Generations in, Generations of: Pregnancy in Jane Austen

Abstract

ABSTRACTPregnancy seems tangential to the concerns of Austen's oeuvre and has received little scholarly attention. In all major Austen novels, however, pregnant characters are active, if secondary, participants in plot. In this article, I argue that pregnancy pushes at epistemological anxieties between inside and outside in Austen's work, and that pregnancy has something to tell us about tensions between critical notions of surface and depth, dignity and the ridiculous. I explore the ubiquity of pregnancy in Austen's completed mature novels, connect the narrative function of pregnancy to shifting mores in Austen's time, consider excessive bodies more generally in Austen's writing, and read Austen's two most nuanced narrative deployments of pregnancy in Sense and Sensibility and Emma. I approach Austen's much studied use of free indirect discourse – a technique that complicates tidy notions of surface and depth – to suggest that bodies complicate narrative relationships between inside and outside, and that those relationships help elucidate contemporary methodological concerns in literary studies. Austen's passing mentions of pregnancy resonate with critical anxieties about pleasure and perspective, highlighting the generative possibilities of what I call “perverse criticism”.