Shitting on Something Else - Jane Austen Has Become An Alt-Right Icon, Somehow

[TheBlackAdder]

.


First, they take over Pepe, now this.

Life as a Jane Austen fan can be, occasionally, infuriating. Male classmates deride her as subliterary fluff, pop culture uses her as a shorthand for romance novels, and, for women, professing to love her turns you into a cat-possessing cliché. The latest insult, however, is the most egregious yet: Alt-right thinkers have appropriated Austen as a symbol of white nationalism, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Nicole M. Wright.

Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, noticed an Austen cameo in a Milo Yiannopoulos speech in January. “As a Victorian novelist might have put it,” she quotes him, “it is a truth universally acknowledged that an ugly woman is far more likely to be a feminist than a hot one.” Amusingly, Wright points out, Yiannopoulos, an alt-right “fellow traveler,” was incorrect about Austen’s era: the Regency-era author died some 20 years before the Victorian period commenced.

More to the point, however, is that Yiannopoulos is not being very careful with his references. The “truth universally acknowledged” in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, that “a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” is delivered with gentle sarcasm, not earnestness. In parodying the language of philosophical treatises, the author mocks the very simplistic assumption she’s putting forth.

More at the jump:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jane-austen-has-become-an-alt-right-icon-somehow_us_58d02757e4b00705db51b946


.

[Adrahil]

1. My wife is a 19th century British Literature professor.

Jane Austen was highly critical of marriage mores and the "marriage market" of the time. Her work favors connections and respect between men and women, something that was somewhat subversive at the time. Some of her work could be bitingly satirical... see "Northanger Abbey."

[synergie]

2. They can only take the symbols we allow them to.

I don't care about pepe, I'm pissed about the taint on the swastika because a bunch of white xtians did some horrendous things with a symbol they stole from other cultures and religions the were desperately trying to appropriate, but I will not stand for some bleached blonde rent-boy (and he proudly extols his prostitution) who can't read taking over one more thing.

[Warpy]

3. At least the alties are consistently tone deaf

While it's difficult to put sarcasm into print, Austen delivered a knockout punch of it in that particular passage, along with the portrayal of the long suffering, bored husband of the ditzy wife that he'd married when he was much younger and she was beautiful.

They seem to have missed the whole thing.

[Jane Austin]

4. Oh,no!

Not my namesake!

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. On a lighter Austen note, did you see the story about her creating fake news?

'Mischievous' Jane Austen faked Steventon marriage records

Novelist Jane Austen created fake entries in a marriage register linking herself with two separate men, it has emerged.

The Pride & Prejudice author is thought to have made the handwritten entries in the record book while a teenager in Hampshire in the late 18th Century.

Hampshire Archives, which holds the Steventon marriage register for 1755-1812, says Austen had access to the book because her father, George Austen, was the rector of the parish.
...
It is not known whether either Fitzwilliam or Mortimer actually existed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-39330703

[Jane Austin]

8. No, I hadn't seen that.

Too funny!

[First Speaker]

5. I've always wished that a time portal could have brought Shakespeare and Jane together...

...imagine a play and/or novel with Rosalind and Lizzie Bennett meeting! Throw in Falstaff and Mr Collins, and you'd have my idea of heaven...

[JHan]

6. Milo being Milo but this has been a thing among alt-righters for a while...

They're obsessed with Western civ. cannon . They'll read Aurelius, Aristotle, Aquinas and Solzhenitsyn but won't learn any of the redeeming lessons contained in the classics. Instead they twist whatever they read to suit their world view.

There was a great article about this last year by Donna Zuckerberg, editor of Eidolon

How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor

This is my call to arms for all classicists. No matter how white and male Classics once was, we are not that anymore. In spite of the numerous obstacles that remain, our field is now more diverse than ever, and that is something to be proud of. These men are positioning themselves as the defenders of Western Civilization. Classicists, when you see this rhetoric, fight back. We must not allow the Alt-Right to define what Classics will mean in Trump’s America."