Here is an awesome post in defense of Jane Austen, and in defense of Pride and Prejudice in general. Makes me want to take a look at the book again – it’s been a while since I read it.
I have always been extremely annoyed by the co-opting of Jane Austen’s name in defense of “chick lit”. Not that there’s anything wrong with “chick lit”, although it is not my cup of tea. Fine. Chick lit. Read it. It’s a genre. Enjoy it! But I have always heard a really defensive shrill note in the “we’re just doing what Jane Austen did” chorus. No. You’re not. Go back and read what Austen actually wrote, and do not try to convince me that it is a 19th century Sex and the City. It is NOT. And if you make that argument, I will find it hard to take you seriously. You can’t actually have read and understood Jane Austen and honestly think that it is a precursor to Sex and the City or Devil Wears Prada. Again: nothing wrong with chick lit. But just accept it for what it is and stop trying to pile legitimacy onto what is, essentially, urban romance novels. Stop!!
But anyway. Abigail is MUCH more eloquent when making her points:
The stereotypical chick-lit heroine is the representative of a lost generation–women who, although they have rejected the traditional subservient, domestic role of the female in their actions, have done so almost unconsciously, and are now searching for a new paradigm for their lives. Austen’s heroines, in contrast, know their place in the world–as wives and mothers–and are eager to assume it. More importantly, chick-lit is almost universally concerned with the gratification of desires–I want a great job, I want a studly yet sensitive boyfriend, I want a child–whereas Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice in particular, are morality plays. The reward for becoming a better person, Austen tells us, for shedding the petty selfishness of childhood and emerging into maturity, is a good, stable marriage, the right and privilege of becoming the bedrock of a new generation of Englishmen and -women. This is so far from chick-lit’s themes of self-actualization and self-acceptance as to very nearly make the works polar opposites, which is hardly surprising–Austen wrote 200 years ago, when conformity and self-sacrifice were virtues, not vices as they are, for better and worse, today.
Jane Austin stories are okay, as much as I don’t really appreciate her writing. Link to anything about the Bronte sisters, and you’re toast, red.
hahahahaha I think it’s too late, Mistress Emily.
In that case, bitch, you’re going DOWN!
Now all you need to do is put up a post saying you love Renee Zellweger, and I can de-link you, and we can have a big blog war.
Come on. There are some lines that just should never be crossed, even between friends for the sake of comedy.
Yeah, the Renee Z. line is sacred. It should never be crossed.
All I have to say is the more popular her books are, the more movies will be made of them, and then there’s a chance we’ll see more Colin Firth.
And can’t we agree that THAT’S what’s important?
Oh yes. Complete and heartfelt agreement!
Here’s a philosophical dilema – when Colin Firth appears in a movie with Zellweger, does it cancel out his Firthy goodness?
Colin with McSquinty?! It is too horrible to contemplate!
Let’s never speak of it again.
Didn’t it happen already in Bridget Jones?
I just … Colin Firth is always yummy – but I prefer to see him with someone I don’t despise.
Oh, you’re right. I am a stupid.
They’re the only Richard Curtis movies I’ve never seen, I think.
It did. It did. Thank goodness the second one sucked so much ass that watching it again would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. I’ve learned to live with the idea with the first one.
I did not see the second one and judging from the reviews I didn’t miss much!
Oh, Sheila, it was PAINFUL. Literally. Just bad. The kind of bad where you watch it and seriously wonder how anybody thought the shit was funny. BJ’s neuroticism was mildly amusing in the first one; it went completely overboard in the second, to the point where it made perfect sense that she’s bloody single well into her thirties and you don’t even feel bad for her because of it. Truly terrible, including a sing-a-long in a Thai prison. You’ll have to watch it yourself if you want any further details than that.
Concerning Austen’s novels as morality plays vs. contemporary chick-lit as being about self-actualization, I have always found it interesting that Austen was the favorite novelist of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, intellectual great-grandfather of contemporary neo-conservativism. Interesting to imagine what Strauss might have made of chick-lit.
Thanks for the kind words, Sheila. One thing, though: since posting the entry on my blog, a Readerville friend has pointed out that what many chick-lit writers are saying is not that Austen wrote chick-lit but that if she were writing today, she’d be accused of writing it.
It’s not an argument that I know how to respond to. On the one hand, I think if Austen were living in our era, it’s almost impossible that she would write the books she did. On the other hand, if someone did write P&P today, I can definitely see it being dismissed as ‘just a romance’ by our genre-crazy literary establishment (or, in the best case, as a book that ‘transcends its genre’).
I still don’t think ‘but Jane Austen would have been called a chick-lit author’ is a good defense of chick-lit, or an excuse for dragging Austen into the discussion, but as I said on my blog, I do feel for chick-lit authors and the amount of crap they put up with.
Abigail –
I do, too, and I very much appreciated your point. It’s a genre. Like any other genre. The hostility thrown at it seems quite unwarranted – and I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it – the theory you might have as to why this is the case.
Harold Bloom remarks somewhere in discussing Gore Vidal’s failure to achieve canonical status that not all genres are equally available for canonization at all times. This seems to be true with respect to Jane Austen’s genre at the current moment, and we might actually have our friend Mr. James Joyce to blame for that. His achievement was so enormous that hardly any novel that doesn’t show his influence on some level is available for canonization.
Whether it might be possible for some innovative writer to create a sort of Joycean romance genre, I don’t know. It very well might be. (And I’m not thinking of “Nausicca”; this would have to be something very different.) If you consider that avant garde writers after Joyce have managed to integrate popular genres into a Joycean style (Thomas Pynchon’s gothic is probably the largest example), then it might be possible to do something similar with the romance genre. But Austen wouldn’t be able to write the same kind of novels that she wrote today and achieve the same canonical status.
One sees the same phenomenon in classical music. One couldn’t write something like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony today and have it taken seriously.
Bryan – have you read any AS Byatt??
One of the reviews of Possession which I loved said: “Byatt writes as though James Joyce never existed.”
That is to say: her models are the major novels of the 19th century – primarily George Eliot. The interweaving of social issues with romance – the epistolary themes – the sense of eavesdropping, peeking in through windows …
It was a fascinating observation, I think, and right on the money. She ignores Joyce. I love her books (well – her last 4 books not so much – but I LOVE Possession) … It’s a throw-back, a definite looking backwards to a style that is now out of style … and yet she breathes new life into it – it’s not a historical romance, most of it takes place in the 20th century … but there is something very old-fashioned in its structure.
Strange that I would find that so refreshing.
I love Joyce even though he did (as TS Eliot observed) “kill the 19th century”.
The same thing has happened in theatre. The avant-garde theatre movement of the 60s is still with us … to write a well-made play in the style of Miller, or Williams or Ibsen – is still rather out of style.
The only ones who seem to be really doing that right now are the new breed of Irish playwrights. Their plays come to New York and everyone FALLS OVER DEAD WITH SHOCK AND APPLAUSE at how amazing how they are. And yes – they are. But they’re pretty much just standard well-made interesting dramatic works of art, with a well-made plot, a catharsis at the end … They’re throwbacks. But they feel new.
I don’t consider myself enough of an expert to offer an opinion on chick-lit – I liked the Bridget Jones books, and I’ve given the rest of it a wide berth. I do find it interesting to chart the transition from the standard romance template (sweep me off my feet as I weakly protest, you bulging he-man, you) to the chick-lit template (offer me your undivided attention and unconditional commitment as I juggle my career and love-life), which unquestionably has a great deal to do with the changes that have taken place in women’s lives over the last few decades – as I wrote in my blog entry, in a lot of ways, we’re seeing a lost generation of women who don’t know what their place is and what they’re supposed to want.
As for my theory on why chick-lit is so reviled, it’s not something I can support with evidence, but I definitely believe that there’s an element of misogyny, or at least a fear of women, to it. Women make up the majority of book buyers and the minority of authors, and while they were quietly and shame-facedly buying bodice-rippers, that was fine. Chick-lit is proud of its own silliness, and the success of BJ has moved these pinkish tomes front and center. I definitely feel that we’re seeing shrill reactionary-ism from a male establishment puzzled by a publishing phenomenon in which men have no place, as readers or authors.
Again, this is pure speculation, and it doesn’t account for the equally shrill reactions against chick-lit from women.
Abigail – yeah, I can certainly see the resentment coming out in that hostility – resentment at the very successes of these books. It’s kind of silly.
Sheila,
I haven’t read Byatt, although I intend to at some point. It will be interesting to see how her work ends up surviving, although of course it won’t really be possible to determine her canonical status until long after I’m dead.
After writing my previous comment, I was pondering why it is that genres become unavailable for canonization, and the more I think about the question, the more convinced I become that there is much truth in Bloom’s claim that canonical status is influence. What a writer has to achieve above all else in order to survive is originality. She must find where the tradition has been wrong so that she can be right.
Joyce summed up an entire literary culture and in doing so basically terminated it. After him, originality has meant finding where Joyce was wrong so that one can be right, and that implies working more or less in Joyce’s mode. Figures with that kind of influence are rare. In the English language, probably only Milton has had a similar effect.