anghraine

I’m obviously a big fan of bringing together major or minor characters from across Austen’s novels into one big Jane Austen Cinematic Universe. I do think, though, that there’s a sort of … I don’t know if I’d say problem, but there’s an issue.

If you’ve got a world populated primarily or heavily by Austen’s own characters, I think the “everyone back then thought/did X” argument (though always problematic) becomes stronger than it really is, because it treats Austen’s characters as normative. This goes both ways; Austen’s characters become representative of the typical, and attitudes/conduct assumed to be typical are imposed onto Austen’s characters.

What it tends to erase is the possibility that some of Austen’s characters—certainly not all, but some, especially among the central characters—are extraordinary people. Not necessarily in the melodramatic OTT sense, but in the sense that they’re in some way (usually many ways) atypical of the world around them, even as they’re bound up in it.

Just going w/ P&P, Elizabeth and Darcy are very much embedded within the world they live in, but they don’t live demographically representative lives within it. There’s no point where most young ladies were like Elizabeth, or where most rich landlords were anything like Darcy. Some were! They’re not unrealistic as in beyond the realm of reasonable possibility. But they are beyond the realm of reasonable frequency.

I think it’s more apparent that the characters are fairly unique people when you treat the novels as discrete continuities. Alternately, there’s the possibility of a really big world in which the cross-novel Austen characters are a minority who can thus be treated as the unusual people they are. But otherwise … even though I’m really fond of the JACU, I think something pretty important can get lost in it.

Tagged: #strier talks about how historically-minded critics tend to ignore the possibility that elements in fiction might be unusual or surprising #/in their own time/ #and how sometimes 'it seems to be saying this but it would be odd at the time' is just ... an odd thing. bc people write about odd things. #and it got me thinking about this #i remember mags at austenblog used to fight the good fight with this too #and be like ... yeah but just bc real life people usually did such and such doesn't mean it's how austen wrote her characters