The British novelist Howard Jacobson has done us all a service by pointing out the sex in Jane Austen.
Not the obvious but offstage sex: the elopement of Lydia and Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, the adultery of Maria and Henry in Mansfield Park, the seduction of Eliza in Sense and Sensibility – all the juicy misbehavior that makes clear Jane Austen did, after all, know how babies are made.
No, in a lecture delivered over the weekend at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, held in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, Jacobson makes a subtler point: that Austen’s stories are suffused with sexual tension, not despite but because of their lack of on-stage sex scenes, with their apparatus of logistical description so familiar to readers of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.
“Is Anne Elliot's agitation, on being helped into the carriage by Captain Wentworth, any less materially present to us, is her disarrangement any less sensually felt, because there's no mention of where Wentworth puts his hands. . . ?” Jacobson asks. “The choice not to be more explicit – where on her body does he touch her, how hot are his fingers? – isn't governed by decorum only. It's as likely to be an artistic decision, too, keeping us wondering, as Anne herself must, what Wentworth's employment of his hands denotes, how far she dare allow her passion for him to be awakened.”
Partly, Jacobson is saying something about Austen’s writing – about how omitting precise details allows her to convey, quite precisely, the inchoate wishing, wanting, not having that make for the emotional drama in her stories.
And he’s also pointing out something that Janeites understand, if only unconsciously: the peculiar emotional intensity of Austen’s seemingly eventless stories is partly the fruit of repression. In the culture she writes about, people are expected to hide their feelings of joy, anger, misery, resentment – and, yes, lust – under a mannerly, suitable-for-public-consumption mask. But repressed emotion is no less present for being repressed; indeed, the effort to not express it may intensify its power.
This is one reason I’m often unconvinced by Austen interpretations that insist on literalizing and physicalizing every relationship in the books – claiming, for example, that Marianne Dashwood “must have” slept with Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. These interpretations imply that only physical consummation could account for the intensity of emotion in Austen’s stories. Why would Marianne be so upset about Willoughby’s betrayal, the argument seems to go, unless he’d stolen her virginity as well as her heart?
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t (personally, I think not), but as Jacobson reminds us, it’s fundamentally beside the point. She doesn’t have to have slept with him to feel what she feels. All the agony of wanting, having, losing – it’s right there on the page, not off stage at all.
2 comments
Feb 13 2018 10:33PM by Joan Ray, Professor Emerita, English
Marianne did not have sex with Willoughby. Read the book, volume 2, chapter 10, to see Marianne's reactions when Elinor tells her of Willoughby's seduction of Eliza Junior: "She felt the loss of Willoughby's character yet more heavily than she had felt the loss of his heart; his seduction and desertion of Miss Williams, the misery of that poor girl, and the doubt of what his designs might once have been on herself, preyed altogether so much on her spirits, that she could not bring herself to speak of what she felt even to Elinor; and, brooding over her sorrows in silence, gave more pain to her sister than could have been communicated by the most open and most frequent confession of them" I read so many articles, both in print and on line, where well known scholars and novelists state views about Austen's novels that are disproved by actually reading them!
Feb 13 2018 11:07PM by Deborah Yaffe
I agree with you. I imagine that those on the other side of this question would argue that Marianne's horror is at Willoughby's desertion of Eliza, rather than just his seduction of her, although the "what his designs might once have been on herself" line definitely makes that argument hard to sustain. (Plus, he's deserted Marianne herself by this point in the novel, so if seduce-and-abandon was going to sink his character in her eyes, it would already be sunk.) I also think that some critics are unwilling to fully acknowledge Austen's sexual ethics, which are more conservative than those currently fashionable in academic circles: Although she feels compassion for the wrongs done to an Eliza or a Maria, JA also firmly believes that young women who let themselves be seduced into extramarital sex are guilty of a grave and irreparable moral error, of the kind that her heroines just do not commit. Ergo, it's unlikely she'd want us to believe that her heroine Marianne had slept with Willoughby.