Rereading the Patriarchal Text: The Female Quixote, Northanger Abbey, and the Trace of the Absent Mother

Rereading the Patriarchal Text: The Female Quixote, Northanger Abbey, and the Trace of the Absent Mother Debra Malina Would the veil in which Mrs. Tilney had last walked, or the volume in which she had last read, remain to tell what noming else was allowed to whisper? No: whatever might have been the General's crimes, he had certainly too much wit to let them sue for detection.1 Jane Austen In reading, one encounters only a text, die trail of an absent author.2 Patrocinio P. Schweickart In an attempt to create a community of women readers, writers, and critics who can construct a literary discourse amenable to feminist concerns, Patrocinio Schweickart proposes a gender-coded dual reading strategy. When reading "certain (not all) male texts," feminists should invoke "a dual hermeneutic: a negative hermeneutic that discloses [the texts'] complicity with patriarchal ideology, and a positive hermeneutic that recuperates the Utopian moment ... from which they draw a significant portion of their emotional power." By thus bifurcating their responses, claims Schweickart, feminists can practise Judith Fetterley's resistance to the "immasculation" that normally uses the woman reader 1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 196. References are to this edition. 2 Patrocinio P. Schweickart, "Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading," in Gender and Reading, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 47. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 2, January 1996 272 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION "against herself'3 by soliciting "her complicity in the elevation of male difference into universality," while simultaneously allowing themselves identification with the male hero, because, in many cases, "stripped of its patriarchal trappings, [the hero's] struggle and his Utopian vision conform to [feminists'] own." When reading "female" texts, on the other hand, the feminist reader should take "the part of the woman writer against patriarchal misreadings that trivialize or distort her work," and should take as her ultimate "destination" the writer's "heart and mind": a key "feature of feminist readings of women's writing [is] the tendency to construe the text not as an object, but as the manifestation of the subjectivity of the absent author. ... To read [a woman writer], then, is to try to visit with her, to hear her voice, to make her live in oneself."4 In recent rereadings of Jane Austen's NorthangerAbbey and Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, feminist critics have practised something akin to what Schweickart prescribes for the feminist reading of "female" texts, attempting "to recuperate ... the tradition ... that would link women writers to one another, to women readers and critics, and to the larger community of women." Just as the heroines, Catherine and Arabella, recover texts of "absent mothers" and reinterpret them in feminist ways, so have feminist critics recovered the texts in which ttiey appear, taking the novelists' part "against patriarchal misreadings" as they evince "the need 'to connect' " with these literary foremothers.5 To these ends, they have discovered heretofore ignored alliances between Austen and Lennox, on the one hand, and the female writers of Gothic novels and French romances, on the other: some now view as celebratory intertextual relationships that had long been painted as parodie and scornful. If the novels hold a lesson for feminist readers of "female" texts, however, they have perhaps even more to teach the readers of "male" ones. For, as internal readers and hence as models for external ones, Catherine and Arabella read not only published romances which are the texts of absent mothers, but also, and more significantly, the patriarchally constructed worlds in which they live, including, in Catherine's case, an absent mother as patriarchally constructed "text." In deciphering these "male" texts, the heroines seem to pursue Schweickart's bifurcated approach of resistance and identification. This pursuit meets with 3 See Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1977). 4 Schweickart, pp. 43-44, 42, 42, 46, 47. 5 Schweickart, p. 48. REREADING THE PATRIARCHAL TEXT 273 varying degrees of success, however, because, as Teresa de Lauretis argues , narrative delineates a "female position" fraught with difficulties for...