General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism by Barbara K. Seeber (review)

408 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 work is varied yet also coherent in its individual and cumulative commitment to mapping the relationships >between a mother and daughter, between two writing lives, and B more broadly B between two generations of writers.= In so doing this collection pays homage, by a kind of deeply informed and admiring imitation, to the richness of these two women=s powerful lives and achievements. These essays will be of self-evident interest to scholars and critics of Wollstonecraft and Shelley and a number of their early and later Romantic contemporaries, Byron, Coleridge, Godwin, Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among them. It will also be of interest to scholar-critic-theorists and practitioners of life writing, to feminist scholar-critics, and potentially also to a wide-ranging audience of common readers intrigued by the mystery of intersections among writers= lives, work, and human relationships. (CATHERINE N. PARKE) Barbara K. Seeber. General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism McGill-Queen=s University Press. x, 160. $42.95 Barbara Seeber runs suggestive parallels between Jane Austen and Adrienne Rich=s Aunt Jennifer, whose terrified hands weighed down by patriarchy embroider tigers that are >prancing, proud and unafraid.= >Gentle Jane,= argues Seeber, practises a similarly subversive art, although she uses a pen to inscribe that >little Bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory= rather than plying Aunt Jennifer=s more acceptable ivory needle. As this book competently shows, commentators often debate whether Austen is conformist or subversive, but Seeber cuts the critical knot by stating that >this being both conservative and radical at the same time, constitutes the dialogic nature of her work.= Even in narratives that manufacture consent by silencing dissent, she finds a persistent dialogism whose conflict, simultaneity, and multiplicity render them radical. As Seeber explains, >it is in the interplay between main text and subtext that the subversive effect lies.= With Foucault and Althusser in mind as well as Bakhtin, she argues that Austen=s polyphonic texts challenge and interrogate dominant ideologies. By focusing on >other heroines,= she finds that monologic closure is undermined; by attending to >cameo appearances,= she hears tales of sexual and financial exploitation that have been elided from the main narrative; by looking through the lens of a suspicious hermeneutics, she uncovers hidden >crimes= of violence and domestic abuse, together with carnivalesque laughter. On Mansfield Park, for instance, she relates imperialist implications to Fanny=s emotional colonization in a foreshadowing of Patricia Rozema=s cinematic reading. All such dialogisms, she argues, destabilize Austen=s main narratives. humanities 409 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Seeber certainly pays attention to aspects too often excluded from discussions of the novels. But if Aunt Jennifer calls up images of gentle Jane waving despairingly from the attic, this Bakhtinian valorization of >unresolvable dialogues= prevents Seeber from declaring whether Austen is ultimately conservative or subversive. I=d like to know. Of course readers no longer merely decode what the author >meant,= because a book does not say only what an author thought it did, nor should we diminish the play of possibilities. But once Seeber replaces the author by Foucault=s >author-asfunction -of-discourse,= the narrative itself, or elements of it, bizarrely become the creative agents. Passives and personifications can elide the author=s role altogether, as in >the violence and coercion that is used to transform Marianne,= or >the main narrative=s memory is selective, but the cameo does not permit such forgetfulness for the novel as a whole.= Likewise, to overlook Austen=s intertextualities is to erase her own responses as a reader. Episodes concerning the two Elizas, Mrs Smith, Wickham and Georgiana, which Seeber identifies as >cameo appearances,= may sit lumpily in the text because they derive primarily from elsewhere. I endorse the idea that texts are to an extent produced by readers, but if you obliterate the author altogether, what is the original location of readings against the grain? Austen=s unconscious practice or Austen=s conscious art? Does Seeber really mean that Austen sleepwalks as a writer, that her narratives and subtexts intersect more radically...