Jane Austen: Did She Have a Politics?
P. Schultz
Below you
will find a link to a most interesting article on Jane Austen, entitled “How
Jane Austen’s Emma Changed the Face of Fiction.” Although it is not primarily
or even marginally about Austen’s politics, the author makes the claim that “It
[Emma] was not revolutionary because of any intellectual or
political content.” And this is a claim that needs, I think, to be disputed and
for the following reasons.
Jane
Austen, in Emma and her other novels,
wrote about British humans. And the
question is: How could she do that without writing about politics? She could do
that only if human beings are understood as being uninfluenced by politics –
which is of course absurd if you think about it for a few minutes.
Humans
in Britain are, emphatically, British,
as well as being, emphatically, human.
And humans are, emphatically, passionate
and those passions are “schooled,” “tamed,” “refined,” or “manipulated” by
political or social arrangements, by the kinds of societies we humans inhabit.
And these societies don’t just grow
or haven’t just grown; they have been
constructed. They are the products of human activity, are human artifacts; they
are human projects, ongoing, for better or worse.
Some
societies seek to “tame” or “school” the human passions, to elevate or refine
them. Others seek only to manipulate these passions, usually by relying on one
passion primarily – e.g. fear, ala’ Hobbes et. al. – and/or by playing passions
off against one another. For example, fear is used to control ambition or
pride. Or as James Madison wrote in the Federalist:
Ambition should be made to counteract ambition because, well, because genuine
virtue is exceedingly rare and, hence, unreliable. [Federalist #51] Relying on genuine virtue is like relying on angels
to govern men, or so Madison indicates in that essay.
Jane
Austen knew and illustrated a society, a regime, that sought to manipulate the
passions, as is illustrated by Emma and her quest to arrange marriages by
virtue of what she took to be subtle manipulations of the passions of certain
individuals. Like Emma, these societies seek to manipulate the passions, to
direct them in ways that would be “safe.” Austen also knew and illustrated the
limitations of such a society, which is why her heroines are almost always less
than satisfying, including Emma, and her men almost always lack generosity,
i.e., capacious souls. That “romance” in Austen is, well, not so romantic is a
reflection of the limitations of British society and, perhaps, of modern societies
in the Western tradition, thereby illuminating Freud’s argument about Civilization and Its Discontents.
One
cannot help thinking, when finishing one of Austen’s allegedly “romantic
novels”: Is that all there is? Is that what romance comes down to, a marriage
between Emma and Mr. Knightley, or between Mr. and Mrs. Elton, or between Frank
Churchill and Jane Fairfax? Ah, but that might be all there is to romance in
the modern and post-modern ages. If it were so, it would be a situation worth
thinking about. And at least, apparently, Jane Austen thought so.
No comments:
Post a Comment