Stieg Larsson/Jane Austen/Harry Potter mashup
I spent the holiday weekend doing basically two things: listening to the new Lady Gaga and rereading Jane Austen’s Emma. The Emma urge had struck me, weirdly, just as I was reaching the gripping climax of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I actually interrupted Larsson briefly to indulge it. I didn’t reread the whole novel straight, nor did I even read the physical book, because my copy is still packed away in plastic somewhere. Instead I jumped around in it online at the Republic of Pemberley, which has the full text. I cringe slightly to admit that, because I have mixed feelings about a website which has a little box at the bottom of each page that says, in cloying Austinese, “No, you’ve not lost your way. You remain safe within the borders of The Republic of Pemberley.” Actually I have mixed feelings about Austen fandom in general (which, it should be noted, is a distinct phenomenon from Austen herself, about whom I do not have mixed feelings).
Um…you all have read Emma, right? And all have the same microscopic familiarity with its text as with those of the Potter books, so that I can say “Box Hill” or “Mr. Dixon” or “barouche-landau” and you’ll reply, “Yeah - and??”
*hears crickets, but ignores them*
Whatever the flaws of the Miramax Emma, Jeremy Northam hit the Box Hill scene out of the park. Don't even talk to me about Mark Strong, who was in Box Hill ragey mode for the ENTIRE ITV production - ugh. As for Jonny Lee Miller - try graduating from high school first, dude.**
Actually I’m pretty sure I know why the Emma urge struck me when it did. I’d just read about 500 pages of a book that features several rapes, plenty of incest, a lot of ethically appalling political and corporate behavior, and an explicit awareness of the prevalence of violence, especially sexual violence, against women. On some level I probably needed sexual succor; hence, Emma. It also might have something to do with the fact that the weather in New York is finally good, and in spring a not-that-young woman’s fancy turns to thoughts of …whatever. Of Jane Austen, apparently. Or possibly with the fact that even if you’ve spent the last six months feeling dead set against sex, men or any combination of the two, there is nothing like having to study for two finals to make you want to spend the day writing Jane Austen porn* instead.
My plastic-bagged copy of Emma has an introduction by Terry Castle that has been making me nod my head and say “Yeah” for about fifteen years, because she totally enables and legitimizes my own intense attraction toward this book. She writes about how the comforts of Emma aren’t merely escapist, they’re therapeutic; she enlists the most inarguably legit of all Austenites, E.M. Forster, to lend his backing to my fangirly feelings (“She is my favorite author!...I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers”); she asserts, without sounding at all apologetic, that Emma is all about joy and well-being, and that underneath the black-belt-level satire, it is an intensely emotional book. Maybe most critically of all, Castle gets, and is willing to say, that part of that joy, well-being and emotion is sexual.
I can’t lie: a major part of the reason I love this book is that the connection between Emma and Mr. Knightley is so incomparably and eternally sexy. Long before jealousy shocks them out of their mutual complacency and forces them to finally consider each other in a romantic light, they are drawn together by the instinctive recognition of a common obsession: no one else in Highbury feels compelled to grapple with the nuances of the questions “What is right?” and “How should people live?” to the degree that they do, not even the excellent Mrs. Weston. (Actually, Jane Fairfax might be capable of meeting them on their philosophical level, but as Mr. Knightley points out, what’s the good of that in someone who’s not willing to even talk to you about it, much less crack jokes about it?) In their conversations, neighborhood gossip is elevated to the level of a restless, ongoing ethical struggle - not a struggle against one another, as it often appears, but toward a larger truth. In such a quest, it’s terrible to feel that your favorite person in the world does not share your understanding of what truth is, which is why their fights are so disturbing to them both.
No matter how grieved or irritated they get about each other’s perceived failures, neither of them can do without the other’s opinion and perspective for more than a few days. Even when Mr. Knightley isn’t around, Emma is constantly having mental conversations with him that basically consist in “Oh, shut up, Mr. Knightley; I’m right” or “Damn it, you actually WERE right, but there’s no way I’m going to tell you that, you smug bastard.” Except that Mr. Knightley is actually not smug - certainly not the way Emma herself sometimes is - and when she eventually acknowledges his moments of superior judgment, as she almost always does, he generally responds by granting the justice of some of her own points. For his part, Mr. Knightley, though he would no doubt be startled to have it pointed out to him, is addicted to Emma’s conversation and compulsively seeks it out; at one point in the novel a blizzard snows everyone in for several days, making it impossible for Emma to see Harriet or go to church, but somehow Mr. Knightley still manages to get to Hartfield - walking, as he always does - to see the Woodhouses. The longstanding relationship between the Knightley and Woodhouse families provides the perfect cover for him, both in his own mind and that of Highbury at large, though anyone who’s thought about it for two minutes would realize that if Mr. Woodhouse lived alone, Mr. Knightley would be at Hartfield only slightly more often than at the Bateses’.
The other successful screen Mr. Knightley is, of course, Paul Rudd’s politically conscious, Nietzsche-reading Josh in Clueless. I find the notion of Mr. Knightley reading Nietzsche hilarious all by itself.
Since it seems to be Confess Your Sickeningly Girly Behavior Day here where I live, I will also tell you that the very first scene I reread was the marriage proposal scene - which is actually sort of a misnomer, because nobody involved in this scene comes into it planning to propose or get proposed to, and that’s part of why it’s so great. Actually, the planned marriage proposals in Austen never work, have you noticed that? Collins, Darcy 1.0, Elton, and there must be a botched proposal attempt in Persuasion that I’m not remembering. Anyway, if your hair’s all nicely combed and you’re sitting there mentally rehearsing your best lines while you nervously wait to get the chick in question into a confined space, you ought to know from the outset that that shit is doomed. Emma and Mr. Knightley, by contrast, are totally stunned, though also quite psyched, to find themselves engaged as they exit Hartfield garden and prepare to act nonchalant over tea with Mr. Woodhouse. I really wish Austen had not prissed out gotten all protective of her heroine when it came time for Emma’s side of the dialogue, because it seems to me that she has some ‘splainin’ to do before Mr. Knightley -- who has no idea of how Emma’s whole life has flashed before her eyes in the last couple of days, or what fantastic writing her turmoil has inspired from her author -- will believe that she already loves him. Nor am I convinced that saying “just what she ought,” as “a lady always does,” would be at all sufficient in such a situation. (See what I mean? Prissy.) Still, the whole novel flows into and informs this scene, and the emotional payoff is huge; the first time I read Emma it took me several hours to come down from the high this scene produced. It took me a lot longer to notice that even here, amidst all the intense and serious happiness, there is comedy: Mr. Knightley’s near-180 on Frank Churchill during this scene is sufficiently hilarious that Austen herself ends the chapter by laughing at him about it.
A romantic denouement like this is a fantasy, I get that; I suspect it was a conscious fantasy even for its author, who probably knew by this time in her life that she wasn’t going to have an opportunity to get married in a way she could live with, let alone fantasize about, and decided that such wishes might be more satisfactorily realized in art in any case. I worry about some of the uses to which women have been putting Austen for the last two hundred years, and feel like two or three of these books (I don’t even have to specify which ones, do I?) ought to come with warning labels. In the case of Emma (which admittedly is fetishized by a lot fewer people than P&P), somebody really ought to point out that the case of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax is closest to what deserving people are likely to get in their own lives, and that’s if they’re lucky: someone you like enough to put up with their (considerable) bullshit.
So now the long weekend is over, and no doubt this strange self-indulgent mood of mine will pass and I’ll embrace ugly reality and its ambivalent, realist literature once again. Although, to get back to Stieg Larsson for a minute, the funny thing is that that book, for all its disturbing content, is a fantasy too - a fantasy of sexual justice topped off with a fantasy of corporate justice. The way the Harriet Vanger case is resolved is a stroke - in hindsight, it’s the most satisfying thing Larsson could have done with it, and I actually found it more believable than the wrap-up of the Wennerström subplot: wouldn’t someone have noticed at some point that the evidence against him was obtained by, um, slightly illegal means?
You’re probably wondering where the Harry Potter part of this mashup is, and the answer is that while rereading Emma, I entertained myself by wondering what the common ground between Mr. Knightley and Snape is. There must be one, given that I fangirl them both like an idiot, but all I could really come up with was high intelligence, a seemingly congenital inability to mince words, and dark hair.*** Mr. Knightley is, of course, the compleat Gryffindor; although in the end I think Emma is one too****, you can’t deny she has a few Slytherin moments along the way, so maybe you could make the case that they have a sort of Snape-Lily dynamic in reverse. In fact, however, the Emma character who comes closest to Snape is Mr. Knightley’s younger brother, the astute but moody and antisocial John Knightley - the only person in the book who ever dares to direct any snark against the highly snarkable Mr. Woodhouse. (Actually, John Knightley snarks against Mr. Perry, the local apothecary, but it amounts to the same thing.) John Knightley is in the novel primarily to offer an unflattering contrast to his older brother, but I’ve always liked him anyway, and now maybe I know why.
*Jane Austen porn differs from regular porn that it is much more subtle - so much more subtle that it doesn't actually need to involve sex. Mine didn’t.
**I like Jonny Lee Miller - in fact, I like everybody who ever came within fifty feet of the set of Trainspotting. But thirty seconds into the marriage proposal scene from the 2009 BBC miniseries - which came up at the top of the search results when I was looking for clips from the Paltrow/Northam version - I was cringing and muttering, “No. Just - no.”
***I realize Austen does not specify that Mr. Knightley has dark hair. Nevertheless, I’m quite sure that he does.
****I also entertained myself by assigning all the Emma characters to a Hogwarts house. Mr. Weston is a Gryffindor, though I think I’d place his wife in Ravenclaw; Miss Bates, Harriet Smith and Mr. Woodhouse are all Hufflepuffs; Jane Fairfax is a Ravenclaw, obvs, while Frank Churchill may very possibly be a Slytherin. Mr. Elton is definitely a Slytherin, but somehow it seems too easy to automatically chuck Mrs. Elton in there with him; she’s not a conniving jerk so much as a hapless pawn of her own bad taste and social tone-deafness, which control her as fully as the verbal diarrhea does Miss Bates. So I’ll just say that whatever house Gilderoy Lockhart is in, Mrs. Elton is in that one too.)
Um…you all have read Emma, right? And all have the same microscopic familiarity with its text as with those of the Potter books, so that I can say “Box Hill” or “Mr. Dixon” or “barouche-landau” and you’ll reply, “Yeah - and??”
*hears crickets, but ignores them*
Whatever the flaws of the Miramax Emma, Jeremy Northam hit the Box Hill scene out of the park. Don't even talk to me about Mark Strong, who was in Box Hill ragey mode for the ENTIRE ITV production - ugh. As for Jonny Lee Miller - try graduating from high school first, dude.**
Actually I’m pretty sure I know why the Emma urge struck me when it did. I’d just read about 500 pages of a book that features several rapes, plenty of incest, a lot of ethically appalling political and corporate behavior, and an explicit awareness of the prevalence of violence, especially sexual violence, against women. On some level I probably needed sexual succor; hence, Emma. It also might have something to do with the fact that the weather in New York is finally good, and in spring a not-that-young woman’s fancy turns to thoughts of …whatever. Of Jane Austen, apparently. Or possibly with the fact that even if you’ve spent the last six months feeling dead set against sex, men or any combination of the two, there is nothing like having to study for two finals to make you want to spend the day writing Jane Austen porn* instead.
My plastic-bagged copy of Emma has an introduction by Terry Castle that has been making me nod my head and say “Yeah” for about fifteen years, because she totally enables and legitimizes my own intense attraction toward this book. She writes about how the comforts of Emma aren’t merely escapist, they’re therapeutic; she enlists the most inarguably legit of all Austenites, E.M. Forster, to lend his backing to my fangirly feelings (“She is my favorite author!...I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers”); she asserts, without sounding at all apologetic, that Emma is all about joy and well-being, and that underneath the black-belt-level satire, it is an intensely emotional book. Maybe most critically of all, Castle gets, and is willing to say, that part of that joy, well-being and emotion is sexual.
I can’t lie: a major part of the reason I love this book is that the connection between Emma and Mr. Knightley is so incomparably and eternally sexy. Long before jealousy shocks them out of their mutual complacency and forces them to finally consider each other in a romantic light, they are drawn together by the instinctive recognition of a common obsession: no one else in Highbury feels compelled to grapple with the nuances of the questions “What is right?” and “How should people live?” to the degree that they do, not even the excellent Mrs. Weston. (Actually, Jane Fairfax might be capable of meeting them on their philosophical level, but as Mr. Knightley points out, what’s the good of that in someone who’s not willing to even talk to you about it, much less crack jokes about it?) In their conversations, neighborhood gossip is elevated to the level of a restless, ongoing ethical struggle - not a struggle against one another, as it often appears, but toward a larger truth. In such a quest, it’s terrible to feel that your favorite person in the world does not share your understanding of what truth is, which is why their fights are so disturbing to them both.
No matter how grieved or irritated they get about each other’s perceived failures, neither of them can do without the other’s opinion and perspective for more than a few days. Even when Mr. Knightley isn’t around, Emma is constantly having mental conversations with him that basically consist in “Oh, shut up, Mr. Knightley; I’m right” or “Damn it, you actually WERE right, but there’s no way I’m going to tell you that, you smug bastard.” Except that Mr. Knightley is actually not smug - certainly not the way Emma herself sometimes is - and when she eventually acknowledges his moments of superior judgment, as she almost always does, he generally responds by granting the justice of some of her own points. For his part, Mr. Knightley, though he would no doubt be startled to have it pointed out to him, is addicted to Emma’s conversation and compulsively seeks it out; at one point in the novel a blizzard snows everyone in for several days, making it impossible for Emma to see Harriet or go to church, but somehow Mr. Knightley still manages to get to Hartfield - walking, as he always does - to see the Woodhouses. The longstanding relationship between the Knightley and Woodhouse families provides the perfect cover for him, both in his own mind and that of Highbury at large, though anyone who’s thought about it for two minutes would realize that if Mr. Woodhouse lived alone, Mr. Knightley would be at Hartfield only slightly more often than at the Bateses’.
The other successful screen Mr. Knightley is, of course, Paul Rudd’s politically conscious, Nietzsche-reading Josh in Clueless. I find the notion of Mr. Knightley reading Nietzsche hilarious all by itself.
Since it seems to be Confess Your Sickeningly Girly Behavior Day here where I live, I will also tell you that the very first scene I reread was the marriage proposal scene - which is actually sort of a misnomer, because nobody involved in this scene comes into it planning to propose or get proposed to, and that’s part of why it’s so great. Actually, the planned marriage proposals in Austen never work, have you noticed that? Collins, Darcy 1.0, Elton, and there must be a botched proposal attempt in Persuasion that I’m not remembering. Anyway, if your hair’s all nicely combed and you’re sitting there mentally rehearsing your best lines while you nervously wait to get the chick in question into a confined space, you ought to know from the outset that that shit is doomed. Emma and Mr. Knightley, by contrast, are totally stunned, though also quite psyched, to find themselves engaged as they exit Hartfield garden and prepare to act nonchalant over tea with Mr. Woodhouse. I really wish Austen had not prissed out gotten all protective of her heroine when it came time for Emma’s side of the dialogue, because it seems to me that she has some ‘splainin’ to do before Mr. Knightley -- who has no idea of how Emma’s whole life has flashed before her eyes in the last couple of days, or what fantastic writing her turmoil has inspired from her author -- will believe that she already loves him. Nor am I convinced that saying “just what she ought,” as “a lady always does,” would be at all sufficient in such a situation. (See what I mean? Prissy.) Still, the whole novel flows into and informs this scene, and the emotional payoff is huge; the first time I read Emma it took me several hours to come down from the high this scene produced. It took me a lot longer to notice that even here, amidst all the intense and serious happiness, there is comedy: Mr. Knightley’s near-180 on Frank Churchill during this scene is sufficiently hilarious that Austen herself ends the chapter by laughing at him about it.
A romantic denouement like this is a fantasy, I get that; I suspect it was a conscious fantasy even for its author, who probably knew by this time in her life that she wasn’t going to have an opportunity to get married in a way she could live with, let alone fantasize about, and decided that such wishes might be more satisfactorily realized in art in any case. I worry about some of the uses to which women have been putting Austen for the last two hundred years, and feel like two or three of these books (I don’t even have to specify which ones, do I?) ought to come with warning labels. In the case of Emma (which admittedly is fetishized by a lot fewer people than P&P), somebody really ought to point out that the case of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax is closest to what deserving people are likely to get in their own lives, and that’s if they’re lucky: someone you like enough to put up with their (considerable) bullshit.
So now the long weekend is over, and no doubt this strange self-indulgent mood of mine will pass and I’ll embrace ugly reality and its ambivalent, realist literature once again. Although, to get back to Stieg Larsson for a minute, the funny thing is that that book, for all its disturbing content, is a fantasy too - a fantasy of sexual justice topped off with a fantasy of corporate justice. The way the Harriet Vanger case is resolved is a stroke - in hindsight, it’s the most satisfying thing Larsson could have done with it, and I actually found it more believable than the wrap-up of the Wennerström subplot: wouldn’t someone have noticed at some point that the evidence against him was obtained by, um, slightly illegal means?
You’re probably wondering where the Harry Potter part of this mashup is, and the answer is that while rereading Emma, I entertained myself by wondering what the common ground between Mr. Knightley and Snape is. There must be one, given that I fangirl them both like an idiot, but all I could really come up with was high intelligence, a seemingly congenital inability to mince words, and dark hair.*** Mr. Knightley is, of course, the compleat Gryffindor; although in the end I think Emma is one too****, you can’t deny she has a few Slytherin moments along the way, so maybe you could make the case that they have a sort of Snape-Lily dynamic in reverse. In fact, however, the Emma character who comes closest to Snape is Mr. Knightley’s younger brother, the astute but moody and antisocial John Knightley - the only person in the book who ever dares to direct any snark against the highly snarkable Mr. Woodhouse. (Actually, John Knightley snarks against Mr. Perry, the local apothecary, but it amounts to the same thing.) John Knightley is in the novel primarily to offer an unflattering contrast to his older brother, but I’ve always liked him anyway, and now maybe I know why.
*Jane Austen porn differs from regular porn that it is much more subtle - so much more subtle that it doesn't actually need to involve sex. Mine didn’t.
**I like Jonny Lee Miller - in fact, I like everybody who ever came within fifty feet of the set of Trainspotting. But thirty seconds into the marriage proposal scene from the 2009 BBC miniseries - which came up at the top of the search results when I was looking for clips from the Paltrow/Northam version - I was cringing and muttering, “No. Just - no.”
***I realize Austen does not specify that Mr. Knightley has dark hair. Nevertheless, I’m quite sure that he does.
****I also entertained myself by assigning all the Emma characters to a Hogwarts house. Mr. Weston is a Gryffindor, though I think I’d place his wife in Ravenclaw; Miss Bates, Harriet Smith and Mr. Woodhouse are all Hufflepuffs; Jane Fairfax is a Ravenclaw, obvs, while Frank Churchill may very possibly be a Slytherin. Mr. Elton is definitely a Slytherin, but somehow it seems too easy to automatically chuck Mrs. Elton in there with him; she’s not a conniving jerk so much as a hapless pawn of her own bad taste and social tone-deafness, which control her as fully as the verbal diarrhea does Miss Bates. So I’ll just say that whatever house Gilderoy Lockhart is in, Mrs. Elton is in that one too.)