"Marvin Mudrick published 'Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery' in 1952. Irony (the real kind, not the Alanis Morissette variety) was Austen's predominant mode, as Mudrick pointed out, and this not only made her 'almost inhumanly cold and penetrating' but also positioned her against 'all the delusions intrinsic to conventional art and conventional society.' That was the manly '50s speaking; by the 2000s, Austen became, in the popular mind, a wistful reminder of all the chivalrous pleasures of a long-lost social order -- a society that would have driven the average contemporary Janeite to insurrection if she actually had to live in it.
"Like Dumbledore's mirror, Austen's fiction seems to have the ability to reflect whatever its readers most wish to see. Austen is the grandmother of chick lit, much as that fact may irk her highbrow admirers. But that's not all she is, and to persuade yourself that her novels are only about being courted by rich, handsome men well-versed in ballroom etiquette is to be as dangerously silly and frivolous as Elizabeth Bennet's youngest sister, Lydia. The chick-lit take on Austen is forever trying to subtract the brutal social and economic realities from her fiction (as well as ignoring the mortifications her heroines undergo)".
Thank you, Laura Miller. The rest of the story is here.
I’m all for resistant reading, but I think it’s just annoying when tragedies, satires and comedies get turned into ‘romance’ in the public consciousness. Think Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. Yes, romance is an aspect of these stories (and one which I enjoy, with the exception of Wuthering Heights) but if you read them purely as romance you’re missing so much.
For the record, I’m a Darcy fan because I like intellectual, argumentative, challenging men with integrity, not because I have any illusions about how ‘nice it would be’ to have doors opened for me by a 'gentleman' for the rest of my life.
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