When evaluating the contemporary relevance of Jane Austen’s novels, critics must consider whether escapism prevents political action. Through her satirical depiction of upper-class British society, Austen tells stories of constructive escapism to cleverly capture the darker undertones of the nineteenth-century world. At the same time, however, Austen’s rebellious plots concern themselves primarily with pretty, wealthy young women in the drawing room. In a modern world of polarized conflict, hate speech, and socioeconomic woes, perhaps readers should no longer be focusing their attention on novels about upper-class, privileged white women who existed two hundred years ago. True, Austen created threatening and unruly heroines who oppose the norm by championing change in their environments. However, the once-revolutionary messages in Austen’s novels may now be too limited in scope to support an argument for the contemporary relevance of Elizabeth Bennet’s vehemence of speech, Fanny Price’s vehemence of thought, or Emma Woodhouse’s vehemence of independence.
Though Austen was aware of her world, she was also of her world in a way that challenges our ability to sympathize with her characters and their concerns. The leading ladies of Austen’s novels operate from an astronomically more privileged position than working-class, impoverished, or enslaved women. In Emma, despite Emma’s cleverness and her desire to exercise control over her surroundings, Emma never realizes that the world is bigger than Highbury. Rather, by marrying Mr. Knightley, Emma simply rises to be a bigger fish in her small pond. Readers never hear Emma’s opinions on property rights or women’s exclusion from politics or other spheres in which they could have otherwise promoted large-scale social change. The driving impulse behind Emma is Austen’s argument that equality of social situation is the surest measure of happiness in all relationships, which deflates the impact of Emma’s revelations about having empathy and compassion for those less fortunate than herself. By the end of the novel, the friendship between upper-class Emma and her socially lesser friend Harriet sinks to “a calmer sort of goodwill” (E 332), which, Austen notes, “was not to be regretted” (E 332). Despite the importance of Miss Bates to the plot, Miss Bates exists less as a person in her own right and more as a cautionary tale of why Emma should be kinder. In this way, Austen neglects to demonstrate why more equity is necessary in systems that operate above the reach of Emma and her friends. This limited scope prevents Austen from being the voice of social justice that the readers of the world need today, or, indeed, that they needed in the nineteenth century.
Admittedly, not all talented authors are obligated to be champions of social justice to be considered relevant. Some exist to entertain us, make us laugh, and capture the little struggles of ordinariness and the everyday in a way that rings with its own hard-hitting truth. In her article “Post-feminist Austen,” Vivien Jones describes how Austen “respects . . . readers and their ordinary lives” (Jones 68) but also deals with “high-class problems” (68), engaging with “important nothings” (68) in a way that makes her beloved by postmodern popular culture. However, Austen also intentionally uses comedy as a tool for social critique. Pride and Prejudice, for instance, makes light of miscommunication to highlight Darcy’s transformation from unswayable prejudice to dynamism, suggesting that privileged people should and must change to create a more just world. Yet, this change in Darcy never goes beyond his quest to win over Elizabeth. Despite Darcy’s rescue of Lydia from Wickham, neither Elizabeth nor Darcy, nor Austen as a storyteller, show much sympathy for Lydia as a young girl taken in by a sexist system that requires her to marry her seducer. In her epilogue, Austen makes light of Lydia’s financially precarious situation after her marriage, offering a blithe quip about Lydia and Wickham staying frequently with the kind-hearted Bingleys, who frequently “proceeded so far as to talk of giving them a hint to be gone” (PP 265). Austen’s humor as a weapon is limited to fighting the battles of Elizabeth, who, unlike Lydia, has not made any perceived moral transgressions. This flaw makes the plot of Pride and Prejudice feel short-sighted. Though Austen uses comedy as a tool for social critique, her social critique is limited, preventing her satirical sweet spot between romantic comedy and social analysis from ringing true.
Furthermore, Austen’s stories of young women living in the countryside and finding happiness through marriage make Regency England appear harmonious and picturesque when realities were grim for the working class and people of color. Many of Austen’s heroines, such as Fanny from Mansfield Park, enjoy large houses and comfortable lifestyles mined from the profits of the British empire, making them complicit in the abuse of the enslaved people in the Caribbean. The trouble with making a case for Austen as a relevant author today is that mixed signals are everywhere in her works. In Mansfield Park, Fanny says to Edmund, “‘But I do talk to [Sir Thomas] more than I used to. I am sure I do. Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’” (MP 136). Fanny adds that she would have “longed” (136) to inquire further, “‘ . . . but there was such a dead silence!’” (MP 136). In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said reads the “dead silence” of the Bertrams as equivalent to Austen’s silence (Said 96). Said reflects, “It would be silly to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave” (Said 96), implicating Mansfield Park as a work of cultural power harmfully advocating a morality that condones the imperial enterprise.
The problem is, despite these allusions to slavery in Mansfield Park, Austen does not grapple with race seriously in her novels, preventing readers of her era or readers today from transferring the rebellious spirit of her heroines to the larger picture of social justice. In Mansfield Park, there is a sense of the world beyond the English countryside being, at worst, a dangerous thing. At best, it is underexplored. By not taking a clear stance on issues of enslaved people, and by not discussing working-class people at all, Austen limits her rebellion against oppression to the very small box of her upper-class heroines. Today, readers who may have once connected to the rebellious independence of Austen’s heroines may seek a stronger, more inclusive version of rebellion that does not keep the lower classes in their place. As sharp-witted as they are, Austen’s heroines cannot compensate for the glorification of the landowner.
Modern-day feminism challenges Austen’s Western, upper-class model of important nothings, forcing readers who advocate for women’s rights to question whether Austen’s novels deserve the same kind of attention and relevance today as they did upon their publication. As Austen and her heroines navigate personal choice dilemmas of marriage and lifestyle, they do not disrupt the status quo. Austen’s novels “make fulfillment a function of individual choice rather than structural change” (Jones 78). Austen allows Emma to continue as the reigning queen of Highbury without asking her to look beyond its borders. Meanwhile, Miss Bates remains poor, and Harriet remains unworthy. In Pride and Prejudice, though Austen permits Elizabeth to rescue herself from the danger of becoming middle-class by marrying a wealthy man, Austen sentences Lydia to a lifetime of marriage with a predator for the crime of defying societal limitations on gender and sexuality. The servants of the Bennet family continue to wash and clean without receiving attention, let alone relief. This is not to say anything of the enslaved populations referenced so briefly in Mansfield Park and then left in the margins of Austen’s social critique, leaving a permanent stain on the rebellious humor that would have otherwise given Austen’s novels a lasting relevance in a literary world committed to justice and activism. In this way, Austen’s portrayal of leading ladies and women’s issues rings conservative, suggesting that her voice should no longer resonate in today’s environment of readers who look to champion attention to intersectionality and systemic change.
However, it is essential to remember that Austen writes with a constant lens of satire and irony. Since Austen uses comedy as a weapon to challenge social boundaries, readers cannot always take her plots at face value. Yes, Austen tells stories about wealthy, white, young women, but her novels also cleverly display how these women have the courage, or lack the courage, to challenge institutions that place beauty, wealth, and whiteness on a pedestal. The inclination toward social change that Austen exhibits in her novels is undeniable. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth constantly yearns toward justice, trying desperately not to leave her friend Charlotte behind in a world that seeks to strip away either her security or her ability to marry someone she can love and respect. Elizabeth is always in nature, constantly escaping the confines of home, and she is always critically engaged in the active process of decision-making and deliberation on what is fair and right. Even during Darcy’s first proposal, Elizabeth cross-examines Darcy’s crimes, injustices, and wrongs against Jane and Wickham, whom she perceives to be innocent and underprivileged by the nature, respectively, of gender and class inequities. Voicing Elizabeth’s impassioned reflections through free indirect discourse, Austen describes “[Darcy’s] pride, his abominable pride, his shameless avowal of what he had done with respect to Jane . . . and the unfeeling manner which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty towards whom he had not attempted to deny” (PP 134).
Emma and Fanny see the world differently than Elizabeth, but with the same critical eye for justice and improvement. After Emma behaves cruelly to Miss Bates at Box Hill, she immediately feels the extent of her wrongdoing. Even before Mr. Knightley confronts her, she feels uncomfortable, and during their conversation about her wrongdoing, “[she] blushed, and was sorry” (E 258). However, when she gets in the carriage, she experiences truly overwhelming, and redeeming, remorse, thinking, “Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life . . . How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates!” (E 259). Emma makes a mistake for which she takes accountability, a timeless lesson that Austen executes with feeling and realism. Emma’s error motivates her to create positive change, for both herself and her beloved community over which she holds so much power and influence.
Meanwhile, Mansfield Park takes place in the grandest estate of all Austen’s novels, which makes it easy for the reader to forget the severity of the poverty that haunts Fanny’s past. At Mansfield Park, Austen creates an atmosphere of literal and metaphorical theatrics, allowing readers, like the Bertrams, to continually overlook Fanny and her struggles amidst the glamor and intrigue of her privileged surroundings. Fanny, however, never forgets the class disparity that divides her from the Bertrams, and neither does Austen. The facade of the pretty, safe, enclosed aesthetic of the Mansfield Park setting falls away when Fanny goes to stay with her impoverished parents and siblings in Portsmouth. While staying in Portsmouth, Fanny’s constant awareness of class dichotomies haunts her decisions about her future. When lying awake at night, kept up by the noise of a small, untidy, indigent household, she muses that “The wonderful improvement which she still fancied in Mr. Crawford was the nearest to administering comfort of anything within her current thoughts” (MP 281). Austen adds, toward the end of the novel, “Would [Mr. Crawford] have preserved, and uprightly, Fanny must have been his reward, and a reward very voluntarily bestowed . . .” (MP 317). Even Fanny, as conscience-stricken as she constantly shows herself to be, understands the necessity of obtaining economic and social security through marriage. In Austen’s England, women of all social classes had to choose between marrying a man with financial security or staying single and enduring lifelong financial insecurity. Through humor and hidden clues, Austen emphasizes the injustices her heroines endure. Going a step further, she reinforces how the concerns of her heroines are inevitably entangled in the larger societal injustices of classism and the patriarchy.
A closer look at Mansfield Park and Austen’s discourse on slavery, too, suggests that Austen uses irony and allegory as a means of cautioning readers against passivity in the face of systemic injustice. Though Austen does not offer any further direct commentary on slavery in Mansfield Park beyond one ambiguous passage, the marriage of Edmund and Fanny, whom Edmund practically raised, echoes the paternalistic quality of British imperialism. Austen writes, “the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be” (MP 321), and the irony in this narration suggests Austen may not endorse this marriage after all. In “Symbol, Allegory, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,” Shawn Normandin suggests that the marriage of these too-similar characters may reflect Austen’s critique of the British empire and Fanny’s passivity as a character (Normandin 607). By this account, Fanny is a tragic emblem of the disempowered, exemplifying Austen’s rare ability to speak on race, class, and imperialism through the recognizable “important nothings” (Jones 68) with which her middle and upper-class British readers could identify and empathize, leading to global understanding.
Austen’s novels also come with the radical theme that women are engaged in the pursuit of happiness. An iniquitous amount of pressure exists on women to contract their own needs for the good of mankind, a gendered, timelessly restrictive idea dating back to the era of Austen and well ahead of it. While large-scale social change is essential, women also need to see literary representations of female characters seeking personal happiness without being punished for behaving selfishly. In Mansfield Park, Austen juxtaposes the easy fate of Henry Crawford with the tragic downfall of Maria Bertram to demonstrate how common it was to see male literary heroes prioritize their needs and desires without receiving criticism for behaving selfishly or impurely. Through plot points such as the case of Henry and Maria, Austen’s novels emphasize how young women, even wealthy young women, endured oppression, with their happiness eternally subsumed to the need to protect their socioeconomic status. Instead of viewing Austen’s portrayal of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice as a shallow one, a look at the wider societal context suggests that a more proper reading of Lydia’s unhappy ending is Austen’s realistic unmasking of the injustice of a classist, patriarchal society. Gender inequality disempowered women along all class lines when Austen published her novels, and gender inequality continues to pervade post-feminist society. Austen’s rebellion against the lack of individual choice presented to women was groundbreaking, and it is still groundbreaking today.
Austen’s verve, energy, and biting wit give her portraits of upper-class British society a distinct edge, offering hidden criticisms that should never be lost. Uniquely, Austen uses comedy as a weapon, uniting entertainment with social critique to fight against stupidity, ignorance, and sexism. Contemporary struggles against injustice display how Austen’s two-hundred-year-old themes timelessly situate themselves in contemporary cultural relevance. True, Austen’s heroines are privileged, and insurmountably distanced from the inhumanity of slavery and the struggles of being working-class. Nevertheless, Austen’s genius shines as she uses her extraordinary gift for character and comedy to bring the complex minds of her heroines to the page, demonstrating their free-thinking capacity for change and the necessity of privileged people evolving to create a better, more just world. As long as privileged and underprivileged populations exist alongside women who wish to leverage their privilege for a just purpose while also seeking their own happiness, women who wish to change the world will need Austen’s portrayals of heroines who champion awareness, liberation, and a compulsion toward compassion.
