It always comes back to WWJD…What Would Jane Do?
Alert Janeite Julie P. sent us a link to an interview with Elizabeth Kantor, the editor of the Conservative Book Club and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature.
FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Kantor: The fact that the great works of literature in English are vanishing from college curricula, or else being distorted beyond recognition.
[. . .]
And then, when politically correct English profs do turn their attention to the great works of English lit., they use them to forward their own political agendas–they dig through our literary classics looking for examples of the racism, colonialism, and “patriarchy,” that are supposed to be the essence of Western culture.
Naturally Dr. Kantor covered Jane Austen in her book.
FP: What are some of your favorite works of English literature and what do they mean to you?
Kantor: Jane Austen’s novels are right up there. The conventional wisdom now is that Austen was a really very “subversive” author—that her books are full of secret rage against “the patriarchy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As I argue (with lots of examples from Austen’s side-splittingly funny novels) in The Politically Incorrect Guide, Austen is an astute observer of human nature who was well aware that most men would be immensely improved if they were a little more patriarchal than they are. Austen’s novels may be the most fun books in the English language. And they’re also a boost to your moral intelligence. They really inspire you to aim for personal integrity.
Well, it’s good to know that Dr. Kantor didn’t use her book to promote her own political agenda, because, as she took pains to point out, that would cause the downfall of Western civilization. Also, she needs to re-read Persuasion MP, P&P, and S&S and pay particular attention to the parts where some of those set to inherit the great estates under the patriarchal system were less than deserving, and then we’ll discuss whether Jane Austen wanted her society to be “more patriarchal.”
As we already blogged about tonight, the Janeite diaspora embraces a diverse set of viewpoints (to say the least). We are not being politically correct in saying that, just pointing out a fact. That being said, we would, as always, caution against taking an absolutist view of Jane Austen’s work, no matter to which extreme one wishes to cling. And do read things thoroughly! One would not wish to be condemned as Jane condemned John Thorpe, who could only say of Camilla, “It is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not.”
Doppelganger from 50 Books points this out quite eloquently in a post on her blog:
A more burning question than the state of my life might be this one: was Jane Austen gay? More specifically, was she gay for her sister, as this article speculates right off the top? When you continue reading, you realize that the thrust of the article isn’t about Austen’s alleged homosexuality, but instead is about the celebrity-obsessed times in which we live, which create a climate in which we care less about the import of a writer’s words and more about rampant gossip about the writer’s personal life.
She referred to this article in The Times.
Jane Austen had a lesbian affair with her older sister, Cassandra. It’s obvious, really. There was “the passionate nature of the sibling bond” so evident in the letters. There were her descriptions of women, betraying “a kind of homophilic fascination”. And, of course, there was her fascination with the “underlying eros of the sister-sister bond”. Case closed, I’d say.
Well, no. All these quotations come from a 1995 article in the London Review of Books by Terry Castle, an American academic. Castle was simply noting certain important preoccupations in her writing. An eager subeditor, however, had other ideas. “Was Jane Austen Gay?” was the headline. The LRB had barely hit the newsstands when Newsnight went on air with an earnest discussion of the sexual proclivities of one of our greatest novelists. Good grief! Was Mr Darcy really a woman, the bulge in his breeches a clumsy prosthetic? We had to know. But why? Literary biography is one of the dominant forms of our time. Almost weekly, big fat books emerge to reveal new truths about our greatest writers. [. . .] And, yes, Austen is in for another doing-over, as a film released next year, Becoming Jane, about “a little-known but true love affair with the brilliant, roguish and attractive young Irishman Tom Lefroy”. One way or another, it seems, we shall just have to accept the awful, the incredible truth: Jane Austen had sex. Gosh.
See where this sort of thing ends up? Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Put down the extremes and back away slowly! And always ask yourself: What Would Jane Do? (In this case? We are convinced she would post and snark, but that’s only because it advances our blogger agenda.)
November 30th, 2006 at 12:47 am
Well, I finally have to say it. I’ve held onto it for so long…here it goes.
I have a super-secret hush-hush letter, which has been passed down in my family from generation to generation. In it, Jane Austen confesses that she is, in fact, an alien. A lesbian alien. It’s all right there. And I’m making a movie about it, called “Jane vrs. Alien vrs. Predator.” This movie will not only address little-known aspects of Jane’s life, but will also present a philosophical system which can be derived from her novels, and which I like to call “Guide to Preserving Western Civilization.”
Oh, and this movie will star Pamela Andreson as Jane Austen. We’re modernizing her.
::throws up hands and retreats::
November 30th, 2006 at 4:49 am
@ Dae:
LOL!
November 30th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Oh my head!
LOL, Dae!
November 30th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Dr. Kantor is correct that Jane Austen can’t really be cited as supporting today’s academic agendas, but is incorrect that Austen thinks men should be more patriarchal in order to improve. As a man who finds great merit in Austen, I don’t see her saying that to me at all. It seems to me Jane’s messages for improvement, to women as well as to men, are:
1. Never make someone think you feel more for them than you really do.
2. Never make someone think that some third person feels more for them than that person really does.
3. The most important ‘accomplishment’ any young person should achieve, man or woman, is the ability to judge accurately what the feelings are of any given person toward any other person.
4. The next most important accomplishment is the ability to take charge of one’s feelings — to be able, once you sense that a feeling either favorable or unfavorable to another person has begun to develop, to arrest the process momentarily and consider whether the feeling is well-founded, and to permit or encourage the feeling to grow only if it appears to be well-founded
5. Seek to inspire feelings of love in another for yourself only in a person for whom you already feel love, and only for the purpose of receiving that person’s love (not for financial or social gain).
6. Be hesitant to judge a person harshly for having appeared to have failed to uphold the standards you think he/she should have upheld, because you can never be sure that you know enough about the situation the person was in to be able to judge whether she/he acted well, given the situation the person was in.
There are lots of others that could be listed but they are common-sense (don’t hurt other people’s feelings, live within your income, etc.). The foregoing are, I think, Austen’s unique contribution and are what we get from her that we don’t get anywhere else, or at least, not so effectively from anywhere else. She sees feelings as akin to things that grow in nature, but that need to be tended, nurtured, sometimes trimmed, by a consciousness that understands them but that is able to stand free of them. People with widely different political and social views on questions of today can agree with Austen, and no doubt it is an easy matter for any of us to look at someone whose political & social views are opposite to our own, and convince ourselves that that person is ignorantly or hypocritically contradicting Austen. (Whenever one is tempted to do this, and put-down another person, re-read point 6 above!) But as to saying Austen was in significant part a social critic, I just don’t see that in her work. The sense I get is that she thought very highly of the society and culture she lived in, because that culture made it possible to value, cultivate, and protect emotions in a way that emotions deserve, and permitted people to be more compassionate and caring of one another. She knew her society was imperfect, and wished that women had greater opportunities for more exciting lives, but helping us to become better, more sensitive and caring individuals was her priority, not changing the rules of her society as a means of correcting its imperfections.
November 30th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
I definitely see her as someone who appreciated merit and was willing to accept someone who’d earned their place in society over an undeserving person who was born to it.
Persuasion talks about self-made men being better than a baronet. Even in P&P she lets us know that not all titled people are good and that not all people in trade are unworthy. Look at Darcy’s friendship with Bingley — if Darcy were as much of a snob as Lady Catherine is, he’d never have been such good friends with Bingley. And, by the end of the book, we also know that Darcy realizes that his own socially prominent relatives are capable of embarrassing him.
November 30th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Jane Austen vs Alien vs Predator? I would pay some serious money to see that one come about!
November 30th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Sophie, Sylvia, and Kelley B…thanks. Sometimes I just have to let it out.
…and don’t you think that Jane would own both Alien and Predator?
December 1st, 2006 at 11:49 am
Oh absolutely! She’d dance circles around them with her wit and spirited energy and still have enough left over to take on Freddy and Jason!