Edward Said’s most egregious misreading of a literary work concerns Jane Austen’s
There are several references to Antigua and Sir Thomas’ plantation in
“We must first take stock of
So Jane Austen’s “discrete” reticence must be filled out by reading ahead a hundred years. In other words, there is nothing that would justify describing Austen as condoning slavery, but we must look to works written by others, not Austen herself, and written a hundred years later to do so!
Said covers his tracks, using a common ploy laid bare by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Intellectual Impostures. Intellectual impostors often, in willfully vague language, try to have it both ways. “Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.”[2] Here is how Said does it, denying his own thesis:
“All the evidence says that even the most routine aspects of holding slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation were cruel stuff. And everything we know about Jane Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery. Fanny Price reminds her cousin that after asking Sir Thomas about the slave trade, “there was such a dead silence” as to suggest that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both. That is true.”[3]
In a recent article, Susan Fraiman, takes to task Said’s lazy and unwarranted reading of Jane Austen:
“Yet had Said placed Sir Thomas Bertram, for example, in line with the deficient fathers who run unrelentingly from Northanger Abbey through Persuasion, he might perhaps have paused before assuming that Austen legitimates the master of
Gabrielle White devotes an entire book to defending Jane Austen from Edward Said. She examines Austen’s last three novels, and sets them in the context of the world of the abolitionists. Ms White writes, “The last three novels, the so-called Chawton novels [
For White, Mansfield Park “challenged the pro-slavery lobby amongst readers in a context after slave trading had been made a felony; it gave succour to the anti-slavery campaigners; and it told the story of a young girl that could retain readers’ interest once the hopes of abolition and emancipation would be achieved. It is only after change that the author is prepared to have done with everything else and restore all to ‘tolerable comfort.’ The narrator stipulates a change for the better ‘for ever’ in the eldest son and heir, Tom, who is reformed. The fictional world of
In the novel, Fanny Price recounts a conversation she had with her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram: “‘Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’ she asks her cousin Edmund, and then adds: ‘—but there was such dead silence!'” Not only Sir Thomas, but his children sat in the room “without speaking a word.” Brian Southam has argued that Sir Thomas’s silence indicates that he was unable to answer her satisfactorily, and that by simply daring to raise the question at all, Fanny was able to make her abolitionist sympathies clear—she was indeed “a friend of the abolition.”[6] Fanny Price also approves of anyone who speaks up for the oppressed. “To be the friend of the poor and oppressed! Nothing could be more grateful to her…”[7]
The dialogue on the slave trade in Emma [
In Persuasion, Austen celebrates the Royal Navy and “by implication its impending work to enforce in law over slave trading.”[8] We know Jane was very proud of her brothers in the Royal Navy, which played its part in the suppression of the slave trade. Frank, her brother, wrote home condemning slavery after a visit to
As White says, Edward Said was “way off the mark,” since he is insensitive to the satire present in Austen. Said was not known for his sense of humor. He is even less sensitive to irony; as Rajan put it, “Said’s reading [of Mansfield Park] is not without problems, both as a matter of interpretation of Austen’s style (he overlooks, for example, the operation and effects of irony), as well as in historical understanding (of her position on abolition, for instance).”[11] Finally, White notes, “Jane Austen’s untimely death in 1817 meant she would not live to see further outcome of the popular resolve for abolition during the reappraisal of early years, both in her undermining the status quo of chattel slavery, and in celebrating the abolition of the British slave trade.”[12]
Did Edward Said even have a coherent thesis in his section on Jane Austen and Empire in Culture and Imperialism? He tells us that “[t]he first thing to be done now is more or less to jettison simple causality in thinking through the relationship between Europe and the non-European world, and lessening the hold on our thought of the equally simple temporal sequence.”[13] He cannot even manage to tell us straightforwardly to jettison these two things; we are “more or less” to do so.
If we are to jettison simple causality, does he mean we ought to adopt complex causality—or rather, causality as such? No answer is forthcoming. A few lines above, Said informs us that European culture did not “cause” imperialism. Does he mean “cause” simply or complexly? If there is neither a causal nor a temporal relation, what relation does he have in mind? He evades the latter question by introducing the metaphor of “counterpoint.” But counterpoint is a concept drawn from music. How can it apply here? No answer is given. In the same paragraph, we are told incoherently that “[t]he inherent mode for this counterpoint is not temporal but spatial.” Does he mean “simple spatiality” or “complex spatiality”? How can there be space without time or causality?
If we now ask the question, “What is the relationship between a European novel and European imperialism?” we find that Said has not even pretended to tell us. Said does recognize that this is a fundamental issue, but evades it by introducing irrelevant and obfuscating side issues and metaphors. Without an answer to that question, Said does not have a coherent thesis.[14]
[1] Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism.
[2] Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense. Post-Modern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.
[3] Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism.
[4] Susan Fraiman. Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture and Imperialism
in Deidre Lynch ed.. Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees. Princeton:
[5] Gabrielle D.V.White. Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition. ‘a fling at the slave trade’.
[6] Brian Southam. The Silence of the Bertrams, in The Times Literary Supplement, 17 February, 1995, pp.13-14, referred to by Claire Tomalin Jane Austen. A Life. Harmondsworth:Penguin Books 1998 ,p.234, p.333.
[7] Jane Austen.
[8] Ibid.,pp. 2-3.
[9] Marilyn Butler, Introduction , Jane Austen. Selected Letters 1796-1817, ed. R.W.Chapman,
[10] Claire Tomalin .Jane Austen. A Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998. p.332
[11] You-me Park & R.S.Rajan. edd. The Postcolonial Jane Austen,
[12] Gabrielle D.V.White. Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition. ‘a fling at the slave trade’.
[13] Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism.
[14] I owe these points to Irfan Khawaja.
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