Language, Discourse, Society General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabeand Denise Riley Selected published titles: Ashley Tauchert ROMANCING JANE AUSTEN Narrative, Realism, and the Possibility of a Happy Ending Reena Dube SATYAJIT RAY’S THE CHESS PLAYERSAND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity John Anthony Tercier THE CONTEMPORARY DEATHBED The Ultimate Rush Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson LITERATURE, POLITICS AND LAW IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE Geoff Gilbert BEFORE MODERNISM WAS Modern History and the Constituency of Writing Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley (editors) THE LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY READER Michael O’Pray FILM, FORM AND PHANTASY Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics James A. Snead, edited by Kara Keeling, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West RACIST TRACES AND OTHER WRITINGS European Pedigrees/African Contagions Patrizia Lombardo CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD Second edition Moustapha Safouan SPEECH OR DEATH? Language as Social Order: A Psychoanalytic Study Jean-Jacques Lecercle DELEUZE AND LANGUAGE Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBERTY The New York School of Poets Moustapha Safouan JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING (Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose) Stanley Shostak THE DEATH OF LIFE The Legacy of Molecular Biology Elizabeth Cowie REPRESENTING THE WOMAN Cinema and Psychoanalysis Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT The Emergence of Literary Education Denise Riley ‘AM I THAT NAME?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE The Woman’s Film of the 1940s Language, Discourse, Society Series Standing Order ISBN 9978-0-333-71482-9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Romancing Jane Austen Narrative, Realism, and the Possibility of a Happy Ending Ashley Tauchert University of Exeter © Ashley Tauchert 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-9747-0 All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988,or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90 Tottenham Court Road,London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St.Martin’s Press,LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States,United Kingdom and other countries.Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-54635-0 ISBN 978-0-230-59969-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230599697 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tauchert,Ashley. Romancing Jane Austen :narrative,realism,and the possibility of a happy ending / Ashley Tauchert. p.cm.––(Language,discourse,society) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. 1.Austen,Jane,1775–1817 – Criticism and interpretation.2.Women and literature–England – History – 18th and 19th century.3.Narration (Rhetoric)– History –19th century.4.Love stories,English – History and criticism.5.Closure (Rhetoric) – History – 18th and 19th century. 6.Happiness in literature.7.Realism in literature.I.Title.II.Language, discourse,society (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) PR4037.T385 2005 2005049831 823(cid:1).7––dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Dedicated with love to Chris, who continually reminds me of the possibility of a happy ending in spite of overwhelming odds to the contrary. This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements viii Preface ix Introduction: The Persistence of Jane Austen’s Romance 1 1. Northanger Abbey: ‘hastening together to perfect felicity’ 27 2. Sense and Sensibility: ‘her opinions are all romantic’ 49 3. Pride and Prejudice: ‘Lydia’s gape’ 73 4. Mansfield Park: ‘she does not like to act’ 93 5. Emma: ‘the operation of the same system in another way’ 111 6. Persuasion: ‘loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone’ 137 Conclusion: ‘such an alternative as this had not occurred to her’ 156 Notes 170 Index 190 vii Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the time and labour of the following people: Gill Howie, for understanding the nature of the quest; Jane Spencer, who knows more than most how to do this kind of thing properly, and still encourages me to do it in my own way; Margaretta Jolly, for trawling through early (and very late) drafts and asking all the right questions; Helen Taylor, for embodying critical and challenging leadership; Colin MacCabe for provoking thought and ‘put- ting his money where his mouth is’; Helen Hanson, for understanding something very important about being a heroine; Min Wild, for being a passionate and constructive reader; Regenia Gagnier for telling me what my question reallywas early in the project, and for complimenting my writing at just the right moment. Warm thanks are due to everyone in the School of English at Exeter for being patient with me while this has been on my mind. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge all the vibrant and passionate students who took the level 3 ‘Colin Firth’ module in 2005… I am indebted to my lovely family for laughing at me when I am distracted, for making me laugh when I have become too serious, and for reminding me of the importance of domestic comfort above all else. Thanks to Mark Tauchert and Becky Peters, Gemma, Joseph and Zak for being there, and to my dad for showing me how to make an argument. Thanks to Craig for the inspiring photos of Upton Pyne. Love to Valerie Callaghan for being such a positive role model. I am particularly grate- ful to Jack, Alice and Georgie for making my life so happy, and for being so easy to love. An early version of the argument made here appears as ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen: “Rape” and “Love” as (Feminist) Social Realism and Romance’, in Women: A Cultural Review, 14, 2 (1993): 144–58. viii Preface ‘If love is a conspiracy, it is much older than the age of “bourgeois individualism” in which some historians tend to locate it.’ Margaret Doody, The True Story of the Novel1 ‘The articulation of a feminist standpoint based on women’s self-definition and activity…embodies a distress which requires a solution. The experience of continuity and relation – with others, with the natural world, of mind with body – provides an ontological base for developing a non-problematic social syn- thesis, a social synthesis which need not operate through the denial of the body, the attack on nature, or the death struggle between the self and other, a social synthesis which does not depend on any of the forms taken by abstract masculinity.’ Nancy M.C. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint2 ‘A woman with the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.’ Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey3 Following on from the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine(Palgrave, 2002), this study closes a research cycle which initiated in a desire to participate in contemporary debates concerning the dawn and daybreak of women’s Anglophone literary history. Taken together, these two books offer a revised account of Wollstonecraft and Austen as peculiarly resonant figures in that documented history, through engagement with contemporary critical questions concerning femininity, subjectivity and writing. Accent of the Feminine tested the arguments of the ‘equality/difference’ debate raised in recent feminist philoso- phy against the textual evidence of Mary Wollstonecraft’s interven- tions in late eighteenth-century political theory. My key focus there concerned the anachronistic implications of a resonance between the eighteenth-century feminist polemic of Mary Wollstonecraft and thetwentieth- century ‘feminine philosophy’ of Luce Irigaray. Romancing Jane Austenconsidersthe Jane Austen cultural phenomenon through the strong lenses available from accounts of the romance as a narrative mode. It is both an attempt to make conscious the complex and sometimes contradictory network of associations centred on the romance, and to ix