Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (33 page)

and Prejudice
is directly concerned.41

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Clara Tuite has demonstrated the narrative sleight of hand by which

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Austen champions Elizabeth’s bourgeois values and demonstrates her

single worthiness to appropriate and share the world Darcy inhabits.

Elizabeth’s “taste—her claim to imaginative possession,” registered

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in the visit to Pemberley House, when she is both the invading bour-

geois tourist and the privileged connoisseur, “is made to legitimate her

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upward movement into the class which has the prerogative of material

possession” (139–40). “
Pride and Prejudice
offers the paradigmatic

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instantiation of this recommendation of bourgeois femininity to the

aristocracy.” Elizabeth “is recommended to the landed classes by vir-

tue of nothing more (that is, neither breeding nor money) than her

inherent taste and sense” (146).42

By virtue of her taste, Elizabeth is the informed and uniquely

“ delighted” observer of the “ something” (259) that ownership of

Pemberley both means and guarantees, as opposed to the “nothing”

of her family’s social inferiority. And Lydia, not the ostensibly unpre-

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sentable aunt and uncle from Cheapside, represents those features

of the bourgeoisie that must be repudiated and excised in order for

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the deserving members of the family to move from the position of

being, as Tuite puts it “on the verge” (140) to comfortably inhabit-

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ing, “making-over . . . the aristocratic estate in the image of bourgeois

Romantic desire, domesticity and nostalgia” (146). Like Caroline in

the commission report, Lydia is a woman composed entirely of appe-

tite. She is a camp follower.43 Her sexuality is so ubiquitous and insis-

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tent that it cannot be contained even by her lover-turned-husband.

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After her elopement with Wickham and enforced marriage, the narra-

tor reports, “Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy,

and fearless” (321). That Lydia is unchanged after her putative sex-

ual fall connects her folly structurally as well as psychologically with

her mother’s rather than with her father’s—aligning her with those

characters who cannot be educated or shamed out of their asocial

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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 119

behavior. It signifies one of two possibilities, neither of which cancels

out the other: Either the “fall” itself occurred long before her elope-

ment with Wickham—may, indeed, not even have involved him—or

her cohabitation with him is not regarded by her as a criminal or even

an illicit act, in which case she would not register, in any narratively

conventional way, a material change in consequence of taking the

step. The first possibility is commensurate with a rhetorical slippage

between flirtation and actual sex, where the first not merely causes

or denotes the second but effectively replaces it: flirtation, what Flora

Fraser calls conduct unbecoming, is constitutive of sex.44

This was the conclusion of the commissioners. Fraser posits

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that one of the likeliest explanations for why Caroline successfully

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sidestepped the allegation of adultery—aside from the satisfactory

explanation of Willy Austin’s parentage—was that she and her vari-

ous lovers engaged in non-penetrative sex: “ At all costs, a woman

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whose legitimate children would be in line to the throne had to avoid

impregnation by a lover” (125). Of her possible affair with George

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Canning, Fraser suggests, “the likelihood is that they indulged in

the prophylactic sport of heavy petting, as her contemporaries so

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often did” (124). Fraser’s last clause probably alludes to a collection

of widespread (if widely condemned) practices to prevent concep-

tion, including coitus interruptus, oral and anal penetration, and

mutual masturbation.45 It is unlikely, therefore, that the Princess’s

behavior would have been construed as a criminal act. Markers of

illicit sexual behavior in women were few: essentially either proof of

defloration or of pregnancy. Unless a co-respondent came forward

(this was not likely in the Princess’s case, as it was still a capital

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offense), the law rested on these malleable signifiers.46 The pos-

sibility that the commissioners might have attempted to use such

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slippery, if evocative, evidence lies in the story of the Princess’s mys-

terious bed stains.

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In the 1806 report, Betty Townley, a sometime laundress for the

Princess, deposed that she had occasionally been given sheets to wash

that were particularly stained:

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I have had linen from the Princess’s house the same as other ladies:

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I mean that there were such appearances on it as might arise from

natural causes to which women are subject . . . I recollect one bundle of

linen once coming, which I thought rather more marked than usual.

They told me that the Princess had been bled with leaches, and it dirt-

ied the linen more: the servants told me so, but I don’t remember who

the servants were that told me so. (Perceval 24)

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120

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

In this testimony, the stains the laundress encounters are blood,

and their intensity, greater than that arising “from natural causes to

which women are subject, suggests she believes they are the result of

a miscarriage. On another occasion, she is both more and less explicit

about the nature of the stains:

I recollect once, I came to town and left the linen with my daughter to

wash; I looked at the clothes slowly before I went . . . I thought when I

looked them over, that there might be something more than usual. My

opinion was, that it was from * * * * * * The linen had the appearance

of * * * * * *. I believed it at the time.” (24)

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Here her phrases have been replaced by asterisks identical to those

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used in the deposition of Frances Lloyd, whose quoting of Townley

probably led to Townley being deposed: “a woman . . . of the name of

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Townley, told me that she had some linen to wash from the Princess’s

house. That the linen was marked with the appearance of * * * * * * * * *”

(12). The asterisks, almost certainly inserted by the editors of the report,

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are probably designed to leave readers with the question of whether they

replace the words “a delivery” or “a miscarriage,” depending on whether

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they signify that the Princess gave birth to Willy Austin herself, or simply

suggest the possibility of other sexual misconduct. The commission

finally rests on the latter, a conclusion that leaves open yet another

possible substitute for the elided phrase. If the Princess engaged in

sexual hijinks but was deliberately avoiding pregnancy, then it is pos-

sible these are not bloodstains but semen stains, and their “something

more than usual” is an indicator that they result from enthusiastic

but non-vaginally penetrative sexual activity. The Princess’s habit of

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being “too familiar” with men becomes the sexual crime it is generally

believed only to give rise to.

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This is the function of sexual misconduct as well in
Pride and

Prejudice
, where Lydia’s flirtatiousness is not the material cause but

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the substance of her sexual fall. In her unheeded warning to her father

about Lydia’s behavior and its probable consequences, Elizabeth

makes it clear that flirtation comprehends illicit sexuality:

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If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exu-

berant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not

to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of

amendment. Her character will be fixed, and she will, at sixteen, be

the most determined flirt that ever made herself and her family ridicu-

lous. A flirt too, in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation; with-

out any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person; and from the

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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 121

ignorance and emptiness of her mind, wholly unable to ward off any

portion of that universal contempt which her rage for admiration will

excite. (246)

Elizabeth’s rhetoric suggests a continuum, along which the moment

of actual crisis is impossible to determine. Although Lydia will

“soon be beyond the reach of amendment,” this does not mean that

her pursuer is even now putting the finishing touches on his plan

of seduction—the carriage ordered, the cloak and mask ready—but

rather that her “character,” already bad, will become “fixed.” The

language suggests a confirmation, a cementing of what is already in

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place: Lydia will be a “determined” flirt. That she will make flirta-

tion “the business of her life” recollects the famous early description

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of her mother: “ The business of her life was to get her daughters

married; its solace was visiting and news” (45). It also connects flir-

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tation with that other business, prostitution, an association rein-

forced by Elizabeth’s classist rhetoric in phrases such as “the worst

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and meanest degree.” Lydia is not in danger of falling; she has, for

all practical purposes, already fallen. It remains for her father to

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“check” her before her vices become so ingrained as to become,

like the Princess’s, disastrously public, involving her family in the

“disgrace.”

The evidence of Lydia’s sexuality is too palpable for this to be a

narrative of seduction. Her story does not function like a conven-

tional narrative, despite its careful, if complicated, rendering in the

variety of letters that attempt to make sense of her flight. Her sexual-

ity and her history both begin with the advent of the – – shire militia,

and neither ends with her marriage, “in which,” as Galperin points

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out, “Lydia will presumably have other officers at her disposal” (132).

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A telling instance of Lydia’s sexuality occurs when she whiles away a

carriage ride by narrating for her sisters a prank that implicates her in

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a variety of sexualized modes:

“[W]hat do you think we did? We dressed up Chamberlayne in

woman’s clothes, on purpose to pass for a lady,—only think what

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fun! Not a soul knew of it but Col. and Mrs. Forster, and Kitty

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and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her

gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny,

and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came

in, they did not know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so

did Mrs. Forster. I thought I should have died. And
that
made the

men suspect something, and then they soon found out what was the

matter.” (237)

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