- Men Reading Jane Austen: Close Writing Across Gender Scripts
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- What exactly is subversive about men reading—and moreover, liking—Jane Austen? How did Austen come to signify, among male readers, effeminacy? My aim here is not to offer a genealogical account of how male readers of Jane Austen acquired a sissy reputation. Nevertheless, the question of Austen’s ostensibly destabilized male readership interests me, particularly the robust body of Austen criticism by gay male scholars which has emerged. I contend that these critics’ open identification with Austen must grapple with their dual position of reading (and enjoying) Austen and also being read as unmanly, resulting in a defensive, uphill battle to navigate and reclaim loaded social scripts about masculinity. This queer cross-gender identification strikes me as an opportunity to re-read/write gender scripts at play in the literature and reception of Jane Austen. How does Austen reconsider and reform masculinity and what are the implications for male readers who cross-identify with Austen, such as D.A. Miller and Joseph Litvak? By means of a close-reading of scenes from Northanger Abbey as well as queer Austenian criticism, I interrogate this explosion of cross-identifications to deconstruct what gendered misreadings, slippages, resonances, and overlaps emerge across the bodies of the text (reader, author, character). I propose that the bond between Spinster woman author and Unheterosexual male reader disrupts the conjugal imperative of the marriage plot. In closing, I consider how we might queerly re-encounter the marriage plot post-legalization of same-sex marriage.
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