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(cont'd from previous thought) I mean, it's my old beef with Virginia Woolf again, isn't it? Her insistence in Room of One's Own that the disruption of women's novels by their sociopolitical rage prevents them, rather than enables them, in reaching aesthetic incandescence. It's the place where I've never been able to get myself to agree with her - because everything she says about the way Charlotte's anger tears through the narrative fabric of Jane Eyre, about the way that Austen holds herself back and prevents the same, I'm on board with. Only, it makes me love Charlotte all the more, and is the major factor in my lack of passion for Austen. I love seeing Charlotte claw through the warp and weft of the literary tradition with the ferocity of her feminist rage, love it.

(there's something to do with Brecht in this thought-stream as well, though I'm not sure I quite have the connection down. It's that I know from long exposure that I respond with heightened affective intensity to the strategies of Brechtianism, the exposure of the mechanisms of the story and its conveyance. I trip hardest of all on that stuff, it makes me feel so much that sometimes it's too much to even deal with. Witness the way I feel about Into the Woods. But I confuse myself once I actually go into Brecht's theoretical writing, because he's talking about using disruption to create affective distance/ the V-effekt, and in me it doesn't work that way at all. Virginia seems to be distanced, alienated, and put-off by Charlotte's proto-Brechtian disruption of formal illusion, just as Brecht's theoretical writing would seem to anticipate. It only makes me fall harder in love.)

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"Charlotte's proto-Brechtian disruption of formal illusion" - I don't understand how CB disrupts formal illusion more than Austen JA makes it very clear that she's a novelist, writing a novel, in several places. There's one time - can't exactly recall where... where she writes that something about how the reader can seethe book's nearly finished, by the few pages which are left. Am I misunderstanding what you mean (highly probable) or just not knowing enough about Bronte's writing?

I'm actually not sure I would have made that claim on my own? I was mostly thinking through Virginia Woolf, who complains about the way Jane's feminist rants break the unities of the text but praises JA's smoother and less-interrupted style. JA certainly is metatextual, extremely so - but I do think Virginia has a point about JA's metatextuality being more deliberate, more polished, less disrupted. Virginia talks about the "breaks" in CB, and that sounds about right to me - there's something unpolished and uncontrolled about the way that CB's passion takes over her pen, something that really works for me - as it doesn't seem to have worked for Virginia.

Thanks - I see now the distinction you are drawing between CB's disruptions of illusion and JA's very different ones. I should read VW again, to see what she says about Austen's assertions that she's a novelist writing a novel. (Which I enjoy - from Sterne to ... Trollope? Thackeray, anyway. But de gustibus.)

I'll now go away and ponder on metatextuality and nineteeth-century novels generally, and whether it declined through the century. Thanks for the interesting post!

I think there were ideas about The Novel around at the time when she was writing about how it should formally be, strongly inflected by H James and presumably the sort of thing that EM Forster was about when he disses on breaking the 4th wall in Aspects of the Novel. (And for real tooth-grindyness about C19th women novelists, see David Cecil's work on same.)

Which also has problems about being a Whiggish progress narrative to The Perfect Model of What A Novel Should Be Like, as in 'Fielding did all these asides to reader, but we NO BETTAH NAO'.

Failure to embrace the sixty and sixty (+) ways.

bah henry james.

Can I just say how much it breaks my heart looking at Woolf's relationship with Forster and seeing how hard she tries and how little he gives her in return?

I'd never thought about it like that, but yes, that is also part of my disinterest in Austen. I just don't see the 'biting feminist critic' everyone else seems to see in her. I see lightly bitchy social commentary with no real guts behind it.

I haven't read much Bronte beyond Jane Eyre, and then too young to really think of it in feminist terms, but her writing has *grit*.

I do think the feminist voice is there - Rosario Ferre has this great short essay, "From Ire to Irony," about the suppression of women's anger in their fiction, and it really convinced me on the Feminist Austen score - but Austen and Bronte always remind me of Blake's dig at Milton: "Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it." Austen's got her rage on such a tight chain.

Ah, but Brecht in theory and Brecht in practice were two different things, too. Both him as a playwright and as a director. (If you read descriptions by the actors, and also correspondance with collaborators etc.) He so wasn't above using emotional connections for the audience; he didn't want it to feel safe, though, I think that's the distance intended, i.e. maintaining the ability to think about the story you're told.

Re: Charlotte's anger, famously directed at Austen when people kept telling her she should write like Jane. I'm not sure whether I'd call it feminist anger, though; it was certainly connected to both her own entrapment in Victorian female roles, but at the same time, at lot of it is directed at other women. I'm thinking less of Bertha Mason here than of Blanche Ingram (what Rochester does in pretending to court her to make Jane jealous is incredibly jerkass not just to Jane but also Blanche, but I have the impression Charlotte thought Blanche had it coming), and one of her memorable anti Austen outbursts imagine the late Jane A. looking down at her "with a well bred sneer", which makes me think Charlotte who didn't know anything about JA's circumstances mentally cast her as Blanche and every female employer Charlotte in her governess attempts ever had. There's also her demonizing of Madame Heger (who seems to have handled a situation where one of her teachers crushed on her husband and turned increasingly stalkery with as much tact as she could) while casting Monsieur Heger as a flawless Übermale who has all the answers and surely would love her if only Madame would let him. It's an understandable emotional escape mechanism in what must have been an incredibly painful situation for Charlotte, but still.

I mean you're right of course. I'm glad I can be Charlotte's reader, and don't have to be her friend. It's just - it comes so easy to me, making justifications for others, and I have such an awfully hard time mustering and maintaining anger on my own behalf, I end up using fiction as a prosthetic, or something to lean on. I - and I think many other women too, by virtue of feminine socialization practices - often don't let myself experience, acknowledge, and integrate upset; it's so exhilarating watching Charlotte acknowledging everything all over the place that I get carried away.

I suspect that emotional health, as usual, lies between the two extremes: it's not fair to hate Mme. Heger, but at the same time it's all right to feel angry and upset about your situation. It might not be Austen's fault if her legacy is used as a stick to beat one, but the smacking still legitimately smarts, and one has every right to object. Charlotte is way too far over to the one side, but I tend to get stuck on the other, so we balance each other out!