Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History Olivia Murphy Jillian Heydt-Stevenson , Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. x + 275. £40 hardback. 1 4039 6410 6. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions, which addresses a range of issues and offers several new and persuasive readings of Jane Austen's novels, is nevertheless most significant for successfully exploding the persistent cliché that there is no sex in Jane Austen. 'Prostitution and pornography, sodomy and syphilis' are some of the subjects Heydt-Stevenson sets out to recover from centuries of criticism hampered by fond images of a 'dear Aunt Jane' who is allowed to be gently and innocently humorous, but never bawdy, outrageous or grotesque. This work of recovering the earthier aspects of Austen's fiction should enrich our reading of the novels by making her less-polite language – her hints, winks and nudges – transparent. As useful and entertaining as this project of recovery is, it is Heydt-Stevenson's skilful articulation of Austen's technique of juxtaposition and comparison (the 'unbecoming conjunctions' of the title), which could be claimed as the book's most important contribution to Austen scholarship. Austen's strategic use of doubling and contrasting in her novels has been noted by many critics, and indeed for a long time it routinely informed analyses of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions moves beyond these critical commonplaces to investigate the novels' incessant shadowing – of Elizabeth Bennet by her sister Lydia and by Charlotte Lucas; of Fanny Priceby Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park; of Persuasion's Mrs. Smith by Mrs. Clay – as a kind of structural double entendre, whose more troubling, secondary meaning has been overlooked by a determinedly naïve, protectively censorial readership. Through the prism of the unbecoming conjunction (a phrase lifted from Persuasion's disconcerting examination of the grieving Mrs. Musgrove's 'fat sighings') Heydt-Stevenson sets out to explore three interconnected subjects: various kinds of fashionable consumption in Austen's novels; their emphasis on physicality and the relationship between mind and body; and the novels' bawdy content and suppressed sexuality. The book's study of fashionable consumption demonstrates the utility of careful historicizing in recovering meaning from the seeming minutiae of Austen's novels. The usefulness of this approach is most apparent in Heydt-Stevenson's discussion of objects such as portraits in miniature, filigree work and hair jewellery, which for Austen's contemporaries were charged with emotional, political and social significance. While at times this examination of numerous disparate forms of conspicuous Regency-era consumption seem to be somewhat tangential to the book's central argument, it is nevertheless interesting in its own right, and provides an illuminating historical gloss on Austen's novelistic representations of her consuming society. Of the various kinds of fashionable consumption the book touches on, hair jewellery (that is, rings and brooches decorated with woven human hair) stands out as most successfully intertwining the book's concerns with the body and its place in Austen's fiction. As Heydt-Stevenson argues, for Austen's contemporaries hair jewellery was a popular sentimental commodity. Those manufacturing the jewellery (ostensibly out of hair provided for them by their customers) capitalized on the vogue for demonstrations of sensibility, but also aroused anxieties in consumers about the provenance of the hair in their jewellery: substitutions were presumably easy to effect and almost impossible to trace. Heydt-Stevenson analyses the function of hair jewellery in Sense and Sensibility, where the hair in Edward Ferrars's ring is at different times assumed to have come from the heads of three different women. Like the novel's frequent use of mistaken identities and substitutions (particularly of lovers), hair jewellery was at once highly emotionally charged, and symbolic of the fact that – like the market for goods – the marriage market was essentially impersonal. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions next seeksto recover the 'bodies' of characters within Austen's fiction, particularly the responsive bodies of her heroines and anti-heroines. This strategy of feminist criticism comes rather late to studies of Austen, who has been generally considered an author unusually reticent about her...