Miss the point much?
This article popped up on our Jane Austen Google Alert and is a real teal deer, so we didn’t read it very thoroughly, just the Jane Austen stuff. Probably shouldn’t have bothered, really.
(We’re fairly certain that the site is badly coded and the ?s should be quotation marks. High ASCII characters make mockery of us all.)
�When I teach 18th century literature, I teach 18th century literature,� she says firmly. There she becomes more concerned with post-colonial criticism. She gives Jane Austen’s �Mansfield Park� as an example. When teaching the book, she asks students to look at what Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagelton writes as most comparative literature departments around the globe do, and then asks them to consider what Edward Said says. In Said’s book Culture and Imperialism he describes the power relations of the 18th century and turns from the book’s romantic plot to its historical context. �There’s a family in a beautiful estate. There are trees, horses, hunting. The mansions with maids and cooks,� she says of Mansfield Park. �Their biggest problem is boredom.� Except for two lines where Austen mentions that the father has to go off to the Caribbean every so often to put down a slave uprising on his sugar plantation.
That’s a different edition from the ones we’ve read, which say no such thing.
�Then we find out that their money comes from Africans who were dragged kicking and screaming from ships and Jane Austen doesn’t even turn a hair.
Leaving aside the question of exactly what generates the money from the Antigua estate, to say that “Jane Austen doesn’t even turn a hair” is wrong on so many levels that we are at a loss.
December 4th, 2007 at 7:21 am
I’m so glad that I’m not in any of her classes…
December 4th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Oh, thank you, thank you for my laugh of the day!!
December 4th, 2007 at 8:44 am
**No one in that period was indignant about it**
Hello???? Does the phrase ‘Abolitionist movement’ ring a bell?
December 4th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
This person didn’t even do a very good job of reading Edward Said on Austen, thus striking out on both the past and the present.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Uhhh, I get so frustrated when people assume that just because a writer of that period didn’t write about slavery in their works, it must mean that they didn’t care about it!
It’s like saying that writers today who don’t include the war in Iraq in their fiction or romances or whatever are ignoring the current events.