Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man

The years following the French Revolution fostered a period of cultural instability in England. This cultural instability led to the dynamic developments in sexual identity and gender relationships that we can observe in the novels of Jane Austen. While numerous scholars have intelligently taken up the topic of Austen’s women and the social construction of femininity in her narratives, the issues both of Austen’s men and of the social function of masculinity remain relatively under-discussed. In Disciplining Love, Michael Kramp offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic function of gender, love, and desire in the novels of Austen, initiating a new direction in the study of the early-nineteenth-century novelist by employing the theoretical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to read Austen’s corpus. As the power and legitimacy of the aristocratic man waned, England had to turn to the bodies and the potential of new men from emerging classes and families. These men, however, had to be taught how to be proper male subjects in the modernizing world; most importantly, they had to be instructed to discipline their susceptibility to sexual desire and amorous emotions in order to maintain the hegemonic role of masculinity. In the modern nation of the nineteenth century, men who remained liable to love and desire ran the risk of becoming vulnerable to irrational passions and experiences. Such passions and experiences were simply not compatible with the post-Revolutionary English society that encouraged individuals to maximize utility and become industrious, and that required them to retain rational individuality.