lunedì 13 luglio 2020




                     Interview with Chris Munroe 


                                         
Dorotea: Hello Chris,we would like to ask you some questions  about Jane Austen. How did your passion for this writer and her novels begin?
Chris:   I first read” Pride and Prejudice “when I was in high school. But I didn’t become really interested in her as an author until I took a class on her in college. I read all of her books in one semester. And for my final project, I did a comparison of two or three modern young adult retellings of” Pride and Prejudice.”
 Dorotea: What makes Jane Austen an immortal and modern writer in your opinion ?
 Chris: • I think Jane Austen is so immortal and modern because she wrote about relationships and feelings that were very genuine. She looked at the world around her and saw the role women had in society, which was less than equal, and she wrote stories about women who found happiness anyway. And along the way she satirized some of the inequality that she saw. For instance,” Northanger Abbey”, her first written novel (and last published) was a satirization of the Gothic novel which was popular at the time. She wrote about a young woman who seemed to believe she was living in a Gothic novel, when in fact she was not, highlighting the silliness of the genre itself.
 Dorotea:  What are the characteristics of emotional and family relationships in Jane Austen’s time?
 Chris: • I’m not sure. In my class we studied more about women’s equality at the time, reading the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and the like. I imagine the relationships you see in the books between the characters were pretty similar to ones she saw around herself all the time. From Mr. and Mrs. Bennet (a foolish wife and a long suffering husband) to the sister in law from” Sense and Sensibility” (greedy and cold) to Emma and her father or any of the sibling relationships (warm and loving).
Silvana: Elizabeth Bennet was Jane Austen’s favourite heroine.”I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print” Do you like this character?
 Chris: • I love Elizabeth Bennet. She is so aware of what is proper and what will be best for her family and yet time and again she steps outside of propriety for the sake of her own happiness. Mom won’t send the carriage to check on Jane? She’ll just walk. Overheard Mr. Darcy talking down about her? Let him know she heard. Marrying Mr. Collins will save her sisters and mother from destitute homelessness when her father dies? She won’t do it. She is wholly independent (for a woman of her time period) and a very fun character. I can see why Austen liked her so much.
 Silvana: What do you think of the psychological analysis of the characters of her novels?
Chris:  • One of the things that has stuck with my from my college class is when we were talking about the novel Emma. My professor said that, basically, the reason Emma gets into so much trouble in the book is because she is bored. She needs, in other words, to get married to give her something to do. I’m not a huge fan of Emma, but that idea always stuck with me, that Emma caused so much trouble because she was a smart young woman with nothing to do. If she were a modern girl she would need to get a job, but in Austen’s time her only option was to marry, so that was the end Austen gave her.
 Chris:  • One other thing that I remember from class is from Persuasion. The couple who rents Anne’s father’s house are out driving one day and Austen describes them. The husband is directing the horses and every so often his wife reachers out and corrects his hold, keeping their carriage from going off in every direction. My professor made sure to point it out to us, because it’s a microcosm of their relationship and it displays some of Austen’s genius. The man drives, because that’s what society has told the couple has to happen, the woman can’t possibly drive. But every time he’s about to drive them off the road the woman calmly reaches over and corrects him.
 Silvana: Is Jane Austen a truly Romantic Novelist?
 Chris:  • If you’re talking about Romanticism (as opposed to, say, romance novels, which are a very different kind of genre) I’m going say…maybe not? So I haven’t studied the different literary eras myself, as I was much more interested in creative writing than literature when I was in college. But from my little reading from Wikipedia, I don’t think so. Jane Austen was a very grounded writer, and Romanticism seems a little too flighty for what she wrote. She was satirizing the world around her, not glorying in it, as it seems the Romantics were supposed to. However, there is a line in the Wikipedia article, “To express these feelings, it was considered the content of art had to come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a work should consist of.” In that case, I do believe Austen had the Romantic spirit, because she did tend to write heroines who ignored and even laughed at those “artificial” rules of society. But I don’t think she was truly a Romantic.
 Luca:  “ I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like" is the sentence that Jane Austen will write before composing the novel "Emma". Starting from this sentence, we can say that Emma is an anti-heroine, a rebel who refuses to recognize the principle of male authority. Can this female character embody, in a self-deprecating way, the writer's alter ego?
Chris:  • Absolutely. As I said above, one of the things I find most interesting about Emma, even though I don’t like her very much, is that she causes so much trouble because she was bored. I imagine Jane Austen felt rather bored a lot of the time too, which is why she wrote. It’s quite possible Emma is what she imagined she would be if she lived in a different socioeconomic bracket. There’s a modern author, Diana Gabaldon (she writes the Outlander series), who says that every character she writes, from the heroes to the awful, horrible, villains, are all a part of her. I’m not saying every character was Austen’s alter-ego, but I imagine many of the heroines contain traces of her, not just Emma.
 Luca:  Jane Austen was an acute observer of the society in which she lived, studied attitudes and emotions, but although her novels represent masterpieces of the pre-Romantic period, the author has a different vision of love and marriage, focusing mainly on the financial benefits derived from it. What leads the writer to this material vision of marriage?
Chris:  • Partly it was just the world she lived in. Austen was engaged for half a second to a gentleman, if I’m remembering correctly. She wasn’t a hermit, she readily engaged with society. She knew exactly what a woman could look forward to if she didn’t marry well (either as a spinster with no income beyond what her father/brothers gave her or as a woman married to man who doesn’t make enough money). Yet despite that I don’t think she took a completely material vision of marriage. After all, her stories are known to be some of the world’s greatest love stories. Jane doesn’t marry Darcy because he’s rich but because she loves him. Same goes for Emma and Anne. In fact, I’d say Persuasion is an argument against the material view of marriage. Anne doesn’t marry her love because someone convinces her he’s too poor and regrets it for years. Only when they come back together does she find true happiness.
 Luca: Jane Austen was one of the most shining icons of English literature in a complex and changing age, especially for the role in society of women who were beginning to become aware of their value, their responsibilities and above all their rights. With the protagonists of her novels, the writer describes the female universe within the wealthy English class of the Georgian period, emphasizing how women enjoyed few and limited rights and that "good marriage" was the primary goal of every family. Can we consider this wise denunciation, a sort of rebellion against the condition of women, also taking into account the active participation of the writer in the feminist movement of that time?
 Chris: • Yes, absolutely. As I’ve written above, Austen was often satirizing the world around her, making fun of the ridiculousness she saw regarding women and their place in the world. She was staunchly a feminist (think of the woman who corrects her husband’s driving in Persuasion) and I think she was definitely writing with the view of the feminist movement of the time. That’s why we studied writers like Mary Wollstonecraft in my college class.
Dorotea, Silvana and Luca: Chris,many thanks for talking to us ,today. It was very Kind of you and your answers are very interesting! 

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