Regency Rebels to Modern #MeToo
In this month’s Musings, Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm, author of books including ‘There’s Something About Darcy’ and creative director of our Jane Austen 250th celebrations, muses on Jane Austen’s heroines and the contemporary fight for gender equality.
Tarana Burke is not a name usually associated with Jane Austen. Activist, author, and founder of the #MeTooMovement, Burke is a household name nowadays but she began reflecting on, and chronicling the experiences of, abuse and harassment in relative obscurity. On her MySpace page in 2006, she gave herself and others a voice to relate their experiences. It was not until 2017 that the movement went viral with the hashtag. Prominent names in the world of music, acting and politics took it up and, since then, Burke has been dubbed one of the ‘silence breakers’ on the subject of sexual abuse.
Burke blames the conditioning in her upbringing for disabling her when it came to recognising and reporting abuse. The responsibility, she says, was placed on her to protect herself as a girl. So, when the abuse happened, she considered that as her failing.
“ … when I thought of my experience, I didn’t hold my abusers accountable – I held myself to blame. In my mind, they didn’t abuse me. I broke the rules. I was the one who did something wrong,” Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the MeToo Movement, Tarana Burke, 2021
This will sound all too familiar for historians and researchers of 18-19th century culture, and readers of Jane Austen’s novels. Women – and by that we mean girls and children as much as grown adults – were determined to be at fault for the behaviour of men.
Mary Wollstonecraft, early feminist and mother of novelist Mary Shelley, helped to find the rhetoric to describe this predicament, this moral and physical jeopardy into which girls and women were thrown:
“I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves. Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison,” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft, 1792
Wollstonecraft went on to say that women needed to be part of education and reform so that they could properly and reasonably participate in society and were not subject to ‘local manners’. By this she meant the conditions and behaviours that were imposed on women in different contexts across the world. Limit women and girls and you limit society.
Austen did not directly quote Wollstonecraft or mention her by name (she does not directly cite other writers often), but what she did do was allude to them and their work with her use of rhetoric. Critics, across the decades have positioned Austen at different points along the feminist spectrum. The more we learn about and interpret the context of her time, the more we discover the radical – even revolutionary – roots to her work. These are embedded in her published writing and are also manifest in the work left unfinished at her death.
In a letter of 1813 to her friend Martha Lloyd, Austen announced that she was firmly on the side of Princess Caroline, rather than her husband the Prince Regent: “I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband.” However, as evidence of Austen’s lack of agency, she had to squash her hatred of Prince George when the request came down that she should dedicate Emma to him in 1815.
Professor Robert Morrison, one of the ‘Musings’ contributors, reminds us that through her heroines, Austen had a mouthpiece to ‘hit back’. Foremost among the ‘obstinate’ and ‘headstrong’, the original in many ways, was Elizabeth Bennet. She speaks her mind, and in the moment that she answers Lady Catherine with: “He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal,” she became a radical. William Dean Howells, the American critic, declared her words a ‘protest’, even an ‘insurrection’ (1901).
Many aspects of women’s lives in Austen’s time can now be framed in the language of the MeToo movement: toxic masculinity, coercive control, financial abuse. Women had such little agency, physically and financially, that they were little more than a chattel or commodity. Such status was typically enshrined in law. Forced marriage, now illegal in the UK, was an ever-present prospect for women in the 18th century. The abduction and forced marriage of a woman-of-fortune is a recurring device in the plots of novels of the period, reflecting society. A woman would be disgraced for spending the night, unmarried, under the same roof as her abductor. Non-consensual sex and sexual assault may or may not happen. It was enough that she had been in his company overnight.
Where Austen’s stories intersect very clearly with the MeToo movement is in the behaviour of the dangerous rakes, such as Willoughby and Wickham. They are predatory men, particularly where younger teenaged girls are concerned, such as Eliza Williams (Colonel Brandon’s ward in Sense and Sensibility), Darcy’s sister Georgiana and the youngest of the Bennet sisters, Lydia.
I had the opportunity of interviewing Adrian Lukis (Wickham in the 1995 Pride & Prejudice) at the Jane Austen Festival some years ago, before the MeToo movement became viral. I asked him how he played Wickham, in the knowledge that he was out to seduce what would now be deemed underage girls. He told me that was, of course, the toughest challenge in depicting the character. He said that he resorted to a self-centred mindset for Wickham, a sense of ‘I deserve this’ at whatever cost to others.
It has perhaps never been so apposite to interrogate how we depict these historical characters. Austen embeds the solution to this toxic masculinity and coercive control in her novels with men who are allies. She gave us Colonel Brandon, Uncle Gardiner and Mr Darcy, who are the male family and supporters that come to the rescue. Austen is often accused of not confronting major issues such as war, revolution and social upheaval. However, the ripples of these wider events consistently shaped her narratives. Father-figures and guardians are often inadequate and concerned with other matters of worldly business, thereby leaving their young charges vulnerable.
Austen showed us a catalogue of risk and coercion in her novels, none of which are the fault of women. They show us how precarious a young, single woman’s situation was. In Northanger Abbey, John Thorpe (a friend of James Morland) compels Catherine into an open carriage ride so that she is seen publicly on the streets of Bath with him. Where is her brother, where is Mr Allen? They should be her protectors. Mr Allen even comments on how unseemly it is for young people to take open carriage rides. This is Austen exposing his neglect. Catherine feels guilty about allowing it to happen. A feeling echoed centuries later in real life by Tarana Burke.
Women were told their own minds in the domestic sphere also. Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice insists that Elizabeth does not mean ‘no’ when she refuses his proposal. He tells her she is being a coquette and will accept him. She has to exert her full rebellious spirit to be believed – that ‘No, means NO!’
Austen showed us characters with the desire for agency, echoing Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric, and foreshadowing Burke’s activism. Each of her women is a ‘silence breaker’ in their own way.
