets of London flowing

This language, parodically riddled as it is with cliche and hyper-

Henry Tilney's subsequent parody of gothic romance is even

rhetorical stance suits him at the time - parodic, critical or meas-

'the picturesque'. Nor is this all; in accepting Henry's authority,

both with the truth of the matter as we perceive it and with

in my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong'

That he was perfectly agreeable and good-natured, and alto-

As the General appears in an increasingly unamiable light at

The collision of genres in Northanger Abbey has interested a

better than romance because it exposes the excesses of romance,

(242). When unromantic, down-to-earth people manifest such

of the novel and repossess the narrative power they normally

excused, are overshadowed by an emphasis on the despicable

She found him, however, perfectly the gentleman in his behav-

Not only does this evaluation point back to women's inadequa-

described' (12). He cedes agency to her, and thereby abrogates

lack of energy and agency, then, is explained away by the

Certainly, Elinor's blind spot about Edward has been noted;

The pejorative tone he uses to describe Mrs Smith's morality is

(330). Willoughby is granted the same dispensation that Edward