Throughout this academic term I had been slowly slogging through the pages of Jane Austen's Emma, and now that the term has come to a close, so has the book. Finally. Don't get me wrong, I adore Austen for her subtle wit and attention to detail, but in the hustle and bustle of this reader's modern life, it is difficult to get a mental foothold in the lackadaisical world of the British bourgeoisie circa 1815. It would take some time, particularly those passages where the perniciously loquacious Mrs. Bates would ramble on for several pages, until I could to settle into the narrative and awaken to its ascerbic wit. Oh, Mrs. Bates, how you do ramble!
MTV generation beware! (Also, addicts of cult pomo fiction, who have become accustomed to brash shout-outs beginning in medias res such as, "My body was hurdling through the pitch black of metallica tunnel hell and all I could think was Julie and the way the nape of her kneck reminded me that we're all just robots encased in hideous sacks of flesh," and the like. Austen is many circles in hell above a sentence such as this.) Austen's fiction is driven by diction, not plot; so, in order to cope with the utter absence of plot devices to engage my imagination, I recalled a narrative form that was more familiar to me: Soap-Opera. I doubt I'm the first to recognize similiarities between Jane Austen and programs like Days of Our Lives in their parallel accounts of spiraling romantic attachments, family drama, and highly politicized female relationships. A friend of mine who was conducting research on audience responses to the popular HBO drama Sex and the City familiarized me with the work of Tania Modleski, who argues in an article on the soap opera genre that certain narrative devices such as unresolved conflict and an emphasis on relationships within families and between women make the form uniquely "feminine." Because they are expressly "feminine," these narratives empower women even as they reinforce feminine stereotypes. One of the ways this liberation takes place is by assembling real or imagined communities of women around the idolized work of fiction.
Hence, Karen Joy Fowler's enormously famous Jane Austen Bookclub, which may now be purchased in one of two highly fashionable paperback covers, either blue or red (to match your outfit, I suppose). Fowler imagines a group of women, and one male (lucky or desperate?), who gather to read and discuss the works of Jane Austen. Their first book? Emma, of course. A mise en abyme, so to speak, of the role of feminine literature in the lives of women, since readers of Fowler's book are invited to imagine themselves as part of a community of readers of Austen as well as the community of readers of Fowler. Leave it to contemporary women to make reading Jane Austen a thoroughly ironic act -- Anyone want to start a Jane Austen Book Club Book Club???
As distant as we are from the gentrified countryside of Austen's novels, it is fascinating the ease with which readers identify with her characters. I myself discovered, or perhaps fabricated, parallels between the characters in Emma and the people and events in my own life. I have to admit that my romantic life became a bit more interesting around the time that Emma discovered her true feelings for Mr. Knightly, but I'll leave it at that.
For as much as I enjoy these similarities and my associations with fellow readers of Jane Austen, particularly as the act of reading Austen's highly stylized depictions of ideal femine sexuality and romantic relationships seems almost rebellious on a college campus where relationships are more often characterized by libertinism than restraint, what I really love about Jane Austen is how difficult she is for modern readers, like myself, to read. Austen's books cannot be brashly skimmed or picked up and set down between bites of fast food take-out. To read her without feeling the urge to pull your hair out, you have to become absorbed by her delicate prose. Not only does your mindset have to adapt to her pace, but you must physically adapt to the experience of reading Jane Austen. I feel my breathing slow down as I follow her languid sentences, waiting for the pause of a long-awaited period. Descending into Hartford, the modern world finally slips away, and you enter a world without high speed internet, six-second sound bites, and the mass annoyances of mass media. I wound't trade places with Austen or any of her characters even if it afforded me that measure of peace, but I take comfort in having found a space for peace and orderliness in this chaotic world that is often as stressful as it is terrifically exciting. I would go crazy if I had to write like Jane Austen, sitting in a Victorian drawing room and covering up my work with my embroidery anytime someone would enter the room, but I'm glad she did it.
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