Jane Austen For Dummies (65 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Austen's last finished novel,
Persuasion,
has seen three versions.
In the 1960â1961 winter holiday season, BBC presented a four-part miniseries on videotape.
Then in 1971, Britain's ITV/Granada offered a 225-minute miniseries, available on VHS and DVD.
The oddest point about the 1971 version is that the actress playing the heroine, Anne Elliot, always looks the same. In the novel, Anne is said to have lost her bloom during the eight-year period since she had rejected a proposal from Captain Wentworth, the novel's naval hero. She then regains her bloom at Lyme Regis â so much so, that her father, who never pays attention to her, notices how much better she looks when he sees her again in Bath.
The 1995 version of
Persuasion,
starring Amanda Root as a wonderful Anne, emphasizes the change in Anne by showing her rather frumpy early in the film, and then rather attractive later. This adaptation of the novel had two lives as both a television production (seen in the US on PBS-TV's
Masterpiece Theatre
) and a commercial film. It was produced by the BBC and Sony Pictures. Nick Dear wrote the script, and Roger Michell directed. Ciaran Hinds plays Captain Frederick Wentworth. The film does well in showing more realistically than other Austen-based films what life was like back then.
⢠Dinner is in a darkish room because it's lighted only by candles.
⢠The naval officers' uniforms are well worn.
⢠Their faces sport five o'clock shadows.
The only disappointing part of the film comes near the end: Nick Dear used Austen's cancelled chapters about the reunion of Wentworth and Anne. When you read the book with both the cancelled and Austen's revised final chapters, you see why Austen changed them. You can get this as a DVD or VHS.
A new television version of
Persuasion,
with a screenplay by Simon Burke, is to be part of Britain's ITV Austen series to be shown in the UK in August 2006. So we'll just have to wait to see if the new Anne Elliot loses her bloom or not.
A new film docudrama,
Becoming Jane,
a fictionalized account of Austen as a young woman, is in the works for a 2007 release. It presents the highly controversial and unsubstantiated story of Jane Austen's reunion with Tom Lefroy in London. (For more on Austen and Tom Lefroy, see Chapter 3.) Anne Hathaway plays Jane Austen and James McEvoy plays Tom. A person I know who read the script reports the film has a lot of “invention” in it: This means, if your teacher assigns you to learn about Austen's actual life, reading
this
book will get you a much better grade on the test than seeing the film. But the film is said to be fun â truth aside! The Irish Film Institute is supporting the film.
Determining Austen's Literary Descendents
In This Chapter
Recognizing Austen's influence on novel development
Seeing how Jane Austen inspired the genres
Understanding the origin of “chick lit”
Popularizing Austen in today's culture
J
ust as Jane Austen's writing was influenced by those who came before her, so her writing influenced and continues to influence those who follow her. First-tier writers â and by first-tier, I mean those who are in the canon of British and American writers whose works are considered by scholars as the best literary representatives of their time â such as George Eliot, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Wharton all show in their work that they knew and respected Austen, another canonical writer. Austen's work has also inspired a vast number of sequels in the past 40 years for those readers who are interested in such hypothetical matters as how Darcy and Elizabeth function as a married couple or how Emma, as Mrs. Knightley, raises her own children. Then there are the authors who've been inspired to use Jane Austen as a literary character to flesh out her personality. Some writers and reviewers see Austen as the founder of
chick lit,
which in its best sense is literature written for women that shows women fulfilling themselves like Elizabeth, Emma, Elinor, and other Austen heroines do. And finally, nowadays advertisers and reviewers occasionally deem the author of a novel that can loosely be called a “comedy of manners” because it reflects a contemporary, recognizable social scene, the “new Jane Austen.” (“As if!” as Cher says in the clever film
Clueless,
an
Emma
-based story).
Obviously, Jane Austen has had a wide, deep, and broad influence on her readers.
From canonical works of literature to fluff, and all kinds of books in between, you can identify Jane Austen's presence, and this chapter explores just that.
Among the first-tier novelists (see Table 16-1) whom Austen influenced are those who write in the realistic tradition. Austen's novels present realistic situations and experiences that reflect the world of the gentry in the England of her times. In so doing, she presents characters whose psyches she explores so that her readers can come to understand them, sometimes better than those readers understand themselves. (For more on early realistic writing, see Chapter 4, especially the section on Henry Fielding.) The witty dialogue seen particularly in
Pride and Prejudice
influenced the dramatist Oscar Wilde, who wrote comedies of manners for the stage as Austen did for the novel.
| Novelists | Dramatists |
|---|---|
| Gaskell | Wilde |
| Eliot | |
| Trollope | |
| Flaubert | |
| James | |
| Wharton | |
| Forster | |
| Woolf |
Speaking of Austen's “realism” refers to her realistic portrayal of life among the English gentry in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Used in this broad sense, the term realism isn't to be confused with the later 19th-century movement called “Realism” in American, British, and especially French literature, where novelists sought subjects related to middle-class life and placed less emphasis on traditional plotting. Austen crafted her plots with great care and focused on the gentry of her time. But Austen's realistic writing, as well as Fielding's and Richardson's, which strongly influenced Austen's, certainly contributed to 19th-century Realism. And many of those realistic writers, such as George Eliot, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Gustave Flaubert, learned the elements of realistic writing from Austen and will be discussed as her literary heirs in this chapter. (For more on the class structure of Austen's day, see Chapter 2.)
The narrator is the “voice” that tells the story, as opposed to the actual author, though the two are often one in the same. (The narrator and the author are noticeably different when an author chooses to present the novel in the voice of a particular character: for example, a male author tells the story in the voice of a young girl.) The narrator can tell the story from different perspectives or points of view. Austen uses two of these perspectives or narrative techniques:
Omniscient, third-person narration
occurs when the narrator is all-knowing and speaks of the characters in the grammatical third person (he, she, they, Elizabeth, Darcy). Jane Austen uses an omniscient, third-person narrator, applying free indirect discourse and even mediating omniscient narration. Austen is also occasionally the intrusive omniscient narrator commenting on events, as she does in the final chapters of
Northanger Abbey
and
Mansfield Park
.
For example, in the final chapter of
Mansfield Park,
she writes of “My Fanny,” showing affection for the novel's heroine, Fanny Price. Reading that phrase, we know she'll treat her with tenderness is that chapter.
Objective narration
is also known as “fly on the wall.” Characters speak to each other with no intermediary words from the narrator. This technique can be applied to dramatic presentation. Austen uses dramatic presentation, when she offers, without interceding, the ongoing conversation among characters, as in the drawing-room scenes at Netherfield in
Pride and Prejudice,
where Darcy and Elizabeth engage in extensive dialogue, with occasional comments from other characters like Bingley. In so doing, Austen sometimes doesn't even insert “he says” or “she says.”
Austen's heirs in the top tier of literature were influenced by her writing in multiple ways. Not only did they follow her in presenting a realistic view of their contemporary society, but also in choosing the types of characters and societies they treat, as well as in narrative technique.
Austen almost always uses an all-knowing narrator that speaks of the characters in the third person (he, she, they, and so on) â see the sidebar, “Examining types of narrative technique.”
Austen used both an omniscient narrator and a dramatic presentation of characters through conversation. Among Austen's many important contributions to the novel form, which was developing as she wrote, is the narrative technique she used to present a character's thoughts and feelings called
free indirect discourse
. This term means that Austen writes so readers can slip into the character's head and understand what the character has been experiencing intellectually and emotionally. By dramatizing the character's consciousness, Austen advances the action. For example, in
Emma,
Mr. Knightley recognizes his romantic love for the heroine: “He had been in love with Emma, and jealous of Frank Churchill, from about the same period, one sentiment having probably enlightened the other. It was his jealousy of Frank Churchill that had taken him from the country. . . . He had gone to learn to be indifferent” (E 3:14). Today, readers are used to reading passages of free indirect discourse. But Jane Austen was key in developing and using it in her novels.
Literary scholars frequently think of Henry James and Jane Austen as a pair. Rudyard Kipling's short story, “The Janeites,” published in 1924, encourages this practice. “The Janeites” is about a small group of British soldiers in World War I, all of whom are masons, who form a subsidiary Masonic group based on their knowledge and admiration for the works of Jane Austen, which comfort them in the trenches. Told largely in a British Cockney dialect, the story has one soldier, Hammick (âAmmick), say of Austen, “ . . . what a pity âtwas Jane âad died barren,” to which Macklin counters, “She
did
leave lawful issue in the shape o' one son; an' âis name was âEnery James.” Here's a translation from the Cockney English: Hammick says that Austen, who was unmarried, died without children (“died barren”). Macklin disagrees, saying that Austen left one heir, a literary one: Henry James. (For more on Kipling's “The Janeites,” see Chapter 1.)
Henry James was influenced by Austen, whom he admired greatly. James's presentation of the thoughts of major characters owes much to Austen's narrative technique, especially how she goes into the minds of Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet, though James's style is more complex than Austen's. In fact, James criticized Austen for her occasional overt narrative intrusions because they subvert realism, such as the final chapter of
Mansfield Park,
where the narrator quickly wraps up the novel, dispensing poetic justice all around. Readers have noted the similarities â deliberate or unconscious â between Kate Croy in James's
The Wings of the Dove
and Mary Crawford in
Mansfield Park.
Many of his novels, such as
The Ambassadors,
are regarded as comedies or novels of manners in the vein of Austen, who learned about comedies of manners from the brilliant plays of the masters of this type of writing, William Congreve and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. (For more info on comedies of manners, go to Chapter 4.)
Canonical writers of both novels and plays before and after James are also indebted to Austen. Here they are in chronological order; for James's place in the chronology, see Table 16-1 in this chapter.
Elizabeth Gaskell:
While far more concerned with presenting social problems overtly than Austen, the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell focuses on domestic life in country villages in the manner of Austen, where the events within a family are the material for novels. Among Gaskell's novel in this vein are
Cranford
and
Wives and Daughters
.
George Eliot (pen name Marianne Evans):
Eliot's most famous work,
Middlemarch
(1871), is a novel of epic proportions with a cast of characters far larger than any Austen novel. But its subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” the center of which is the village of Middlemarch, is reminiscent of Austen's focus on country
life. Eliot, like Austen, delves into the psychological lives of her characters.
In fact, early reviewers of Eliot's writing noted the similarities between hers and Austen's. Nowadays as novel readers, you expect to find the author dealing with the inner lives or psychology of characters. Keep in mind that Austen was one of the early novelists to bring her readers into characters' minds without having them write letters to express their feelings.
Middlemarch
's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, may also be likened to Austen's heroines as she, too, is looking for personal fulfillment. Austen handled this type of female character so successfully that she is sometimes credited with founding the noncanonical but currently popular chick lit.
Anthony Trollope:
The great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who called
Pride and Prejudice
the best English novel, was also an heir of Jane Austen, particularly as he, like Austen, was a novelist of manners. Both novelists look acutely at their respective societies and quietly satirize parts of it. On this subject, Trollope, with his six-novel Barsetshire series, presenting the lives of ordinary people in the fictional English county of Barsetshire, is a good example.
Gustave Flaubert:
Flaubert, whose best-known novel is
Madame Bovary,
is a social, psychological, and moral Realist. Like Austen, he uses free indirect discourse. The consciousness of the characters advance the action in his works and put readers into intimate contact with the characters' thinking.
Oscar Wilde:
Victorian playwright Oscar Wilde succeeded Sheridan as the master of comedies of manners with his plays
Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband,
and
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Joking in a letter to her sister about her newly published
Pride and Prejudice,
Austen foresaw her readers' “delight in the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile (sic)” (Letter, February 1813). By “Epigrammatism,” Austen means clever, witty, terse comments, such as Darcy's saying, “âEvery savage can dance,'” or Mrs. Bennet's, “âThose who do not complain are never pitied,'” or Elizabeth's “âIs not general incivility the very essence of love?” (PP 1:6, 1:20, 2:2). Likewise, Wilde, in his comedies of manners for the stage, is also skilled at clever one-liners, as well as lively repartee between hero and heroine in the vein of Darcy and Elizabeth.
Edith Wharton:
An American novelist, Wharton offers in her novels ironic studies of turn-of-the-century (from the 19th to the 20th century, that is!) New York City society, complete with young heroines who have much to learn. She, too, wrote comedies of manners. Examples of her work are
The House of Mirth
and
The Age of Innocence
.
E. M. Forster:
Forster wrote, “I am a Jane Austenite.” He follows Austen in writing comedies of manners set on the domestic stage, paying attention to decorous behavior (behaving according to one's class) and stressing individual morality. His novels include
A Room with a View
and
Howard's End
. (For decorum and morality in Austen, see Chapter 12.)
Virginia Woolf:
Woolf wrote influentially about Austen in her important essay, “Jane Austen,” in
The Common Reader
(1925). Like Austen, Woolf experimented with narration, but Woolf's narration is the modern stream of consciousness technique (following the mind of a character in a continuous flow of thought). While in many ways, Woolf and Austen are very different types of writers â because they come from very different worlds, with Woolf living through the physically and psychologically cataclysmic Word War I â Woolf, like Austen, dealt with the ordinary experiences of women.
Barbara Pym:
While not a canonical writer, British novelist Barbara Pym has been called “the twentieth-century Jane Austen.” Pym writes subtle, quiet comedies set in country villages (sound familiar?). Her main characters tend to be single women, but their stories tend not to have the happy endings that Austen's heroines enjoy. Her heroines also tend to be spinsters â more like Miss Bates (in
Emma
) than Elizabeth or Emma. Readers find parallels between Pym's
A Few Green Leaves,
with its heroine named Emma, and
Emma
. Other have suggested that
A Glass of Blessings
is Pym's version of
Emma
. Because
Some Tame Gazelle
deals with two sisters, readers have found parallels with
Sense and Sensibility
.