Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice by Sarah Raff

Abstract

Sarah Raff. Austen's Erotic Advice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 224. $31.95. We have had many diverse (and sometimes contradictory) versions of Jane over years: reticent and angelic Aunt Jane, exemplar of domestic retirement; miniaturist unconcerned with historical and political events unfolding around her; prim and proper moralist; conservative anti-jacobin; committed feminist; consummate Stylothete; and saucy smuggler of racy content and bawdy comedy, to cite just a few. Sarah Raff's ambitious new study offers a provocative new iteration of beloved novelist: a veritable belle dame sans merci, whose strategic narrative seduction leaves adoring readers forever her thrall. Taking as her springboard steady rise of Austen cults and fan cultures (recently surveyed by Claudia Johnson), Raff argues that phenomenon of Janeism--both exorbitant devotion that Austen inspires her readers and peculiar forms this devotion often takes--is consequence of Austen's design (1). For Raff it is no coincidence that a dozen or more volumes claiming to offer enthusiastic fans access to Austen's advice have appeared market: modern readers who turn to their favorite author's novels and letters seeking counsel their romantic lives are fact adopting a role that Austen actively prompted them to take (1). Raff outlines origins of this role by turning to eighteenth-century literary debates (didacticism; quixotism), to plots of Austen's novels (courtship plots of pedagogical love [7]), to novelist's frequent recourse to rhetorical techniques such as generalization (best exemplified precepts and maxims that pepper her fiction), and most importantly but perhaps most controversially--to Austen's biography, notably her relationship and epistolary correspondence with her niece, Fanny Knight. What ultimately unites these seemingly disparate contexts is a tantalizing view of novel as an instrument for matchmaking: a go-between, pander, even a seducer (13). The modern Janeite Raff's account assumes role of eighteenth-century quixote, a figure that embodied apprehensions about potential negative impacts of novel reading for young (usually female) readers. Eighteenth-century novelists were hounded by charge that their works seduced female readers and turned them into quixotes. Confusing fiction with reality, susceptible female reader, as this story goes, would impose the semiotic code of whatever novel she was reading on whole range of her experience, propelling her to engage reckless imitation: Once inflamed for first time by a licentious scene novel, reader, unable to consummate her desire with text itself, attempts to enact that scene real world (13). So far, this is a familiar story. What sets Raff's account apart is how she turns this conventional view of its ear by detailing how orthodox, moralizing authors like Samuel Richardson themselves encouraged reader (15). The antidote to was, ironically, a different form of quixotism: Richardson filled his novels with explicit lessons and prescriptive (or precepts) in order to fend off charge that [he] promoted quixotism, but Raff ingeniously demonstrates that this form of didacticism is a mode of seduction and an invitation to quixotism (8) a literary culture that systematically eroticized tutelage (7). She argues that what Austen recognized with unparalleled clarity was that generalizations like those employed by Richardson Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), far from preventing, fact promoted reader's Galatean enthrallment to a Pygmalion-like author ... (7). That is, as speech acts, and precepts place reader a position of submission to author/creator's will and, via a quixotic structure of transference, perform a seduction that Raff describes Lacanian terms (17). …