Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (32 page)

the Princess of W!!!” (324). In the Satirist’s analysis, Ashe wrongs the

Princess, prostituting her for the purpose of “ribaldry” and slander-

ing her by forging her signature on a document that cannot be hers.

Squeezing one more laugh out of the forgery theme, the Satirist gets

tangled up in his own metaphor, since these letters are not that kind

of forgery. Caroline’s signature, authentic or otherwise, is nowhere

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in
The Spirit of “the Book
.
”
The book is typeset, and each letter ends

with the Princess’s name, but it is her name, not her signature, on the

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page. Even in found manuscript stories, the physical book one holds

is not the collection of documents discovered by the editor. Those

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have been collected, copied, sometimes revised or emended, printed,

and bound by someone else, and this process distinguishes the book’s

consumers from its discerning editor. But this is not the found manu-

script story Ashe offers his readers: his letters are phantasms; the letter

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is
the spirit.

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Managing Propriety for the Regency:

Jane Austen Reads the Book

The Satirist’s conclusion reverts to the same domestic ideology that

informs Jane Austen’s assessment of Caroline’s actual letter, published

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y 115

two years after Ashe’s novel. The Princess’s overt sexuality—whether

registered in bed sheets that have been too energetically romped upon

or in lurid maternal confidences—is unpalatable: unroyal, because it

is unwomanly. Readers must look beyond the evidence for an expla-

nation of what they cannot accept. For the Satirist this means dis-

crediting the source: Ashe cannot replicate royalty; one proof of

this is his Princess says things no true princess would ever say. The

Princess’s authenticity is in her co-optation by an ideal of domestic-

ity. For Austen, as for Ashe and for Caroline, looking beyond the

evidence means understanding the Princess as a woman abandoned

by the men who should have been looking after her. Ashe’s Caroline

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makes this argument in her opening letter. She collapses the injustice

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of the inquiry, which represents her “as a wretched outcast from soci-

ety, who merits the scoffs and the scorns of a merciless world,” into

its corrosive effect on the very “honor” that it aimed to impugn, and

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that she defends. One must look to the inquiry itself and not its puta-

tive grounds for an explanation of Caroline’s deviations from propri-

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ety. It, she claims, “has set me adrift upon the tempestuous ocean of

my own passions when they are most irritated and headstrong.”

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It has cut me out from the moorings of these domestic obligations,

by whose cable I might ride in safety from their turbulence. It has

robbed me of the society of my husband and my daughter. It has

deprived me of the powerful influence which arises from the sense

of
Home
, from the sacred religion of the
Hearth
, in quelling the pas-

sions, in reclaiming the wanderings, in correcting the disorders of the

human heart. (8)

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Austen’s reading of Caroline ought to set her apart from Ashe’s

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target audience. Hers is a decision taken, not the passionate identifi-

cation his sentimentalism and epistolary mode called for. “I suppose

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all the World is sitting in Judgement upon the Princess of Wales’s

Letter.” The world that judges, quickly and without all the evidence,

is different from the reader who, like Austen, “resolve[s] . . . to think

that she would have been respectable” but for the Prince’s behavior.

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Austen’s explanation of how she arrived at this resolution reveals a

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complex interplay between detachment and identification: “I shall

support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because

I hate her Husband—but I can hardly forgive her for calling her-

self ‘attached & affectionate’ to a Man whom she must detest.”

Austen identifies with Caroline—as a woman and a fellow hater of

the Regent—but can “hardly” forgive her for the hypocrisy that

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R o y a l R o m a n c e s

denies their common hatred. And even Austen cannot entirely elimi-

nate rumor from the evidence she sifts through: “the intimacy said

to subsist between her & Lady Oxford is bad.” She is judging here;

the qualification “said to subsist” hardly tempers the final damning

monosyllable. In the end, however, resolution replaces judgment, the

resolution to believe that Caroline would have been more like the

kind of woman with whom Austen could identify unreservedly, “if

the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first.”

The assumption that women become unrespectable because the

men in their lives fail to treat them “tolerably” (with kindness, cor-

rection, or both) as others have noted, is at the heart of Austen’s con-

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servative ideology in
Pride and Prejudice
.38 The paradigmatic figure

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for identifying and controlling feminine impropriety is Darcy, the

idealized private gentleman whose eventual union with the hybrid

Elizabeth perfects and extends his ability to enact his will on, and so

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alter, the social landscape.39 In the vindicatory letter to Elizabeth that

follows his first proposal of marriage, Darcy reminds her of her own

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liminal social position (a liminality that constitutes her own redemp-

tive capacity by the end of the novel). At the same time, he positions

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himself as the only consistent arbiter and standard of propriety in the

novel’s community. Darcy assures Elizabeth that, “The situation of

your mother’s family, though objectionable, was nothing in compari-

son of that total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly

betrayed by herself, by your three younger sisters, and occasionally

even by your father” (218). “Want of propriety” covers not only Lydia

Bennet’s indiscriminate flirting with the members of the militia—of

whom her eventual husband Wickham is one among many. Darcy’s

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phrase also comprehends Elizabeth’s mother’s excesses. Talking and

consuming are the most evident, but below these is Mrs. Bennet’s

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implied sexuality, registered in her former prettiness and in a heedless

interest in men nearly equal to Lydia’s: “I liked a red-coat myself very

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well—and indeed so I do still at my heart” (67). Mother and daugh-

ter’s behavior renders as “nothing” the social inferiority that had at

first seemed Darcy’s chief preoccupation.

Although Darcy’s list appears to include Mr. Bennet (“occasionally

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even by your father”) in the “uniform” impropriety, both his rhetoric

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and his ranking—at the end of his list and attenuated by the double

qualifiers “even” and “occasionally”—remind Elizabeth what the

narrator confirms a few chapters later: that Mr. Bennet’s impropriety

is both the result of and his response to an unequal marriage—an

adjustment for his private happiness that disregards the public mean-

ing of the family and so will need to be readjusted by Darcy and

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y 117

Elizabeth. In an instance of the interplay between narrator and char-

acter typical of Austen’s free indirect discourse, chapter nineteen of

volume II begins with a summary of the Bennet marriage that shifts

from justification to condemnation. The narration here fixes and

authorizes Darcy’s judgment insofar as it is endorsed, implicitly by

the narrator and explicitly by Elizabeth, who “could not have formed

a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort” if her

“opinion” had “been drawn from her own family” (250).

The history that follows is the history of Mr. Bennet’s mistake,

when, “captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of

good humour, which youth and beauty generally give,” he mar-

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ried “a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind, had

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very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her.”

Deprived “for ever” of “respect, esteem, and confidence,” and with

“his views of domestic happiness . . . overthrown,” he seeks the conso-

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lations of a rational man, rather than indulging in “those pleasures

which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice.”

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“To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her igno-

rance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort

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of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife;

but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true phi-

losopher will derive benefit from such as are given” (250).

The end of this history restores Elizabeth’s point of view—

“Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her

father’s behavior as a husband” (250). The reassertion of Elizabeth’s

voice doubly ironizes the narrator’s aphorism in the preceding para-

graph. Like the truth universally acknowledged in the novel’s famous

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opening, which means both itself and its inverse, the true philoso-

pher’s means of deriving entertainment are both psychologically jus-

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tifiable and catastrophically wrong in the event. Elizabeth’s clearness

of vision replicates Darcy’s as well as the narrator’s.

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Mrs. Bennet’s folly, unlike her husband’s, arises from nature and is

apparently ineradicable. Darcy’s ranking, in which the wife’s impro-

priety trumps her husband’s and her own low origins, betrays an

unwillingness to discriminate between want of propriety and social

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inferiority. It is not so much that one is an easy way of recogniz-

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ing the other as it is that one stands in for the other: flirtatiousness,

heedlessness, excess of all kinds—eating, drinking, laughing, talk-

ing, shopping, even dancing too much—in Mrs. Bennet and Lydia

both
mean
sexuality, and sexuality means lower-class identity. Lydia

especially is a figure unassimilable to the linked gender and class cat-

egories that confront the other characters, and to which they adhere.

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Her function as either a comic or a sinister inversion (depending on

generic expectations) of Elizabeth’s “liveliness” has been demon-

strated by numerous Austen critics, most notably Mary Poovey and

William Galperin.40 Lydia’s boisterous sexuality also has its contem-

porary counterpart in the figure of Caroline as she is represented in

the commission report (but not in either her letter or Ashe’s novel).

Both Lydia and the Caroline of the report collapse the distinction

between “want of propriety”—that is, behavior that merely suggests

sexuality—and illicit sexuality itself. This collapse is crucial to the

formation and character of social class categories with which
Pride