Saturday, September 16, 2006

Meow!

I don't know that "Mean Girls" quite stacks up to the underhanded scheming, passive-aggressive insults and blatant snobbery from the women of "Sense and Sensibility." I had trouble even finding a sympathetic adult female character besides Elinor and Marianne.

Any thoughts on what Miss Austen had to say about her sex? Would you credit any behavior to the limited and cutthroat role for women of the day -- marriage for their own (and family's) prosperity and reputation?
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6 comments:

Ben said...

Maybe it speaks of Austen herself. The narrator had even more biting wit than any of the characters.

5:15 PM, September 17, 2006
kc said...

Good question, Christy.

My sense is that JA had a great contempt for stupid self-important people, be they male or female, although her contempt softened into mere amusement if these people were not in a position to harm anyone else, if their buffoonery were merely spectacle without consequence.

I think she also had a sharp sense of the things that conspired (economics, sexism, etc.) to keep most women fairly stupid and uninteresting, and saw it as a real accomplishment when a woman could rise above these circumstances. All of her books are about the "exceptional" woman. And she herself was one. I was just reading that she turned down a marriage proposal from some wealthy dullard even though it would have saved her from the degradation of spinsterhood and would have helped her mother and sister financially. Seems that wouldn't have been a life worth having, despite the material comforts it offered.

12:46 PM, September 18, 2006
kc said...

I wonder how these lines about women characters were received in JA's day:

Of Lady Middleton, the narrator says "She had nothing to say one day that she had not said the day before. Her insipidity was invariable."

"Even Lady Middleton took the trouble of being delighted, which was putting herself rather out of her way."

She thought only of her children and her role as mother/wife.

Of Mrs. Palmer, who says: "Mr. Palmer does not hear me. He never does sometimes."

Of Mr. Palmer: "His temper might perhaps me a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman."

Of Lucy: "... a person who joined insincerity with ignorance."

Of Mrs. Ferrars: "She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas." (I love that. JA has a secret respect for Mrs. Ferrars, a very powerful woman. hehe)

And Marianne offends all the women because she refuses to take part in the banal conversations that they endlessly have regarding the respective heights of their children and their clothes and their merits, etc.

1:04 PM, September 18, 2006
cl said...

It was Middleton's name that I was trying to remember. I had hopes for Lady Middleton that she was an unobtrusive, if self-absorbed, character who would come to life later. And she did direct the attention away from Elinor's embarrassment at that dinner. But that was it.

And, of course, her interest in Lucy and her sister didn't speak too highly of her taste.

5:26 PM, September 18, 2006
cl said...

KC, I wonder if that anecdote about marrying the wealthy dullard turned into the story about Elizabeth Bennett's friend in P&P.

5:26 PM, September 18, 2006
george said...

I think Austen was making a comment against women marrying for security. I came across a little bio that had a blurb about her parents; her father was a country clergyman and her mother was of a higher social status, but she had no problem giving up luxuries for the domestic life, which I think was reflected in Elinor and Marianne.

3:44 AM, September 23, 2006

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