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She spoke then, on being so entreated.-What did she say?-Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.
-Jane Austen, Emma
IS THIS TRUE? Does a lady always say just what she ought, even in a Jane Austen novel? Only the repetition of many re-readings can dull us to the extraordinary implications of this claim. Yes, the voice is ironic-but the structure of the passage also suggests a more earnest impulse behind the narrator's smooth dismissal. Who asks, "What did she say"? The reader, of course. The reader always does. By ventriloquizing her reader's curiosity, and then implying its naughty prurience through her refusal to satisfy it, Austen seems more interested in characterizing her own novelistic practice than in (not) reporting Emma's acceptance of Mr. Knightley' s offer. Austen's own authorial ladylikeness allows her to say only what she ought-in this case, nothing at all. Austen alerts us here to the parameters of her own narrato rial propriety: what she considers worthy and unworthy of narration.
One of the most striking things about Jane Austen's novels is that they simultaneously are rather brutally repressive of their heroines' dynamism and fancy-ruthlessly reining in their spheres of energy, activity, and even fantasy to the linear trajectory of the marriage plot-and also have given enormous amounts of reading pleasure in an uninterrupted regime of almost two hundred years. One possible answer to this conundrum is that this very repression is the source of our pleasure, that we all secretly and somewhat sadistically enjoy watching the "instruction" or chastening of high-spirited heroines-what Eve Sedgwick has called the "punishing . . . moral pedagogy" (8SS) of Austen's novels. However true this claim may be on one level, it clearly does not capture the full range of pleasures that Austen's novels give and have given. To that end, I would like to offer a somewhat more complicated genealogy of the reading pleasure that Austen affords.
Every recent critical discussion of narrative pleasure is indebted to Peter Brooks's seminal study Reading for the Plot: De sign and Intention in Narrative. According to Brooks's analysis of the Freudian "master-plot" of the classical novel, our pleasure in narrative is a kind of delayed gratification analogous to the controlling of psychic energy. What Freud...