Anachronistic Fantasies and Inept Explication
The local PBS station began showing Lost in Austen last Sunday night. The first episode barely held me. I couldn't bear hearing voices so close to the text but hitting it always off-key as they wove the inevitable changes of swapping modern, real Amanda for eighteenth-century, fictional Lizzie. Tonight, however, at the end of the second episode, when Amanda has permanently messed up everyone's lives, I'm fascinated. That's quite an alternate reality she's achieved there, with Jane married to Collins, a martyr for her family, and Charlotte off to Africa, probably a happier fate than marriage with Collins...
However, I'm concerned that the people who made this miniseries may have misunderstood an essential component of Austen's worldview. It's the same misunderstanding that made me put down Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after reading just the dust jacket at the library. Red alert, denizens of the twenty-first century! Austen embraced the class structure of her time. Duh. She supported and validated it through all her stories. She believed that equals should marry equals -- not just equals in brains, but equals in class status. She was neither a democrat nor a revolutionary, and among her characters, those who trespass these marks suffer for it! It's not just Emma, I promise; it's everywhere. To put a P&P point on it, that is, the Bennett girls are not the class inferiors of Darcy and Bingley. They are a gentleman's daughters, and thus in the same class as the Netherfield and Pemberly boys.
Save the class-transgressing fantasies for the Brontës. Austen is too early, too conservative, too ... Austen! And we like her just fine that way.
However, I'm concerned that the people who made this miniseries may have misunderstood an essential component of Austen's worldview. It's the same misunderstanding that made me put down Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after reading just the dust jacket at the library. Red alert, denizens of the twenty-first century! Austen embraced the class structure of her time. Duh. She supported and validated it through all her stories. She believed that equals should marry equals -- not just equals in brains, but equals in class status. She was neither a democrat nor a revolutionary, and among her characters, those who trespass these marks suffer for it! It's not just Emma, I promise; it's everywhere. To put a P&P point on it, that is, the Bennett girls are not the class inferiors of Darcy and Bingley. They are a gentleman's daughters, and thus in the same class as the Netherfield and Pemberly boys.
Save the class-transgressing fantasies for the Brontës. Austen is too early, too conservative, too ... Austen! And we like her just fine that way.