3. Lady Satan: The Mistress of Deceit

In Lady Susan (1794), Lady Susan is Jane Austen’s favorite person. Happily energetic in her ostensible languor, Lady Susan is actually tough-minded and agile in her social acuity and abilities; she knows how to read the room (or no room, as it were, for her), as we say, and truly embodies the label her sister-in-law, Mrs. Vernon, accurately and angrily applies to her: the “Mistress of Deceit.”1 Let us recall Miller’s assertion that Austen appears nowhere in her fiction because there is no artistic, liberated, financially successful, unmarried woman residing therein (Austen herself was of course not a financial success—though might we say she was artistically successful?). Does Lady Susan resist this definitional axiom? And if that axiom is not definitionally axiomatic for Austen’s fiction, then, well, what then? For Lady Susan is, although engaged in various flirtations, indubitably liberated, single, unmarried for the moment. But can we go so far as to call her artistic like Austen is artistic? Perhaps. She is certainly Austen’s closest analog in that she throws away the standard female accomplishments of the time precisely because, according to her, those timely accomplishments amount to “throwing time away” (13). “To be Mistress of French, Italian, & German, Music, Singing, Drawing, &c.,” she tells us, “will gain a Woman some applause, but will not add one Lover to her list. Grace & Manner, after all, are of the greatest importance” (13). Better to be the mistress of deceit in full, dexterous possession of the conjoined attainments “Grace & Manner.” But what is this Grace & Manner? It turns out grace&manner, for Lady Susan, are precisely the dissimulations of deceit—or, to translate the hendiadys Lady Susan lauds, grace&manner are aesthetic not just in the sense of physical comportment and propriety but also in the sense that Lady Susan is an artist writing her own fiction about herself, her pleasures, and those of others, and so writing her self, as it were, Foucault’s creativity and innovation. It is not for nothing that Lady Susan is an epistolary novel whose titular appellation declares it is the formation of the personage of its title in the body of her writing that is both this book and the self she has written into existence. Her deceit takes the form of self making and self identifying, and this is why she never identifies with anyone else in the novel; she is for freindship—for creativity of, and pleasure in, the self, not cross-identification as self-sameness with any other. Her daughter, Frederica, is, in contrast, “a stupid girl,” because she adheres to the conventional norms of society that Lady Susan dismisses with such casual, wanton haughtiness (13). Frederica is not going to attract any lovers by learning the mellifluous cadences of French, of all horrors, or even the romantic dolce stil (to borrow Dante’s vulgate terminology) of Italian!

While it is easy to think of Austen’s works as one long prothalamion, Lady Susan’s sneering contempt for marriage in this early fiction refuses to harmonize with this ubiquitous cliché. Like the social mores that proper-lady Lady Susan disregards, her notions of music are out of time with the times. Untaught in music and singing, Lady Susan’s time-is-out-joint song is one of discord and dissonance amid a society intent on doing as one ought, a society invested in conforming to the bio(necro)political replication of itself in the individual, which in turns replicates that society. Lady Susan, of course, for this reason, looks like the villain of the piece, especially when stood next to later heroines like Elizabeth Bennet. Yet she is Austen’s purest person, hero or heroine Kippfiguren—a happenstance similar but different from Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan is the hero whose heresiarchal rebellious theodicy we are seduced by and follow and cheer on. Temptatious, sly, dastardly, insinuating, charming, the Prince of Darkness is the hero because sin is seductive and, if we are to take the pedagogical instruction the poem offers, we must renounce him, refuse his wiles, just as Christ does in the desert in Milton’s Paradise Regained. Lady Susan, in this regard, you see, is a kind of Lady Satan, except here we are not meant to renounce her—rather, exactly the opposite: we are meant to embrace her and renounce the society in which she moves. Hail Satan! After all, Satan leads us into sin and temptation; what’s not to like? To Austen, Lady Satan has the right of things. To be in time with society—to learn music and singing—is to paradoxically throw time away, as all you are learning to do is sing the same song everyone else is singing; you are putting time back in joint; you are part of the choir, not a soloist voicing a powerful aria, the one who rebels and, even, finding oneself suddenly submerged in a lake of fire, surges up and sways a disconcerted straggle of followers to carry on, to rebuff Christian pieties of a world that does not, as Lady Satan does, march to the beat of a different drummer but rather marches in lockstep to the rhythmic tattoo suasions of one–two, one–two . . .

Confronted by this society’s relentless obsession with the marriageableness of men and women, Lady Satan revises and even discards what it means to be a woman and foresees, at least for a time, the end to the marriage plot, even though she, too, at last, falls prey to the trap’s lure. In regards to marrying Reginald de Courcy, the brother of Mrs. Vernon, she states flat out, “I cannot easily resolve on anything so serious as Marriage; especially as I am not at present in want of money, & might perhaps, till the old Gentleman’s death, be very little benefited by the match” (18). After her previous husband’s decease, Lady Satan’s widow’s life, her single life, suits her quite well, and she considers Reginald’s erotomania to be merely fodder for idle flirtation. She even convinces Reginald that, of the rumors he has heard and believes about her, they universally arise as a direct intersection of a—in Reginald’s words, repeated from Lady Satan that technically appear in Mrs. Vernon’s words in one of her letters—“neglected Education & early Marriage” (16). In diverting this stream to her own riverine, Lady Satan shows us how she insinuates these two sinuous rivers into confluence. Education she despises, yet here she reverses that revulsion so that it is the very things she faults for ruining young women that are also at fault in ruining her even as she (openly) secretly, as we’ve seen, actually esteems its lack as what has saved her. She makes her supposed societal weakness her wily strength. From the other direction, she holds up her early marriage as something that has negatively affected her as if it was simply not the proper marriage for her, even though to her no marriage is in fact the proper marriage for her. She’s constantly saying the opposite of what she is saying—Austen’s perfect ironist. But in doing so, she’s actually transforming her truth—that education and marriage are evils unto themselves—into the kind of lies that nonetheless do the work of advancing her truth! It is, as I say, insinuating, like Satan, because it relies for its strategy on telling a truth by telling a lie. However, the curious thing is that the lie is also the truth—the true, absolute truth. According to her own sense of what an education and a marriage should be, her education was neglected and her early marriage did not suit her; the lie, then, is the lie society tells itself, a lie agreed on about these matters. More ruthlessly honest than her society can ever be, Lady Satan’s art allows her to remain on the outside of society looking in, exactly where she wants to be.

The key to Lady Satan’s art is thus the same as the irony that powers Austen’s works in general: the distinction between artfulness and artlessness must not only look but also prove to be irreducible. Speaking of her expectation to perceive unchecked coquetry on Lady Satan’s part, Mrs. Vernon writes,

Her behaviour, I confess, has been calculated to do away with such an idea; I have not detected the smallest impropriety in it—nothing of vanity, of pretension, of Levity; & she is altogether so attractive that I should not wonder at his being delighted with her, had he known nothing of her previous to this personal acquaintance; but against reason, against conviction, to be so well pleased with her, as I am sure he is, does really astonish me. (16)

Lady Satan’s behavior is calculated so that one cannot detect the calculation behind it at all. She has gone beyond additive logic! In fact, it is a case of detection; one has to read the clues closely in order to discern what Lady Satan is up to—or so Mrs. Vernon fancies in what she fancies is her role of detective who can decipher the calculations. Curiously, what she has detected is “not” and “nothing”—that is, she has found nothing at all, which means she has found nothing, almost as if nothing is a something one can find insofar as one finds that one does not find it. That is, the something one finds one has found is nothing; one has found, rather—er—only that one has not found it. Lady Satan, in short, deploys her artful stratagems so artlessly that they not only avoid detection but also mislead detection with a set of clues that, if detection could truly detect, would comprehend as a false trail meant to work just as it works. Mrs. Vernon, in detecting, is, it turns out, not detecting. She cannot figure out the calculations because there isn’t an additive logic at work here. “Against reason” and running mad; no wonder Reginald likes Lady Satan. She scrambles and baffles close reading and critical thinking such that the poor, piffling codes of the Enlightenment’s calculating machine of reason are easily broken (Austen is not at all interested in Leibniz’s and Newton’s calculus priority furor, let’s say). Lady Satan is the precursor to “the woman,” Irene Adler, who out-clued the clueless Sherlock Holmes by clueing him in to what she was up to all along.

Mrs. Vernon’s observations on her early meeting with Lady Satan takes the measure of how the mechanism functions even as she misses the indistinguishableness of the artful and the artless. In not seeing the artlessness of the art—which is to say, exactly what she sees—she sees exactly what Lady Satan wants her to see. This process continues later on, only now Mrs. Vernon has to be led to know a bit, just a fearful bit, for Lady Satan to fully fulfill her whims and aims. Consider this scene as Mrs. Vernon details it: “Poor Reginald was beyond measure concerned to see his fair friend in such distress, & watched her with so much tender solicitude, that I, who occasionally caught her observing his countenance with exultation, was quite out of patience. This pathetic representation lasted the whole evening, & so ostentatious & artful a display had entirely convinced me that she did in fact feel nothing” (31–32). As Lady Satan says elsewhere in a note to Mrs. Johnson, she intends to bring these relatives to heel as she herself runs mad, to make them acknowledge her superiority (“it shall be my endeavour to humble the pride of these self-important De Courcys still lower” [15]). Of course, this acknowledgment has to come in the form of, in part, Mrs. Vernon’s knowing what cannot be uttered aloud in polite society—namely that Lady Satan has, through a subtle art that cannot be detected, brought Reginald off as her own, as we have seen. This will never do! Mrs. Vernon must also be allowed to glimpse the mechanism, the artfulness of the artlessness, because otherwise she will not know she has been duped. Part of the thrill of conning someone is letting them know they have been conned without letting them know exactly how the trick was worked (this is all, in other words, very au courant Mr. Woodhouse, which is to say, very Austen). What was before perceived by Mrs. Vernon as artless now is “so ostentatious & artful” that Mrs. Vernon can at least, at last, detect something: “nothing.” Only in this case, that something is the nothingness of Lady Satan’s feeling—or rather its lack. Sometimes nothing is, indeed, something. Once again, though, Mrs. Vernon misses the legerdemain of the double bind. The something Mrs. Vernon finds, this nothingness of feeling, is actually something, a feeling of triumph, of “exultation,” over Mrs. Vernon, who is seeing it in action and misreading it because it is directed at Reginald in order to be directed at her without her knowing of the directing or actual direction of it, even as it must also arrive at its intended destination: her. She is allowed to know Lady Satan feels nothing, to see how Lady Satan works, but only partially, for in keeping part of her work, her art, a secret, Lady Satan retains further satisfaction because her handiwork relies precisely in this double, ironized concealed revealing, lying truth telling. True art is hers because the true art is her: a single, artistically successful, unmarried woman.

Uncaptured by the social, whose prisons muster their gleeful, clutching forces all around her, Lady Satan’s definition of love teeters on the balance of her grace&manner: true love is a lie that expresses its truth through the artfulness of its unfeigned, unsigned, unseen artistry. Imagine Lady Satan’s shock when she suddenly discovers that her daughter, Frederica, continues to be a stupid girl by falling in fake love:

She is actually falling in love with Reginald De Courcy! To disobey her Mother by refusing an unexceptionable offer is not enough; her affections must likewise be given without her Mother’s approbation. I never saw a girl of her age bid fairer to be the sport of Mankind. Her feelings are tolerably acute, & she is so charmingly artless in their display as to afford the most reasonable hope of her being ridiculed & despised by every Man who sees her.

Artlessness will never do in Love matters; & that girl is born a simpleton who has it either by nature or affectation. . . . She is in high favour with her Aunt altogether—because she is so little like myself, of course. (36)

This is the love that is of society’s making and not the true love of Lady Satan, and it will never be entre chien et loup, never eclipse the love society esteems as that which must prevail: love and friendship rather than love and freindship, as given here in the mouth of the fiend, Lady Satan, who is the true freind (and so true friend). Lady Satan comprehends the gender rules of her time perfectly well. Lacking the artistry that she herself possesses, women like Frederica will be subject to the stupidities of men, who are equably as stupid as Frederica. Lady Satan knows that love must work “against reason,” against the calculations of cold pecuniary investments set by a marriage mad, rather than a run-mad, world. Being artless ushers back in horrible things like a “reasonable hope of her being ridiculed & despised by every Man who sees her.” Man, who here live to ridicule and despise, can, unlike Mrs. Vernon re. Lady Satan, see women like Frederica unocculted because Frederica has no art. Hence, “artlessness will never do in Love matters.” Love, in fact, Lady Satan sets as protagonist against Man; you can’t have one with the other as long as Man can look but not see the woman as an artist. Love, in other words, cannot be as long as there cannot be unmarried, successfully artistic, liberated women like Lady Satan. In such a world, one falls prey to not just Man but to married women like Mrs. Vernon, who is no more an artist than Frederica; nor can she teach her to be. If Lady Satan seems wickedly evil in insisting that “do not imagine . . . I have for a moment given up my plan of her [Frederica’s] marriage,” a prison house she has no wish to do hard time in herself, it is only because, we can now see, Frederica has already thrown her time away by falling in time to the pitter-patter wasting-time marching orders of the Mrs. Vernons of the world!

No longer operating ex abundantia cautela, we can now run mad, ask something that appears a bit outré. If Lady Satan is an artist writing herself into existence, or trying to anyway, and this art, this process of art of which she is the artist, is also love, true love, that is freindship in and as love, then can we also say that Lady Satan, who is also this process, is love? Love as it is for Austen? Love, unmarried, successfully artistic, liberated? And is this a portrait of Austen as a young woman? In want of freindship?

Yet her characters in the so-called mature fictions seemingly never quite manage to run mad. Elizabeth, Elinor, Marianne, Emma, and Anne must marry! as expected, and fulfilling that expectation retains the very social structures that make it impossible for Austen herself, the artistically successful, single, unmarried woman, to ever materialize as characters in her fictions.

The power cisheteropatriarchal norms exert to preserve the impossibility of Austen-to-come is neatly exemplified in the famous entail in Pride and Prejudice, which threatens and curtails the estates and futures of all these Austen daughters, and which can only be broken by the birth of a son. In the sense that an entail attaches the estate to male heirs, often for several generations, the entail functions as a metonym for cisheteropatriarchal society itself.2 Austen wants to break free of the same binaristic authoritarianism—and its very real historical discursive materiality—that demands her literary daughters face the unhappy dispossession of their lives in what will be, for better or worse, living as part of a pair in a marriage of a man and a woman whose love’s friendship always teeters precariously on the bad fiendship (unlike Lady Satan’s freindship) that friendship is with often no freindship in sight. Until the entail—and all that it entails about society—can be eradicated, Austen, who does not and cannot appear in her novels, does not want to appear. She wants to run mad.

Speaking of the nonnormative suggestiveness housed in Pride and Prejudice’s title, whose terms “impl[y]” unexpected social irregularity, David Sigler comments that it does nonetheless often “seem like the most heteronormative novel in the British canon” because it relies “upon the force of ‘truth[s] universally acknowledged’ to establish marriage as the only possible framework for erotic life.”3 Indeed it might, as might be said of her other novels. In freindship with Sigler’s reading, Woodhouse’s triumphal sundering of the binary at the end of Emma and Lady Satan’s artless artfulness both radicalize the marriage plot so sufficiently that we can now see the conjunctive dysfunction of Pride and Prejudice as working toward a scrambling of what Austen’s future society will look like—one that also makes a room for her.

For Austen, this existence can only come into being outside of the constitutive cisheteronormativities of her day that inscribe women as women and men as men in rigid biological and performative social constraints that subject both women and men to living up to and according to supposed transcendental binary gender truths acknowledged on a cosmic scale. Elizabeth takes “liberties” with her husband, Darcy, Pride and Prejudice mentions at the end, but this mention is like quick minimalist brushstrokes on a canvas, meant to signal a disruptive tear in the social fabric of this world even as the larger canvas itself persists in the majoritarianism of its blankness (430). While we have long fantasized about an Austen perfectly personified in the distinguished rebel jewel that is Elizabeth and the decisive, cutting nature of her bon mots that always bulls-eye her targets, Elizabeth’s rantipole radicality twists on itself in that even as she defies social decorum and propriety she does so, seemingly in order to maintain those very things; Lydia, that other brazen social wild child, is, to Elizabeth, an unseemly brat who needs settling down, to behave normatively. And if, for the sake of argument, we can further dawdle in the pyschobiographic, then familial accounts of Austen’s compositional methodology suggest her complete abstraction from a world in which she did not fit and in which, as someone who lives in the world in her head in front of company—she rudely ignores her nieces and other family members—is somewhat like Elizabeth who struggles always, even with the seemingly well-matched, like-minded mountebank grotesqueries Wickham and Lydia, to obey the harsh commands of propriety that police Regency-era politeness. It is not too much to say, in fact, that these liberties Elizabeth takes actually serve to bind her and Darcy closer, to safeguard the marriage, and, as such, to safeguard the social cisheteropatriarchal canvas from being painted over. (But this is all wrong, as we will see a bit later.)

Unmarried, artistic, and liberated, Austen does not endeavor to take mere liberties with and within the very society that adjudicates the illiberal terms on which she must live and that exercises the means of social control of and over and under and with gender. Liberty of this sort is nothing other than a relentlessly cisheteropatriarchal regime that disallows, through its apparent inability and unwillingness to imagine other-than-cisgender lives and the coefficients of hierarchized gender privilege that marginalize those who are unwanted in that society. Austen wants to bust out of this prison house regime of dimorphic gender altogether and allow for the full plenitude of life; Elizabeth’s expropriating liberties from Darcy signals this prison break plan because while it subtly reverses the gender roles of master and wife, it does so to envisage a social reconstruction where jailbreaks are unnecessary. Austen wants to inherit her own estate—the estate of her novels, and all that they entail. It is the luxurious insouciance of freindship’s freedom of self-creation.