Look who’s on the cover of Newsweek!
As Alert Janeite Lisa wrote when she sent us the link, Jane is “in the middle, next to Barak Obama, below Saddam Hussein Osama bin Laden and kitty corner from Jesus.” Front and center, Gentle Readers! Represent!
Unfortunately it’s another save-Jane-from-the-Janeites article.
It might seem all to the good that Austen is now one of those writers held up as a model by such nostalgics as Tom Wolfe: a novelist for everyone, dishing up literary intricacy and complexity for the scholars, a corking good read for the groundlings and a rebuke for the snobs. But it’s time to rescue Austen from her fans, lest the most adventurous and discerning readers pass her by. If you look at her books closely, you find them more bleak than charming: her characters are isolated within their own minds, trapped in tight spaces, forced to socialize daily with a small group of people they can never fully trust, including their own families. Not a one of her heroines ever shares everything with a true confidant—that is, up until the marriage we never see—and everybody has secrets and conflicting agendas. Courtship is deadly serious business: fail to find the right husband and you end up poor, or married to someone you can’t stand, or cast out of this iffy Eden for fornication or adultery, perhaps to die.
As Karen Joy Fowler wrote, “Surely no one else’s fans have been scolded so often for so long over the wrong-headed ways they love her. Even Austen herself has been appropriated for this project. She would be so ashamed of you, her fans are told. You’d embarrass her.” There are many ways to love Jane…as we have witnessed on this blog just the past few days. If you want to play in your particular corner of the Janeite fandom, embrace it with good humor. It’s when it starts getting taken too seriously that the problems begin, and that usually happens when big money is involved: for instance, a major Hollywood film.
Austen balances out that bleakness with wisdom, with humor, with romance, and above all with a deeply satisfying sense of form, analyzed by scholars and subliminally sensed by general readers. Entertainment, advertising, professional sports, the gossip industry, electro-gaming and the tsunamis of digital information seem calculated to obliterate that bleakness, or at least drown it out with noise. Literature, by contrast, tries to find what Samuel Beckett called “a form to accommodate the mess”—the pain and disorder of life inside and outside the mind. If admirers of Beckett, or whatever exemplar of High Seriousness or harsh edginess or meta-coolness you want to name, pass up Austen because of the prevalent notion that she’s a literary fashion accessory who can be cozied up to as “Jane” … well, what? The sky won’t fall, the books will survive, but the culture will ratchet down another notch, and the best readers will never know what they’re missing.
Oh, stop it. If anyone passes up reading Jane Austen’s novels because she’s too popular, well, it’s their loss. There are plenty of us who can balance an enjoyment of the trappings of modern Janeiteism and a serious interest in her novels. Don’t blame the Jane Austen fans for the excesses of popular culture, which cannot let a good thing lie but must seize upon it and beat it into submission. However, some of the collateral stuff is FUN–some of the movies are good, some of the pastiches are good, we love our dolls and action figure and graphic novel and LOLAustens. That doesn’t take a thing away from the novels themselves.
June 25th, 2007 at 3:03 am
No, Mags, that’s not Saddam, it’s Osama bin Laden. Anyway, I’m glad to see Muhammad Ali there as well—the Greatest alongside the Greatest!
June 25th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Yes, it is, isn’t it? I need to go to bed.
June 25th, 2007 at 3:30 am
“The best readers will never know what they’re missing”: what a stupid argument. If they’re such good readers, they’ll have enough discernment to see through the hype and discover Jane Austen for themselves. Popularity hasn’t spoiled Shakespeare. I think Jane Austen can handle it. And who says “the best readers” are those who admire Beckett, harsh edginess and meta-coolness? Journalists do like their little boxes. What makes intellectual trendiness (”meta-coolness”?) more acceptable than sincere fandom? I think I’m a pretty good reader. I have a Ph.D. in classical language and literature, and wrote a dissertation Vergil’s Aeneid, a work of High Seriousness which is harsh and edgy and written in Latin. Strangely, the fact that there is a Jane Austen action figure hasn’t kept me from reading and appreciating her novels. In fact, where can I get a Jane Austen action figure?
June 25th, 2007 at 4:27 am
Very good Robert. Their argument is not good, do we need a literature career to understand Jane? Why is bad to have fun with things like dolls by example? I think that readers just need a critical sense to apprecite her wonderful novels in order not to ‘be bewitched in heart and soul’ by marketing products such as childish films of sequels, and if they enjoy it, I think is not so bad. There’s an Austen thing for each of us,…and she is so special that she doesn’t become a product.
If we read it, that’s because we have some intelligence.
June 25th, 2007 at 8:02 am
There are also two kinds of Jane fans. The reporters and critics tend to lump us all in together. They should, in my opinion, separate the lovers of fiction who read Jane and the fans who watch Jane Austen movies but don’t read her novels. I have encountered many people who haven’t read Jane since High School, or who have never read her books because her language is too dense, but who voice an opinion on who is the better Mr. Darcy or Elizabeth Bennett. An interesting phenomenon.
June 25th, 2007 at 8:09 am
That is to say that the lovers of Jane’s movies should not be dismissed. They are just a different kind of fan who seem to have fallen in love with Jane’s characters. I, too, love Jane action figures, mugs, towels, and sayings. But that is because I fell in love with Jane’s wit and genius, not her characters per se.
June 25th, 2007 at 9:35 am
His assumption appears to be that readers who are into High Seriousness or harsh edginess or meta-coolness are the best readers. I disagree–people who only want to read modern trendy stuff are not the best readers–if such a distinction exists. I also hardly think that the culture will ratchet down another notch if everyone doesn’t read Austen. Oh, and let’s blame her fans for keeping the “best” readers away!
*grumbles stuff that I can’t write here*
I can’t think of any other fandom where popularity is seen as a bad thing! I mean really, did anyone ever scold Charles Dickens’ fans, “Oh, you bad people, your love of Charles Dickens is stopping the best readers from reading his wonderful writings–and if they just would, it would save the world! Society will rachet down into chaos and stupidity, and it will all be your fault!
June 25th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Robert,
Archie McPhee sells the Jane Austen action figure. Alexander the Great is their only classical offering at present, but one can always hope for a future set of Neoterics.
June 25th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Thanks, Heather! Speaking of action figures, I was dragged into Madame Tussauds (London) on Saturday, and there was no wax figure of Jane Austen! How can people claim she’s become too popular if she isn’t represented in Madame Tussauds? Dickens was there. Britney Spears was there. I would have had my picture taken with Jane Austen. As it was, I had to settle for being photographed with Patrick Stewart.
June 25th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
A wax figure of Jane Austen in Madame Tussauds would go a bit too far in my opinion, lol!
I personally think the action figure is a bit weird too, but if anyone likes it, it’s fine by me! 
I think it’s so silly of these ’serious’ critics to say that we Janeites would emberrass Jane Austen… They’d embarrass her by only talking about her work without using any wit at all. Jane herself also loved to laugh I’m sure, and had a brilliant sense of humour!
I think her best readers are not deadly serious all the time, and are people who love and understand her work, and especially her sense of humour!
June 25th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
But why, Franka?
There are wax figures of almost everyone - the queen, the kings etc. among the historical figures, even Madame Tussaud herself, then why not Jane.
I would love to see her there.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:54 am
That’s one of the snobbiest and most arrogant articles I’ve read in a while. It sounds like Caroline Bingley trying to impress Mr. Darcy. Or like Mr. William Elliot on the topic of good company.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
To answer your question, Reeba, I think wax figures are always a little bit silly, so that’s why I wouldn’t want to see a Jane Austen one… I don’t understand why anyone would like to see a wax figure of a famous person, by the way. Besides, we don’t know exactly what Jane Austen looked like, so that would make a wax figure of her even more silly, in my opinion. Almost as silly as Anne Hathaway portraying Jane!
The silliest thing I’ve ever seen (and definitely NOT bought) is a small Jane Austen doll with a magnet on it, so you could put it on your fridge, but you could also use it to play headstock cupboard with… They also had little Shakespeare dolls!
June 26th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I’ve lured us off-topic, talking about Madame Tussauds, but I would point out that Madame Tussaud herself was a contemporary of Jane Austen (Madame T. arrived in England in 1802), and that her Chamber of Horrors is very much in the Gothic tradition that Jane Austen herself parodies in “Northanger Abbey.” A wax figure even figures prominently in “The Mysteries of Udolpho.”
June 26th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
It’s an interesting issue and I’ve often thought about why Austen fans are ridiculed as if they were avid readers of Barbara Cartland or Mill and Boon.
I think some of it may stem from an old Austen camp/Brontes camp rivalry (personally I read all four authors)- ie Bronte readers saw themselves as more passionate, interesting and feminist than Austen fans. I believe this kind of stereotyping has fallen by the wayside (and into musical tastes) but the history is there. It is possible that because Austen has a wider readership and a more diverse readership, than many other classical authors, her very popularity is the key. Perhaps it’s this lack of exclusivity that leads some folk to represent Austen readers as if they were an army of sad, overly romantic, unintellectual women who understand none of the novels beyond the central romance. This of course, is as untrue as the stereotype that all fans of sci fi are desperately awkward and geeky fanboys.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Ah, yes!! I get it now!
That was rather silly of me¨. *very embarassed*
Of course no one knows what she looks like really so any wax figure would be like;
Almost as silly as Anne Hathaway portraying Jane!
LOL!
Robert Hardy, you are right.
Catherine Morland would have just loved the Chamber of Horrors.
So creepy and gloomy. Ugghhhh.
I can well imagine Emily’s horror after viewing one such ‘decomposing’ wax figure.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Franka, you mean one of these?
I keep mine in work and terrorize my co-workers with it: “JANE SAYS REDRUM!”
June 26th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
I really want one of those now.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
The Unemployed Philosophers’ Guild sells the finger puppet and the ragdoll (I have both!)
Finger Puppet
Little Thinkers Doll
Of course the stuff is silly, but that’s why it’s fun! If we start taking our Janeiteism (or the goofy collateral stuff) too seriously, that sucks all the fun right out of it.
June 27th, 2007 at 1:17 am
LOL! Yes that’s the one I meant, Mags!
It looks horrible… poor Jane! 
Reeba, it wasn’t a silly question at all, don’t worry about it!
I think many people would like to see a JA wax figure, although we don’t know what she looks like. 
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Mags;
RedRum or any kind of Rum? How could anyone mention Ann Coulter in the same magazine,let alone the same title with Jane Austen?
Wonder what jane would say about Ann,Eh?
James