‘I See Her Instrument Is Open’: (Dis)playing the Musical Body in the Work of Jane Austen

This article contextualizes Jane Austen's depictions of musicians and instruments within contemporary philosophical perceptions of music as a means of ‘unvirtuous’ corporeal stimulation in order to examine Austen's attitude towards female sexuality. It outlines music's relationship to visual sexual consumption through investigating music's function as an art of specifically visual pleasure and the female musician's empowering position as the public generator of such pleasure. Examining the spatial and visual interactions between a heroine, her musical instrument, and her body presented within each of Austen's novels, this article suggests that, given this musicological context, Austen's mildly musical heroines represent a rejection of the publicized and sexually active (as opposed to sexually passive) female musician.