I haven’t read any feminist analysis of Austen but I do like Jane Austen’s work and I think maybe we talked about this before. It’s not romance slop, it’s a very sharp observational comedy/warning type of genre.
The romance tropes types misunderstand it or misrepresent it. In pride and prejudice, BOTH Lizzy and Darcy and at fault. It’s pride AND prejudice, one for each of them. She’s too proud and he’s too prejudiced. It’s ONLY when both of them understand and fix their flaws that they and critically those around them, reach happiness. Until that point their flaws hurt them and their loved ones. Both of them have to change. And Lizzy does. She makes amends and Jane gets with her chap and she fixes her ways and she gets the prize.
Agree 100%, and that's why I think feminist analyses of her and the Brontes are blind and stupid. They need to fit them into their Marxist gender war mold, where women as a class are in conflict with and subjugated by men as a class, so anything else that isn't that is invisible to them. Once you see how that's the critique works, you can largely dismiss it and spend your precious life-hours on something else.
I'm a much bigger fan of Wuthering Heights and have read it at least 3 or 4 times, so I'll use that as my go-to. Catherine Earnshaw is Emily Bronte's foil for her own seething contempt for the kind of rich, beautiful, spoiled, narcissistic young woman who treats everyone around her like garbage and ultimately ruins her own life because she's incapable of empathy or thinking about the consequences of her own actions. Such women exist in the real world, of course, and Bronte writes Catherine as only a woman who understands other women could. But of course, Catherine is an individual. Bronte's not a Marxist, so she's not writing Catherine as some sort of product of social forces or a metaphor for all women. Catherine's a nasty bitch because, well, some women are just nasty bitches, and Bronte decided to write a novel centered on one. I like to imagine it was because she was just little tired of all the ultimately good-hearted characters in Austen and her imitators. Unlike Lizzy, Catherine is just rotten to her core. So, by the way, is Heathcliff. The poor boy who strikes it rich
doesn't have a heart of gold, not like he would in Dickens. Nope, he's just a rotten bastard who can't move on from his youth and ruins his own life via his own nursed grudges.
Now, why do feminist analyses fail? Feminists are Marxists, and Marxists don't really believe individuals exist. When they encounter the Catherine character, they are blind to why a woman might write such a loathsome female character. For non-Marxists, it's simple enough. Nobody truly feels enmity for a woman like another woman does, and Bronte's hatred for a very particular sort of woman is palpable throughout the novel. But Marxism says all members of the oppressed class are allies. If they have conflict, this is a manifestation of their oppression, and a way the oppressor class keeps them from uniting together to throw off their chains. They're unable to even see Catherine as a person; she must be some sort of commentary on all women, and since Bronte is a woman, the character couldn't have genuinely come from her. It must have come from the social forces oppressing her. Thus the feminists come up with preposterous explanations for the Catherine character, such as:
- She's a sexist trope, and Bronte, being a creature of her age, was not fully able to break free of such tropes
- She's the sort of woman that men want to read about, and Bronte wrote her to break through the male-dominated publishing world
- She's a manifestation of Bronte's own internalized misogyny
- She's actually the heroine of the book, the strong independent woman who don't need no man, but Bronte colors her with patriarchal baggage about such women being terrible people due to being a creature of her age, and we need to unpack that 19th century knapsack to see the true strength of Catherine
And so on. If you know anything about feminists, you could probably make up your own moronic interpretation and discover it's already been published in some feminist literary journal. Heathcliff, of course, gets no such forbearance from feminists. He's just a bad man because men are bad and Bronte's striking out against the patriarchy or something like that. Regardless of which feminist is trying to interpret Bronte, she always comes to the conclusion that the book is some sort of insufferable garbage about women being oppressed.
Fortunately, the book is not insufferable Marxist garbage. It's an excellent story that dives into the psychology of what narcissists and sociopaths are actually like, and doesn't shy away from how they ruin good people's lives and don't suffer karmic retribution. However, it must be read without poisoning your brain with the thoughts of English professors, virtually all of whom are Marxists and therefore incapable of understanding or even enjoying a good book.
