TY - JOUR
AU - Looser, Devoney
AB - It is not controversial to say that William Shakespeare drew heavily on other historical, political, and cultural sources in composing his plays. Most critics agree that previous writers influenced his artistic choices—from plot, to characterization, to word choice—without leading us to conclude that his borrowings in any way lessen his own genius or literary achievement. Where Jane Austen is concerned, it has taken a longer time, but we are finally coming around to the same opinion. Studies from Jocelyn Harris’s Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (1989), to Janine Barchas’s Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, Celebrity (2012) to Margaret Doody’s Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places (2015) demonstrate the extent to which Austen was not only well read in the literature and popular media of her day but was knowingly crafting historically informed and cannily allusive fiction. Harris’s impressive new book, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen (2017), builds on the work of her pioneering 1989 study, deepening our sense of what Austen may have been up to in crafting her novels. The ‘may have been’ angle is crucial to her book’s method. Readers who have qualms about speculation into Austen’s personal and political beliefs, authorial choices, and habits of reading and gossip—who are troubled by perhapses, maybes, and likelys—will not approve of this book. For readers willing to engage with the possible, and to consider links that do not, at first glance, seem probable, Harris’s well-written, deeply researched, and timely book has a great deal to offer. Harris’s theory is that ‘Jane Austen was a satirist, a celebrity watcher, and a politician in the historical sense of one keenly interested in practical politics’ (p. 1). This book is not, she argues, just another study of how Austen ‘made books out of other books’ but is instead an extensive look into how her ‘satirical allusions to celebrities, scandals, and controversies were just as significant for her creativity’ (p. 1). Harris makes the important point that the notion of celebrity emerged during Austen’s lifetime. Celebrity culture no longer involved only royal family watching but also involved the public’s following of ‘writers, actors, politicians, naval men, heiresses, and ‘exotic’ individuals’ (p. 1). Austen not only knew about these celebrities, Harris argues, but she likely wrote about them, whether because she was hiding sly references to them in her prose fiction (to make satirical points or draw a loose veil over her risky beliefs) or mining from them to create memorable, multifaceted characters. Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen is divided into seven chapters, with an introduction, a conclusion, and three appendices. Each section delves into a series of people and events that may productively be seen in concert with Austen’s novels. The first two chapters speculate that Jane Austen, through her female author-relative, Cassandra Cooke, would have known and used the interesting gossip she learned about famed novelist Frances Burney D’Arblay and her troubled family. The Cookes and the D’Arblays lived next to each other in Great Bookham, a proximity that may have led the Cookes to learn much and then to share that information about their famous neighbours with cousin Austen. Harris’s book digs down into possible correlations between Mansfield Park’s ideal silent, prudish heroine, Fanny Price, and Fanny Burney when she served at court (pp. 43, 52). Harris weaves a provocative picture of the ways that Austen’s fiction demonstrates her ‘extensive homage to the celebrated Fanny Burney’, beyond her expressed opinion that Burney was ‘the very best of English novelists’ (p. 63). Subsequent chapters argue for Austen’s debts to Maria Edgeworth’s fiction, especially her novel Patronage (1814). Harris argues that ‘Austen could have revised her novel [Mansfield Park (1814)] after reading Edgeworth’s sensationally successful publication—Patronage’ (p. 101). As Harris painstakingly documents, Austen would have had to have done so in proof, in the space of five months, with changes ‘inserted at high speed’ (p. 101). Harris shows extensive knowledge of Patronage and of Edgeworth’s earlier novel, Vivian (1809; 1812), showing the extent to which details recur and are repurposed. One hopes that future scholars will set out to compare Austen’s and Edgeworth’s texts with each other, searching for overlapping words and phrases, to potentially deepen the case for influence that Harris makes on the basis of names, events, and plot points. Such a study would allow us to test the incontrovertible point that Harris makes—that Austen ‘improves’ on Edgeworth in her treating of private theatricals, seductions, and elopements (p. 109). As Harris concludes, ‘If I am right … By laying Mansfield Park alongside Edgeworth’s Vivian and Patronage, we may once again observe Jane Austen at work, merging newfound material into her manuscript and perhaps even her proofs—sculpting her novel right up to the very last moment before publication’ (p. 136). The next chapters return, once again, to historical people, making the case for potential references to them in Austen’s fiction. Most of these individuals travel in the circles of the controversial figure who would become the Prince Regent (later George IV) and his equally controversial brother, the Duke of Clarence (later William IV). Harris’s fascinating, suggestive arguments are made in brushstrokes, both wide and fine. She draws for her finer points on letters, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and works of art, including satirical prints by Cruikshank and Gillray. These sections of the book must be read closely because so detail-rich and allusive, but they repay close reading. Especially engaging are the sections on the mesmerizing actor Dorothy Jordan (mistress of the Duke of Clarence and mother of 10 children), who is described as a possible inspiration for Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet. Harris makes the case for what Austen might have known, appreciated, and drawn on from Jordan’s stage acting and her controversial life. The most brilliant parts of the chapter are those in which Harris shows not only that Austen would have known particular Shakespeare plays, and used that knowledge in her novels, but that she would have known and used them via the era’s most famous Shakespearean actors, including Jordan. (The sections describing how ‘Jordan’ was then used as slang for chamber pot allows Harris to walk us through intriguing close readings of many satirical prints, as well as Austen’s likely viewing of them.) As Harris argues, ‘it is clear that [Austen] knew Shakespeare pretty thoroughly, through both reading and performance—especially by Mrs. Jordan’ (p. 240). Harris’s prompting us to examine not only print Shakespeare’s influence on Austen but performed Shakespeare’s influence as well, is both original and important. The tour de force sections of the book are certainly the sections on Sara Baartman (the ‘Hottentot Venus’), the Duke of Clarence, issues of race, abolition, and slavery, and Mansfield Park and Sanditon. Harris looks deeply into Austen’s characterization of the ‘half-mulatto’ character Miss Lambe in the unfinished Sanditon, as well as the decades of criticism on Mansfield Park as a pro-colonialist vs. pro-abolitionist novel. Harris’s summary and analysis of the commentary on these matters, from the work of Edward Said forward, and her description of the opposing positions on slavery and abolition that may be found among members of Austen’s family, are quite simply superb. It is difficult to find any scholarship on these subjects that is simultaneously attentive to Austen’s fiction, to the history of theory and criticism, and to the minutiae of Austen family history and biography. Harris weaves all of these kinds of evidence and arguments together to great effect. As she argues, ‘Austen’s half-mulatto West Indian heiress may therefore recall caricatures about the Duke courting Baartman for her money’ (p. 260). Harris also suggests that Austen’s referring in a private letter to herself as a ‘wild beast’, when considering that she might be put on show as an author, suggests the possibility of her actual viewing of Baartman, who was often likened to a wild beast on display. Harris’s arguments are highly illuminating. For years to come, readers and critics will be weighing the massive number of new insights in this book, troubling through their implications for our future readings of Austen, politics, history, and popular culture. Published by Oxford University Press 2018. This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public domain in the US. Published by Oxford University Press 2018.
TI - JOCELYN HARRIS. Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen
JO - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgy021
DA - 2018-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/jocelyn-harris-satire-celebrity-and-politics-in-jane-austen-N0DwwjdkTa
SP - 798
EP - 800
VL - 69
IS - 291
DP - DeepDyve
ER -