So, okay, maybe it wasn't the most disturbing thing in the news last week, but I did find the folderol surrounding the supposed Jane Austen portrait troubling. In case you didn't know, what was supposedly the only portrait of Brit Lit's sweetheart was to be auctioned at Christie's last week, its price set at a modest $800.000 USD.
It would have been worth a great deal more, of course, had anyone been able to prove it is indeed a painting of Jane Austen. It has been in possession of direct-line descendants of her brother Edward until now, the Rice family. Many compelling arguments exist to suggest that the subject of the Rice portrait is not our girl: the hair isn't dark or curly enough to match descriptions and other sketches of her, the dress wouldn't have come into fashion until she was in her 30's while this is clearly a study of an adolescent, there are no proper portraits of the other Austen children and no one in her family could have or would have afforded one, and so on. It's also compared unfavorably with her niece Cassandra's miniature of her.
Okay. Maybe it isn't her. So far I'm on board. Until they interview an art scholar on NPR and he says that the girl in the portrait is simply too pretty to be Jane Austen.
Say what?!
So I decide to dig a little deeper, and I go to a blog dedicated to Jane Austen, and I read a bunch of Austenites arguing --quite rightly -- that it's unreasonable for us to demand of Jane Austen that she be remembered as beautiful, as if her litererary accomplishments were superfluous to the achievement of being physically attractive. One of them says: "The impulse is not terrible. We Janeites want to believe that Jane Austen was a pretty woman; it is the most natural instinct in the world. However, as Jane herself said, she did not write for such dull elves as have not a good imagination themselves. Can’t we accept Cassandra’s portrait, and just imagine that face lit by humor and animation and color? Are we, as Janeites, such pictures of intellectual poverty?"
My qualms with this whole thing are two: First of all, the discussion, even by supposed fanatics of Austen's writings, revolves ceaselessly around her physical characteristics and fashion sense, which I'm sure whatever's left of her is tittering about behind a pretty little skeleton hand.
Secondly, and more importantly, at what point is it intellectual poverty on our part to conclude that because of her incredible talent, she must needs have been homely? Are we still so far from fathoming that a bright, talented woman might also have turned out to be beautiful? That looks and brains aren't necessarily mutually exclusive? Mr. Art-Radio Scholar said that no one in Austen's time could have written so authoritatively about the experience of homely, rural, modest, practical and resourceful girls unless she was herself one of them. I couldn't disagree more: all it takes is a measure of empathy and imagination.
Miguel de Cervantes was neither a choleric nobleman nor a phlegmatic fatso, and his Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha has over 400 characters, many of them splendidly drawn. His physical appearance isn't once thought to have had a bearing on his craft, other than that he couldn't have written his novel with his right hand, as it had already been chopped off. To use a more contemporary example, Federico Garcia Lorca was extraordinarily easy on the eyes but that didn't stop him from writing about alienation and the lot of homely women in La casa de Bernarda Alba.
Adrienne Rich observes in When We Dead Reawaken: Writing as Re-Vision how deeply we've bought into the notion that, in order to be an author, one must be deeply afflicted somehow, whether because of alcoholism or physical ugliness, handicap or misanthropy. So much had she herself believed this, that she felt ashamed of wanting a normal life and poetry at the same time, until she learned to see her art as growing something instead of destroying. Is it so unthinkable that Jane Austen could write good novels without being sad about being plain, or that as a pretty girl with an inquisitive mind she might have cared about the experience of others enough to inform herself and write about it?
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th century Mexican nun, was by all accounts an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her works still challenge readers today, but she's still called "the 10th muse" by some scholars. She wasn't a muse at all, the object of someone else's inspiration, but a poet in her own right. About her own portrait, overly flattering in her opinion, she writes:
This, that you see, this colored treachery,
which, by displaying all the charms of art,
with those false syllogisms of its hues
deceptively subverts the sense of sight;
this, in which false praise has vainly sought
to shun the horrors of the passing years,
and conquering of time the cruelty,
to overcome age and oblivion's might,
is a vain artifice cautiously wrought,
is a fragile bloom caught by the wind,
is, to ward off fate, pure uselessness;
is a weakened zeal, and, rightly seen,
is corpse, is dust, is gloom, is nothingness.
Her beauty detracts nothing from her genius, nor from her modesty, though she struggled in life to undermine it, chopping her hair, donning a habit and, at intervals, rejecting human contact. In this way, physical beauty became her affliction and a recurring theme in her literature.
The startling thing for me about this whole discussion isn't the who's-hot-and-who's-not aspect of it, but the tapestry of preconceived notions it reveals about art and womanhood and creativity. I don't really care whether Jane Austen was beautiful, but it alarms me that someone - a scholarly someone at that - argues that she couldn't have been beautiful because she wrote good books. Had Jane Austen known Sor Juana, I'm inclined to think they would have painted the town together, talking books and breaking hearts.
