Category: Reading Progress

Bitch in a Bonnet
by Robert Rodi
isbn: 9781499133769
Publication Date: August 10, 2014
Pages: 514
Genre: Books and Reading
Publisher: Createspace

Novelist Rodi continues his broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a “a woman’s writer … quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic — the inventor and mother goddess of ‘chick lit.’” Instead he sees her as “a sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century.”

In this volume, which collects and amplifies three years’ worth of blog entries, he combs through the final three novels in Austen’s canon — Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion — with the aim of charting her growth as both a novelist and a humorist, and of shattering the notion that she’s a romantic of any kind.

I’m currently reading Bitch in a Bonnet by Robert Rodi.  My first, I think, work of Literary Criticism.  It’s been on my shelf for years, and it’s the second volume of a 2 volume set that, I’m surprised to learn, was published through Createspace.  Had I known that way back when, I’d not have put it on the wishlist, because self-published literary criticism instinctively feels like it would be a self-aggrandising disaster.

Luckily, I was unaware, because this is pretty good, egregious copyediting errors aside.  Rodi dives into a detailed discussion about Austen’s work, title by title, arguing why all of history since their publications have done her a disservice by pegging her as a ‘romance’ writer.

I’m thoroughly enjoying it – both Rodi’s point of view that Austen is anything but a romance writer – which I agree with 100% – and his snarky narrative voice.  He’s a little bit outrageous which makes his analysis fun to read.

This volume covers Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and this is where my mini-project comes into play.  I’ve read Emma and Persuasion both enough times to remember everything Rodi is discussing, but Northanger Abbey I only ever read once and quite a while ago.  And I don’t remember it as fondly as the others (even Mansfield Park).

So, I’m going to attempt to re-read Northanger Abbey, in tandem with Rodi’s breakdown of it in Bitch in a Bonnet.  I have no idea if I’m going to be able to do this, or if I’ll lose patience.  I generally don’t like side-by-side reads because it’s constraining and smacks of self-discipline.  Also, I can’t tolerate someone else telling me how or what to think about anything.  But I already know I agree with Rodi about Emma, so I’m hopeful this will work out well if for no other reason than it’s entertaining confirmation bias.  Shrug; nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
Publication Date: January 1, 1975
Pages: 222
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Folio Society

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naove Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who introduces Catherine to the joys of Gothic romances, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's house, Northanger Abbey. There, influenced by novels of horror and intrigue, Catherine comes to imagine terrible crimes committed by General Tilney, risking the loss of Henry's affection, and must learn the difference between fiction and reality, false friends and true. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, Northanger Abbey is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's work.

 I’ma havin’ some issues with this first chapter about apples.  I have issues theological, academical, and pedantical (a word I just made up), and if I don’t rant them out they’ll nag at me and I won’t be able to let them go.

Pollan is talking about his first plant, the apple.  Which is an interesting plant in its own right, (each seed in an apple, if planted, will grow an entirely new variety of apple – very likely a crap, inedible one, but totally unique), but Pollan has instead glommed onto the man and the myth that is Johnny Appleseed.  Going in, one can see the relevance:  while John Chapman (a/k/a Appleseed) is ‘helping’ frontier settlers by seeding the apple trees, he’s also working for the apple, allowing it to increase its habitat across a whole new continent.  So far, on topic.

But the author has lost himself in the whole mythology of Appleseed, arguing he wasn’t a saint, the way so many want to believe he was – a hero with no questionable habits.  Fine, I guess, except in his argument against mythologising Appleseed as a heroic saint, he turns around and mythologises him into “very much an American Dionysus”.  So … it’s ok to idealise the historical figure as a Greek god, but not as a Christian saint? Never mind that Chapman/Appleseed himself identified as a Christian (although not a mainstream one to be sure) and would discuss the “good word” with people as he traveled.

How about just letting John Chapman be John Chapman?  How about we don’t argue what special snowflake box he belongs in (which is really the same box with different wrapping paper), and just let him rest in peace, with the record showing he was a complicated man who loved the outdoors and planting apple trees.

And what in the name of a Jonah Gold does any of it have to do with the evolution of plants as it pertains to domestication, and who domesticated whom?

Rant over.