The Real Housewives of Jane Austen

Why do reality television’s most popular stars so uncannily resemble the heroines of the 19th-century writer’s work?

.. But what’s clear reading Austen today, or watching one of the countless adaptations of her work, is how much the women in her novels have in common with so many of the women on reality television. Her female characters are defined by two primary qualities: their privilege and their powerlessness. Her writing focuses almost entirely on women searching for stability and status, deploying the very limited means available to them. Deprived of intellectual gratification or professional empowerment, they scheme, manipulate, and get bogged down in petty rivalries with each other. Their ultimate endgame is marriage, described by Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice as the “pleasantest preservation from want.” That they do nothing of much more substantive significance (except, some of them, on rare occasions, be kind sisters or daughters) is their flaw, but also, as Austen portrays it, their fate.

 .. Caroline Bingley, one of the least self-aware and most pathetically predatory characters in literature, would adapt in a matter of minutes to being cast in any one of the Real Housewives franchises.
.. Almost two and a quarter centuries later, a flourishing television genre peddling “reality,” and fantasy, promotes a vision of women if anything more retrograde than Austen’s, without any of her irony.
.. The Bachelor took the essential principle behind Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire—that women will sacrifice their independence, their bodies, and their dignity to fulfill their ultimate goal of marrying a wealthy man—and wrapped it up in a gauzy veil of romance.
.. “The Bachelor set the mold for how women would be treated on reality television,” says Pozner. “With it, producers and networks accomplished what the most ardent anti-feminist organizations and activists had never been able to achieve. They created a version of the world that was supposedly real, that looked real, but in which women not only appeared to not have any choices, but appeared not to want to have choices.”
.. In addition to being gorgeous, they were to be some combination of gullible and calculating, naïve and brazen, stupid and manipulative. They had insignificant careers or livelihoods of their own, and their dual goals were either to safely ensconce themselves within a marriage or to find fame, the financial value of either of which would establish them as an object of envy for all their competitors.
.. Austen, Gilbert and Gubar write, explores the “hostility between young women who feel they have no alternative but to compete on the marriage market,” alert to the ways in which “female anger is deflected from powerful male to powerless female targets.”
.. “One of the points Austen is making is that Lady Susan is just what … books advised women to be,” Tomalin writes. “She has perfectly mastered the art of using the conventions of society to get what she wants.” So, too, the best reality-show stars master the conventions of their genre—without ever seeming even slightly tempted to question them.