Re: ...continued...fpbDecember 15 2010, 07:09:07 UTC
Who ever said "horrified"? I said that I suspect that she might have supported the opposite point of view. And no more than suspect. In matters so obviously hypothetical it would be idiotic to have more than a hypothesis; I would say the odds are about six to four in favour. More to the point, I doubt she would have felt very strongly either way. In her world, a place in Parliament, like a house in "town", was merely a reflection of the real source of power and esteem, which was money. (Sir Thomas Bertram on his prospective son-in-law Mr. Rushworth: "If this man did not have £12,000 a year, he would be a very dull fellow indeed." Of course, Rushworth's candidacy is hotly pushed by the female half of his household.)
Re: ...continued...fpbDecember 15 2010, 07:27:48 UTC
P.S.: dumb mistake of the day: General Tilney, father of the love interest and all-around bear, intervenes brutally and unsuccessfully in Northanger Abbey, not in Persuasion.
Re: ...continued...fpbDecember 15 2010, 09:35:55 UTC
Anyway the point is that no amount of remarking upon skewed and unequal relationships makes a woman - or for that matter a man - a feminist. They lack the essential ingredient: "A voice cries in the desert: prepare the ways of justice, make straight her paths. Every mountain shall be knocked down, every valley raised up; the crooked shall be made straight, the rough shall be flattened." Unless these things are pointed out, not as the way things are, but as unjust in themselves, deserving to be knocked down, and able to be knocked down without consequences, you are not speaking of a feminist. And there is nowhere where JA even shows an understanding that change is possible. It was only at the end of her life that she even described an individual having an actual career, that is, rising in status; that order in society might change was beyond her.
Re: ...continued...inverarityDecember 15 2010, 18:39:47 UTC
That's why I called Austen a "proto-feminist." I think she had an awareness of inequality and a wish for things to be different. She probably never made the leap to more actively desiring change -- she'd have had very few role models at the time to suggest that it was even possible.
We've both agreed it's pure speculation as to what she would have believed had she been exposed to the women's suffrage and feminist movements that came along later. I still think she probably would have regarded them favorably.
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We've both agreed it's pure speculation as to what she would have believed had she been exposed to the women's suffrage and feminist movements that came along later. I still think she probably would have regarded them favorably.
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