Missing the Point of Jane Austen

Apparently there's a whole industry out there criticizing Jane Austen for not being woke enough. Or praising her as the world's first feminist. Or taking her to task for not turning her novels into tirades against slavery. That's what I get from a fairly sensible article about "Interrogating Jane" by Lona Manning.

Oh dear. What fools these mortals be.

I want the novels of an era to be drenched in the conventional wisdom of the time. That's because I don't trust history, don't trust politicians, don't trust historians to tell me the truth about the Good Old Days.

Instead, I want to be able to winkle out of the text and the story what was really going down back then. The value to me in Jane Austen is precisely that. That servants don't exist as people. That when Fanny Price asks a question about the slave trade there is a dead silence. That Anne Elliot is good dutiful girl that rejects the marriage proposal of the young Captain Wentworth without a fortune on the advice of elders, and then grows up to marry him anyway. When he is as rich as Croesus.

I want to be able to feel the grinding harshness of life in the English countryside that is described by Thomas Hardy. I want to be able to experience the social crosscurrents in George Eliot's Adam Bede, from the rising young carpenter, to the woman preacher, to the twerpy orphan girl to the twerpy son of the manor. And I want to read about the pride of long-term farm tenants and their tradition of honor and respectability. I want all this without so much as a single fashionable word from today's moral framework.

I want to experience the emergence of the servant as almost a person in North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, in the person of Dixon, the servant of the Hales.

I want to read what Anthony Trollope writes about blacks and creoles and whites and what have you when he travels to the West Indies in the 1850s in The West Indies and the Spanish Main. And I don't want to hear any wokey flim-flammery about his whiteness and his upper-class Victorian sensibility and his apology for European colonialism.

And I don't want to hear a single word about how the slavery in the United States was uniquely evil and has condemned the United States to bottomless perdition forever.

What is interesting is that slavery, ubiquitous since forever, became a scandal during the 18th century. What is interesting is that after the abolition of African slavery in the 19th century in Europe and the Americas the world saw the founding to two slave states held up to the world as the very incarnation of truth and justice. What is interesting is that after the 19th century saw the elimination of whole forests of subordination the 20th century saw the replanting of a sort of neo-feudalism in the welfare state.

What is interesting is that after the righteous elimination of eevil absolute monarchies and their subjugation of the people and commerce for their dynastic adventures, the 20th century has seen the growth of monster state loot and plunder, where the ruling class extracts 40 to 50 percent of the income of ordinary people in order to reward their political supporters -- who are often, but not always, the very people that cough up the revenue.

What will be the fate of today's authors when knowing commentators from the virtuous future bemoan today's moral obtuseness and cowardice. And conclusively prove how today's writers deliberately and hypocritically avoided facing up to the monstrous injustices of our age.