Jane Awesome

Today, December 16^th, is Jane Austen’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Jane!

Despite Austen’s popularity today in the form of multiple BBC miniseries, Hollywood films, Pride & Prejudice­-themed board games, Jane Austen novel continuations, and a plethora of other Jane Austen awesomeness (like the Jane Austen action figure or Jane Austen toothpaste—spoiler, it’s rose-flavored!), many people have a prejudice against the scribe of Bath.

For many, Austen is little more than romance—it’s frothy, lacy, ephemeral and, ultimately, shallow. Charlotte Bronte maligned Pride and Prejudice, writing in a letter that it was “a carefully fenced highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers—but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen’s works became increasingly popular and the term “Janeite” was coined to describe people who adored Austen’s works and everything about them. It may very well be that the zeal with which some adore Austen is precisely what makes others hate her. Modern-day Janeites exist now too, and it’s probably quite easy to make fun of them, as they dress-up in Regency clothing, learn how to dance eighteenth-century country dances, and even travel to England for a “JaneAusten Weekend.”

The idolatry and fandom surrounding Austen can often overshadow her literary achievements; the zeal of some fans seems to put her work in the same category as Star Trek and Harry Potter—things to nerd-out over, but not take seriously.

Of course, I disagree! Austen’s novels are well-crafted, well-written works that comment on a variety of topics, both singular to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as ones more universal and transcendent. In her works, she addresses both “domestic” issues, such as marriage, rules of civility, gender relations, family relations, entertainment, and the running of a household, as well as “worldly” issues, such as commerce, law, economics, nation-building, war, slavery, national character, landscape gardening, architecture, and aesthetics.

This is not to suggest that we can only designate literature as “Important” or “influential” because it addresses this second category of issues or theme. Instead, what I wish to point out is that there is no “domestic” without the “worldly”—and vice versa. Literature by women has, throughout history, been maligned, under-appreciated, discarded, forgotten, or otherwise neglected often because it deals with domestic issues. The same could be said of art or crafts or musical compositions by women. Alice Walker, among many women writers, has addressed this problem in her landmark essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.”

Similarly, when we study history in high school, it is often a history comprised of wars, battles, elections, economics, and individual “important men.” For some reason, what people ate, how many children they had, how they lived, what jobs they had, how they loved, married and died is not considered history worth teaching and writing. This concept is slowly changing in the academy—but popular conceptions of what count as important histories or significant works of literature still focus on a male-centered story arc.

To get back to Jane Austen, it seems that her novels and her contributions to literature are often under-valued not just because she was a woman, but also because her fans are overwhelmingly women. And because her main characters are women. And because the surface plot line is often “will the girl get the guy?”  (Never mind that the same could be said of countless novels by men!)

Yet, to discard Austen’s works, to read them merely for plot, to suggest that plot is what makes a work great or not, is to miss the entire point of literary study. The best literary scholars are those who are the most open to new views, to new works, to possibilities, ambiguities, silences, and apertures in the works we study. This message is itself part of Austen’s novels, and the crux of her most well-known work, Pride and Prejudice. To be too proud to read Austen’s novel, or too proud to admit to liking it, or, what’s worse, perhaps, to be so prejudiced about a work that you refuse to even read it, is juvenile and shallow: the very opposite of Austen’s work.

 

It's not all about marriage...and even if it is,
well, why does that make her novels less important?

I’ve tried to write this post as logically and rationally as possible, but the truth is, I’m a total Janeite. My roller derby name is Jane AweStun. I would totally go to a Jane Austen Weekend if I could afford it. So, rock on, Jane! Happy Birthday, you badass.

…and to my fellow Janeites: be strong! Haters gonna hate…but it is a truth universally acknowledged that geeking out is a lot more fun than joining the haters…

Eighteenth-Century Women Writing About Women Writing

Our friend Aphra.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege to teach an upper-level English course at Stony Brook on a topic of my choice. Since the department was looking to run an upper-level course on poetry, I proposed (successfully) to teach a course on eighteenth-century women poets. It was an exhilarating experience in many ways, as the students were mostly unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature or culture. Together we explored the fabulous voices of female poets starting with Aphra Behn and Anne Finch and ending with Joanna Baillie and Mary Robinson.

One thing that particularly struck me was how often women wrote about writing, specifically, about being female poets and the challenges therein.

Elizabeth Thomas’s poetry is filled with the anger and frustration of being told (apparently) many times over that poetry was not “fit for women,” as in her poem, “On Sir J---- S---- saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode”:

Unhappy sex! how hard’s our fate,

by Custom’s tyranny confined

To foolish needlework and chat,

Or such like exercise as that,

Lady Mary Chudleigh

But still denied th’ improvement of our mind!

(1722)

In these lines, she reiterates, almost to the letter, the earlier complaints of Mary, Lady Chudleigh in “The Lady’s Defense”:

‘Tis hard we should be by the men despised,

Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;

Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,

And with the utmost industry bred fools;

Laughed out of reason, jested out of sense,

And nothing left but native innocence;

Then told we are incapable of wit,

And only for the meanest drudgeries fit

(1701)

Sarah Egerton’s “The Emulation” (1703), Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia” (1724), Mary Leapor’s “An Essay on Woman” [not an essay…a poem] (1746), and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of Woman” (c. 1795) elaborate similar themes of being withheld from knowledge and education all the while being told that, as women, they were silly, useless or incapable of bettering themselves.

Poems like Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” (1713?) and Esther Lewis’s “A Mirror for Detractors. Addressed to a Friend” (1748) more specifically discuss the problem of being a woman poet:

Anne Finch

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed

--From “The Introduction”

…when a woman dares indite,

And seek in print the public sight,

All tongues are presently in motion

About her person, mind, and portion;

And every blemish, every fault,

Unseen before, to light is brought

--From “A Mirror for Detractors”

For those of us who study the literary output of the ladies of the eighteenth century, such sentiments are probably expected from our literary foremothers. For my students, however, they were a wonderful illustration of the limited rights and position of women in the eighteenth century. Even for myself, the anguish, chagrin, frustration and outright anger of these women was palpable in these poems in a way that was immediate and unmediated, and I started using them in introductory women’s studies courses as a way of foregrounding later nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s right movements.

As usual, the past reasserts itself in the present, however, and I find these poems still illustrate the frustrations of women writers writing now. Countless articles have appeared lately about how women writers are constantly belittled and their output discounted by publishers and reviewers, as well as how women’s novels are often marketed with “softer” “more feminine” book covers. All this, despite the fact that women now edge out men in pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in the United Stated. We no longer lack the education, but we are still marginalized when it comes to reviews and marketing.

Similarly, the poetry of women is, in my experience, under-taught at the undergraduate level. When I mentioned to a colleague (a male Romanticist) that I was teaching a course on “eighteenth-century women poets,” he (half-) jokingly replied, “Oh, were there any?” If he looked at almost any general literary anthology, however, he might surmise that there certainly weren’t enough to make an entire course syllabus just on them alone.