Tanya Gold, in her Guardian article What’s with this Jane Austen fixation? raises an interesting issue, and one that I have pondered recently after seeing the Austen novels top the lists of “popular classics” again and again. What resonance with today’s readers is implied by the enduring, in fact resurgent, popularity of Jane Austen’s fiction? And what does significance does that resonance have – what does it show about our society, culture and the way we think today?
Ms Gold posits a contrast between the patriarchal society and the plight of women in those times, and the relative sexual equality, and greater economic opportunity, achieved since then. Certainly, valid points; but unsatisfying inasmuch as she does not give a reason for the novels’ popularity today, contenting herself with berating her fellow women for their reactionary attitudes. She does not attempt to answer the question (“what’s with the Austen fixation”); she only poses it rhetorically. I think it a question worth interrogating.
Consider the historical circumstances, and what was new (and therefore important) about Austen’s novels. Franco Moretti, in “Serious Century”, an essay in the five-volume (two-volume in the selective English translation) work The Novel he himself edited, refers to the ordinariness of the content taking, for the first time, centre stage.
Extraordinary events, hitherto the selling point and the major content of fiction, and eradicated, or become peripheral. This was part of a movement in art, rejecting the heroic, the heightened, and the marvellous, in favour of the mundane, the everyday, and the interior lives of deliberately prosaic figures. The reader was presented with a protagonist whose life and social position was similar to her own.
Austen’s novels, in other words, are quintessential bourgeois art, concerned with social status, manners (in the older sense) and achieving advancement without presumption. The fact they are written about women reflects the fact that the readership of novels at the time was overwhelmingly female, and since the novel was beginning to provide a reflection of the reader, albeit one that was still idealised in various ways. What does the harking back to this time, and its values – or rather the trajectory of changing social values at that point in time – mean for today?
Perhaps, in a world defined by neoliberal economics, similar conditions to those that gave Austen’s work its original popularity, tend to set her up at the head of a canon, the progenitor of a lineage of bourgeois fiction. This is a flip and reductionist response, that needs at least better articulation, and most likely reformulation in a more considered way. But it is, at least, the beginnings of a response to the original question. I hope others will argue with it, or add to it.
Recent Comments