Jane Austen, Still Hot after 200 Years
If you’re like me, you can’t get enough Jane Austen! (Sarcasm.) Actually, it seems the world, particularly America, can’t get enough of the author either. David Gates asseses Jane Austen’s appeal to American audiences,
[She] caters to Americans’ perennial Anglophilia—as does that odd preoccupation with the royals. With that, she offers Regency variants of the Cinderella story—the oldest work of chick lit, and the central fable about class, and about marriage [. . . .] The motor of all her books—courtship leading up to marriage—has a strong resonance in the socially conservative 2000s, when young women who might once have been feminists aspire to be Bridezillas, starting their marriages $20,000 in debt. Still more creepy, a version of Austen’s world has become the American Dream—at least as dreamed by advertisers and the entertainment industry. Her “charming” country villages, in which even the most financially precarious upper-class people amuse themselves while surviving on the labor of invisible servants, look like our aspirational world of guilt-free leisure and nonstop entertainment, with illegal immigrants mowing the lawn and building the new deck.
Oh, snap! Really, this may seem harsh, although Gates is actually kind and complementary—if not effusively apologetic—to Austen-the-novelist in her important place in world literature. I’d tend to agree with his assertion though, that Jane Austen, ”literary fashion accessory” and writer of (in my opinion) the most popularly over-read, over-analyzed book in the Western English canon, Pride & Prejudice, ”seems to offer middlebrow entertainment with an upmarket sheen”.
What think you? Leave a comment by clicking the link above. And for some deadly serious Austen scholarship, check out the Jane Austen Society of North America.