Jane Austen has alt-right riveted
UNITED STATES: The works of Jane Austen are an inspiration to authors seeking to pin down the essence of modern life.
Yet, even after tributes as varied as Tea With Jane Austen ,a comedy horror film, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating, it still comes as a shock to discover that a mostly male movement with a hateful Right-wing message should also be in need of the bonnetwearing author.
The world of Austen scholarship has been ruffled by an American academic’s discovery that her work has been appropriated by members of the alt-right, a loose collection of white nationalists, pseudo-libertarians, overt racists, antisemites and isolationists whose influence helped to propel Donald Trump to the presidency last year.
The tycoon finally disavowed their support weeks after the election in November. But then Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who coined the term ‘‘alt-right’’ was filmed delivering a racist address and declaring ‘‘Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!’’
Nicole Wright, an English specialist at Colorado University, had her curiosity piqued in January when Milo Yiannopoulos, a British Right-wing provocateur, dropped an Austen reference in a speech he made at her campus.
Before an audience dotted with red Trump ‘‘Make America Great Again’’ caps, Yiannopoulos, then the Breitbart editor, argued that the most beautiful people end up conservative.
’’As a Victorian novelist might have put it, it is a truth universally acknowledged that an ugly woman is far more likely to be a feminist than a hot one,’’ he said.
Wright was intrigued. ‘‘Perhaps Yiannopoulos had glanced at the title of Austen’s most famous novel and assumed that Pride and Prejudice was a justification of white pride and prejudice against ethnic minorities,’’ she recalled in a magazine article this month.
She also points out that Austen died two decades before Queen Victoria’s reign began. Investigating further, she found that ‘‘to my surprise, invocations of Austen popped up in many altright online venues’’.
Wright said Austen is deployed as a ‘‘symbol of sexual purity’’, a ‘‘standard bearer of a vanished white traditional culture’’ and as an exception that ‘‘proves the rule of female inferiority’’.
Austen’s novels were praised as a model for the ‘‘racial dictatorship’’ of tomorrow on the website of Countercurrents, an alt-right publisher.
Contributors debated the vision of marriage in Pride and Prejudice and the benefits of going ‘‘back to an Austen-like world’’ after ‘‘the ethnostate is created’’.
In one notorious post for The Daily Stormer, which has been called the ‘‘top hate site in America’’ by The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a white supremacist blogger approvingly described the pop star Taylor Swift as ‘‘a secret Nazi’’, whom he imagined ‘‘sitting at home with her cat reading Jane Austen’’, while her contemporaries indulged in loose sexual behaviour ‘‘with coloured gentlemen’’.
Although such references are a distortion of Austen’s work, the effect is dangerous Wright argues, because ‘‘by comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cosy England of Austen’’, alt-right theorists are able to ‘‘nudge readers’’ into thinking that ‘‘perhaps white supremacists aren’t so different from mainstream folks’’.
– The Times