D. A. Miller, _Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style_

THE LAST ITEM in my Austen binge, and the best, I'd say. A Queer Theory take on the novels, not so much in the sense of tracking down traces of same-sex affiliation (as Terry Castle did back when), but in the sense of elucidating a novelistic discourse that apotheosizes as it conceals...

...a statement that makes almost no sense at all, but Miller's idea is that the historical Austen is not particularly discernible in the novels at all, notwithstanding all those readerly efforts to find the real Jane, as analyzed by Brownstein and Johnson. The real Jane, Miller argues, had next to no actual social capital as an unmarried, aging clergyman's daughter, but her style dissolves-and-transcends her own marginalized subject position and makes her a god: "Like the Unheterosexual, the Spinster too resorts to Style, the utopia of those with almost no place to go" (29).

Miller fastens onto moments that seem ephemeral--the first glimpse the Dashwoods get of Robert Ferrars, a sentence that ends one chapter of Emma and then also begins the next--and opens them up into vistas. "Close reading" hardly seems to do justice to the method--it's more like Geertz's thick description--thick reading? But Miller is better than anyone else I've read at showing how much is going on in the Austen sentence, e.g., its "obey[ing] an overwhelming urge to give correctness a theatrical form."  "Even of a non epigrammatical Austen sentence," he writes, "try normalizing the typical inversion; correct the sentence would remain, but gone would be the acrobat somersault that flaunts this correctness, that supplements grammatical completion with artistic finish" (84).

This helps me understand my relatively low enthusiasm for Eileen Myles or Kathy Acker or Chris Kraus. Their content is bold, urgent, and transgressive enough, certainly. Toujours de l'audace, and so on. More power to them. But their sentences tend to be well-behaved, domesticated little creatures. Austen's content (pace Helena Kelly) tends to stick to the conservative notion that a young woman's most important task is to find a  good husband, true. But her sentences are those of a daredevil. What Milton's Satan is to Paradise Lost, Austen's sentences are to her oeuvre.

Miller's book is short--one hundred and eight pages, counting the footnotes, which you should by no means skip. But it's one of the great books on Austen.