Jane Austen's erotic advice

211 Pages·2014·1.359 MB·English

by  Austen, Jane;Raff, Sarah

Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice

Jane Austen’s
Erotic Advice
• •
•
Sarah Raff
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
W ith offi ces in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
© Oxford University Press 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the
appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raff , Sarah.
Jane Austen’s erotic advice / Sarah Raff .
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–976033–6
1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Infl uence. 2. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Criticism
and interpretation. 3. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Family. 4. Sex in literature.
5. Eroticism in literature. 6. Advice in literature. 7. Women novelists,
English—19th century—Infl uence. I. Title.
PR4038.I52R34 2014
823’.7—dc23
2013028789
9780199760336
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Preface 1
1. From Quixote to Galatea 13
2. Pride and Prejudice ’s Vanishing Narrator 40
3. Emma and the Betrayal of Fanny Knight 61
4. Propositioning the Reader in N orthanger Abbey 100
5. “She Felt Its Application to Herself”: P ersuasion ’s Consolations 130
Conclusion: Th e Waning of Application 164
Notes 169
Index 195
( v )

Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice

•
Preface
In recent years, a dozen volumes purporting to off er readers access to
Austen’s love advice have come into print, and visitors to the Jane Austen
museum in Chawton have been caught depositing mounds of human ash in
the garden that once was the author’s.1 As our latest Austen-craze reaches
fever pitch, the “illicit” readerly love that Lionel Trilling denounced in
1957, the tendency to take this novelist “outside the proper confi nes of
literature,” is emerging yet again as the central fact of Austen’s reception. 2
Scholars usually envision Austen as the passive victim or benefi ciary of the
“Janeite” tributes that do so much to defi ne her for the popular imagina-
tion. My claim, by contrast, is that the phenomenon of Janeism—both the
exorbitant devotion that Austen inspires in her readers and the peculiar
forms this devotion often takes—is the consequence of Austen’s design.
When today’s readers consult Austen-themed divination toys for coun-
sel about their romantic lives, declare themselves “in love” with Austen,
dress in Regency costumes, or request that their remains be smuggled and
scattered onto the Chawton House grounds, they adopt a role that Austen
actively prompted them to take. Th is book explores the origins of this role
in eighteenth-century literary debates, in Austen’s personal experience, in
the plots of Austen’s novels, and in the speech-acts I call “generalizations”
that punctuate the discourse of Austen’s narrator and characters.
If eighteenth-century literati could catch a glimpse of the modern Ja-
neite, they would recognize in her their era’s most potent symbol of fi c-
tion’s power to do harm: the female quixote, as she came to be known after
Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 novel of that name. Already discernable in Jona-
than Swift’s “Phyllis or, the Progress of Love” (c. 1719), the female quixote
( 1 )