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• W2927207910 abstract "“A LOW BUT VERY FEELING TONE”: THE LESBIAN CONTINUUM AND POWER RELATIONS IN JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA TIFFA N Y F. P O T T E R Queen’s University A drienne Rich’s concept of the lesbian continuum is a theory which, con­ sidering its obvious applicability, has not been used frequently enough in the analysis of women’s relationships in literature. With the exception ofthe re­ cent publication of the diaries of Anne Lister,1nineteenth-century literature and most modern literary criticism have held firmly to the taboo against the acknowledgement of the existence of lesbianism and its representation in writing by women. Jane Austen’s Emma, for example, presents a wide array of relationships that fall into Rich’s lesbian continuum, including at least two that consistently use the discourse of lesbianism as it is revealed in the decoded diaries of Lister. The obviously sexual tone of Emma’s descrip­ tions of and relationship with Harriet Smith has been duly noted (although rarely discussed in any way that takes seriously the possibility of a lesbian attraction in a work by Jane Austen), but Emma’s clearly powerful and confusing attraction to Jane Fairfax has generally been ignored. To apply Rich’s theory, however, is not necessarily to suggest that a character must be read as a genitally sexual lesbian, but rather to acknowledge that her relationships with women fall into the “range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with other women” (Rich 648). Using Rich’s definition, it becomes clear that Austen constructs a clear current of homoeroticism through Emma’s relationships with Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax.2 This in itself is important to a complete reading of the text, but warranting equally full discussion is the larger socio-political and sexual significance ofthe women’s relationships in the novel. Whether inten­ tionally or not, Emma is asubversivetext: it offers to the reader aperception of a lesbian continuum and the displacement of the masculinist hegemony that is the result of what Rich terms the “direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women” (649). In the end, of course, it is possible that this subversion falls to what Judith Butler sees as the ultimate failure of much resistance: that it “becomes a futile gesture, entertained only in a derealized aesthetic mode which can never be translated into other cultural 187 practices” (78). However, that the lesbian subtext exists at all, and that this suggests the possibility of independent female sexuality and its inherent displacement of patriarchal heterosexist control of women’s bodies, minds, emotions, and attachments, is a critically underanalyzed issue. Few critics have even begun to consider the question of Emma’s rela­ tionships with women. Marvin Mudrick’s famous comment acknowledges Emma’s attraction to women, but the sense of disgust in his response pre­ cludes any further discussion of the issue (203). More recent critics, how­ ever, have scarcely been more open. Ruth Perry actually uses the phrase “compulsory heterosexuality” in her essay (198), but also refers to Emma’s relationships as “misguided and failed” (188) and dedicates only a few para­ graphs to the consideration of any element of women’s relationships outside of expected social positioning; never does she attempt to place the women’s relationships in any type of larger scheme. Alex Page’s essay does address Emma’s sexuality and the novel’s signals ofhomoeroticism, but reads Emma to be experiencing an androgynous stage in her life that is “not unusual for female teenagers in a patriarchal society to pass through” (563). This, of course, is exactly the reading ofabnormality and immaturity in women’srela­ tionships as merely a step toward heterosexuality that Rich protests against. Most distressing, however, is the type of criticism typified by Bruce Stovel’s assertion that the novel presents Emma “as most women, ifnot everywoman, in her movement from having a best friend in another young woman to find­ ing that friend in her husband” (67). Such criticism entirely misses the potential for irony in such statements as “Near the..." @default.
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• W2927207910 title "“A Low but Very Feeling Tone”: The Lesbian Continuum and Power Relations in Jane Austen’s Emma" @default.
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• W2927207910 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.1994.0034" @default.
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