The Bonds Between Us... (Part One)

Today is the 206th death anniversary of Jane Austen. Every year her birthday (December 16th) and her death anniversary (July 18th) bring up certain emotions for me and today I am going to touch upon some of them.

I have titled this post, “the bonds between us” as in this piece I am particularly going to focus upon the feminine bonds of our lives --- these extraordinary bonds, fraught with complications and struggles but are also very often the bedrocks of our lives. The bonds between mothers and daughters, the bonds between sisters, bonds between friends, bonds between partners, bonds between cousins, bonds between aunts and nieces, your teachers and mentors… think about the women in your life and what value does each individual woman hold in your life or has somehow profoundly impacted your life.

I remember the exact moment or feeling, I think it was at some point in high school when I learned that Jane Austen passed away at the age of forty-one. As a young girl of fifteen or sixteen I was instantly hit with sadness and grief at this fact. But after over-coming that moment of grief and the fact of her death becoming lost in the abyss of time --- my young mind removed itself from the sadness and dragged itself back into the fascination of her stories.

It was not until my early or mid-twenties that I consciously began to think about Jane Austen’s life as a single woman in the early nineteenth century and contemplate about her death at such an early age and the end of an author’s life at her literary peak. Then later on, during my bachelors and graduate studies, I constantly used to think about her life at Chawton cottage and how it would have affected her mother and sister. How Cassandra survived emotionally after the death of a sister who was a constant companion? How do you cope with such a gap in your life?

One major reason of my close examination of Austen’s life was because of my mother’s family and her close connection with her sisters and mother (my grandmother).

I sometimes refer to my life as living a somewhat twentieth century or twenty-first century version of Jane Austen’s life. Both my mother and father come from traditional South-Asian and Muslim backgrounds. My mother belongs to a family of seven sisters, herself the third, and bearer of three children.

As my mother’s youngest daughter, I was placed by nature in the special position of a critical observer, with an acuteness, slightly resembling Austen’s. The role of a critical observer is not an easy one (but this is what writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, or any creative individual or storyteller is destined for because of their talents). A critical observer is not just an observer, but their observations are constantly evaluating the situations and circumstances around them, they are constantly observing the gaps in society and people (including themselves). It is a position full of pain, of evaluating the injustices around them and having no means of removing those injustices --- the position becomes even more complicated when it is held by the youngest introverted girl of a family. Austen presents the roles of critical observers, especially the introverted and silent ones, in her beloved characters like Anne Elliot, Fanny Price, and Eleanor Dashwood. Both Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse are critical observers too --- but they are more extroverted vocal characters --- which positions them a bit differently than the previously mentioned.

From the moment I opened my eyes and since I had any sense of perceiving the difficulties around me (age of four or five) I had seen a constant struggle or should I say an endless struggle preying upon the lives of women around me. My mother and her two elder sisters were married within a tight-knit closed family circle and I saw the lives of my younger aunts marred by the effects of these marriages. While the husbands of your sisters might be a source of some family or financial support in traditional cultures but these relationships are wrought with engrained patriarchal structures and the women (even if they belong to a middle class and the so-called moderate background (religiously moderate)) are surrounded by veiled boundaries and pressures --- especially as single-women who are trying to survive after the death of their father and attempting to find ways to earn money, finding jobs to the best of their abilities, and refusing to get married, I will re-state this to as “refusing to be trapped into a marriage of convenience and refusing to accept male partners, whose psyches would be inevitably embedded in traditional patterns of a traditional culture--- where women would be required to abandon all their intellectual and creative abilities and become good housewives devoted to preserving the societal and religious norms as best as possible --- from the age of four to thirteen I had seen my three younger aunts struggle against a wave of social and financial pressures and by the age time I was eighteen/nineteen, I was very clear on why the bond between Austen and I ran so deep (and it’s not just me why the bond between Austen and women, especially women of today of any society and culture runs so deep).

What my younger aunts witnessed in the lives of their elder sisters were insensitive partners of convenient and arranged marriages and they did not at any cost wanted to repeat those patterns in their lives--- even if that meant financial instability and insecurity. The bargain between financial stability and a loving and sensitive partner (who would specifically care for your intellectual and creative abilities and worth) is a very cruel one. Women all around the world in the past centuries, belonging to any western or eastern societies have made these bargains.

Jane Austen and the women of her time made these bargains, and women who chose to somehow preserve their intellectual worth and attempted to pursue their personal independence and freedom had to face the consequences of financial insecurities with having no husbands at their side to support them as it is observed in Jane Austen’s life and also her sister’s.

The Austens belonged to the middle class strata of their society (for Austen’s lifetime it was the Georgian period of the British history 1714-1837 which is also sub-categorized into the Regency period of 1811 to 1820). The Austen family would be considered the part of the gentry and middle class families of the English society. Their father was the rector of Steventon, which attached him to the church and the clergy on more of an administrative level. He would have been considered an administrative leader of the Steventon Anglican parishes and hence this position would have given him a very respectable social position in their parish and society. As daughters’ of a rector, the status of Cassandra and Jane would have also been pinned down as young women of respectable and moderate Christian families. Young women of respectable middle class families who remained unmarried--- either by choice or various other social circumstances (not having been made any offers of marriage by suitable/compatible men) You can find these parallels in the lives of women of any culture and society who are trying to go against the grain and break the traditional boundaries of that culture. Jane Austen was a critical and acute observer and evaluator of her society. Her pain and dissatisfaction with her own situations and circumstances is depicted within her intricately crafted characters of her six novels. Jane Austen's letter's and biographies also provide us with valuable insight into her life --- however, the fact that Cassandra burnt the majority of Jane's letter's after her death in an attempt to veil her feelings and opinions about certain people and/or topics ---speaks volumes about the author's life and her inner feelings or conflicts. If those letters would have survived they might have given us a more closer look into the anger, dissatisfaction and/or Austen's disapproval of her own society or more particularly the behaviors of certain individuals within that society, who might have hurt her on an emotional and psychological level.

From the age of four I became the observer of my aunts’ lives (who were battling the social and financial pressures in the late 80’s and 1990s in a traditional South-Asian society), I was and I am still the observer of my mother’s life, of my sister’s life and consequently became an observer of my own.

I immigrated to Canada at the age of thirteen, with my family, and then was given a new honor, becoming a new kind of critical observer, as an immigrant South-Asian girl, who hoped to abandon every thread and tatter of social pressure and cultural/religious boundary behind in the land which she was leaving, but then the lives of immigrant children, become even more complicated, especially for young girls who want to begin afresh (on a clean slate), but are constantly haunted by the ghosts of traditional systems that they were anchored in or they are still a part of as an immigrant family.

In these new systems, the bonds between us become even more stronger and complicated. I will write about these bonds in the next installment of this post. When women of the same family stand upon the same land but on very different grounds because of their age and perspectives.

The question or observation then becomes: Is what level of desire does each woman contain to either leave the systems and norms that she belonged to or belongs to? or does she want to preserve these systems and norms at some level?

The answer for each woman is different and hence it makes the bonds between these women complicated and difficult, especially for girls and women who desire to leave these traditional systems completely behind.

In honor and memory of Jane Austen, a solace and comfort for the hearts and souls of many like myself. May you rest in peace always <3

Keep Unveiling!

T.K. Urooj

18.07.2023