Austen, Actresses and Accessories

Much Ado About Muffs

L. Engel

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137427946
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du théâtre

This interdisciplinary project draws on a wealth of sources (visual, material, literary and theatrical) to examine Austen's depiction of female performance, display and desire through her deployment of a culturally and symbolically charged accessory: the muff.

1

Around 1787: Austen’s Volume the First, the Elizas, Private Theatricals, and Muffs

Abstract: Chapter 1 juxtaposes an analysis of clothing, accessories, and theatricality in Jane Austen’s earliest writings with the controversies surrounding the private theatricals at Steventon inspired by the arrival of Austen’s dynamic cousin Eliza de Feuillide. At the same time Eliza was planning performances in Austen’s home, another Eliza, the actress Eliza Farren, was acting and directing private theatricals at Richmond House. I draw connections between representations of gigantic muffs in satiric prints and the issues surrounding the dynamics of women’s “publick” appearances in Austen’s Juvenilia and Eliza de Feuillide’s correspondence. Focusing on the muff as a stylish, theatrical, and suggestive accessory highlights the contradictory images of women surrounding Austen in her early teenage years.

Engel, Laura. Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado About Muffs. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137427946.0005.

The Rice Portrait: youth and style

A lovely young girl poses gracefully with her parasol, her slender fingers clutching the delicate folds of her dress revealing her stockings and black shoes. She stares confidently and knowingly at the viewer, her face emerging from the darkness of the sky in the background. Her costume is simple and elegant; a necklace, which looks like a round locket, circles her neck, emphasizing her youthful body and lack of bosom. We have no undisputed image of Jane Austen as a child; however, several scholars believe that a “professional oil painting of an attractive, fashionably dressed girl, whose age is difficult to determine”¹ may indeed be a depiction of Austen as a teenager.

“The Rice Portrait” as the painting has come to be known, originally thought to be by the well-known artist Zoffany, is now attributed to Ozias Humphry, who was commissioned to paint a portrait of Austen’s great uncle, Frances Austen² (Figure 1.1). Despite the controversy surrounding the authenticity of the image, Claudia Johnson maintains that the painting is a representation of Austen. In a recent TLS article, she claims, “It would now seem that there is decisive evidence that the ‘Rice Portrait of Jane Austen ... is indeed an authentic likeness of the novelist, made in her life time. This evidence consists of the three lines of script in the upper right-hand corner ... First, the artist’s signature: Ozia{s} Humphry, R.A. Second, the date of the portrait: 178* (the last digit is probably a nine). And third, the name of the sitter: Jane Austen.”³ A high-resolution “digital scan” has enabled researchers to uncover this information on a 1910 photograph of the portrait, which provides evidence that these inscriptions existed before twentieth-century cleanings of the painting. Johnson admits that this information raises additional questions surrounding the mysterious appearance of these details and the double signature of the artist; however, she suggests that “Walker’s camera saw something that ordinary people looking at the portrait did not see, in part because the writing was difficult to detect beneath a century’s worth of grime, and in part, confident (though mistaken) about artist and sitter as people already were, no one looked for signatures, names and dates where they were placed.”⁴

Johnson’s idea that ordinary people only see what they want to see, particularly in terms of Austen, also applies to academic analyses of her work. Tatjana Jukic suggests, “The Rice Portrait debate is thus but the tip of the iceberg: it foreshadows the problem of the iconic authenticity of Jane Austen in all its aspects ... The visual representation of the author seems to be key to the silences of her discourse, bridging the gap between what remains unsaid in Austen’s letters and novels, and the need of contemporary readers to focus their readings of old texts on essentially contemporary notions of body, politics, and history.”⁵ Thus, whether or not the portrait is definitively Austen is less interesting than the ways in which the figure in the painting has become a visual emblem of the seductive, playful, and theatrical irreverence of Austen’s early writings. Because we have so little direct information about Austen’s childhood (we have no letters before 1796 and no diaries or memoirs), scholars have relied on the accounts of others and on Austen’s notebooks, which contain her earliest writings, to piece together a composite idea of what Austen was like before she became the “Austen” who composed her published novels. The lovely, playful figure in the Rice portrait has come to represent a possible glimpse of a teenage author, whose lively heroines engage in shopping, stealing, drinking, gambling, and seduction.

FIGURE 1.1 Ozias Humphry. Portrait of Jane Austen known as The Rice Portrait. (ca. 1792–1793) courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.

In a newly published facsimile edition of Austen’s “Volume the First,” which contains a variety of short plays, stories, and miscellaneous fragments dating from as early as 1786–1787, Katherine Sutherland explains the resistance to acknowledging the significance of Austen’s youthful productions: “Early editors and biographers (still either Austen family members or instructed by them as to what they knew) seemed reluctant to jeopardize a reputation founded in realism and naturalism by exposing to view the zany and surreal fiction of the juvenilia; and, with few exceptions, the view persisted.”⁶ Peter Sabor remarks in his excellent introduction to the Cambridge edition of the Juvenilia, “Austen’s remarkable early fictions, fragmentary though some of them are, can no longer be dismissed as mere apprentice work, and rather than damaging Austen’s reputation, they have come to augment it.”⁷ In fact, Margaret Doody argues persuasively and in agreement with Deirdre Le Faye’s suggestion that Austen returned to her early writings when she began work on her later fictions. Doody emphasizes that the enthusiasm and interest Austen’s family showed in her notebooks “inspired her to return to writing, and thus to undertake the serious and heavy work of finally revising Sense and Sensibility, the first of her novels to be published.”⁸ Juliet McMaster declares definitively, “if you don’t know the juvenilia, you don’t know Austen.”⁹

The notebooks

Austen’s notebooks represent an archival artifact of her labor as a writer and transcriber. Peter Sabor reminds us: “No original drafts of Austen’s first writings survive. What remains are her transcriptions in three notebooks, containing a total of some 74,000 words ... ‘Volume the First,’ the shabbiest of the three notebooks, is a small quarto, bound in quarter calf and marbled boards. The leather on the spine is now largely worn away and the boards are severely rubbed and faded.”¹⁰ Paula Byrne posits that Austen’s dedication to the process of rewriting her earlier works plus her specific design of the notebooks provides evidence of her desire to see herself as an author. “Jane Austen also took the trouble of creating these books, which involved much labor with goose quill and inkwell, so as to present herself, at least in her own imagination, as a professional author. Though written by hand, the volumes have the accouterments of proper published books: contents lists, dedications, chapter divisions. Even as a teenager, Jane Austen knew what she wanted from life: to be a writer.”¹¹ Katherine Sutherland stresses the inherent theatricality of the notebooks – these were pieces Austen designed to be read out loud and shared with a familiar audience.

All three juvenile notebooks are confidential publications; that is, they are semi-public manuscripts whose internal features reveal they were intended for circulation among family and friends. They are not the secret confessions of a teenage girl, entrusted to her private journal and for her eyes alone. Rather they are stories to be shared and admired by a select audience, filled with allusions to family jokes and events; they are sociable texts, the products of protective and indulgent circumstances. All three notebooks exhibit evidence of heavy wear, suggesting frequent re-reading and family performance that can be securely dated before their acquisition by holding libraries, where access has been limited and narrowly supervised.¹²

There is a paradox inherent here in the difference between the wear and tear of the actual notebooks (proof of their repeated use) and their subsequent sequestered history. Sutherland’s comments about the notebooks being suppressed and closely guarded leads to a kind of “opening of the flood gates” metaphor when scholars finally do gain access to Austen’s early work. Clearly, the writings have engendered a wide range of interpretations. The narratives have been called raw, authentic, erotic, and undressed, and are viewed either in opposition to or as a precursor of Austen’s later writings.¹³ Paula Byrne argues, “Because she was writing for herself and her family, she allowed herself a lack of restraint unthinkable for published novels. In this sense, the vellum notebooks give access to the authentic interior life of Jane Austen, free from the shackles of literary convention and the mask of respectability required by print.”¹⁴ Jillian Heydt-Stevenson reminds us:

Most readers agree that the Juvenilia’s raw erotic energy punctures the mythic representation that Austen’s writings sprung from the head of late eighteenth-century culture in a form that was utterly refined, the very template of decorous propriety and deportment. What connection we should draw between these earlier works and her more mature novels has been a debated topic. In my opinion, these stories are not anomalies of her youth and expressions of a vernal freedom later wholly censored. Instead what we find in the Juvenilia points towards what we should also pay attention to later: the critical and historical significance of the erotic content of her polished and urbane works.¹⁵

Indeed, if we consider Austen’s Juvenilia to be embedded in a larger culture obsessed with issues of theatricality, distinctions between “private” and “public,” femininity, performance, embodiment, consumerism, and sexuality, the writings seem much less like “anomalies” or hidden, “authentic” musings exposed. Instead, the subject matter seems to tap into the relevant cultural landscape.

Austen’s clever use of theatricality, fashion, and accessories in her early writings are tied to the muff as an object and a signifier in its paradoxical relationship between secrecy and revelation, sexuality and style, ridiculousness and fashion, theatrical construction and organic matter. Images of actresses with muffs and the caricatures that appear around them interrogate these boundaries between the decorous and profane, private and public, excessive and contained.¹⁶ These concerns are mapped in particular in Austen’s “Volume the First” in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Much Ado About Muffs
• 1  Around 1787: Austens Volume the First, the Elizas, Private Theatricals, and Muffs
• 2  Restless Luxuries: Muffs in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility
• 3  Jane Austen as Fashion Plate: Musings on Muffs
• Epilogue: The Afterlife of Muffs
• Bibliography
• Index