[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_27

Persuasion, Jane Austen, 1817

I never dared to show off how much I loved Jane Austen for fear of people's judgments. After all the films that have been produced and continue to be made on her novels, people are convinced they already know what it’s about, without ever having read anything.

“Why should I read them?” I have been told several times, “They are romantic comedies! Cheesy, boring stuff." Considering the novel (primarily if written by a woman, especially if it talks about women) as a medium not worthy of value is an old story. In this regard, let’s think of Coleridge's words: "Where the reading of novels becomes established as a habit, it cannot but cause the gradual destruction of the powers of the mind." In the words of Charles Lamb, “A female poet, a female writer of any kind, I think ranks below an actress.”

Jane Austen knew well the prejudices against her sex and the place she had to occupy, so much so that she never tried to escape them. Her worlds are built inside a house. The characters hide and reveal themselves in the living rooms; an argument disrupts the walk in the garden; suffering is consumed by candlelight in one's room. Jane's place, the woman's place, is the house, and Jane does not leave the house.

Her love stories don't have that cloying and passionate flavor that films are imbued with. Austen favors reason, balance, and realism: love stories are a pretext, and she enjoys drawing masks and removing them to complicate and unravel the entanglements. There is an almost imperceptible complexity in her plots that are woven with care and lightness. The pleasure of reading her novels is given by the fact that her characters are as accurate as they are today, with their hypocrisies, mannerisms, desire for gossip, and all their hopes. When we read a novel by Jane Austen, we sit down to have tea with her characters, which have the face of our neighbor or one of our colleagues.

Her heroines are neither passionate nor faint-hearted. They aren't even in love, so what drives them for a good part of the novel is not love. In Elizabeth, perspicacity and acumen prevail; in Emma, the explosive energy of character; in Catherine, naivety. So unromantic was Austen that she disgusted one of the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, who wrote resentfully: "Miss Austen is without feeling, without poetry, perhaps she is sensible, real - more real than true - but she can never be great." It makes you smile today that Austen’s works are synonymous with romanticism.

Looking back at the first drawings I made when I was a teenager, I realized how I, too, always drew home interiors: all my scenes were set inside a room; I learned how, in many cases, I too represented "romance" even if it wasn't the love story that interested me. For me, the romantic story was a pretext: it was dramatic, beautiful to see, and, above all, a fantasy that allowed me to escape from the room and from a routine that was too tight.

I chose the novel "Persuasion" because it is the only one where the protagonist, Anne, shows her feelings and, therefore, all her fragility. I quote some of her words: ‘Yes. We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet and confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You always have a profession, pursuit, or business to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’

Jane Austen is describing the genderization of roles and its consequences. When I was a teenager and read this text, I didn't know the distinction between sex and gender; I just knew that males were different from females. I, too, shared the same feelings about the character of Anne.

I spent my days locked in the kitchen, studying and drawing, watching my male friends speed down the road on their scooters. My female friends and I could only go out if accompanied, in "protected” time slots,and always under the protective eye of someone because, as our caregivers told us, “it’s dangerous out there. "

While my male peers were getting their first hangovers, the most my female friends and I could do were Nutella’s sleepovers. The males seemed to be masters of the world and all its secrets, and we were naïve creatures who lived in the shadows, talking about them, spying on them, dreaming about them. It's not a very different scenario from that depicted in Jane Austen's stories.

It is clear why romance becomes a woman's dream: if the only one capable of moving freely in the world is the man, the man is also the only one capable of taking you out of the room and protecting you. Whether he comes to your rescue on a white horse or a scooter makes little difference.