As an element of contemporary literary criticism, the term “cultural appropriation” has sucked the life out of literature. Authors have always meant to write about other people’s lives. Jane Austen understood this better than most, and her wisdom is more timely than ever.
After the release of American Dirt earlier this year, the novel quickly fell from the year’s most-hyped work of fiction to the year’s most excoriated one. And the reason was, generally, that a white woman had appropriated Hispanic culture.
Literary critics were quick to accuse its author, Jeanine Cummins, of wrongdoing, but she simply practiced what authors have been doing for centuries. As Gene Lyons wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times:
Austen herself, however, never married anybody, much less a handsome gentleman with an inherited title and 100,000 pounds a year.
She was a literary genius, that’s all.
Oddly enough, the English author, who died in 1817, more than 150 years before the term “cultural appropriation” was coined, has much to say about it.
First of all, if Austen were alive today, she would likely say that cultural appropriation is a bunch of nonsense. Dictionary.com defines “cultural appropriation” as “the act of adopting elements of an outside, often minority culture, including knowledge, practices, and symbols, without understanding or respecting the original culture and context.”
Intentionally using and abusing someone else’s heritage is certainly reprehensible, but many modern accusations of cultural appropriation don’t often fall within these lines. The term, which grew popular in the 1980s, now frequently refers to the crime of trying to understand and participate in another culture, and it has been used to vilify everyone from high schoolers in prom dresses to novels to the study of mathematics.
When cultural appropriation becomes a question of identity rather than a question of respect, that’s when we may need a reminder that we must be able to escape our own identities in order to live well. Austen knew that to be a good writer, and even to be a good friend, you must learn to get inside someone else’s head. Dwight Lindley, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College and an Austen enthusiast, says Austen’s great strength is the way she turns all of her characters into storytellers.
“The thing that I love about her is her sense of human nature and the motives that drive us very subtly … and especially the way that we try to understand the world by telling stories about it, to ourselves and other people,” he says over the phone.
Lindley says that Austen characters are like “little authors,” and the drama in her plots arises from a negative answer to this question: Are you doing a good job at storytelling? Now that a new adaptation of the Austen classic Emma has hit theaters, this might be a lesson that more of us can take to heart.
The plot of Emma revolves around its simultaneously charming and frustrating protagonist, Emma, who is too smart for her own good. When she tries to meddle with her friend Harriett’s love life, she learns that intentionally misreading the desires of others can lead to disastrous consequences.
Emma believes that she understands the motivations and hopes of those around her, so rather than attempting to respect their beliefs, she steamrolls them. Austen knows that we live our lives through the stories that we tell about ourselves and others, and it’s important that we tell the right ones.
“Emma gets a taste of her own medicine when Harriet, toward the end, reveals that she’s in love with Mr. Knightley,” Lindley explains. Emma herself is in love with Mr. Knightley, and she realizes that she’s responsible for steering Harriet away from her former suitor, which leads her to fall for Emma’s love interest instead. Emma realizes that she has misunderstood not only Harriet but also herself. This leads to Emma “realizing she’s got to change something in herself if she wants to tell stories right,” Lindley says.
“We tend to approach the world thinking that it circles around us and narrate stories in which I am the protagonist, and everyone else is just a bit part in my story,” Lindley explains. “That’s exactly what Emma does. And her maturation is realizing, ‘Wow, these other people have their own stories, and I am actually playing a smaller role in their stories in which they’re the protagonist.’ … Jane Austen’s brilliance is realizing that, and she helps us see it.”
This is true not only in Emma but also in the rest of Austen’s work. She is a master at helping us see vices in both her characters and in ourselves. But she wouldn’t have been able to do it without, respectfully, putting on someone else’s shoes.
