Jane Austen and the Theatre (review)

One can just see Jane Austen, avant la lettre/après la mort, directing the scholarly debates about her embrace or rejection of the theatre (Death of the Author be damned). Penny Gay's fine monograph Jane Austen and the Theatre takes up that debate, pressing her argument that "Austen never 'defected' from the theatre," in contradistinction to Jonas Barish's assertion that Austen "disavow[ed]" the family theatricals at Steventon, "burning them in effigy, setting them down as forbidden games" (The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, 306, 304). Perhaps both Gay and Barish are too self-consciously melodramatic in their performance of scholarly debate about Austen's (anti)theatrical predilections. Indeed, Austen needs no "sexing up," as any Janeite knows; like her fictional heroine Catherine, she "can shift very well for herself" (Northanger Abbey, 237; quoted in Gay, 62).

Nevertheless, Gay's is an elegant analysis and appreciation of the staging of the neo-classical/Romantic world. Gay's premise, though not a new one in the postmodern sense and sensibility of Judith Butler, is that "Femininity, masculinity, social status, and age are the major role-types performed by members of the society that Austen anatomises" (91). Austen, she asserts, was convinced of "the pervasive theatricality of contemporary genteel society" (23). As to gender, Gay suggests that Austen is a protofeminist who subverts the eighteenth-century cultural construct in which the middle- and upper-class female is the performer, publicly displaying her accomplishments for the male observer, a necessary enactment in order "to win a husband and thus a life-wage" (91). Further, Austen "felt a strong need" to "imagine contemporary heroines who are complex, intelligent, witty, and virtuous, despite social disadvantages" (78).

Gay makes her case, first of all, by detailing the primal scene of the Austen family theatricals that so impressed the adolescent Jane as well as the teenage Miss Austen's visits to the theatre in Bath and London. To Gay, the mature Austen's "narratorial persona" was forever marked by the irony of theatricalized masculinity and femininity—the obsessive rehearsal of gender that simultaneously declaims its natural essence.

Foregrounding plays and theatre criticism contemporary with Austen's works, Gay uses the eighteenth-century archive mostly to good effect to show a "confluence" of historical processes focused on the public, performative engendering of the sexes (78). But the analysis of that confluence at times seems theoretically rushed or even arbitrary in the scholar's felt need to make connections between context and text. This is one of the dangers for New Historicists, myself included; the will to make ideological connections between a broad range of texts may create illogical oscillations between homology and analogy. As Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee suggest, "the homological method . . . studies comparable artifacts or entities both historically and ontologically in the hope of discovering a common anthropogenic root," while "dissecting an analogy . . . assumes two objects have already been produced" ("Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism," in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, 1999, 15). In other words, where homology would assume a likeness between gendering and theatrical performance and seek a common antecedent of the two processes, analogy would assume the almost monolithic, originary, hierarchical status of, say, performativity and explain gender and other sociocultural processes through the performance mode.

It is when Gay focuses explicitly on good old-fashioned close reading of theatrical allusions and structures in Austen's novels that her argument approaches sublimity by making one feel, to crib from Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, that "We were all alive" (quoted in Gay, 118). Crawford's gloriously vibrant—and suspect—comment, of course, refers to the hours the young people have spent producing and rehearsing a play. Gay's book, as a whole, shows us that Austen was most alive when figuring the erotic energy that could only be filtered through theatre.

For example, Gay's is a splendid discussion of the section in Mansfield Park in which Edmund and Mary practice...