Is Jane Austen overrated?

That's a question posed by the title of Ron Rosenbaum's article in Slate, enticingly luring you with the promise of Slate-style contrarianism.  But since the anti-Austen faction (led by notable stalwarts like Charlotte Bronte and V. S. Naipaul) has been so vocal as of late, this isn't the contrarianism you've been expecting: It's the backlash against the backlash.

The answer, according to Rosenbaum, is No, but also kind of: 

Enough! Please! We get it. I’ve written it myself several times. Jane Austen is a serious—and seriously great—figure of seriously great literature. Don’t diminish her work by calling it chick lit! Did I mention she’s a very, very, serious (but brilliantly comic and satiric) author?

But it’s begun to seem like she’s now assumed the role of the designated highbrow writer for light readers. It’s not that she’s overrated. It’s that she’s in dire jeopardy of being overhyped—and dumbed down in the process.

Rosenbaum's argument is close to what I've been telling my senior students for years now: It isn't that Austen is overrated, really, but mis-rated.  Austen is widely loved, but for reasons other than what makes her writing so brilliant and unparalleled.  Yes, the romance between Elizabeth and Darcy is compelling, and it would be nice to live at Pemberley for a little while, but Pride and Prejudice is more than a playground for our own retrograde fantasies.  What makes it, and the rest of her novels so compelling, is the simultaneous sharpness and subtlety of her satire, the fluidity of the narration, and the careful attention to individual character.  In this last facet I don't thinks he has any equals besides Shakespeare, and in the first two none at all.

Rosenbaum does a good job skewering the cottage industry of Austen schlock, though with a measure of glee and unsubtlety that I'm sure he didn't pick up from Austen herself.  (Satirical she was, snarky she was not.)  I agree with his thesis 100%: It is the reduction of her novels, whether to "chick lit," or moralistic pablum, or fodder for Regency dress-up parties, that threatens to overshadow how invaluable they are.

What really fascinated me, though, was his conclusion.  He theorizes that:

...silly as they are, the zombie, sea monster, and horror movie mash-up versions of the Austen novels are, if not deliberate, then unintentional expressions of What’s Missing From the Snow Globe World of Austen. That sense that she is not questioning the moral order of the universe, the horror of unredeemed human suffering, and the meaning of the human presence within it. She doesn’t have to, but let’s not ignore the fact that she doesn’t. She does not venture into the realm of theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the alleged goodness of God with the prevalence of evil—which almost every great novelist and dramatist does.

Rosenbaum may be correct when he says that the mashers-up are responding to the "sense that she is not questioning the moral order of the universe," but I question whether that's true.  Just today in my AP class we did a close reading of Mr. Collins' proposal to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, annotating the ways in which he unknowingly embarrasses himself.  For one, he seems to think it is appropriate for a proposal to reference the inevitable death of both of Elizabeth's parents:

But the fact is, that being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured father (who, however, may live many years longer), I could not satisfy myself without resolving to chuse a wife from among his daughters, that the loss to them might be as little as possible, when the melancholy event takes place -- which, however, as I have already said, may not be for several years... To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds in the four per cents, which will not be yours till after your mother's decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to.

Pride and Prejudice may not have much in the way of metaphysics, but it is not ignorant of death, and because Austen does not "stray into tragedy," as Rosenbaum writes, does not mean that she creates a "Snow Globe World" in which tragedy is non-existent or impossible.  Death looms over Pride and Prejudice; the possibility that Mr. Bennet will die before his wife and daughters are provided for gives Jane and Elizabeth's romances their urgency.  It is very concerned with the way death affects the living, and with the unjust social structures that would amplify the tragedy of death by casting the female Bennets out of their home.

Rosenbaum recoils in disgust as the moralizing vacuity of William Deresiewicz's "self-help" book on Austen, but it's no more fair or accurate to depict them as amoral.  It is possible, and I think not a stretch, to read her heroines as people who have no time for metaphysics because their society has set them to the task of procuring husbands.

Rather, what Rosenbaum interprets as a lack I think is one of Austen's great gifts: a lightness of tone even about the most serious of matters.  Certainly I appreciate it more now that I'm faced with the overblown seriousness and melodrama of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, who were more or less her contemporaries.  It's a rare gift--Wilde inherited it, and if he hadn't gone to prison to produce De Profundis and "Reading Gaol" we might think of him, too, as a talented figure who doesn't quite fit the description of a "great novelist and dramatist."  (I will let the question of how we might think of a James Austen or an Olivia Wilde go unasked.)

Ultimately, the pop-culture remorae that cling to Austen cause Rosenbaum to reassess his appreciation of her.  His conclusion is that she doesn't "plumb the depths" like the greats do, and I leave it to you to decide for yourself how deeply she plumbs, and how important such plumbing is to your conception of greatness.  I will conclude by saying that I think it's her subtlety, her nuance, and her narrative control that keep us coming back to her, the blurriness between her voice and her characters', her inability to be pigeonholed and pinned down.  And as long as we're still wondering what exactly it is her novels are and do, they are as compelling as they ever were.

The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum

In the mid-90's, journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum fired a volley into a battle that had, until that point, been strictly confined to the fields of academia: He claimed in the pages of The New York Observer that critic Don Foster's attribution to Shakespeare of a long poem called "The Funeral Elegy" was erroneous.  "The Funeral Elegy" is tedious and long, but it is signed W.S., and Foster claimed that by using a database called SHAXICON that compared word usage in the "Elegy" to Shakespeare's body of work he could positively identify the work as the Bard's.  Nonsense, Rosenbaum said (more or less), just read it:

He from the happy knowledge of the wise
Draws virtue to reprove secured fools
And shuns the glad sleights of ensnaring vice
To spend his spring of days in sacred schools.

The "Elegy" is shallow, clunky and just plain bad, but it is bad in a way that doesn't sound like Shakespeare.  In the early 2000's, after years of public sniping that was probably more contentious than it might have been had Rosenbaum not stepped in, Foster conceded the battle, admitting that the "Elegy" was probably the work of Shakespeare's contemporary John Ford.  (In defense of Ford, he also composed one of the all-time best dramatic titles: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.)  It wasn't exactly V-E Day, to be sure, but in his book The Shakespeare Wars, Rosenbaum tells us why we should care by putting the controversy in context:

Now all that wooly literary judgment stuff could be junked--number-crunching had arrived at a state of Fosterian sophistication.  Literary value was to be defined by digitized statistics.  And the only reason his opponents, mostly in the United Kingdom, couldn't abide his claim was that they were--like fearful and ignorant primitives (bardolaters, idolaters)--primitives now forced to bow before the superior judgmental power of the number-crunching computer.

Literary judgment, literary value was already under assault from the pseudo-science of Theory whose partisans believed their job was to demonstrate that literary judgment was always incoherent, inconsistent, irredeemably subjective, the product of unacknowledged personal prejudice.  Or that "literary value" was just a construct, a slavish reflection of the internalized values of the power relations of an oppressive hegemony.

In other words, the "Elegy" controversy reflects something rotten at the heart of modern criticism, and forces us to confront why Shakespeare--and all great literature--matters to us.  What does it mean to be fundamentally "Shakespearean," and is it something that we can describe and discern?  And what is all the "fuss about," as one of the critics quoted in The Shakespeare Wars puts it?

In The Shakespeare Wars, Rosenbaum sets out to investigate a handful of arguments about Shakespeare's works.  The "Elegy" question is the most fascinating--and bloodiest--but there are others.  What do the different endings of Hamlet and Lear in the Quarto and Folio versions tell us about how Shakespeare wrote, edited, and regarded his own work?  Does the play Sir Thomas More contain a passage written by Shakespeare, in his own handwriting at that?  These questions matter, Rosenbaum says, because they are at the heart of why Shakespeare matters.

Nor are all the questions academic--some of the most fascinating arguments deal with Shakespeare on film and on stage, with the way Shakespeare's words are presented.  How, for example, should one play Shylock, the villainous Jew of The Merchant of Venice?  As a victim of prejudice, lashing out at his oppressors, or as an anti-Semitic stereotype?  (In this case, I agree with Rosenbaum--the play is virtually impossible to perform for modern audiences in its intended spirit.)  Or, for a simpler question: Can Shakespeare be effectively performed on film?

The back half of The Shakespeare Wars largely drops this premise, and instead becomes a kind of free-form investigation into what Rosenbaum sees as the most valuable of modern Shakespeare criticism.  Rosenbaum, who once abandoned the English department at Yale and in a way straddles the line between critic and journalist, is especially suited to this task, but something about these chapters seems half-baked.  Rosenbaum has a way, I find, of introducing an interesting idea, but never concluding it satisfactorily before moving on to the next.  (It would take too much space to really show what I mean, but much of it is present in a chapter about critic Stephen Booth and his concept of ambiguity--which Rosenbaum treats with too much ambiguity himself.)

But even when the thread is lost, The Shakespeare Wars is enjoyable because Rosenbaum's love of Shakespeare is so palpable.  It reminds me of reading Harold Bloom, though Rosenbaum would hate that I said that.  (He excoriates Bloom in a chapter about "recovering" Henry IV's Falstaff from Bloom's "overblown generalizations.)  Like Bloom, Rosenbaum believes that Shakespeare is vital--that's why these questions are so important.