What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved by John Mullan

Author:John Mullan [Mullan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, History, Europe, Great Britain, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Women Authors
ISBN: 9781620400418
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Published: 2013-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

In Austen, as in the eighteenth-century novels from which she learned, pre-marital sex happens because a young woman gets into the hands of a rakish man, not because two people simply cannot resist each other.

Naturally, none of Austen’s heroines would have sex before marriage, but sex before marriage is not unimaginable to her. Her most naive characters know that it happens – even Jane Bennet, though she is determined to believe otherwise. ‘My father and mother believe the worst, but I cannot think so ill of him’ (III. iv). And it happened in Austen’s world. In a letter of 1808 to her sister, she seems to be referring to the known fact that her distant cousin Fanny Austen is getting married after a sexual indiscretion with her husband-to-be. ‘I am sorry she has behaved so ill. There is some comfort to us in her misconduct, that we have not a congratulatory Letter to write’ (Letters, 55). This hints at a reality never encountered in her fiction: two self-possessed adults who simply cannot wait for marriage. In Austen, as in the eighteenth-century novels from which she learned, pre-marital sex happens because a young woman gets into the hands of a rakish man, not because two people simply cannot resist each other. There are would-be rakes about. Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon has read the novels of Samuel Richardson and has decided that he will ‘seduce’ Clara Brereton (Ch. 8). But this is comedy. ‘Clara saw through him, and had not the least intention of being seduced.’ She will not be a character in one of the novels he favours.

‘She is lost forever,’ says Elizabeth to Darcy, but it is not so (Pride and Prejudice, III. iv). Lydia is saved by marriage, into which Wickham is bribed. Sex before marriage, however, is different from sex outside marriage. Fanny Price thinks of her cousin Maria’s adultery as ‘this sin of the first magnitude’ (III. xv). Lady Bertram, not usually a person for forceful judgements, acknowledges ‘the loss of a daughter, and a disgrace never to be wiped off’ (III. xvi). Duly divorced, Maria is sent off to some Sartrean hell of confinement in a distant county with Mrs Norris for company. In Sense and Sensibility, the adultery of Eliza, Colonel Brandon’s sister-in-law, also leads to her husband divorcing her, but has to be narratively justified. She is victim rather than agent. ‘My brother had no regard for her; his pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly’ (II. ix). We take the middle phrase to mean that he was sexually dissolute (Colonel Brandon is speaking to Elinor, so some polite euphemism is necessary). The implication is confirmed when, a few sentences later, we hear that he was ‘a husband to provoke inconstancy’. Is it surprising that ‘she should fall’?

Adultery was not unknown among Jane Austen’s acquaintances. In 1801 she wrote to Cassandra about a ball at the Upper Rooms in Bath where she had seen the notorious Hon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.