Failures of Feeling by Lee Wendy Anne;

Author:Lee, Wendy Anne; [Lee, Wendy Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Sense, Insensibility, Sympathy

IN THE CASE OF JANE AUSTEN IT IS, remarkably, Austen herself who presides as the insensible of the novel.1 Both critics and Janeites have long been preoccupied with the singularity of her unfeeling and its shaping impact on her work, making it necessary to prove either “the biographical fact that Jane Austen had loved,” as Virginia Woolf put it, or, as another camp upholds, the general impression that she hated. Charlotte Brontë, annoyed at the recommendation to read more Austen, famously took issue with her forebear’s dispassion: “Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman; if this is heresy,” Brontë concluded, “I cannot help it.”2

Far from sacrilege, findings of Austen’s insensibility are linked not only to her perceived sexlessness (in Brontë’s account, Austen’s neglect “of what throbs fast and full”), but also to her divinity—that is, her moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical ascendancy. “For Jane Austen has no passion, preaches no gospel, grinds no axe; standing aloof from the world, she sees it, on the whole, as silly. She has no animosity for it; but she has no affection,” eulogized Reginald Farrer on the centenary of her death.3 Fellow Austenian Lord David Cecil boasted that the novelist was “unable to express . . . emotion directly” and that because she “surveyed her creatures with too detached an irony for her to identify herself with them,” she could not “voice their unthinking gushes of feeling.”4 An icon of contempt—that cardiac “immobility” declared by Hobbes to be scandalously unaffected by either aversion or desire—Austen becomes personally subject to charges of cruelty, deviance, and froideur. Unthinking readers may stoop to identify with her characters’ feelings, but the novelist would never.

“Distance—from her subject and from the reader—was Jane Austen’s first condition for writing,” begins Marvin Mudrick’s classic Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, which epitomizes the critical impulse to make Austen’s celibacy the basis of her style.5 For Mudrick, Austen’s “single life-principle” of emotional quarantine and chilling self-exemption kept her not only from engaging in personal and, in his account, sexual relations but also from giving way to readerly pleasure. As E. N. Hayes acidly complained in a polemic against Emma, “Of the passion of love little is said, I think for the obvious reason that Jane Austen knew nothing of it firsthand. If her men and women feel the thrill of love, certainly the reader is never aware of the fact.”6 Too merciless or “priss[y]” or inhuman to entertain mere feelings (Mudrick 168), Austen may appear to concern herself with friendship, love, and, in particular, heterosexual desire, but in fact, this story goes, she could not care less. (Her letters and juvenilia are cited as further evidence of such deep-seated insensibility.)7

The reception of Austen and her novels—a history pivotal to the fortunes of the genre at large8—offers a potent example of how failures of feeling are entwined with narrative failure and how the charge of insensibility so often marks a disruption to protocols of fictionality.

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