D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-09075-0. Price: US$29.95.

D. A. Miller’s spellbinding Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style revisits what has long been a productive line of inquiry in Austen scholarship – the relationship between character and narration. This quietly polemical short book, which Miller calls an essay (much of it was written for the 2000 Beckman Lectures), attempts to shift the focus of Austen criticism away from historicist readings back toward what he sees as the site of her “literary achievement” (108) - the Austen plot, the conjugal imperative. What emerges is a virtuosic Barthesian close reading of several Austen novels as well as one of the most compelling texts of queer theory to emerge in recent years. The book opens in high Miller Style, describing an autobiographical subject as a universal one; Miller describes his boyhood feelings of shame at having chosen the wrong object - Jane Austen - to invest with the “Secret Love” of the first chapter’s title. Where a large section of the earlier Narrative and its Discontents (1981) focused on Austen’s plotting, this book, like his more recent work, focuses on matters of style, secrecy, shame, surveillance, and performance. Along these lines, the “Secret Love” refers to another wrong object, an object which Miller sees as the embodiment of Austen Style: Robert Ferrars’ toothpick case in Sense and Sensibility. Miller argues that Austen’s Style creates the appearance of virtual stylelessness. But the Style seeks to be visible enough to be recognized as such, to be noticed as an outline: While Austen’s work abounds in jewelry, the toothpick case is unique in Austen because it exists outside the bonds of “donation, alliance, social function, and signification” (12-13) in which all other Austen jewelry participates. The scene and the case are almost wholly insignificant to the plot, emphasizing their paltry content and their self-containment. This stylish insignificance is increased by Ferrars’ manner as he purchases the case; rather than focusing on the marriage market (the Miss Dashwoods are in the store as well), he buys the case with an exorbitant attention to its detail. Since Austen’s name, according to Miller, is synonymous with sexlessness (4), and since the case is outside social bonds, both the case and the scene are emblematic of Austen Style and of celibacy (in the sense of being unmarried). Mary Crawford, in Mansfield Park, strengthens this equation between Style and celibacy as the only Austen character to choose Style over marriage, to martyr herself to Style, by remaining celibate. With the caveat that all readings of Miller’s writerly work are tendentious, this reading of Style as celibate marks an amazing departure in the history of queer theory. If this aesthetic moment (celibacy as Style) were to be read with the logics of Eve Sedgwick’s “Beast in the Closet” or even Miller’s earlier essay “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” then “this paltry content” would not be a figure for celibacy, but for queerness (though we might think of celibacy as a subset of queerness). In queer theory, “absence” (silence, preterition, the closet) is usually read as “proof” of homosexuality because there was virtually no period vocabulary for homosexuality. Homosexuality could (almost) only be represented as absence - the love that dare not speak its name, or the "impossibility" lesbian sex - making it difficult to read “absence” as an absence of sex. This small moment which imagines contentlessness as celibacy rather than queerness, following Foucault’s injunction to read “not one but many silences” (27), suggests the guiding antithesis of Miller’s book - the incompatibility of Austen’s Style and Austen herself. Since Miller sees the conjugal plot and its attendant …