Carrol Cox wrote:
>As to MP your general statement about Austen is correct -- she was
profoundly conservative. Your specific remarks belong in Cliffs notes
and are the cliches of the most superficial tendencies in the history of criticism of austen. You are probably also correct in your invocation of burke, but it is childish to leap from a general philosophical account to an attempt at specific analysis of a text. You are prfoundly wrong in your amateurish invocation of "sense & reason" as though their content were self-evident. You might read Empson's _structure of complex words_.
>
Right, in a six-line email I'm supposed to unpack sense and reason. Good one. Well how's this for reasoned: "superficial," "Cliff's Notes," "childish," and "amateurish." The last is particularly good from a declared leftist, as if litcrit were supposed to be left to the "professionals." Phyllis Franklin would be proud.
I don't quite know how you derive my worldview from a reading of Austen. My point is that dependency and humanity are the kind of liberal shibboleths (hence the reference to Bloom) that _MP_'s narrator implies that Fanny is too dumb to see through. Fanny is dependent on the Bertrams for her (imagined) class identity, and they take every opportunity to lord it over her. When Fanny asks about the plantations on Antigua, on which the Betrams depend for their wealth (despite the fact that, as readers of the novel would know, the slave trade was illegal in British colonies at the time of the events in the novel), she is silenced. By novel's end, Fanny has erased her confrontation with Bertram power from her memory, since she now occupies the place in the family left when Mary is condemned to exile. If the novel is about dependency, it's not about "humanity," but historical permutations of class made operable by liberal notions like "humanity as dependency."
Sheesh.
Christian