Review of Sarah Raff, Jane Austen's Erotic Advice
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts
Review of Sarah Raff, Jane Austen's Erotic Advice
Danielle Sprat 0 1
0 Part of the Dramatic Literature , Criticism and The ory Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Feminist, Gender , and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Literature in English , British Isles Commons
1 California State University , Northridge , USA
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Sarah Raff, Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Vii + 201pp.
ISBN: 978-0199760336
Reviewed by Danielle Spratt
California State University, Northridge
At the end of her deft study of Janeite culture, Claudia Johnson playfully enumerates the
range of goods produced for the Jane Austen “marketplace” and wonders how Austen’s
“power to sell — and to sell not merely her novels but also knickknacks—[proves] how
right James was when he observed that ‘our dear, everybody’s dear Jane’ served a very
‘material purpose’” (181). We might emend this long list, one that ranges from Austen
action figures and bumper stickers to thimbles and tea strainers, to include the Jane
Austen bandage, which Amazon advertises with the clever question “[Who] better to
protect your wounds than an author synonymous with the romance of the landed gentry?”
While the Jane Austen bandage might seem simply to be another instance of
tongue-incheek Austen kitsch, it offers a potent physical representation of what Sarah Raff’s new
work characterizes as the fundamentally palliative, “profoundly compensatory and
reparative” nature of Austen’s writing (4).
With exquisitely patient and often revelatory close readings of the novels published in
and after 1815, Raff’s compellingly titled Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice accounts for the
dynamic, intensely felt relationship between Austen’s narrator and her readers, or what
Johnson calls the Janeite “presumption of— or is it an aspiration to? — intimacy” (10).
Raff compares the relationship between Austen’s narrator and her reader to that of
Pygmalion and Galatea, a model that demonstrates the mutually constitutive relationship
between instruction and seduction. In so doing, Erotic Advice offers an important revision
of traditional “rise of the novel” narratives: the anti-quixotism of much novel writing
during the eighteenth century capitalized on the false binary between didactic novels and,
to use William Warner’s term, “novels of amorous intrigue” in order to seduce the reader
more thoroughly (93). According to Raff,
novelists were convinced that it was by seducing the reader that they could
most thoroughly teach her[.] . . . Before Austen, the quixote wishes to be
the kind of person who has the kind of adventures that deserve a place in
the book she loves. The quixotic reader of Austen, by contrast, follows
cues in the novel because she wants to become the creature of its author.
(23, 28)
Raff’s study frames this insight by paralleling Austen’s novelistic narrator with her
troubled role as her niece Fanny Knight’s romantic advisor, a gesture that indulges the
Janeite penchant for authorial biography at the same time that it offers a skillful balance
between formalist and psychoanalytic study.
In chapter one, Raff accounts for the construction of this erotic relationship between the
narrator’s Pygmalion and the Galatean reader by considering how Austen’s narrative
voice proffers epistemological certainty as the foundation of their relationship. By
focusing on the imaginative value of the generalization, offered as a kind of advice to the
reader, Austen’s narrator encourages her audience
to pause to furnish [the literary generalization] with personal particulars
that it can then interpret. . . . Bridging real and fictional worlds,
generalizations act as levers on which material from one realm slides into
the other. They encourage the superimposition of fiction’s semiotic code
upon everyday life that misleads quixotes into madness or sexual
transgression. (16)
Here, Raff asks us to revisit another standard understanding of eighteenth-century novel:
rather than relying on particulars of characterization or setting, the genre’s often didactic
narrators increasingly deployed these generalizable maxims in order to create an intimate
relationship between print and person.
Chapter two, an analysis of Pride and Prejudice, distinguishes the role of Austen’s early
narrator from that of her Fanny Knight-inspired post-1814 narrative voice. Austen’s most
well-known novel “subordinates the author/reader relationship to the romance among
characters that works to illustrate it. . . . The novel generates love that readers experience
not in their own persons but in that of Elizabeth Bennet and bestow not on Austen but
Mr. Darcy” (40-41). Raff tracks the “vanishing” presence of the narrat (...truncated)