The paper aims to explore the queer undercurrents and female kinships, especially homosocial bonds spanning across the works of Jane Austen. The queer potential has been recognized in female friendships throughout Austenite fiction. Though never mentioned explicitly. The emotional attachment, shared passion, intellectual fulfilment and interdependency between female friends and sometimes sisters, offer a critical space for the potential to subvert the so far heterosexual marriage plot. It also draws out attention to Austen’s controlled depiction of such ideas under the given patriarchal social structure. Basing itself upon queer theory, affect studies as the framework, we analyse the non-procreative intimacies in Austenite fiction that pose themselves as a powerful alternative to heteronormativity and economies of desire and stability. It also draws from Eve Sedgwick’s work and the homosocial triangle delineating how same sex attachments eclipse the central romantic unions and the need for a woman to be paired with a man. The characters of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith from Emma are homosocial in nature and contain a charge for homoeroticism standing as a queer resistance to the patriarchal structure. The characters that have potential of being unconventional, especially women of desire intense female friendships are marginalised and pushed to the periphery as the “other” so that the heteronormative relationships can grow at the centre holding them as the base. 

Jane Austen and The Patriarchy:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

This very famous line from Austen’s timeless novel Pride and Prejudice ironically and satirically places her text in the times of Regency England, a world rooted in patriarchy. One can see that although men have a choice to select their partner, but the agency to choose is limited only to the other gender. Therefore, any other forms of male same sex bonds need to be justified. This is later justified in the paper drawing from the theory of erotic triangle and Sedgewick’s essay titled Between Men. Women on the other side of the spectrum were twice marginalized and oppressed by the system, since they had absolutely no agency to choose their partner’s gender. The world she belonged to did not even acknowledge women with some of the basic fundamental rights like right to property and acquire wealth, while her characters portrayed ideologies way ahead of their time, where they wanted to be empowered enough to be at the apex of the gender discourse, sexually, financially and socially independent.

 A lot of critics have delved into various aspects of her works, but the queer undercurrents in Ausentite fiction is scarcely explored or dealt with. This is precisely because none of her works give explicit depictions of queerness, but the undertones have always been there, like unheard voices planning a quiet rebellion. From the nomenclature of her novels to her bold central female protagonists, Austen makes her intention to rebel very clear. Emma, the female protagonist, after whom her novel is named, states at the very beginning of the novel itself that she wants to be at the apex of the gender and social discourse, financially independent and plans to stay unmarried throughout. Though this headstrong girl is later made to conform into heteronormativity by marriage acting as the symbol of social acceptance, the existence of the quiet rebellion in her to stay independent in the best possible meaning of the term, reiterates Austen’s act of rebellion against the patriarchy and the gender discourse.  

The Queer Understanding to the Jungian Idea of Wholeness:

In her novel Sense and Sensibility, the character of Elinor stands for sense, logic, rationale, restraint, whereas Marianne stands for sensibility, emotion, impulses, and romantic idealism. The unification of the terms at the very title with a conjunction hint at a possible intellectual, emotional non-procreative union mimicking the Jungian Idea of wholeness. Carl Jung talks about a state of psychological wholeness achieved by the unification of the anima with the animus. He opines that a male has to come to term with his innate unrecognized femininity in him in order to achieve a state of wholeness and the female has to recognize her innate masculinity. Which basically means that a state of wholeness can be achieved only when the masculine and the feminine elements come together. Therefore, we can say that the title is a deliberate choice for the wholeness to occur by the masculine temperament of Sense and rationale meeting the romantic and sensible femineity. Austen is bound by society and therefore replaces the names of her female characters with their emotional values, escaping the societal taboo. This also echoes the Indian yogic concept of the Ida and Pingala. While explaining Ida and Pingala, the Upanishads say something very similar to what Carl Jung says about psychological wholeness.

Ida pingalyor maddhye susumna pravathy asau |

Yada Milati tad vayur bhavet paramapavanah || 

It translates to-

When, in the middle of Ida and Pingala, the flow of Sushumna awakens and unites with them, then from these two arises the supreme sacred (state).

Many of her female characters starting from Elizabeth Bennet, to Emma, to Marianne show signs of an unrecognized masculinity within themselves, which although not acknowledged completely forms a very important aspect of their personality and self. It gives them the ability, strength and courage to form opinions, pass judgements, uphold their sense of morale and choice, and from characters like Marianne uphold their need for sensuousness and desire. That is what makes Austen’s female characters more intriguing and independent from the prototype female characters created in that era. Men too, on the other hand, show signs of suppressed femininity in them, be it Mr Darcy or Mr. Knightley there is a vulnerable, emotional and feminine side to almost all of Austen’s male protagonists, tracing the roots of the characters from a female gaze, making the characters become more realistic and form a balanced arc till the end of the novel. 

The Erotic Triangle in Austenite Fiction:

Eve sedgewick’s talks of the erotic triangle in fiction and states in her essay. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, that erotic triangle basically delineates the fact that two male same sex bonds in a patriarchal society are justified by the advent of a third female acting as the conduit. The triangle can be seen inversed in Austen’s fiction, where we see in almost all her novels the prevalence of intense female homosocial bonds that are justified by their shared fondness over a third male. Female friendships in Austen’s works echo a lot of later feminist and black womanist writers like Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf, and even in Francis Lee’s film Ammonite, where nothing is labelled or explicit but intense and implicit. Francis Lee’s portrayal of the same sex bond can be seen as a contrast where the bond is made explicit due to the era it is set in. The bond acts as a queer resistance to patriarchy where Mary Anning develops a homosexual relationship and both the women are abandoned and deprived by patriarchy.

A dark, heaving mountain of a quilt lay in the bed… and something underneath it writhed and squirmed like a creature in an agony of suffocation. The quilt would sometimes be hoisted up in the middle, sometimes the corners would rise, and sometimes it seemed as if a whole elephant was struggling to get free.

On the other hand, one can see in Lihaaf, the quilt acting as a symbol of homoerotism, the sole symbol through which Chughtai portrays the acts of homoerotism, much similar to the shared bedroom of Austen and her sister, and later also for her characters lading us to the bedroom scene. 

“The woman is the conduit of a power relation, that is, of a bond, between men.” (Eve Sedgewick)

The females turn to same sex bonds that start off as homosocial deprived by patriarchy. Many of the later Austenite’s in their sequels and theatrical adaptations talk of lesbianism in Austen as seen in Emma in love by Terry Castle and other adaptations have elements of doubles and cross-dressing in the play, enabling a female character dressed as a male to kiss Harriet or Emma on stage, thereby justifying the underlying homoerotic current.

The Pre-Lesbian or the Autoerotic Theory:

In her essay, Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, Eve Sedgewick writes about the pre lesbian or the auto erotic theory. Through that she states that the emotional and sexual excess is directed inwards as the female becomes autoerotic and wants to self-satisfy herself, which explains the need for many of Austen’s characters like Emma to remain unmarried and Marrianne’s sexual excess under the influence of intense homosocial bonds.  This can further be understood from the Jungian theory of wholeness and as well as from the concept of Ida and Pingala, where the female characters attain a state of wholeness due to the presence of an inherent suppressed masculinity in them, making them self-sufficient and self-satisfying, making their presence, standalone and independent.

The lesbian economy of Sense and Sensibility, like the novel’s economy of language, has been so assiduously and thoroughly disavowed that we can be most certain of its importance. The ‘sense’ is the effort to deny a bond of shared vulnerability and emotional intensity… that is too threatening to the heterosexual, materialist social order.

What one must understand here is that Austen is bound by the gender discourse of Regency England and therefore her characters must conform into marriage as social acceptance. Austen is somewhere trapped between self-fashioning and self-cancellation. Many of the later Austenites do portray same sex bonds but only to aid patriarchy where the female unites with the male. Even though the same sex bond is much stronger, the heteronormative union must take place, for example, in Terry Castle’s Emma in love, a devastated Emma has to run to Mr Knightley for refuge and reunion from the torment that her homosexual relation had caused her. This can also be a parallel to what Adrienne Rich had opined later, that the male locus of power is located at the female’s dependence on the male to satisfy her. 

Austen’s Personal Life and the Bedroom Scene:

Austen’s relationship with her own sister Cassandra Austen had quite a lot of homoerotic undercurrents as is identified through their letters, many of which, according to the BBC documentary was burnt by Cassandra herself. This intense need for a homosocial bond can be seen in her portrayals of sisterhood and spinsterhood in her novels as well. 

A bedroom scene was a rare sight in Regency England especially in Austenite fiction, but when we are gifted with one in her novel Sense and Sensibility, the bedroom scene consists of not a man with a woman, but two women, loosely dressed, vulnerable and engrossed in an intimate act of emotional reciprocation. Cassandra Austen writes in one of her letters post Jane’s demise, echoing her all pervasive boundless love for her only partner-

She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, it is as if I have lost a part of myself …

The Conclusion:

Therefore, it can be understood that Austen’s intense female homosocial bonds, the sexual excess in her characters, their need to arrive at an autonomy in the societal discourse was an absolute threat to the patriarchy. While the overt structure of Austen’s novels invariably steers to a heterosexual union and marriage, a critical queer reading highlights the queer undertones, the intense homoerotic and homosexual undertones, female kinships and the themes of spinsterhood in her novels as well as in her personal life. The queer undertones were marginalized, but they were never removed. As an autoerotic presence, the woman will also have to be endowed with a sense of autonomy to self-pleasure and therefore be blessed with knowledge and absolute independence, something that the patriarchy would definitely disapprove of. Therefore, the independence is granted but only as much as is required to show the act of rebellion while still being conformed to the prevalent discourse. This exactly adheres to the concept of self-fashioning and self-cancellation as proposed by Stephen Greenblatt. The terms are complementary and supplementary to one another- where a quality is identified which does not conform to the societal norms and aesthetics, and is immediately eradicated both by the state and the individual.  It is as if the female characters are granted power only till the point that will aid patriarchy.

The heterosexual bonds like that of Elinor and Marriane Dashwood are formed based on the homosocial and homoerotic bonds that act as the based, but they are pushed to the margins so that the heteronormative union and the marriage plot can take place at the centre. But the fact that in order for the heteronormative to grow, the homoerotic had to be pushed to the margins is indicative of the power and intensity the bond held, enough to threaten the bond at the centre. Adrienne Rich in her essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, opines that –

The assumption that heterosexuality is the only natural and normal way of life has crippled the imagination of women.

References:

Austen, J. (1811). Sense and Sensibility. Thomas Egerton.

Austen, J. (1815). Emma. John Murray.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1992). Jane Austen and The Masturbating Girl. In Tendencies (pp. 109–129). Duke University Press.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between men: English literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press.

Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(4), 631–660.

Austen, J., & Castle, T. (1995). Emma (T. Castle, Intro.). Oxford University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Saraswati, S. S. (n.d.). Ida, Pingala and Sushumna. Bihar School of Yoga. DOI https://www.yogamag.net/

Chughtai, I. (1942/2009). The quilt (M. Asaduddin, Trans.). In M. Asaduddin (Ed.), Lifting the veil: Selected writings of Ismat Chughtai (pp. 1–14). Penguin Books.

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