Abstract
David Selwyn’s account of the child in the work of Jane Austen has been introduced, with a difference set up between his project of drawing attention to a child that is too often forgotten or overlooked, and my own interest in returning the child to the text as a disruptive ‘return of the repressed.’ This initial chapter will begin to introduce some of the complexities that can attend this return through an analysis of Austen’s Persuasion, a novel widely understood to be concerned with romance and iteration, and having little or nothing to do with childhood. In my reading, the child is certainly constructed as marginal within Austen’s narrative, yet it can also be understood in terms that repeat those of the romantic couple, a repetition that, in itself, would seem to place the child at the novel’s heart. It follows that I am not so much interested in recognising the central importance of the child in Austen than in problematizing the notion of a stable material structure such centrality entails. As such, this chapter can be understood to repeat moves made in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal reading of repression in Austen criticism, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’.1 For Sedgwick, repression can be conducted in ‘anti-repressive’ readings as much as those that are explicitly ‘normal and normalising’ as long as they validate the discrete and visible ‘identity’ of the heterosexual subject as the necessary focus of critical interest, and resist reading all that such a focus requires to be forever ‘dropping out of sight’.2
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Notes
E. Kosofsky Sedgwick (1991) ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, Critical Inquiry, 17, 818–37. Although the rigorous reading Sedgwick offers has done more than any other to challenge assumptions about what is required for an engagement with Austen, it has, in my understanding, no interest in the specific question of the child. For a reading of the child in Sedgwick’s wider work, see Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson ‘Queer Theory’, 35–46.
See also D. Caselli (2010) ‘Kindergarten Theory’, 241–54. Finally, see the Chapter 4 of this book.
Selwyn, Austen, pp. 54–5. For an additional, recent text that brings to light previously neglected narratives of childhood in a work by Austen, see Rachel Bowlby’s reading of Mansfield Park in R. Bowlby (2013) A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 162–76.
J. Austen (2004 [1818]) Persuasion (Oxford: Oxford World Classics), 94.
J. Wiltshire (1992) Jane Austen and the Body: The Picture of Health (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 162.
P. Rogers (1994) ‘Introduction’ to the Everyman edition of Persuasion (London: Orion), p. xvi.
A. Pinch (1996) Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 153.
A. W. Litz (1975) ‘Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement’, in J. Halperin Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 221–34, p. 223, p. 225.
Wiltshire, Health, pp. 172–3. Elsewhere, Wilshire’s argument points to the necessity of supplementing the body, pp. 192–3. In terms of little Walter, however, the body is always sufficient. See, for example, the claim that the ‘setting’ of his scene is ‘precisely imagined to focus these tensions and to increase them, give them material weight when the little boy hangs himself round Anne’s neck’, J. Wiltshire (2003) Jane Austen, Introductions and Interventions (Macmillan Critical Series) (Delhi: Macmillan India), pp. 41–2.
Caselli, ‘Kindergarten’, 242. For a text that extends the appeal to presence beyond the child, see J. Phelan (1981) Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press) and its contention that Austen’s fiction is fundamentally concerned with seemingly nontextual qualities of morality and plot.
S. Thornton (1988) ‘Vanity of Childhood: Constructing, Deconstructing, and Destroying the Child in the Novel of the 1840s’, in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.) Children in Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 122–50, p. 141.
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Cocks, N. (2014). The Child and the Return. In: The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452450_2
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