ABSTRACT
“Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”—the essay, not the phrase—began as a contribution to a Modern Language Association session. As the historicization of sexuality, following the world of Foucault, becomes increasingly involved with issues of representation, different varieties of sexual experience and identity are being discovered both to possess a diachronic history—a history of significant change—and to be entangled in particularly indicative ways with aspects of epistemology and of literary creation and reception. Masturbation itself, like homosexuality and heterosexuality, is being demonstrated to have a complex history. Yet there are senses in which autoeroticism seems almost uniquely—or at least, distinctively—to challenge the historicizing impulse. One “sexual identity” that did exist as such in Austen’s time, already bringing a specific genital practice into dense compaction with issues of consciousness, truth, pedagogy, and confession, was that of the onanist.
