Alt-right in thrall to Jane Austen’s white world
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.
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 into a speech he made at her campus.
Before an audience dotted with red Trump ‘‘Make America Great Again’’ caps, Yiannopoulos 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.
Dr 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 thinking in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this month.
Investigating further, she found that ‘‘ invocations of Austen popped up in many alt-right online venues’’. 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 Counter-Currents, 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’’.
Although such references are a distortion of her work, the effect is dangerous Dr 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’’.
Her works are peopled almost entirely with white characters, but this is not proof of bigotry, her defenders claim.
As Claire Fallon wrote in The Huffington Post, ‘‘In fact, white nationalists would do well to realise, her work has endured largely because it cleverly and subtly skewered them.’’