Real Men and Austen

A friend sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal column by William Deresiewicz describing how studying Jane Austen taught him the meaning of manhood. Reading about Elizabeth Bennet’s failures and her resulting humiliating, Deresiewicz learned what real manhood, and real education, was all about: “Humiliation, I realized, was exactly what I needed, too. Our egos, Austen was teaching me, prevent us from owning up to our many errors and shortcomings, and so our egos must be broken down. ‘Humiliation,’ after all, comes from ‘humility.’ It humbles us, makes us properly humble.

“I had come to graduate school with a very different idea about what it means to get an education. Growing up, I had learned to equate being educated with knowing things, knowing facts. And the purpose of knowing things, in a strangely circular way, was simply to ‘be’ educated, to be able to pride yourself on being a ‘man of culture’ (and feel superior to those who weren’t).

“Knowledge, culture, ego: That was pretty much the formula. But now I was learning a new idea—about education, but also about being a man. You didn’t have to be certain, Austen taught me, to be strong, and you didn’t have to dominate people to earn their respect. Real men were not afraid to admit that they still had things to learn—even from a woman.”