The Flirt's Tragedy

In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and W.M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-doubles. In the writing of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, flirting harbours potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In works by D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Foster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations. In this study, Richard Kaye makes a case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the 19th century and early 20th century novel. The author examines flirtation in major English, French and American texts to demonstrate how the changing aesthetic of such fiction fastened on flirtatious desire as a paramount subject for distinctly novelistic inquiry. The novel, he argues, accentuated questions of ambiguity on which an erotics of deliberate imprecision thrived.