The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (review)

"Flirtation," Richard Kaye argues, "represented a useful paradox not only because it was tragically and comically resonant but also because it reflected the self at its most intensely sociable and most frustratingly secret" (13). This conceptual capaciousness works against a well-defined argument in this wonderfully suggestive, often beautifully written, but finally inconclusive study of the narrative politics of deferred desire in an extraordinary range of fiction, a range that is ill-served by the temporal and national boundaries of the subtitle. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence suggest a surfeit of object choices perhaps proper to the study of flirtation.

In his opening theoretical gambit, Kaye rejects Michel Foucault: the seemingly terminal entrapment of desire in a web of discursive restrictions prevents, Kaye contends, noticing and analyzing the wiliness of erotic will. (Unfortunately, Foucault's later work on technologies of the self is not discussed.) Kaye makes instead an unlikely but refreshing choice: Georg Simmel. Simmel's two short essays on flirtation combine a proto-queer theorizing of a happily indecisive eroticism and a Darwinian analysis of why women are made, as it were, to flirt: like all other animals, in the process of sexual selection, women are the "choosers" (Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love [Yale, 1984] 140).

Many provocative assertions make the introduction a fascinating read: flirtation has a pedagogic function in that it teaches the non-flirt how to be sociably sexy and thereby find a mate; flirtation is the deviant other which heterosexual love and marriage requires to define itself, all the while needing to partake of its undeniably useful practices. In an intriguing if cryptic formulation, Kaye suggests that deferral is the "aim of nineteenth century subjectivity" itself (6). The fictional flirt is set up in the introduction as both highly functional and tragically disposable: despite her considerable utility, the flirt must be cast out in order for a novel to end with generic aplomb.

The first chapter traces the narrative trajectory of the antiheroic flirt: she cannot triumph in the novel, but she can and often must figure in it to keep the relationships, and hence the plot, humming. She might indeed stick around for quite a while: the "often-elaborate processes of expulsion may last the entirety of the novel" (57). The chapter ultimately makes two claims that need reconciliation: Kaye contends that the coquette must "ultimately function outside the orbit of novelistic realism" (68) and that it is through the "probing exploration of the teeming, abstruse inner life of the flirting female [that] the Victorian novelist supplants earlier literary discourses that shape the representation of the self" (83). The flirt seems to be at the center and at the margins; opaque and highly readable; without psychological depth and very deep indeed: that she is, novelistically, all of these things is both persuasive and in need of further explanation.

In the engaging second chapter, Kaye (following Simmel) turns to Charles Darwin's ideas of sexual selection in the Descent of Man (1871). The attribution of the ability to flirt to females turns out to be an attribution of power: females become the subjects and males the objects in Darwin's imagining of how mating works. An astute reader of the implications of Darwin's ideas, Kaye initiates a fascinating argument about the sexual and hence social power conferred on women by Darwin: "It was the entwined questions of female dominance and male beauty that rendered Darwin's propositions so problematic for his contemporaries" (96). Both flirtation and beauty, Kaye argues, are assigned not only a place in the animal kingdom, but a crucial one: as a result, Darwin supplies us with "a naturalized theory of the 'unnatural'" (117). A discussion of Grant Allen's popular writings on Darwin and an analysis of late...