Headin' West Again

Well, I’m off this weekend to another conference. This time, it’s the Arkansas Philological Association’s annual meeting, hosted by the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. At last weekend’s conference, I presented a paper on a medieval author, but this week I’m on more familiar territory—Jane Austen. The title of my paper is “‘He began to wish to know more of her’: Sex as Text and Subtext in Pride and Prejudice.” Catchy title, huh?

I guess I need to explain how I came to write a paper with such a titillating title (say that three times, quickly). I took a class at Ole Miss called “Studies in Romanticism,” and this class had an interesting premise. Instead of just studying works produced during the Romantic era (as most of us had already done), we examined selected Romantic works juxtaposed with contemporary reproductions, things like re-writes, continuations, movie versions, etc. The purpose was to analyze present-day conceptions of the Romantic era and the works produced during it and compare them with the ideals of the people actually living, writing, and reading during that time. One of the works we read was Pride and Prejudice.

As an aside here, I know some of you will be surprised to hear Austen characterized as a Romantic author. The neat thing is, Austen’s so great that everybody claims her. For some, she is the consummate eighteenth-century novelist, a woman at the end of a long line of authors struggling to “birth” the novel. For some, she is a Romantic, a novelist whose heroines appreciate nature and value human connection. Still others have claimed that she is the mother of the Victorian novel. Maybe she’s all of these.

Anyway, after reading P&P, watching several movie versions (most notably the 1995 BBC version with Colin Firth and Joe Wright’s 2005 version with Keira Knightley), and reading a modern Regency-era Historical romance, the professor raised this question: “Everybody claims that P&P is a romance novel. Romance novels are about sex. Where’s the sex in Pride and Prejudice?” He said he’d really like it if one of us took the challenge of answering that question in our seminar paper, and being an Austen scholar, I stepped up to the challenge.

It was a really interesting paper to write, not at all like anything I’d examined in her works before. I won’t share my findings here because I hope to submit the essay for publication. If it does get published, rest assured, you’ll be the first to know. :-)

On the last night the class met, each of us had to read a 15 minute version of our paper and then field questions from the class. The first question I got? “Do you realize how many times you just said the word ‘sex’ in fifteen minutes?”