Thank You, Jane Austen

When I was in Portland I visited a cousin who's in his early forties and whom his mother has tried (unsuccessfully) to marry off for many years. He is a solitary man, finicky and withdrawn; for a while he was a Christian so committed to the faith that he occasionally slipped into fanaticism. I didn't look forward to seeing him, but I went for my father's sake; my father is a great believer in family loyalty. To my surprise, my cousin and I had a long stimulating conversation. I found out that he's interested in Tibet and Buddhism, that he doesn't think church is the only place where you can worship God, and also that he would like to start a family some day. "But it's hard," he said, "to find someone who will give you your space, you know?" All the couples he knew at his church were controlled by the women, he added; the men were under the tyranny of their wives.

I was flabbergasted. All my education and my experience has trained me to be watchful about women being controlled by men, never the other way around. So it never occurred to me that men had concerns about their own independence and freedom. What about the patriarchy? What about the political and social and sexual oppression of women for hundreds of years? Of course the first thing I asked Husband when I got home was if he thought my cousin had a point or was simply paranoid. Husband said, looking at me as if I was asking a silly question, "Well, think of the novels of Jane Austen." I could hardly believe my ears. I laughed with glee and a not altogether wholesome sense of victory. So Jane is among us, I thought. Whenever yee shall gather in my name.... "In Jane Austen's novels women are always in charge," Husband said. "Even if it appears otherwise, the women are the ones who pull the strings from behind the scenes." A lightbulb went off in my head then. You can think of the oppression of women as motivated, at bottom, by fear, and of patriarchy as a defense tactic.

It's hard to believe sometimes that my everyday life offers me such delicious, perfect segues, but it just so happens that only last week I finished reading The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler for my July book club meeting. The book is quite good and improves on second reading; it's more whimsical, thought-provoking and funny. I will allow myself only one rant about the discussion at the book club meeting, and it is this: I think I will become physically violent if I ever again hear someone say, with a grimace of disgust and disappointment on her face, "Oh, this book was all right but not very uplifting." I'm going to hate the word uplifting for the rest of my life. It seems that the average reader cannot tolerate characters who do not pull themselves up by their bootstraps by the end of the story; they cannot intellectually digest quirkiness, complex motivations, inner contradictions. One woman in the book club complained that all Jane Austen characters are obsessed with money and she doesn't see the point of that. Another woman said acridly that she felt sorry for the women in Jane Austen's books because they had nothing to do all day, and sorry for the men because they were so terrified that they might have to work for a living that they had to resort to marry rich. Deep breaths, I told myself. I'm not coming back here, I told myself. But I will, just for one more discussion. I don't know if it is out of loyalty that I'm doing it, or out of masochism.