Upon suffering a concussion, I found myself in the hospital and attempted to convince the nurse that I was perfectly alright by holding up the copy of Pride and Prejudice that was in my bag and reciting dramatically, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Apparently, recitation of dear Jane is not evidence of a functioning brain (I had a grade two concussion after all). But the point is that even during a moderately traumatic event, literature was one of the first things to pop into my addled head. Continue reading “You Are More Than Just A Graduate Student: Some Thoughts About That Elusive “Work-Life Balance””
At CUNY, a New York state public university where I teach an introductory course in literature and writing, undergraduates like thinking about power. Their material disadvantages make social critique come naturally. Knowing this and wanting to get them hooked, I present Romantic literature as an early expression of dissatisfaction with social processes and conventions, a perspective to be developed later by Marx. This semester, I threw Jane Austen into the mix, and oriented reading and discussions of Persuasion around questions of social class. We spent a lot of time discussing the historical attributes of Austen’s class system that seem strange to modern sensibilities: the phenomenon of rank, the marriage between cash and land, the ambiguous category of the “gentleman” and the expanding mercantile economy. Continue reading “How much history?”
As we march ahead, perhaps forebodingly, into a new epoch in America’s political climate, one might wonder exactly what can be the value of teaching Romantic poetry and prose. In the weeks immediately following the recent historic election (however one chooses to define “historic”), we must consider whether undergraduate students really want to spend their time reading Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal” or Keats’s “To Autumn” or Austen’s Emma. When these students are otherwise preoccupied with what Twitter and Snapchat have to tell them about the current state of the world, why would they choose to bow their heads over texts that, while they may have something to say about the early nineteenth century in Britain, seem to be so distant and disjointed from our own time and place? This was a question I set out to explore this fall…and then November 8th happened. Continue reading “Pride and Prejudice and Politics”
Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan has always occupied a somewhat uncomfortable and often overlooked place in the thoroughly – sometimes exhaustively – scrutinized Austen canon. Written in the mid-1790s, around the same time as the first, now lost but likely also epistolary, drafts of Sense and Sensibility (née Elinor and Marianne) and Pride and Prejudice (née First Impressions), Lady Susan is an odd artifact. Neither a work of Austen’s youth nor of her adulthood, Lady Susan is a liminal text, lacking the romping spirit of Austen’s juvenilia and the stylistic maturity of her later omnisciently-narrated novels. And yet…not unlike its eponymous widow, Lady Susan is a story that ought to retreat quietly into the background, but which instead insists upon getting her/its way. Continue reading “Love and Friendship”
Are we at peak Jane Austen? Have Austen adaptations jumped the shark? What did Jane Austen know about corpse-lovers? Catherine Engh, Cailey Hall, and Caroline Winter discuss the recent film version of the Austen mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
This winter, I’ve been working to familiarize myself with the affective turn in Romantic studies. But the reading experience has been generally defamiliarizing; ideas about affects, emotions, feelings and passions are consistent, it seems, only in their inconsistency. In their introduction to Romanticism and the Emotions, Faflak and Sha usefully suggest that the difficulties that Romantic scholars encounter trying to theorize affect stem from the nature of the project, which is “to categorize what by definition at once sustains and eludes both thought and language.” The common ground that unites those that I’ve read on the topic is not so much a shared theory as a a shared belief that we can learn something about our contemporary interest in affect as a scientific object (neuroscience) and as a subject for the humanities by looking back to emotion’s (uneven and multilayered) emergence as a category of experience in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods.
In the place of a single book review, I’ll provide here a brief and by no means comprehensive survey of a few books on the topic that I’ve been spending some time with lately. The readings here ask unresolvable, but pressing, questions about the relation between feeling and knowing, bodies and texts, affect and agency, aesthetics and socio-political forces. The list is completely idiosyncratic: Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods is influential, but I haven’t read it and Romanticism and the Emotions from Cambridge UP is fresh and excellent but, as a collection of essays, is too daunting to summarize. I’d love to know what other people are reading on the topic—please feel free to add your recs in the comments section!
Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Strange Fits of Passion asks what writings by Hume, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen can teach us about the relationship between knowing and feeling. Recurring questions include: Where do emotions come from and how do they travel? Can we judge whether feelings are fit to their occasions? Are feelings our own (personal) or are they transpersonal (conventional)? The last question is the most central to the study; Pinch everywhere challenges the notion that emotions come from some irreducible core of the self. She does this by emphasizing the “vagrancy,” (10) or trans-individual status of emotions in Romantic literature. What interests me most about Pinch’s book is her idea that that language, and especially imaginative language and utterance, plays a key role in bridging the gap between affect (materiality, physiology) and emotion (psychology). In poems by Wordsworth and Smith, poetic figures are simultaneously produced by passion and productive of emotions that circulate as conventions.
Reading Hume, who did not theorize language, Pinch seeks to recover the role that representation plays in shaping sympathy. In Hume, “force” designates the mysterious motion of the mind that translates ideas into impressions (and vise-versa) and is thus crucial to “sympathy.” “Force” is an unsatisfying concept in Hume if only because it fails to explain how and why some ideas impress us more forcibly than others. Contrasting Hume’s representation of imaginary men of misfortune with his famous representation of his own despair at the end of Book I of the Treatise, Pinch suggests that sympathy may be most forceful where we attribute imaginary feelings onto indifferent objects. Readers have long found it difficult to sympathize with Hume’s melancholic outpourings and this may be because he represents them as his own, rather than as ours to imagine.
In attending to the conventional and virtual aspects of feeling, Pinch sidelines the common charge against the Romantics (especially central to eco-critical conversations) of egoism and anthropocentrism. Pinch’s open displacement of this issue sets her apart from the other books listed here, which are more explicitly concerned with the ethical and political stakes of formulations of ‘sympathy’ that emerged in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Strange Fits of Passion positively stands out, however, in its analysis of the ways that gender differences get entangled in writers’ rendering of emotion. I especially enjoyed reading Pinch’s on Wordsworth’s “Goody Blake and Harry Gill.” For Pinch, the poem identifies the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” with an old woman’s passionate utterance. More surprisingly, it likens Harry’s violence towards Goody to the male poet’s desire to empathize with an experience of feminine suffering that will authenticate his verse. There’s a great anecdote here in which Joseph Cottle reads the Lyrical Ballads aloud to Hannah Moore. On the second reading of “Goody Blake,” Hannah Moore lifts up her hands, “in smiling horror” on hearing the curse “O, may he never more be warm!” Pinch writes, “Moore perhaps recognizes through her own playacting the power of a woman’s curse to engender poetic pleasure” (97).
Yousef, Nancy. Romantic Intimacy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Romantic Intimacy asks how the epistemic problem of other minds informs accounts of intimacy in writings that range from eighteenth century moral philosophy to contemporary recommendations for psychoanalytic practice. Yousefmoves lucidly between moral philosophy, poetry, novels and contemporary theory as she carefully draws out the ethical implications of relational experience in Romantic texts. A central thesis is that writers like Wordsworth, Austen and Coleridge are skeptical of sentimental philosophy’s confident appeals to the authority of shared feelings yet untethered to notions of (re)cognition (in Kant and Levinas) that emphasize equality and reciprocity between persons. Yousef’s book encourages us to see in Romantic literature diverse accounts of relational experience that expand beyond the paradigms of Humean sympathy and Kantian respect.
Yousef shares with Adela Pinch an unprepossessing interest in the formal and aesthetic qualities of the texts she explores. But where Pinch tends to reify a dichotomy between private and shared emotion, Yousef is drawn to poems like “Frost at Midnight” that challenge that divide. In Coleridge’s poem, little Hartley’s breath—his passive and unimposing presence—provides the relational background that sustains Coleridge’s intimate lyrical outpouring of memories, fantasies and hopes. Yousef provides startling analogies between the “generative silence” Coleridge’s infant son provides in “Frost at Midnight” and contemporary experiments with silence in psychoanalytic practice and performance art.
An interest in affective asymmetries coheres the excellent chapters in Romantic Intimacy on Wordsworth, Austen and Coleridge. If “Frost at Midnight” configures a relational situation where one person is completely silent so that another can speak, Pride and Prejudice represents the erotic possibilities of a relation where one person is endowed with gift giving power so that another can learn to receive. Yousef points out that Elizabeth Bennet’s engagement with Darcy is read at turns as a capitulation to power and as an aspirational (Kantian) assertion of equality between rational beings. Attention to the role of gratitude in Elizabeth’s bilding offers a way out of this impasse. For Yousef, Elizabeth’s entanglement with Darcy demonstrates the transformative force of a self-abasing moral feeling that constitutes the subject “as an implication of appreciation for an other” (112). Pride and Prejudice thus represents the subject as the effect of gratitude, rather than the other way around. 3. Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Anonymity and Dispossession theorizes Romantic subjectivity in the wake of the Enlightenment call for transparency and self-revelation. Jacques Khalip argues that second-generation romantics (Keats, Hazlitt, Shelley, Austen) saw Enlightenment models of personhood as deeply inauthentic and sought to re-conceive of the self as anonymous. To think about subjectivity as anonymous is to value experiences of trauma and privation over experiences of self-possession and confessional plentitude. As critical praxis, understanding subjectivity as dispossessed, or as being-without, involves attending to the virtuality of figuration (de Man and Derrida are important theoretical influences in the book) and to literary representations of anachronisms that evoke “an existence whose untapped power” is “always temporally unfinished and suspended, not knowing what it is, and what it will be” (7). Khalip wants us to see that Romantics thought of identity as “always an unmade and undone “thing”” (14) and, in so doing, shattered the relational channels of sympathetic exchange and mutual recognition. (see Yousef!) Anonymity and Dispossession intersects with the concerns addressed in Pinch’s and Yousef’s book and Romantic affect theory more broadly in its treatment of “sympathy.” Khalip carefully draws out sympathy’s political dimensions, or its entanglement with the logic of financial speculation and accumulation. Khalip points out that the category of property underwrites formulations of sympathetic selfhood in Hume, Burke and Smith. All three of these philosophers acknowledge the virtual and potentially destabilizing aspects of sympathy (see Pinch!) only to keep the self as imaginary possession intact. Shelley then amplifies the destabilizing features of sympathy present in Hume, Burke and Smith in order to re-conceive of sympathy as a “dissimulating” process that tears apart the “apparently fluid causality of consciousness” (117) and thus allows for a challenging ethical experience: “Sympathy…is an obligation to otherness that cannot be properly defined, but to which the subject remains critically open” (132). This is sympathy in the wake of any illusions about the linkage between affect and cognition, impressions and ideas, meanings and texts. It is a sympathy that refuses to understand the relationship between the self and the other in terms of mimesis.
Chapter four asks what the book’s broad themes of a skeptical and uncertain selfhood look like in the hands of women writers. The unifying mood is not of sympathy but of melancholy. Khalip argues that for Wollstonecraft, Shelley and Austen, melancholy entails a withdrawal from the public sphere that is sometimes strategic, sometimes compulsory. One surprising suggestion is that by refusing the demands of self-presentation, female writers display a “powerfully anonymous mobility in the world.” Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and Austen’s Persuasion are well chosen and illustrative of the point. If the delicate being taught only to please of the Vindication is cognitively and emotionally stunted by a discourse of femininity that “spuriously regulate[s] the visibility of the female self,” then the Wollstonecraft fashioned in the letters is more like Austen’s melancholy heroine who cultivates a skepticism that “disarticulates personal fulfillment from self-presentation and self-assertion” (135). Khalip’s book leaves us with challenging questions about agency—if we can’t define ourselves, then how do we know how to act in the world? Romanticism and Dispossession encourages us stop thinking of ourselves as willful actors and to take up an obligation to perpetually reorient ourselves in relation to a fundamentally unknowable world.
Like many who have read Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, I began the novel with the knowledge—one could even say the predisposition—that I would find in it the moments that Jane Austen parodies in Northanger Abbey. In Northanger, Catherine Morland finds a scrap of paper that she is certain will prove to be the last testament of General Tilney’s late wife—only to find that the memento is actually a laundry bill. This scene is one of many in which Austen communicates how Catherine’s excessive engagement with gothic novels has prejudiced her ability to interpret her immediate surroundings and experiences. I’ve read Northanger a handful of times and have always been a big fan, so I approached Radcliffe’s work anxiously, waiting for her heroine, Adeline, to find some damning piece of paper, which would fulfill my own expectations of gothic horror conventions.
Sure enough, a little over 100 pages in, Adeline stumbles upon the manuscript of a man who had years before been captured and killed in the abbey where she and her guardians, the La Mottes, are hiding from the French authorities. The “MS” horrifies yet captivates her, and for the next few chapters, she continually rushes back and forth between the room where she keeps the manuscript and the other rooms of the abbey, where she finds herself having to fight against the Marquis de Montalt’s sexual and marital advances. Her attention is torn between the written fragment of the past—much of which has been obscured by the erosion of ink on the page—and the immediate dangers of her present.
Did it fulfill my desires for cliché yet disturbing gothic goodness? Absolutely. But when I got to that part of the novel, I didn’t think of Northanger Abbey. Instead, a completely unexpected picture flashed through my mind:
Over winter break, I’ve had the opportunity to fuel my Jane Austen obsession with Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptations of Sense and Sensibility (2008) and Pride and Prejudice (1995). I enjoyed them both! In my enthusiasm, I’ll follow up Caroline’s wonderful post on Alan Rickman’s Colonel Brandon and Cailey’s fascinating review of Feeding France with a few comments on the very different ways that Davies’ two miniseries represent the kind of solitary states that turn up all the time in Austen’s novels. I mean those moments in the narrative when a character’s (often the heroine’s) “privacy” is inflected with—or we might say invaded by—irrepressible thoughts and feelings for others. The tendency to doubt, judge, “(re)read” and generally speculate about other minds is one of the things that makes an Austen heroine the herione–this capacity distinguishes Elinor Dashwood from Anne Steele, Elizabeth from Mary Bennett. (There are shades of thinking and feeling for others, of course. Lucy Steele, for instance, is good at anticipating other people’s behavior but her cunning doesn’t enable her to transcend her immediate interests.) Frequently, a heroine’s thoughts and feelings about other characters come into relief when she is alone—i.e. temporarily free from the claims, misconstructions and physical proximity of others.
After reading Darcy’s letter exposing the ‘truth’ about Wickham, Elizabeth Bennet famously cries, “Till this moment I never knew myself.” The expression passes in just the kind of reflective solitude that I want to suggest is the special privilege of the Austenian heroine. We might equate Elizabeth’s urgent solitary exclamation with the sort of emotional content that Shakespeare’s soliloquies represent. Think, for instance, of Richard III’s despairing exclamation upon waking from a nightmare that, “There is no creature loves me; / And if I die, no soul shall pity me: / Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself?” For Richard as for Elizabeth, self-knowledge comes with a fresh and difficult (humiliating, haunting) perception of one’s relation to another (or others) . In general though, dialogic forms like drama and film evoke solitary movements of thought and feeling far less frequently than realist novels. For Frances Ferguson, “the limitation of theater is that it consists of almost nothing but direct quotation, so that drama must continually create an unfolding plot that motivates individual characters to present their views, to have thoughts that rise to the level of the expressible” (167). Theatre can’t, in other words, capture unvoiced thoughts and feelings like free indirect style. David Garrick as Richard III, William Hogarth (1745)
Though their film consists of almost nothing but direct dialogue, screenwriter Andrew Davies and director Simon Langton manage to evoke the intense feelings of shame, regret and longing that accompany Elizabeth’s recognition that she has misjudged Darcy’s character. Nancy Yousef has observed that Elizabeth’s attachment to Darcy grows with self-abasing feelings of gratitude that are “largely described and situated in solitary meditations” (107). The BBC adaptation stays faithful to the spirit of Austen’s novel by showing us that Elizabeth’s romance with Darcy develops as much in private spaces of reflection as in face-to-face encounters. The filmmaker’s attempts to show that Elizabeth is a reflective character are respectable (she is frequently shot sitting in front of the mirror) but, in one instance, the visual representation of Elizabeth’s preoccupation with Darcy is semi-ludicrous. In the carriage ride from Rosings to Merryton, Elizabeth gazes pensively out of the window and, all of a sudden, a ghostly apparition of Darcy appears reflected before her. He rehashes a line from the proposal scene: “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” Although Elizabeth’s feelings of regret and self-loathing are conveyed in the bodily shudder with which she responds to and vanquishes Darcy’s specter, the whole bit has me thinking less about Elizabeth’s affective state (the scene leaves little to the imagination) and more about how unnatural it feels to know exactly what a character on screen is feeling. Movies may just be better off leaving us to wonder about the content of characters’ minds.
By not giving us full access to Elinor Dashwood’s thoughts, a montage towards the end of the BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility imagines new possibilities for Austen’s heroine. The montage is about as effective as any scene in Antonioni at generating ambiguity about a silent figure. Multiple shots dwell on Elinor after she has returned to Barton and learned (been misinformed) that Edward Ferrars has married. In this moment in the novel, psycho-narration follows Elinor’s thoughts as she conjures a vision of Edward settled in marriage and discovers that, “happy or unhappy,—nothing pleased her; she turned away her head from every sketch of him.” In the film, however, Elinor’s mood of frustrated desire saturates a series of strangely beautiful shots that picture her going through the solitary motions of everyday life. We watch her paint a landscape, hang a picture, buy a fish, gaze out the window and, finally, out at the sea. Though Antonioni would probably leave off the sad tune that acknowledges Elinor’s disappointment all too obviously, her contemplative activities suggest visually the kind of aimlessness that he became famous for representing on screen. Watching Elinor, we entertain the idea that she may be sad, bored, distracted or lonely but we are not certain that her feelings correspond to thoughts of Edward.
In the final shot, Elinor appears on a bench before the sea, with her back to the viewer. In an essay on Austen and Cavell, Eric Walker argues that this image represents Elinor’s self-sufficiency—“like Elinor herself in the image, Elinor’s desire, autocentric and allocentric, faces elsewhere, elusively”—and simultaneously anticipates her upcoming marriage—“the bench marks the grounded and settled spot where the marriage empire summons identity to take seated place, with room for one other.” Insofar as the shot suggests thoughts of an absent other, it evokes the typically intersubjective quality of solitude in Austen. But where the novel Sense and Sensibility gives us an incontestable description of the unpleasant thoughts about Edward that are running through Elinor’s head in this moment, the film, which can only suggest thoughts and emotions, leaves open the possibility that Elinor’s thoughts may tend, elusively and abstractly, towards a horizon that is hers alone to imagine.
Works Cited
Ferguson, Frances. “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form.” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 157–80.
Walker, Eric C. “Walker, Austen and Cavell,” July 1, 2014. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/cavell/praxis.cavell.2014.walker.html.
Yousef, Nancy. Romantic Intimacy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013.
The actor Alan Rickman passed away on January 14, 2016. He played many roles—most people probably know him best as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies—but to me, he will always be Colonel Brandon, a role he played brilliantly in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995). The film departs from the novel in many ways, as all adaptations do, but it remains one of my favourite adaptations of Austen, in part because of Rickman’s performance. So, I’d like to share five things I love about Alan Rickman’s Colonel Brandon. Continue reading “Five Great Things about Alan Rickman’s Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee’s Sense & Sensibility (1995)”
Theodore Rousseau, The Great Oaks of Old Bas Breau
In Edmund Burke’s attack on the “metaphysic rights” (152) of men that inspired the French Revolution, he urged Britons to look to their “breasts” rather than their “inventions” for the source of liberty. Burke deployed the language of sensibility to naturalize a political system organized around the idea of heredity. The argument goes that inheritance binds English citizens to their constitution with the instinctive force of a bond of kinship. But Burke has to admit that the awe-inspiring aspects of the state –its “pedigree and illustrating ancestors” (121)—are just so many “pleasing illusions” that make “power gentle, and obedience liberal” (171). Psychologically, however, Britons need these institutions because they have so thoroughly internalized the principles that they represent that those principles have become second nature. What keeps property and political representation in the hands of the few is what ties Britons to a shared past and future. Burke’s logic would be like Foucault’s if Foucault had wanted to celebrate the panopticon. Continue reading “Ancient Pedigrees, Old Trees and Numinous Rocks”
Romantic Intimacy asks how the epistemic problem of other minds informs accounts of intimacy in writings that range from eighteenth century moral philosophy to contemporary recommendations for psychoanalytic practice. Yousef moves lucidly between moral philosophy, poetry, novels and contemporary theory as she carefully draws out the ethical implications of relational experience in Romantic texts. A central thesis is that writers like Wordsworth, Austen and Coleridge are skeptical of sentimental philosophy’s confident appeals to the authority of shared feelings yet untethered to notions of (re)cognition (in Kant and Levinas) that emphasize equality and reciprocity between persons. Yousef’s book encourages us to see in Romantic literature diverse accounts of relational experience that expand beyond the paradigms of Humean sympathy and Kantian respect.
