lrthreads: multi-fandom side blog

Happy birthday to Kara Walker! This etching, from Walker’s series reflecting on the traumatic history and enduring ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade, represents the sea as a vehicle for human suffering. In the center, hands lift a slave ship up above the tumultuous waves. In the foreground, a submerged female figure attempts to swim through choppy waves, giving the scene a sense of hopelessness. See this print currently on view in our installation “Seascapes.”

“no world,” 2010, by Kara Walker © Kara Walker 

Was talking to my dad yesterday and.

Hm.

Apparently my dad is (still?) disappointed that I didn’t get my PhD in English Lit (and tried not very subtly to convince me to apply to grad school) because he’s very certain of the fact that I am exactly the right kind of person to fixate on tiny details and do a lot of research on them and write a dissertation on them and he’s not *wrong* it’s just that I don’t know how to tell him that I have channeled that energy into writing 300k words of pornographic fanfiction because I would *much* rather do that and work at a computer store than work with academics.

But also we both agree that it’s bullshit that nobody adapts the conservatory scene or the banquet scene in Dune, so that was a nice chat.

I should point out that my dad was a college professor, before he retired. I don’t know if this was him going “my kid should be a college professor too” or if this was him going “one of my kids should attain a higher level of education than I have and the other one is a functional human being so it’ll have to be you” but I did point out to him that I’m neck deep in writing approximately twelve essays about hierarchy, community, and liberation in the works of Jane Austen and he was like “but you’re not going to publish it” and. The thing is, I *am* going to publish it, I’m just going to publish it for free and while I might pay someone to copy edit it and ask some people to review the individual essays, I’m not going to attempt to get it peer reviewed.

Also he’s never sure whether or not I’m fighting with my sister when we talk about Austen.

(to be fair, neither am I)

My sister owns like twenty extremely twee and photogenic editions of Austen books and went on a Jane Austen vacation where she went to the Austen house and went somewhere else and did an Austen tea but *GOD FORBID* we talk about class and how naval commissions worked in the Georgian era. No, Austen was never writing about *class.* English authors would never write about anything so gauche as *class* /s

There’s a definite possibility that Bingley’s father got rich through the slave trade, but Austen leaves out specifics in that regard and the vague way she describes the family’s wealth (so new that their father didn’t live to buy a mansion, but no so new that his daughters were only educated at home, and belonging to a family in Northern England) could mean that their wealth came about from the slave trade or could mean that it resulted from the beginnings of industrialization and the cotton trade (which, of course, would still have had some profits derived from slavery but is not quite on par with Sir Bertram’s ownership of a plantation in Antigua in Mansfield Park).

As to the Gardiners, they don’t actually appear to be spectacularly wealthy, just *more* wealthy than the Bennets, and there’s no special speed connected with the way Mr. Gardiner raised himself from being the son of a lawyer to someone who lives in a part of town that Caroline Bingley mocks him for (which is to say, he doesn’t appear to have raised himself particularly high in society). Mrs. Bennet married slightly up, which is the Bennet daughters are tenuously part of the landed gentry but are still fairly poor, and Mrs. Phillips married a lawyer like her father; she seems to be better off than Mrs. Bennet but worse off than the Gardiners. But the source of Mr. Gardiner’s income is pretty clear:

Working in trade and keeping warehouses in London means that while Mr. Gardiner may have traded in goods that were made or made possible by slaves, he was not directly involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Living close to his warehouses indicates that he is not wealthy in the way that the Bingleys or Darcy are wealthy - he is wealthy enough to keep a house in London and take vacations, but not so wealthy that he can live off of the interest of his wealth.

Given few direct references to slavery in Austen, which are uniformly negative, I think that it is unlikely that she would intentionally write sympathetic characters as engaged in the slave trade.

Austen was not an abolitionist, and it’s important not to color her as one. I don’t want to whitewash the Austen family connection to slavery - it did definitely exist (her father was the trustee of a plantation in Jamaica for some time) - but there has been something of an upswing in people attributing all of the wealth in Austen’s work to the slave trade, and that isn’t accurate.

Darcy, for instance, isn’t contemptible for his wealth because he was a slave trader. He’s contemptible for his wealth because he was a *landlord.*

(I’m joking, kind of.)

@ms-demeanor I agree with you for the most part, but I’m kinda curious why you say that Austen’s references to slavery are uniformly negative.

I can only think of two instances where slavery is mentioned directly:

The first is in Emma where Mrs. Elton thinks Jane Fairfax is making a reference to the slave trade, and says that she and Mr. Elton are abolitionists– to which Jane replies that she wasn’t talking about the slave trade, but the governess trade. It’s an interesting exchange, because the Eltons are portrayed as being nasty, petty, annoying people, and they’re the only people in Austen’s books (as far as I remember) who explicitly say they’re abolitionists. At the same time, the way Mrs. Elton phrases it kind of makes it sound like she assumes that being an abolitionist is not only accepted, but expected of her– and no one else, including Emma, seems to think it worth remarking upon that she is an abolitionist. I guess if you squint it’s maybe implied that Jane is an abolitionist? But I don’t think it’s stated explicitly; rather it’s an assumption made by Mrs. Elton (who makes a lot of other misguided assumptions).

The second is in Mansfield Park, which you mentioned. Sir Thomas Bertram explicitly gets his money from slavery, and while he’s portrayed as being rather domineering at times, he’s certainly not the bad guy in that book by any means. Pretty much no one in that book treats Fanny well, but Sir Thomas is kinder to her than almost anyone other than Edmund, and also admits he was wrong to pressure her to marry Henry Crawford. His connection to slavery, as far as I can recall, is portrayed pretty neutrally.

I don’t know what Austen’s personal views on slavery were, but her books seem to be deeply ambivalent about it– honestly, my impression purely from her books is that she considers the subject rather taboo, or at least distasteful. When Mrs. Elton talks about abolition, it’s treated as embarrassing/awkward, rather than as a moral issue, and Sir Bertram’s failings don’t have anything to do with him owning slaves.

I’d love to be corrected, though– maybe I missed something!

The scene in Emma actually strongly implies that Mrs. Elton’s family is connected to the slave trade and that she is extremely defensive about it. She hears a mention of slavery and immediately says “if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend of the abolition,” Mr. Suckling being her brother-in-law.

It’s phrased in a very “the lady doth protest too much” kind of way, because she hears someone mention the concept of trading in human flesh and immediately assumes it’s a jab at her brother-in-law - which suggests that her brother-in-law (not her husband, father, or sibling, very specifically this one person she is connected to) was involved in the slave trade before abolition.

It’s like Ivanka Trump hearing someone mention the border wall and turning around to say “My father is the least racist person you’ll ever meet!”

This is also emphasized by the fact that her family name is Hawkins, the family name of the man who introduced the slave trade to England, and that she is from Bristol (with Liverpool and London it was one of the three main hubs of slavery in England) but pretends to be from Bath.

Fanny Price’s one mention of the slave-trade is met with dead silence. She asks Edmund if he heard her ask her uncle about the slave trade, he says that he had hoped she would ask him more questions, and she responds that she would have if her question hadn’t been met with dead silence. There are several interpretations to this, but honestly my feeling is that Fanny asked a question that she thought was apt and it went over like a lead balloon.

Fanny is a *fascinating* character because she is so completely broken by her family that you have to approach her as an unreliable narrator. Fanny looks at the world like a kicked dog and it makes Mansfield Park absolute torture to read sometimes, and part of that is in her devotion and generosity toward her *awful* relatives.

I would actually argue that Sir Thomas Bertram is one of the worst of several very bad men in Mansfield Park. When, after years of abuse at the hands of the Bertram family and constant reminders of how much she owes them for allowing her into their home to be abused, she refuses to marry Henry Crawford and tells her uncle that she could not like him enough to marry him, he criticizes her for essentially talking back, saying that he thought she was free of the independence of spirit that infected young women these days. (This paper is good overall, but look specifically at pages 10-11 for how poorly the Bertrams generally and Sir Thomas Bertram in particular treated Fanny). My general takeaway is that everyone at Mansfield Park is terrible enough to deserve each other and that Fanny and Edmund are lucky to get away and be happy and poor together.

There’s actually a TON of academic writing on slavery in Mansfield Park. There are several the points that academics can get deep in the weeds on (particularly whether or not the names she used were allusions; I tend to believe they were) but the “slavery” section of the Mansfield Park wikipedia page has a decent, if quick, overview.

There are plenty of people who see Austen as an apologist for slavery, there are plenty who see her as an abolitionist. I don’t think that Austen was an abolitionist in an activist sense, I do think that she was likely very sympathetic to abolition.

Reading through Austen analysis is interesting because you stumble across a lot of people who have no idea what is going on. Austen was relatively subtle in her own time, and now seems so subtle that she is opaque. If you want to get a feel for that, look at the Jane Austen Fandom Wiki, where nobody who has spent more than an afternoon with a Jane Austen book has ever written a description of any of the characters. Their description of Sir Thomas is so anodyne that it becomes revisionist.

Genuinely, there is a lot of context that modern readers have lost when reading Austen. There are a lot of references and allusions and turns of phrase that fly right over our heads unless we spend a lot of time catching up with them. It’s a thing that happens in literature as time passes, it’s why Shakespeare nerds and Chaucer nerds are slightly crazy - they know all these excellent in-jokes and they can’t explain them to normies without writing a dissertation. Austen is very similar, and because her books are often presented as comedies of manners it is easy to overlook the fact that nearly all of them also contain tremendous tragedy.

Anyway, if anyone ever wants to read up more on Austen and Austen criticism, Persuasions is an online journal of Austen criticism that is at least partially free to read. It’s pretty awesome.