romantic imprisonment: women and other glorified outcasts.by nina auerbach

Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. by Nina AuerbachReview by: Patricia Meyer SpacksNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Jun., 1987), pp. 104-107Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044917 .

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104 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

while I would opt for a plainer expository vehicle, the overall conse- quence of Wilt's stylistic preoccupations is a critical study which is finely sensitive to Scott's language(s), so peppered with felicitous turns of phrase, and so free from current buzz words and critical jargon, that it gives pleasure even when it perplexes or provokes dissent.

GEORGE DEKKER

Stanford University

N I N A A u E R B A C H, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. Gender and Culture Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Pp. xxvi + 316. $25.

In Nina Auerbach's literary universe, Jane Austen writes novels populated by monsters. George Eliot constructs a personal life filled with her own theatrical performances and characterizes her novelistic heroines by their degree of skill as actresses. Little Women, in Auerbach's rendering, depicts life and marriage as "inevitable snuffings- out to which the strong submit." Such revisionist interpretations dominate a collection of essays loosely unified by their common preoccupation with alienation and imprisonment as Romantic themes. Auerbach's often star- tling interpretations of nineteenth-century poetry and fiction, like her illuminating earlier book, Woman and the Demon, remind us of the nine- teenth century's dark side-but only, this time, at the cost of considerable overstatement.

Austen, Eliot, the Brontes, and Lewis Carroll recur as objects of con- templation in these pieces, all but two of which have appeared in print before. Auerbach also investigates the Brownings, Dickens, Dorothy Say- ers, Louisa May Alcott, and Ellen Terry, and she demonstrates in passing her knowledge of many minor works, particularly of fiction. Yet the col- lection generates an impression of narrowness rather than of range, partly because of its obsessive preoccupations.

One of these is Auerbach's predilection for demons, recurring in the most unlikely contexts. She sees Austen's "horror of children" as related to the "swarm of twisted progeny" in Romantic fiction, comments on Fanny Price's "blighting power" in Mansfield Park, understands Alice in Wonderland as "alienated" and "tortured," a "'fabulous monster' of sol- itude." Each of these interpretations usefully calls attention to a strain of harshness in texts sometimes sentimentalized by bland exegesis. On the

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REVIEWS 105

other hand, such readings also falsify the tone of the works to which they refer. Austen's feelings about children register in her fiction most often as impatience, irritation, realistic awareness -of the kinds of trouble the young, especially when poorly educated in social discipline, can cause their elders. Annoying children in her novels make a terrible fuss about being stuck by pins, or they fill the house with noise, or they climb on an aunt's back and refuse to get down: a far cry from the "plenitude of abortions, miscarriages, and clownish monsters" Auerbach finds typical of Romantic fiction. The harshness of realism differs vividly from that of Romantic fantasy, although their psychological and social origins may be the same. Auerbach, interested in fantasy, confuses it with its opposite. Lewis Carroll himself, in fact, strikes realistic notes. Generations of chil- dren have thrilled to Alice's relentless self-interest, the ease with which, in the guise of "good girl," she gratifies her curiosity and finds ways to express her feelings. (I taught Alice in Wonderland once, with considerable success, in a course called "The Independent Woman.") But tortured? A monster? Surely such terms go too far.

One can understand why Auerbach overstates her case. She wants to defamiliarize works perhaps too comfortably canonized and to establish lines of lineage too often ignored. She places The Mill on the Floss in a line including Gothic novels and the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, sets Alice in Wonderland in relation to the Victorian preoccupation with "fallen women," demands that her readers think of Austen and Wollstonecraft together. She takes a fresh look at cliches. Did Austen and Eliot and Bronte really think of their literary works as children substituting for those they unfortunately never bore biologically? Should feminist critics concentrate on literature written by women? Arguing in support of her negative answers to such questions, Auerbach provokes discussion and suggests profitable lines that it might follow. She insists that we should not take our literary history for granted, reminds us that literary like other kinds of history is constructed, and boldly proclaims the stability of her own constructions. Admiring that boldness, and the energy with which this critic supports her positions, I yet find her intellectual struc- tures shaky because insufficiently grounded in coherent theory, adequate social and intellectual history, or attentive reading of a text.

At one level, Auerbach shows herself very attentive indeed. She takes details of vocabulary seriously, dwelling on the implications of the nar- rator's assertion that Maggie Tulliver is "absorbed in the direct, imme- diate experience," pointing out explicit allusions in The Mill on the Floss to "demons" and to "Medusa" and demanding that the reader give such terms full weight. She quotes a familiar passage from Mansfield Park in which Fanny Price, in Portsmouth, recognizes that she now understands

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106 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Mansfield as "home," and she offers a penetrating and economical for- mulation of its meaning: "home is palpable to Fanny only by its absence." Romantic Imprisonment contains many such sharp insights but few satis- factory essays, since sharp insight here characteristically coexists with blurry misstatement. For example: Catherine Morland's "last 'rescue' by Henry Tilney [in Northanger Abbey] may be said to make her the slave of a slave of a slave, since the pedagogic Henry is ruled by the whim of his autocratic father, who is himself the slave of money and propriety." In fact, Henry's "rescue" of Catherine comes only after he has acted, for the first time, "open and bold" (Austen's words) in opposition to his father-opposition "steady as the sanction of reason and the dictate of conscience could make it." Again, discussing The Mill on the Floss, Auer- bach cites Philip's wondering "why Maggie's dark eyes remind him of the stories about princesses being turned into animals," then comments, "Witches in folklore are more likely to turn into animals than princesses are." She uses Philip's speculation to support her own theory of Maggie's association with the malignant supernatural, ignoring the crucial passive construction ("being turned") that calls attention to the girl's victimization. Lucy Deane comments on the "witchery" that makes Maggie look best in shabby clothes; Auerbach takes this usage as having literal force. She associates the marriages of Catherine Morland, Emma, and-incredibly- Anne Elliot with "the demonic marriage of the dead" in Melmoth the Wan- derer. True, many of Austen's weddings "transmit dark signals" (and other commentators have noted the fact). But this perception hardly implies that the conception of such weddings derives from the impulses that fuel Romantic narratives of cannibalism and other violent forms of mutual destructiveness.

The last two essays in this collection (the only ones not previously published) show Auerbach at her best. Thematically related, they con- cern, respectively, George Eliot's association with theatricality and the lit- eral career of the great Victorian actress Ellen Terry. Without the strain- ing for authority that mars earlier pieces, the study of Eliot demonstrates by quotation from the novelist's contemporaries and her letters the de- gree to which she acted self-defined parts and projected a carefully con- ceived public personality. Precisely chosen citations help the reader un- derstand Eliot's "performance" in the context of a belief-held by others as well as the novelist-that "sincerity" and "theatricality" need not be at odds. Then Auerbach demonstrates that even Eliot's "good" characters- Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, for example, or Dorothea in Middlemarch can be interpreted as expert actresses. Such "anti-heroines" as Rosamond Vincy or Gwendolen Harleth, she argues, "do not stand for the morally repellent deceit of acting, but simply for acting that is bad."

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REVIEWS 107

This new way of thinking about Eliot illuminates perplexities of the novels and suggests further critical possibilities; it appears to emerge from the consciousness of a confident and informed critic. Even here, though, careless reading and overstatement weaken the argument. In her introduction to the collection, Auerbach claims for herself a scholarship of "trespass," a word given positive weight by feminist usage. Going be- yond preestablished bounds creates the excitement of criticism; when Auerbach writes most forcefully, she generates just such excitement. But trespass means, the OED tells us, "A transgression; a breach of law or duty; an offence, sin, wrong; a fault." The critic, surely, must be careful about what laws he or she chooses to transgress. We may applaud writers who violate stultifying and largely unexamined inherited assumptions without wishing them to break the laws of responsible reading and precise as- sertion.

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS Yale University

D A N I E L C O T T O M, The Civilized Imagina- tion: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. x + 229. $32.50.

The Civilized Imagination is an analysis of the con- flicts between aristocratic and middle-class values in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. Daniel Cottom rejects other critics' attempts to find an aesthetic resolution of conflicts in these writers. For him, aesthetic values are "constructions of social order" (p. 202), and they necessarily include the disharmonies of society. He regards literature as "a creation that is social before it is individual," a creation that then embodies conflicts not "wholly apparent to the writer" (pp. 200, 195).

Cottom achieves substantial successes with all three novelists. Al- though the subject of the ever-rising middle class once again confronting ubiquitous aristocratic values does not promise very much that is fresh, Cottom either opens new topics or deepens old ones for each novelist. His method often appears to put him in conflict with the texts he analyzes as well as with the societies they represent; nevertheless even interpre- tation that appears strained usually calls attention to an important aspect of a work. Consider, for example, Cottom's interpretation of Catherine

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