Review of Sarah Raff, Jane Austen's Erotic Advice

ABO : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830, Apr 2016

A book review of Sarah Raff's Jane Austen's Erotic Advice.

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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 - Creative Commons License Thi s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Thi s reviews is available in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol6/ iss1/4 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)


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Danielle Spratt. Review of Sarah Raff, Jane Austen's Erotic Advice, ABO : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830, 2016, pp. 4, Volume 6, Issue 1,