"Jane Austen: Irony and

Authority"
Critic: Rachel M. Brownstein
Source: Women's Studies 15, nos. 1-3 (1988): 57-
70.
Criticism about: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
(1775-1817)

Nationality: British; English

[(essay date 1988) _In the following essay,

Brownstein focuses on several of Austen's novels,
including Pride and Prejudice, to support her
argument that Austen uses irony to convey a
"discursive authority" from which women can derive
pleasure in a patriarchal society.]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, right now,

that language is involved in giving and taking both
power and pleasure. Whether we begin by asking if
the pen is a substitute for the penis, or think about
why we read stories of love and adventure, or
consider, from any point of view, pornography or
psychoanalysis, we end by analyzing ways people
please themselves and assert authority over others
by using words. (To observe that critics writing about
pleasure and power have managed to get what
measure of the good stuff they can is to state the
merely inevitable.) Claiming that women writers are
powerful--i.e. effective and influential--has been a
focus of feminist critics concerned to dispute the
canon, to rehabilitate forgotten writers, and to revise
women's relation to the languages of power. That
Jane Austen, unforgotten, canonized, and stunningly
authoritative, has been a problem for feminists is not
surprising: in the struggle for power between
politically radical and conservative critics, she has for
years been claimed by both parties. Her own interest
in power is suggested as her uses of the word
acknowledge there are different kinds: in Pride and
Prejudice, for instance, Elizabeth says that "It is not
in my power to accept" an invitation (211), and, "I do
not know any body who seems more to enjoy the
power of doing what he likes than Mr. Darcy," (183)
and her friend Charlotte reflects that "all her friend's
dislike [of Darcy] would vanish, if she could suppose
him to be in her power." (181) Courtship as power
play is the subject of all Austen's novels; playing
with--or against--power is the substance of them.
And through irony, by pointing to the limits of
definitive and assertive language, Jane Austen
suggests a powerful and pleasurable relation women
in patriarchy may have to discursive authority.

The title page of Sense and Sensibility, the first

novel Austen published, identified it as by "A Lady";
Pride and Prejudice is signed "By the Author of
'Sense and Sensibility,'" in other words by A Lady
already published. The veiling signature insists on
the dignity of femininity itself as "Currer Bell,"
"George Eliot," "Fanny Fern," or "Mrs. Humphry Ward"
do not. It implies, as if modestly, that all ladies speak
in the same voice--Austen was of course not the only
one to write as one--, which with pointedly feminine
obliqueness will avoid such blunt signifiers as proper
names, and say precisely what one might expect it
appropriately to say, and no more. "A Lady" insists
like a post-modern critic on an author's gender and
class, indeed identifies the writer simply as a
representative, perhaps only a function, of gender
and class. The word makes the titillating suggestion
that sex is the subject, and also a promise that it will
be avoided. (Austen obliges on both counts.) Finally,
the signature indicates that the female author is an
accepted kind of author, probably one who will make
herself delightful and useful without going so far as
to set up as an authority. As Mary Ellmann wrote
decades before the body became a theme of cultural
critics, "the male body lends credence to assertions
while the female takes it away" (148). Signing herself
"A Lady," even a published author promises to assert
neither her (discreetly veiled) self nor any original
idea of her own. This novelist will not, presumably,
pit her literary capacity and performances against
"the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the
History of England, or of the man who collects and
publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton,
Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and
a chapter from Sterne, [which] are eulogized by a
thousand pens;" she does not claim authority,
merely, slyly, "genius, wit, and taste." (NA, 37)

On the other hand, precisely by coming on as A Lady

the author is assuming a certain kind of authority: as
Mary Poovey has argued, economic changes,
together with anxieties about class and gender
distinctions, created in eighteenth-century England
the enthroned image of The Proper Lady, symbol of
refinement and taste (and perhaps wit, if not genius),
and with it, at considerable cost to themselves and
their sex, some real power for ladies. It was largely
limited to the drawing room. Austen's writing as such
A Lady, her mode of assuming ladylike authority in
ladylike language, provokes the questions about her
social and political allegiances that have divided the
critical authorities who have written on the most
respected woman writer in English. Jane Austen's
awesome respectability has alienated some of her
readers, and inspired wrong-headed enthusiasm in
others. Does she want women's power confined to
drawing rooms? Does she sanction or mock the
image of the authoritative proper lady, which
confines as it defines feminine power?

As A Lady, Austen seems now to represent and

speak for British civility, perhaps even civilization, at
its toniest. In The Counterlife, the American novelist
Philip Roth introduces a representative traditional
Austen fan, an Englishwoman who rereads the novels
each year because, she says, "The characters are so
very good." More explicitly, she continues, "I'm very
fond of Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park. When she
goes back to Portsmouth after living down with the
Bertrams in great style and grandeur, and she finds
her own family and is so shocked by the squalor--
people are very critical of her for that and say she's a
snob, and maybe it's because I'm a snob myself--I
suppose I am--but I find it very sympathetic. I think
that's how one would behave, if one went back to a
much lower standard of living." (270) Mrs. Freshfield
is pleased that the characters are fastidious, and that
the author is--that both dislike squalor, quite as she
does. It is not fair to lump such a reader with the so-
called Janeites; she is no idealizer of a gentle,
genteel Jane; what she is is a Jane Austen snob. She
imagines Jane Austen has the same standards of
embattled gentility she has, that like her Austen
values those standards above everything. Readers of
Mansfield Park will allow that Mrs. Freshfield's
confusion of standards for living with standards of
living is something Jane Austen tempts one toward;
the serious question is whether Austen is
accountable for attracting snobs like her and
encouraging them in snobbishness. I think she is.
When we thrill to the way Mrs. Bennet is dispatched
as "a woman of mean understanding, little
information, and uncertain temper," or to the
translucent, transcendent tact with which Mr. Bennet
tells his daughter Mary, in company, "You have
delighted us long enough," (101), we respond with
approval to a snob's ruthless high standards, and to
her high-handedness. Austen's novels set us at a
little, pleasant, critical distance from the actual,
inelegant, disorderly world her letters reveal she
herself lived in just as we do. Furthermore, the
twentieth-century reader who, while not an authentic
member of the English gentry, enjoys the sublime
confidence of Pride and Prejudice--famously one of
the world's impeccable masterpieces--can
congratulate herself on her superior taste with a
smugness very like Mrs. Freshfield's. I suspect that
even morally serious readers able to list the
shortcomings of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, and
prove Jane Austen knew they are no better than
Fanny Price's Portsmouth parents, enjoy their own
complicity with Austen's sure, exclusive Lady's tone.
 This tone is, wonderfully, so authoritative as to
enable Austen to put down titled ladies. Those of us
who are not complacent about being snobs enjoy
noting that titled ladies are not among the most
admirable characters in the novels: that
hypercorrected Lady Middleton and empty Lady
Bertram are portrayed as patriarchy's mere
creatures, and conventional Lady Russell and
authoritarian Lady Catherine de Bourgh as its wrong-
headed police. Nevertheless, it is as a lady--an
untitled member of the gentry, "a gentleman's
daughter," which is how Elizabeth Bennet
appropriates the term for herself--that Jane Austen
condemns them. Austen carefully shows that Lady
Catherine's manners are no more than her
aspirations better than Mrs. Bennet's. To mock Lady
Catherine's "authoritative manner," (84) she reports
in unexceptionably calm and decorous ladylike tones
that, for instance, after dinner and cards at Rosings,
"the party ... gathered round the fire to hear Lady
Catherine determine what weather they were to have
on the morrow. From these instructions they were
summoned by the arrival of the coach. ..." (166)
Austen's special interest in exposing the pomposities
of a great Lady or the pretensions of a couple of
would-be ones--for example, the "two elegant ladies"
(41) who are the Bingley sisters' maids--are signs, if
we need them, that she signs herself with irony.
There are ladies and ladies; "A Lady," as a signature,
claims to be generic and claims at the same time a
certain classy distinction. How are the claims
related?
 About being A Lady writing, which is to say about
writing as a member of the group of women
novelists, Austen's irony is even clearer, and also
more complex. Her position on women's novels is
spelled out in Northanger Abbey: they are more
original than most of what's published, she declares.
Even though their characters are very often
stereotyped and their plots are commonly
implausible, she says, they are both pleasurable and
accurate, works "in which the greatest powers of the
mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation
of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and
humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen
language." (NA, 38) The emphasis falls on "chosen
language." Choosing language, commenting on the
stereotypes and formulas of novelists, and the
language available for use in social life, is always
Austen's subject. Of Emma's response to Mr.
Knightley's proposal, the narrator writes: "What did
she say?--Just what she ought, of course. A lady
always does." (E, 431). Writing as A Lady, Austen
savors the discrepancy between being a stable sign
in her culture as well as a user and analyst of its
signs.

A letter to her niece Fanny Knight suggests her relish

of a woman writer's peculiar position and power.
Fanny, evidently, had regaled her aunt by recounting
an adventure rather wilder than a fictional Austen
heroine might have had, a visit to a gentleman's
room. Intending to be charmed, indeed excited,
there, poor Fanny had ended up disgusted, like
Swift's gentleman in the lady's squalid dressing
room. Evidently she emerged with her sense of irony
intact, and of this her aunt expressed approval: "Your
trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his
room amused me excessively.--The dirty Shaving Rag
was exquisite!--Such a circumstance ought to be in
print. Much too good to be lost." (Letters, 412) A
cluster of characteristic Austen values come together
here: an appreciation of telling details; a pleasure in
telling them, and in hearing tell; a clear sense of the
connections between saying and feeling, and social
and emotional life; and seriousness about getting
into print. Austen admired women's novels that told
stories like Fanny's, about the ironic self-awareness of
a rational creature absurdly caught in a lady's place.

Her own novels, with their ostentatious embrace and

sly mockery of the tropes of fiction for women,
depend on her readers' familiarity with that fiction--
on their having the thorough, easy knowledge of
them that enables one to recognize social or literary
conventions, and to relish them. The reader she
counts on will respond to a turn of standard plot as if
to the anthem of an outgrown school, and treasure a
collegial allusion to such matters as the "telltale
compression of the pages [that promises] ... we are
all hastening together to perfect felicity" (NA, 250)--
all of us together, characters and narrator and
readers assembled in the same linguistic craft.
Austen presents herself as a daughter of the
novelists who formed her vision and her readers',
and continued to inform it. Condescending, mocking,
competitive, this attitude is also defensively and
devotedly filial. Far from struggling in a Bloomian
agon with awesome precursors she aims to
overthrow, Austen keeps her mother and sister
novelists always in mind to measure the ways she is
like and yet unlike them. If we must have a
psychological hypothesis to "explain" this with, the
paradigm of female development elaborated by
Nancy Chodorow will be more useful than the Oedipal
model.

Austen wrote first of all for her intimate family,

"great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so"
(Letters, 38), as she put it; Austen fans tend like a
very close family to be clubby and even a little
apologetic about a very personal taste (as opposed
to a liking for George Herbert, say, or George Eliot).
We relish a sense of the choosiness and the
exclusiveness (the sad accident of there being only
six novels enhances it) of our little community. The
pronoun in the title of Lionel Trilling's last essay,
"Why We Read Jane Austen," reveals something more
than a magisterial critic's traditionalist, universalist
attitude: the feeling that the culture we share with
Jane Austen is beleaguered or not enough valued,
that powerful people on the outside don't take it
seriously, serves to bind us more tightly together,
"we" snobs like Mrs. Freshfield, "we" readers of
women's novels, "we" humanists in a dehumanizing
world, even "we" wary students of how language
determines our pleasures and power. Those others
who take the truth to be whatever is universally
acknowledged remain ever in the corner of Jane
Austen's eye: by their limitations we measure our
own sagacity, and also our snugness. As Katherine
Mansfield remarked, "every true admirer of the
novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone--
reading between the lines--has become the secret
friend of their author." Wayne Booth, quoting this in
The Rhetoric of Fiction, adds--losing the connection
with words on the page, but avoiding Mansfield's
"he"--that the Austen reader has an "illusion of
travelling intimately with a hardy little band of
readers whose heads are screwed on tight and whose
hearts are in the right place." (266) The illusion
depends on the way the confident, confidential tones
of A Lady are deployed so as to mock the accents of
authoritative patriarchal discourse in the universe
that contains her universe and her fictions.

The literary tradition in which Jane Austen was

placed and/or placed herself--the tradition of Jane
West and Mary Brunton--was not the dominant
tradition; one of the most arduous projects of
feminist scholars has been to retrieve and reevaluate
eighteenth-century fiction by women. Everything
Austen wrote about the novel (and perhaps
everything in her novels too) indicates that she knew
quite as well as we do that the genre she chose or
was constrained to choose (rather as her heroines
choose their husbands) was not universally
esteemed--that Catherine Morland is representative if
not accurate in her assumption that "gentlemen read
better books" than novels (NA, 106), works,
presumably, of greater heft and seriousness.
Logically enough, while portraying authority figures
and their discourse as in general not exemplary,
Austen mocked women's novels most for their
moralizing. The maxims that articulate the attitude of
patriarchal authority on sex and marriage, the main
subject of such novels, are parodied in Pride and
Prejudice: Elizabeth lifts up her eyes in amazement
as her sister Mary moralizes, after Lydia runs away,
"that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable--that
one false step involves her in endless ruin--that her
reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful." (P &
P, 289) Pointedly, Austen does not write down: she
will not preach like pedantic Mary. Her Mr. Collins
comically echoes the stentorian tones of the "learned
doctors" who spell out the moral meanings of
romantic actions in novels by, for instance, Charlotte
Lennox and Fanny Burney. In his final letter to Mr.
Bennet he warns "my cousin Elizabeth, and yourself,
of what evils you may incur, by a precipitate closure
with [Darcy's] proposals," and declares his
amazement at the "encouragement of vice" that
occurred with Lydia and Wickham were received by
her parents. (363-4) Mr. Bennet rightly observes that
this clergyman's attitude is less than Christian, but
he himself is no more a reliable authority than his
heir is. He is as Elizabeth's meditations on his
character point out considerably less than
ineffectual, not only pathetically hampered by the
entail from disposing of his own patrimony, but worse
than useless as a head of his household. Austen's
shift from the explicit didacticism of her sister
novelists is signalled by the absence of an
authoritarian father figure from the novel: Mr.
Gardiner, who has the tact to arrange some things, is
a shadowy minor character. There is no one but the
hero and heroine themselves to discuss, at the end,
what "the moral" of their story might be (381).
Hapless Mr. Bennet's comment on life itself
meanwhile resonates: "For what do we live, but to
make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in
our turn?" (364) It is neither the moral of the whole
novel nor one the whole novel repudiates.

Pride and Prejudice is about women's lives in

relation to sexual roles and to marriage; therefore--
that the connection is inevitable is Jane Austen's
point--it is about power, and independence and
authority. The novel opens, seductively, in the mode
of the Johnsonian essayist: "It is a truth universally
acknowledged that a single man in possession of a
good fortune must be in want of a wife." On the face
of it this sentence has an authoritative ring: as
surely, it is the paradigmatic Jane Austen sentence,
which was famously and enigmatically praised by
Virginia Woolf as "a woman's sentence." Confronted
by the sentence suitable for men writers, Woolf
declared, Austen "laughed at it and devised a
perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her
own use and never departed from it." (80) The
initiating philosophical-sounding premise of Pride
and Prejudice is a good example. It laughs at
authoritative sentence-making. As everyone has
pointed out, it is full of logical holes: a truth
universally acknowledged is probably less than true;
the truth at issue here is not really that single men
want girls (which "in want of" does not mean
anyway) but that poor girls need husbands. And, far
from describing the real state of things in society, the
novel's first sentence expresses a gossip's fantasy
that women exchange or traffic in men. The sentence
acknowledges, by putting it first, Mrs. Bennet's view
of things (or is it only what for her purposes Mrs.
Bennet acts as if she believes?): that rich men want
to be supplied with (even poor) wives. We are
encouraged to reflect that although this is not the
case, it may be operatively true when people act as if
it's true. The power of discourse to determine action
is suggested.

The last sentences of Chapter I, quite as

authoritative as the first sentence is, complement it,
by contrast. Far from entertaining Mrs. Bennet's point
of view, the narrator here speaks from above, and
decisively detaches herself from the woman: "She
was a woman of mean understanding, little
information, and uncertain temper. When she was
discontented she fancied herself nervous. The
business of her life was to get her daughters married;
its solace was visiting and news." These dismissive
declaratives crackling with the briskness that charms
snobs are very different from the meditative voice
that pronounces the ironic, pseudo-philosophical first
sentence. But the conclusion of the chapter
resembles its commencement in one important
regard, that is, in claiming distance and authority--
the authority a lady in a drawing room shares with a
philosopher, a society epigrammatist shares with a
judge. The reader is encouraged to reflect on the
similarities and also the differences between ladies
and philosophers, drawing rooms and the arenas of
real power. And the limits of any authoritative
statement are suggested when we look more closely
and discover that the impressive balance and
antithesis of the final sentence is factitious: Mrs.
Bennet's solace, far from being a change from her
business, is her mode of conducting that. "News," the
narrator's last word on this first chapter, a simple
word rather elaborately kinder to Mrs. Bennet than
"gossip" might be, nicely labels the subject of the
chapter. The cap suggests the chapter was
substantive; but as Chapter 2 follows, the roundness
and fullness the cap helps emphasize begin to seem
illusory. We find that the scene between Mr. and Mrs.
Bennet was by no means as crucial and conclusive as
we thought when it turns out that Mr. Bennet visited
Mr. Bingley before his wife asked him to.

The first sentence and the first chapter of Pride

and Prejudice, integral, finished units in their
different, equally forceful ways, mime so as subtly to
mock the certainties of authoritative discourse; in the
plot of the novel, such discourse becomes a theme.
Proud Mr. Darcy sets the action going when he
scrutinizes Elizabeth Bennet and pronounces her
"Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me!"
To the feminist critic, that italicized pronoun recalls
the sinister bar of the masculine "I" that Virginia
Woolf described, in A Room of One's Own, as a
shadow disfiguring male texts: as Darcy goes on to
declare his opinions on female accomplishments and
related matters, the egoism of the male authority is
amusingly exposed. The action that devolves from
his comment on Elizabeth proves his first judgment
was false and the first step toward its own undoing.
To begin with, Elizabeth mocks by repeating the line,
telling the story on him; "she had a lively, playful
disposition," the narrator explains, "which delighted
in any thing ridiculous." (12) By talking so as to
render him ridiculous she is deliberately
manipulating her own psyche (rather in the manner
of Fanny Knight visiting her gentleman's room); "he
has a very satirical eye," she tells Charlotte, "and if I
do not begin by being impertinent myself, I shall
soon grow afraid of him." (24) In other words, by
repeating his words to others she is talking for--in
effect to--herself, choosing and using language not to
express feeling but to create it, to make herself feel
powerful. Darcy will accurately observe, much later,
that she finds "great enjoyment in occasionally
professing opinions which in fact are not your own"
(174). Lest we think she does this just to flirt, we find
her, very much later in the novel, doing the same
thing in the very private precincts of her own mind,
as she thinks about the question of whether Bingley
will propose to Jane. At the conclusion of that
gentleman's visit to Longbourn, toward the novel's
end, the narrator tells us that, "Not a word passed
between the sisters concerning Bingley; but Elizabeth
went to bed in the happy belief that all must speedily
be concluded, unless Mr. Darcy returned within the
stated time. Seriously, however, she felt tolerably
persuaded that all this must have taken place with
that gentleman's concurrence." (346) Here again,
talky Elizabeth is enjoying herself by professing--
silently, but nevertheless as if to a drawing-room
audience, in well-constructed, carefully timed
sentences--an opinion that is not seriously--not in
fact--her own. The remarkable sentence that begins
"Seriously, however," as it remarks on the non-
seriousness of the sentence that precedes it, raises
interesting questions about the power of positive
assertions--highly subversive questions about the
seriousness of all definitive statements and
sentences, in what is after all a tissue of words, a
series of sentences. Austen invites us to consider
that words and sentences might not be signs or
containers of meaning after all, that playfulness
rather than meanings might be what they represent:
"My dearest sister," Jane says once her affairs are
settled and Elizabeth's are at issue, "'now be serious.
I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing
that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how
long you have loved him?'" Elizabeth answers, "'It
has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know
when it began. But I believe I must date it from my
first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.'" Jane
can tell she doesn't mean it: "Another intreaty that
she would be serious, however, produced the desired
effect; and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn
assurance of attachment." (373).

Elizabeth could tell herself Darcy might ruin her

sister's happiness only because she knew he would
not, being ready by now to have his friend marry
Jane. As she also knows, he was long before
conquered by her own "lively"--he does not call them
"satirical"--eyes, "bewitched" by her powers, so much
so as to ask her to understand--she would have had
to be either an impossibly rational creature or a very
smug witch to do so--that he fell in love with her
against his better judgment. But she does not say
these things. Many chapters later, when they finally
can both with dignity agree to marry, it is after a long
talk which ends with Elizabeth biting her tongue: on
the verge of making a caustic observation, she
"checked herself," for "she remembered that he had
yet to learn to be laught at, and it was rather too
early to begin." (371) Since people are comical, quite
as Mr. Bennet says, dignity is precarious, and silence
helps better than words to maintain it. Darcy will
eventually be made to learn to laugh: in the novel's
nearly penultimate paragraph, which begins to detail
the bliss of the married life of the Darcys at
Pemberley, we are told that Darcy's sister Georgiana
"at first ... listened with an astonishment bordering
on alarm, at [Elizabeth's] lively, sportive, manner of
talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in
herself a respect which almost overcame her
affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry.
Her mind received knowledge which had never
before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions
she began to comprehend that a woman may take
liberties with her husband, which a brother will not
always allow in a sister more than ten years younger
than himself." (388) In the happy end Georgiana will
take the place at Elizabeth's side of Jane, the more
feeling sister with whom Elizabeth shared the sisterly
mockery of men Jane never could engage in either.
She will be the female confidante and foil--the other
woman to talk to--that is necessary to the happiness
of even the mistress of Pemberley. Both Darcys, then,
will be instructed by Elizabeth happily ever after. In
other words, just as the marriage plot comes to
triumphant closure it is neatly undercut: female
bonding and women's laughter are elements of this
novel's happy end. One woman will make a man the
object of her pleasantries while another one listens
and learns. This subtle subversion of the
conventional romantic plot accords with the novel's
attitude toward verbal tissues that appear to wrap
things up once for all.

Like her heroine, Austen questions authoritative

discourse through dialogue. Dialogue, Mary Ellmann
wrote, "might be defined as the prevention of
monologue" (xii); as such it is a critique of patriarchal
absolutism in prose. There are many modes of
dialogue in Pride and Prejudice, the first of which
is ironic narrative. When Austen refers to the "two
elegant ladies" who wait on the Bingley sisters she
means that these women absurdly pretend, like their
mistresses, to elegance. Irony is an efficient mode:
the description of the maids serves for the
mistresses. Like an impatiently rude interlocutor,
irony questions a statement as it is made; a single
sentence becomes in effect two, assertion cum
contradiction.

Literal dialogue between characters in the novel

may also be a process of assertion and contradiction,
sometimes of opinions, sometimes of the authority to
state them. Although we tend to remember Pride
and Prejudice as chock full of witty exchanges,
some of the most interesting dialogue is between
talk and the lack of it. There dialogue is as much the
subject as the mode of discourse. The first chapter is
a case in point: "My dear Mr. Bennet," his lady begins
the action by saying to him one day, "have you heard
that Netherfield Park is let at last?", to which "Mr.
Bennet replied that he had not." The switch to
indirect discourse signals the man's taciturnity; he is
not quite responding to his wife. One is reminded of
this marital lack of exchange when Elizabeth and
Darcy talk together later: "'It is your turn to say
something now, Mr. Darcy.--I talked about the dance,
and you ought to make some kind of remark on the
size of the room, or the number of couples.' He
smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished
him to say should be said." (19) Elizabeth is unlike
her mother making deliberate, sophisticated
conversation about conversing, but my point--aside
from the small truths that voluble Elizabeth
resembles her mother, and that Austen's egoistic
young people both tend to italicize pronouns--is that
Darcy is hardly a Benedick to Elizabeth's Beatrice,
therefore that the real exchange is between talking
and not talking, and that that is one way Austen
suggests the limits of discursive authority.

In her Lady's voice, which combines an authoritative

ring with flexible self-mocking undertones, Austen
can comment with varying degrees of explicitness on
the limits of rhetorical and human authority. Through
self-reflexive irony she can keep her distance from
the discourse of authority, the patriarchal mode of
imposing oneself through language. Except for ladies
in domestic and literary circumstances (drawing
rooms and fictions) circumscribed by the world of
men, women have been denied such authority.
Writing as A Lady and considering the constraints
that determine her persona--considering as a
persona--, Austen reflected on the power of
authoritative language. And on other kinds of power.
When Elizabeth scrutinizes her third-volume feelings
about Darcy, she acknowledges that it is she who has
the power to provoke the words that will change her
life: "She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful
to him, she felt a real interest in his welfare; and she
only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare
to depend upon herself, and how far it would be for
the happiness of both that she should employ the
power which her fancy told her she still possessed, of
bringing on the renewal of his addresses." (266) The
rhythms are authoritative, magisterial. The novel
reader knows the heroine must wait, and we with
her, for a second proposal it is not in her power to
make--but also that Elizabeth's struggle to turn fancy
into knowledge and power is the significant action.
The proposal, important though it is, will be a coda to
the inner action of discriminating among thoughts
and the words for them. Only if we ignore that
sentence and its sisters can we read Pride and
Prejudice as a mere romance. Which is not to
gainsay the pleasure we take in the novelist's very
romantically and conventionally uniting the lovers, in
the very end--or, rather, in the Gardiners' having
done so. Having been responsible for the mechanics
of getting the couple together, Elizabeth's relatives
are thrust forward in the novel's last sentence as the
only legitimate claimants to agency. Does the
emphasis fall on the fact that the hero and heroine
are mere puppets of circumstances, or perhaps of the
marriage plot? Are we meant to envy their prospect
of happiness ever after in the paradise of Pemberley?
Or to note with sly pleasure that these cultivated but
rather dull middle-class Gardiners will be frequent
guests at that monument to Lady Catherine's class?
It is hard to decide, and this, I think, is what must be
borne in mind when we write about Jane Austen,
whose authoritative irony eludes, even mocks, our
authoritative critical discourses.

Selected Bibliography

Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W.

Chapman (5 vols.) Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1933.

Austen, Jane. Jane Austen's Letters, collected and

edited by R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Ellmann, Mary. Thinking about Women. New York:

Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman

Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar,

Straus, and Giroux, 1986.

Trilling, Lionel. "Why We Read Jane Austen." The

Times Literary Supplement, 5 March 1976.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York and

London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.

Source: Rachel M. Brownstein, "Jane Austen: Irony

and Authority." Women's Studies 15, nos. 1-3 (1988):
57-70.