Perfectly Helpless: Jane Austen and Perfectionism

Perfectly Helpless

Andrew H. Miller

In remarking that Jane Austen was, “of all great writers . . . the mostdifficult to capture in the act of greatness,” Virginia Woolf became

only the most famously helpless of Austen’s readers, the culminatingfigure in a tradition of critical incapacity that might be said to beginwith Sir Walter Scott, who found himself unable to capture Austen’smerits in illustration, and Thomas Macaulay, who confessed that sheachieved her ends “by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis” and“defy the powers of description.”1 This tradition continued, then, withsuch critics as the one who wrote in the Saturday Review in 1882 thatAusten made him feel how “powerless analysis is to lay bare the sourcesof so subtle a thing as literary interest” (quoted in Southam, 2:27).Henry James characteristically denied, and hence sustained, such ana-lytic helplessness when he remarked that Austen’s light felicity “leavesus hardly more curious of her process, or of the experience in her thatfed it, than the brown thrush, who tells his story from the gardenbough”—reminding us how handy it is to avoid curiosity about thethings we are powerless to understand.2 Austen seems to have invitedcritics to acknowledge a wondering awareness of impotence before herfictions.

Modern Language Quarterly 63:1, March 2002. © 2002 University of Washington.

1 “Jane Austen,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. 4(London: Hogarth, 1986), 155; Walter Scott, unsigned review of Emma, QuarterlyReview, October 1815, rpt. in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, 2vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 1:67; Thomas Macaulay, unsignedarticle “The Diary and Letters of Mme D’Arbley,” Edinburgh Review, January 1843,rpt. in Southam, 1:123.

2 Henry James, “The Lesson of Balzac,” in The House of Fiction, rpt. in Southam,2:229–30.

66 MLQ ❙ March 2002

It would be immodest to propose to continue in this august tradi-tion of failures—as if I could. Instead, I hope to find provocation tofurther thought in these instances of thought’s defeat—to draw onthese writers’ experience of bemused incapacity to help me in mycapacity as a reader of Austen. I’ll consider the varieties of helpless-ness in Austen’s work and wonder why her novels in particular shouldinspire such a collective shaking of heads and upturning of emptyhands. These speculations will lead me to some reflections on novelis-tic form and its ethical inclinations, the formal and ethical aftereffectsof Austen’s writing later in the century. The form of the realistic novelinclines it to participate in that Victorian preoccupation that theycalled self-culture and that, provoked by the writing of Stanley Cavell, Ihave come to call moral perfectionism. Both banal in its apparent self-evidence—why should I not want to improve, to be in some sense bet-ter tomorrow than I am today, to be, indeed, all that I can be?—and,often enough, crushing in its rigors, such self-culture structured dis-parate Victorian discourses (aesthetic, ethical, political) around narra-tives of character conversion and development.

That Austen’s novels are narrative hedgeworks, their plots propelledthrough the reticulation of constraint, is a familiar enough thought.From Anne Elliot’s years of desolation following her refusal of Went-worth to Fanny Price’s silencing dependence on her cousins, the nov-els originate in, are premised on, the experience of impulses ham-pered, desires thwarted, needs obstructed even as they are first felt.Looking just at Sense and Sensibility, in which Elinor’s love of Marianneis pervasively figured as constraint, and recalling just a few chapters ofit, we can see how constraint constitutes social relations and how thejostling of such constraints characterizes the movement of Austen’splots. On receiving a mysterious letter, Colonel Brandon announcesthat he must flee Barton Park for London. Pressed to delay his trip, he

Andrew H. Miller is associate professor of English at Indiana Univer-sity and editor of Victorian Studies. His essay is part of a larger proj-ect on Victorian perfectionism, sections of which are forthcoming inELH and Texas Studies in Language and Literature.

regrets to say that “it is not in [his] power.”3 When reminded that hisdeparture will render his friends—the three Miss Dashwoods, the twoMiss Careys, Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton, Sir John, and Mr. Wil-loughby, in short, the community of the novel—powerless to pursuetheir planned sight-seeing, which depends upon Brandon, he expresseshis sorrow at disappointing them but insists that it cannot be helped.When Mrs. Jennings presses him, with characteristically impertinentpersistence, to explain what has summoned him so irresistibly, shefinds her prying ineffectual before his intransigence. All of Brandon’scompanions are as powerless to pursue the course of their pleasures asthey are to explain their being becalmed. When a week or so laterWilloughby receives an analogous summons to London, he finds him-self similarly powerless to defer his departure: his patron insists that hedecamp immediately. Just as Brandon’s forced departure unfurls a fur-ther outwork of felt constraints, so here, more concentratedly, Wil-loughby’s departure produces further instances of powerlessness.Willoughby finds himself forced to disappoint the Dashwoods, withwhom he has arranged to eat dinner that night, and when Elinorattempts to console her sister on the departure of her lover, she findsherself, in turn, prevented from doing so. When Elinor later lays herhand on Marianne to keep her from starting up to speak withWilloughby, standing but a few yards distant at a London ball, we wit-ness only the most cinematic of the novel’s constraints. “Good heavens!”Marianne exclaims, “he is there—he is there—Oh! Why does he notlook at me? Why cannot I speak to him?” As powerless to be composed asshe is to converse with Willoughby, Marianne sits “in an agony of impa-tience, which affect[s] every feature” (152). Austen seems to inscribecharacter by circumscribing it.

Austen devotes much of her intelligence to a discriminating tax-onomy of such experiences as I have roughly tossed together, display-ing her unhappy knowledge of just how many hands can be laid onone’s forearm, with so many motives, to so many ends. Not only doesshe carefully show that some people—women, in particular—aremore pervasively constrained than others, but she distinguishes among

Miller ❙ Perfectly Helpless 67

3 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1998), 56.

the varieties of constraint, evaluating the severity of their effects.Among these varieties, helplessness is distinguished by what it impliesabout motive: I am helpless when my solicitudes are fettered, when Iwould like to help but cannot. It is constraint in this form that Mar-garet Oliphant acknowledged in Austen’s work when she spoke of

a certain soft despair of any one human creature ever doing good toanother—of any influence ever overcoming those habits and moodsand peculiarities of mind which the observer sees to be more obstinatethan life itself—a sense that nothing is to be done but to look on, to sayperhaps now and then a softening word, to make the best of it practi-cally and theoretically, to smile and hold up one’s hands and wonderwhy human beings should be such fools.4

Oliphant sees our help obstructed only by the obduracy of character,but, for Austen, the list is, sadly, much longer: financial dependence,chance, decorum, respect, the bodies of others, my own body, thephysical world, the incoherence of desire, irresolution, gender, confi-dences received, privacy won, the imagination and its poverty, educa-tion and its absence, gratitude and its obligations all can invite thedespair native to helplessness, each felt obstruction nested in othersand nesting others in turn. (Indeed, Oliphant imagines despair as thenatural response, but again Austen has a more discriminating view: inMansfield Park, while Fanny looks helplessly on at her companions asthey try to decide on a play to perform, we are told that she “listened,not unamused, to observe the selfishness which, more or less dis-guised, seemed to govern them all, and wonder[ed] how it wouldend.”5 For Austen, how we typically respond to our incapacities—withdespair or amusement, boredom or suspense, as a matter of concernor a matter of course—is deeply telling of our moral psychology.)

The edges of Austen’s interest in such helplessness and its uses arefurther defined by her interest in what may be thought of as its oppo-site, the unwanted aid offered by officiousness. Many of her minorcharacters—like Mrs. Elliot, Lady De Burgh, and Mrs. Ferrars—arevirtuoso practitioners of this dubious art, but so are some of her major


4 Margaret Oliphant, unsigned article “Miss Austen and Miss Mitford,” Black-wood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1870, rpt. in Southam, 1:216–17.

5 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (New York: Penguin,1996), 111. Hereafter cited as MP.

characters, of course, such as Emma and Darcy. (That most of theseofficious figures are women makes the significant exceptions—Darcymost notably—more striking.) Dramatizing these two sentiments isone important way that Austen calibrates her heroines’ capacities asactresses in and on their world. Both our helplessness before the proj-ects we pursue and the officiousness of others toward us as we pursuethem cut into our autonomy, suggesting as they do our inability inde-pendently to achieve our aims, to find means for the ends we set our-selves. Those who come to love happily in the novels—Anne Elliot andWentworth, Elinor and Marianne, Mr. Knightley, Emma and Mr. Wood-house—are those who best learn how to help each other and learnhow to be helped, forming autonomous relations free from both help-lessness and officiousness.

I should say as well that Austen’s sophistication—or, rather, herappreciation of others’ sophistication—leads her to study our ten-dency to appeal to our general liability to helplessness in order toexcuse specific, deliberate acts of unjustifiable behavior. Such casuistrycan be seen in a casual way when Emma defends her cutting remarksto Miss Bates by saying, “How could I help saying what I did?—Nobodycould have helped it,” as if Miss Bates’s inanities left Emma incapaci-tated before herself.6 But Austen treats such casuistry in a more sus-tained fashion in the various conversations concerning whether, inclaiming that his patroness prevents him from visiting his father andnew stepmother, Frank Churchill is truly helpless or is claiming help-lessness to justify his moral laxity. Can he truly not, as his father apolo-getically puts it, “command his own time,” or is he merely “manoeuv-ring and finessing,” as Mr. Knightley believes (164)?

As I’ve said, these are familiar enough observations. But it is myfurther thought, then, that the feelings of constraint that compose somuch of the novels’ emotional texture and so often propel their plotsderive their powerful aesthetic effect, ultimately, from our helplessnessbefore the events about which we read: all of Austen’s characters arelike Willoughby; they are there, but they do not look at us, and we can-not speak to them. A particular form of constraint—the helplessnesswe experience as readers—underwrites our appreciation of the var-


6 Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 367.Hereafter cited as E.

ied forms that Austen displays so profusely in the novels. It is temptingto call this experience one of sympathy—our sympathizing with thesimilar feelings of the characters—but it can feel more as if they have come to sympathize with us. Incapacity is a requirement of ourencounter with characters; it is something like a transcendental condi-tion of reading. When the characters themselves are helpless, we dis-cover (with something like relief, whatever our frustration) their com-pany in our own condition, as if they have come to join us in that statein which we have languished since we first lifted the cover of the book.Another way to phrase this intuition would be to say that the forms ofconstraint represented in the novels thematize this constitutive aspectof novel reading. But that phrasing seems to distribute our attentionspoorly, as if suggesting that Austen’s leading aim were to tell us some-thing about the reading process. I’d rather say that her books are espe-cially adept at drawing on our inability to help the characters whoselives we nonetheless suffer in order to achieve various aesthetic (and,I’ll suggest later, ethical) ends. Adela Pinch neatly notes that AnneElliot is in certain ways a model for the reader of Persuasion: formally,in that “there is something ‘literary’ about [the novel’s] temporalstructure,” so that Anne’s “first courtship is to the second as a book isto a reader”; and substantively, in that her state is frequently figured asreaderly, impervious “to the outside world.”7 But for present purposes,Anne is nowhere more like us than when she longs “for the power ofrepresenting to [her friends] what they were about, and of pointingout some of the evils they were exposing themselves to.”8 We endureAnne’s silence among the characters of Persuasion, and experience thedepth of her character, because it has a powerful analogue in our ownsilent incapacity before the characters and events of the novel. And tothe considerable extent that Anne’s constraint produces the effect ofinteriority, the depth of her character, our helplessness as readers givesthat notion of subjectivity its affective credibility.9


7 Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 163, 160–61.

8 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (New York: Norton, 1995),55. Hereafter cited as P.

9 Here, as elsewhere, Anne is, as Deidre Lynch deftly puts it, “thought-full andwordless”: “The interior animation that makes Persuasion into the record of the ‘dia-logue of Anne’s mind with itself’ is also manifested as a form of privation, as if inte-

Of course, we are helpless before the events of all novels we read.Such helplessness spurred Percy Lubbock to close his Craft of Fiction byannouncing his helplessness before the genre as a whole: “There aretimes when a critic of literature feels that if only there were one singletangible and measurable fact about a book—if it could be weighedlike a statue, say, or measured like a picture—it would be a support ina world of shadows. Such an ingenuous confession, I think it must beadmitted, goes to the root of the matter—could we utter our sense ofhelplessness more candidly?”10 But Austen seems—seems to me, atleast—particularly adept at amplifying this feature of narrative phe-nomenology, in part, no doubt, because of her stylistic assurance. Sheappears always in possession of her powers; her prose never needs helpbut is unfailingly up to its aims.11 But I think we can specify the sourcesof this response more concretely. Perhaps the greatest drama inAusten’s novels and in her career as a whole lies in the tense andchanging relationship between her moral or political aims and the twoprimary narrative techniques most distinctively hers: the objective,external representation of character (especially in dialogue) and freeindirect discourse.12 Among the principal effects of this dynamic rela-tion is the cultivation of the helplessness that I have tried to evoke


riority had as its necessary consequence an impassive, incommunicative exterior”(The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 215–16). Our own wordlessness asreaders—our inability to communicate with characters—deepens our own sense ofinteriority.

10 Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking, 1957), 273–74. Amongthe consequences of such helplessness is that no limit is set on critical interpretation,and this consequence highlights issues of overinterpretation, making pressing thequestions of how far we can go and how we can stop. If I am helpless in my criticalmeasurements, I might ask, despondently, “Why begin?” but also, perhaps no lessdespondently, “Why end?”

11 See D. A. Miller, “The Late Jane Austen,” Raritan 10 (1990): 55–79; andHarry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UniversityPress, 1999).

12 For all their pointed differences, both Marilyn Butler and Claudia L. Johnsoncould agree on this characterization of Austen. The political aims they discover inAusten are almost diametrically opposed, but for both critics the narrative means toachieve those aims lie in the deployment of these two narrative techniques. See But-ler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); and Johnson, JaneAusten: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

here. If the objective, exterior mode of narration invites a sense of ourincapacity before the events we perceive, a sense of their distance fromus, then Austen’s cultivation of free indirect discourse, and with it hercultivation of our sympathies, makes this distance and incapacity affect-ing. Our acute sense of helplessness emerges from the conversationbetween these narrative techniques as our inability to act on the eventsand people before us is coupled with a desire to do so. Thus in Emmathe narrator absorbs Emma’s thoughts or is absorbed into them, lead-ing us ever more intimately into her reflections, only, brutally, to desertus, leaving us alone with our heroine, objectively, externally rendered,as she speaks shamefully to any number of fellow characters. There weare, with her but powerless, as she leads Harriet Smith to reject Mr.Martin’s proposal of marriage or humiliates Miss Bates. Emma’s treat-ment of Jane Fairfax derives much of its force from this dynamic:Emma knows Jane’s situation as well as we do and is no more active inresponse to it than we are. But, of course, she could do something,where we cannot.

For myself, this experience of helplessness—this sense that I cando nothing for these characters; that they are not simply out of earshot(being both too close and too far for that), but that I am absolutelydebarred from their world even as I endure its events—this experi-ence is perhaps the most acute aesthetic response in which I regularlyindulge. It leaves me, often enough, in an agony of impatience thataffects every feature. Some conceptions of sentimental powerlessness—not to mention my own identification with Marianne—might leadone to say that, in rendering the reader newly helpless, Austen takes astep toward the effeminization of reading in the Victorian period. Ican imagine a genealogy of the nineteenth-century novel—culminat-ing, perhaps, in the metaphysical aspirations of Hardy’s fated plots—that correlates the novel’s manipulation of readerly helplessness; itsdevelopment of deep, isolated interiority; and its gendering of reading.When late Victorian psychologists remarked that “man thinks more,woman feels more. He discovers more, but remembers less; she ismore receptive, and less forgetful,”13 they were characterizing the


13 Quoted in Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon,1993), 65.

capacities that distinguished men and women as readers, as well asrecalling in a medical register the conversation held between AnneElliot and Captain Harville toward the end of Persuasion. In both dis-cussions, the capacity to remember (and especially to remember whatone has read) is seen as a particularly feminine trait, associated withthe constraints under which women labor. “We certainly do not forgetyou,” Anne says to Harville, “so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, ourfate rather than our merit. . . . We live at home, quiet, confined, andour feelings prey upon us.” “We cannot help ourselves” (155).

The restive chagrin that helplessness causes is balanced by a rangeof complementary satisfactions, beginning with the thought that, whenI put Sense and Sensibility down and haul myself up off the couch, whenI am confronted not by Marianne’s hopeless love of Willoughby or Eli-nor’s helpless love of her sister but by, say, my love of my own sisters, Iactually can do something for them (and in doing something for themno doubt also do something for myself): by being so cruelly crampedas I read, my solicitude seems to enjoy an access of freedom once Iclose the book. The more a narrative holds and guides my helplessattention, leading and directing my will, the more it flatters me intothe dubious belief that, in putting the book down, I become againunsubjected, free, unwritten. In producing in her readers a subjectivitythat is helpless, Austen creates an idealized subjectivity that likes tothink that it can help, and will. In some moods I think of this as a signof the genre’s ethical desperation. Perhaps in closing the book I amallowed to revert to my normal, officious ways.

Nineteenth-century criticism of the novel conventionally estab-lished its distinctiveness (and attempted to regulate its status) by defin-ing it against drama, and the comparison is especially useful in evokingthe sorts of helplessness and officiousness I have been discussing. Wehave a joke about an apparently officious theatergoer: a yokel jumpsonto the stage to save Desdemona from Othello—to help her. Now,the joke here, if that is what it is, lies in the idea that the yokel does notrealize that there is no help to be had; there is nothing he can do. Hethinks that help is what is needed, but helplessness and officiousnessare the wrong categories to apply to this experience. But knowing thisonly makes it more striking if I continue to imagine myself in a posi-tion to help or chafe at my inability to help. In this picture, our pecu-


liar fate as playgoers is to be burdened by desires that we seem unableto ignore but that, as transcending our powers, we are unable toindulge. When we read a book, the antagonism between our desiresand our capacities is perhaps more vivid than when we view a play, as itis even more difficult to see why, with no stage before us and no peoplein view, we might think we could be of assistance. Wentworth standsover the fallen and terrifyingly still Louisa, lying before him at theCobb, and cries out, “Is there no one to help me?” (P, 74). I know thatno one is more capable than Anne here—certainly I am not. Yet I stillwant to help. It is the impossibility of satisfying this recurrent desire,more striking than the yokel’s because its satisfaction is even moreimplausible, that I now want to assess. (Perhaps I should first ward off amisunderstanding: I am not urging a return to the idea that readersare inevitably passive; rather, I am indicating that two things to which Iactively respond in reading a novel are my desire and my inability tohelp in such moments as this one at the Cobb.)14

I can measure the sense of being debarred from the characterswhose lives we nonetheless suffer in at least two fashions. The firstderives from the fact that they are unembodied inscriptions—we can-not see them; we do not share their space; they are not “tangible andmeasurable,” as Lubbock lamented—a fact felt especially in thosemoments that are most cinematically or dramatically animated. Unlikedramatic characters, novelistic characters are (as Deidre Lynch hasmemorably noted) just that, a collocation of reproducible characters,letters arranged on a series of pages. It is a remarkable feature of DavidMarshall’s Surprising Effects of Sympathy, and I believe of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theory to which he responds, that this difference


14 As this essay is a fairly continuous, if sometimes indirect, response to ideasdeveloped in other contexts by Stanley Cavell, I am glad to point here to a passage towhich this paragraph is indebted: Cavell’s extended discussion of acknowledgmentin “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 327–53. “What I reveal” in watching aplay, he says, “is what I share with everyone else present with me at what is happen-ing: that I am hidden and silent and fixed. In a word, that there is a point at which Iam helpless before the acting and suffering of others. But I know the true point ofmy helplessness only if I have acknowledged totally the fact and the true cause oftheir suffering. Otherwise I am not emptied of help, but withholding of it. Tragedyarises from the confusion of these states” (338).

between drama and the novel—the difference that these arts presentto our eyes—is largely overlooked. (It is a sign of the continuing secu-rity of this habit that even so assured a book as Audrey Jaffe’s new Scenesof Sympathy consciously builds its theoretical scaffolding on the sup-posed visibility of those with whom we sympathize in reading.)15 Butour sympathy with characters synthesized from letters is strikingly dif-ferent from that with those who weep, laugh, and blush, who speakand remain silent, who behave heroically and behave shamefullybefore us in the theater. But different in what ways? Perhaps as a start-ing point I can say that, when I assemble the characters of a novel inmy mind, building them up internally as I absorb words from the page,my intimacy with them is more like an intimacy with myself, or withsome aspect of myself, than it is with another, with someone over there,beyond those footlights, under that arch, looking out over those waves,worried, from those rocks. But what aspect of myself might I be inti-mate with in being intimate with the characters of a novel?16

Austen’s writing, with its pronounced dramatic inheritance, hasled critics regularly, almost obsessively, to translate her prose intodrama, to understand it as something they have seen; it is one indica-tion of the way the words on her pages strain toward bodily animation,testing the limits of the novelistic form. An especially fulsome criticfrom the Retrospective Review, for instance, wrote in 1823 that Austen’scharacters were


15 David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau,and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Audrey Jaffe, Scenes ofSympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 2000). My conjectures here are much more in keeping with those ofCatherine Gallagher (whom Jaffe quotes): “The body of the other person, althoughit conveys the original sense data and serves as the basis for all the modes of rela-tionship that supposedly allow sympathetic identification, is also paradoxically imag-ined to be a barrier. It communicates but it also marks out the sentiments as belong-ing to somebody else and hence as being simply objective facts. . . . This proprietarybarrier of the other’s body is what fiction freely dispenses with; by representing feel-ings that belong to no other body, fiction actually facilitates the process of sympathy”(Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 171).

16 As further evidence for my sense that the reading of novels invites a respon-siveness to the self, I note here the habit of describing readers as “self-absorbed”(e.g., Flint, 4, 22, and passim). Such usage raises the question of whether, in beingabsorbed in a book, one can escape being absorbed in oneself as well.

beings instinct with life;—they breathe and move, and think and speak,and act, before our mind’s eye, with a distinctness that rivals the pic-tures we see in memory of scenes we ourselves have beheld, and uponthe recollections of which we love to dwell. They mingle in our remem-brances with those whom we ourselves have known and loved, butwhom accident, or coldness, or death, have separated from us beforethe end of our pilgrimage.17

Austen’s ability to create characters “instinct with life” continued tobe a leading feature of critical commentary, a principal point of herrepeated affiliation with Shakespeare. It is an index of her alert skepti-cism, which also received regular critical commentary through the Vic-torian period. As they struggle toward being “instinct with life” andlapse back into the state of lifeless inscriptions, Austen’s charactersraise the question of what it is to be “instinct with life” and whetherone can recognize it in oneself or others. This skepticism about thenature of the human was thematized by the Retrospective reviewer as acomparison between the enduring life of those characters (if life iswhat it is) and the recent death of their author:

So fast and so thick do recollections of what is beautiful and good inthe works of this admirable woman throng into our mind, that we areborne away involuntarily and irresistibly. They . . . have enshrinedthemselves in the heart, and live forever in the thoughts,—along withthe recollections of all that is best and purest in our own experience oflife. . . . Those imaginary people, to whom she gave their most beautifulideal existence, survive to speak for her, now that she herself is gone.(111)

Borne helplessly away by the recollections thronging into his or hermind, the critic is inhabited by Austen’s imaginary characters, whichsociably mingle with memories of embodied people and, indeed, standas proxies for one once embodied person, Austen herself. The juxta-position of the recently deceased author and her surviving characters,never quite alive but never quite dead, either, makes graphic, if mawk-ish, Austen’s skepticism about what counts as life.18


17 Anonymous review of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, RetrospectiveReview, 1823, rpt. in Southam, 1:109.

18 I develop these ideas further, in a different context, in “The Specters of Dick-ens’ Study,” Narrative 5 (1997): 322–41.

Just as Austen’s novels mobilize our helplessness as readers toamplify our experience of her characters’ helplessness, so this sourceof that helplessness—the textual nature of these characters—also isregularly dramatized in her novels. Frank Churchill, for instance, existsvividly in the minds of Highbury residents for years as a figure of lettersbefore riding out of that state and into embodied form “in all the cer-tainty of his own self,” as Austen oddly puts it (E, 317), as “a very goodlooking man; height, air, address all . . . unexceptionable” (202).Frank’s letters—years of them, professing his helplessness before thedemands of his patroness—like Austen’s letters generally, study themigration of personality into and out of textual states, the translationback and forth of embodied and inscribed character, as if testing theborders between those conditions and our confidence in their differ-ences.

But—and here rotates into view the second way I will assess ourpeculiarly skewed intimacy with them—Austen’s characters, “instinctwith life,” are also conceived of as absolutely apart from us, separatedby accident, by coldness, or, most firmly, by death. They are, in variousways, complete, and their completeness throws into relief our own par-tial condition. Austen’s characters are, as critics have often remarked,“finished”: while Woolf thought all of Austen’s prose “finished, andturned” (148), Scott observed more precisely that the feature of Austen’swriting he felt most helpless to capture was the way that her characterswere “finished up to nature” (67); Macaulay found that “the greatmerit of Miss Austen is in the finishing of her characters” (119). In theheavily narrativized world of the novel (but not only there) the pastserves as a principal repository of the completed. It need not be so, ofcourse, as less linear conceptions of time, for instance, indicate: thepast can return as in cyclical models, or it can be eternally present, asin more Augustinian models. What constitutes completion—say, acompleted character—is equally variable. But for the novel, a com-pleted world with completed characters is a world of the past, a worldnot so much represented as recalled. Of course, “finished” capturesthis doubled significance neatly: if its leading meaning for Scott andMacaulay was that Austen’s characters are polished, down to the lastdetail, complete, they are also done with, over, “finished.” Memorythus comes to be the faculty by which we apprehend them, as if read-


ing were a continuous act of remembrance. Straining to leave inscrip-tion behind and achieve embodiment, Austen’s characters are also, forthe reviewer of, exactly, the Retrospective, creatures of our past, towardwhom we strain in our recollections. In maintaining a “fundamentallyelegaic relation to Jane Austen,” and in experiencing that elegy chieflythrough her characters’ uneasy embodiment, D. A. Miller only furthersAusten’s own ends (55). But at the same time, as the Retrospectivereviewer remarks, we love to dwell on these recollections, to call themback to us—to read them again and again. For all their being finished,Austen’s characters are regularly retrieved for prequels and sequels, asif the more finished a character were, the more eager readers would beto start her up again.

Just as Austen’s novels mobilize our experience as readers con-fronting textual inscriptions to amplify our sense of, for instance,Frank Churchill’s uncertain humanity, so they draw on our experiencein retrospection—as in all those famous concluding scenes where thelovers come to understand and celebrate who they are, now, together,by recounting their converging tales, or where Elizabeth Bennet, todiscover who she is, must recollect all she has been, or in Emma’srepeated instances of retrospective remorse. Persuasion becomes theparadigmatic Austen novel in this regard: as Pinch suggests, Went-worth is finished before the novel begins; he is cast into the past, hav-ing entered the book of Anne’s memory and the naval registry, avail-able only through recollection and rereading. But then, as we begin toread the novel, he emerges from that shadowy, uncertain existence, asif reanimated for Anne (and, by extension, for us), her past miracu-lously breathing and moving outside her and not merely in her mind’seye. What once appeared complete and finished is revealed as partial,lying in expectancy.

Again I can develop the thought that Austen’s characters are notso much represented as recalled by appeal to her dramatic inheri-tance, for the thought that fictional characters exist in our past liesbehind Cavell’s following remark about Shakespeare’s plays. The timein which these plays are set, Cavell writes,

is of course not necessarily the present—that is up to the playwright.But the time presented, whether the present or the past, is this moment,at which an arrival is awaited, in which a decision is made or left


unmade, at which the past erupts into the present, in which reason oremotion fail. . . . The novel also comprises these moments, but only ashaving happened—not necessarily in the past; that is up to the novelist.(“Avoidance,” 334)

If, for all my intimacy with them, I cannot act on or with or for charac-ters in novels because they are (are only?) inscriptions, I am furtherprevented by their being finished, by their lives’ having already hap-pened. I experience them existing—to the extent that they do, or inthe peculiar way that they do—through a facility akin to memory; myintimacy is curiously characterized by the backward way I look at them,there in the past, here in my mind. (In this way Austen’s novels and thenovelistic form in general participate in a more culturally diffuse inves-tigation of the nature of memory, one prompted by associationist psy-chology. Dugald Stewart, at roughly the same moment, tries to recon-cile the “belief in [the] past existence” of objects remembered with the“belief” that they exist “before us at the present moment.”19 Where arethe objects we remember? And, more pressingly, when are they?) Thusabout cinema Cavell elsewhere writes that “in viewing a movie my help-lessness is mechanically assured: I am present not at something hap-pening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened,which I absorb (like a memory). In this, movies resemble novels.”20 Asthe reviewer for the Retrospective remarked, characters mingle in ourremembrances with those we have loved and absorbed into our mem-ories, and we can no more act on them than we can change our ownpast. Herein lies the redemptive exhilaration I find under the other-wise leaden skies of Persuasion: in its suggestion that the past can bechanged or its effects, at any rate, undone as Anne is allowed to undoher past, her refusal of Wentworth, and elicit a second proposal. Myintuition now is that this exhilaration derives from the sense that, ifthe past can be undone, then somehow we can also help the charactersabout whom we are reading.

I’ve intimated that, in manipulating these two features of novelisticcharacterization—finished and dispersed—to amplify our sense of


19 Quoted in Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves:An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 142.

20 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enl. ed.(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 26.

helplessness, Austen has aimed not solely at phenomenological or aes-thetic ends but at ethical ones as well. One might understand theseends cynically: while suffering beheld lays on us an oppressive obliga-tion, as exerting a claim on us, suffering recalled presents no suchobligation, as we can no longer offer assistance. Our helplessness wouldthen free us from responsibility while our sympathy consoled us withthe conception of ourselves as compassionate. Bad faith yet again. Per-haps this is how Frank Churchill reads. But the outlook for us need notbe so dire. For we sometimes simply cannot help others, as we cannothelp what is finished, and perhaps at some moments we need to bereminded of our incapacity as much as we need to be reminded of ourpowers. At such moments the novel allows me to understand my dif-ference from others as a version of my difference from my past.

In writing that the novel invites me to understand my difference fromothers in this way, I find that I have glossed another passage fromCavell, one I long thought obscure. In his most extended treatment ofVictorian prose, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Cavell says ofEmerson that his writing “works out the conditions for my recognizingmy difference from others as a function of my recognizing my differ-ence from myself.”21 This inward difference, as cultivated by novelreading, is efficiently captured by Lionel Trilling when speaking ofEmma:

The narrative technique of the novel brings us very close to her andmakes us aware of each misstep she will make. The relation that devel-ops between ourselves and her becomes a strange one—it is the rela-tion that exists between our ideal self and our ordinary fallible self. Webecome Emma’s helpless conscience, her unavailing guide. . . . Ourhand goes out to hold her back and set her straight, but it cannot reachher.22

The form of the novel (as it was modified by Austen) seems toinvite my identification with those whom I understand to want the helpthat I cannot provide. (Trilling seems to have accepted this invitation


21 Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emer-sonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 53.

22 Lionel Trilling, “Emma,” in Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, ed. Ian Littlewood,vol. 4 (Mountfield: Helm, 1998), 220.

often, finding his efforts at aid continually solicited and continuallythwarted. In “Manners, Morals, and the Novel” he reports trying toguide and correct first Oedipus, then Lear and Gloucester, and thenEve: “‘Woman, watch out! Don’t you see—anyone can see—that’s asnake!’”)23 Helpless to constrain her, to lay his hand on her forearm,Trilling imagines himself outside Emma—a masculine mentor figurefor this errant woman. Knightley, no doubt, provided Trilling with amodel for such solicitude. “There is an anxiety,” Knightley says earlyon, “a curiosity in what one feels for Emma. I wonder what will becomeof her!” (69). But Trilling also understands himself to be inside Emma,as someone she has assimilated as her “conscience.” Again the novelgives him his cue, in all those imaginary conversations Emma carrieson with Knightley. But Trilling finally internalizes this tangled dynamichimself, as a matter of his own narrative potential, as the differencebetween his fallible and ideal selves (what Cavell would call hisattained and unattained selves). The satisfactions of the novel’s end,on this account, lie in large measure in its utopian unification of selveswhose division the novel has structurally engineered. Just as Emmaand Knightley, Elizabeth and Darcy, must be estranged if they are to beunited, so I must be estranged from myself if I am to end up marriedwithin. I may not want to be inwardly married—marriage may not bemy favored emblem of harmonious union—and, even more emphati-cally, I may not want to be married to myself; indeed, I may not evenwish to be my own second cousin. But I take the fact of estrangement(outwardly, between lovers, and inwardly, between aspects of myself) inthese novels to indicate that the concept of union, as well as these par-ticular unions, is being tested. As Cavell might say, what it is to beunited—either socially and erotically in outward marriage or psycho-logically and erotically in inward marriage—has no external guaran-tee in the novels and must be generated and justified afresh. This is afeature of their modernity.

In this dynamic, structurally determined process of internaliza-tion, division, and unification, Trilling exemplifies what the Victorianscalled self-culture and Cavell calls moral and political perfectionism.


23 Lionel Trilling, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” in The Moral Obligation toBe Intelligent: Selected Essays, ed. Leon Wieseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,2000), 107.

Assuming that our lives should perfect what is distinctively human inus, should realize an ideal self, derived from exemplary others, perfec-tionism finds and studies the motivation to ethical behavior in thedynamics of exemplarity; it understands us to be more surely led byour attraction to others than by the coercion of rules. Basing a conceptof self-fulfillment on our capacities of responsiveness, perfectionism is(as Cavell emphasizes) less a full-blown moral theory, one in competi-tion with the utilitarian and deontological theories that have carvedup moral philosophy between them since Austen’s moment, thansomething prior and more fundamental, an investigation of the incli-nation to avoid ethical reflection altogether, a confrontation with ourabsorbed inattention to our lives. Such perfectionism dominated thewriting of Emerson’s British contemporaries. While Carlyle’s Heroes andHero-Worship is the most famous nineteenth-century articulation of thisdimension of ethical thought, its variations structure the ethical con-tent of writing by Newman, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde; by Dickens,Nightingale, and Eliot; by Whewell, Karl Pearson, and F. H. Bradley; byThackeray and Du Maurier, motivating and organizing many of theirundeniably disparate preoccupations.24 It marks the British inheri-tance of Goethe no less than the inheritance of Plato and Thomas àKempis. We discover our moral capacities, remarked J. S. Mill to thestudents of Saint Andrews,

only so far as we feel capable of nobler objects: and if unfortunatelythose by whom we are surrounded do not share our aspirations, per-haps disapprove the conduct to which we are prompted by them—[welearn] to sustain ourselves by the ideal sympathy of the great charactersin history, even in fiction, and by the contemplation of an idealized pos-terity: shall I add, of ideal perfection embodied in a Divine Being?25


24 Such a claim is consonant, I think, with the tale told by Carolyn Steedman,which takes as its point of departure the observation that we tend to conceive of ourinward life, or a large section of it, as the place for the life of our past—as centrallyrepresented by a child. The history of interiorized subjectivity—often baroquelydetailed and elaborated, a commotion of many voices or a desolation of one—Steedman argues, is importantly Victorian, and it hinges on the creation of child-hood as a concept that we have escorted to lodgings “inside” us. Contemplating ourinner life, we contemplate our past—a past inhabited uncannily by others (StrangeDislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 [Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995]).

25 J. S. Mill, “Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews,” in

As Mill suggests, perfectionism forces an uneasy sensitivity to expo-sure, as to the response of an audience, including one’s own responseto what one reads or hears; hence it stresses one’s exposure to oneself.Equally pertinently, we see in Mill’s remark the pressure that moralperfectionism puts on the solitary assessment of self-respect. Suchassessment need not be conducted in the atmosphere of more or lessheroic opposition cultivated in Mill’s exhortation at Saint Andrews; forGeorge Eliot, for instance, it tends to be made in a stillness set apart, asthe world picks its own way, away, uninterested, otherwise engaged, orcasually dismissive.

Mill’s youthful friend and adult antagonist F. D. Maurice similarlyappeals to the perfectionist power of attraction and influence, bywhich character is formed through identification with exemplary fig-ures. “The thought of one person,” he noted in his lectures on casu-istry, delivered the year before Mill’s address at Saint Andrews,

if it is really his, calls forth the thought of another, to resist it, to con-spire with it, or to complete it. Surely it is so with the most illustriousmen and the least illustrious. No great man really does his work byimposing his maxims on his disciples; he evokes their life. Correggiocries after gazing intently on a picture of Raffaelle, “I too am a painter,”not one who will imitate the great Master, but who will work a way forhimself. The teacher who is ever so poor in talent or information, butwho is determined to speak out the convictions he has won, who is will-ing now and then to give some hint of the struggles through which hehas won them,—leads one or another to say, “I too am an I.” The pupilmay become much wiser than his instructor, he may not accept his con-clusions, but he will own, “You awakened me to be myself, for that Ithank you.26

In such matters the rotations are vertiginous. Dorothea Brooke imag-ined that she needed an exemplar to guide her life, someone to leadher into her future and away from a past of inactive helplessness. Butshe discovers instead that she herself is to be that exemplar for others.


Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, vol. 21 of Collected Works, ed. John M. Robson(Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984),254.

26 F. D. Maurice, The Conscience: Lectures on Casuistry, Delivered in the University ofCambridge, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1872), 7–8.

As such, she learns that she has to make herself known to them; andgiven a fairly conventional Victorian distribution of moral obligationsto women, this means that she needs to make herself known as readyto know others: “That simplicity of hers, holding up an ideal for othersin her believing conception of them, was one of the great powers ofher womanhood.”27 Her burden is to allay our skepticism about ourown existence.

I cannot make good in a brief space on my claim that such perfec-tionist dynamics pervasively structure the moral and political thoughtof the period—as in the contests between Mill’s utilitarianism andMaurice’s intuitionism, or in the paradoxes of commodity culture, orin the developments that political liberalism underwent across theperiod. Nor can I develop the intimation, present in the striking con-gruence of Cavell’s writing and Trilling’s, that this distinctly Victo-rian perfectionism has had its more recent continuations in liberal cul-tural criticism (as, say, in Martha Nussbaum’s belief that readingVictorian novels is exemplary for ethical conduct).28 If liberal guilt canbe thought of as downwardly directed sympathy,29 then perfectionismcharacterizes something like its opposite, upwardly directed sympathy,with an attendant range of affects, from admiration to envy to schaden-freude. Instead, by way of closing, I will try to cultivate interest in thefuture development of that claim by glancing down two paths alongwhich such a consideration of perfectionism and helplessness mighttravel.

The first path brings to the fore the various comparisons withdrama that have quietly accumulated during these conjectures andextends them to specify more exactly the work of the novel in enablingsympathy. If Hardy would be one culminating figure in a genealogy ofthe century’s perfectionism, especially of the helplessness to which itattends, another, no doubt, would be Freud—and this begins to


27 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 2000),532.

28 Martha Nussbaum, “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Litera-ture,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1990), 3–53.

29 See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

explain the vaguely psychoanalytic tone not only of my remarks but,more surprisingly, of Oliphant’s. Here are her words again: “a certainsoft despair of any one human creature ever doing good to another—of any influence ever overcoming those habits and moods and pecu-liarities of mind which the observer sees to be more obstinate than lifeitself—a sense that nothing is to be done but to look on, to say per-haps now and then a softening word, to make the best of it practicallyand theoretically.” We seem to be reading on another couch now, orbehind one, as our sympathy and impotence are harmonized in aminor key, and therapeutic hopes decline to looking on and mullingover which softening words to offer and when.

In “Psychopathic Characters on Stage” Freud develops his conceptof identification—a development itself, with appropriate modifica-tions, of the idea of sympathy—through a picture of drama:

The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he isa “poor wretch to whom nothing of importance will happen,” who haslong been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition tostand in his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel andto act and to arrange things according to his own desires—in short, tobe a hero. The playwright and the actor enable him to do this by allow-ing him to identify himself with a hero. They spare him something, too.For the spectator knows quite well that actual heroic conduct would beimpossible for him without pains and sufferings and acute fears, whichwould almost cancel out the enjoyment. He knows, moreover, that hehas only one life.30

The model of drama offers much to our consideration of ourinward lives, emphasizing our uncanny self-difference and the unset-tling autonomy of inward representations, our passiveness beforethem. But imagine for a moment an alternative psychology, modelednot on viewing plays but on reading, in which we did not see ourthoughts but read them. Such a psychology seems to have little of theheuristic value of one based on drama (or, at any rate, a differentvalue), because reading, unlike watching a play, is already so much likethinking: there is too little difference for the analogy to instruct us.


30 “Psychopathic Characters on Stage,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 6 (London:Hogarth, 1981), 305–6.

But the most important thing, for present purposes, is that in novelsthe process of therapeutic conversion or transformation has alreadybegun: in being set unembodied in the past, experience has come tous ready for our sympathy. This fact gives me one way to characterizethe work of the novel as Austen modified it: such novels, Freud mightsay, come to us with the process of working through already under way,with the psychological metabolization of content already begun for us,by the very structure of the genre. The frustration of working throughis that it must happen in time and is slow; the novel proposes toadvance us beyond ourselves in this process.

The second path leads from Richard Simpson’s 1870 review of J. E.Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, a review that firmly places Austen’s writing inthe perfectionist environment I have been describing. “The true hero”in Austen’s novels, writes Simpson, the man

who at last secures the heroine’s hand, is often a man sufficiently herelder to have been her guide and mentor in many of the most difficultcrises of her youth. Miss Austen seems to be saturated with the Platonicidea that the giving and receiving of knowledge, the active formation ofanother’s character, or the more passive growth under another’s guid-ance, is the truest and strongest foundation of love.31

This scenario includes several features crucial to the perfection-ism in which it participates: the inheritance from Plato, whose increas-ing importance in the period derives, in part, from a valuation of thissort of education, where ideals elevate; the pressure perfectionism putson ideas of giving and receiving, being passive and being active; and,above these more particular concerns, the guiding preoccupation withcharacter and its formation, especially through the relations of olderand younger figures, understood as having been together all theirlives, and especially in moments of conversion or crisis. Of course, thesituation in Austen’s novels, as in perfectionism generally, is more com-plex than Simpson represents it. Who forms whom, older or younger,man or woman, for instance, is not always clear. When Henry Crawfordasks advice of Fanny Price, she answers:


31 Richard Simpson, unsigned review of the Memoir, North British Review, April1870, rpt. in Southam, 1:244.

“I advise?—you know very well what is right.”“Yes. When you give me your opinion, I always know what is right.

Your judgement is my rule of right.”“Oh, no! Do not say so. We have all a better guide in ourselves, if

we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” (MP, 341)

We can, as Henry does, create and then defer to an exemplar in orderto escape our own responsibilities. If, in countering that deference,emphasizing the need for an inner attentiveness, a responsiveness tooneself first of all, Fanny seems to turn from the idea of an externalexemplar, she is only preparing the way for the theories of identifica-tion and internalization that Trilling—who quotes appreciatively fromSimpson’s review in closing his own essay on Emma —exemplifies.

In this general way, Austen’s perfectionism invited later, Victoriancritics like Simpson to see in her prose their own perfectionist pre-occupations; her novels were presented as models for writers and assources of sympathetic admiration for readers—as instances, that is, ofperfectionist exemplarity calling reader and writer to cultivate theirbest selves through identification. But Simpson’s review of Austen-Leigh’s memoir also gathers together many of the dominant preoccu-pations of this essay: the cultivation of sympathy through a helplessvision of the past, understood as uncannily present in the mind andheart and as contributing to an understanding, in turn, of individualidentity—where that identity is uncertainly balanced between textual-ity and embodiment.

As she wrote her novels, Simpson remarks, Austen “sat apart onher rocky tower, and watched the poor souls struggling in the wavesbeneath. And her sympathies were not too painfully engaged; for sheknew that it was only an Ariel’s magic tempest, and that no loss of lifewas to follow” (246). Picturing Austen as if she were a spectator at aplay, observing characters at a distance, Simpson presents her as ratio-nally resistant to the extension of her sympathies, aware that the fig-ures below her are only creatures of writerly magic. But, of course, inpicturing her as free from identification with her own fictional charac-ters, Simpson himself identifies her with the fictional character ofanother. While, in the second scene of The Tempest, Miranda sufferswith those she sees suffering, as she puts it, the cries of the marinersknocking “against [her] very heart” (1.2.8–9), Prospero remains apart,


his sympathies unengaged. But while the force of Simpson’s allusionunderscores the tangled nature of such identifications—where Austen,in her indifference to her own characters, is best understood as littledifferent from the characters of another—it also directs our attentionto the objects of that sympathy (or lack of sympathy). For the marinersat whom Prospero and Miranda gaze sail to them out of the rocky seasof the past: like the characters about whom we read in novels, like Cap-tain Wentworth, these sailors inhabit a warring world of memory, onethat Miranda and Prospero apprehend by recollection. Sympathy withthese sailors, like our sympathy with Austen’s, is retrospective. “Canstthou remember / A time before we came unto this cell?” Prospero askshis daughter (1.2.38–39). “Certainly, sir, I can,” she replies (1.2.41).“But how is it,” Prospero asks, surprised, “that this lives in thy mind?”(1.2.48–49). I understand this question as an anticipation of the sortthat Austen’s novels were to pose, its epistemological import derivedfrom a social source: the matters of self-knowledge that Prospero andMiranda debate stem from the experience of sympathy with charactersthey understand as existing in the past. Without possessing the past sym-pathetically within you, Prospero remarks, thou “art ignorant of whatthou art” (1.2.18); without understanding your difference from thatpast, you are in danger of not knowing others.

In trying to capture Austen in her act of greatness, Simpson placesher amid fictional characters from the past, situating them in a shared,uncertain ontological world: he identifies her by identifying her withthem. Simpson thus sustains the skeptical conditions that Austen her-self described in her novels, exploiting the complete, inscribed nature ofher characters with special force in order to secure and amplify oursympathy with them. In discovering her power to do so, Austen helpedthe Victorians remember (remember, no doubt, what they alwaysknew) that the past is something to be read and recalled in suspense—perhaps with despair, perhaps with amusement, perhaps with indigna-tion—like a novel, something with a future even as it is something Iam constrained to endure, helplessly.


Perfectly Helpless: Jane Austen and Perfectionism

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