Misreading Jane Austen

Once this girl came into the writing center with a paper comparing Pride and Prejudice and Madame Bovary, wherein she argued that the fundamental difference between Madame Bovary and Elizabeth Bennett was that the former refused to be satisfied with her life while the latter happily accepted whatever life gave her. I politely pointed out if Elizabeth was the type to simply accept what life gave her, then she would have married Mr. Collins; or, she would have married Mr. Darcy while he was still being a condescending prick to her. I argued that Elizabeth Bennett is every bit as unyielding in her demands on life as Madame Bovary, and that her analysis should therefore dwell on why Bennett gets what she wants in the end while Bovary does not.

I offer this vignette as an example of the typical misreading of most "women's" literature, wherein women who are compliant, docile, and domestic are supposedly set up as the ideal, in spite of how often this character isn't present at all, even in Jane Austen novels. I find this misreading tendency relevant because I recently saw a set of seven novels "for LDS women" being promoted at Deseret Book. I have no problem with the selection itself, which included Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, and Jane Eyre. At least five of those are undisputed classics of English literature.

No, what I find distressing is how they are presented, as "books for LDS women," complete with flowery book covers to emphasize their (false) simplicity and frivolity. I wrote an essay recently arguing that the genre a text is presented in influences how we read the text (for example, Frankenstein reads differently if you approach is as a horror rather than as a Gothic Romance). In other words, I'm distressed that these complex works of literature, in being presented as "for LDS women," will perpetuate the same misreadings as shown by the girl who came into the Writing Center.

The role of women in the LDS Church is complex and often misunderstood, and filtering the readings of difficult texts through this reductionist lens of a "model for the proper behavior of women" does nothing to address this complex relationship. This simplistic presentation cheats both the text and the reader.

I also can't help but note the texts that were left out: Mrs. Dalloway, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Frankenstein and Villette are all famous, inoffensive texts by women that are no where in sight in this collection. Now, I recognize that it's asking a lot to expect Virginia Woolf to appear in any official LDS book list; but the inclusion of even a single text that couldn't be immediately misread as a call for marriage and feminine-docility would be encouraging.