Adulterous Austen: Educating the Rake in Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no sex in Jane Austen's fiction. Even for readers new to her work, Austen represents a sense of propriety in which sex is thought to play no role. In Austen criticism, references to "chasteness"—of her characters, her prose, herself—abound, although opinions diverge as to what we ought to make of this apparent lack.¹ I build here on Susan Morgan's suggestion that the omission of sex from Austen's works ushered in an era of reading for heroines' emotional conflicts, rather than for the threat of sexual assault that dominates novels in the latter half of the eighteenth century.² Taking a cue from Morgan, we might therefore think about Austen's works as distinct from her eighteenth-century precursors not for omitting narratives of sex, but for depicting heroines who are free of a preoccupying fear of sexual force. In comparison to pre-1800 heroines like Harriet Byron, Evelina, or Emily St. Aubert, Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse face very tame dangers—humiliating themselves with an ill-timed jibe or joke, or having affection for the wrong man. In other words, Austen's novels offer heroines who risk the perilous outcomes of their own choices, and though this risk departs from the threat of sexual assault (readings of John Thorpe's carriage-driving in Northanger Abbey aside), it is not divorced from sex as such, as the delineation between Austen's paragon suitors and less suitable candidates crucially falls along distinctly sexual lines. Like the moral hero of Austen's beloved Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and his many literary descendants—Frances Burney's Lord Orville and Mr. Delvile, Maria Edgeworth's Clarence Hervey, even Ann Radcliffe's Valancourt—the leading gentlemen of eighteenth-century fiction from Grandison on are strikingly chaste.³ The erasure of a sexual past—whether implied through omission or, in the case of Grandison, explicitly stated—thus becomes a crucial component of the makeup of the gentleman, whom writers of the period, according to Jason Solinger, "defined in relation to both the domestic heroine and the ill-educated man of birth."⁴ It is to the relationship between this sexualized "ill-educated man of birth" and the desexualized gentleman figure that I turn in this essay, as the two work in tandem in Austen's novels to promote a portrait of masculine hypersexuality that would seem contrary to Austen's reputation as a writer of chaste drawing room fictions.⁵

As in so many novels that precede them, the primarily sexless courtship plots of Austen's works juxtapose the desirable male hero who notably lacks a sexual past against the morally depraved male suitor with an illicit sexual history. This dichotomy comes through no more clearly than in the two Austen novels featuring adultery plots—Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Readers tend to interpret the insertion of adultery in both of these novels along the same lines as Mary Poovey, who reads Austen's project as "educating her readers to the dangers of uninhibited desire" in order to preserve "the social order she cherished."⁶ In other words, both the two Elizas plotline of Sense and Sensibility and Maria's affair with Henry Crawford act as warnings to Austen's female reader as much as to Marianne Dashwood and Fanny Price. Paradoxically, however, the biproduct of this warning is that it brings to the surface the particular societal constraints imposed on women. Devoney Looser has categorized the work of those critics who would read Austen as unearthing legal power imbalances in order to offer a critique of them as investing Austen with a "sneaky feminism," one that uses "traditional romance plots to soften her ironic and perhaps more radical feminist messages."⁷ Looking specifically at these secondary divorce plots, however, reveals a representation of gender politics that goes a step further in its conservatism, reproducing the gendered biases of divorce laws themselves. These laws, increasingly practiced over the course of the eighteenth century, purported to offer a formal equality between the spouses that in...