Culture, Digested: Jane Austen Trad Wives

“I was born in the wrong century.”

Generally when a woman says this in a movie, she’s surprisingly not referring to a desire to awake in the future when some of the difficulties of feminist liberation have been better worked out. No longer stuck in the tricky moment between the granting of new rights and freedoms and the ability to more freely accept and utilize those new rights and freedoms without social backlash or the problems associated with being a pioneer. No, what she means is she’s nostalgic for the days of forced marriage, no rights or legal recourse to divorce or family courts, and being traded by your family like a donkey or a bale of hay. She thinks it’s romantic.

When Agathe says this line in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, she means she doesn’t like the superficial experience of dating apps. But it might also mean that she’s hopeless at managing her social and romantic life, and she would trade her freedom for someone figuring it all out for her. Agathe is an aspiring writer, and after her friend mails a few pages of an unfinished story she is invited to stay at a Jane Austen writers residency where she will, of course, fall madly in love, become a real writer, and dress up in an empire waisted dress and attend a ball. A nostalgic retreat into the past is all this modern woman needs to solve all her problems.

As I was reading for the Revolution and Ruin book club George Sand’s Indiana, a novel about a woman struggling to organize her romantic life while surely wearing an empire waisted dress, I was wondering what made Jane Austen such a go-to figure for film and television adaptation and what got in the way of similar treatments for Sand’s work. Because we’re doing Pride and Prejudice yet again, this time a six-part Netflix series, and this is after re-releasing the 2005 version into the theaters, releasing a new Bridget Jones movie (which was originally a P&P modern update), and the other modern update Fire Island. Actually, the Jane Austen adaptations are endless, and seem to speed up over time. In this frenzy for empire-waisted dramas, the Alcotts and the Austens and the Brontes, why has no one announced a six-part George Sand adaptation with one of our willowy blondes?

I think it has to do with the dogs. Men keep killing Indiana’s dogs. First her husband kills her dog, and then the men who are ostensibly there to save her from her husband kill her other dog. It’s hard to have a romantic fantasy as the heroine of a novel when you have to imagine your husband killing your dog. And while Jane Austen is also writing about the political situation of women in marriages and domestic spaces, the really nasty versions of it are always happening in the background to someone else and never to our plucky heroines. In order to give her characters a happy ending, Austen must give her women the ability to work around their oppression and disempowerment, to find the one good man who would never kill his wife’s dog.

Mark Darcy, too, is a more aspirational husband than Ralph, there to solve all of Elizabeth’s problems with one good match. Not just her loneliness, but her precarious financial situation, her social standing, her reputation for being kind of a bitch. Does it matter if she doesn’t have the right to leave her husband? Of course not, she’s marrying dreamy, dripping wet Mark Darcy. Who needs no-fault divorce when you are loved ardently?

As George Sand writes about Raymon, “He loved society with its rules and its shackles because it offered him opportunities for struggle and resistance, and if he hated disorder and violence, it was because they promised insipid, easy pleasures.” I think there’s something similar going on with the easy 19^th century nostalgia. It’s not just that love, sex, and romance in contemporary times is insipid or easy, but that being able to choose who to love, how to live, and who to be comes with the consequences for those decisions. So much easier to be treated like a little doll with no agency.

When women started politically organizing themselves, one of the first demands they articulated was for the ability to leave their marriages. As Christopher Clark writes in Revolutionary Spring, women in the 1830s were demanding marital reform before they were even using the label “feminism.” Marriage “was the cellular matrix on which all other structures of domination were built, and it was the narrow chamber in which women experienced patriarchy as bondage at first hand.” He writes about journalist and activist Claire Demar, who called marriage “absurd in its absolutism,” and railed against the laws under which women had no right to property and “no recourse against husbands who humiliated, mistreated, or neglected them.”

But many women worked against political reform for the simple reason that they were able to make their oppression work for them. Women who had access, even if only indirectly, to wealth and power, were often able to manage their disempowerment. Even if they were oppressed, they did not suffer from it. That was true in 1830, it was true when Phyllis Schlafly was leading the fight against the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and it’s true of the Tradwives and conservative women of today.

Which is why it’s unfortunate that in the United States we tell the wrong story about second wave feminism, believing that it was a cultural movement that encouraged women to pursue education and employment rather than understanding it as a political movement that moved to offer protections to women who were already — out of necessity — entering fields of education and employment. The postwar boom did not last long and the spoils were not evenly distributed, meaning women of the lower classes were already entering the work force in larger numbers and politically organizing to protect themselves in these institutions. The bored housewives of Betty Friedan’s advocacy and the pretty girls who read Ms. were taking advantages of progress won by lower class women and pretending it was a lifestyle choice and not essential work.

There’s a weird exchange in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life between Agathe and a brassy, bossy “Marxist feminist” writer at the retreat. The feminist is arguing that all literature is political and should be understood as such, and Agathe, more demure and therefore elegantly reasonable, insists that literature is there to help us figure out how to live a life. As if these are not the same pursuit! Later the feminist will break down because she is undergoing so far unsuccessful IVF treatments, and this is treated as something of a gotcha moment, implying that her political stand comes out of personal dissatisfaction and she is simply misdirecting her energy out of unhappiness. Probably I don’t even need to mention that this movie is written and directed by a woman.

I think the constant return to Jane Austen novels reveals an ambivalence toward our liberation, in the same way the tradwife influencers and conservative girlies saying it’s feminism’s fault they can’t find a husband to support them shows the same. The ambivalence is understandable — we liberated women from patriarchy and dumped them into the financial market. The terror of creating a life with no structural support other than stacks of money is overwhelming. But instead of a culture that imagines what women can do with our freedoms, we’re instead retreating into a fantasy of cozy disempowerment.

Recommendations:

• I liked this deep-dive on why the music at the Met opera sucks so much.

• I got the bad taste that Jane Austen Wrecked My Life left in my mouth out with a Film Forum viewing of Shall We Dance, the only good movie about the male midlife crisis! That movie is fucking delightful. I am impatient for this version, with almost 20 minutes that had been cut for the original American release restored, to show up on Criterion or someplace similar.

• Someone should fix the market.

• The worst painting you’ve ever seen in your life might show up at the Smithsonian.