#but british imperialists needed an ENGLISH LANGUAGE (and BRITISH) writer to venerate

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

#due to the Great Data Decay academics write viciously argumentative articles on which episodes aired in what order #at conferences professors have known to engage in physically violent altercations whilst debating the air date number of household viewers #90% of the couch gags have been lost and there is a billion dollar trade in counterfeit “lost copies” #serious note: i'll be honest i always assumed it was english imperialism that made shakespeare so inescapable in the 19th/20th cent #like his writing should have become obscure at the same level of his contemporaries #but british imperialists needed an ENGLISH LANGUAGE (and BRITISH) writer to venerate #and shakespeare wrote so many damn things that there was a humongous body of work just sitting there waiting to be culturally exploited... #i know it didn't happen like this but i imagine a English Parliament House Committee Member For The Education Of The Masses or something #cartoonishly stumbling over a dusty cobwebbed crate labelled the Complete Works of Shakespeare #and going 'Eureka! this shall make excellent propoganda for fabricating a national identity in a time of great social unrest. #it will be a cornerstone of our elitist educational institutions for centuries to come! long live our decaying empire!' #'what good fortune that this used to be accessible and entertaining to mainstream illiterate audience members... #..but now we can strip that away and make it a difficult & alienating foundation of a Classical Education! just like the latin language :)' #anyway maybe there's no such thing as the 'greatest writer of x language' in ANY language? #maybe there are just different styles and yes levels of expertise and skill but also a high degree of subjectivity #and variance in the way that we as individuals and members of different cultures/time periods experience any work of media #and that's okay! and should be acknowledged!!! and allow us to give ourselves permission to broaden our horizons #and explore the stories of marginalized/underappreciated creators #instead of worshiping the List of Top 10 Best (aka Most Famous) Whatevers Of All Time/A Certain Time Period #anyways things are famous for a reason and that reason has little to do with innate “value” #and much more to do with how it plays into the interests of powerful institutions motivated to influence our shared cultural narratives #so i'm not saying 'stop teaching shakespeare'. but like...maybe classrooms should stop using it as busy work that (by accident or designs) #happens to alienate a large number of students who could otherwise be engaging critically with works that feel more relevant to their world #(by merit of not being 4 centuries old or lacking necessary historical context or requiring untaught translation skills) #and yeah...MAYBE our educational institutions could spend less time/money on shakespeare critical analysis and more on... #...any of thousands of underfunded areas of literary research i literally (pun!) don't know where to begin #oh and p.s. the modern publishing world is in shambles and it would be neat if schoolwork could include modern works? #beautiful complicated socially relevant works of literature are published every year. it's not just the 'classics' that have value #and actually modern publications are probably an easier way for students to learn the basics. since lesson plans don't have to include the #important historical/cultural context many teens need for 20+ year old media (which is older than their entire lived experience fyi)

[thejgatsbykid]

Hi, I was reading some Charlotte Bronte criticisms and I saw your post so I have a question. I read Jane Eyre a while ago and I got the impression that it was subtly racist and/or xenophobic, and promoting British imperialism? Helen Burn's comment about non-christians, Rochester's comparisons between the non-British women he's loved and his wife vs Jane plus St. John - I feel like Charlotte Bronte leans into and promotes that? What do you think? Thanks and have a nice day.

Thank you for the ask!

So I'm gonna preface this by saying: the majority of British literature from, oh, the 18th century onwards is, by virtue of being British literature during the height of classic colonialism, going to be racist, xenophobic, and pro-imperialist to one degree or another. Even if it's not blatant, unapologetic propaganda (looking at you Rudyard Kipling) it is steeped in the culture of an England that derives almost all of its wealth, resources, value, and cultural identity from being an imperialist oppressor. That's just… unavoidable. It's the background radiation of English society. (Exceptions made, obviously, for specifically anti-colonial and post-colonial literature, but the uhhh majority of the English literary canon is. Not that.) Furthermore, as argued in this article, one purpose of a lot of Victorian literature was to paint over Victorian crimes against humanity- "Many imperial officials moonlighted in both the active (killing) part of the genocides, and the passive PR side. Many were very popular writers, and all their doorstop books were virtuous, virtuous, oh so virtuous."

Charlotte Bronte (and her sisters, and Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, and many other writers of the era) wasn't an imperial officer, obviously. But that doesn't erase the cultural influence that Victorian imperialism had on Victorian writers, nor their dependence on Victorian colonial brutality to maintain their lifestyles of blood-soaked Victorian comfort through stolen wealth. Which isn't to say that none of that literature has value, obviously, just that, you know. It's definitely all at least a little racist.

Jane Eyre, however, definitely falls on the "more" side of the "more or less racist" scale. Jane Eyre is, at times, abominably racist. You've named more instances than I can remember (not having read the entirety of it in uhhh long time) but like… yeah. All of that. Plus the anti-Romani racism in Rochester's weird little fortune teller costume thing (which is just… so fucking weird and uncomfortable for so many reasons lmao) and the inherent racism/xenophobia/imperialism of missionary work as a rule. I assume this is about my Bertha Mason post tho so I'll talk a little more about her.

The paragraph introducing Bertha Mason is by itself, in academic terms, a fucking doozy, in that it refers to her consistently as "it" and describes her with some of the most dehumanizing language I've ever encountered ("whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell" "it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal" "the clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind-feet" it GOES ON). See here an essay alluding to Bertha Mason's role as a specter of the evils of race-mixing, a la HP Lovecraft, which, yikes!

Now all that isn't to say that all the racism in Jane Eyre makes it, like. Worthless as a novel. Like I said, all Victorian literature is a little racist, backdrop of colonial brutality, maintaining the visage of a polite society through propaganda, etc. Personally I think Jane Eyre sucks and isn't worth reading by itself, and I think, like all the books we venerate as classics, it DEFINITELY needs to be read with a critical eye to its flaws (personally I would pair it with Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall or Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper to highlight the violence against women, or with Conrad's The Heart of Darkness or another anti-imperialist book (sadly I'm not as well versed in anti or post colonial literature as I'd like to be, I'm dead certain there are Indian or Caribbean writers with some bangin post-colonial lit to contrast) to highlight the racist/colonial themes) but, like, I only have a bachelor's in lit so the Literary Canon doesn't care what I have to say lmao.

#said Jamie #long post #this is a bronte hate blog #kept all this off my Austen blog bc i know some of my followers there are into jane Eyre and i always feel bad saying it sucks lol