Attitudes …

… Bryan Appleyard — High Art and Justice. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… following Edward Said, it became commonplace to set, say, Jane Austen against the slave trade in the Caribbean. Well, it’s a perspective but what does it mean? Does it reduce her greatness? I really cannot see how. To say she was morally wrong to benefit from slave-based wealth is a truism, so did everybody else she knew, including the English poor. She may have inserted the slave issue into her work, but the fact that she didn’t says nothing against the great human truths she expressed. In any case, cruelty is everywhere in Austen and metaphor is the essence of art; she covered slavery and its overthrow in the relations between Elizabeth Bennett and the unspeakable Lady Catherine de Bourgh.