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...extraordinary implications claim. Yes, the voice is ironic--but the structure of the passage also suggests a more earnest impulse behind the narrator's smooth dismissal. Who asks, "What did she say"? The reader, of course. The reader always does. By ventriloquizing her reader's curiosity, and then implying its naughty prurience through her refusal to satisfy it, Austen seems more interested in characterizing her own novelistic practice than in (not) reporting Emma's acceptance of Mr. Knightley's offer. Austen's own authorial ladylikeness allows her to say only what she ought--in this case, nothing at all. Austen alerts us here to the parameters of her own narratorial propriety: what she considers worthy and unworthy of narration.
One of the most striking things about Jane Austen's novels is that they simultaneously are rather brutally repressive of their heroines' dynamism and fancy--ruthlessly reining in their spheres of energy, activity, and even fantasy to the linear trajectory of the marriage plot--and also have given enormous amounts of reading pleasure in an uninterrupted regime of almost two hundred years. One possible answer to this conundrum is that this very repression is the source of our pleasure, that we all secretly and somewhat sadistically enjoy watching the "instruction" or chastening of high-spirited heroines--what Eve Sedgwick has called the "punishing ... moral pedagogy" (833) of Austen's novels. However true this claim may be on one level, it clearly does not capture the full range of pleasures that Austen's novels give and have given. To that end, I would like to offer a somewhat more complicated genealogy of the reading pleasure that Austen affords.
Every recent critical discussion of narrative pleasure is indebted to Peter Brooks's seminal study Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. According to Brooks's analysis of the Freudian "master-plot" of the classical novel, our pleasure in narrative is a kind of delayed gratification analogous to the controlling of psychic energy. What Freud calls the pleasure principle is the working of the higher mental processes on the "primary process" of the instincts: we learn to bind the anarchic energies of tile instincts, to direct them at proper objects, in order to gain a greater ultimate pleasure through delayed gratification than we would by immediately heeding every infantile desire. In the novel, according to Brooks, this unbound energy or desire is the impulse to begin to narrate: "Desire is always there at the start of a narrative, ... often having reached a state of intensity such that movement must be created, action undertaken, change begun" (38). From a state of quiescence or stasis that we infer was there before the beginning of the narrative, a crisis occurs, a desire is born, something narratable happens. This desire or narrative energy, according to Brooks, is always directed toward an end: the closure of the narrative, which enables us to make retrospective sense of what has come before (93-96).
The binding of this energy takes place through acts of repetition, return, and delay: for example, cases of mistaken identity or misunderstandings that are repeated before they can be cleared up--or even misguided attempts at matchmaking that must fail miserably before the proper marriages can come to pass. According to Freud (and Brooks), this process is a painful one. These abortive attempts at the right ending often take the form of thwarted expectations, unwanted attentions, painful revelations, or other such disagreeable phenomena that are only pleasurable retrospectively, in their resolution. Narrative pleasure, according to the Freud-Brooks model, is primarily reserved for the end, for closure, when there is a discharge of energy that brings the organism--or the characters or the reader--back...
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More articles from Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
George and Georgiana: symmetries and antitheses in Pride and Prejudice..., January 01, 2007
Edward Austen's Emma reads Emma.(Miscellany)(Emma Smith), January 01, 2007
James Stanier Clarke and the Firebrand.(Miscellany), January 01, 2007
An open invitation, or how to read the ethics of Austen's Pride and Pr..., January 01, 2007
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