Mark T. Mitchell considers Jane Austen in light of our porn culture:
That porn culture changes the way men think is obvious, but it also affects the way women think of themselves. In a hyper-sexualized society, women will naturally tend to think of themselves primarily as sexual creatures. Women too often come to act, talk, and dress as if sex is completely separate from love, as if the biological mechanics of sex have nothing to do with reproduction, and as if a different partner every night leads to a satisfying life. The lies compound, deceive, and deaden.
[. . .]
Which leads me to Jane Austen. I recently read Pride and Prejudice with a group of bright and engaged students. The experience was, in some ways, rather jarring, and in no way are the differences between Austen’s world and ours more manifest than in the area of sex. Pride and Prejudice is in many ways a comedy of manners, especially manners governing the relationships between men and women. And the cultural whiplash one feels when moving from the world of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy to our world of hook-ups and porn is disconcerting. Try, for instance, to imagine Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (Lizzy and Fitz no doubt) hooking up. It is impossible. Given who they are and the value they place on propriety, constancy, amiability, and marriage, to imagine them participating in the hook-up culture is to debase them. It is to seriously damage their integrity as persons. How could it do anything less?
April 27th, 2011 | 12:10 pm
There is no shortcut. We must advocate for chastity, pure and simple, and endure the mocking and spitting upon which will come from today’s broken culture.
The cultural norm for attitudes toward sex has lined up perfectly with those of a 19-year-old male. For each of us, we need to ask–will we be complicit in this, either overtly or through silence, or will we oppose it hammer and tongs, as it deserves, and insist on some adult supervision in this most important area?
April 27th, 2011 | 12:24 pm
[...] Mark Mitchell over at Front Porch Republic has an excellent assessment of our morally bankrupt culture. H/T Joe Carter on the First Thoughts blog. [...]
April 27th, 2011 | 6:11 pm
Of course, the world of Jane Austen’s novels bear slight resemblance to the reality of the England in which she lived–which is why her books are novels, and not history texts.
So, while the courtships of the Bennett sisters are prim, proper and chaste (with, of course, the exception of Lydia who runs away with the cad Wickham), let us remember that this was the Regency Period, the time of Beau Brummel and the man who would be George IV, which was, as far as I can tell, as highly sexualized and promiscuous as our own era.
Certainly, there was little by way of chastity among the lower classes. London was famous for its “stews”–pestilential slums permeated with gin houses and brothels (even as late as the Victorian era, London had far more brothels than churches), and the urban and rural lower class alike were notorious for their indifferent fornication. There would not have been so many sermons and tracts against the promiscuity of the proles if the proles had not been so promiscuous.
The upper classes were, in their way, just as bad. With marriages seen in dynastic terms (Austen was right in noting it was mostly about money), loveless marriages were common, and it was accepted that one or both parties would take lovers–but not before the wife had begotten a legitimate “heir and a spare”. Bed-hopping among the nobility began at the top with the Prince Regent and the Duke of Clarnace (their father, George III was a Hanoverian anomaly, a uxuruious husband who loved (exclusively) his wife). As long as one was discreet and did not give cause for an affair of honor, nobody seemed to mind. Of course, cross the wrong husband or leave him looking foolish, and one could easily end up “eating grass before breakfast” on the dueling field. The Duke of Wellington in fact wound up in several such affairs, as did his cavalry commander, the Earl of Uxbridge, who ran off with the wife of one of Wellington’s brothers. And let us not forget the long-running affair of Horatio Nelson and Emma Lady Hamilton.
Only in the middle classes (the urban merchants and the squirearchy) do we find much attention paid to chastity and continence, for the simple reason that only they suffered from chronic status uncertainty. That is, unlike the poor, who had nothing the lose, and the aristocracy, whose position was secured by birth, the position of the middle classes depended entirely on the success of their business fortunes, whether mercantile or agricultural.
This in itself demanded self-discipline, diligence and deferred gratification, particularly as the state of one’s fortunes were always at the mercy of external forces beyond one’s control: most of the middle class were just one shipwreck or crop failure away from descent into the lower classes–from which there was no guaranteed way back. This is the source of the status insecurity that plagues the Bennetts, whose daughter lack of dowries means their future looks a lot like that of Jane Eyre–unless they can marry up.
For the middle class, marriage was just as dynastic as it was for the upper classes, but they lacked the long tradition of “political” marriage that sanctioned extramarital affairs. Such mores did not jibe with the contractually oriented world of the English middle class, and so chastity was demanded–at least of their daughters.
But even there, birth records tell a rather different story, as genealogists have long known. That is, an amazing number of women seem to have given birth to their first child within six months of their marriage.
Unless one believes that something in the food or air was inducing premature labor, there is only one explanation for this (and it holds for colonial America as well, where it looks like something approaching two-thirds of all brides in Massachusetts Bay went to the altar in a family way).
It’s always bad policy to extrapolate the nature of a particular historical period from the novels of its time. Just as you get a totally mistaken impression of the Regency from reading Jane Austen, so you get a totally mistaken impression of 20st century America by reading “I am Charlotte Simmons”.
April 28th, 2011 | 8:05 am
“so you get a totally mistaken impression of 20st century America by reading ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’.”
Oh, I thought that novel was remarkably accurate.
April 28th, 2011 | 10:03 am
“Oh, I thought that novel was remarkably accurate.”
Maybe some students in some colleges, but to tar all with that remarkably broad brush does a disservice.
Now, I went to Georgetown University in the middle of the 1970s, and if there was a party and pick-up school, that was it. My classmates were casually and happily promiscuous (and in many cases chronically inebriated and under the influence of illegal controlled substances); more than once I woke up to find my roommate noisily rutting in his bed across the room with whatever girl caught his fancy that evening.
In comparison, most of the college students I know, and most of the colleges I have had the opportunity to observe, are considerably more straight-laced. For one thing, college is a lot more expensive than in my day, and that causes students to focus their minds a lot, as does the realization that jobs are hard to get in the real world. In comparison with us, most of them are drudges. And most of them do not “hook up”. Casual sexual relationships of the kind which my generation took for granted have been superseded by a kind of serial monogamy. I doubt that the modern college student is any more promiscuous than the average GI of World War II (who, on the average, had four sexual partners in four years).
So no, Wolfe is not writing a documentary, but a novel (and even Wolfe’s documentaries use novelistic techniques that tend to distort and exaggerate for dramatic effect–see, e.g., my own personal favorite, “The Right Stuff”). And “I am Charlotte Simmons” does what a lot of good novels do–takes an outlier, and elevates it to a norm. Austen did it in her books, Wolfe does it in his.
April 28th, 2011 | 10:28 am
Stuart, if you’re reading Austen as a social history of the era, then yes, you’re getting a distorted picture.
But I’m not so sure you can say that you’re not getting an accurate picture of how things were (imperfectly) done among ordinary well-conducted upper-middle class and non-titled upper class families. Though Austen’s language is subtle, Lydia is far from the only character in Austen who stepped outside the norms, if you keep your eyes open. Contrary to what a superficial reading might yield, a slavish adherence to arcane rules is not the only reason that things like secret engagements, correspondence before engagement, and closed carriages were deeply frowned upon. Not because things didn’t happen in such situations, but because they *did*. And my suspicion is that the filmmaker who showed a morning-after scene between Isabella Thorpe and Frederick Tilney of Northanger Abbey was not deviating from the spirit of Austen at all, though Austen’s (and her publisher’s) standards required indirection and circumlocution.
May 2nd, 2011 | 2:15 pm
It would certainly make them less interesting. Do you think anyone will be watching Sex and the City in 200 years? Probably not.
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