Pure and Virtuous, Dirty and Fun: The Intercourse of Sexuality and Consolatory Female Reading in Jane Austen
Adjudicator's remarks available on the St. Jerome's website.
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Over the past decade, the modern book industry has become saturated with—as many would not-so-affectionately put it—smut. ‘Chick-lit’ has departed from plain harlequin romance and into the realm of the explicit, with eroticism selling itself under the guise of literature. It is thus not surprising that, in response, the opposite has occurred: literature has been transformed into erotica. The ease of self-publishing erotic fanfiction has paved the way for such novels as Spank Me, Mr. Darcy and Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife. In contrast to many claims that characterize such works as “mindless gratification [that] … encourage readers to view this kind of creative license as normal” (Scharfenberger), this essay argues that so-called ‘chick-lit’ has always served a purpose of consolatory gratification, and any attempts to place Austen’s work upon the high-shelf of literature, cerebral and sexless, says more about the critics than the text itself; it is revealing of the ways in which society continues to repress expressions of sexuality by and for women. While it is true that Pride and Prejudice, like Austen’s other novels, is more concerned with conversations surrounding marriage rather than its consummation, there is a physical dimension to the novel often ignored. Modern reimaginings do not bastardize a beloved classical work, but rather draw out what the book already lays bare. This essay will show how modern criticism of erotica is ideologically the same line of criticism which dismissed Austen’s novels and audience in her own time; how Pride and Prejudice serves a function of sexual empowerment for modern women facing constraints similar to those Austen faced; and then demonstrate textually how fanfiction texts such as Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen merely amplify the already sexually-charged imagery of Austen’s original prose.
While it is difficult to ascertain Austen’s average readership outside notable male examples within the aristocracy, Austen’s preoccupation with female reading in her novels suggests they were intended for (or at least consumed by) the same female demographic that modern erotica targets. This is seen most obviously in Northanger Abbey through Catherine Morland’s obsession with gothic novels, but also through her assumption that Henry Tilney has not read them, suggesting: “They are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books … young men despise novels amazingly” (Northanger Abbey 102-103). This statement implies that Catherine was not unique in her interest of novels, but that novel readership was aligned with the female gender as whole—to the willing exclusion of men. Henry Tilney’s obsession with Udolpho further proves this, as he is the exception, feeling a need to invoke and dismiss a gender binary of “gentleman or lady” in order to justify his appreciation of “a good novel” (102). Austen invokes this gender binary again when Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice “protests” that “he never read[s] novels,” much to the chagrin of Kitty and Lydia. He says, “I have often observed how little young ladies are interested in books of a serious stamp…” (Pride and Prejudice 46). By publishing novels, Austen writes with a primarily female audience in mind—an audience whose consumption of a genre flies in the face of prevailing critical, masculine opinion (represented by Mr. Collins) which considers it lesser, neither serious nor clever. This is a clear parallel to the modern conflict surrounding the appreciation of erotica, as it is enjoyed almost exclusively by women to the derision of everyone else. It is also significant that the “books of a serious stamp” which Mr. Collins refers to are almost certainly ‘conduct’ books in the same manner as his recited sermons of Dr. Fordyce (Pride and Prejudice 46): a genre in Austen’s time which consistently dismissed novels for their corruptive sexual influence on women, and which Austen had read via Gisborne (Uphaus 334). Her association of them with the pathetic Mr. Collins suggests that she sees the opinions of such men as similarly pathetic, and Pride and Prejudice as a pointed statement against them. Austen’s novels thus occupy the same role in the dynamic of low and high culture which persists to this day in the dismissal of female erotic works. While the standards of morality have changed, the players and opinions have not.
The common purpose of Austen’s works and modern erotica is made even clearer in that the anxieties conduct books express regarding female readership directly parallel those of modern articles dismissing Austen erotica. As Richard Ritter notes in Imagining Women Readers, early 19th Century conduct writers such as J. L. Chirol and Hannah More saw novels of the period as “vehicles for vice and infidelity,” deliberately “calculated to irritate the senses, to inflame the imagination” of “girls” (Ritter 5). As Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice seem to acknowledge on an almost metatextual level that their primary readership would be women, they could easily have been objects of Chirol and More’s criticisms. Both novels take love and courtship as their subjects, and both protagonists experience passion and indulge in imagination through their pursuit of a man. In a society as sexually repressed as Austen’s England, it is not outrageous to imagine how such works might have been subversive in their content. Now that Austen’s novels are considered “tried-and-true literature” in the realm of high culture and academia, the renewed association of Austen with low culture is threatening (Scharfenberger). Modern critics are thus eager to distance erotic works from the canonical Austen: For example, Ann Channon (manager of Jane Austen’s House Museum) calls Austen erotica “gratuitous,” a “quick fix” (Andrews), while critic Scharfenberger characterises it as “mindless gratification … shamelessly stuffed with morally debasing scenes” which make the classical reading of “young people” conditional on “the promise of sexual escapades” (Scharfenberger). The similarities here to 19th Century novel criticism are obvious: both lines of thought emphasize moral danger to young women in the context of their sexuality. This consistency in the face of a two-hundred-year difference suggests as well that their objections are not purely rooted in content, but stem instead from moral conservatism: they are a reaction to the prospect of women using fiction to privately indulge in their own sexualities, shaming them from knowing their bodies as anything other than objects of exchange with a man. More even uses the phrase “cheap gratification” just as Scharfenberger does in reference to erotica (Ritter 5), while Chirol suggests that novels threaten to “relax soul and body at once,” encouraging girls to “indulge” in “pernicious … practices” (Ritter 5). Chirol’s reluctance to specify exactly what these ‘practices’ entail suggest a sexual subtext—likely an allusion to masturbation. This all suggests that novels of romance and courtship in the 19th Century served or were at least perceived to serve the same function as modern erotica; that a sizable amount of erotic fanfiction chooses Pride and Prejudice as its subject indicates that in Austen’s case, this was likely true.
While it is impossible to directly question Austen’s original readers as to the sexually liberating nature of her work, it is possible to imagine how her texts were used through comparison to societies which restrict the liberty of women to the same extent that Regency England did. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books recounts Azar Nafisi’s true story of teaching Western novels banned by the Iranian government (notably, Pride and Prejudice) to a select group of female students. The girls themselves make this connection, saying: “The Islamic Republic has taken us back to Jane Austen’s times. God bless the arranged marriage!” (Nafisi 258). They see in Jane Austen’s supposedly sexless world a reflection of their own, one in which sexuality is always bubbling beneath the repressed and cerebral surface. As Nafisi says, “Our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it … we had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous … or dirty and fun” (Nafisi 304). The clinical separation of intellectual love from sexual passion, as Nafisi describes, has often been a criticism levied at Austen; however, inherent in any world without blatant physicality is the implication of sexuality, as people (and women) are inherently sexual: as Nafisi suggests, there is always something “fun” beneath the apparently virtuous. This is exactly what Austen expresses in her novels: as the girls say, “What we had with all the writers, but especially with Austen, was fun … we became childish and teasing and just plain enjoyed ourselves” (Nafisi 258). For such women, reading the romance of Austen is a way into ‘enjoying themselves’ in a society which does not merely shun female self-pleasure but seeks to repress it entirely. For a woman, to know Austen is to know one’s body. When Nafisi asks explicitly, “How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body … ?” the answer is obvious: “I went to the next session armed with a copy of Pride and Prejudice in one hand and Our Bodies, Ourselves—the only book I had available on sexuality—in the other” (Nafisi 304). To these women, reading Austen’s novels—even in their original, unaltered form—goes literally hand-in-hand with reading their own bodies; it is tantamount to an instruction manual of the same nature as the world’s most widely celebrated book of female sexual health and empowerment. Thus, when Catherine Morland characterizes novel-reading as a source of “extensive and unaffected pleasure” (Northanger Abbey, 102), this reframing of Austen’s work makes it easy to imagine how “pleasure” might otherwise be interpreted—how one might experience it in reading Austen.
The sum total of Austen’s lineage with modern erotica suggests that if she were writing today, unburdened from the morals of her time, her texts might more closely resemble the works of those who supposedly stand to sully her memory. This is seen in that Austen fanfiction draws its explicit sexual content from the language of the original novels, suggesting a latent eroticism within the restrained intercourse of the original text. One of the more well-written and circulated examples of Austen erotica is titled Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen by Arielle Eckstut and Dennis Ashton. While clearly written with a tongue-in-cheek sensibility for self-prescribed Janeites, the mere fact of its existence suggests that the appeal of Austen’s work for her audience lies partly in their desire for sexual fantasy. It is also notable for establishing a metatextual premise whereby the authors, “two amateur Jane Austen scholars,” stumble upon “a hidden cache of manuscript pages” expurgated from the original novels for their explicit content (Eckstut and Ashton 1). When people pick up the book, they are primed to imagine every chapter as penned by Austen, an expression of her original intent, inviting readers to see the seemingly innocuous content of the final published version the way it was meant to be seen: as a prelude to explicit sexuality. Eckstut and Ashton reinforce this by grounding their depiction of sex between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in the sexual aspects of their supposedly non-sexual intercourse: their walks together; their awkward, silent looks at one another; and their use of ‘small-talk’ as a sort of verbal foreplay.
Eckstut and Ashton first reveal the sexual nature of walking in Austen’s original text by locating their sole sex scene between Darcy and Elizabeth not in any of the many scenes where the two are alone together in a private, enclosed space, but instead on a walk: “. . . They soon outstripped the others, and when they had reached the carriage, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were half a quarter of a mile behind … much might have been said, and silence was very awkward” (Eckstut and Dennis Ashton 22). By using Austen’s actual canonical prose to begin the scene, they reframe her use of walking as an expression of physicality in anticipation of the physicality of sex that is to come; their awkwardness and silence reinforces the act as a sort of clumsy foreplay. Viewed through this sexual lens, it is telling that scenes within the original novel where the two wait in anticipation of talking to one another are grounded in movement. When Darcy contemplates revealing his feelings of love to Elizabeth, for example, Austen writes that he “walked about the room” in “a silence of several minutes” before walking directly towards her in an “agitated manner” (Pride and Prejudice 128). While some of his deliberation is tied up in the practical consequences of proposing to someone ‘lower’ than him, he would not have approached Elizabeth so directly without being sure of his intent in doing so. That he is stopped upon seeing her face-to-face implies that his pause is one of anxiety, frustration, and “agitat[ion]” at the reality of betraying his feelings to Elizabeth’s actual body, when for so long his appraisal of her was entirely confined to his mind. Faced with physicality, Austen has him respond accordingly, using movement as an expression of his internal desire. Elizabeth does the same when expecting Darcy and his sister, as Austen writes: “She retreated from the window, fearful of being seen … she walked up and down the room, endeavouring to compose herself” (174). Faced with the prospect of interacting with Darcy again after their walk together at Pemberley, her anxiety manifests itself in physical movement; there is an anticipation of being in the same room with him, body to body. And thus, when Austen has them reveal their desire for one another at the end of the novel, it is not in a parlor, or a drawing room, but on a walk together (247).
Sexual tension between Elizabeth and Darcy is seen also in their repeated silent glances at one another. When Darcy first notices Elizabeth, his appraisal of her is not emotional, but visual. Austen writes that “he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, [at which point] he withdrew his own” (Pride and Prejudice 7); three chapters later, Darcy remarks: “I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow” (15). His attraction to Elizabeth is at first physical, visual, grounded in acts of making and breaking eye-contact (a schoolyard cliché) as a form of mutual sexual appraisal, bringing him ‘pleasure’ in this essay’s more suggestive use of the term. Eckstut and Ashton illustrate the inherent sexuality of Elizabeth and Darcy’s tendency to look at one another through their erotica by repeatedly framing the fictional pair’s sexual encounter through sight. As she bends down to perform fellatio on Mr. Darcy, they write: “Elizabeth felt a sudden sense of regret as she looked up to find Mr. Darcy’s tender and striking visage, which gazed back upon her” (Eckstut and Ashton 22); as she begins, “Elizabeth looked up to find again Darcy’s steadfast gaze … continuing to look at her directly” (23); and then at end, they further note that Darcy, “anxious to observe her … leaned back to obtain a full view of Elizabeth’s activities” (28). Given the prominent role that face-to-face, eye-to-eye gazing plays within the canonical development of Darcy and Elisabeth’s relationships, the frequency of these mentions within a sexual context suggests that such looks as written by Austen are not innocent expressions, but part of a mutual silent dialogue of sexual appraisal; when they look at one another, it is with desire, and with the implication of all the ways that they might come to see each other.
Finally and possibly most significant is the use of idle conversation—small talk—as a form of verbal foreplay. As Darcy plainly explains in Pride and Promiscuity: “We talk too much. We have exhausted ourselves with conversation. Our energies have been dissipated … May we not let our actions speak now?” (Eckstut and Ashton 23). With this, Eckstut and Ashton frame conversation and sexual intercourse—the verbal and the physical—as merely two different methods by which Darcy and Elizabeth express their desire for one another. The writers further cement this point by having them intermittently discuss the mundane while kissing: “I hope the weather has not been too wet for you while at Rosings,” Elizabeth says; “‘Do you enjoy cards, Mr. Darcy? ... Both felt a shiver of excitement” (26). The intent here is obviously comedic, but the sense of parody is derived from the Austen readers general understanding that their constant verbal sparring throughout the original novel is clearly a sort of flirtation within the realm of what was acceptable at the time. When they discuss the mundane, it is merely the sublimation of intense sexual desire. This is yet another reason why Eckstut and Ashton chose to situate their narrative intrusion in the walking scene at Pemberley. In the first line immediately after their point of divergence from the original novel, Austen writes: “At last she recollected that she had been travelling, and they talked of Matlock and Dove Dale with great perseverance” (Pride and Prejudice 172). This is exactly the sort of line exchanged between the two during their erotic fanfiction scene, and in light of this, it evokes the same sort of humor; they have sublimated sexual tension into the innocuous. Eckstut and Ashton thus suggest that within this single line of dialogue lies the sexual potential of an entire scene.
Regardless of Austen’s true intentions, the perception of her novels and the ways in which her readers understand them suggest an inherent sexual dimension. For a certain portion of her female audience—both historical and contemporary—they serve a clearly defined function of sexual release, empowering women to explore their own sexualities on their own terms. The rise of Austen erotica is merely a more explicit expression of what already lies in the novel, and even those works which depart drastically from the original—depicting non-canonical pairings, homosexual relationships, etc.—are merely expressions of non-conventional sexuality in a society that still unfortunately dismisses non-male, non-heterosexual pleasure as debasement. Ultimately Austen’s historical readers, conduct-book detractors, and fanfiction writers all suggest a sexual tension bubbling beneath the surface of her work, ready to at any moment burst into full-on erotic fiction and sexual liberation.
Works Cited
Andrews, Emily. “Classics given 50 Shades of Grey Makeover That Would Make Jane Austen Blush.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 17 July 2012, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2174576/Classics-given-50-Shades-Grey-makeover-make-Jane-Austen-blush.html.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Dover, 1995.
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Penguin Random House, 2003.
Eckstut, Arielle, and Dennis Ashton. Pride & Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen. Simon and Schuster, 2001.
Halsey, Katie. Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786-1945. Anthem Press, 2012.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008.
Ritter, Richard De. Imagining Women Readers, 1789-1820: Well-Regulated Minds. 1st ed., Manchester University Press, 2015.
Scharfenberger, Kim. “The Rise of Jane Austen Erotica.” Aleteia, 9 Sept. 2013, https://aleteia.org/2013/09/09/the-rise-of-jane-austen-erotica/.
Uphaus, Robert W. “Jane Austen and Female Reading.” Studies in the Novel , vol. 19, no. 3, 1987, pp. 334–345. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/29532512.
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