2. You Give Love a Bad Name

While critics have in recent years noted both the queerness of the world spaces in Austen and the personages who inhabit those spaces, perhaps most famously Eva Kosofsky Sedgewick in her reading of Elinor and Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as engaged in a sisterly, homoerotic passion and D. A. Miller’s reflections on the queer no-room-for-her–ness of her style, queerness, as Spade (among many others) notes, is not coeval with gender.1 To use Heather Love’s definitions to make this point—although one could use many other differing definitions—“queer is associated primarily with nonnormative desires and sexual practices” whereas “transgender,” for example, is associated primarily with “nonnormative gender identifications and embodiments.”2 Just as importantly, as Spade argues, mainstream LGBTQ+ agendas tend to trend toward legal reforms that embrace the existing system and thereby exclude vulnerable transgender, intersex, and nonbinary populations that gain nothing from, say, the legalization of gay marriage, because marriage itself is a statist, necropolitical carceral institution that further entrenches cisheteropatriarchal binarism and generative, coincident, consequent discrimination, and, for some people, multimarginalization. Spade’s analysis in many ways follows from Foucault’s archeological historical excavation of the carceral state that illustrates how power is the province of the massive, displaced, delocalized, disseminated discursive effects that operate both inside and outside the law (and thereby define the law); therefore, power’s reform is not possible through legal or social redress. Because what Spade calls rights-based LGBTQ+ movements seek inclusive reformation inside the very system that exercises the dispossessive exclusionary means that define that system, Spade contends that such movements have been co-opted by the very system they would oppose, in the process becoming more discursive-materialist strands of power that are used to render nonheteronormative genders and lived existence impossible. Spade, quel surprise!, pushes this Foucauldian analysis to the point of abolition.

Austen’s so-called juvenilia cue us as to why she thinks the overly determined, deterministic binarism inherent in the gendered politics Spade excoriates should fail, why she wants it to fall. Let’s consider the titular, telling misspelling of her early novella, Love and Freindship (1790), which looks, in its easy, sweepingly generic terms to bespeak a binary of everyday familiarity wherein friendship betokens mutual bonds of amiable camaraderie while the simpatico feelings of love encompass something more intangible, sensual, and sexual—the unknown, and unknowable, let’s say, mysteries of attraction.3 Although Park Honan relates that Austen was a terrible speller (and her letters and the copy text of Sanditon certainly bear this out, especially regarding her refusal that “i” comes before “e” except after “c,” an indication that it is not, importantly, a mere matter of griffonage), the obvious conspicuity of the flipped “i” and “e” throughout her work betray an orthographic intentionality not accounted for by the vagaries of an alphabetical inability, misapplication, or confusion. Certainly spelling was fluid at the time, but the care of the change is perhaps also evidenced by the fact that so many who write on Austen unconsciously switch the vowels to what they think must be correctly intended.4 Is it too much to say that this misspelling, whether intentional or no, educes why Austen’s novels hunker down in states of long indecision—not just to suspensefully suspend the reader’s pleasures in witnessing true love fulfilled, wherein so many contretemps are thrown up to avoid the completion of married union, but as a collywobbles in Austen Voice itself that it can’t help but walk widdershins in order to arrive at noon to (never) officiate a marriage it is dubious about consecrating?

Like the title Love and Freindship, with its ostensible commonplace binaristic dialecticism, the novels have various shields they use to buffer their true purpose—in this case, the desire for, if not nonbinary life proper, then at least the prospect of nonbinary life, or to think one’s relation to nonbinary, or to think a life lived outside a social world conditioned on marriage that, as Austen sees it, reviles love (here we might think of Pride and Prejudice’s Charlotte’s—another comic character seemingly made for our dismissal who we should take seriously—hateful encomium on how marriage, however charmingly it might begin, curls into lovelessness: “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar before-hand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always contrive to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards”).5 Again, whether intentional or no, we can see, in the flipping of the letters “i” and “e,” Austen’s game given away. “Friend” derives from freonde in Old High German, West Saxon, and Old English. From this etymology, one meaning is “love” or “lover.” So Austen’s actual title of Love and Freindship, as signaled by this vowel swap, is not a binary of any sort but Love and Love(r). Freindship’s misspelling notifies us of its true, (un)designed meaning here, love, which is also to say that friendship means love—or should and will mean that if society can correctly be rearranged like freindship’s frenzied letters. Love is lacking in both friendship and in love as long as love lacks freindship, which it does as signaled by the misspelling to show that, as yet, friendship is not in love, not in love with love, we might say.

Friend’s opposite, etymologically, plays here as well, because standing across from friend is fiend, from the parallel, not quite homographic word feonde, which has a similar etymological history as freonde. Not just Love and Lover, then, but Love and Enemy, Lover and Enemy, of which the latter two reintroduce a binaristic logic that Love would reject in its rejection of the fiend for the love of the freind that is true love instead. But while it is difficult to ascertain who in the novella is the friend, the lover, and the enemy, or, indeed, if they are all the same thing, that is precisely the point because Austen wants to impress on us how, within the cisheteropatriarchal social world she moves in, this binaristic logic holds dominating sway even though it is a sociocultural invention rather than a metaphysical endowment—something universally, transcendentally acknowledged. Love, which needs freindship—the very food of love, to repurpose Darcy’s statement about poetry (“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love”)—in order to be love, remains loveless because friendship is the cloak in which the fiend disguises himself and appears (49). The friendliness of the fiend immediately will call to mind the loveless scheming of Mr. Wickham and Mr. Willoughby (in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, respectively) as lovers whose dalliances betray false friendship as fiendship that the remainder of each novel can only allay with the peekaboo possibilities of real freindship, “real” love, in Elizabeth’s, Elinor’s, Marianne’s, Emma’s, and Anne’s conclusive selections.

Nonbinaristic love and freindship abolish the binary; love and friendship uphold it. The solution to resolve the pharmakon of love and friendship, according to Love and Freindship, is to “run mad,” which means to remain free if one can from the social structures that shape love and friendship into a binaristic carceral regulative ideal. If the mishegoss of Love and Freindship’s plot belies what we consider coherence and rationality, as does all of Austen’s juvenilia in one way or another, the novella nonetheless provides an anvil of logic on which sense is forged in the run-mad world Austen wants. This appears in the form of Sophia, a name, let us recall, that means “wisdom” in Greek, and finds personation here in one of Austen’s other Mr. Woodhouse philosophers whom we often move easily to ignore as an ironized opposite-day version of insight and enlightenment, of sophistry rather than sophistication. Sophia’s advice to Laura as she lies dying, “run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint,” hardly sounds like the prudential advice or acumen of an Enlightenment philosophe like Diderot or Voltaire (133). Yet for all its seeming corybantic flummery, such advice matches the overall thrust of the architectural ossature of her novel’s plots and thematics. Rather than give into the so-called feminine traits of fainting that the novella ruthlessly satirizes, being insensibly on the heel, on the wheel, fleet of foot, running mad, which is to be sensible, flees the carceral logics of gender and sexual propriety. It is perhaps to be what Susan Stryker says of her own transness, in her performative punk rock, slap-back, slap-down reading of another famous side-along text to Austen, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “groundless and boundless movement.”6

Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing supplies a firmer definitional historical grounding of Sophia’s run-mad subjunctive, which is worth reaching for because Love and Freindship is deeply invested in the gender blurriness of Shakespeare, even exploiting it as Gustavus and Philander in their, frankly run-mad, staging of Macbeth in the novella, play several male and female characters simultaneously—they are, in short, something of a Kippfiguren, both and neither male and female at once. Augustus and Edward are, meanwhile, frank in their homosexuality. An early exchange in Much Ado about Nothing:

Beatrice will never run mad because to run mad, as its meaning is unraveled here, means to desist from the marriage ideal of society her suitor, in this case Benedick, are urging her toward. She will, that is, ultimately accede to this female/male binaristic state; she will ultimately accede to the, let’s just say it, cisheteropatriarchal cultural, if not biopolitical, hegemony signaled by Benedick’s very phallic name: good penis. As such, enter, from a different wing on this amalgam stage, Sophia, whose wisdom runs riot over such wayward winding plans and tells her dear friend that (to follow Star Trek) she need not be assimilated, that resistance is not futile, no need to consent to be a friend, in other words. Follow, even—if she dares, if she likes—the model of gender switching of Gustavus and Philander, and even find same-sex lovers like Augustus and Edward do. However, Sophia’s advice remains a bit incomplete as to the practicalities of how one is to run mad. How, after all, does one run mad in the hangover of the age of the Enlightenment, which so privileges the construction of the subject alongside its binaristic opposite, reason? One answer is, as we’ve seen, freindship in and as love; the other is that deceit is necessary.

We may think of Austen as genteel, witty, and inventive, but her whole juvenilia is awash in sororicide, fratricide, etc. (“I am now going to murder my sister” is the startling provident fallen sparrow of one early story [223]). She wants this other world that the juvenilia envision, and it turns on this notion of love and freindship. Let us recall Foucault, who asserts of identity, “if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful.” Flipping and re-spelling—dis-spelling, really—Foucault’s script, Austen theorizes freindship as more than identity, as collectivity and communitarian care for the death of the family that insists marriageability and bio(necro)politics are always the order of the day. In this regard, Austen’s “History of England” is a history of sexuality, as Austen notes in her sly remark about King James I that Peter Sabor draws our attention to: “his Majesty was of that amiable disposition which inclines to Freindships, and in such points was possessed of a keener penetration in Discovering merit than many other people” (287). As David Hume says in his own History of England, it was well known at court that what was needed to sway the queer King James’s favor at court were attractive young men. Very amiable he was indeed! What would it mean to track the word “amiable” in Austen if we understand it the way Austen does here? How amiable was Mr. Wickham? And what does it mean that Darcy was “truly amiable”? The play here on penetration as anal sex recalls us to the idea not of identity but to an abolitionist radicality of gender and sexuality—or, as Austen verbalizes it here, “Freindship.” Freindship, that is, discovers merit in nonnormative stylings that do not comport with the court—the court of the law, the court of public opinion—because the real merit lies outside such courts. Freindship courts its suitor, love, we might say, for reasons other than binaristic anthrogenesis, to use Sophie Lewis’s word.7 Freindship is the real friendship that makes freindship but also moves beyond identitarian groundings in the public decrees of the social and the state. Love and freindship, then. And, as we’ll see, what we must call honest deceit.