Let it be understood in all senses that what the word disgusting de-nominates is what one cannot resign oneself to mourn.

—Jacques Derrida

In a well-known passage from one of her letters to her sister Cassandra, Jane Austen records her own response to Pride and Prejudice (1813):

I had some fits of disgust. … The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté [sic], or anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style.¹

That Austen can be driven to disgust not just by her own writing, but by its very refinement, by what is most “light, and bright, and sparkling” in it, comes as no surprise: the hyperfastidiousness she evinces here conforms perfectly with the venerable stereotype of gentle Jane, where the gentleness or gentility in question easily assumes a pathological or ideologically suspect character. Of course, what disgusts Austen is not so much her novel's “general style” itself as the lack of a “contrast” that would “bring the reader with increased delight to [its] playfulness and epigrammatism.” In its belated wish to interpolate a certain differential heaviness, however, Austen's acute calculation of rhetorical effects bespeaks the characteristic work of an aesthetic of distinction.² Gagging on the stylistic consistency—that is, the overconsistency—of Pride and Prejudice, getting sick from what amounts to too much of a good thing, Austen thus presents herself as her novel's ideal reader. For reading Pride and Prejudice—reading any Austen novel—means submitting, consciously or not, to a rigorous aesthetic discipline, undergoing subtle but incessant schooling in the ever-finer classifications, discriminations, and aversions that maintain Austen's exacting (because never quite explicit) norms of good manners and good taste, of “rectitude and delicacy,” according to which anyone, even a distinguished hero or a delightful heroine,³ or anything, even an unrelieved “playfulness and epigrammatism,” can fall under the dreaded rubric of the disgusting.

But what if, instead of merely providing evidence of how well Austen has learned her own lessons, her “fits of disgust” signified a protest against that discipline? There is more than one way, after all, of being disgusted by Pride and Prejudice—indeed, by the very aesthetic properties that would seem to make it irresistibly appetizing. For if the novel functions discreetly and thus all the more efficaciously as a kind of conduct book, the good manners and good taste it works to implant operate in the service of a eugenic teleology of good breeding: that is, of the marriage plot, whereby the traditional novel idealizes heterosexuality and its reproduction. Much of the most adventurous recent Austen criticism, of course, has concentrated on uncovering just this ideological labor in her fiction. As a result, it has become possible not only to see how her novels serve up what D. A. Miller calls “social prescriptions that readers are palatably, even deliciously made to swallow,” but also to begin to resist such dubious nourishment, spitting out—even spitting up—what no longer tastes quite so delicious.⁴ In expressing her disgust on reading Pride and Prejudice, Austen may be doing something other than just voicing her fear of dulling (or offending) our palates with too much brilliance: she may in fact be seen as at once authorizing and enacting a resistant reading of her own text.

If Pride and Prejudice is disgusting because it is “too light, and bright, and sparkling,” its seductive surface does not so much conceal a disciplinary core as constitute and convey a new and improved discipline of its own. The lightness of the style, I would argue, functions much like that of today's lighter, leaner cuisine, which, as we are constantly reminded not just by doctors and dietitians but, even more dishearteningly, by restaurant critics and cookbook authors as well, is both what we want and what's good for us. Pride and Prejudice, whose low-fat, low-cholesterol language positively makes our mouths water, begins to seem uncannily “modern,” a prescient fictional precursor of our own food and drug administration.⁵

But the stylish askesis the novel purveys is not merely a question of style. In thematizing its écriture minceur, it articulates the strict moral regimen enforced by and upon what it would project as a whole interpretive community of weight watchers. The “easy playfulness” (70) of Elizabeth Bennet's manners is matched, not surprisingly, by her “light and pleasing” (70) figure, so that she serves as a fitting embodiment of the verbal ethos of the novel in which she stars. Thus streamlined, moreover, she can figure over and against characters like Mr. Collins, whose “heavy looking” (109) body almost automatically convicts him of the “stupidity” (163) with which he is soon charged, and which accounts for most of the rare morsels of “solemn specious nonsense” to be found in the text; or like the “indolent” (81) Mr. Hurst, whose vice is confirmed, and whose character irreversibly discredited, in the summary observation that “when he found [Elizabeth to] prefer a plain dish to a ragout, [he] had nothing to say to her” (81). If we haven't yet internalized the precept that less is more, those of us unfortunate enough to share Mr. Hurst's taste are reminded that the only appropriate response to a ragout is dégoût.

Even more telling, of course, is Elizabeth's moral superiority to the novel's various comically aberrant female characters, all of whom, in different ways, betray both an excessive appetite and an inability or an unwillingness to control it: Mrs. Bennet, who has never learned how to “hold her tongue” (305); Lydia Bennet, who has inherited not only her mother's shameless garrulity but also her none-too-discriminating taste for soldiers; Miss Bingley, who, with her invidious sarcasm (literally, a rending of flesh), repeatedly and haplessly bites off more than she can chew; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose similarly self-subverting freedom in “delivering her opinion” (198) more efficiently delivers proof of her “ill breeding” (207). Reduced—or rather, expanded—to comic types, these characters, paradoxically, can never really “grow”: they can only repeat themselves. Even the notoriously “fast” Lydia is stuck in a one-joke role. Along with Collins, these “literary fat ladies,” as Patricia Parker would call them, indeed provide whatever precious textual padding remains amid the general svelteness.⁶ Modelled against the static backdrop they compose, the self-disciplined Elizabeth should seem to move even more sleekly through the novel's marriage plot, which, though it places obstacles in her path, does so, apparently, in order that we may marvel at the “liveliness” and general light-heartedness with which she negotiates them.

As Austen anticipated, however, the novel may not be sufficiently “stretched out” or larded to make us consume it with such “increased delight.” Not every reader, at any rate, will choose to join the “admiring multitude” whom the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy is destined to “teach … what connubial felicity really was” (325). What one hears as a certain sarcasm in this very phrasing may even bespeak Austen's distaste for the ideological project in which she finds herself enlisted. Of course, in carrying out this project, she is hardly unique among eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English novelists, and Pride and Prejudice is hardly the only one of her novels in which the exigencies of the marriage plot ultimately take precedence over every other claim for narrative interest. What makes Pride and Prejudice unusually hard to swallow, I have been suggesting, is not so much the marriage plot per se as the particular ideologico-aesthetic ruse that is supposed to make it go down so easily. For no matter how the novel's distinctive lightness (liteness?) gets glamorized, it remains a fetish in a symbolic economy of privation: indeed, it has to be turned into an object of desire precisely insofar as it represents—and requires—the systematic denial of pleasure.

For all its “Mozartean perfection,” in short, Pride and Prejudice seems to me the least enjoyable of all of Austen's novels. Where the other novels offer us various juicy tidbits to sink our teeth into on the way to the wedding, Pride and Prejudice, though not entirely fat-free, generally exercises an almost stingy restraint in dispensing preclosural gratifications, withholding any that might tempt us to stray too far or too unproductively from its foreordained linear trajectory, catering only to those tastes whose indulgence will leave us, like the heroine, lithe and trim enough to be put through our paces.

Novels such as Sense and Sensibility and Emma obviously have to conduct their heroines (and their readers) toward the triumphant genital heterosexuality enshrined in the institution of marriage, but, as critics have shown, the very plotting of that development through a progression of proto-Freudian “phases” at least affords their heroines (and their readers) various perversely “pregenital” and/or nonprocreative excitations.⁷ Faced with Pride and Prejudice, however, the reader who is not especially tantalized by the prospect of a wedding feast is going to be left feeling more than a little hungry.

In this situation, is there anything to do with one's mouth besides complain? As I have suggested, one way of resisting the heterosexist teleology of Austen's master plot is to cultivate—indeed, to savor—whatever perverse reader-relations that plot may permit, if only so as, precisely, to master them. To tease out the kinkiness of the interaction between Emma and Knightley, for example, or to play up the seductive theatricality of Mary and Henry Crawford, is fantasmatically to perpetuate a relation with a lost or occluded object: in the first example, a perversity between characters, which the normalizing narrative has to cover up; in the second, an energy more visibly located within characters themselves, who must therefore be dealt with more punitively, expelled from the text in a climactic paroxysm of moral revulsion. What a resistant reading of Mansfield Park may resist, then, is the pressure to reenact that expulsion: instead of casting the Crawfords out, as one is expected to do, one may try to keep them in, guarding them, perversely, in what French Freudian theory has helped us to picture as a crypt within—or upon—one's own reading body.⁸

In other words, if the disgusting “is what one cannot resign oneself to mourn,” purgation is not the only response to it; what has been theorized as the fantasy of incorporation suggests an alternative form of non-mourning. The fantasy of incorporation promotes what Freud calls the work of melancholia, where the refusal to mourn signals a refusal of loss. Neither a mere throwing up and casting out nor, as in mourning, an idealizing, metaphorical introjection of the lost object, incorporation, as Derrida has suggested in his commentary on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “involves eating the object … in order not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside, into the pocket of a cyst.”⁹ Insisting on a certain literalization of the object, at once killing it and keeping it alive, incorporation is a fantasy not only of eating one's cake and having it, but also of becoming one's cake, of identifying oneself with it and thus of denying its absence, which the metaphorical substitutions characteristic of mourning would implicitly acknowledge.¹⁰

In view of what I've said about the slim pickings presented by Pride and Prejudice, however, the question would seem to be: how can one perpetuate a fantasmatic relation with something one never had in the first place? One possible answer might begin by recalling that, under the novel's terroristic regime of good taste, no one, not even Elizabeth Bennet, is immune from the charge of vulgarity. For example, Elizabeth's very athleticism—the clearest demonstration that hers is a disciplined body—provokes Miss Bingley's disgusted censure when, in a burst of unladylike impetuosity, Elizabeth undertakes the walk to Netherfield to visit her sister Jane and shows up in a dirty petticoat. If Miss Bingley's sneering assertion that this behavior displays “a most country town indifference to decorum” (82) testifies more damningly to her own bad moral taste, there might nonetheless be some advantages to not sanitizing Elizabeth too quickly by reading the passage “figuratively.” That is, it might be useful to allow Elizabeth's dirtiness itself to maintain a certain insistent literality, a weight and density comparable to those enjoyed by the incorporated object in the work of melancholia.

And though, Lydia's worthy efforts notwithstanding, the novel as a whole may not satisfy one's appetite for certain perverse pleasures, Miss Bingley's ill-advised mudslinging, like Lady Catherine's later judgment that Elizabeth's marriage to Darcy constitutes a “pollution” (396) of the woods of Pemberley, has the oddly appealing effect of stigmatizing the heroine as not only a transgressor of class distinctions but also a sexual threat. However transparent a betrayal of her own jealousy, snobbishness, and sheer mean-spiritedness—that is, however disgusting in its own right—Miss Bingley's disgust suggests one way of cathecting what we might otherwise pass up as an excessively wholesome text: by recognizing that, through the very plotting of its heroine's upward mobility, of her inevitable ascent toward marriage, it affords us a way of articulating sex with class—specifically, of eliciting from it a certain social perversity, in which the older sense of “vulgarity” as social offense already anticipates or implies the newer one of “vulgarity” as sexual offense.

In fact, far from being adventitious or merely occasional, Elizabeth Bennet's implication in the disgusting to a great extent defines her. It is this very stance, moreover, that she takes (rather self-congratulatorily) to define herself. What she shares with her father, of course, and what qualifies the two of them to figure as the novel's most conspicuous author-surrogates, is a sophisticated “delight … in any thing ridiculous” (59). Self-styled connoisseurs of the stupid and the vulgar, bemused practitioners of the art of treating the disgusting as a delicacy, these two characters demonstrate the classic middle-class technique, recently delineated by John Kucich, of making oneself look classier than the rest of the middle class.¹¹ But this raises a potentially unsettling question: to what extent are they therefore not only author-surrogates but critic-surrogates as well?

One reason for retaining a certain psychoanalytic frame of reference is that, inflected by an awareness of the politics of sophistication, it can help us not only to resituate the “easy” ironic “playfulness” that informs this lightest and liveliest of Austen's novels, but also to rethink our own way of consuming it. If the interesting characters in Austen's novels usually fall into two asymmetrical categories—the category inhabited primarily by the heroines, who can (or must) do the essentially interiorizing work of mourning; and the category of those who, endowed (or afflicted) with no such interiority, live exclusively in the nauseating vicariousness that, for Austen, virtually is the social—if, in short, the characters can be classified as either elegiac or emetic—what makes the jaunty Elizabeth Bennet differently interesting is that, oddly like the melancholic, she marks out a liminal zone between the interior and exterior. While she dwells exclusively neither among the disgusting nor among the mournfully refined, she effects a certain commerce between these two realms. As a refined consumer of the disgusting, she may have tastes more like those of a resistant critic than we might imagine, and more to teach us about our own refractory middle-class fantasies of incorporation than we already know.

That is, if Pride and Prejudice, more saliently than any of Austen's other novels, mobilizes the marriage plot in such a way as to legitimate the nascent social conjunction that has been called a “middle-class aristocracy,”¹² the concomitant middle-class sophistication embodied by Elizabeth Bennet has the capacity to signify more than just a binding of potentially unruly social energies: its overdetermination can provide an instructive context for the oppositional projects of contemporary bourgeois academic criticism. It is an irony worth remarking, in other words, that the discursive strategy impelling Elizabeth's success story—in which what really succeeds, more balefully, seems to be ideological containment itself—looks a lot like the discursive strategy whereby latter-day middle-class sophisticates would disrupt the very ideology in whose interest Elizabeth fares so well.

Much of the appeal of Pride and Prejudice, in any case, consists in its fulfillment of the wish that middle-class readers can be sophisticated. While the middle-class heroine of Northanger Abbey can only aspire to the sophistication epitomized by her aristocratic husband, Elizabeth Bennet not only possesses sophistication before the novel has even begun, but proves herself more charming than Prince Charming himself—more charming, more clever, more witty than all the Darcys and Bingleys and Hursts and de Bourghs put together. But what exactly is this middle-class sophistication that makes Elizabeth, according to her author, “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print”? Just what is it in Elizabeth's “general style” that enables her not only to win Darcy but, in so doing, to outclass and infuriate snobs like Miss Bingley and bullies like Lady Catherine, making her the prototype of all those wisecracking comic heroines of literature and film, those avengers of their class against its supercilious would-be oppressors?

Consider the following exchange, in which Elizabeth attempts to recuperate her mother's embarrassing monologue about a suitor of Jane's who once wrote verses for her:

“And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth impatiently. “There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”

“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy.

“Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Every thing nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”

Darcy only smiled; and the general pause which ensued made Elizabeth tremble lest her mother should be exposing herself again.

(90)

Clearly framed as a diversionary tactic, Elizabeth's rather panicky “playfulness and epigrammatism” here work not just to take the spotlight away from her vulgar mother, but to establish Elizabeth's distinction over and against that vulgarity, with which she might otherwise seem too closely affiliated. But though Elizabeth may come off looking distinguished, the playful epigrammatism thanks to which she does so is not entirely distinct from the abjected discourse of the mother.¹³

For Elizabeth's wit obeys a chiastic logic, whereby Darcy's apparently refined, metaphorical defense of poetry as the “food of love” gets set up as a mere received idea, against which her own ironic, deidealizing reading, if it is to emerge as superior in analytic sophistication, must invoke a certain irreducible antimetaphorical insistence: that of the body and its appetites in their ineloquent, almost stupid, but strangely heroic materiality. While the “fine, stout, healthy” body in love can take poetry or leave it, such merely metaphorical food will hardly nourish what Elizabeth rather surprisingly disparages as a “slight, thin sort of inclination.” (Even if “stout,” in Austen's day, may have meant “vigorous” rather than “thickset,” we can indeed imagine here a happy prolepsis, not unlike that of “vulgarity,” whereby the body for which this health-conscious novel secretly longs is neither slight nor even light, but perhaps best described by the distinctly un-Austenian adjective, zaftig.¹⁴) Indeed, so paradoxically offensive is the idealized metaphoricity of poetry as the food of love that it can have the literally disgusting effect of “starv[ing]” that weak inclination “entirely away.” The savvy, down-to-earth Elizabeth advertises a robust middle-class materialism that—at once appealing to the debunking force of what a nicer aesthetic would find repulsive, and thereby evincing its own disgust vis-à-vis the latter—chokes on the spiritualizing clichés that the aristocratic Darcy, for one, has not been too proud to swallow.

This is not to say that Elizabeth has no saving interiority: her grief and humiliation in the wake of the disgrace caused by Lydia and Wickham, her anguished recognition that “never had she so honestly loved [Darcy], as now, when all love must be vain” (295), testify to her appetite for the work of mourning. But Elizabeth owes her success to more than just her refined and refining inwardness. If, on the one hand, what makes middle-class sophistication middle-class, as Norbert Elias suggests, is its displacement of merely exterior, superficial aristocratic civility into a psychologized cultivation, it just as constitutively distinguishes itself, on the other hand, by activating the resulting self-consciousness through an endless putting into quotation marks of its own lower stratum, of the vulgarity that thereby figures within it as an indelible prehistorical trace.¹⁵ Through her witty remarks on poetry and love, Elizabeth distinguishes herself from Darcy and her mother alike, playing the high metaphorizing taste of the one off against the low literal-mindedness of the other—the terms in which she champions the body and literality, for instance, are themselves figurative—and thus exhibiting a rhetorical virtuosity that neither of them can claim.

Playing both sides against the middle—that is, against itself—middle-class sophistication vulgarizes mere (i.e., aristocratic) sophistication and sophisticates mere (i.e., lower-class) vulgarity. Elizabeth invites Darcy to acknowledge the charm of the latter tactic when, at the end of the novel, she asks him “to account for his ever having fallen in love with her”:

“My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners—my behaviour to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?”

“For the liveliness of your mind, I did.”

“You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them.”

(388)

Resorting again to chiasmus, Elizabeth identifies her manner, as well as her “manners,” in terms of an alluring “impertinence” as opposed to a disgusting “civility.” Yet if she has “interested” Darcy where other women could not, this is not simply because of her difference from their “deference”—not simply because he finds refreshing what would otherwise seem disgusting—but because she has had the wit to stylize the vulgarity that keeps threatening to reclaim the rest of her family. “Bordering on the uncivil,” Elizabeth's stylistic practice is a strategically displaced, ironically mannered version of what she has avowed in herself as a certain “coarseness of … sentiment,” itself bordering on the incorrigible Lydia's “coarseness of expression” (247; Austen's emphasis). And while Elizabeth by no means celebrates such contaminating contiguity with Lydia—or, for that matter, with any of the more disgusting members of her family, which is to say, just about everyone but Jane, the Gardiners, and perhaps her father—her remarks to Darcy above make disarmingly clear that she has grasped the rhetorical and social advantages of vomiting vulgarity into the inside, of incorporating it into a new, more capacious and more versatile class style.¹⁶

The evident upward mobility of this style might represent something of an embarrassment for those of us who recognize in it an uncanny precursor of our own would-be “impertinent” deployment of the “disgusting”: if not unabashedly downward, the movement of oppositional criticism is supposed to be audaciously and unpredictably lateral, transgressing disciplinary divisions, cultural boundaries, and so forth. The point is not to unmask oppositional criticism as merely another mode of bourgeois careerism, but to mark the different, almost opposite, ethical and political valences with which strikingly similar strategies can be charged. For the fantasy of incorporation, which I have associated with an admirably perverse resistance to the normalizing (i.e., heterosexualizing) pressures of the marriage plot, bears a strong resemblance to the far less attractive operation of containment—more specifically, to “the endless ‘rediscovery’ of the carnivalesque within modern literature” (and criticism), which Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have demystified as “a counter-sublimation, a delirious expenditure of the symbolic capital accrued (through the regulation of the body and the decathexis of habitus) in the successful struggle of bourgeois hegemony.”¹⁷

Perversely cultivating a taste for what the regime of “family values” demonizes as the disgusting, much recent gay, lesbian, and anti-heterosexist criticism could probably be historicized as a “counter-sublimation” of the kind Stallybrass and White describe. But less than the question of whether that criticism is “really” oppositional or “really” complicit in the success of bourgeois hegemony, what interests me is why the problematic of class and the problematic of sexuality so rarely engage each other in contemporary academic discourse. Not that our culture as a whole abounds in places where they can be found in dialogue; in this respect, the academy indeed mirrors the world from which it might be imagined to differ. While every television talk show nowadays strikes another blow against the poor old repressive hypothesis, what remains largely unspoken, in as well as out of the academy, is not sexuality but the class relations around sexuality. Yet, if this issue seldom gets addressed, it nevertheless—or for that very reason—gets acted out, generating powerful or even violent effects, as demonstrated currently by a whole range of attacks on “cultural elites,” attacks launched most notoriously and most visibly in and through the mass media by right-wing politicians like Vice-President Dan Quayle, but also increasingly in evidence within the field of lesbian and gay studies itself, where a resentful activism sets itself up in opposition as much to a supposedly triumphant ivorytower mandarinate as to the aforementioned guardians of the Family.¹⁸

If the example of the impertinent Elizabeth Bennet confronts “perverse” criticism with a hypothetical narrative of its own class origins, it should go without saying that, far from constituting one more discrediting assault, this genealogy is designed to promote the cause of perversity. Instead of neutralizing “perverse” criticism by exposing its position of class privilege, it would suggest that “privilege”—or what gets stereotyped under that rubric—can itself have the dangerous force of the perverse. In a culture that tolerates the sophisticated even less than the disgusting—indeed, for which the sophisticated paradoxically represents the disguisting at its most egregious—and that constructs its middle class as the sacred repository of normality itself, the sophisticated middle-class connoisseur of the disgusting commits an offense that includes but is not limited to the sexual. Or rather, her sexual offense counts as a social offense, and vice versa. Not only has she developed unorthodox appetites, but she has the effrontery to flaunt them, as though looking down her nose at those members of her class who, less knowingly fluent than she in their command of the operative codes of good and bad taste, and therefore less adept at scrambling them, have to content themselves with merely upholding them. And since pride must always be met by prejudice, the bold infractions of elite criticism have to get recoded as pathological, as symptoms of sexual abnormality in its most repellent form, so that what might seem an enviable cosmopolitanism can take on instead the horrifying, abject alterity of what one avoids like the plague.

That this repellent form, especially in the age of “AIDS,” is almost always male homosexuality reveals what we might call the other face of counter-sublimation: if the continuing success of bourgeois hegemony is best allegorized by the rising heroine of the marriage plot, her recasting in the homophobic image of the gay man reminds us how easily the privileged middle-class subject can turn into a scapegoat.¹⁹ Rather than designate one figure or the other as the “true” embodiment of elite middle-class culture, we might try to imagine them as a telling composite, as an emblem of the dynamic interdependence of perversity and privilege in oppositional criticism. For if the former obviously inflames our culture's numerous arbiters of taste, the outrage that it signifies is scarcely separable from that of the latter. Privilege may not seem the most likely feature in the repertoire of an oppositional politics, but while its provocative potential may be hard to admit in theory, its provocative effects are everywhere legible in contemporary social practice.

Only if we presume to know that “privilege” can only mean one politically suspect thing does its intimate relationship with the perverse appear necessarily to give away the game of oppositional criticism—give it away, that is, as “nothing more than” a game, in which, for example, what is at stake is merely the familiar (or quasi-familial) antagonism between fractions of the dominant class, between, say, the Elizabeth Bennets and the Lady Catherine de Bourghs of the late twentieth century.²⁰ The pleasures of such sociological reduction are not to be denied; but privilege has its pleasures too, and if oppositional critics have not exactly denied them, neither have we been particularly eager to affirm them, whatever certain “activists” and “populists” would say to the contrary. By exhibiting our shameful “elitism” as tastelessly as our engrossed detractors like to accuse us of doing—as saucily, in other words, as we flaunt the sexual transgressiveness with which that “elitism” is symbolically interfused—we revolting critics might do more than just play into the hands of the enemy. By living up to our bad press, with the full insolence we are already thought to enjoy, we might find ourselves in an even more privileged position to repel sexual and aesthetic regimes that, as many people (not all of them middle-class academic critics) might say, are strictly from hunger.

This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at a special session entitled, “Austen's Manner,” at the 1991 Modern Language Association convention. I would like to thank Mary Ann O'Farrell, who organized and chaired the session, and a fellow panelist, D. A. Miller, who has encouraged me to indulge my indelicate appetites. As always, Lee Edelman has provided invaluable nourishment, intellectual and otherwise.

Notes

1. Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:299-300.

2. On this aesthetic (which, the author is at pains to show, is by no means merely an aesthetic), see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). One of Bourdieu's central theses is that “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (6).

3. The phrase “rectitude and delicacy” describes Jane Bennet (Pride and Prejudice, ed. Tony Tanner [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980], 168). Austen thought Elizabeth Darcy “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print” (Letters, 2:297), but one does not have to endorse the snobbery of a Miss Bingley to notice in Elizabeth some of that “want of propriety” (228) that Darcy observes in almost everyone else in her family. As even a sympathetic critic like Claudia Johnson has to admit, “Elizabeth's wit is occasionally marked by an unabashed rusticity bordering on the vulgar” (Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 76); Johnson also remarks that Elizabeth's “celebrated liveliness” “verg[es] sometimes on unlady-like athleticism” (76). As for Darcy, it is significant that, while he makes a favorable first impression, before long “his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity” (58).

4. D. A. Miller, “The Late Jane Austen,” Raritan 10 (Summer 1990): 79. Miller's sumptuously suggestive reading of Austen's body politics has provided me with abundant food for thought. Other critiques of Austen's marriage plot include, for example, Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 89-96; Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The “Bildungsroman” in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 1987), 15-73; Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 194-207.

5. An example of the incoherences that occasionally beset this discourse of reduction appears in an article by Gina Kolata, entitled “Squeezing Fat, Calories, Guilt, and More Profits out of Junk Food,” on the “Ideas and Trends” page of the New York Times “Week in Review” section (Sunday, August 11, 1991, E5). On the one hand: “‘It is very clear that the consumer wants low-fat and low-calorie foods—there is no question about that,’ said Nomi Ghez, an analyst at Goldman Sachs who follows the food industry.” On the other hand, several paragraphs later: “‘We have been telling people for decades to give up most meats and dairy products, to eat vegetables, grains and fruits,’ said Dr. Adam Drewnowski, the director of the human nutrition program at the University of Michigan. ‘But this is not happening. People seem to be not entirely thrilled about eating naturally low-calorie foods like broccoli and grains. They turn up their noses and say, How about some chocolate chip cookies?’”

6. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, 1987).

7. See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 818-37.

8. That, alternatively, one may cathect Fanny Price's oddly juicy neurosis itself, her “monstrosity,” is suggested by Nina Auerbach, “Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling As One Ought About Fanny Price,” in her Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 22-37.

9. Jacques Derrida, “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xxxviii. This essay's epigraph, which I have just incorporated partially into the text, is from Derrida, “Economimesis,” trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11 (Summer 1981): 23. The text, an analysis of Kant's aesthetics, informs my reference below to the relationship between disgust and vicariousness.

10. For a shrewd discussion of incorporation in terms of “the melancholia of gender,” see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 57-72. Butler's account is extremely helpful in its inflection of psychoanalytic theorizing toward a more searching analysis of the politics of gender and sexuality. My highly condensed remarks on incorporation owe much to her impressive synthesis and reorientation of a number of Freudian and post-Freudian texts.

11. See John Kucich, “Transgression in Trollope: Dishonesty and the Antibourgeois Elite,” ELH 56 (Fall 1989): 593-618. In my thinking about the genealogy and the dynamics of middle-class sophistication, I am greatly indebted to Kucich's essay. See Poovey, 196-99, for an excellent account of the essentially defensive function of Elizabeth's “playfulness.”

12. The term “middle-class aristocracy” comes from Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 160. See 134-60 for an account of Austen's role in articulating that “paradoxical configuration” (160). In his reading of Pride and Prejudice, Moretti also provides a helpful analysis of the symbolic marriage between the middle class and the aristocracy.

13. I allude here to Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

14. According to R. W. Chapman, stout in Austen “perhaps never = fat”; but he indicates one possible exception in her letters, and one could adduce others. See Chapman, ed., Austen's Letters, 2:Index VII (“Jane Austen's English”; no page number). As D. A. Miller would remind us, however, the economy of scapegoating virtually requires that any fat-affirmative gesture we glimpse here be accompanied by a compensatory violence against the “slight, thin” body: on “the aggression that the diminutive woman suffers in Austen no less than the large,” see Miller, “The Late Jane Austen,” 62-64. On the fat (female) body as “an alternative body-identity fantasy” in recent gay male culture, see Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little-Understood Emotion,” Discourse 13 (Fall-Winter 1990-91): 13. The notion of “chunks of literality” (36) elaborated in that essay has had a stimulating effect on my thinking about fatty residues in Austen. I am further indebted to Michael Moon for the felicitous term, “revolting criticism,” which he used as the title for a session at the 1990 MLA convention, and which I echo at the end of this essay.

15. See Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, Volume I, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978). On the function of the lower bodily stratum in middle-class culture, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

16. For an acid and deliberately reductive reading of Derrida's sophisticated vulgarity, see Bourdieu, 494-500.

17. Stallybrass and White, 202, 201

18. On the activist/elitist binarism in gay studies, see Lee Edelman, “The Mirror and the Tank: ‘AIDS,’ Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Activism,” in his Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). For an example of how this binarism gets framed and circulated, see Jeffrey Escoffier, “Inside the Ivory Closet,” Out/Look 10 (Fall 1990).

19. For an extensive and richly nuanced analysis of how the homophobically constructed gay man can figure as the “other face” of the heterosexual woman, see Lee Edelman's essay, “Imag(in)ing the Homosexual: Laura and the Other Face of Gender,” also forthcoming in Homographesis.

20. Readers of Bourdieu's Distinction will recognize that I allude here to his differentiation between dominant and dominated fractions of the dominant class, and to his elaboration of the conflict between those class fractions.