Sense and Sensibility and Psychoanalysis: Jane Austen and the Kristevan Semiotic

Recent scholarship has brought late twentiethand early twenty-first-century critical theory to bear upon Jane Austen. Sydney Miller and Devoney Looser read Austen and her afterlife alongside Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964). They agree that modern Austen mash-ups and kitsch reproductions reveal the “campiness,” or sheer frivolity, of the Austen originals, as theorized by Sontag. Matthew Taylor (“Beholding the Beholder’s Eye”; “Sensibility’s Double Take”), in turn, applies generative anthropology and mimetic theory to the novels, in particular René Girard’s premise of “two audiences,” while my own work has read Austen and her afterlife through theories of performance and performativity, such as Judith Butler’s, and through Jack Halberstam’s notion of gaga feminism (Cano, “Austen and Shakespeare”; Jane Austen and Performance; “Jane Goes Gaga”). Such a growing trend has begun to complement more traditional, and still prevalent, historicist approaches to Austen, allowing us to see Austen anew by highlighting little-noticed aspects of her fiction (camp sensibility, mimetic tendencies, the absence of an original “performance”). Yet what remains largely missing among these various theoretical enquiries is a psychoanalytic reading of the novels that investigates the unconscious of the text and the existential challenges it poses to writer, characters, and readers. In this essay, I bring Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, into conversation with French linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, one of Sontag’s and Girard’s contemporaries and still a prominent and prolific figure in the Western intellectual landscape. Not surprising, given the novel’s rootedness in eighteenth-century notions of sentimentality, most studies of Sense and Sensibility have been historically inflected. Marvin Mudrick’s now classic assessment, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, regards Sense and Sensibility as a condemnation of excessive feeling and a parody of the novel of sensibility, as its title suggests already (62, 90). Another classic, Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character, reads the Dashwood sisters in relation to the flowering commercial modernity