Austen posts, April (Tumblr)

[anghraine]

Again, I only discussed her a few times, but here they are:

kungfunurse asked:

1/2 Good morning. Hope you’re warm and safe this week. I’ve got a question about Austen fannish hx that I was hoping you could help with. Like many, I fell in love with Austen over Firth’s wet linen-clad chest. I went on from there to read her books and seek out scholarly meta. I know there’s an undercurrent of “those started the dark times” with Firth’s dip in the lake, but I don’t know the reasons behind it. Is it just that the ‘95 adaptation got so big it steamrollered over other favs?

2/2 Or did the mini-series lead to Austen’s characters getting misrepresented in later adaptations? Thanks for taking the time. I always enjoy your blog.

I replied:

Thanks! I’m quite cozy these days.

As far as I understand, you’re asking if my dislike of the fanon interpretations that sprang out of the 1995 comes from a) it being so popular that it overshadowed other interpretations in other adaptations, or b) it being so popular that its interpretations were repeated in other adaptations. I’d say … both, really.

First of all: I’ve never hidden that I dislike the 1995 P&P as an adaptation (it’s good TV, but I don’t really care) and I specifically dislike that scene. My reasons are varied but certainly subjective, so I don’t want anyone to think they’re wrong to like it, or that it’s the author of all P&P-related sins.

Also, this is more than a little rambling.

Disclaimers aside, I think there are two major factors in how certain ideas got spread by the 1995 P&P. Firstly, there were pre-existing ideas about P&P that the 1995 used; in those cases, the 1995 isn’t uniquely responsible for them, but rather, amplified them. Then there were elements that the 1995 either exaggerated or invented outright.

In both cases, it was not just the immense popularity of the adaptation that spread ideas I consider mistaken (the other P&P adaptations have also been very popular and made highly questionable decisions). Rather, the sway of the 1995′s interpretations and inventions was the result of the widespread belief/insistence that it was The One True Adaptation in which Austen’s vision was precisely translated to cinematic form. That is, the 1995 largely supplanted the novel in popular consciousness because it was seen as the novel (an interpretation very much pushed by many of its fans), in addition to being extremely popular in its own right.

So. The wet shirt scene is a pretty good example, in that it a) differs quite significantly from the book, b) is now overpoweringly associated with the characters in the book, because of c) the narrative of the 1995 == Austen. It bothers me the most (well, almost the most—there’s one I hate more, lol) because it’s become the iconic image of Austen’s Darcy despite being highly uncharacteristic for him, IMO, and overshadowing the character dynamics of the original scene.

The scene sometimes gets directly carried over into other adaptations, and sometimes not, but I think we see something of the dynamic in where the 2005 goes with it. In a lot of ways, the 2005 overtly resists the 1995′s narrative, but ultimately adopts/continues/reflects what the 1995 did, and that’s present here. While the Darcy/Elizabeth meeting in the 2005 doesn’t involve the pond, it relies on the same underlying assumption that Darcy and Elizabeth’s encounter doesn’t carry sufficient dramatic weight unless something is added. It adopts the logic of the 1995 while merely differing in particulars.

There’s also stuff like the idea that Elizabeth is radically set on only marrying for love (the deepest love!!), which gets repeated in adaptations over and over and over again despite never appearing in the novel. It’s a … possible interpretation, but the phrasing and setting are so exactly replicated from adaptation to adaptation that it’s pretty clearly a direct result of the 1995′s popularity and displacement of the novel.

OTOH, I think a lot of what it did with Darcy reflected a broader sense that Austen’s Darcy doesn’t quite work, that he’s underwritten as a romantic lead and needed to be ~improved. I mean, iirc Andrew Davies said so outright (and it’s obvious in any case). That’s also very much present in the 1940, though taken in another direction. It’s there in the 2005, of course; Colin Firth said he was playing Darcy as shy, but Matthew Macfadyen played him as very much more so. There are stage versions going back to the early twentieth century with complaints about Darcy. Austen criticism has constantly struggled with The Problem of Darcy, going back to the very beginning.

I do not remotely agree with this perception, I’m sure to the surprise of no one; I think Darcy is a difficult character for many people because he doesn’t actually fit the archetypes he’s reduced to (e.g., he’s not a subpar Byronic hero, he’s just not a Byronic hero). He doesn’t live up to this idea of a satisfactory brooding romantic lead—as argued by Andrew Davies, but also many others—because he wasn’t written as a somber exemplar of masculinity in the first place. Also, people often project their feelings about his (supposed) general type (which varies) onto him; I read an article awhile back about how he’s the sort of person who would steal handicapped parking, and, um, what.

(It’s worth nothing that there’s an alternate narrative alongside this one. Critics aside, Darcy has always been a very popular character—comments about him as one of the novel’s main attractions go back to 1813 itself, and Austen seems to have thought that the novel’s appeal rested on both Elizabeth and Darcy, to go by one of her remarks to Cassandra.)

Anyway, the deliberate ‘correction’ of Austen’s Darcy in the 1995 reflected a reasonably common perception of him, rather than some unique misreading by Davies et al. Their particular correction dominates over the other ones because the 1995 dominates over the other ones (esp in its portrayal of Elizabeth and Darcy), but the subsequent versions probably would have tried to correct Austen regardless.

In conclusion:

- Its towering influence has operated on both vectors,

- It’s fine if that works for you, but

- I will hate it forever.

An anon asked:

i'm curious as to your thoughts on the pride and prejudice and zombies movie if you saw it? i personally tried to watch it and couldn't really get past the first scene with lizzie and darcy bc i found the dialogue too cringy, but i am well aware that might've just been me.

I replied:

I couldn’t bring myself to watch it, tbh.

madamovary responded to the first meta/rant:

is the issue with Darcy maybe that he can’t translate to a visual medium? so many of the instances that make me love him in the books are second and thirdhand references to him, or the brief glances into his own thoughts, or that sort of tertiary quotation where you get what someone said without quotation marks - he starts out inaccessible and you grow to understand him just slightly ahead of lizzie. i’m not sure that works outside of written fiction.

I replied:

Good point! I wouldn’t say can’t, but yes, I think those are some of the reasons it’s difficult.

And I think it’s particularly the case because—

Okay, it’s deeply over-simplistic to say the first half of the novel is Elizabeth’s and the second is Darcy’s. But the first half is, I think, where Elizabeth really wins audiences over, while Darcy is on an upswing from the letter onwards and never comes down again. And while the first half kicks off like a play and in some ways reads like one, the second is much less theatrical—in many ways, it functions as a re-reading of the first half, which in retrospect becomes more ambiguous.

That is, the ‘theatrical’ scenes (some of which are later on, as with the meeting at Pemberley, but most are not) leave open these spaces where we don’t really know what people’s expressions are or how they’re speaking, or sometimes even what they say, but where it’s easy to assume we do. We’re left to draw our own conclusions (or Elizabeth’s conclusions, as the case may be). That’s obviously much easier to represent in a written narrative—not easy, but easier.

The ambiguity around what is really being seen and said is mostly associated with Darcy, and … I don’t think it’s impossible for film to be ambiguous, of course, but it would probably be difficult to carry it out in the way the novel does in obscuring the ambiguity itself. It’s less that we don’t know him than that we don’t know we don’t know him.

In any case, the bulk of the second half fills in those spaces to some extent, though of course there’s lots of room for interpretation in what we weigh and how the sides hook together. And in a lot of ways, Darcy is where the two sides hook together, or most obviously are seen to; we see Darcy one way in the first half and then we see him in a very different way, even though the reasons for the differences are much more complex than they look like. The end result is that where Darcy is at his best is also where Darcy is at his least cinematic.

It may be that the various contortions that adaptations go into around him are attempts to give Darcy’s attractive/sympathetic side the weight in audiences’ minds that Darcy at his highly memorable worst will have. So the 1940 Darcy is made charming all along and 1995 Darcy becomes this brooding sex object and the 2005 is inarticulate and shy and LBD keeps him offscreen altogether while constantly suggesting that Lizzie’s perception of him is unreliable.

Possibly, they’re trying to prop him up in the visual medium and create a continuity with later Darcy, where the novel’s continuity rests heavily on frequently-offscreen hints and absences—again, something far better suited to the novel (and even there, missed by many people: hence the complaining about Darcy over the years from certain quarters).

I do honestly still think they’re underestimating audiences and … basically taking the easy route in terms of film conventions. But I do agree that he’s a difficult character, and particularly difficult for film.

In a weird way, it's the same issue as with Faramir, where the form of his depiction didn't really suit the medium, so they just altered his fundamental personality, and it's justified as ... like, something had to change for the medium, therefore the specific changes they made were the right ones. Okayyy.