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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34481 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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This brings me to my first point: Atlas Shrugged in schools. A book which inspires diehard followers to spend their time and money bringing its insights to the unenlightened masses. A book which, simultaneously, people must be paid to read. That contrast is enough to make Atlas Shrugged useless in the eyes of public schools; it would be enough even if elites were united in their admiration for Rand's alien prose.

What? Every book in public schools is foisted upon the students.

But most of them don't inspire some small fraction of philosophy fanatics. Nobody ever ran for office cause of Jane Austen.

It's the combination of stylistic suck and some ephemeral, hard-to-measure goodness which makes the school system uncomfortable. Immersion is not a gradeable category.

Nobody ever ran for office cause of Jane Austen.

Maybe not, but don't you think maybe that a lot of women took a chunk out of the national birth rate because of it, which is much more macro-historically important?

a lot of women took a chunk out of the national birth rate because of it

I'm not sure what version of Jane Austen novels you are reading, maybe you're going by the bastardised modern movie adaptations? Mr Darcy as Mr Right, and waiting until you get Mr Right because you deserve the rich, hot, high-status hero rather than the ordinary guy? So women turn down chances at marriage and children because they won't take what they can get in the window of their prime fertile years?

That's not the message of Austen's books. She's very clear-headed about the vital necessity for women to marry, because for women of a certain class (stuck between the working poor and the gentry with inherited wealth), they can't economically survive without a husband. The entire plot of "Pride and Prejudice" revolves around Mrs. Bentley's desperate attempts to get her daughters married off. Mr. Bentley is, in fact, a bad father; he make Elizabeth his favourite, ignores his other daughters, and does nothing to assure Elizabeth's future. He teaches her and gives her a wider view of the world, but it's in effect making her a substitute son, and an amusing companion for himself. He regards his wife with indifference, and leaves the burden of assuring their daughters' futures on her (and she's not really capable, she is a silly woman, but she is genuinely doing her best). The crisis is that he only has a life interest in the estate, and the moment he dies, she and the girls will all be turfed out with no money of their own. Her elder daughters have to marry, and make good marriages to men with enough money to support them and the rest of their families, before that happens so that she and the younger girls will have breathing space and resources. She's also competing with every other mother with daughters for the pool of eligible young men - that's the interest in Mr. Bingley, who is good-natured but has nothing else other than his income to recommend him. That's why it's a disaster when Kitty runs off with Wickham (with no indication that either of them intend marriage, and you can tell at the end that Kitty will spend her married life sponging off her sisters who made advantageous marriages). Kitty has not alone ruined her own reputation, she is tainting the reputations - and hence the marriage chances - of all her sisters.

You only understand all this when you're older; reading the novels in school doesn't emphasise this enough, or rather, you're too young to get why parents worry about marriage and money and all the rest of it. "Persuasion" is about romance and marriage for love, but not the conventional teen romance notion - Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have their engagement broken out of not alone bad (her father's unwarranted snobbery) but good (family friend intervenes because she thinks this is not a suitable match) reasons, and wait years until - by the standards of the time, and maybe today's standards of "the wall" - she is out of her prime years. Theirs is an adult romance. "Sense and Sensibility" is about a family that do suffer the fate Mrs. Bennett fears - the father dies, the son inherits and prioritises his own family so the mother and sisters are turned out of the house with their own scanty resources. The 'sense' of the eldest sister is contrasted with the 'emotionalism' of the middle, who is all about the romance and the passion and not basing her attraction on reason. Spoiler alert for 212 year old novel: in the end, despite an 18 year age gap, the middle daughter ends up happily married to the second male lead:

Henry Dashwood, his second wife, and their three daughters live for many years with Henry's wealthy bachelor uncle at Norland Park, a large country estate in Sussex. That uncle decides, in late life, to will the use and income only of his property first to Henry, then to Henry's first son (by his first marriage) John Dashwood, so that the property should pass intact to John's four-year-old son Harry. The uncle dies, but Henry lives just a year after that and he is unable in such short time to save enough money for the future security of his wife Mrs Dashwood, and their daughters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, who are left only a small income. On his deathbed, Mr Henry Dashwood extracts a promise from his son John to take care of his half-sisters. But before Henry is long in the grave, John's greedy wife, Fanny, persuades her husband to renege on the promise, appealing to his concerns about diminishing his own son Harry's inheritance, despite the fact that John is already independently wealthy thanks to both his inheritance from his mother and his wife's dowry. Henry Dashwood's love for his second family is also used by Fanny to arouse her husband's jealousy, and persuade him not to help his sisters financially.

...Marianne recovers from her illness, and Elinor tells her of Willoughby's visit. Marianne realizes she could never have been happy with Willoughby's immoral, erratic, and inconsiderate ways. She values Elinor's more moderated conduct with Edward and resolves to model herself after her courage and good sense. Edward later arrives and reveals that, after his disinheritance, Lucy jilted him in favour of his now wealthy younger brother, Robert. Elinor is overjoyed. Edward and Elinor marry, and later Marianne marries Colonel Brandon, having gradually come to love him. The two couples live as neighbours, with sisters and husbands in harmony with each other. Willoughby considers Marianne as his ideal but the narrator tells the reader not to suppose that he was never happy.

It was Lydia who ran off with Mr. Wickham, not Kitty. Lydia married Mr. Wickham, Kitty married a clergyman, Mary married a law clerk at her uncle's firm, Elizabeth married Mr. Darcy, and Jane married Mr. Bingley.

Thanks for the correction, I'm always mixing up the younger sisters.

That's certainly the plot of Jane Austen's books - but the theme of the "bastardized modern version" is the conclusion a modern person would draw even if they read the originals.

Yes, the heroines of Jane Austen books have to marry for sound financial reasons. That is not an endorsement of marriage! It's an endorsement of having enough money. For a fun romantic fiction, it's still an excellent plot device to make your character have to go flirt with someone, and then you write about the ups and downs of the flirting versus the finances. The lesson a modern woman takes is that you should have your own apartment and job, and then you will never have to flirt with anyone except Mr. Darcy.

Of course, the point of the "Prejudice" in the "Pride and Prejudice" is that you might not want to flirt with Mr. Darcy either, and you might need to get over yourself and think twice to land a really good match, but that's typically not the theme I see emphasized by modern readers.

Sure, modern adaptations like to recast them as fun romances in pretty frocks. That's the success of Bridgerton, as it took the Regency Romance genre and just made a few changes to bring it up to modern tastes. But Austen is not a Regency Romance (though she might have influenced the genre) and her practicality about "these are the economic facts of life" as well as "what is marriage about? what is love?" are not the same "marry rich" or "get your own money then you can chase the sexual passion" tropes.

She contrasts the mere mercantile marriages for money, which are often unhappy for various reasons, and the romantic entanglements where it's all about passion and sex (from the imprudence of Lydia running off with Wickham, to other relationships in the novels where the attraction is superficial, based on a romantic notion derived from pop culture, and is often revealed to be shallow, fake, and undependable). 'Find someone who you can respect and who respects you, with similar values, and both of you live by a code of honour' is her ultimate message. Elizabeth Bennett gets a rich husband, but not all her heroines do. What matters more is someone compatible, honest, and virtuous. And that holds for what the men should be like, as well as the women.

Of course, the point of the "Prejudice" in the "Pride and Prejudice" is that you might not want to flirt with Mr. Darcy either, and you might need to get over yourself and think twice to land a really good match, but that's typically not the theme I see emphasized by modern readers.

Well, a superficial reader who only sees things through a modern lens, sure. But I could similarly recast the story of Les Miserables, Great Expectations, or Madame Bovary with shallow chick-lit themes. This is why actually reading and understanding literature is important, and it's hardly fair to blame Jane Austen for inspiring chick-flicks loosely based on her novels.

I think a lot of people do still read the old classics and "get" what the actual point was, but this is incidentally why I disagree with the popular sentiment that high school English classes are terrible and kill love of reading by making teenagers read old books they may not necessarily enjoy. Not all books are supposed to be "easy" or "fun."

(Though I maintain that Dickens and Austen are actually enjoyable reads; I liked Dickens even in high school. Madame Bovary, on the other hand, was not a book I think any teenager can really relate to. I found it horribly boring in high school, and reread it as an adult and appreciated it much more.)

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