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Austen and Austin

Since the publication of J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words in 1962, cultural and literary scholars have worked to connect his “performative” language theory to the vital, often gender and sexuality-based, field that has since become known as “performance studies.” Little has been written, however, about the author whose marriages are ubiquitously performative: the philosopher's “namesake,” Jane Austen. In Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), Stanley Cavell broke news to literary scholars in writing about Austin and Austen, focusing on the moral perfectionism of Emma. By contrast this article follows the spirit of linguistic conformity and play in Austen's earlier major fiction, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. Precisely because Northanger Abbey does not unveil the “transparent mind” of free indirect speech or achieve what D.A. Miller calls final “Austen Style,” the author argues for its engagement with the contestable social and linguistic environment of making “sense.” Not until Austin's bracingly unconventional lectures were collected as a series of extraordinary books in the mid-twentieth century – a list that also includes his collection Philosophical Papers and the Austen-inspired Sense and Sensibilia – did Jane Austen's novels receive a philosophical counterpart adequate to her works' philosophical energies.