7. Looking Through the Glass

In the mature fiction of Austen World, something hilariously sens dessus dessous is surely afoot with the first person. Whenever it pokes its head above the undulating waves of the free indirect discourse, the “I” is always unidentified and undefined in Austen’s fiction, which is doubly disconcerting since things have been going along swimmingly for hundreds of pages before this stranger is revealed to have been bobbing alongside us all along, previously as invisible as now inexplicable. It might be solipsistic to identify Austen with this speaking voice, but the fissiparous nature of the indirect discourse whose channel we’ve been flowing in, as well as the choppiness introduced by the unabashed nonidentification of this “I,” tantalizes by the several branching tributaries it affords. But let us follow the main fork: that this “I” is no one at all—a much more interesting . . . identification. Miller, we recall, claims that “Austen’s work most fundamentally consists in dematerializing the voice that speaks it. From the very start, ‘I’ have been commuted into a generalized ‘you.’”1 Is this so? Well, perhaps, at least for a time, in those first hundred pages of fiction—but a literal “I” does eventually enter, in several of her fictions and seems, on the water’s surface, to keep treading with this metaphor, to be explanatory, even confiding in the reader, our ear in and under the water, even as it also seems to want to distance us from it in that it is, very announcedly, intruding into a narrative where it wasn’t before, as if a no (room?) reservoir for it. It is, in this stentorian sense, also a kind of freshet in Austen Voice and World so big and bold that we must find our way to swim with and in it.

Who is speaking through this Voice, this prosopopoeia? Indeed, the “I” is always a type of prosopopoeia, a type of metaphor, in any fiction, just like when “I” have had the temerity to write, throughout this book, “Austen”; it is a metaphor (metonym) for my interpretation, for “my” Austen—even, we might say, for me, myself, and I. It may be possible to say (we’ll find out) that Austen denotes the “I” and the I that is writing this—insofar as there is such an I (but we’ll return to this). What’s more, as Grace Lavery writes, there are clear parallels and linkages between the narratology of fiction and gender transitions:

Changing sex requires one to ask oneself what changes and what remains the same when one goes about radically changing both one’s bodily composition and one’s modes of social participation. Narrative fiction, and literary style, are both modes by which this question has been asked by queer writers, and this is why, for me, a gender transition has also, and even primarily, been a genre transition: a new and newly necessary crossing between one style of narrating and another.2

What is at stake in Austen Style and World, in this singular “I” that obtrudes, seemingly from out of the beyond, to opine on the tidying up of the fairy-tale endings of her most confounding, even somewhat malevolent, work (there is something, well, not quite nice in what ultimately happens to some of the characters, isn’t there?). Mansfield Park, and her most propulsive, consumable presentation of heady happiness, Pride and Prejudice, is a transition away from the famed machine of indirect discourse that has been chuffing and chattering right along on the page and in our heads. That is, the “I” is both waving and drowning. Gender transition can also denote genre transition, to follow Lavery, and this shift in “I,” in Austen Voice, elaborates a gender transition to something fluid and nonbinary that refuses to even be nonbinary in the binaristic sense that binds it in an additive logic. As Lavery captures it, “there are as many genres of transness as there are genres.”3

It is for this reason that the first person flits in, fleet and ephemeral, as if the ghost of some heretofore absent nonbinary son-to-come, yet somehow nonetheless necessary presence whose summative tone flirts with, if not outright offers, the disclosure of the “truth” of the text, a run-madness, a love and freindship. Always staggeringly bolded in its anonymity, the first person’s near elision—like the cartographic cartwheels tracked across Pride and Prejudice—makes it all the more conspicuous for that, a full-bodied yet seemingly dissolute consciousness that seems, for all its hauntological disembodiment, to speak not only in but of and as and for the novels. We might understand the “I” as a kind of fata morgana, then, finally appearing near the end of the novels as if it has been hovering on the horizon all along, awaiting our arrival to be seen by us across the distant sea of howsoever tatterdemalion many pages we are swimming in but that Austen might be drowning in. So we can well ask, is this, at last, Austen, or at least an Austen of sorts? Or do we grasp merely air here, but air that, how shall we say, in its ethereality, underwater where we can’t breathe, is the whole point, the ungraspable thing whose very ungraspability allows us to grasp what is up, what is going on, to keep our heads above water, to breathe, at least, at last? That is to say, of this “I,” this nonhaptical thing, is it the very thing we must grasp to understand that Austen, or Austen Style, is not about manifestation, instantiation, immanence, or gender or biological essentialism?

Such a rare occurrence in her novels, this “I,” its lengthy deferral—it appears well after any denouement—judders Austen’s reader out of the patter of the indirect discourse and, like the nonbinary yearnings writ large across the rolling hills of Austen’s countryside romances, mesmerizes with the sheer gaudiness of its abrupt abutment (kind of like the grossly landing word “abutment” is meant to do here). Kind of like that man from Porlock who, Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells us, shows up to knock him up out of his knocked-out morphine dreams of Kubla Khan, which then forces Coleridge to organize his visions of his disorganized dipsomania into a well-structured poem about the pleasures of life in the paradise of the Romantic imagination.

When the “I” speaks, for instance, in Mansfield Park, it does so to comment on the whirligigging trans/formative/ness, the sliding mobility of subject/object desire and desire to be the subject/object, of the gendered involutions of Edmund and Fanny. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” this first person says. “I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest” (533). The “I” hints at its purpose that it cannot carry out but an endeavor in which it nevertheless must tarry: to literally “restore every body,” not to their proper body or their proper gender—not that there ever was and is ever such a thing, necessarily, as a “proper” gender one can arrive at anyway—but simply in the sense of “body” in the sense of “person,” the person that person desires to be or (always already?) is or was or will be. In this instance, the “I” restores Edmund, even if only through the acknowledgment of his desire-to-be, to that woman he wants to be, and Fanny, again via that chiasmatic acknowledgment of Edmund in Fanny and Fanny in Edmund, to the man she wants to be. (Well, you know by now the word I don’t write here, right?) (Because it’s yours.)

Gender in this mise-en-scène—Edmund and Fanny and Austen World generally—is never terminal, though; in fact, gender is always veering from a teleological terminus ad quem, and it does so in a retroactive fashion (an ahistorical fashion, the purest historicism, Austen’s historicism) that effectively abolishes any notion of a terminus a quo as well. This veering is the very act that abolishing gender enacts because it unworks or unsutures fixity and stability. It is the untimeliness at the heart of Austen’s historicism, or what we might call her historical locutability. Just as the first person materializes out of nowhere, as we say, so does this voice also materialize out of no when, a narratological displacement that should make us quake, in an insouciant way, a little, at its easy, sure-handed, multihanded disposal of the supposed cosmic telos (if not an eschaton) of the vaunted Austen cisheteronormative marriage plot. The first person tells us just this:

I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people.—I only intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire. (319)

The undateability of the first person overlaps with the undateability of Edmund’s and Fanny’s nonconsummation consummation (they aren’t married yet, thank Lady Satan, Austen says!), even as it is noted that this timelessness renders liberty to fixity, a kind of locative immobility that simultaneously treads purposelessly forward in its admitted purposiveness. Immobility is on the move, just as is’s was is the present in Pride and Prejudice that is the future. Edmund and Fanny will arrive somewhere, somewhen. But this somewhere, somewhen’s up-for-grabbedness is also its perpetual reminder of gender’s fluidity, the way it is in flux, and fluxes (the flux capacitor), the spatial, and the locative to allow for the making of being in a time and a place of one’s own free choosing and making. Simultaneously, it is “natural” only to the extent that it is variable (“vary”) in that it differs and defers depending on and in “different people.” As such, the fixity of “every body,” whose phrasing repeats here from the above restoration passage, is variable, fixed only insofar as it is variable—that is, the only thing fixed about it is its variability. “Every body” should “believe” this atemporal temporality precisely because it applies to every body. This passage, this I’s vocalization of “transfer,” is an apostrophe, an invocation, a prayer to and for the reader (please pray with me, reader, in my Satanism, it implores)—and this is obviously preferable, this prayer, for this is for you—for that they may reckon with their identity and whatever “desire” might or might not attach to that identity. Or any no identity: abolition.

Differently and yet intimately relatedly, this passage skews back to the axiomatic problematic between desire and pleasure on which Foucault dwells in his later work, with his desire to push us beyond desire to, well, pleasure. One way he distinguishes the two, in “just a series of questions,” as he calls his ruminations on the subject, is “that medicine and psychoanalysis have made extensive use of this notion of desire, precisely as a kind of instrument for establishing the intelligibility of a sexual pleasure and thus for standardizing it in terms of normality. Tell me what your desire is, and I’ll tell you who you are. I’ll tell you if you’re sick or not, I’ll tell you if you’re normal or not, and thus I’ll be able to disqualify your desire or on the contrary requalify it.”4 Even as he notes that Deleuze and Guattari repurpose “desire,” Foucault worries that its long history of being mired in “medico-psychological presuppositions” contravenes any reconceptualization of it. As such, instead: pleasure. “By using the word pleasure,” Foucault says,

which in the end means nothing, which is still, it seems to me, rather empty of content and unsullied by possible uses—in treating pleasure ultimately as nothing other than an event, an event that happens, that happens, I would say, outside the subject, or at the limit of the subject, or between two subjects, in this something that is neither of the body nor of the soul, neither outside nor inside—don’t we have here, in trying to reflect a bit on this notion of pleasure, a means of avoiding the entire psycho-logical and medical armature that was built into the traditional notion of desire?5

What Foucault has in mind here is something like Gill-Peterson’s, Moten’s, Harney’s, and Bey’s abolition. For Foucault, the point is the anti-identitarian avowal of pleasure’s capaciousness, in Bey’s sense of anti-identitarianism (which is not, let us recall, anti-identitarianism but antianti-identitarinism—so, again, nonidentitarianism), beyond even its own known limits that efface the cisheteronormative subject as identifiable. Bey: “If we want radical, if we want the gifts of blackness and transness and black feminism, it is not merely that somethin’s gotta give—no, everything’s gotta give.”6 Pleasure, that is, breaches the subject to broach and approach new possibilities of subjectivity and even nonsubjectivity; in the breach of the subject is always once more unto the breach. Fanny’s and Edmund’s trans enactment of this breach breaches breach (if not, yet, each other’s britches) to espouse the culminating pleasure at the heart of their “desire,” their pleasure for and to be the other—and hence the constitution of nonbinary being and beings that shatter the mythopoetic narrative of the cisheteronormative romance of desire at the heart, even, of that cisheteronormative romance, and as an Aristophanian reading of Austen (and vice versa, because, surely the above is Austen reading Aristophanes) shows, is transness and nonbinariness, a destruction of both the cisgender self and the binary world that births and sustains it. If cisgender never exists, it will never persist. Austen Style, that is to say, moves us beyond the additive logic of binary and nonbinary because both are effaced by the other when Edmund looks into Fanny’s face that is reflected in Edmund’s face and vice versa in this gender contretemps. Nonbinary is . . . nonbinary in its anti-, but, yes?, (non)nonbinarism.

On Austen logic, this nonbinary—and we might as well say it at this point, again, in full, the recognitions, or misrecognitions, of gender abolition—contretemps directly colors in that other constitutive moment of exemplary ego in Austen: the never-ending story of Sir Walter Elliot looking in his looking glasses.

The scene is decked out in gender issues. What might be seen as Sir Walter’s effeminacy, his discriminate surety about his own beautific appearance, is even what sets the plot in motion in Persuasion! In the beginning, we are told that “vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man” (4). So, here, in this Freudian scene (that will become Lacanian), the ego formation explicitly occurs in terms of narcissism: Sir Walter’s love of himself. Still more, though, is the allusion to the Book of Revelation that sets Sir Walter up as not merely ego but God, a kind of super Ego. The Greek apocalypsis, meaning “revelation” or “disclosure,” is significant here because it establishes the formative ego as standing in the light for all to see, even as it exposes the full extent of Sir Walter’s vanity: he is as a God unto you, but most especially to himself. In the Vulgate, Apocalypsis 22:13 reads “ego sum alpha et omega, primus et novissimus, principium et finis.” The ego, here, simply means “I am,” spoken in God’s voice, as these are supposedly his words; like Sir Walter, he is “the beginning and the end” (principium et finis) but also “the first and the last” (primus et novissimus). Not only is Sir Walter like God, as an ego, but also, in Freudian terms, he is an ego ideal, fully formed and bounded off from external social influencing, what directs the person and the social world from without within. The effect here is totally strange and wild: Sir Walter functions as a synecdoche for cisheteronormativity as his gender generates from his own narcissism in such a way that it apparently forecloses the possibility of transition or nonbinary. There is no escape from the temporality laid out here because it comprehends both its own origin and its teleological finality, its complete certainty of its own transcendental intelligibility as divine metaphysical bestowal.

Or does it?

Because there is also a queerness and nonbinarism to his self-fashioning in that his affection for his own aesthetic is more effeminate than the effeminacy of the women in the novel: “few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion” (4). Once Sir Walter lets out Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft, one of the few alterations the admiral undertakes in the house (besides moving the umbrellas) is to denarcissify the place. He tells Anne,

“I have done very little besides sending away some of the large looking-glasses from my dressing-room, which was your father’s. A very good man, and very much the gentleman I am sure—but I should think, Miss Elliot” (looking with serious reflection) “I should think he must be rather a dressy man for his time of life.—Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord! there was no getting away from oneself.” (138)

There is a clear corollary here between Sir Walter and Mr. Woodhouse: Mr. Woodhouse’s ubiquitous hypochondriac dubiety is the inside-out image of Sir Walter’s confidence in the salubrious aesthetic rectitude of his own profile. Let us note, though, that Sir Walter does not have one looking glass, but several! Which means his narcissism goes much further than simply looking at himself in the mirror: he likes looking at himself looking at himself in the mirror. Sir Walter is, literally, the personification of narcissism who loves himself, and who sees in himself not only good looks but the fundament of his self-coveted esteemed social status. He is the object of his desire, the object he both desires and desires-to-be. He is more womanly than the women in the novel, but in needing to see himself seeing himself, his chirality is exposed: seeing himself seeing himself as him-self is the only time he can see his chirality. It is in this nonsuperposability, this nonreflectivity so many mirrored selves provide, that he can finally see himself as not just a reflection but as looking back at himself as not himself for who he is—which is to say, he can see himself as the woman “few women” could ever be but the woman he wants to be, and thus also desire himself as the woman he wants to be, to create and pleasure himself as a woman.

One needs, contra Sir Walter, to be capable of what the novel distinguishes as “serious reflection” on the part of Admiral Croft in which the object—the object of one’s desire—should be to get away from oneself, to move from one’s own confidence in the transcendent nature of one’s identity to, well, something somewhen elsewise. You want, in short, when you look through the glass, to not see one’s self. Serious reflection shows you, rather, who you are or can be; it is to see effeminacy, for one thing, staring you in the face. To move away from the word “desire,” you want to multiply, as Foucault suggests, your pleasures, not propagate sameness in the masturbatory indulgences of self-identity with a self that is oneself.

The rest of the novel bears this out. “She was only Anne” we are told of Persuasion’s heroine (5). Yet Sir Walter sees major differences between himself and his daughter. Unlike what we see between Fanny and Edmund, who find pleasure in the other they want to be, in the estimations of Sir Walter, it is he who remains “only Walter” whereas Anne undergoes considerable change at the hands of age: “a few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early; and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her, (so totally different were her delicate features and mild dark eyes from his own); there could be nothing in them now that she was faded and thin, to excite his esteem” (6). The mise-en-scène in these mirror stages conflicts with the parallax view Edmund and Fanny display in looking at each other. Walter sees no likeness at all when he studies Anne’s features precisely because she is not a looking glass; barring that, he can find “little to admire in her,” little to love of himself in her. If it is unclear what the little remainder—this angry inch?—capable of drawing his admiration is left over from the “little” he finds, then the next clause sweeps in to aid us: it is “nothing.” It turns out there is little to admire because there is nothing to admire, which thus makes the little, to follow this logic, more than nothing. But if we follow the seriatim of the clauses, there had once been something to admire, however little, and that littleness is the remainder, the reminder, the trace of Sir Walter in Anne when she was younger: “she had been a very pretty girl.” Anne’s problem, if we follow Sir Walter’s thinking, is that although she was pretty when younger, when a girl, she never grows up to be quite a pretty woman because “her delicate features and mild dark eyes” were “so totally different . . . from his own.” She never, in other words, grows up to be a pretty woman like him! And hence he cannot desire her. He desires, rather, to be the pretty woman that he is. In this case, his object of his desire is both the object he wants to be and the object he wants to pleasure. By uniting both the manly and the womanly in his person, and the manly as womanly and womanly as manly, in wanting to become a woman, Sir Walter rejects the binaristic logic of society and, like the god he fancies himself as, exits these human social concerns to find his own pleasure even while, to be sure, remaining a misogynist asshole.

Sir Walter, in looking through the glass, goes through the looking glass of binaristic society, but more importantly, in looking at himself looking at himself, he achieves a kind of perverse parallax view that Austen Style laurels in its quest for self-expression. Sir Walter can anamorphically see and cannot see himself from different perspectives, from each mirror gazing on both himself and the image in the other mirrors; he’s created his own house of mirrors in his own funhouse. Gazing on his fine figure, Sir Walter gazes back on his own fine figure-to-be. The mirror self cleaves him from himself in the sense of “cleave”—as that which both joins and rends. Multiply reflected in funhouse mirrors, Sir Walter’s cleaved self proliferates into a harlequin of Walters, each performing the same cleavage. Yet despite this calculated multiplicative effect of anamorphic Walters on his part (he is the one who has brought in so many mirrors, after all), Sir Walter sees only one unified image in the fragmented imaginary: himself becoming herself. He was only Sir Walter, more womanly in his manliness than the other women of the novel. This is why Sir Walter is unable to see Anne as anything other than herself; she’s trapped in the binaristic logic he conceives himself expropriated from. If, to go back to his ultimatum of alpha and omega, he is a god who, following his own narcissistic logic, comes to his own mind, then, as Leah DeVun shows us concerning god’s nonbinary nature, he is a god that unites, in its disunity, both male and female and neither-nor into nonbinary.7 And he does it without ever saying it except by silently looking through the glass.