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Book review
Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon

by Clara Tuite

Cambridge University Press, 2002

Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon is published under a series title of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism whose general editors are Marilyn Butler from Oxford University and James Chandler from the University of Chicago. Clara Tuite’s study is the 49th in the series. The broad focus for the series is British writers in the period of the Romantic Movement in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on literary and other kinds of politics. There are many titles to interest Jane Austen society members, including Edward Copeland’s Women Writing about Money, (No. 9), Reading Daughters’ Fictions 1709-1834 by Caroline Gonda (No 19), British Fiction and the Production of Social Order 1740-1830 by Miranda Burgess (No 43) and Woman Writers in the 1790s by Angela Keane (No 44). A minority of books in the series focus on a single writer, mostly the poets: Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. There is a volume on that staunch defender of English rural life, William Cobbett (No 9) and then, this volume, the first in the series to discuss a single novelist. We would all recognise that Jane Austen’s novels are romantic, in the modern sense that they are love stories, but her work is often considered to stem from a Johnsonian classical influence, ‘Augustan’ as Tuite puts it, rational rather than Romantic, nearer to Pope than Wordsworth. She prefers to see Austen as a conservative romantic.

Clara Tuite is a literary scholar, so it is not surprising that embedded in the discussion are frequent references to contemporary literary criticism both as support for and refutation of other critics’ positions. The endnotes are thorough and informative and can take the reader beyond the already myriad concerns of the study. The author demonstrates a wide and deep appreciation of the historical and philosophical backgrounds to the novels, and discusses these both through the known history of Jane Austen’s family and from British history and culture both before and after they were written. She also traces the growth of Austen’s reputation by interpreting what the novelist was aiming to do, what she achieved at the time and how her work was received in later years and up to the present day. She states that the study ‘develops out of the cultural-materialist revision of the narrative of the rise of the novel and locates Austen’s work within the generic struggle for cultural recognition of the female identified novel in the late eighteenth century’ (p.8). So there, partly, is the ‘sexual politics’ part of the title, but there is also reference to the marriage plots in Austen as part of a heteronormative (meaning, I’m glad to say, heterosexual) culture dealing with inheritance, marriage, dynasty and domesticity. Most readers would feel on home ground here. Beyond this, she sees the ‘queering of Austen as a very exciting part of Austen’s current revival… and ‘…seeks to contribute to a queer appropriation, or queer reading, of Austen’. At which point, and whenever such contributions were made, this was one reader she failed to convince; in other words, the discussion seemed trivial and irrelevant to an appreciation of what Jane Austen wrote.

Another part of the title refers to the ‘Literary Canon’. I remember the first time I picked up this book and glanced through the opening coming across the term ‘canonical Austen’ and wondering, as I drove off to exercise class, ‘am I in for an intellectual treat, or an intellectual defeat? The answer turned out to be just a little of each. The language is highly abstract, and academic, so that one of my intentions, to review the book for the December Sensibilities deadline did not happen. The introduction was full of interest but very difficult to read. I needed to paraphrase constantly to be sure I understood and this took time. The author is not a lucid writer who can communicate complex ideas simply; rather she ‘seeks to complicate’(p10) and wants ‘to problematise’ (p.28). The numerous concepts she brings to her analysis weigh heavily on her prose and although she frequently signals what she is doing, unfortunately, at times in a repetitive way, the general organisation of material in the chapters does not seem systematic enough to act as signposts to the meaning.

If ‘canonical Austen’ gave room for thought, what about ‘hypercanonicity’? This term appeared in the first paragraph, and it seems now a reasonable task for me to attempt to summarise what was interesting about the content in less daunting terms. Jane Austen is hypercanonical in that she is often quoted or referred to and is central to British literature and culture and even to popular global culture. Quotation includes reading, criticism, rewritings, continuations, sequels and adaptations The author identifies five main ways in which the canon (that is, not just her work but the associations that extend from it) is constructed. There is the Augustan Austen, which focuses on neo-classical style and formal perfection, on civilised life represented by the gentry rather than popular culture. She sees this as a Cambridge based 1920s to 60s viewpoint, represented by F.R.Leavis and Ian Watt. I would put the Austen biography by Elizabeth Jenkins into this category. The second construction is the idea of the novels as perfect realism, and part of the ‘great tradition’ of what is great about the English novel – also a Leavis idea but she does not discuss this systematically. The third is what she calls ‘Green’ Austen. This is the association with the natural forms of the English countryside, the preference for organic development from country values rather than modern encroachments. A startling illustration appears in the form of a David Jones advertisement for March 1996 (p.14). This shows the fashion model wearing a Fair Isle cardigan and leaning against a tree. ‘A little bit of country’ superimposed on the picture with an accompanying side message. This includes as part of Autumn behaviour suggestions like ‘make jam or curl up with a Jane Austen novel’. This sort of reference she refers to aptly enough as ‘the pleasurable banality of Austen’s ‘fall into a quotation’ (p 15), the quotation marks being for her own previous terminology. The fourth construction identifies Jane Austen with taste and the last with the identification of Austen’s work with the courtship and marriage plot. These themes appear throughout the discussion in fairly complex forms but are, once categorised, not used systematically. For example, it would have been useful to have had subsections of the introduction dealing with each, but only the first ‘construction’ had a full section and there was much blurring, renaming and complication.

The first chapter discusses the juvenilia, but particularly Catherine and the Bower in which she discovers much sexual innuendo and describes the bower, rather horridly as ‘a licensed site of prepubescent homosociality which borders on homoeroticism’ (p.37). The second chapter deals with Sense and Sensibility briefly and then discusses Austen’s ‘free, indirect style’, in comparison with epistolary or participating narrator style. It ranges through the gothic and the sentimental novel in discussion also of Northanger Abbey. There is much which would be of interest here but the effort of paraphrasing often outweighs the benefits. Take this statement, for example,

Bender’s account can be complicated by historicising the dialectical movement of free, indirect discourse within the moment at which late eighteenth century realism establishes itself in opposition to romance. (p69) then imagine this level of discussion before, and after, and in a long chapter. The next chapter has similar complications but is the one where I found most interest. It is called ‘Breeding heritage culture: Mansfield Park, Reflections on the Revolution in France and the glorious revolutions of the country house.’ (The punctuation here seems idiosyncratic but is replicated exactly.) In fact, a more lucid and less densely packed discussion of the content here could have made an interesting book in itself. The final chapter is on Sanditon, where the author sees Jane Austen moving away from the marriage plot into a focus on an empowered woman whose upward mobility does not depend on marrying but on independence, here through property speculation.

There are some areas of interest in this difficult book, but ultimately it lacks communicability. There is so much the author wants to cover but her failure to resist comment on every possible aspect of modern Jane Austen studies, as well as all the other aims set out in the introduction, is ultimately a loss to the reader, or, to put it another way, will mean that potential readers will be few. I am reminded of Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge’s novel, Small World (p.24) who states at an academic conference that he ‘used to be a Jane Austen man’ having written five books ‘to establish what her novels meant – and naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before’. He then began a further commentary ‘the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle… so that there would be nothing further to say…. Perhaps one day the author of this work will deconstruct and rehabilitate and reproduce the better parts of this work in more coherent forms. Her students would surely appreciate that.

Yvette Field

14 February 2004

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