MY Jane, MINE!

There's something about Jane that makes her fans feel as if they know her. We take her words into our hearts and live by them. What's so strange about this phenomenon is that Jane Austen is one of the most objective writers I can think of. Her narrator is often called god-like and removed. How then can we possibly know what she intended in her works? Often what we'd like to think Jane intended is what we wish she intended. Personally, I like to think of Jane as a bad ass feminist. She's irreverent as all hell and spares no one (ex: read her letters for abortion and miscarriage jokes, they're awesomely bad). But hey, what do I know? She may have been as conservative as some people like to believe, the quiet old aunt, the perpetual virgin, an advocate of traditional, patriarchal values (breaks my heart to think of it). Because we cannot know Jane or her thoughts, we cannot make assumptions about authorial intention, and the same can be said for all artists. This does not mean we should ignore metaphor, allegory, and the subconscious. For even when an author reveals their intentions, their works, as separate beings, often contain worlds and realities that the author is unaware of (ex: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has decidedly (homo-)erotic themes even though the author maintained until her dying day that the poem was a children's story. Fairy tales and children's stories often contain sexual themes, with or without the author's intention!). To say that we cannot examine certain aspects of her work because our contemporary literary criticism did not exist at her time is rather absurd, as every generation of critics brings their own take to literature and history, making the tradition/canon a living, breathing evolving and fabulousss entity. If a literary term or psychological theory did not exist at Austen's time, it certainly doesn't mean that we can't speculate about the underlying meaning of her work. To me, that would be like saying that no one had diseases or disorders before they were given names (before, during, and after Jane Austen's time, many people were locked away because of unidentified insanity and many people died from unidentified cancers/tumors). I definitely think that historical context is extremely important to keep in mind, and I don't think Tony Tanner's argument strayed too far from that (certainly women had fears related to virginity in the 18th/19th century, just like they did before then and just like they do now). I promise this is not just me liking the sound of my own voice, hah, and I realize I'm running out of time before class. Hopefully after class I'll have time to finally talk about Sense and Sensibility, which is my actual assignment.