The Other Austen

Guaranteed to Bring Out the Bitch In You

  • 24th May
    2012
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  • 9th May
    2012
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You know Mansfield Park…

xsounprettyx:

its a nice story and all. Two people who love each other end up together is always nice, but what some people fail to realize about the main couple is, THEY ARE FIRST COUSINS!

That is incest people.  I get it, those were the times and all, but come on, INCEST!

Its a lovely story, but yeah. I’ll skip this romantic tale.

yeah, but Edmund was Fanny’s first cousin. so like, you have your second cousins, and then your first cousins, and then your cousins!!

  • 5th May
    2012
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  • 23rd March
    2012
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  • 16th March
    2012
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“Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.”

“But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did you not hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”

“I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be enquired of farther.”

“And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence!”

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).  This conversation, between Mary Crawford (the first speaker) and Fanny Price, has attracted much post-colonial critical attention.  Many argue that this “dead silence” permeates the novel—this is one of the few references to the slave-trade, on which the wealth of the Mansfield Park estate is based.  The unspeakability of the slave trade in this context suggests the British attempt to separate capitalist and colonialist endeavors from the domestic sphere. (via 18c)
  • 14th March
    2012
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  • 29th February
    2012
  • 29

Janeites, read this!

(posting this in response to some of the complaints I’ve been seeing about Mansfield Park 1999)

Run Mad, But Do Not Faint: The Authentic Audacity of Rozema’s Mansfield Park
by Claudia L. Johnson

Mark Twain was so sick of Jane Austen that he wanted to dig her up and hit her over the head with her shinbone. Most people probably don’t want to clobber Austen, but even the gentlest soul might worry whether he or she can endure another precious Austenian movie without committing some indecorum – gagging, perhaps, or smashing a tea-set.

Twain, of course, was impatient with the prettified Austen purveyed in the marketplace of middlebrow culture since the late nineteenth century, when deluxe editions and magazine articles represented her nostalgically as a serenely domestic figure, whose wit ran the gamut from arch to barbed, and whose work excluded every form of unmannerliness and complication, sex and politics most of all. Today, though bookbags, postcards, and paperweights do their share, it is largely t.v. and movie adaptations that produce and circulate fantasies about Austenian elegance. As these productions have become a phenomenon, they’ve inflated coziness into opulence: costumes have become too lavish, gentlemen too strapping, country houses too grandiose, and all too idealized, too much. No one really likes costumers, and an honest curiosity about the texture of daily life in the past is one of the few pleasures they indulge. But while we make a fetish of furniture and dress in these adaptations, it’s wise to remember that Austen’s novels are indifferent to this kind of specificity.

Besides, there has always been another, less conspicuous, vision of Austen and her work. This other Austen :) is seen as alienated from the world that prettifies her, an Austen D.W. Harding celebrated for her “regulated hatred” and for her refusal to help “make her society what it was, or ours what it is.” The iconoclastic Austen could disarm Twain in an instant, and is beloved not for the primness, propriety, or romantic conventionality imputed to her, but for the energy of her satire, for the irreverence and to some even the bitchiness of her wit, for the trenchancy of her social criticism, and the complexity of her characters’ passions, passions sharpened by intelligence and intensified by good manners.

Read More

  • 29th February
    2012
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  • 29th February
    2012
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  • 28th February
    2012
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  • 24th February
    2012
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How could she (Fanny) have excited serious attachment in a man who had seen so many, and been admired by so many, and flirted with so many, infinitely her superiors; who seemed so little open to serious impressions, even where pains had been taken to please him (Henry); who thought so slightly, so carelessly, so unfeelingly on all such points; who was everything to everybody, and seemed to find no one essential to him?

Mansfield Park, Chapter 31

Why I love/hate Fanny Price. lol

(via twinsand)

I don’t understand how this passage and element of MP can make people hate Fanny. I think Henry desires her MOSTLY because she doesn’t want him. He’s basically a date rapist.

And all Fanny did was dare to exist and wanna make out with her cousin a bit. No big deal.

#the fanny wars

#in defense of fanny

#victim blaming

  • 7th February
    2012
  • 07

pinkand-yellow:

So, I’m reading Mansfield Park, and I’m pretty sure I ship Fanny/Mary Crawford. It’s not my usual style to ship the corners of a triangle just because I hate the center, but pretty much they’re otp, and you can’t convince me otherwise.

mary: hey fanny, wanna rehearse some lines with me?

fanny: sure!

mary: lolol, “rehearse.” *grope grope grope* gurrrrl, your form is FOINE!

  • 3rd February
    2012
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  • 10th January
    2012
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  • 29th December
    2011
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