Can we enjoy classics anymore?
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (p.219)
Maeve Hastings reflects on the supposed timeless quality of classics, with a more modern, feminist lens.
Last week, I made a list of all of the classics I have always wanted to read - what better time to than over quarantine? Admittedly, many of these have sat on my bookshelf under a pile of my obligatory reading; during term time, I would fantasise about throwing One Hundred Days of Solitude out of the window and break in the spine of my untouched Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Finally, I can find comfort in the classics during a fittingly Hardyesque time of tragedy. However, having just read Rebecca, and as I near the end of Tess, it has struck me that the classics have an obsession with the mad or socially deviant woman who inevitably dies, in a form of poetic justice. I cannot help but begin to question whether the representations of women in these classics are sustainable. From Anna to Adela, from Bovary to Bertha, the image of the dead woman is remarkably alive within literature across time and space.
Right from Antigone, female characters have been caught in a cultural system in which the traditional endings for women are either suicide or madness, often functioning in tandem. The lexis of disability used by male authors to describe their beloved female characters as “feverish” and “out of their minds”, reflects a patriarchal drive to pathologise female rebellion as unnatural and reduce it to hysteria. However, we are taught to love these heroines, and, as a result, to see their madness and suicide as romantic and passionate, for, as Poe kindly points out, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”. This is disturbing in many ways, but particularly in the sense that the figure of the self-sacrificial heroine has been glorified in literature, to be readily internalised by an impressionable young female readership. Being a woman becomes a death sentence, or else a one-way ticket to an insane asylum.
Of course, I understand the need to contextualise the texts I am reading. However, in some ways, I feel that I am reading timeless classics beyond their time. I find it difficult to enjoy the classics in the way that my mum or grandma did: for a fourth wave feminist occupying the #MeToo generation, classics have in many ways been ruined. The madwoman in the attic is not so much a neurotic but a symbol of female oppression. Latent beneath every madwoman is a history that is hard to ignore: in the nineteenth century, women outnumbered men in Victorian asylums almost two to one; Dickens’ infamously mad Miss Havisham becomes more disturbing with the knowledge that he himself tried to have his own wife locked up in an asylum. And so, can we enjoy these classics knowing what the real-life Miss Havisham had to endure? The trend arguably has remnants today in the vernacular of twenty-first century youth; all of my girl friends have at some point asked me if something they said to their ex “would have come across psycho”. While it may be far-fetched to attribute current teen fears to the feminine endings set forth in the classics which most of us probably haven’t even read, it does feel as though women are doomed to madness.
Significantly, the majority of the aforementioned texts are written by men, provoking a more disturbing thought: the suicide of the madwoman is as equally fetishised as it is stigmatised. All you really have to do is look at the iconography of Ophelia. Indeed, madness and women are etymologically associated; in particular, the “mad virgin” is a tired trope that has been etched into social psyche. Just looking back at the books I’ve read these past two weeks (or however long isolation has been - I’ve lost count), the lingua franca of dead white male writers is striking: the female is either dead or deranged, hysteric or hypersexualised. These tired tropes, surely, are classic in the Gen-Z sense: “oh she dies? What a classic heroine”, not classic in the pass-this-on-to-future-generations sense, at least if we want to reshape models of femininity for girls. It feels as though every female heroine goes mad, dies or at least considers suicide. Of course, it doesn’t help that English literature classes frequently reinforce the ideology of women being prone to psychic and physical disorders. They quite literally teach us to psychoanalyse our female heroines. So, we conclude, dancing, loose hair and singing are symbolic of madness, or otherwise sexual repression, and the powerful women of the canon become case studies of the female condition.
Like I said, I love these classics regardless and perhaps therein lies the problem. I find it difficult to understand why my mum, in her twenties, idolised Cathy Earnshaw, just as I cannot explain why I myself love Jane Eyre despite her being a self-described “prop”. They are classic because they are universally cherished and shared, yet this term has become problematic and protected, under which we forgive the mass feminicide within literature over the centuries, as we give these very books to our daughters to read.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have realised how claustrophobic the straitjacket criterion of female heroines is if I hadn’t self-inflicted a long overdue classics binge (I only have myself to blame), or perhaps I, too, am going mad. Anyway, I’m going to get back to reading Tess.