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Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style

D.A. Miller (Goodreads Author)

3.93 · Rating details · 84 Ratings · 7 Reviews

What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer's unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen's style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.

For no Jane Aust ...more

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Paperback, 108 pages

Published August 28th 2005 by Princeton University Press (first published 2003)

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Aug 10, 2011 Sherwood Smith added it

Shelves: discussing-fiction, history-napoleonic

This is a very short book, extremely well written, dense with fascinating thought. Disquieting thought, even, as I find myself wanting to explain, excuse, make everything nice when he discusses the comfortable het world’s assumptions about Austen's books from a non-het POV. Like his analysis of the Famous First Sentence in P&P.

Like this bit Miller brings up: (When Mr. Knightley pronounces Frank Churckill’s script “like a woman’s writing” even the women he is addressing, Emma and Mrs. Weston This is a very short book, extremely well written, dense with fascinating thought. Disquieting thought, even, as I find myself wanting to explain, excuse, make everything nice when he discusses the comfortable het world’s assumptions about Austen's books from a non-het POV. Like his analysis of the Famous First Sentence in P&P.

Like this bit Miller brings up: (When Mr. Knightley pronounces Frank Churckill’s script “like a woman’s writing” even the women he is addressing, Emma and Mrs. Weston, leap to vindicate it against what they consider a “base aspersion.”

Whoa. We don't want Frank being thought one of "those" kind of men, do we!

Miller opens with a description of those who discover Austen at a very early age. Then comes this provocative statement:

Yet sooner or later, this experience of reading Jane Austen found itself contradicted--felt itself disabled--by the quite different experience of being read reading her. If the one moment, private and elective, united us all in common ecstacy, the other, public and compulsory, brought alienation into our midst, the mutual alienation of “girls and “boys.” For eventually--whether the “event” followed on our raptures, or occurred even before they had commenced (with trauma, who can be certain of sequence?)--popular opinion let us know that what should have sundered us from all identifying labels had in fact glued onto us one in particular: in short, that what we took for Style, everyone else took for Woman.

And, later on, But the same discovery that, sometimes even despite herself, made a good girl good, made the boy all wrong. Plied with a Style whose unknown strength went straight to his head, he had fancied himself conquering the world with his swank Excalibur; now he woke to sobering sounds of derision and found that, during his intoxication, just as Lydia Bennet had done to another would-be soldier in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had put him in a dress.

Gender politics and Austen, eh? I don’t know that men--whether gay or straight--now get castigated for a taste in Austen the way Miller describes, but his following observations about the gay man reading Austen and finding all the jabs and prickles of the het world’s view of Austen’s place in literature jabbing him back into his closet make one take a good hard look not just at Austen but at the experience of reading, and how ‘one is being read.’

Here’s the opening blurb on the back of the book:

“What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer’s unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen’s style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is.

That encapsulates the failure of Millar's central point, which (I think, anyway) overlooks the rational detachment of late Enlightenment writers. Austen and her family were not romantics, they did not succumb to effusions of emotion. Irony and wit kept a quill's distance from unpalatable subjects, but that was balanced by her bewitching sympathy for women, and her insight into character.

I don't see any sign in any of her works that she was ashamed of her spinsterhood. On the contrary, there is just the smallest sign of evidence in the later books, and in the few letters that Cassandra left us, that she may well (at least later in her life) have considered spinsterhood a lucky escape, in particular in phrases like her comment about her sister in law (pregnant yet again), "Poor animal." She certainly saw plenty of the mortality of childbirth, and the constant fatigue and worry of motherhood, and how there was basically no escape if you were married.

That aside, Millar's book is intelligent and thought-provoking, which far too many books about Austen aren't. ...more

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Mar 23, 2009 Jee Koh rated it it was amazing

Miller's book-length essay is a delightful and thought-provoking read. Its thesis is that the heart of Austen's style lies in "a failed, or refused, but in any case shameful relation to the conjugal imperative." To obliterate the signs of a shameful spinsterhood, she adopts a style that polishes all human particularities from the narrator's voice, and achieves a kind of impersonal, ironic, universal objectivity. But the escape into style, Miller contends, will still leave traces of the personal. Miller's book-length essay is a delightful and thought-provoking read. Its thesis is that the heart of Austen's style lies in "a failed, or refused, but in any case shameful relation to the conjugal imperative." To obliterate the signs of a shameful spinsterhood, she adopts a style that polishes all human particularities from the narrator's voice, and achieves a kind of impersonal, ironic, universal objectivity. But the escape into style, Miller contends, will still leave traces of the personal.

The first part of the essay, "Secret Love," supports the thesis by reading allegorically an episode from Sense and Sensibility. Miller acknowledges that allegory is rare in Austen, but argues persuasively for the usefulness of such a reading of the Dashwoods' visit to Gray's, the London jewelry shop, where they see Robert Ferrars selecting a toothpick case. Jewelry, pervasive in Austen, is always either given by a relative or lover, in token of union through marriage or common blood. The jeweled case, so fussily selected by the "unheterosexual" Ferrars, does not signify any attachment to marriage or family; it is style for style's sake. The spinster, like the homosexual, does not possess social signification of the sort granted to married men and women. Or as Miller puts it:

Behind the glory of style's willed evacuation of substance lies the ignominy of a subject's hopelessly insufficient social realization, just as behind style's ahistorical impersonality lies the historical impasse of someone whose social representation doubles for social humiliation.

Miller points out that the realism of Austen's works allows no one like Jane Austen to appear in them. There are happy wives and pathetic old maids, but there are no successfully unmarried woman. The second part of the essay "No One Is Alone" argues that Austen's style presupposes and enforces its author's own "under-representability." It looks at the insufficient Neuter of a narrator in Northanger Abbey, and then the accomplished Neuter in Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. In the mature novels, the heroines employ their wit, or style, to court men's attention, and their fall, accompanied by self-lacerations about their excessive wit, is rewarded by getting the man they want, as well as the marriage state, and estate; they become recognized by society as Persons. The plot is saved from cynicism by the heroines' naivete and good faith.

"Austen Style not only knew whereof it spoke, but also spoke without any apparent experiential implication in such knowledge," writes Miller. It is a paradox of divine omniscience, but it is also a paradox of divine melancholy, in which "an impersonal deity unceasingly contemplates the Person that is its own absolutely foregone possibility." In the third and final part of the essay, Miller expands on this divine melancholy by examining the free indirect style in Emma. He finds the eponymous character the most fully realized in Austen's oeuvre. The chapter "Broken Art" also judges Persuasion a failure of Style as constituted in the earlier books, since, there, Style becomes personifiable, idiosyncratic, instead of objective. Sanditon, written when Austen was dying, is read as a crumbling of the Style when wit deteriorates into mere wordplay and alliteration.

Emma allows us to envision the utopia of a double perfection, the perfection of Style matched by that of Person; Sanditon reaches towards the perhaps more feasible state of their double, their simultaneous annihilation.

...more

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Jun 17, 2015 Nikolina Hatton rated it it was amazing

I think it's possible to give a book five stars without necessarily agreeing with all of its conclusions/premises. Some might see this as an insensitive portrayal of Austen-the-spinster-narrator; however, I think there is more to the essay than that, and if you read it, you'll see why. Intriguing, provocative, and painfully well-written, you can tell that "Style" is an object close to Miller's heart, that he has sensed it in Austen, and this essay is his desperate attempt to comprehend it. (Espe ...more

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Aug 30, 2007 Nina rated it liked it

Shelves: regency

I learned a lot about D. A. Miller and a little about Austen's work.

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Sep 24, 2009 michelle rated it it was ok

Shelves: biased-western-canon

Many of Miller's claims were sound to me, but I had some issues with his habit of relating Jane Austen's authorial voice with her biographical position as an unmarried woman.

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Mar 15, 2008 Éowyn rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction

Yes, still as turgid and self satisfied as when I previously waded through this.

Must actually get rid of it this time and remind self not to re-read things you have rated two stars...

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Jan 03, 2016 Devoney Looser rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-i-ve-reviewed-in-print-and-on

I've had the pleasure of reviewing this book: Looser, Devoney. Rev. of Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style, by D. A. Miller. JASNA News 20.2 (2004): 16–17. Print.

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