It has been a while since I have posted. Suffice it to say that the year has been stressful. Sometimes I post a round up of all the books I have read, or the best ones, anyway, at the end of the year. I have read a lot of books—I am a reader, but this year, I am going to leave you with the one I just finished.
At the Jane Austen Society of North America Annual General Meeting, I was privileged to be on a panel about Austen adaptations. One of my colleagues discussed two Austen adaptations that I had not read. Naturally, I had to see what they were about.
Ladies of the House is an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. In it, we meet a trio of women—Daisy (Elinor), Wallis (Marianne), and Cricket (Mrs. Dashwood). The book opens with the funeral of Gregory, the father, who was a politician of many decades in D. C. and who, it turns out was both having an affair and embezzling money for many years. The women are left to pick up the pieces and carry on.
The novel works as a fun read, but it also asks a lot of relevant questions for our own time. How much should women build their lives around men? Don’t get me wrong, it is a romance, and —spoiler alert—it ends the same way you would expect it to, if you have read Sense and Sensibility. The author is not saying men are bad, just questioning how much women should depend on them for happiness and purpose. The various characters arrive at different answers, as is the case with any well developed story question and Daisy, as the staunch, stoic, woman of reason, is a good character and one that readers of Austen will likely love; I know I did.
What I want to leave you with is the thought experiment at the end of the book. Daisy imagines a future which she hopes for, but to her mind hasn’t happened yet.
Women begin to see that our fates are linked more with each other than with the fates of men. As such, we begin to act less in our own self interest and more in the interest of all women. (376)
This made me think a little, because there are those who would argue, and I believe rightly, that the women who have not worked for the benefit of all women are mostly white women of a certain class. They saw their privilege and knew it protected them and were unwilling to risk what little agency they had to help others. It is a legacy that Feminism is still wrestling with.
So, the message isn’t for all women, but for those who have chosen to put self interest above equality and respect for all women to wake up and look around. Money won’t protect you if it isn’t your own. Men who are misogynists will not protect you if you step out of line. Society will not protect you when the powerful don’t follow any rules. The only protection you have is each other, and it behooves us all to act in the interest of all women, of all people who are oppressed, lest we become the oppressors, or the bystanders who watch while others are oppressed.
This message is hopeful, because it means we do have the power to make the world better, when we act together. Also, who doesn’t love a happy ending?
Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a fabulous new year. Let’s make the world better, together, shall we?
