(no subject)
post #2 in which the author discusses the inequities inherent in 19th century discourse
So I'm rereading The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler and I just came across this Emerson quote:
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seems to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. All that interests in any character [is]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? Suicide is more respectable.
I like Emerson as much as the next American high school graduate. What a joy he was to read instead of the plodding descriptiveness of Conrad or the incomprehensibility of Joyce. I also understand that he lived in a different world than Austen, and me, so perhaps it is unwise to expect him to see the error in this statement. But it makes me so mad I could spit.
It is incredible that Emerson would come down on Austen for her lack of "knowledge of the world" as if she had the means as a single women to travel and do as she pleased. Or that he would complain about the frivolity of the marriage plots in her novels- when for the women Austen writes about a good marriage is the most important step towards a tolerable life- and, unfortunately, vice versa.
This inability to respect the issues that matter to women as issues of any import drives me absolutely batshit crazy (or maybe I'm just on the rag). It's why I, as an English major, was expected to read and love the canon of male writers as if they were writing about me but only those of us who took Women Writers were even expected to read the bevy of female voices in the history of literature.
It's also why any time I disparaged the Beats in my column as trite, misogynistic, and completely overrated I would get torrents of hate mail. Writing about the legal ties that will determine the path of the rest of your life and which you are expected to enter into before you are 20 is frivolous, but writing about getting drunk and hitching rides is a matter of great import. I think I might be mixing my metaphors there- but you know what I mean.
I just wish that feminism worked faster, I guess. And I wish that I never had to hear Austen described as "pinched and narrow". Especially by an author I love.
blergh.
So I'm rereading The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler and I just came across this Emerson quote:
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seems to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. All that interests in any character [is]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? Suicide is more respectable.
I like Emerson as much as the next American high school graduate. What a joy he was to read instead of the plodding descriptiveness of Conrad or the incomprehensibility of Joyce. I also understand that he lived in a different world than Austen, and me, so perhaps it is unwise to expect him to see the error in this statement. But it makes me so mad I could spit.
It is incredible that Emerson would come down on Austen for her lack of "knowledge of the world" as if she had the means as a single women to travel and do as she pleased. Or that he would complain about the frivolity of the marriage plots in her novels- when for the women Austen writes about a good marriage is the most important step towards a tolerable life- and, unfortunately, vice versa.
This inability to respect the issues that matter to women as issues of any import drives me absolutely batshit crazy (or maybe I'm just on the rag). It's why I, as an English major, was expected to read and love the canon of male writers as if they were writing about me but only those of us who took Women Writers were even expected to read the bevy of female voices in the history of literature.
It's also why any time I disparaged the Beats in my column as trite, misogynistic, and completely overrated I would get torrents of hate mail. Writing about the legal ties that will determine the path of the rest of your life and which you are expected to enter into before you are 20 is frivolous, but writing about getting drunk and hitching rides is a matter of great import. I think I might be mixing my metaphors there- but you know what I mean.
I just wish that feminism worked faster, I guess. And I wish that I never had to hear Austen described as "pinched and narrow". Especially by an author I love.
blergh.