Jane Austen, Feminist Icon

 by Devoney Looser - LA Times - January 20th, 2014 

LEAVING BEHIND 2013’s 200th anniversary celebration of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for 2014’s of Mansfield Park, I find myself feeling wistful and almost a little sad. Poor Mansfield Park! 

What are its chances at capturing the limelight, cast as it is in the shadows and on the heels of Pride and Prejudice? No 12-foot fiberglass statue of Jonny Lee Miller as Edmund Bertram will be installed in a London lake. Out of Print Clothing has not made a Mansfield Park T-shirt. Thinking about it all is enough to make me miss last year’s endless, painful news articles beginning, “It is a truth universally acknowledged.” Anyone who might try to trot out, “About 30 years ago ...” risks being mistaken for riffing on the Gettysburg Address or a gold watch ceremony.

Yet this movement from celebrating the character imagined as Austen’s most beloved heroine, Pride and Prejudice’s spunky Elizabeth Bennet, to contemplating her least appreciated, Mansfield Park’s mousy Fanny Price — is also a perfect liminal moment. It is an opportunity to think more deeply about Austen’s reception and about her relation to the women’s movement. Many readers today celebrate spunky Lizzy Bennet as a proto-feminist role model. What will we do with the dour, humorless Fanny? Are we doomed to repeat what most of the characters in Mansfield Park do and simply ignore her?

I hope not. It has been an exciting, troubling year for Jane Austen as a feminist icon. Last summer’s announcement of Austen’s selection as the face of the new £10 note was both a high and a low point. British women’s media activists hailed the choice, the result of having agitated for a female face — other than the Queen’s — to remain on British currency. In the wake of celebrating their success, feminist leader Caroline Criado-Perez received rape and death threats on Twitter. Of course this prompted soul-searching conversations on the dangers of abuse on Twitter, but it also provoked debate about claiming Austen for feminism. Some found in the connection a new form of preposterousness, akin to mixing her fiction with zombies. Others trumpeted ours as the first generation to discover her feminist subtexts.
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