Ellen Moody wrote in Janeites and Austen-L as
part of a response to Diana Birchall’s short story about Mary Musgrove’s
constant complaining being rationally based:
"...I was not talking of dull
machinations to make best sellers but a serious critique of the way Mary
Musgrove is understood. What I found
interesting in the story is that it opens up the unfairness of Austen's presentation and suggests a larger
perspective which could generalize out to other women in her position. I see
Austen's presentation of Mary Bennet in the same light, only more cruel and self-flagellating
for was not Jane a reading girl?"
Ellen, I not only suggested 3 years
ago that Mary Musgrove's whining was actually a clever survival strategy, I have
been saying for over 5 years now that Mary Bennet is a POSITIVE self-portrait
of the young Jane Austen---she only seems to be a pedantic fool, because we see
and hear her only through the eyes and ears of Elizabeth Bennet, who has no better
insight into Mary's character than Emma does into the character of anyone
around HER. And speaking of Jane Austen’s
Marys being presented in what appears to be a consistently negative light in
her novels, I have also been saying for years that Mary Crawford in MP is a much
deeper, smarter, ethical, and loving person than Fanny Price realizes, or will
admit to herself. Indeed, I believe that Fanny is sexually attracted to Mary,
who has been quietly courting Fanny during the entire length of her stay at
Mansfield Park!
But back to Mary Bennet---as I and a
handful of other renegade Austen scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, Mary
Bennet's handful of speeches are chock full of veiled (and intellectually
profound) allusions to Hume, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and other intellectual
luminaries, whom Jane Austen herself surely read all her life. Mary only seems
like a pedant to Lizzy, because just as Lizzy has never taken the time to practice
her piano-playing, Lizzy has also never taken the time to read Hume, Locke, and
Wollstonecraft. Mary is not just quoting
from these great books, she is interpreting them through an autodidactic
feminist lens, applying them to real life in amazingly subtle and insightful
ways.
The most perfect example of that is
what I have argued repeatedly since 2010, i.e., that it is Mary who repeatedly
WHISPERS to Lizzy during the second half of P&P, warning Lizzy of the
danger that Lizzy is being seduced by Darcy's great wealth, good looks, and
campaign of supposed character reform--but Lizzy is just not listening, because
she thinks Mary is talking about Lydia, and because she just hears "Yada
yada yada" when Mary speaks.
And such anti-intellectualism was
not just a phenomenon of JA's era. Think about modern-day political debates.
Isn't that the way left-leaning intellectuals are perceived today in many First
World countries by many of those on the other side of the fence politically--"they
think too much", "they're not in the real world", "they're
pedants and phonies", "their book knowledge is trumped by common
sense", etc etc. Jane Austen observed the deep anti-intellectualism that
surely was out there in her time, as it is in
ours, and Mary Bennet is her
character who, when properly understood, best embodies JA's profound and
subversive irony on this point. As do Miss Bates and Harriet Smith, in a
different way.
So, Ellen, I suggest that you take
seriously the possibility that you have missed the massive irony that undergirds
many of Jane Austen's characterizations --- i.e., many of the characters (but
most of all
every one of JA's heroines) who seem
to have brilliant psychological insight are, when viewed from the alternative
perspective that JA carefully but subtly provides everywhere, seen to be deeply
clueless,
especially in their negative judgments on the people closest to
them. You have to work to read the narration of the novels as subjective, in order
to then re-place yourself in a different point of view, where you can see what
the heroine ignores.
And, in exactly that same vein, but
conversely, many of the characters who appear to be fools are not fools at all,
but are merely and mistakenly perceived as fools by the clueless heroine. So
it's not just
Mary Musgrove, or Mrs. Bennet, or
Harriet Smith, or Miss Bates, it's also Mr. Rushworth (counting speeches), Sir
Walter Elliot (with his witty jokes on admiral ranks and facial coloration), and
other "fools" who turn out to surprise us with remarkable examples of
their insight and awareness.
Most important of all, my way of
reading Jane Austen with "double vision" (recall Miss Bates speaking
about the advantages of two pairs of "spectacles") resolves the
massive paradox that Ellen's way of reading Jane Austen constantly creates
-because, indeed, why WOULD a reading girl like Jane Austen make such cruel
mockery of a reading girl like Mary Bennet? And why would a loving spinster
aunt like Jane Austen make such cruel mockery of a loving spinster aunt like
Miss Bates?
You try to resolve the paradox by
saying that JA had a great deal of self-hatred that she poured into her novels,
but that's not the Jane Austen I see--I see a Jane Austen who was intensely
proud of her
hard-earned autodidactic erudition
and genius--she taught herself everything by reading, reading, reading, and
thinking, thinking, thinking--like a Regency Era Good Will Hunting--- and she
turned herself into one of the immortals not only of literature, but also of
literary criticism (because her novels brim over with veiled insights into the masterworks
of Shakespeare, the Bible, Milton and a hundred other authors great and
little), psychology, and (yes) history--because her novels are, as the
discussion at Beechen Cliff strongly hints, a radical new form of social
history. And the proof of her success as a writer of history is that reading
her novels tells us, today, much more about real life, especially the real life
of women, during the Regency Era in England than all the solemn histories of
Regency Era England put together!
Food for thought!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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