1 - Jane Austen's Aesthetic Vocabulary of Character

Summary

Portraiture and architecture are often interconnected surfaces of the self in Jane Austen's use of visuality. Both have the power to convey the way in which characters’ shifting perspectives reorient their prejudices and lead to marriages based on compatible views and values. Drawing upon David Lodge's theory that the ‘vocabulary of discrimination’ allows for a categorical means of communication through a language within language, my discussion moves from two- to three- dimensional forms of aesthetic representation in her fiction. The analysis focuses on Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), which best demonstrate the novelist's manipulation of the gaze and correlatives of character.

After contextualizing Austen's visual technique, the chapter first examines her novels’ reliance on the physiognomic qualities of the likeness to compel the viewer, and thus the reader, to picture the subject differently. Unlike Ann Radcliffe, whose references to portraits show the permanence of female subjection, Austen uses the ‘likeness’ as a positive force for change in her plots: visible and metaphorical portraits improve characters’ insights into themselves and others through perceptual substitution, or the replacement of one image with another, that inspires a change of heart. Like Radcliffe, however, Austen discriminates between the male and female experience of viewing and being viewed. While the painted male gaze has the power to ‘arrest’ the heroine's eyes and heart, the heroine cannot control a male viewer's way of looking and feeling. The reader observes that in contrast to Austen's fictional women, who require visible portraits to alter their perceptions of men, her heroes must be able to ‘picture’ a woman's character in their mind's eye.

Society's absorption of the Lavaterian habit of looking and René Descartes's philosophy that ‘the eyes of the body reify the eye of the mind’ anticipate the connection between portraiture and architecture, which comprises the second half of my analysis. Like portraiture, architecture provides characters with an external means of identification. By imbuing the physiognomies of structures and their surroundings with comparisons to the Aristotelian golden mean, Austen reasserts the early eighteenth century's investment in looks that speak.