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yet another screed about Andrew Davies+Austen
While most of my bottomless annoyance at Andrew Davies is directed at his P&P, let's not forget his NA, which has a really excellent cast (Felicity Jones in particular is perfect as Catherine IMO) AND which overlays Catherine's preoccupations with female novelists with the male fantasies in Matthew Lewis's The Monk.
In NA-the-book, Austen only references The Monk once, as John Thorpe's preferred reading material in his denunciation of Frances Burney. It's an alarm bell ringing over his head (it's hard to summarize The Monk but it involves incest and rape among many other things). Austen loved Burney! She specifically mentions Burney in her defense of the novel in this same book! Like, who thinks "hmm, let's use this quasi-pornographic male text held up as superior by a self-absorbed asshole as a significant component of the film"? I think there's plenty of evidence in his P&P that Davies's priorities are skewed towards amplifying conventional masculinity, but it goes to a whole new level in NA.
And yes, approach to the source text is not the sole metric by which an adaptation should be judged, but I think that the ways adaptations engage with their sources (what they change/don't change/mix up) are suggestive about their aims and priorities as well as influential in popularizing conceptions about the source text. The aims and priorities of Davies's take on NA are just ... what the fuck.
In NA-the-book, Austen only references The Monk once, as John Thorpe's preferred reading material in his denunciation of Frances Burney. It's an alarm bell ringing over his head (it's hard to summarize The Monk but it involves incest and rape among many other things). Austen loved Burney! She specifically mentions Burney in her defense of the novel in this same book! Like, who thinks "hmm, let's use this quasi-pornographic male text held up as superior by a self-absorbed asshole as a significant component of the film"? I think there's plenty of evidence in his P&P that Davies's priorities are skewed towards amplifying conventional masculinity, but it goes to a whole new level in NA.
And yes, approach to the source text is not the sole metric by which an adaptation should be judged, but I think that the ways adaptations engage with their sources (what they change/don't change/mix up) are suggestive about their aims and priorities as well as influential in popularizing conceptions about the source text. The aims and priorities of Davies's take on NA are just ... what the fuck.
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