The Postcolonial Jane Austen by You-Me Park
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Part of my ongoing research in preparation for my graduate thesis.
It is always unfortunate and a little annoying when books turn out to be non-referencing when researching one’s topic. But regardless of my personal feelings with respect to the time I used perusing this text, I found it rather confusing and lacking any distinct focus and direction.
I remember taking a postcolonial literature course back during my undergraduate years with a professor named Austen, kind of ironic, right?
The prof was nice enough and very enthusiastic about the topic and I really tried my best and worked hard in the course, but at the end I, actually both of us, realized that the postcolonial branch of literature and literary criticism wasn’t my forte.
Having said that, I found I struggled to find a definite description of what postcolonial theme/topic encompasses and found the introductory essay in this collection puzzling, to say the least. Was it about race, gender, social issues, political issues, cultural issues; it wasn’t clear which direction this was meant to take.
Besides my obvious shortcomings in this general branch of English academia, I felt my patience tested reading the essays as they kept name-dropping one contributor to the postcolonial work after another. Nothing was really explained or put into context and I kept thinking, yes, I have heard of this or that academic/author’s work, but I can’t quite put my finger on it right now. It was distracting.
In that sense I thought these essays were a sort of historic overview of the work done in postcolonial literature with a slight nod to Austen’s works, although only Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion were mentioned and relatively briefly at that.
At one point, one of the essayists decided to discuss a draft of a novel titled ‘Emma’ by Charlotte Brontë, which made this whole experience even more confusing.
One common theme I have noticed in the literary and social criticism of Jane Austen’s work, was the opinion that she was not loud enough in her opinions against slavery, against the lack of education of women and their denial to work and support themselves in the 1800’s, hence the criticism category.
I feel that sometimes these critics forget that it was a difficult time to voice one’s true opinion. During the time of war with France anything that could be construed as less than “English” was considered treason. Irony and wit were Jane’s way to insert, very subtly, yet relatively clearly, her opinions without getting into hot water for it.
Besides, how many social and political issues could she have possibly addressed in her books? At one point it would have become obvious.
Other than that, I found the essay titled “Learning to ride at Mansfield Park” quite interesting.
Overall, the general tone of these essays was rather dry and missed a sense of enthusiasm (for lack of a better word). I was able to glean a few other sources to check out from the essays’ respective bibliography, making it a helpful resource in itself. I would suggest it to anyone interested in postcolonial literary criticism.
