The many levels of Jane Austen’s work
Karen Joy Fowler, the author of The Jane Austen Book Club, recently spoke to the Palm Beach Literary Society. According to the Palm Beach Daily News, Ms. Fowler discussed how the meanings of Jane Austen’s novels changed for her as she read them at different stages of her life.
Fowler said her parents wanted her to read the classics, and she was introduced to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen during her early teenage years. She loved the book and also read Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. It was during the time when Fowler was reading “shallow teen romance novels” and viewed Austen’s novels as a type of teen romance.
“What I loved about them was the romance,” she said of Austen’s novels. “I loved the heroines. I loved the false tension over whether she would end up with the man she was supposed to be with, and I loved the happy ending. That’s pretty much all I noticed.”
The next time Fowler read Austen’s novels was when she was in college in the 1960s.
“Now with my feminist consciousness in full blossom, I realized she was an extremely feminist writer,” Fowler said. “I noticed two things somewhat paradoxical: that her books were much darker and much more complicated than I had understood and much funnier. I had not really noticed, as a teenager, how very funny she is.”
Fowler again picked up Austen’s novels while a young mother.
“This time, enmeshed in my own family, it didn’t seem like Austen even wrote romances at all,” Fowler said. “It seemed that romance was a convenient plot structure to hang a story that was all about family, all about parents, all about siblings, all about the peculiar relationships we have in our families. I noticed as a young mother what I had not noticed before — that Austen was pretty hard on mothers.
This ties in nicely to the discussion we’re having in the comments for The Editrix’s Cranky Post below. The marriage plot in Jane Austen is there, and it is important, but it is not the be-all and end-all of her work. There is something in her work for everyone, at every age. Isn’t that why we keep reading and re-reading them?
March 15th, 2005 at 10:30 pm
I had a very similar experience to Karen Fowler’s. At 16 I couldn’t be bothered to finish reading P&P. I was like Kitty or Lydia- more interested in a campful of soldiers or what new bonnet was in the store window. But when I read P&P during my second year of college (studying psychology), I fell instantly in love with Austen’s humorous and brilliant observations of people and relationships. I even find that her observations became more mature as she grew older (thus my admiration for Persuasion).
Since JA’s novels are so frequently misconstrued as simple happy-ending romance novels, I wonder how many people out there (in her era as well as now) fail to look beyond the surface of her works. Surely this doesn’t apply to any Janeites we know… but one must wonder.
March 16th, 2005 at 4:05 pm
I don’t mind saying there’s more than a happy ending, but I certainly don’t want to say less. The problem with much of the literati’s conclusions about Jane Austen is they look too deeply into the story and fail to feel that the characters are “real,” to wish for and be delighted by the triumph at the end. Especially egregious is Marvin Mudrick’s assertion that all the endings are either wimpy cop outs or ironic. Susan Korba’s Queer reading of Emma is just as bad - Emma is “forced” into “playing wife,” since she can’t marry that hot babe Jane Fairfax. All this to say that sure, Jane Austen was interested in showing accurately and critiquing social institutions and behaviors. If we focus only on the social commentary, however, we are forced to ask the question: why read novels when we could just read an essay or biography on the Regency time period? My answer: Because these things are merely background which makes all the action in the plot believable.
Note: I may be convinced to shift my position a bit, so don’t think I’m completely wedded to the above view of Austen.
March 16th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
Ah! Now, see, ibmiller, you are falling into a common trap. You don’t agree with an extreme view so therefore the other extreme must be emphasized. Jane Austen would not approve of that. There are rarely extremes in her work, and I submit that is a large point of her novels. The villains are normal, everyday sort of villains. There’s a post a few down, the one with the top 100 fictional characters, where the author who chose Mrs. Norris spoke of “the banality of evil.” That’s so true. If you didn’t live with Mrs. Norris, you might think her a perfectly nice and good person. Only if you’re in the family, and you know the damage she did to Maria, Julia and Fanny, do you know the damage that can be done by even an ordinary person with bad judgment. She ruined two lives and darn near ruined a third; only Fanny’s own good judgment–which Mrs. Norris continually discounted–saved her.
By all means enjoy the novels however you wish, but I still feel that a public perception of Jane Austen’s novels as “chick lit” or slightly classier-than-normal Regency romances does them a grave disservice–and does us a disservice as Janeites.
March 16th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Well, as long as we don’t discount the pleasures of the story, I can accept the point made.
March 16th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
To clarify: I’m concerned more with public perceptions of Jane Austen’s work than with our perceptions as Janeites. We already know that they are wonderful. It’s a shame that others might not be persuaded to try them by a misperception, don’t you think?