5/21/2023 0 Comments Jane austen by a ladyIn Northanger Abbey and Lady Susan, two of her posthumously published early works, the libidinal is mediated through novels and letters. Critical readings of Jane Austen are not typically prurient ones, yet there are certainly subtle libidinal undertones within Austen’s acutely clever prose. Female language, she claims, expresses sexual pleasure. 1 This linguistic strategy reflects the multiplicity of women’s sexuality. Perhaps Luce Irigaray, the twentieth-century feminist theorist, may have countered that women purposefully eschew ‘stops’ and ‘grammar.’ Women’s language, Irigaray argues, “sets off in all directions leaving ‘him’ unable to discern the coherence of any meaning” (28–29). Henry Tilney of Northanger Abbey derisively suggests that women’s writing “is faultless except … a general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar” (Austen 16).
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