6. In the Classroom

On the other hand, there are certainly characters in Austen who at first seem not in on nonbinary possibility, like Knightly. Knightley is always, more so than even Mr. Darcy, ostensibly set forth as the exemplary specimen of Man in Austen’s novels, a kind of befleshed transcendental phallus who testifies to and confirms what counts as man and what counts as woman (fucking math), even though, as we saw, he is quite happy to enter into a heterodox ménage marriage. Howsoever, beforehand of that throupled eventuality, he almost struts in airing his opinions: his high-dudgeon declaration, “Nonsense! a man does not imagine any such thing,” in response to Emma’s opining that men expect women to marry any of them who asks (64); his sniffy “It is like a woman’s writing,” in reply to Emma’s accolades on Frank Churchill’s handwriting (321); his “he is a disgrace to the name of man,” which he trumpets as a judgment on Churchill (464). Knightley, whose very name echoes the conferral of regal patriarchal beknighting power, pronounces his opinions in a manner much like declaring a fiat—decrees that not only are ironclad but that also erect the very thing that they announce. A case in point: he affirms, on the contested subject of Miss Fairfax’s temporarily residing with the odious Mrs. Elton, the reified nature of the pronoun:

Another thing must be taken into consideration too—Mrs. Elton does not talk to Miss Fairfax as she speaks of her. We all know the difference between the pronouns he or she and thou, the plainest-spoken amongst us; we all feel the influence of a something beyond common civility in our personal intercourse with each other—a something more early implanted. (309)

This is, to put it mildly, a confusing utterance because the necessity for the transition from a reflection on Mrs. Elton’s flattery and its accusative and objective genitive cases to a discourse on the praxis of pronouns and the youthful pedagogy of social introspection and manners that governs it would seem a hearty non sequitur. (His point is actually that “thou” is more intimate than the “you” Mrs. Elton uses.) That Mrs. Elton speaks about, rather than to, Miss Fairfax comes as no surprise; Mrs. Elton’s character has been fixed as servile yet conceited, condescending yet egomaniac. From this information’s appearance, the inference is therefore that talking to and talking about someone are linked to pronoun use, and via the social circumintervention that encircles those pronouns that, in Knightley’s pronouncement, seals their application, means the world assigns genders on the basis of what must be bare facts—the physical bodies in front of the faces looking at those bodies. A man, then, is a man take him all, not in all, but in his looks, according to Man.

In this scene, Man’s, Knightley’s, dictum, represents what we might call the prevailing cisheteropatriarchal biopolitics that seeks to restrain the trans camaraderie apparent in Pride and Prejudice and the larger ahistorical historicism of Austen World.

But, again, not quite, in fact.

Knightley’s grandeur as Man gets bruised rather than burnished by the nice derangement of pronouns that traipse across Austen’s novels. Pronouns in Austen embrace a fluidity independent of Knightley’s insistence on the gendered body as a signified irrevocably attached to a gendered signifier.

The gender fluidity in Mansfield Park between Miss Crawford, Edmund, and Fanny suggests how unfirm gender “truly” (the narrator’s word) is as male and female genders triangulate among these three—tendering a third “gender,” among many others, in the process—as they seek the self-discovery of self-identity they want to refuse in order to just be in their interanimation of nonmathematical nonidentitarianism. Like all of her characters, these three, on a surface reading, are presented as cisgender, as if absolutely, unchangeably born this way. (Consider M. W. Bychowski: “Most scholarship is, effectively, cisgender scholarship, not only because it is mostly cisgender scholars who have claimed the education and tools to publish it but also because most scholarship assumes the cisgender status of any character or historical figure who is presented to readers.”1) Miss Crawford finds out Fanny’s hidey-hole rooms to beg her help in a theatrical rehearsal. Miss Crawford:

“I came here to-day intending to rehearse it with Edmund—by ourselves—against the evening, but he is not in the way; and if he were, I do not think I could go through it with him, till I have hardened myself a little, for really there is a speech or two—You will be so good won’t you?

“There, look at that speech, and that, and that. How am I ever to look him in the face and say such things? Could you do it? But then he is your cousin, which makes all the difference. You must rehearse it with me, that I may fancy you him, and get on by degrees. You have a look of his sometimes.” (197–98)

“There—very good schoolroom chairs, not made for a theatre, I dare say; much more fitted for little girls to sit and kick their feet against when they are learning a lesson.” (198)

And then the narrator reenters, in full third-person flair:

She began, and Fanny joined in with all the modest feeling which the idea of representing Edmund was so strongly calculated to inspire; but with looks and voice so truly feminine, as to be no very good picture of a man. With such an Anhalt, however, Miss Crawford had courage enough and they had got through half the scene, when a tap at the door brought a pause, and the entrance of Edmund the next moment, suspended it all. (198–99)

Undoubtedly, Miss Crawford offers a willfully misleading rationale for seeking out Fanny; why, after all, should she expect to find Edmund in Fanny’s rooms? But this all, like Lady Satan, like Austen, counts out “strongly calculated” precisely to inspire, to breathe new breath into, being and beings. No math here!

Miss Crawford’s discourse begins in dissimulation, disguising both herself and her intentions—a mistress of deceit!—the truths of which are revealed by her turnabout from “he is not in the way” to “and if he were,” where the repetition of masculine pronouns emphasizes his his-ness and culminates with her pressing down even harder (she hardens herself a little!—which is deliciously suggestive on its own) on the italicized his as indicative of the fact that she wants a cisgender woman to rehearse with who is nonetheless somehow womanly enough to be manly. The emphasis shifts to what Knightley calls the “thou” and she says “I may fancy you him,” and then kicks it into reverse, to “you have a look of his sometimes.” His cousin, Fanny, may “naturally,” one might suppose, because of the vagaries of kinship, have Edmund’s look occasionally; but the you-to-his transition immediately after the “his” that delineates his nonpresence suggests that Miss Crawford sees Fanny not just as a woman but as a man. She had no reason to expect to find Edmund in Fanny’s apartments, but, in what seems like parapraxis, she sees Fanny as Edmund—she who has his looks as Miss Crawford looks at her. For, importantly, it is Miss Crawford doing the looking. But these are not Miss Crawford’s thoughts, delivered by her; they are her thoughts, delivered via the indirect discourse of Austen, whose more manifest presence, in this Austen Style she is both in and never in. strolls in through the paragraph-door right afterward . . . alongside Edmund! The entrance of Edmund dispels Miss Crawford’s unconscious replacement of Fanny with Edmund, canceling the transitioning pronouns into solid signifieds appended to male and female bodies, as if to confirm biological destiny in the pronouns’ destinations.

Yet it is significant that just as Miss Crawford associates Edmund’s “his” with Fanny’s “you” when she initially walks into the room, the narrator invites the same parallel between its own narrative voice and Edmund’s. Edmund’s identification with that voice, Austen Style, belies such a stoppering of pronouns and disproves Mr. Knightley’s Man theory. Although Edmund, now apparently representing Man, ports with him the rigorous decision that Fanny has “looks and [a] voice so truly feminine, as to be no very good picture of a man,” that the narrative voice itself hinges here on being both Miss Crawford—or the expression of her thoughts through the narrative voice—and Edmund as that voice’s synechdochal embodiment, recalls the androgynous angry inch searching for its other half from Aristophanes. Miss Crawford begins by looking for Edmund, the female for the male, as do the heterosexual children of the moon, and she does so, curiously, by looking for him by looking at Fanny, where she sees him in her, which embraces both the queer longings of the children of the earth (two women longing for each other) and the longings of the moon (because Miss Crawford is a woman looking for a man)—what is, that is, supposedly cisheteronormative masculinity. That Fanny is no very good picture of a man also signals that men—that Man-ness Knightley references—can be feminine and the feminine masculine, or neither/nor, nonbinary. Simultaneously, it affirms the idea that looking (the social construction of gender, let us plainly say) constructs gender through what is expected even while undercutting those expectations. Miss Crawford thinks of Fanny as a woman yet expects to find in her a man.

Women, in other words, might be men and identify as men even if, physically, they might present as mostly stereotypical women in feature where those features are defined on the basis of cultural standards of binaristic cisheteronormativity. The Edmund/Miss Crawford creature, here, by virtue of Edmund’s identification with Austen Style, points toward this altogether other gender, which is not simply male or female, nonbinary perhaps, and is, also both queer and heterosexual because it wants the multiplicity of many genders and sexualities. Here, then, we have three different genders and multiple sexualities: male, female, nonbinary, as well as queer and straight. We’ve moved from the ménage of Emma, Knightley, and Mr. Woodhouse to the polycule of Edmund, Fanny, and Miss Crawford!

The evidence of gender and sexual fluidity in this scene sunders the novel’s resolutely dimorphic gendered matchmaking. We can thus see what Ftacek means in her reading of Byron’s Manfred: Manfred is transgender in that he sees in his sister, Astarte, himself as his own ideal of himself, and she finds the same in him.2 That it is Fanny and Edmund who ultimately wind up together further confirms this. For as we’ve seen looking through Miss Crawford’s narrated eyes at Fanny and seeing Edmund, Miss Crawford’s eyes, since they are narrated in Austen Style, and Edmund and the Style, are, here, the same. Her eyes are Edmund’s eyes. That is, it is Edmund’s eyes looking out through Miss Crawford’s eyes, thus further cementing how narrative form cements their scrambled gender in this scene—and thus they look at Fanny. Miss Crawford is not just unconsciously looking for Edmund; he is already there, in and through her and in Fanny (“I may fancy you him”). Edmund therefore sees, looking through Miss Crawford looking at Fanny, himself what is, then, in his beloved, his own transgendered and desired version of himself as a woman, because we know (even if he does not yet) that he desires Fanny and that Fanny looks like Edmund. He sees himself in her as her. She is “truly feminine” and “no very good picture of a man” because she resembles Edmund not as a man but as a woman—the woman he wants to be. The other turn of this screw is that because Fanny looks like Edmund, and because what Edmund sees, when he looks at Fanny, is his ideal transgender self, his female version, then Edmund must also look like Fanny so correspondingly the other way around. Fanny’s looks, which are Edmund’s looks, must look out from Edmund and be seen by Fanny! In him, she sees the desired male version of herself; she sees herself in him as him. In you, she says to him, I see the him that is me. In you, he says to her, I see the her that is me. Pleasure in and as (co-)creation. In claiming the other, this nonbinaristic nonmarriage unravels the binaristic logic of rigid gender distinctions and proposes that in the man Fanny whom Fanny wants to be and the woman Edmund whom Edmund wants to be is actually to reclaim pronouns, to self-identify, finally, as an “I,” and to simultaneously and paradoxically blur ideas of Man, man, woman, Woman, and gender—gender, in short, in the fuck of it all that fucks us all, but also, here, gender that holds out the promise of good fucking.

This primal, pedagogical mise-en-scène of self-discovery is thus no mere passing joke. For “little girls” to sit down in those “schoolroom chairs not meant for theatre,” not meant for pretending to be other than who you are, is, as Miss Crawford first appears to appear, actually to learn who you “really” are, your “I.” In this, we receive another of Austen’s gender lessons, here specifically nonbinary and trans or whatever you might like it to be in the held that is, or the is-to-come–ness, of yourself. Those “little girls” might just grow up to be big boys.