Jane Austen is not Romantic

[brigid]

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

I’m re-reading my Big Book of Jane Austen and wondering, yet again, why some people continue portraying her work as romantic.

I mean, sure, they involve matrimony and at the end of the story there’s a marriage and not a funeral, so technically they are romances and not tragedies, but still.

Most of the established marriages are pretty awful, formed of people who barely tolerate each other at best and despise each other at worst. New relationships are entered into with negotiation, almost as business partnerships, even when actual affection is involved. And when a potential spouse who has objected to a match based on social standing relents, it’s not because passion has swept him/her away. Rather, it’s because he/she found out something further about the potential spouse like their family isn’t as unrelentingly tediously awful as first thought and there are some Members Of Quality present. For instance, Elizabeth Bennet and her atrocious family (except for sweet, naive Jane) but wait, she has the civilized lawyer uncle and aunt.

A lot of modern readers (and, let’s face it, viewers of dramatic versions of the books) forget or never knew that a good marriage was an upper class woman’s job. If she failed at it, she (or the daughters she misaligned) could face poverty or abuse with little alternative save returning home to live with her parents. If you’ve ever read Vanity Fair you’ve seen what Amelia Sedley– a woman with a very high class education and wealthy background– is reduced to in order to survive. (spoiler: she has absolutely no marketable skills and mostly goes hungry, surviving on handouts from relatives)

Austen’s heroines are women with very little options trying to make the best future for themselves they can. Maybe, like Marianne, they narrowly escape being “ruined” (spoiler: “seduced” (possibly raped), impregnated, and abandoned therefore to be hidden away because of The Shame) by A Cad only to find a decent marriage to a man literally old enough to be their fathers; maybe, like Jane Bennet, they luck out and have a few small difficulties before snagging a congenial easily-pushed-around wealthy dude with bitchy, unpleasant sisters;maybe they’re rescued out of grinding poverty (and a very close knit and loving family) to live among people who treat them like unwanted and threatening time bombs waiting to go off, only to find a love alliance with a cousin after all (but have spent over a decade being treated like crap by the rest of the family). She writes with humor and there are comedic elements and, yes, the novels have a Happy End. But there’s a grim undertone of desperation under the social skewering and witty banter.

If these women fail at catching a good husband, they are fucked.

Comments

[tattycat]

I am constantly telling people they need to read "Tenant of Wildfell Hall" to get a handle on what happened to women that tried to leave bad marriages. The 19th century was not kind to women.

[brigid]

If you knew how to do laundry or scrub floors or fold boxes or sew button holes or something, you might not be that badly off. But if your big accomplishments are painting screens, netting purses, and playing piano? Yeah. Not really, you know, marketable... except in the husband-getting/entertaining your social circle aka wifely duties spheres.

I mean, a husband deciding his wife was crazy-go-nuts and locking her up in a room and then finding a new wife was a common trope of the era! Yes, yes, sensationalist and all... but women were REALLY disposable.

[tattycat]

And you know, laundry *sucked* back then. I do an 18th century laundress impression in living history, and it is all kinds of no fun. I could definitely see the life of a prostitute or a ginny would be preferable in some cases.

Have you met msmcknittington yet? She's a dear friend of mine and she has all kinds of interesting and compatible things to say about Victorian lit and Victorian women. I think y'all would get on well.

[brigid]

Yes I follow her here! And then I realized we've run into each other on LJ's SF and SF_D in the past as well!

When I was a kid, one of my When I Grow Up dream jobs was being an actor in a living history museum. If there were any closer to where we live I might have actually pursued that, but damn if I don't love going to, say, Greenfield Village. (actually, I would especially like to demonstrate napping stone tools. WHOLE DIFFERENT ERA I KNOW.)

Apparently it was relatively common for working class women in England to turn to prostitution during the winter so they could pay for heat etc, and then leave again when Spring/warm weather came. It wasn't a huge deal to them, but (male) lawmakers were very concerned with Protecting Their Delicate Chastity and kept passing laws hindering prostitution including yanking up the age of consent. Of course they made no provision for providing the women with employment/money/coal. So they wound up fucked, but cold and hungry, instead of with a bit of money. Huzzah!

[msmcknittington]

And you know, laundry *sucked* back then. I do an 18th century laundress impression in living history, and it is all kinds of no fun. I could definitely see the life of a prostitute or a ginny would be preferable in some cases.

Dude, what's not fun about stale urine? And soaking things in it? And then beating them with sticks after hauling gallons and gallons of water? Not to mention losing fingers in mangles! Tatty, laugh riot.

I think we should do a clothes washing demo at Pennsic some year and just be horribly unpleasant shrews the entire time, because we are (simulating) washing linens in piss. I think it might come naturally to us, though possibly I just want a reason to soak my feet in a cold tub of water all day while yelling at people.

I wish I could point brigid to something I've said on this topic, but the only thing I can think of is this post, and that's mostly about pre-Victorian women and how women as property is a gross oversimplification.

[brigid]

I have a friend who nearly lost a finger to a mangle because for some reason there was one in his basement and his washing machine was broken and he tried to lose it and... it didn't work out how he expected (he is fine and so are all of his fingers). But his mom used that washer and mangle when he was a kid, and he's in his early 30s.

Thanks for the link to that post. It was really interesting! I like how you pointed out the difference between the upper class/educated women and lower class/uneducated women, because it's a big one.

One of the ways historians suss out how much freedom Irish Women had (you know, back before Ireland existed) is to look at the Brehan Code and other codified laws and see what specifically was outlawed and when. Because if you have to make all new laws against something, it's generally in a response to what's going on. So there's a lot of reading between the lines as to just what freedoms and rights pre-Christian Irish women had with regard to, say, property ownership and marriage rights protection and employment. The last time I dipped my toes into the scholarship (I am not a scholar, just an interested party) pre-Christian Ireland was a fairly egalitarian place, gender wise. Is that view coated in "the past is inherently wonderful yay pre-Christianity" sparkles? Maybe. But it's still interesting.

[msmcknittington]

My mom's mom used a similar set up until a laundromat was opened in town in the 1960s, so I have no doubt that people were still using mangles into the 70s.

Thanks! I'm pretty passionate about that class gap, because the experiences of women to this date are so colored by it, and it's something that's been almost wholly ignored until the past couple decades.

Clothing historians do a similar thing with sumptuary laws to figure out what people were wearing. Generally, the more often a clothing item was taxed or prohibited, the more often people were wearing it. Incidentally, I am also a hobbyist historian, not a scholar. :)

What you say about pre-Christian Ireland being a fairly egalitarian place in regard to gender has made me wonder how much influence Roman gender customs had on early Christianity and how that has filtered down through the ages. Hmmm. How much is Paul being a misogynist dick and how much is the pre-existing Roman influence throughout Europe? Hmmm.

[brigid]

Well, Paul is pretty much a misogynist dick (ladies! keep your heads covered lest men be overcome with lusty lust and think you are prostitutes!), but he'd be a product of his culture, right?

In pre-Christian Ireland, women could divorce their men if their men were presumed infertile (sex led to no kids), or their men didn't satisfy them sexually, or their men preferred other men, or their men fooled around with other women, or the man was abusive or alcoholic. If she divorced, she not only could keep any kids, but the former husband/father was also required to pay upkeep for those kids. Rape was HUGELY punished. HUGELY. And apparently prostitution was pretty much unheard of because if people wanted sex they could easily have it with willing partners and little moral censure. The recompense for killing a woman was less than for killing for a man, but it existed and was fairly hefty; it was the same for boy and girl children until a certain age (basically, puberty). Then you have all kinds of crazy ass powerful ladies in myths and legend and story cycles, including women who compare sexual conquests with their husbands wrt who fucked more people and who was hotter (including "check out these creamy marble thighs! *slaps thighs* I've had one million lovers! You're a limp dick with less cattle than I have! SUCK IT I AM THE QUEEN!")