More on the Woman’s Hour poll
Cristina Odone of the Observer has weighed in on the BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour poll on the ‘book that changed your life’. Ms. Odone sees the poll-takers’ choice of Pride and Prejudice as evidence that “all we apparently want is to be driven from church, dressed in white, an Alpha male beside us. ”
From the article:
Jane Austen’s masterpiece is a perfectly pitched satire on the war between the sexes and the mores of the day. But it confirms, rather than transforms, a woman’s lot. She knew that her own existence - as spinster aunt whose genius received only a modicum of public recognition just before her premature death - would have young women recoiling in horror. No matter how spirited and clever her heroine, an independent life was impossible for a woman of slender means. Had Elizabeth Bennett [sic] spurned Mr Darcy and opted for a life of the mind, she would have been forced to live off her family and been branded a loser. Austen had to bow to the convention of her day - but we needn’t. The fact that we still cling to fairy tales in which ‘he’ saves me betrays a defeatism that now has no excuse. This is the logic that argues that a woman must be wrinkle-free and bouncy-breasted - lest she lose HIM. It is the logic that defends taking on a husband’s name as part of wedding your entire life to his, as one name-changer told the Daily Mail this week.
Ah, yes. Pride and Prejudice is that well-loved tale of a woman who surrenders her individuality, behaving exactly as the social mores of the day required. Who was taught a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous by her Alpha Male rescuer. Who was properly humbled by a man who has no defect, and lived a life of quiet subservience, as would have been expected in her day.
December 12th, 2004 at 1:40 pm
See, I agree with both of you. Austen was no Mary Wollstonecraft, running around advocating free love, I think it would have been impossible for her to be that. She was working with a conservative genre (as in “maintaining the status quo”). That’s the nature of the romance novel. But I really hate it when modern readers only see her plots and completely miss the really radical and revolutionary stuff she did manage to do. For crying out loud, Sense and Sensibility is a “romance novel” where the heroes are largely absent! It’s about the relationship between two women, sisterhood. And Pride and Prejudice deals with so much more than boy-meets-girl. Doesn’t anybody notice how Austen *never* gives us the climatic mushy love-scene we’re expecting? She’s working with the romance plot (how could she write anything else, really) but she pulls the rug out from under it at the same time.
Argh. We really do live in a world programmed to misunderstand Austen.
December 12th, 2004 at 2:24 pm
I guess what I find somewhat ridiculous is this: “Had Elizabeth Bennett [sic] spurned Mr Darcy and opted for a life of the mind, she would have been forced to live off her family and been branded a loser.” Well, she may not have opted for a “life of the mind” but she certainly did spurn two marriage proposals that she would have been expected to accept. Am I supposed to believe that Elizabeth deprived herself of writing brilliant novels or composing awe-inspiring symphonies by marrying Darcy?
I also don’t see anyone mourning over poor Darcy’s choice of matrimony over an independent life.
Perhaps what grates on me the most is this insistence that somehow marriage always equates a narrowing of one’s life. It’s sort of the opposite of Bridget Jones’ “smug marrieds.” If anyone is shown as being saved, it is Elizabeth who is the savior. Darcy doesn’t swoop in to save her from eloping with Wickham, after all. And if managing Pemberley is fulfilling, meaningful, etc. for Darcy, why isn’t managing Pemberley’s household and their children equally fulfilling and meaningful for Elizabeth? If Elizabeth is selling herself short somehow by being Pemberley’s mistress, why isn’t Darcy doing the same by being its master?