ABSTRACT
New Historicism has come belatedly to Jane Austen, and, like one of her suspect heroes, it means to rescue her. Of course, the first wave of New Historicism that swept through Romantic Studies in the 1980s did not altogether pass Austen by, safely harbored, as she was, in the “novel,” but it tended to confirm her position as a writer who was, fundamentally, un-Romantic. Jerome J. McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983) was especially influential. McGann concedes that “‘the place of Jane Austen in literary history’ is a neglected and important subject,” and that her work is “at certain points influenced by Romanticism.” However, not “every artistic production in the Romantic period is a Romantic one … the greatest artists in any period often depart from their age’s dominant ideological commitments, as the example of Austen so dramatically illustrates.” 1 In other words, the New Historicists agreed with “old” ones that Austen was more Augustan than Romantic, Johnsonian than Wordsworthian, orthodox than subversive—a categorization that was strengthened further by Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975). Prior to Butler, in the general view, Austen was a terrifyingly clever ironist with a mind so fine that no ideology could penetrate it. Butler demonstrated the opposite: that Austen had a mind finely attuned to ideology and that she was an active participant in the wars of ideas that raged in the wake of the perceived cataclysmic failure of the French Revolution. For Butler, genre (such as the tension between novel and romance) and cultural fads (such as sensibility) were sites of ideological conflict, into which Austen robustly ventured, girded with a formidable arsenal provided by her Tory rationalism. So although Butler set new standards for the historical contextualization of Austen, she was not, herself, in any obvious sense, a New Historicist—just a sophisticated old one who seemed to confirm the drift of influential New Historicist accounts of Austen’s oeuvre, other than McGann’s, which was that the cultural work it performed was largely conservative, and that although she did have ideological commitments, they were largely Tory. 2 No matter how you sliced it, Austen appeared a stalwart anti-Jacobin, pitted foursquare against Hazlitt’s progressive, radical, “spirit of the age.” Insofar as susceptibility to revolutionary bliss 183was a precondition for joining the Romantic club, Austen, evidently, was not a member.
