by Tony George (’24)
As a canonical novelist in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century English literature, Jane Austen’s writing has received much attention in both popular culture and scholarship. Her novels are known for their witty, sharp sense of humor and examination of domestic life and romantic relationships among the rural gentry class. Contemporary scholarship on Austen also addresses underlying themes in her work, such as the potential for queer readings of the female friendships at the center of her plots. My essay engages in this tradition of queering Austen through a comparative analysis of Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey—two novels that are relatively under-discussed in Austen’s oeuvre. Both books mobilize tropes of the Gothic novel and present complicated depictions of the heterosexual unions that bookend every Austen work. As such, my essay argues that Austen’s deployment of the Gothic in Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey— particularly through the exploration of queer forms of desire—enables a tension between transgression and the status quo within the early domestic realist novel and its reliance on the marriage plot as a narrative structure.
Jane Austen is regarded as one of the definitive authors of the early nineteenth century, notable for her contributions to the development of the novelistic form, for her witty social satire of the gentry class in Regency-era England, and for her reputation as a prominent writer of the marriage plot story structure. Her position within the literary canon has generated considerable discussion and criticism of her work from both traditional and potentially radical perspectives. Indeed, according to Deidre Lynch, there remains a perceived veneer of propriety around Austen and her work that encourages conservative literary critics to read Austen’s novels as “products of an era of classicism,” situating her work within an idealized perspective of English history that privileges a reading based on the uncritical presentation of bourgeois marriage and heralding of domestic values (Lynch 7). On the other hand, there is a precedent for scholarship on Austen that complicates this narrative, with notable canonical examples in authors such as Claudia Johnson and Eve Sedgwick, who have explored female agency and same-sex desire in Austen’s work, respectively. More contemporary Austen criticism similarly signals an orientation towards Austen’s novels that probes the dimensions of romance and sexuality in her work, such as Susan Celia Greenfield and Stephanie Hershinow writing on alternative desires like female-female intimacy and incestuous matches.
One entry point for considering an alternative understanding of Austen’s use of the marriage plot is by looking at two of her novels that perhaps inhabit the most antithetical positions to the traditional narrative, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey. If Austen herself considered Pride and Prejudice to be “rather too light & bright & sparkling,” Mansfield Park represents a significant departure in its somber atmosphere and uncharacteristically diminutive heroine Fanny Price (qtd. in Littlewood vii). Similarly, Northanger Abbey’s deliberate satire of the Gothic novel provides an entry point for aligning Austen’s concerns with those of a genre that initially appears unrelated to her work, thereby revealing a more complex picture of her authorial status. Critics such as Lynda A. Hall have argued for a reading of Mansfield Park that situates it within a Gothic context as well, particularly for its bleak tone, Fanny’s consistent feelings of terror and unease, the threat of a domineering patriarchal figure, and thematic concerns surrounding illicit sexuality (208-209). The notion of illicit sexuality as a prominent element of Gothic fiction has been argued by critics such as George Haggerty, who notes that Gothic fiction reached a height of popularity at the same time that modern notions of gender and sexuality were becoming solidified in public discourse, and as such it “offered a testing ground for many unauthorized genders and sexualities, including sodomy, tribadism, romantic friendship (male and female), incest, pedophilia, sadism, masochism, necrophilia, cannibalism, masculinized females, feminized males, miscegenation, and so on” (2).
In particular, Eve Sedgwick’s infamous essay “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” makes a case for queering Austen in Sense and Sensibility by drawing attention to the “erotic axis” around the relationship between Elinor and Marianne in relation to Marianne’s “excess of sexuality,” which Sedgwick argues positions Marianne within an alternative sexuality, that of the masturbator (828, 829). Similar to the Elinor/Marianne pairing in Sense and Sensibility, both Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey feature prominent same-sex dynamics between the heroines and their female friends, and just as Marianne presents an example of alternative sexual identity as a masturbator, the incestuous relationship between Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park presents another exploration of alternative sexual identity in Austen’s work. The parallels between Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey in terms of their orientation towards the Gothic, and their coded depictions of queer forms of desire, allow for fruitful comparison that interrogates the assumption that Austen’s novels wholeheartedly present an unchallenged picture of bourgeois sexuality and domestic relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As such, I argue that Austen’s deployment of the Gothic in Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, particularly through the exploration of queer forms of desire, enables a tension between transgression and the status quo within the early domestic realist novel and its reliance on the marriage plot as a narrative structure.
In Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel, Lisa Moore argues that depictions of same-sex desire between women in eighteenth-century English novels functioned as a place where anxieties about the instability of emergent bourgeois identity could be played out amidst the backdrop of a rapidly expanding colonial empire that necessitated the demarcation of sexual and racial Others. She argues that the presence of the “dangerous, potentially sapphist female friend provides the heroine with the opportunity to risk and then refuse sexual immortality,” and that this sapphic female friend archetype represents the “sexual Other of the virtuous bourgeois woman” (12). In the case of Mansfield Park, Fanny’s relationship with Miss Crawford is a pertinent example of the dynamic between the heroine and her sapphic sexual Other. When Miss Crawford and Mr. Crawford first arrive at the Mansfield Park estate, Fanny is apprehensive towards Miss Crawford’s forward manner of speaking and conducting herself, telling her cousin Edmund that “she ought not to have spoken of her uncle as she did,” but that she also “is so extremely pretty, that I have great pleasure in looking at her” (Austen, Mansfield Park 51). Edmund and Fanny both criticize Miss Crawford’s decorum but qualify their disapproval with positive assertions in contradictory statements, as Edmund notes “She is perfectly feminine, except in the instances we have been speaking of” (Mansfield Park 52). As an outsider coming from London, Miss Crawford’s free-spirited cosmopolitan nature provides a stark contrast to the insular and morally enclosed world of Mansfield Park that both repels and fascinates Edmund and Fanny, situating her as a desired yet threatening sexual Other. This is underscored by Edmund’s increasing closeness to Miss Crawford as he pursues her hand in marriage despite his reservations about her character, while at the same time Fanny is brought further into Miss Crawford’s orbit by proxy of her incestuous affection for Edmund.
Additionally, Moore argues that the threatening sapphic female friend “haunt[s] the margins of these texts, often most urgently at precisely those moments when the insularity and virtue of the domestic space is being firmly asserted” (12). In effect, Miss Crawford’s arrival at Mansfield Park destabilizes Fanny’s absorption into the domestic space by presenting an Otherness that challenges Fanny’s emotional/erotic proximity to Edmund and also presents an alternative sexuality that is not compatible with the coherent, stable identity of bourgeois domestic female virtue that Fanny is situated to adopt through her placement at Mansfield Park. This very identity category is one that the Gothic novel predates and, in turn, complicates the stability of, through its willingness to explore modes of “sexual and social transgression” (Haggerty 3).
Such a proximity to the possibility of sexual transgression is argued by Haggerty as an essential element of the “Female Gothic” in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe. He notes that the gothic heroine must suffer as a condition of her existence, but also that “‘female gothic,’ in other words, confronts the heroine with her own desires and thrills her with the possibility of transgression” (15). Such an example of the suffering of the gothic heroine in conjunction with the confrontation of her desire is evident in Mansfield Park when Miss Crawford entreats Fanny to rehearse the scene in Lovers’ Vows between her as Amelia and Edmund as Anhalt. Miss Crawford seeks Fanny out in her personal haven, the East room, urging her, “You must rehearse it with me, that I may fancy you him, and get on by degrees. You have a look of his sometimes” (Mansfield Park 134). Such a charged statement draws an erotic parallel between the cousins in that the Amelia/Anhalt character dynamic represents a pair of lovers whose passion is initially deemed illicit yet is able to triumph in the end.
Not only does Miss Crawford as Amelia opposite Edmund’s Anhalt allow her to explore her desire for Edmund under the fictional guise of the play, but by asking Fanny to substitute Edmund in an intimate rehearsal scene and likening the two to one another physically, Miss Crawford encourages a triangulated form of desire where Fanny’s desire for Edmund is expressed through embodying him in relation to Miss Crawford. This mapping of Edmund onto Fanny also queers the dynamic between her and Miss Crawford, further underscoring the way Miss Crawford’s expressions of sexuality operate as a threat to the stability of bourgeois female subjectivity and, consequently, the stability of the heterosexual union as the culmination of the marriage plot’s narrative goals. Once Edmund accidentally interrupts the two women rehearsing with the intent of soliciting Fanny for the same favor, Fanny recedes into the background as an absent figure, the possibility of transgression diminished, as the narration states, “She could not equal them in their warmth. Her spirits sank under the glow of theirs, and she felt herself becoming too nearly nothing to both, to have any comfort in having been sought by either,” (Mansfield Park 135). This sequence therefore calls attention to Fanny’s position as a suffering gothic heroine through the intrusion of a sexual Other into her private space—a private space that is already a distant room akin to an abandoned wing in a gothic castle—but also by situating Fanny within a dynamic that suggests the possibility of alternative sexuality and then revokes it to supplant a more obviously heteronormative relationship. This negotiation between the gothic thrill of potential non-normative desire and the demands of the heterosexual union is further articulated in the relationship between Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey.
In Northanger Abbey, Catherine is introduced through the narrator asserting, “no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her to be born a heroine,” yet her journey to inhabiting the role of a gothic heroine involves a passionate obsession with Gothic novels intertwined with exploration of same-sex desire (Austen, Northanger Abbey 3). In the first half of the novel, her friendship with Isabella Thorpe takes on an intense, fevered tone that is influenced significantly by the two staying “resolute in meeting” despite poor weather in order to “shut themselves up to read novels together,” implying a heightened intimacy achieved through the emotionally stimulating act of reading lurid, fantastical Gothic stories, in particular The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, the central novel that captivates Catherine’s imagination (Northanger Abbey 21). Isabella not only expresses her admiration for Catherine in language such as “My sweetest Catherine, how have you been this long age? But I need not ask you, for you look delightfully. You really have done your hair in a more heavenly style than ever: you mischievous creature, do you want to attract everybody?” but she also notes her preference for “sallow” skin types in men, echoing the first page of the novel where Catherine is described as having “a sallow skin without color” (Northanger Abbey 48, 3).
While Isabella could be likened to Miss Crawford in her position as a potentially dangerous sexual Other, Catherine is just as enthralled with Isabella, demonstrated by the fact that she “watched Miss Thorpe’s progress down the street from the drawing-room window; admired the graceful spirit of her walk, the fashionable air of her figure and dress, and felt grateful, as well as she might, for the chance which had procured her such a friend” (Northanger Abbey 19). The potential sapphic threat of Isabella’s presence is eventually removed midway through the novel in a similar gesture to the removal of Miss Crawford to make way for Fanny and Edmund’s marriage; however, Catherine’s sapphic affection is transferred to Eleanor Tilney due to her closer proximity to the world of the Gothic (her family estate is the titular Northanger Abbey) and, as such, this duplication of female love objects further complicates the role of the sapphic sexual Other in the novel. In this way, Northanger Abbey’s deliberate invocation of Gothic conventions for satirical purposes enables the novel to more clearly foreground Catherine’s potential for advancing transgressive desire in comparison to Mansfield Park. Susan Celia Greenfield argues for such a reading, stating, “Catherine Morland relishes the gothic conventions in The Mysteries of Udolpho and responds to them with queer and obsessive fascination. Reading or thinking about Radcliffe’s novel arouses and distracts her so much that she tends to forget her interest in the hero, Henry Tilney” (346). The possibilities of the Gothic to “shape thinking about sexual matters—theories of sexuality, as it were—and create the darker shadows of the dominant fiction, the darkness that enables culture to function as a fiction in the first place,” (Haggerty 3) open up the space in Northanger Abbey for a negotiation with the perceived stability of bourgeois sexual identity that differs from the situation in Mansfield Park.
Of further significance to this point, Moore argues that representations of intimate female friendships “disappear into subtextual and implicit plots and characters in early-nineteenth-century domestic fiction, providing an acceptably interior, psychic form of difference the novel can solve through the resolution of the heterosexual love plot” (13). Since Northanger Abbey is thought to have been originally written by Austen in the late 1790s—the period often noted as the peak of the Gothic novel’s popularity—the more outwardly expressed affection Isabella and Catherine display for one another aligns with the notion that late-eighteenth-century novels mark a discursive point of tension between fluid and unwieldy displays of female-female desire, and the wrangling of those desires into a “necessary and controllable part of [the bourgeois ascension narrative], essential to the formation of the identity of the heroine, as the emblem of bourgeois identity itself” (Moore 20). Mansfield Park, by comparison—written between 1811-1813—constitutes the move into more subtextual female-female desire which characterizes the domestic realist novel, according to Moore. Furthermore, Haggerty notes that Gothic fiction operated “in a period that had yet to construct the elaborate superstructure of sexuality that emerged in the age of sexology at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century,” which lends further weight to the intersection between Austen’s deployment of the Gothic and expressions of same-sex desire in Northanger Abbey (3). Indeed, Catherine not only embodies same-sex desire in her interactions with Isabella, but her very preoccupation with Gothic literature further informs her role as a figure situated between discourses of sexual identity.
Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of Marianne as inhabiting the sexuality of the onanist in Sense and Sensibility draws in part on a comparison between the vitality of Marianne’s physical movements in connection with her heightened emotional state, and an 1881 case study of the effects of masturbation in young girls. Sedgwick notes Marianne’s “physical as well as perceptual irritability, to both pleasurable and painful effect,” expressed through descriptions of her “agitation,” “rapidity,” and “locomotor pleasures of her own body” (828). Similarly, once Catherine arrives at Northanger Abbey with the Tilneys, her fixation on the titillating, erotic possibilities of the Gothic manifests through displays of emotionally charged physicality. This is particularly evident in her obsession with the perceived mystery of Eleanor Tilney’s dead mother, which is intertextually linked to the plot of The Mysteries of Udolpho, wherein Greenfield argues that “Catherine effectively takes Eleanor’s place, developing an increasingly violent fantasy about the General’s behavior and an increasingly passionate desire to enter Mrs. Tilney’s bedroom” (352).
When Catherine and Eleanor initially attempt to enter Mrs. Tilney’s room, Catherine’s “agitation as they entered the great gallery was too much for any endeavor at discourse; she could only look at her companion” (Northanger Abbey 139). After their attempt fails, Catherine explores the room alone at a later time “without stopping to look or breathe” and, upon reaching the room, “beheld what fixed her to the spot and agitated every feature” (Northanger Abbey 140). Not only do these descriptions echo the embodied erotic frustration and excitement explored by Sedgwick, but the arousal Catherine experiences in relation to an unreachable female figure underlines Haggerty’s assertion that “the maternal figure in the female gothic holds out the possibility of love, of self-realization, and of escape from the confines of patriarchal culture” (15). This sequence positions Catherine at a point of negotiation between the type of alternative erotic fantasies offered by the Gothic, and the marriage plot structure of the novel that must confine such fantasy within its teleological goal of heterosexual union. Indeed, Greenfield points out that after her confrontation with the brightly lit, well-cared-for state of Mrs. Tilney’s room, and Henry’s disapproval of her behavior, the narrative “sucks Catherine into heterosexuality” and fixedly locates her desire towards Henry alone (352). This eventual need to confine same-sex desire through heterosexual marriage is the culmination of every Austen novel; however, the particular contours of the Gothic utilized in Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey inform the complicated, ironic depiction of the final confession and marriage scenes.
Greenfield argues that despite heterosexual marriage as the narrative endpoint, “in many gothic novels, the most memorable marriages lead to anything but felicity, and heterosexual relationships and desires are hazardous for female characters” (349). By interrogating the ironic tone of the confession scenes in Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, we can see how this element of the Gothic novel is mobilized by Austen. In Mansfield Park, the confirmation of Edmund and Fanny’s engagement is communicated to the reader not through a passionate exchange of romantic feelings but by the narrator’s ironic, eliding tone in the following passage:
I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire. (378)
The narrator’s insistence on entreating “everybody to believe” in Edmund’s desire for Fanny coming on “when it was quite natural” underscores the effort the narrative has to achieve to bring their union within the realm of believable romance. Additionally, the notion that there is a discrepancy in time between Fanny acknowledging her desire for Edmund versus Edmund acknowledging his desire for Fanny complicates the assumed felicity of their relationship. Not only that, but a notable fraught aspect of the Fanny/Edmund union is the incestuous nature of their coupling, its perversity underlined in Edmund’s rumination that her “warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love” (Mansfield Park 378).
Incest is a recurring element of the Gothic, and Haggerty argues for its transgressive potential by stating that it’s “political because it defies the attempt of society to control desire” in relation to the demands of patriarchal regulation of the delineations of the family unit (12). By contrast, in Incest and the English Novel, 1684 – 1814, Ellen Pollak argues “through her resistance to Henry and her subsequent marriage to Edmund, she [Fanny] not only seals the Mansfield estate off from the external intrusion of such threatening influences as the Crawford’s and their tainted morality; she also steps into the breach that opens inside the family when the sexuality of a woman like Maria Bertram eludes male control” (195). Yet, Pollak does not conclude that incest in Mansfield Park inherently indicates a reactionary endorsement of familial marriage; instead, she suggests that Austen positions this cousin marriage as an “interrogation of the founding presuppositions about gender and desire through which kinship structures and their multiple cultural exclusions are reproduced” (198). In this way, the incestuous element of Fanny/Edmund functions within the contested space of the negotiation of sexuality in the domestic realist novel as outlined by Moore, wherein sexual Otherness (in the form of Miss Crawford) is negated in favor of the stability of bourgeois feminine virtue in heterosexual marriage.
However, as Pollak suggests, the fact that this particular union is incestuous poses a subtle critique of the supposed stability and naturalness of such a union. Furthermore, Stephanie Hershinow argues that the incest plot functions as “the marriage plot’s Doppelgänger, resembling it enough to reflect critically on its procedures while offering a fundamentally distinct understanding of novelistic form as recursive rather than linear, irretrievably domestic rather than social” (150). Considering these understandings of the position incest occupies in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, Fanny’s desire for Edmund, culminating in a heterosexual marriage, operates in a tenuous space between alternative sexual identity and ascension into the bourgeois domestic realm. This tension is heightened by the influence of the Gothic that pervades the novel’s atmosphere, demarcating the coupling as perverse and contending that the necessary denouement of the marriage plot is, in fact, a dark and troubled affair that reproduces the constraints that the family puts on sexuality.
In the case of Northanger Abbey, the union of Catherine and Henry Tilney is expressed in a similarly brusque way to how Fanny/Edmund is ultimately conceived by Austen’s narrator. Firstly, the narrator’s sly position towards the marriage is confirmed by the statement at the end of the novel,
The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. (183)
This “perfect felicity” is also undercut by the quick dispatch of Eleanor Tilney from the narrative in her marriage to an unnamed man, described by the narrator with a satirical tone: “Any further definition of his merits must be unnecessary; the most charming young man in the world is instantly before the imagination of us all” (184). Catherine and Eleanor’s intimate friendship is a prominent feature of the second half of the novel, and they are particularly brought closer together when both Henry and General Tilney leave Northanger Abbey. Once Catherine is forced out of the Abbey, the language used to describe Eleanor’s distress mirrors the frustrated eroticism of Catherine’s encounter with Mrs. Tilney’s room, “Catherine’s spirits however were tranquilized but for an instant, for Eleanor’s cheeks were pale, and her manner greatly agitated. Though evidently intending to come in, it seemed an effort to enter the room, and a still greater to speak when there” (Northanger Abbey 162). Catherine then attends to her in a tender, doting way: “Catherine, supposing some uneasiness on Captain Tilney’s account, could only express her concern by silent attention; obliged her to be seated, rubbed her temples with lavender-water, and hung over her with affectionate solicitude” (Northanger Abbey 162).
As such, the sudden engagement of Eleanor to an unnamed character provides a jarring complement to the ironic way Austen’s narrator also conceives of the Henry/Catherine match, asserting that Henry “felt himself bound in honour as much as in affection to Miss Morland,” (Northanger Abbey 182). This suggestion that Henry was influenced to marry Catherine primarily due to his honor (stemming from his father’s rude dismissal of Catherine on the basis of her lack of wealth) echoes the way Edmund is described as settling on Fanny due to the removal of Miss Crawford from the marriage landscape. In both cases then, the explorations of alternative, queer forms of desire that the heroines experience leading up to the truncated heterosexual unions provide an example of Haggerty’s claim that “a nonteleological reading of gothic—a queer reading—can begin to show the ways in which gothic works beyond the limits of its structural ‘meaning’ to change the structure of meaning itself” (Haggerty 10). As such, by illuminating the ways that Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey engage with instances of queer desire, the influence of Gothic conventions in these novels strengthens the notion that such depictions can be read as a point of significant tension in relation to the “structural meaning” imposed by the marriage plot as a finale.
The battle over definitive meaning that characterizes a queer reading of the Gothic extends out to indicate how these novels engage in a battle over the stability of the feminine bourgeois subject and further complicates critical interpretation of Austen that overdetermines the importance of the marriage plot structure. While queer readings of Austen and other canonical literature are not a new phenomenon, they remain generative ground for literary criticism that seeks to complicate assumptions about the history of sexuality, identity formation, and the novel’s role in such processes. Rather than characterizing queer desire in Austen in a reductionist manner that equates such desire to a twenty-first-century understanding, attending closely to the interpolation of the Gothic in Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey situates depictions of alternative sexual identity in a historical context that illuminates the complexity of its operations. Such an exploration as I have drawn out here does not insist on a polemical reading of Austen that disavows the cultural and historical contours of her work but pushes on the assumption that such factors remain essential, unchanging, and natural. Instead, I have attempted to show the slippery nature of categories such as sexual identity, marriage, and desire in Austen’s late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century context, and how her writing contends with such instability in unexpected ways.
Bibliography
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Greenfield, Susan Celia. “‘Queer Austen’ and Northanger Abbey.” The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson and Maria H. Frawley, Routledge, 2021, pp. 342 – 357.
Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
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Hershinow, Stephanie Insley. “The Incest Plot: Marriage, Closure, and the Novel’s Endogamy.” The Eighteenth Century, vol.61, no.2, Summer 2020, pp.149-164.
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Lynch, Deidre. “Introduction: Sharing with Our Neighbors.” Janeites: Austen’s Disciplines and Devotees, edited by Deidre Lynch, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 3-24.
Moore, Lisa. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel. Duke University Press, 1997.
Pollak, Ellen. Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, 2000, pp. 818-837.
Tony George is a 2023-2024 MAPH student who works at the intersection between cinema/media studies and gender/sexuality studies. His research interests include theorizing and historicizing queer/trans cinema, representations of gender and sexuality in genre cinema, and depictions of extremity and transgressive content in film and literature.