Monday, December 21, 2009

Her situation in life

Catherine Morland is solidly planted in the middle class. Her father is a clergyman which is a profession at the point in time that he lived. And it is becoming more professionalized (according to an essay over on Victorian Web, much to the detriment of the Church of England. This rings true to me because the clergyman becomes an ongoing issue from Austen on is still an issue as late as the novels of EM Forster.)

Mr. Morland has two good livings. The family is not wealthy but they are comfortable.

This is important and is a detail about Austen that does not bother readers but deeply disturbs academics and intellectuals. She is about as bourgeois a novelist as you will find. Her virtues are the bourgeois virtues. And she writes at a time when these virtues are slowly gaining ascendancy over those of the aristocracy as the governing values of modernity.

Okay, as long as I'm being arrogant and cocksure: Harold Bloom is quite wrong. Shakespeare does not create modern humanity. No artist does, capitalism and Christianity create modern humanity. But if we ant an accurate portrayal of modern humanity as it is being created, the novels of Jane Austen are the place to go. (And it is because this development is so well portrayed in Austen that some academics and intellectuals don't like her)

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