Don't reduce Jane Austen to a feminist icon!
250 YEARS OF JANE AUSTEN (4/6). Our era loves to highlight women artists who fight against the patriarchal shackles. But if the Englishwoman is an immense writer, it is above all through her talents as a moralist, argues British writer and theologian Theo Hobson, in the conservative weekly “The Spectator”.
I managed to watch almost all of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius. I endured the bland acting and the interventions of obscure academics, all astounded by the genius of their heroine.
Unsurprisingly, Austen was portrayed as a funny, provocative, courageous, revolutionary writer, a slayer of conventions and constraints, who radiated girl power in all directions. It was also to be expected, no one mentioned what makes her writing so powerful and what gives Austen her aura as a great writer: her omnipresent morality, a central dimension of her writing that is always overlooked.
The subject is not so easy to approach – who likes moralists these days? Who would recommend a literary creation imbued with moral, even religious, precepts? Yet it must be said: her sense of humor and the accuracy of her observations owe nothing to chance; a certain logic is at work. In her work, selfishness and ordinary vanity deserve to be mocked, dissected with a scalpel.
Austen, however, proceeds with relative discretion. For example, Emma Woodhouse [the heroine of
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