‘Most Delightfully Incongruous’: Desire, Plot and Realism in Barbara Pym's No Fond Return of Love

Abstract

In No Fond Return of Love (1961), Aylwin Forbes is surprised to find himself behaving like Edmund from Mansfield Park (1814) and falling in love with a woman whom he previously did not desire. Ironically, Forbes’ compliance with a famous Austen romance plot highlights the ambivalent status of desire and sexuality as driving forces in his own plot. Does he really want Dulcie? In this article, the author discusses Pym's representation of desire through her use (or misuse) of the romance plot, to argue that she modifies this powerful ideological structure to satisfy her own particular sense of realism. Considering the importance of Austen to Pym, the author examines, first, the ways in which the domestic woman, as defined by Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), persists and is modified as an object of desire in Pym's novels. Second, considering Patricia Meyer Spacks's argument that eighteenth-century romance plots redefine the myths they reflect, the author considers how Pym's work also complicates romance myths. The author's reading of Pym examines her modification of desire and sexuality in vaguely dissatisfying plots that refuse to pander to readerly desires in an unremitting realistic turn.

Keywords:

• Plot
• desire
• Austen
• domestic