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{"id":18440,"date":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=188"},"modified":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","slug":"queen-of-snark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/10\/queen-of-snark\/","title":{"rendered":"Queen of Snark"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

D<\/span>evoney Looser says that Jane Austen\u2019s juvenilia is an exercise in burlesque<\/a>. Not the strip-tease variety, but not so far from that either: \u201cWhere a parody sets out to mimic conventions and make us laugh, a burlesque relies \u2018on an extravagant incongruity between a subject and its treatment.\u2019 They are bolder and more coarsely humorous pieces that go beyond silly copies, like turbo-charged parodies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Austen\u2019s juvenilia consists of \u201c74,000 words of unpredictable snark,\u201d with lines like this from Love and Freindship<\/em>: \u201cYou are this Day 55. If a woman may ever be said to be in safety from the determined Perseverance of disagreeable Lovers and the cruel Persecutions of obstinate Fathers, surely it must be at such a time of Life.\u201d <\/p>\n

All quite, quite deliciously true. But I think that Looser makes a misstep when she characrterizes the juvenilia as \u201cthe most feminist\u201d of Austen\u2019s writings, and when she wonders what made Austen draw back from \u201cprogressive impulses.\u201d <\/p>\n

That\u2019s a misstep not only because it projects contemporary categories onto Austen. It misleads because \u201cfeminist\u201d can mean so many different things. It also overreads the evidence of the juvenilia. Looser writes that \u201cAusten was a child-writer of great, raucous, gender-role-defying fun, an irreverent observer of life\u2019s ridiculous conventions and fiction\u2019s silly habits.\u201d But gender-defiance of the sort Austen depicts is as old as tomboys; growing up in a house full of boys, do we think that she never wanted to be one, to do what boys get to do? And, if she did, does that make her a \u201cfeminist\u201d?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"