The Jane Austen thing.

• Author: Rapping, Elaine
• Position: Culture - Column

Would you believe that 55 percent women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, would, if they had the chance, trade their present situations for the 1950s stay-at-home life of June Cleaver? That's what a recent Parent magazine survey purports to find. And while this particular set of numbers may not be as sociologically or statistically accurate as the magazine suggests, the general idea--that today's women have at least a few qualms about the brave new world of postfeminist "liberation"--seems, even by casual observation, to carry more than a grain of truth. How else to explain the huge box-office and bookstore popularity of Jane Austen and the Brontes with the twenty-something, Gen X crowd?

As I write, no fewer than three Austen novels--Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Emma (radically altered, updated, and revamped as Clueless)--have been made into successful feature films. And young girls, who would never before have dreamed of reading such classics except in Cliffs Notes form, are suddenly carrying well-thumbed copies of her novels around on subways and in coffee bars everywhere. The recent film version of Jane Eyre, featuring Hollywood superstar William Hurt as an unlikely Mr. Rochester, has followed closely upon the Austen run, and it cannot be too long before other long-dead literary ladies find their way to cineplexes and Barnes & Noble new-release shelves.

Of course, as women, all these heroines make for fine role models: intelligent, strong, mature, and admirable in many ways, especially for their time. But it's the fascination with that backward time that seems puzzling.

What is the appeal of these highly mannered and moralistic tales of rigidly choreographed courtship and marriage rituals to a generation of young women brought up to assume they could "have it all" whenever they wanted it, simply by stuffing their Gold Cards, PowerBooks, Trojan Pluses, and "Just Do It" Nikes in their backpacks or briefcases? What could be drawing them--these fans of the unfettered, wild-girl antics of Alanis Morissette, Courtney Love, and P.J. Harvey--to the soft-focus visions of female passivity?

As a female member of a somewhat older demographic segment, I would not, for all the tea in Victorian England, go back to the stay-at-home world I struggled so hard and so long to escape from. But I must confess that I understand the nostalgic urge to escape into earlier, more gender-controlled and limited eras.

I, like so many other...