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Post by Mr. Atari on Apr 7, 2009 15:23:58 GMT -5
Some say she is a literary giant. A genius on par with Dickens and Hardy, whose novels deserve to be read by the masses and taught on college campuses (campi?) around the world.
Other, smarter, people say she is a cut-rate sentimentalist, whose characters are paper-thin cliches, playing out tired and weak plots about class warfare and gender roles while barely dipping her toes into any real plot or interesting conflict. And that if she were alive today, her ideas and skills would qualify her to write Ryan Reynolds romantic comedies or daytime soaps.
But what do you, the viewers at home, think?
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Apr 9, 2009 23:49:06 GMT -5
I once had a Jane Austen scholar explain it to me this way: "You know how a lot of men think that Hemingway has his finger on something fascinating but that a lot of women just don't get? Flip that, and you've got Jane Austen. It's not a chauvinist/feminist thing. But you're just predisposed to like or dislike some things because of the kind of deep down gender fantasies a majority of us have."
And I'll buy that, to some extent. Now, of course, not all guys like Hemingway and plenty of girls do, too. But the balance definitely swings. And vice versa for Austen.
Plus, there are historical ways to look at it: were her characters cliche before she cut them so clearly that they became cliche? If so, I'd call that an achievement, not a flaw. And how many "mannered" Victorian novels were told from a woman's perspective when written by a woman before her generation?
Now, I'm not a fan, but here's how I'd put it: She's a sentimentalist of the highest order. She's the opposite of a cut-rate sentimentalist; she's the Platonic form of a sentimentalist. If you're predisposed to dislike sentimentalism, whether executed well or poorly, you're not going to care. But what she does, she does DAMN well.
It's the Stephen King effect. The majority of people who rag on King don't read much horror, anyway. But those that do know that his early stuff in particular did this odd thing of adding fleshed out character and excellent pacing to the gore fest. But if you're not into the gore fest, you aren't going to care, anyway.
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Post by Mighty Jack on Apr 10, 2009 1:15:35 GMT -5
I love her books. Calling her a cut-rate sentimentalist or comparing her work to dime store romance novels exposese a profound lack of understanding of her work. The romance and drama wasn't superficial by any means, but beyond that there was a great amount of satire and humor in her. Most of Austens early work was slanted heavily towards humor. If all you get from her is sentiment and soapy melodrama then you've missed the forest for the trees.
The era in which she wrote must also be taken into consideration - the Ryan Reynolds comment doesn't work then in that regard. She was deeper, sharper than that.
She's made me laugh, she's put a lump in my throat and made my heart ache, she's had me feeling frustration over the hoops people had to jump through just to be together. And as someone who moves me, makes me feel something in a meaningful way, she earns my respect.
That's what this viewer at home thinks.
Edit: Oh and what Mumms wrote was very wise. (so allow me to amend my original point. critics might understand what she's doing, but don't have enough interest to appreciate it)
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Post by Mr. Atari on Apr 10, 2009 13:38:52 GMT -5
I like Mummi's point, and I admit that there's not much about the genre of mannered Victorian novels that appeals to me at all. Nor plots based on class warfare and gender roles, whether written from a woman's perspective or not. I do respond to sentimentalism, however; I guess I just find hers to be...well, too obvious.
But I have another complaint about Austen, best illustrated through a running gag my college roommate and I used to have about certain bands:
HIM: "Hey, do you like the Gin Blossoms?" ME: "Didn't they write that one song?" HIM: "Yeah, like 20 times."
This is how I feel about Austen's work (and to a similar extent, two-thirds of Dickens' catalog). I've read Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. And I honestly couldn't tell you what happened in which novel. They all run together because they felt like cookie-cutter characters, plots, and settings.
Am I wrong on this? (I'm sure I am.) I just feel like there's nothing that notably differentiates each of her works. Did I just miss it due to my dislike for her style?
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Post by Mighty Jack on Apr 11, 2009 0:59:05 GMT -5
To some degree, though they do stand out for me, Emma especially.
But couldn't you do that for just about anything (even MST3K, is there anything notably different in their work?). Dostoyevski basically wrote about himself and his Eastern Orthodox faith in every novel. Same characater, different title. Does that make it any less brilliant?
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Post by Mr. Atari on Apr 11, 2009 14:57:44 GMT -5
I don't see it.
Dostoevsky had markedly different plots and characters in his works. Crime and Punishment was a cat-and-mouse cop story about a murderer and his conscience. The Brothers Karamazov was a big debate between brothers about ideologies following the death of their father. Dostoevsky's personal philosophy shows in both works, but they are completely different in plot, character, and setting.
Austen? Not so much. There's a girl who likes a boy outside of her social standing. There are manipulative aunts and garden parties. All that's missing is a gay best friend.
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Post by Mighty Jack on Apr 12, 2009 9:54:46 GMT -5
I dunno, but that's all I got - You ever get the feeling your in over your head in a thread? I don't have the literary amunition you and mumms have so I'll have to bow out of any deeper discussion. lol
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Post by Don Quixote on Apr 12, 2009 18:30:21 GMT -5
I enjoyed Northanger Abbey, but the other Austen novels were insanely tedious to me.
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Post by Mighty Jack on Apr 13, 2009 13:02:23 GMT -5
That's one I haven't read, I'll have to check it out. The only one I just couldn't get through was Persuassion. The rest were golden for me but Persuassion dragged and I didn't care about the people or their story.
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Post by inlovewithcrow on Apr 14, 2009 15:46:59 GMT -5
I like Mummi's point, and I admit that there's not much about the genre of mannered Victorian novels that appeals to me at all. Nor plots based on class warfare and gender roles, whether written from a woman's perspective or not. I do respond to sentimentalism, however; I guess I just find hers to be...well, too obvious. But I have another complaint about Austen, best illustrated through a running gag my college roommate and I used to have about certain bands: HIM: "Hey, do you like the Gin Blossoms?" ME: "Didn't they write that one song?" HIM: "Yeah, like 20 times." This is how I feel about Austen's work (and to a similar extent, two-thirds of Dickens' catalog). I've read Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. And I honestly couldn't tell you what happened in which novel. They all run together because they felt like cookie-cutter characters, plots, and settings. Am I wrong on this? (I'm sure I am.) I just feel like there's nothing that notably differentiates each of her works. Did I just miss it due to my dislike for her style? I don't know if you're right or wrong, but you've come close to my feelings about Austen. I'm just bored by her, and I do believe I have to turn in my feminist literary membership card now.
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Post by Satchmo on Jun 17, 2009 17:05:20 GMT -5
I've never had a high opinion of Jane Austen and her novels. Then someone told me that Pride and Prejudice was a comedy. I now will not touch Ms. Austen's work with a seven hundred kilometer pole.
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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Jun 18, 2009 12:30:37 GMT -5
Austen for me epitomized "write what you know" in the best way.
She lived a pretty circumscribed life, especially as she wasn't married, which meant she failed at the one thing all the women of her era were supposed to pull off, by hook or by crook. So she was an outsider to marriage and her community in that sense.
But, luckily, she was also an observer, and she observed her meliu--its manners, its values, its reasons to be--keenly and minutely. I like her books because they are the opposite of cookie cutter characters and plots--like great jazz, they vary on a theme, marriage for a woman, and how this one acheivement dominates and can quite likely ruin a woman's life, mind, intelligence. Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice is on the surface a silly ditz, who is obsessed with getting her daughters married off--so many daughters, so little time! Her husband treats her with a good natured contempt and barely tolerates her twitterings.
But look at it from Mrs Bennet's point of view (and the novel does, in veiled manner.) She has five, count 'em, FIVE daughters of marriageble age. Marriageble age was from about sixteen/seventeen to maybe twenty-two or so. After that you were an on the shelf spinster, and trying to compete for the limited pool of local men was considered comic at best, tasteless at worst. She and her family live rurally, with again, a limited pool of eligible male canidates for matrimony.
If she doesn't get these girls hitched, there's nothing else they can do. They can't get a job. They can't move to London unchaperoned. And most importantly, once Mr. Bennett dies, his entire estate, the family home and all incomes, goes to his nearest male relative, not his wife and children. She and any unmarried daughters will be homeless and penniless, dragging from relative's house to unwilling relative's house, with no standing in their communities, and probably finish off in the poorhouse, buried in a cheap wooden box with no service or headstone.
So no wonder the poor woman's crazed with anxiety. Jane Austen was pointing this out, how her "civilized" middle class life balanced over the abyss of helplessness and dispair. Comedy, indeed.
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Post by Satchmo on Jun 18, 2009 15:57:25 GMT -5
I understand the satire of the book, the problem is twofold however: one, it is too well-veiled to make any impact and two, it simply isn't funny.
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