{"id":3758,"date":"2005-10-20T14:25:05","date_gmt":"2005-10-20T18:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3758"},"modified":"2015-05-18T15:00:54","modified_gmt":"2015-05-18T19:00:54","slug":"pride-and-prejudice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3758","title":{"rendered":"Pride and Prejudice<\/i>: In Defense of Jane Austen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is an awesome post in defense of Jane Austen<\/a>, and in defense of Pride and Prejudice<\/i> in general. Makes me want to take a look at the book again – it’s been a while since I read it.<\/p>\n

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<\/i>, and do not try to convince me that it is a 19th century Sex and the City<\/i>. 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<\/i> or Devil Wears Prada<\/i>. 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!!<\/p>\n

But anyway. Abigail is MUCH more eloquent when making her points:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go read the whole thing.<\/a><\/p>\n

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