Narrative authority in Austen, Scott, Cooper, and Hawthorne

When Anne Elliot's "eyes devoured" Wentworth's note to her in Persuasion, Jane Austen brought together the repression of female sexuality and the reader's interpretive activity to the center of the marriage plot.;Foregrounding the marriage plot and bringing to bear upon it the insights of feminist and reader-response criticism enables us to refine and redefine Trilling's and Chase's generalized theses about the differences between the British and American novel. In the British novel, the continuities in the narrative communities of author-characters-reader are related to their maintaining the connection, however compromised, between female sexuality and interpretation in the marriage plot. Upon this connection, the link between writing and reading, authority and interpretation, depends. In contrast, the American novelists' explorations of the repression of female sexuality and their transformations of the British marriage plot uncover the disruption of the continuity between the activities of reading and authoring that characterize the American novel.;This connection between female sexuality and narrative interpretation marks a crucial juncture in the development of the nineteenth-century novel in both Britain and America. Individual desire is at the heart of the destabilization of the narrative communities as chronicled by the early nineteenth-century writers Austen, Scott, Cooper, and Hawthorne. Moreover, the connection between female sexuality and interpretation in their accommodation to the marriage plot is the pivot upon which the two traditions initially diverge. The British reliance upon the conventional marriage plot as a metaphor for the mediation between individual desire and social order is viewed, by the Americans, as a betrayal of desire and a denial of the origins of meaning. For the American authors, to compromise female sexuality is to repress it; and to repress it is to repress interpretation.