I note that Jane Austen’s tea drinking not under ‘interrogation’, says museum, the museum in question being Jane Austen’s House. The Daily Mail had predictably described the earlier report, now being denied, as “woke madness”.
I mean… I mean… I mean, the creation of tea culture in England is not unconnected from its imperial exploitation, and from the oppression suffered by people of color.
There is a statement from the museum on Twitter which, as it is one of those irritating picture-of-words-without-alt-text deals, I will transcribe:
The plans for refreshing the displays and decoration of Jane Austen’s House have been misrepresented. Jane Austen lived during the era of slavery and the Aboblition by Britain of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807. We are increasingly asked questions about this by our visitors and it is therefore appropriate that we share the information and research that already exists on her connections to slavery and its mention in her novels. This information is widely accessible in the public domain. We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea.
We have been planning to refresh our displays and decoration at Jane Austen’s House for several years. The overarching aim of this long-term process is to bring Jane Austen’s brilliance and the extraordinary flourishing of creativity she experienced at the House to the heart of every visit. Since we are a museum of Jane Austen’s domestic and creative life, this interpretation will by its very nature include the Regency, Empire and Colonial contexts in which she grew up and lived and from which she drew inspiration for her works. This will be part of a layered and nuanced presentation which will be based on long established, peer-reviewed academic research, alongside Jane Austen’s own words and our collection. We firmly believe that placing Austen in the context of her time at her home will only make her genius shine more brightly.
It’s not a very good statement, aside from the delightful absence of the Oxford Comma. It’s incredibly vague, and manages to avoid saying that there is anything wrong with—well, anything, other than misrepresenting their plans.
OK, so, I’ve said this before: as a general rule, great wealth is accumulated at the expense of suffering somewhere else. And the more invisible the people who suffer are, the greater it is. The further off the suffering is, the greater it is. We know that, right? But the invisibility makes it easier for us to sleep. And it is difficult and painful to stay woke, knowing that our sugar or phone or chocolate is part of interlocking systems of oppression and violence. And other stuff, too! It’s not just oppression and violence. But the oppression and violence is real, too.
The Daily Mail calling it “woke madness” to remind people of the connection between sugar and slavery is driven by the many people insisting on the right to sleep through that suffering. There are limits to what we can do about it as individuals—it doesn’t necessarily make life better for someone in a sweatshop if you personally choose not to buy the cheap hoodies they sew—and I do not criticize people, either now or in Austen’s fiction, for their individual participation in that system. I participate in it myself, of course, and I am just as defensive about my iPhone and my chocolate and my grocery-store meat as the Austen fan about their tea. But that just makes it more important to have the wall-text reminder, doesn’t it? And yet some Austen fans (and Dickens fans and Trollope fans or perhaps even Gaskell fans) insist, in a painful and damaging way, on their right to keep sleeping through all that stuff.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
The topic of this post reminds me of the opening paragraph of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s landmark 1986 essay in post-colonial theory, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” which I was teaching recently. She begins, “It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representations should not be ignored. These two obvious “facts” continue to be disregarded in the reading of of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.”
If the Jane Austen Museum is incorporating information about the slave trade into their docentage of the Austen family’s tea-drinking, Spivak’s opening assertion about how nineteenth-century British literature should be read has become just a little closer to being a norm rather than an aspiration.
I don’t think that they truly are going to incorporate the context of the slave trade and colonialism into the information about the writing—about her part in “the cultural representation of England to the English”. They will probably put some information about the context of her life and times, but I suspect it will still ignore the role of literature in the production of cultural representation. But we live in hope!
Thanks,
-V.