Art as display
The Age has an article about art as sexual display that mentions Jane Austen, as it is a rule now that all articles must mention Jane Austen. (We got the memo.)
You can, for example, accurately describe family history in a way we all recognise is true to our biology and mating rituals without the narrative being considered the work of a literary genius such as Jane Austen. Great art reminds us of our everyday humanness even as it transcends it. Darwin cannot tell us precisely how that happens.
Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice opens with a famous sentence that may sound like a pure expression, or rather anticipation, of Darwin’s theory of natural selection: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” But that “pure content”, as John Armstrong refers to it, is only the beginning of the story.
Not to mention being ironic humor. Geez. Lighten up, will ya?
Armstrong says Austen’s popularity is “profoundly mysterious” since her art is much more than a preoccupation with materialism and natural selection. “Jane Austen is a deeply magnificent thinker of subtlety and firmness of mind. Her popularity is based on a complete illusion about what she is interested in. Austen is a severe moralist and her stories are of the moral fitness of the best people not in terms of their ability to breed but of their moral superiority. It is a very Platonic society where morally superior people eventually mate and in which the wicked people mate too but are punished by unhappiness due to their moral weakness.
“The people who admire her work tend to think it is about elegant society,” he says, “but Austen is the harshest critic imaginable of the sort of person who reads her novels for their social character.”
Rather than merely dramatise human biology, Austen - who, incidentally, never had children or enjoyed much material success from her books - strives to deepen our understanding of the human condition.
HA! Told you so.
June 25th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Sometimes I wonder what Jane would think if she knew how much her books are talked about, analyzed, discussed, parodied etc. Maybe that’s why she didn’t want her name published with her work.
June 25th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
And do you think that “the wicked people mate too but are punished by unhappiness due to their moral weakness” in JA’s novels? On the contrary - I think JA is pretty realistic about the fact that many wicked people end up perfectly content, in their nasty, superficial, selfish way. The Eltons and Fanny and John Dashwood are happy couples, of a sort. Willoughby isn’t miserable. Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay will apparently do fine together. Etc.
June 27th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
I think Willougby was quite unhappy. He never got over Marianne. That might not have made him specifically miserable, but it certainly wouldn’t have increased any happiness. Wickham and Lydia would have ended up miserable as well. And even if those situations do not seem like punishment, the “bad” characters never gain that superior bliss which the “good” characters enjoy. One might consider withholding ultimate joy to be a sort of punishment.
Though I must say that Mr. Armstrong has over-simplified and stereotyped Austen fans. I enjoy JA’s works not because of an illusion about elegant societies, but because they are intelligent, insightful, and incredibly funny.
June 27th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Also I don’t think the first line of “Pride & Prejudice” says anything about natural selection, unless stretched by a creative mind desperate for a literary analogy.