The Fear of Writing Badly

Jane Austen; or, The Secret of Style. D. A. Miller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 108 pp.

While almost every reader of Jane Austen will claim to admire her "style," few want the challenge of confronting it. Austen's devotees, most of whom lead lives far from the academy, are interested in the "stuff" of Austen: the carriages, fashions, and geography with which R. W. Chapman loads the appendixes to his editions, as well as the contemporary politics laid out by studies of courtesy books, slave trading, military history, and land use. Austen criticism, of course, has always been attentive to style, noting her imitation of Johnsonian tropes or her seeming invention of free indirect discourse in her third-person narratives. But D. A. Miller's meditation on Austen's style is neither a strict rhetorical analysis nor a formal explanation of craft. It is instead a personal response to—and identification with—an author who inscribes her work with her own compulsive attention to style and who erases her own identity in the process.

For Miller, style with a capital S is the opposite of character, though he begins with a confession of desire for that style—for Austen's polish, her perfectly crafted sentences, and her pointedly precise wit—that surpasses any fantasist's desire for Elizabeth Bennet herself. Loving her style, however, is dangerous, because adoring Austen means not only reading but being read through a gendered lens. Girls reading Austen might be confirmed in "good girl" culture, but absorption by the Austen style, Miller declares, "made the boy all wrong" (3).

The boy is all wrong because either imagining himself as Austen or imagining himself writing in Austen's style squeezes him into a female world. Such gender squeezing materializes in Austen's plots, without her approval, as when a thoughtless Lydia Bennet puts a male soldier into a dress to make up for a shortage of female dancers. The Austen-reading boy joins the "unheterosexual" Robert Ferrars, who, absorbed by the purchase of a toothpick case in Sense and Sensibility, violates gender customs by not acknowledging the women in the shop and by fixating on decorative nothingness. Robert is all style, and thus a threat to the marriage plot that fixes every Austen novel. Austen, the creator of style, is thus at odds with her own work.

Biographically, Miller notes, Austen excludes herself from the plots of her novel, as the spinster artist, the clever observer, the cutting social critic who upholds style. When Elizabeth Bennet delivers her barbed wit in Pride and Prejudice, she embraces style; when she marries, she abandons it; and readers are left with a similar rupture from style at the conclusion of most of the novels as each heroine "becomes Woman at last" (46). Style is marked by shame, certainly in Elinor Dashwood's mind as she observes Robert order his toothpick case. However disappointed readers are by the married, subdued Elizabeth or by the humbled, chastised Emma Woodhouse, Austen clearly relieves her characters of the burden of style as she marries them off into lives of quiet submission.

From the perspective of narrative analysis rather than plot, Austen has been most frequently addressed as the author who introduced "free indirect style" to the English novel (58). Miller acknowledges this popular interest in Austen's restricted third-person point of view—the narrator of Emma, for example, sees the world primarily through Emma's eyes—but is more interested in narrative ruptures, odd narrative moments, like the repetition of "Emma could not forgive her" at the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. This reading, which focuses Miller's third essay, "Broken Art," has dual appeal as pleasurable close reading and theoretical exposé. Miller rightly suggests that Austen flaunts style here, bouncing readers in and out of Emma's head; she makes meaning shift through a play of signifiers. Her "moral...