5. The Son-to-Come

Not that there are not sons abound in Austen’s novels, but there are brotherless and estateless daughters amore, and, in other families that Austen focuses on besides those that are brotherless and estateless, the daughters are fostered out to families with a patrilineal line wherein the son is he who cannot, and will in fact not, inherit, and is the one the fostered daughter will marry. Think Edward Ferrars, disinherited in Sense and Sensibility (1811), who marries Elinor Dashwood, left at the mercy of her half-brother John’s mercilessness. John himself gained Elinor’s uncle’s money that was passed on to his and Elinor’s father but who died early, thus instantaneously prompting John’s receipt of the estate. Or think of Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814), whose second-son status guarantees that his wastrel elder brother, Tom, will assume the mantle of family patriarch while Edmund receives ecclesiastical ordination as a clergyman (although admittedly he himself desires this because it suits his filioreligious piety) and weds Fanny, who never stood a chance to inherit what was never there to inherit in her impoverished family to begin with, and who, as the daughter of her particular father with no time for daughters, would not have done so even if there were. Of course, this is not to say that daughters could not inherit during the Georgian and Regency eras; Lady Catherine derives her fortune from her father’s fee simple will, which provisions that he can deed his estate to anyone, who may then deed it to whomsoever.

Just as there is never an Austen in Austen’s novels, there is also never a son who inherits in the family of the heroine daughters; there is only the daughter, who does not inherit and is consequently adrift in the sea of marriageable hopefuls. Historically, this is an oddity—having no son; Austen’s own mother, to choose a psychobiographic example no less historical for all that, produced eight children, and three of her sons—Edward, Frank, and Charles—combined with their wives to field a fearsome twenty-five children collectively, some of whom were sons.

In Austen’s fictive world, this historical oddness is accentuated and highlighted as odd in that Mr. Bennet’s whole problem, besides disturbances to his bookwormish tranquility, is the entail, which arrives so famously, hilariously, and pompously personified in the personage of blatherskite Mr. Collins. Mr. Bennet, never a savvy saver of money, had been counting, instead of coin, on the entail ensuring his own offspring’s lineal succession of the estate that would keep it in the family for generations (the fee tail will have been put into effect by Mr. Bennet’s father or even grandfather): “five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia’s birth, had been certain that he would” (340). Here we have to admire “successively,” since, surely, it is one of Austen’s grander and lesser-noticed ironic triumphs. For with each succession, each daughter, who successively arrives, the triumphalism of the succession itself is threatened. No less, “was” ironically harnesses a past indexical grammar to the linker “to” to indicate, to mean, a futurity that its very pastness prevents, and indeed guarantees will never occur even while dashing any hopes in the present during which this successive sequential letdown is being uttered. For it is now known that no son was ever, or is, or ever will be, to come. The pastness of “was” is the future. The pastness of was is, now, right now, the future. Which is, nonetheless, not to say that the son does not exist even if he is never born. Daughter by daughter by daughter by daughter by daughter, the son’s existence is denied even as this very natal erasure brings the son so palpably to revenantal life, given that his existent nonexistence still governs the entail over which he is not alive to be master (just as it would have done before Mr. Bennet’s own existence, which was only ever imagined by the original terms of the entail). The ghostly prolepsis of the promised son-to-come that knows it will never come still haunts the novel in a to-come-ness that is never-to-come. In never coming, it arrives; it comes as the imaginary child through which it imagines the future only to, at the same time, announce that that future can, will, never be, yet nevertheless is in this cisheteropatriarchal hauntology.

And we know this—to put perhaps too an indelicate and too fine a point on it—because the fact that the son was, at some point in the past, to come indicates that Mr. Bennet continued to come for some time to no filial effect. Securing the heteropatriarchal lineage and succession remains paramount, and procreative attempts go on despite what is Mr. Bennet’s virulent antipathy to Mrs. Bennet, and even to the notion, for him, when we get no-nonsensically down to it, of family in general. The continuance of male power and prerogative, the continuance of society as it is, is so powerful as to even trump his distaste and indifference—another of Austen’s powerful ironies—since while surely Mr. Bennet is happier not caring, just as surely apathy precludes happiness, so the answer to why he persists in his procreative pursuits must be this patriarchal imperative signified by the hauntology of the hoped-for son. Unlike in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which Victor did not have to Billie Jean the creature and tell him that the kid was not his son, Mr. Bennet is happily indifferent as to having a son but even more so a son-to-come; he is happy, that is, in his apathy, to abandon any notion of gender entail.

Consider, then, the fact that not only are Austen’s main characters never sons, but they also never have sons, or daughters neither, or children of any sort—and here is the coup d’état against what Edelman calls reproductive futurism. If marriage resolutions are meant to preserve the patrilineal line through a biopolitics that proffers its daughters as nothing more than anthrogestators and by this means society itself, then the novels present a curious way of accomplishing those goals insofar as they never attain the prized success that drives them. Presumably Darcy and Elizabeth will have children, as will Bingley and Jane and Elinor and Edward, and so on. That there are never any sons argues that for all of the intensity of Austen’s piled-up cultural details, which so vividly and finely delineate the supposed historical reality of country gentry life during the Regency, Austen is quite a different kind of ahistorical historicist. She is a writer whose futurism—the implication of every novel is proleptic: they go on, and then they end, weirdly, in media res as it were, not beholden to a past bogged down by what she sees in the imprisoning everyday.

It is in this sense, then, that Austen ostensibly coheres with reality because the world she depicts is one of cisheteropatriarchal binarism, so it also realistically expresses the wish of that time that transgender and nonbinary people not exist, which has the effect of making this a no-country for people whom it views as no-people. Yet contrarily, by acknowledging that they do indeed exist, Austen doubles down on her ahistoricist historicism by refusing nonbinary occultation. Instead, she sketches transgender and nonbinary in the real of a different world in which that transphobic, antinonbinary wish does not operate. Indeed, for Austen, the son-to-come is not a story that buys into the repressive hypothesis Foucault shatters: that so-called nonnormative sexualities and genders were invisibilized, shunned, disparaged, denied, kept offstage. Austen shows, thinks, theorizes, and desires transition right out in the open (secret) if we only know where and how to look.

It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged that transition stands in the background throughout Austen’s novels, so glimmeringly and so occluded—just like queerness, as in her anal sex joke in Mansfield Park—that it is ostentatiously so, and so correspondingly foregrounds this backgrounded, hidden concern.1

In the following instance in Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s choices do not rely solely on the irony she is famed for; it takes, rather, the dissimulative form of the joke that disguises its true intentions only so as to deny them, as with Mr. Woodhouse’s cardless card tricks. Look at Lydia, heedless, impractical, empty-headed, boy-crazy Lydia, whose good-for-nothing character leads her family off the prim-and-proper religious prude path, sending them careening into the gutter of social shame and disgrace.

But Lydia’s carelessness might look more like carefreeness when carefully considered rather than casually dismissed as a preview of her later wayward lifestyle. When Elizabeth and Jane unexpectedly meet up with Lydia and Kitty, “who meant to treat them” (242), at an inn near Hertfordshire on their way home from London, Austen blazons the scene with testaments to Lydia’s sprezzatura: her announcement of a frivolous purchase of an unwanted bonnet (“I do not think it is very pretty; but I thought I might as well buy it as not” [242]); her suggestion that the bandbox that holds the bonnet is a more worthy possession (“I am glad I bought my bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another bandbox” [244]); the order of a cold meat and cucumber salad luncheon lanspresado Lydia is too broke to pay for (broke as a joke); the gaiety with which she lauds herself over all of these, the novel wants us to say, dubious expenditures despite her spondulix dearth and supposed status as a stumer. Lydia’s flourishing these dissipations is meant to sign that her cup of asininity truly runneth over. It is as if, like the hollow toothpick case that encapsulates the closeted queerness of the fronted louche Robert Ferrars in Miller’s reading, the emptiness of the bandbox mirrors Lydia’s own empty-headedness and moral turpitude.

Yet her next offhand relation of hilarious high jinks reveals that the emptiness inside the bandbox might be more refulgent than Robert’s crass capitalist yearnings for the worthless jewels that invest him with personal, self-indulgent self-worth. The bonnet, we would say, possesses value in its adjacency to the bandbox that would contain it, not at all meretricious. For Lydia, the bonnet, ugly as it is, is good only for being cut up and rewoven into something new. Hidden inside the bandbox to protect its value, the bonnet, when removed, brought into the open, is judged as valueless except as material for trans/formation/trans/figuration. The bandbox that hides the hat, on the other hand, has value on its own after it is no longer required to bear the burden of being the body that holds what it is not. It needs no transformation once the bonnet is removed because it has now become what it is on its own; it has (not) transitioned into what it wants to be. As such, the bandbox, what has value, is actually what is inside, where value is contained, the bandbox. The bandbox, what is outside, shelters itself in its own inside, knows and protects and creates its own value; it is, as we say in that common parlance that declares someone A-OK in our estimation, itself both inside and out: freindship’s freedom and creativity. Just as importantly, so is the bonnet itself, in that it takes its meaning from being outside the bandbox—which is only to say its syntony with itself, as it is an object that must transition into itself once it is outside of its delusive exterior. Lydia even announces its further transformation in that she will alter it once she arrives home. The bonnet and bandbox ultimately exemplify not something about inside/outside logics, because both the bonnet and the bandbox are what they are on the outside-of-the-outside of the binaristic inside–outside cul-de-sac; they are an expressive non sequitur of (non)nonbinary, nonadditive logic about how the freedom to change sex and gender is what is important, what is essential. If nonbinary seems to be entrapped inside a binaristic logic, then the fact that the bandbox (and bonnet) is both its outside and inside, and neither, emboldens nonbinaristic logic in the very se(a)ems of the sutured carceral logic it unsutures; it ravels its unraveling.

If we find such a reading dubitable, then the transgender joke that shares the contours of the deconstructive, nonbinary bandbox that Lydia relates immediately after this confession to her sisters surely authorizes it. Chamberlayne, a passingly mentioned minor servant character, seems of not much account in the novel. In reality, the minor characters in Austen are indispensable to Austen Style’s functionality. (Think, for example, of the ever-mentioned, perpetually busy coachman, James, whom Mr. Woodhouse worries over, and who allows for the great evil, travel from Hartfield, yet never himself arrives on the page.) Consider how foregrounded this background is as retold in Lydia’s glib loquacity:

We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman’s clothes, on purpose to pass for a lady,—only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Col. and Mrs. Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny, and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they did not know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs. Forster. I thought I should have died. And that made the men suspect something, and then they soon found what was the matter. (245)

Cross-dressing is an early exampling of gender fluidity, and is here evidently meant to function as funny because it falls outside the heterosexual norms of acceptable and anticipated behavior. Let us notice, first, though, that Chamberlayne is, within the narrative terms of this recount, not actually present here. (Like James, he never manifests in situ—just like Austen herself!) His thoughts and feelings on the matter are omitted in Lydia’s giddy recollection at this, as the narrator tells us, example of “good jokes” (245). Chamberlayne’s absence is problematic in that we would expect a serving chaperone to withstand this cross-dressing with ill humor and perhaps even humiliation and shame—the usual result of such gender-bending jokes. While it would seem unlikely that Lydia would notice or care one way or another, that Chamberlayne’s humiliation and shame are not mentioned stands in relief to such presumption. It is not, despite Chamberlayne’s narrative, affective erasure, a scene of subjection; no sense of humiliation or shame brims forth here.

If anything, it is a scene of camaraderie in which cross-dressing and gender fluidity are not laughed at but laughed with as, importantly, something au natural—but not biologically deterministic. After all, “how well he looked!” At first blush, it would seem to be about fooling around—that is, making Denny, Wickham, and the innumerable other men who enter look foolish via this cross-dressing prank. The joke is obvious enough: men do not recognize a man dressed as a woman. However, the point is both oh so and not so obvious: the fact that they do not recognize him perhaps also (w)rings with the idea that they cannot recognize him because the supposed biological boundary separating men from women elides itself when put to the social test. It would seem to signal that men can transition into being women, thereby rejecting, that is, the idea that some men and women are born one way, with an apparently natally bestowed gender, something that is inside, or outside, or true to them—just like the bandbox when we initially meet it before it becomes/is transitively nonbinary. No one is appalled; nor do they laugh at him/her/they. Instead, they laugh at themselves for being unable to not recognize what is staring them in the face, themselves, a man, just as we, the readers, are meant to do, because what is staring us in the face are the nonbinary, transgender, and gender-fluid possibilities in Austen. The joke is on us. But the joke is not that a man looks like a woman but that men can become women or nonbinary and vice versa, the background foregrounded. The inside can be the outside, and vice versa or both and neither, as long as transitional freedom is in the offing, thereby scrambling the solidity of our beliefs about biological and social deterministic codification. Like the bandbox and the bonnet, Chamberlayne, or any character, can transition into a new gender that is that person inside and out or neither or not at all—something multiplicative and nonbinary in its transplicitiveness. And there is nothing funny about that at all.

It is telling, then, the language used here at the moment of discovery. Wickham and the others eventually found out “what was the matter.” In a manner of speaking, the matter here that they discover is Chamberlayne’s gender expressed in the biological sense of the time: the matter of his penis. But while the penis is the matter biologically, it is not the matter in terms of the pejorative colloquial expression “something’s the matter.” It does not trouble them; no judgment arises. What’s the matter here? Nothing’s the matter. This isn’t a palimpsest in Austen World or even, really, an open secret like Robert’s toothpick case, which encrypts a certain closetedness that it paradoxically discloses and displays. It is an expression of transition and nonbinary possibility in an Austen World that is at first seemingly binaristic in its presentation.