"Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice": Contemporary Critical Essays (review)

REVIEWS 425 ancient and modem conceptions of it. She concludes the chapter with a reading of the letters on the Troglodytes, bringing new insights to this much-analysed series by showing how the epistolary format—thejuxtapositions of the letters, the absence of transitions, the framing of this group of letters, the dramatic situation—affects the letters' meaning. In two of the following chapters, Schaub examines the structure of despotism as depicted in the functioning of the harem. Arguing that Montesquieu is the first political philosopher to shift "the focus of the liberal critique of patriarchy from paternal to conjugal relations" (p. 44), she analyses the letters from and to Usbek's wives to show that Montesquieu carefully differentiates the wives' relations to their husband and the circulation of his and their desire, and thus broadens his critique of virtue's subversion of desire. From this focus on the harem as a system that destroys desire and life itself, Schaub moves logically to review the letters on depopulation where Usbek, blind to the contradictions of his own life and behaviour as master of the harem, assaults all institutional—governmental and religious—interventions in the regulations of conjugal relations. The following chapter refocuses on the power structure of the harem, this time as it is embodied in the eunuchs. The last three chapters analyse alternatives to the conjugal and sexual relations of the harem as suggested by two tales of different dreams and realizations of love, both sent to Usbek at critical moments in the life of his harem, and as represented by Rica's bemused observations of French sexual politics. A brief review cannot do justice to the wealth and subtlety of Schaub's detailed analyses of the novel. Certainly, one of the merits of her focus on sexual politics is to show convincingly how all the seemingly extraneous discussions—the letters on the Troglodytes, Usbek's long ruminations on the economic and cultural consequences of depopulation, the letters detailing the love story of two siblings, the daydreams of an unhappy wife imprisoned in a harem, and the apparently gratuitous letters from Usbek 's wives—all present facets of Montesquieu's critique of despotism. Yet, to my mind, the most original and significant aspect of this important study emerges from Schaub's exquisite sensitivity to the literary dimensions of Montesquieu's text. She considers how the temporality and rhythm of the epistolary exchanges shape the political meaning of the text, how the silences, absences, and what is left unsaid in the spaces between the letters are an integral part of the plot, and how the dramatic situation of the letters' position and order in the text must be taken into account when deciphering them. By being attentive to the literary form that Montesquieu chose to investigate sexual politics , Schaub has succeeded in reintegrating the two Montesquieus, the novelist and the political philosopher. Janie Vanpée Smith College Robert Clark, ed. "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice": Contemporary Critical Essays. New Casebooks. New York: St Martin's Press, 1994. ix + 221pp. $25.95. This compilation of critical essays on Jane Austen's two earliest novels appears as a volume in the ever-lengthening series of New Casebooks, which has some twenty titles already in print and as many more announced. In this volume Robert Clark, a Senior Lecturer at the University of East Anglia, has brought together five essays on Sense and 426 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:3 Sensibility and six on Pride and Prejudice; two, originally journal articles, are reprinted in their entirety, while the remainder are excerpted from book-length studies. Each volume is prefaced by a statement of purpose by the general editors: these collections, they note, are intended to "bring together in an illuminating way those critics who best illustrate the ways in which contemporary criticism has established new methods of analysing texts" (p. ix). For Clark this has meant leading off with two examples of the New Historicism dating from the 1970s—readings of Sense and Sensibility by Alistair Duckworth and Marilyn Butler from a political historical perspective—and then moving into poststructuralist discussions of the same novel by Angela Leighton (on the silences in the...