Afterword

Abstract

The 1990s unquestionably witnessed the ‘embodiment’ of Jane Austen. As well as the various and high-profile film and television adaptations and versions of her novels — some of which will be discussed later in this Afterword, but many of which, in keeping with my position that Austen now exists culturally in numerous versions, have been discussed alongside their novelistic originals — which sometimes notoriously focused on the bodies of Austen’s characters, there were contributions to this phenomenon from within the academy. In 1992, John Wiltshire published Jane Austen and the Body, a landmark study which, for the first time, systematically explicated Austen’s characteristic repertoire of often tiny, but only seemingly insignificant, looks and gestures, as well as attempting a proper medicalisation of her recurring concerns with sickness, weakness and hypochondria. Consequently, Wiltshire, rather brilliantly, concentrates on the meaning of the blush:

The blush is not a straightforward phenomenon of the body, rather one of the acutest signs of the bodily enigma, and its deployment in Austen’s narratives is governed by her awareness of its problematic nature, and of the possibility of exploiting this for dramatic purposes. … The blush is no unequivocal guide to emotion, and may be misread — to ironic effect. Its phenomenology is puzzling and its signification is problematic, but it does, in all its varieties, represent clearly a form of the juncture between the body and culture, and functions as a miniaturised version of hysteria, the embodied correlate of a social effect.¹