Just saw an English professor at the forum I go to say this about Jane Austen and figured you could appreciate it:
The thing everybody forgets about Jane Austen is that she's a satirist. That's easy to miss, because most satires are both two dimensional and venomous, and Austin's works are generally neither. This may be because of the library of moral concerns that Austen inherits from Johnson (Samuel) -- Austen's satire seems more reformative than out-and-out bladed.
But e.g. Sense and Sensibility is straight-up burlesque of the sensibility novels that had been popular through the 1790s. I mean, everyone knows this, and everybody reads e.g. Marianne this way. And everybody sees the irony in the passages about, say, Mrs. Jennings or Lucy Steele.
But you wouldn't know this given how Austen gets adapted -- you'd think she was a writer of romantic comedies. And I suppose her works are comic and involve romance. But the comedy comes from the fact that most of the characters are patently ridiculous; if they were drawn in broader strokes, you'd call them caricatures. Yet the impression modern readers seem to have of Austen and her characters is that it's the romantic economy, rather than the characters themselves, who are ridiculous.
I mean, you should listen to people talk about Emma Woodhouse. The whole point of Emma is that Emma has a completely unjustified confidence in her own abilities, and this leads to a series of disasters in Highbury's marriage economy. Although the damage eventually gets repaired, Emma ends the novel as superficial an idiot as when she started it (although she's Knightley's idiot). I mean, yeah, she feels bad about what she's done to, say, Harriet. But even then, her emotional life is generally petty. She only decides she loves Knightley because she's jealous of Harriet, for instance.
That doesn't make Emma an unlikable character, exactly. I can like her the same way I like all the characters on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia -- not for their virtues, but for their predictable and hilarious faults.
But of course Emma's never really adapted this way. The age and character differences between Emma and Knightley are played down considerably in every adaptation I've seen -- I mean, he's twice her age, basically old enough to be her father, and he acts like it. That's not something that either the film adaptations (or the fanfiction) seem willing to touch, and my students are always sort of surprised (and a little horrified) to figure it out.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-02 06:30 pm (UTC)The thing everybody forgets about Jane Austen is that she's a satirist. That's easy to miss, because most satires are both two dimensional and venomous, and Austin's works are generally neither. This may be because of the library of moral concerns that Austen inherits from Johnson (Samuel) -- Austen's satire seems more reformative than out-and-out bladed.
But e.g. Sense and Sensibility is straight-up burlesque of the sensibility novels that had been popular through the 1790s. I mean, everyone knows this, and everybody reads e.g. Marianne this way. And everybody sees the irony in the passages about, say, Mrs. Jennings or Lucy Steele.
But you wouldn't know this given how Austen gets adapted -- you'd think she was a writer of romantic comedies. And I suppose her works are comic and involve romance. But the comedy comes from the fact that most of the characters are patently ridiculous; if they were drawn in broader strokes, you'd call them caricatures. Yet the impression modern readers seem to have of Austen and her characters is that it's the romantic economy, rather than the characters themselves, who are ridiculous.
I mean, you should listen to people talk about Emma Woodhouse. The whole point of Emma is that Emma has a completely unjustified confidence in her own abilities, and this leads to a series of disasters in Highbury's marriage economy. Although the damage eventually gets repaired, Emma ends the novel as superficial an idiot as when she started it (although she's Knightley's idiot). I mean, yeah, she feels bad about what she's done to, say, Harriet. But even then, her emotional life is generally petty. She only decides she loves Knightley because she's jealous of Harriet, for instance.
That doesn't make Emma an unlikable character, exactly. I can like her the same way I like all the characters on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia -- not for their virtues, but for their predictable and hilarious faults.
But of course Emma's never really adapted this way. The age and character differences between Emma and Knightley are played down considerably in every adaptation I've seen -- I mean, he's twice her age, basically old enough to be her father, and he acts like it. That's not something that either the film adaptations (or the fanfiction) seem willing to touch, and my students are always sort of surprised (and a little horrified) to figure it out.