#in the case of the hero in this book (mr. knightley basically)

[triviareads]

as I read Match Me If You Can by Swati Hegde, I'm pondering on the true desi girl experience being trying your damnedest to wear a different Indian outfit for every occasion while a guy just rolls up in the same kurta every time but you can't even fault him because he looks good in it 😭😭😭

[jac-is-procrastinating-again]

Guys. We need to talk about THAT KISS and Jane Austen.

No, we do - bear with me.

"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." (Mr Knightley, hero of Emma by Jane Austen)

So. That Kiss. It's SOOOO messed up, yeah? And Az's expression in the lift veers all over the place, and it's really complex. But WTAF is going on there?

I just had a bit of an epiphany that i thought you might like to share.

So; consider the context.

Aziraphale knows Crowley loves him, yeah? He can FEEL when things are loved (like Tadfield). He considers himself C's partner for life (see that glorious little eyebrow raise when Shax tells him he's not C's type). But he kinda knows that C hasn't quantified it yet, so he does all the things he can to make C think about him as a romantic partner.

He dresses up with some care and puts himself in danger (see how pretty he looks in the French Revolution), then basically arranges himself in a ray of sunlight in picturesque chains till C turns up because he knows how happy it makes C to rescue him (and by the joy on his little face, that's a two way street).

He does nice things for him (where do you think C got the book with all the pics including Alpha Centauri from in S1? He doesn't read books).

He's got all these jolly japes and escapades that he initiates either to bring C joy or to get his attention or whatever. And every damn time C just fails to even consider that there's anything to it other than some sort of accidental humour.

Az doesn't stop there. He does the touchy-feely thing (you almost expect him to say "La, sir!" and hit him with a fan coquettishly) (off topic, I would give actual genuine money to see a C17th genderswapped Az try this). He does every damn thing he can think of to get C to really *see* him...

BUT

HIS DATING MANUAL IS JANE AUSTEN

Bless his angelic cotton socks.

Now in some ways this works quite well. Often the protag's journey in JA culminates in the realisation that though they thought they were unworthy of love, that they actually aren't. Then they get together and it's a whole happy ending.

To Az, this would be absolutely spot on - it would speak to his very heart, yeah?? The "bad" demon who isn't bad would end up with the "good" angel, all's well with the world. They often cock up the first attempt at a proposal, so the fact that it didn't work at the end of S1 is fine because Az is trying to trigger a proposal in S2 with the ball and helping the girls like Emma tries to help Harriet in JA (only thankfully, with better results thanks to a legion of demons).

Az LOVES C, and he knows C loves him but kinda hasn't realised what that means, and he's going all out to find actual romantic love.

BUT let's face it, Az is a total innocent. He'd never read erotica in a month of Sundays, just in case that counts as impure thoughts or something. so the SUM TOTAL of what he knows about how love works, what love is AND CAN BE.... is what's in Jane Austen.

You know what ISN'T in any Jane Austen novel??

Kisses. Yep, you read that right - according to JSTOR (website where academic researchers post stuff) there are ZERO kisses in JA.

There is maybe possibly the implication that someone was kissing before the scene begins in one book, and in Emma there is a shocking and outrageous moment when Mr Elton grabs her hand when proposing (at the time this would have been physically so overfamiliar as to be almost indecent.)

And this is Az's playbook, bless him.

So how does that alter thing?

As far as he's concerned, grabbing C for a dance is the most forward thing he could have done--just look at his face in the moments before, and the whole thing about how his whole hand is intertwined with C, whereas he barely touches the fingertips of the others when dancing (JA etiquette again).

Crowley on the other hand, has been hanging out next to a striptease club in the 70s, and in all sorts of clubs. He's probably a bit Az-centric to have bothered with any shaggery but he has an interested mind and I can absolutely see him reading erotica and chuckling at the lengths humans will go to in search of pleasure. But it wouldn't occur to him that love and sex are that linked, probably, or if it did, only for humans.

So when he gets a talking to by Nina and Maggie, you see Crowley.exe stop working as he starts realising that the whole concept of ROMANTIC LOVE might be applicable to the feeling between himself and Az...

He's absolutely flabbergasted. And then thoughtful. Then a little bit quiet and tentative and it's all set up to be the most beautiful, tender exploration of what could exist between them.... (yeah, thanks for that, Neil).

Then in comes the Metatron like a wrecking ball, and deftly fucks them up.

His proposal is designed to split them apart (which it does) and because he gets in first, that leaves Crowley desperate. He knows that his chance has been lost, so he grabs Az in one horrible, desperate, brutal kiss.

And Az DOESN'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT KISSES.

Az is thinking in terms of a picnic on Box Hill (he tentatively suggests a future picnic when he gives C the holy water in the 70s actually). He thinks it will be a series of lengthy but delicate conversations about how C was perhaps a little too emphatic last time. He's ticked the boxes; there's been the dance, there's been "la sir" and all that malarkey.

He's a little vague on what a proposal actually is if it isn't in a letter (another of JA's irritating habits is to skate over the vital moment) but he thinks that maybe with a little careful curation, he can bring them to this point of happy understanding.

And then, what he gets is THAT KISS.

he doesn't have a fucking clue what it is or what it means, guys, not at first, and he's so SO shocked

He knows how much C loves him; he was expecting/ wanting gentle togetherness (unspecified)but what he got was angry desperation and he doesn't know what to do with that.

Remember in S1 when Crowley goes nose to nose with him in the not-kiss ("I AM NOT NICE!!")? Look at his face when Sister Mary turns up and they don't immediately move. He isn't at all frightened - he does his coy face. Then he spends the next five minutes straightening his clothes, apparently unmoved, and as if he actually rather enjoyed it.

This time he does look scared. He trusts C implicitly but the emotional intensity of the kiss just overloads him totally and so he automatically goes into "i forgive you" mode and it all goes downhill from there. The hand to his lips is part "WTAF was that???" and maybe a little realisation that if it hadn't shocked him so much he might have been open to doing something of the sort again. But he's absolutely floored.

The slightly heartbreaking addition to this is that they both hang around so they can sort it out after the initial shock, but Metatron is wise to that and whisks Az away before he can catch his breath.

Crowley knows how badly he messed up, and he's probably a bit freaked out as well. But when we see Az in the lift, trying not to cry and looking stunned, there's a moment where he suddenly looks deliriously happy. For my money, that's where he realises that the bits Jane Austen left out were probably along these lines, and that Crowley just left out the niceties and cut to the chase (and isn't that so like Crowley??)

And then he has that look of incredulous euphoria he tries to hide from Metatron, as he realises that Crowley wants to kiss him. And that (perhaps in a gentler, kinder way) that he wants to be kissed with that much passion again.

He's just had his whole life handed to him on a plate and simultaneously taken away in the same moment. Yeah, there's stuff he has to do and complications along the way, but God help us when these two get back together. If their love doesn't save the actual universe, I'm gonna be really surprised.

There's a great line at the end of Princess Bride that keeps running through my brain. "“Since the invention of the kiss there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.”

How do you one-up that? Not with THAT kiss, certainly, it was nothing of the sort. The NEXT one though... oh my God. It'll be so good that we're starting to melt now from three years in the past.

I guess we'll find out in a couple of years time in any case- but for now, that's what I'm choosing to look forward to.

:)

[austenmarriage]

New Post has been published on Austen Marriage

New Post has been published on http://austenmarriage.com/miss-austen-no-politician/

Miss Austen—No Politician, She

In this, the 200th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s death, we learn that white supremacists are co-opting the English author in support of a racial dictatorship, shocked opponents are claiming that true readers are “rational, compassionate, liberal-minded people,” and conservatives are chiding Janeites for assuming that great literature can be written only by great liberals.

All these political takes on Austen, yet whenever someone describes her political views, they get them wrong, because they have no idea what hers actually were. As an individual and an artist, she kept her political mouth firmly shut. She had other—I would claim—more important things to write about.

This silence can be confounding, for Austen lived in a time tumultuously like our own. Slavery—the “alt-right” issue of the day—was bitterly fought over. War, political corruption, and disparity in wealth had England on the brink of breakdown. Factory automation was destroying the middle class. Sound familiar?

Yet, when asked about her aunt’s political views, Caroline Austen, who wrote a memoir of the author, said: “In vain do I try to recall any word or expression of Aunt Jane’s that had reference to public events—Some bias of course she must have had—but I can only guess to which quarter it inclined.”

As today, the politics of 1800-1820 had many “quarters.” Radical Tories believed that God had put themselves and the King in charge; the poor deserved their lot because God had made them so. Radical Whigs, full of entrepreneurial zeal, believed that the poor deserved to starve because they were too lazy or incompetent to rise from their rags.

In between was a shifting coalition of moderate Tories, who felt a responsibility to those beneath them, and moderate Whigs, who sought to spread the political and social wealth—mostly to themselves, the rising business and technical class.

Lower-case “republicanism”—power to the people by putting them in charge, rather than an anointed king—drew the same reaction among conservatives then as “socialism” does today—the fear of the leveling of society (and power). A few desperate citizens pushed for revolt out of despair at the lack of economic and political justice.

Many of the issues are woven into the fabric of Austen’s work, but none plays out in the foreground. Thus, people take a slice here and there to justify their own political stances. Sheryl Craig, in her book Jane Austen and the State of the Nation, goes so far as to conclude that Austen’s novels are “carefully constructed texts … about political economics. The love stories came later.” Despite much great information in her work, Craig’s conclusion strikes me as exactly wrong.

A few feminist scholars were also described as “startled” to discover that a Wikipedia entry on Austen claimed she supported traditional marriage. Sorry, but she did.  Every woman in her novels outside of traditional marriage, unless she started out rich, ends up impoverished, disgraced, or dead. The women in traditional marriage end up happy—or make a conscious and occasionally odious tradeoff for its security (see Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins). What Austen insisted upon is that traditional marriage include love and respect.

Naval officers like Frank Austen needed patronage to move up in the navy; otherwise, an officer could languish for years. All but a wealthy oldest son faced an uncertain future.

  The poet W. H. Auden wrote a ditty noting that her supposed love stories actually describe the “economic basis” of society. Four of her six novels open with a reference to wealth, and conversations regularly involve finance. But this “economic basis” develops not through political discourse but through her factual descriptions of life.

Naval officers like Jane’s brothers needed patronage to move up in the navy; otherwise, an officer could languish for years. All but a wealthy oldest son faced an uncertain future.

Being dependent, women must be canny in their romantic choices (see what happens to Marianne and Lydia when they are not). The non-inheriting males must find a career (see all younger sons). The lower classes need patrons to move up (sailor William Price, along with Jane Austen’s sailor brothers).

One sees in these stories her liberal sympathies, but it is not a sympathy of class. While self-made naval heroes return from war to supplant the attenuated aristocracy in Persuasion, the author holds in equal esteem the dull but reliable Col. Brandon, the grouchy aristocrat Darcy, the energetic Mr. Knightley, the farmer Martin—anyone who shares the virtues of industry, intelligence, and generosity.

The telling issue of that era was the slave trade, which became illegal in 1807, when Austen was 31, in her maturity as an author. As I have discussed before, Edward Said and other scholars claim that she turns a blind eye, particularly in Mansfield Park, where the family’s money comes from slavery on a West Indies plantation. Paula Byrne and others, in contrast, claim that Fanny Price in Mansfield Park speaks “truth to power” about slavery.

As today, racial issues divided society. Economic and religious traditionalists supported slavery and evangelicals led the bitter fight to end it.

Austen’s admiration for the poet-abolitionist William Cowper and for Thomas Clarkson’s abolitionist book indicate her opposition to slavery. Despite a few anti-slavery winks, however, Mansfield Park does not prove

As today, racial issues divided society. Economic and religious traditionalists supported slavery and evangelicals led the bitter fight to end it.

these personal views. Apologists cite Fanny’s comment that, when she raises the issue of the slave trade with her family, she is met with “dead silence!” The inability of anyone to respond to her question demonstrates Fanny’s—Austen’s—moral rebuke.

  Only it doesn’t.

Fanny explains the silence: Her cousins simply have no interest in their father’s business, and Fanny does not wish to “set myself off at their expense,” by showing any curiosity about his topics. Earlier, she makes similar, maddeningly oblique comments. She could mean that she’s interested in the plantation reforms that were beginning to make slavery somewhat less horrific. We don’t know. Slavery adds a subtle metaphor about Fanny’s own lowly status, but Austen is too talented to turn her most complex novel into a political tract.

In attitude, Austen was a moderate Tory—the equivalent of a moderate Republican. Austen never challenged the existing order. Like the abolitionist William Wilberforce, she wanted to reform it—not abolish it. She believed in merit as the economic salvation for herself and her brothers. She was a proto-feminist in the sense that she was a pragmatist. Dependent on the men in her family for most of her life, she needed to be able to support, as well as express, herself. That ability became critical when her brother Henry’s bank collapsed, taking much of the family’s wealth with it. (Most of Jane’s funds were safely deposited in Navy Fives–stock paying five percent.)

Practical economic considerations fill her books, but to read the novels as political commentary is to miss the point. Austen creates a rich, original world in which complex, believable human beings interact at their best and worst.

Any political lessons flow from the way human characteristics manifest themselves at all levels in the real world. Life experience, not ideology, dictates any political take-aways from her plots. She demonstrates that women should be able to accept relationships on their own terms and to provide for themselves as their needs require.

In the 200th commemoration of her death, it is disquieting that these lessons of a woman’s right to basic self-determination remain too often unheeded—even disputed.