When I posted yesterday about the eerie, dreadful resonance between the recent prison sentence handed down on courageous female musicians in Russia….
…and the prison sentence handed down on courageous journalists in Jane Austen's England, it
did not occur to me that _another_ news item would cross my monitor within a
day, which would carry an even _more_ horrid, dreadful resonance to the
patriarchal abuses that Jane Austen covertly satirized in her novels. But it
seems that in 2012, we live in an era when pretty much the only thing that
unites the men doing bad things in the world today (and men do seem to account
for pretty much all of it) is their
hatred and abuse of women. Religious extremist men, whether they be Christian,
Moslem or Jew, who all want to blow each other up, nonetheless seem to agree on
_one_ thing, which is that women need to be suppressed, and then God’s order
will be restored, and everything will be happy ever after—until the next war,
that is.
And
speaking of magical thinking, here are the key excerpts from the article I just
read….
…that
made me shake my head in horror:
“Rep.
Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against
Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case
of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological
defenses that prevent pregnancy. “First
of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really
rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate
rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” …. In a
tweet, McCaskill said she was “stunned” by Akin’s comments. … As a state
legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after
questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and
a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to a May 1 article that
year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch….”
Now,
what, you might ask, have Todd Akin’s primitive opinions about female
reproduction to do with Jane Austen?
Well, think about the most famous hypochondriac in
English literature, Mr. Woodhouse, of course the father of the heroine in
_Emma_, with his implicit faith in the “thin gruel” and other cures prescribed
to him by Mr. Perry the Apothecary---and his Satanic love of a “great fire”
during the heat of summer.
As I
first learned in early 2005, and have been doing my best to spread the word
since then, Prof. Jill Heydt-Stevenson, in a 1999 article, blew the roof clear off
of Austen scholarly studies of sexual themes in Jane Austen’s writing, by convincingly
demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that the stanzas of Garrick’s Riddle,
which Mr. Woodhouse just _cannot_ remember in Chapter 9, of _Emma_, are actually a thinly veiled, sharp-as-nails
satire of the medieval belief held by more than a few Englishmen during Jane
Austen’s lifetime, that men with advanced syphilis could be cured if they had
sex with virgins!
Perhaps
you think I am putting you on, because this is too absurd to be true? Well, if
you can’t put your hands on her 1991 article, or on p. 161 of her followup 2005 book “Austen’s Unbecoming
Conjunctions” where this brilliant interpretation is updated, then have a look
at the wonderful 2010 dissertation by Melanie Osborn….
….in
which Osborn amplifies on Heydt-Stevenson’s discoveries and makes the case
trebly more convincing still.
And
now I think you probably already see the sickening resonance between the
“medical” theories of 18th century England about the cure for
syphilis, and the “medical” theories of Todd Akin about pregnancy after
rape---both of which ascribe a supernatural power to virginal or chaste
women---i.e., it seems that raping a virgin can cure a man of syphilis, and, on
the other side of this perverse coin, raping a woman who does not enjoy it even
one teensy bit cannot result in a pregnancy. Taken together, they might almost sound like
they provide mutual corroboration, until you realize that they are both
completely absurd—and what is even worse, arising out of male fear, ignorance
and misogyny!
As I
contemplate the truly horrid and horrible absurdity of all of this, I am
reminded of the chilling line spoken in the movie Time After Time by Jack the
Ripper, sitting in a hotel room in late Sixties San Francisco, opening the
naïve, idealistic eyes of his old friend H.G. Wells about the future of
humankind:
“90
years ago I was a freak. Today I'm an amateur.”
Other
than to change “90 years” to “2 centuries”, that’s _exactly_ what Mr. Woodhouse
would say if he heard Todd Akin’s opinions about the female reproductive
system. At least no English law was ever enacted exonerating men from having
sex with virgins to cure syphilis---but if Todd Akin and his odious ilk had
their way, similarly crazy male ideas about women’s bodies would have the force
of federal law.
And
if Jane Austen were to travel to 2012 in a time machine and hear Mr. Akin’s
opinions, she’d nod sadly and remind us that, yes, Henry Tilney’s rant, in
Northanger Abbey, about Englishmen being Christians….
…is a
satire, because what Jane Austen saw in her world two centuries ago, and what
anyone with eyes can see in the likes of Todd Akin (or the Taliban) in 2012,
is that those women who would allow the likes of Todd Akin or the Taliban the
right to regulate what happens to women’s bodies, are greater fools even than
Mr. Woodhouse.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
Bill Maher brings these lsst two posts of mine together with humor that Jane Austen would have enjoyed:
ReplyDelete"Akin on rape:'the female body has ways to try and shut the whole thing down'. Today he's claiming the medical term for that is "Pussy Riot" "