I did originally post this as a comment but I may as well post it here as an answer to the question. Its short and not very well thought out, but here it is:
I know it just seems like a silly, immature topic, but I think it's fairly valid. Charlotte doesn't place a lot of value on marriage, and gets married to Mr Collins as just a means to get a stable life. She, unlike the other girls in the book, did not even consider that marriage should be for love, and was willing to put up with a completely insufferable man. Conversely, she was devoted to Elizabeth, and loved her in a way she would never love her husband. At the time, homosexuality would have been abhorred, so if she was romantically inclined towards her friend, she would have had to suppress it. However, Austen was, in her own way, a feminist, even though she has a bad reputation for writing novels centred around marriage. It wouldn't seem out of place at all for a lesbian to feature in her books, even if it was subtle, an in joke of sorts. Opinions?
Cleaning & Protecting Carpets Regency Style
1 week ago
mmm see im inclined to agree. she married for security. not for love. and never really seemed close to anyone but elizabeth. it makes a lot of sense.
ReplyDeleteCharlotte isn't gay! She's just not romantic! But I think Mr Hurst is gay though. And eats too much.
ReplyDeleteI just discovered your blog because I asked myself the same question today.
ReplyDeleteMy answer is that Jane Austen intended for her sharp readers to ask this excellent question, but not to be sure of the answer, because in one valid interpretation of Charlotte's character, she is NOT gay, but in another one, she is.
In this regard, it's not an accident that the following line of dialog is whispered to Lizzy by an unnamed female at Longbourn when Darcy and Bingley come to visit in Chapter 54 of Pride and Prejudice:
"THE MEN SHAN’T come and part us, I AM DETERMINED. We want none of them; do we?"
I had not previously considered a lesbian aspect to the above when I wrote about that line in the following post at my own blog:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/08/re-reading-p-mary-bennet-good-satan-of.html
Cheers,
Arnie Perlstein
It's hard to explain how I think Charlotte Lucas is a lesbian but that Austin didn't necessarily deliberately writer her that way. Imagine being a closet lesbian in that era. What would such a woman be like? Well, she'd probably be just like Charlotte. So while Jane Austin might not have been thinking through the specifics of why a woman would be the way Charlotte was -- emotionally intimate with her female friends and pretty much indifferent to men -- she might have known such a woman and written Charlotte that way.
ReplyDeleteSort of like when I was a kid there was a man in our neighborhood who, in retrospect, was certainly gay, but when I was a child I was totally unaware of it. If I had used Mr. C as an inspiration for a character in a novel, that character would have been gay without me, the author, even being aware of it.