CMP#3: Secret Radical Redux

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Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Click here for the introduction.

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CMP#3  Secret Radical Redux

    Austen had an irrepressible sense of humour and it might as well be Jane Austen speaking to us directly when her beloved creation Elizabeth Bennet says, “Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.”  We talk about the crudity of our times--or at least, my times, with our gross-out comedies like American Pie--but you can’t beat the Georgians for cruel humour, and Austen was born a Georgian. She laughed about tragic things like miscarriages and a fat woman mourning the death of her son. Both Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford make wisecracks about an older son dying so his younger brother can inherit.
   In an earlier blog series, I critiqued the book, Jane Austen: the Secret Radical. To recap here, Dr. Helena Kelly, while acknowledging that Austen is sometimes comic, argues she is altogether more serious and critical than people realize. The reason people don't realize this is because Austen had to hide her criticisms of society because she lived "in a state that was essentially totalitarian." Kelly says Jane Austen was a writer who wanted to write seriously, critically, about injustice and women's rights, and the corruption of the state and church, but had to hide her message. Austen was really a secret radical.

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 ​ Of course comedy can tackle serious subjects. That's the entire purpose of satire. Professor John Mullan says Austen is ‘the most unflinchingly satirical of all great novelists."   But Jane Austen is never harsh and biting like Swift. I recently learned there is a name for Austen's brand of satire, Horatian satire. "Horatian satire is the mildest and gentlest form of satire there is—it is not seeking to change the world. It is merely focused on highlighting human folly in all its myriad forms, perhaps through anecdotes and characterisation more so than plot, and so its chief purpose is, primarily, to amuse." The term traces back to the Roman Empire and the writer Horace
  So, what was Austen critiquing with her satire? In Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Dr. Kelly claims to find the following  themes hidden in Austen and further, she argues that these themes would have been controversial in Austen's day:

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• Northanger Abbey: Sex is dangerous (i.e. it could result in death in childbirth). This was a fact of life and not a taboo subject at all. Maternal death was used a plot point in countless novels, but is not used in Northanger Abbey.
• Pride and Prejudice: Kelly’s vague on this, but pro French Revolution, anti-aristocracy and the class system.
• Mansfield Park: Slavery is bad. (Ending the slave trade was official government policy when Mansfield Park was written). 
• Primogeniture (Sense and Sensibility) and land enclosure (Emma) are bad. (But not illegal to complain about).
• Persuasion: life is full of change and uncertainty. (By the end of Kelly's book, we suppose, the reader has forgotten the original thesis that Austen was promoting dangerous views.)

   ​ Yes, people were censored in Austen's time. The government brought prosecutions for "seditious libel;" spreading false and/or dangerous views that threatened the stability of the government and the monarchy. Writing about overthrowing the aristocracy would get you in big trouble. Insults directed at the King or the Regent would get you locked up, no question. In my Mansfield Trilogy, a writer gets convicted of seditious libel for criticizing government policy. Some radicals fled the country to avoid imprisonment, others were ostracized socially and professionally. 
   But the topics Kelly lists?  She might have strengthened her case if she had presented actual examples of people charged with seditious libel for writing about abolition, primogeniture, land enclosure, dying in childbirth, or the unpredictability of human events. Mary Wollstonecraft wasn't prosecuted for writing the response to Edmund Burke. William Godwin wasn't prosecuted for writing Caleb Williams. Maria Edgeworth wasn't prosecuted for Castle Rackrent. All of these works are heavily critical of the status quo. Was anyone prosecuted for writing "about a world in which parents and guardians can be stupid and selfish, in which the Church ignores the needs of the faithful, in which landowners and magistrates... are eager to enrich themselves"? So far I haven't found any examples. 
  And if they were not actually arrested but were condemned socially? What if they were driven out of their professions and held up as pariahs? Well, we certainly have many instructive examples of people being shamed and cancelled today, for the noblest of motives, by the most virtuous people. Perhaps those people in the Regency period had their reasons, too.

   The subjects Dr. Kelly claims to find hidden away in one book are out there, in plain sight, in another book. This doesn't mean I agree that these are significant themes in any of these books, but:

• ​Mansfield Park is supposedly pro-abolition. The word “abolition” doesn't appear in Mansfield Park, but it is found In Emma, when Jane Fairfax and Mrs. Elton mention the slave trade.
• Northanger Abbey is supposedly about the terrifying reality that sex could lead to death in childbirth. But Austen jokes in the opening pages of the novel that Mrs. Morland didn’t die when giving birth to Catherine, as might be expected of a heroine’s mother. Nobody’s mother dies of childbirth in Northanger Abbey. In Emma, on the other hand, we have three people whose mothers die young—Emma Woodhouse, Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill. (And death was used relentlessly by novelists of the day to clear the decks for their plots, to punish the wicked, or build pathos for the orphaned heroine.)
• But Emma isn’t about slavery or dying in childbirth, it’s about land enclosure. Kelly says there is a “preoccupation with land enclosure” in the novel. Yet, despite this preoccupation, the word “enclosure” doesn’t appear in Emma. Not once.
• It's mentioned twice in Sense and Sensibility. But Sense and Sensibility isn’t about land enclosure, it’s a protest against primogeniture, the practice of leaving the estate to the oldest son. Yet, heirs and inheriting feature in all the novels, such as in Pride and Prejudice, when Colonel Fitzwilliam says that younger sons can't marry where they like.
• But Pride and Prejudice isn’t about primogeniture, it’s about class distinctions. But Emma and Persuasion have plenty of explicit discussions about rank and class.
• But Persuasion isn’t about class distinctions. It’s about the uncertainty of human events.  Although it is Emma who exclaims: "Was it new for any thing in this world to be unequal, inconsistent, incongruous—or for chance and circumstance (as second causes) to direct the human fate?" 

   Finally, as I have previously argued, Dr. Kelly is finding allusions in Austen that just aren't there. In this respect, Dr. Kelly's theory is non-falsifiable. ​

Thesis:     Austen is advocating class overthrow in Pride & Prejudice.
Me:          But she isn't advocating class overthrow in Pride & Prejudice.
Thesis:     That's because if she said it openly, she'd be arrested.
Me:          So if she isn't saying it, how do you know that's what she meant to say?​​

I will look at the supposed radical views in Pride & Prejudice in a future post. But first, a closer look at another topic Dr. Kelly discusses in Pride and Prejudice: the militia.

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In the third volume of my Mansfield Trilogy, the writer William Gibson gets in trouble for publishing a pamphlet that is critical of the government. I also feature the radical romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Click here for more about my novels.