The write stuff

As I am reading ‘Jane Eyre’, a novel by Charlotte Bronte, I am amazed by the fact that even though the novel came out in 1855, how far ahead it was of its time. It defied every cannon of Victorian morality of the time. By which I mean that the main protagonist was not a lily livered miss goody to shoes but a plain looking young girl of substance who does not beat around the bush but speaks her mind and is not beyond giving vent to her frustration against the prevailing mores of society and is also at time given to sudden outburst of temper. Even as I write this, I have not yet finished the novel so I would desist from saying a lot more about it. My aim here is to make a larger point whether writers can really afford to completely dissociate themselves from the place they are living in, the people they are writing about or the society they operate in. Can they detach their work from any context which would inform our behavior as human beings.

What got me thinking along those lines was couple of classics that I have managed to read over a period of time. When you analyze Jane Austen, you would find it remarkable what a sequestered and cocooned world she has created for her stories and her characters. You would be forgiven for thinking that they inhabit a different planet considering the fact that when she was productive as a writer, her continent was going through the bloody Napoleonic wars where millions had perished. But her work would not have a whiff of any of that. In her world, everything was honky dory where gallant gentlemen were wooing coy ladies and taking them to balls, quite oblivious to the convulsions around them. Where as when you go through ‘Anna Karenina’, the author Leo Tolstoy makes a lot of reference to the Crimean war and how it influenced his characters. Even Dostoevsky has set his novels firmly against the backdrop of a fast modernizing Russian society. And as to ‘Jane Eyre’, this work is also firmly rooted in realism and gives a  penetrating insight into human psychology and is not divorced from the reality of its time. It just begs the question what is a writers responsibility towards his craft.