Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (review)

Abstract

260 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xxv + 186pp. US$27.50. Claudia Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel is a participant in two lively and expanding critical projects. One is the attention being given recently to eighteenth-century women writers, and thus to Jane Austen not as the initiating point of a single "female tradition" but as the heir to a century of exploration, by hitherto marginal and unknown authors, of the possibilities of female-centred fiction. The other is a revisionary movement within Austen scholarship itself. Fed by the concerns of feminist scholars challenging received canonical wisdom, Austenians have been questioning the (largely male) critical adulation based on the modesty of their subject's choice of subject matter, her feminine disdain for politics, and her artistic wisdom in refusing to argue for a particular position or set of ideas within that properly male domain. Johnson's principal argument is with the conservative Austen of Marilyn Butler 's provocative Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas. But she wittily works against the critical grain in all political directions, commenting that "whatever the station to which Austen is assigned," be it Tory apologist or subversively resentful old maid, "she is not held to entertain an opinion independent of it. She is the 'parson 's daughter' or the 'sailors' sister,' and the mere identification of her kinship relationships to the men in her family is judged enough to warrant the inference that her social opinions affirmed [or automatically reacted against] theirs as a matter of course" (pp. xvii-xix). Austen's contemporaries did not draw the line, Johnson reminds us, between fiction and polemic that we assume to be normative and laudatory. Johnson's method is historical, drawing on the critical thinking that constructs historical periods from a variety of narrative sources, including (for the 1790s, the formative period of Austen's writing) the treatises of Burke and his radical opponents, the debates over female education and the value of novels and romances , including the popular Gothics. Her positioning of Austen in the "middle rank" along a continuum of her female contemporaries moving from Jane West and Hannah More on the extreme right, through Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney , Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, and Mary Brunton, to Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft, allows her to contrast Austen's six novels with the work of really conservative writers, and to show how deeply her strategies question and undermine theirs. Conservative ideologues, drawing on the writings of Burke, "met the threat posed by the revolution in France and the voices of reform in England by reasserting the political momentousness of the family" (p. 50), she observes in the chapter on Sense and Sensibility. Novelists of the same stripe upheld the patriarchal power of the gentry, manifesting itself in a benevolence that provokes, in tum, undying gratitude on the part of those who depend on it. Against this ground, the figures in Austen's fiction, and those in her two least popular novels in particular, show up as quite other than the apologists REVIEWS 261 for reaction that readers have usually found them to be. Thus in Sense and Sensibility the family tends to be the locus of "venal and idle habits," habits which are cast into relief by a likeable scoundrel like Willoughby but which are shared by a host of other privileged male characters in this and other novels. Similarly, it is because of Austen's exposure of the manipulations of patriarchs like Sir Thomas Bertram that the "conventionally happy ending which ensconces Fanny [in Mansfield Park], indispensable at last and still adulating now enervated figures whose discernment has been radically impeached, sustains rather than settles the problems the foregoing material has covered" (p. 116). By neither claiming Austen for the progressive tendency in the fiction of the 1790s nor criticizing her harshly for defecting from this stance, Johnson can argue that Austen's political reticence makes possible a critique of fictional oversimplification that is all the more profound for its lack of programmatic focus. Every one of the novels is illuminated by Johnson's rigorous, informed...