Jane Austen’s hands present a paradox. On the one hand, hands in her novels do the symbolic work of neat and tidy matrimonial pairing—the metaphorical taking of hands in marriage. On the other hand, as this chapter aims to show, hands make a mess of the fantasy that the erotic trajectory of her novels is one of straightforward coupling. This two-handedness is mirrored in the ongoing reception of Austen’s work and the author’s enduring popularity. On the one hand, Austen’s name in the popular imagination remains a near synonym for genteel social organization. And on the other hand, the enduring canonization of her work depends on a veritable cottage industry of disrupting the image of the polite and sexless “dear Aunt Jane.”

One handy flash point in the history of this schism came in 1990 via Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The American critic whose scholarship on sexuality in literature helped form the foundations of queer theory, sparked an uproar with a conference submission titled “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Even in an era before social media, the title quickly made the rounds as evidence of the degeneracy of academic discourse in the humanities. Sedgwick later noted that the paper had yet to be written, let alone published, before the jeremiads began, and thus, that there must have been something self-evidently scornful about the mere association of Austen and masturbation. But what? Masturbation is no longer the execrated act of self-defilement that it once was. Whether today or in the late twentieth century, it is more likely seen as a healthy part of sexual development and self-care. Given this rehabilitation, a more likely account of the furor, Sedgwick postulates, is that the developmental infantility associated with the masturbating girl challenged something we hold dear about the seriousness of Austen’s novels, and more specifically, the unspoken role “mature” sex, which is to say procreative hetero-genitality, plays in defining “the literary.”

In the publication that would eventually come out of this talk, Sedgwick explores the onanistic subjectivity represented by Sense and Sensibility’s sister protagonists, one restless, impertinent, and often listless, and the other the watchful disciplinarian. This coupled subjectivity, Sedgwick argues, speaks to the nascent techniques of medicalization and surveillance enacted during Austen’s time to regulate sexual behaviors into binary forms of sexual identity—gay/straight, closeted/out, and disordered/healthy.