I know Mother’s Day was three whole days ago. My mom and I spent the day together—in Idaho, in fact—until I got on a plane and she and my dad hopped in the car and started driving to California. But it seems that 2012 is the Year of Mom and Jane Austen, and so here we are. It’s Wednesday, but hey, I can still talk about my mom.
I mentioned it briefly during the read-along, but my mother read Mansfield Park along with the rest of the Austen Nation. (She even commented semi-anonymously, like the ninja she is, on one of our read-along posts! Can you spot the rogue parent?) It was her first time—not just her first time reading The Chronicles of Fanny and her Ha-Ha, but her first time reading Austen, period. Shortly afterwards, she joined my Beloved Sisters and me for the second half of Pride and Prejudice and immediately absconded with Miss Osborne’s DVDs, which were apparently better than the identical set that lived on her daughter’s bookshelf from late 2009 through the middle of 2011.
People, I think we have a new member of the cult. I mean, family.
According to mom, that Henry Crawford wasn’t such a bad guy until the whole wife-stealing thing. That was unexpected, but anyway, Maria and Julia weren’t very nice anyway. But before that, why was she so set against him? HE WAS NICE. And why do they call this a romance, again?
Also, Mrs. Bennet is hilarious and having to choose between never speaking to her mother again and never speaking to her father again is great. But is Jane supposed to be prettier than Lizzy? Because that woman looks like a man. And wait, what actor is that? Oh, right, Colin Firth. I liked him in The King’s Speech.
Rumor has it she might pick up Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice (the novel) (though I keep trying to press the Keira Knightley movie on her, for Colin Firth/Matthew McFadyen comparison purposes) next. I promise to stand supportively by, books in hand. Happy reading, Mom!
What is Mother’s Day without fondly remembering the times when our mothers were looking out for our best interests? Mrs. Bennet certainly took great pains to ensure the future happiness of all of her daughters. When Jane asked for the carriage to visit the Bingley sisters, Mrs. Bennet replied, “No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay all night.” Always thinking ahead, that Mrs. B. And she wasn’t wrong, was she?
To celebrate Mother’s Day this year, I have collected some wisdom bestowed on me and my friends by our dear mothers.
On marriage prospects…
• When you get on the plane, you have to be nice if there is a man sitting next to you. He might be single and marry you.
• The entire family is going to fast for one meal every day until you find someone and get married.
• After receiving an email saying I was dating someone, her response was, “I’m so happy! I’ve been praying for this for so long!”
On personal safety…
• No, you can’t go to the New Kids on the Block concert. If you were to go to a concert, you’d probably stand up on a chair to see better. Then you might fall off the chair and break you neck!
• Whatever you do, don’t try on clothes in a Parisian boutique. If you do, you will be abducted and sold into white slavery in Saudi Arabia! I read about it in a magazine.
On the lack of hardiness of subsequent generations…
• Your Great Grandmother Lizzy would wipe her arse with a broken gin bottle.
On becoming a lady of musical accomplishment…
• Don’t bother playing those country songs. Just scream rock ‘n’ roll and kick up your leg and shake your bum!
On the importance of an heir…
• Just get pregnant, you don’t have to get married. I want great grandchildren.
• What? Why would you adopt? You don’t know where that baby came from! If you can’t find a husband, just go out and get pregnant. (Note: This occurred when I was in my 30s.)
On appropriate clothing…
Beloved Sisters, I do not have a Tumblr. I think about getting one all the time. I mean, let’s review: this is a free platform almost entirely for the enjoyment of an endless string of enthralling and amusing images (and, okay, occasional text), curated more or less for one’s own tastes and interests. What could possibly go wrong? I certainly read a lot of other people’s Tumblrs, and it would be so nice to have them all in one place, like a normal person acquainted with the many conveniences of the Internet. (Before you so kindly comment: I am well aware of Google Reader and RSS feeds. I have a SYSTEM, OKAY?) (My system is called “Reading Things.” It is a very exacting system.) And yet: it’s just one more thing, one more place to exist on the Internet, and I never can quite click that little blue “Sign Up” button.
HOWEVER. Let us not allow my old-lady ambivalence to keep us from the riches of the World Wide Web! Let us venture out into the massive temporal sinkhole that is Ryan Gosling memes and animated .gifs!
In other words, let’s find ourselves some good Jane Austen Tumblrs and get to scrollin’. Here are a few gems:
The Other Austen, the Tumblr-iest of the lot
Austen Confessions, a la PostSecret!
and, for all you Shuffle aficionados, the Jane Austen tag.
Happy time-wasting!
*Sorry, Mom; convention of the medium.
Aaaaand we’re back! Welcome to Pride and Prejudice ’95, MST3K-ed by Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Miss Ball, Miss Osborne, bosom friend Miss Tarango, and special guest Mrs. Ball, who missed the first half but is mostly in it for the cake anyway.
We open as Elizabeth Bennet and Colonel Fitzwilliam take a turn in the forest…
Miss O: Lizzy should ditch Darcy and just hook up with Colonel Fitzwilliam. He’s so nice and normal.
Mrs. F: Yeah, but in the book, he explicitly says he won’t marry her.
Miss O: So? That never stopped anybody.
Miss B: Minds can be changed.
[Darcy proposes like a big fat jerk]
Miss O: I can’t imagine having that conversation with so many words. Who argues like that?! I would just say, “….Well, uh, screw you!”
Miss B: “I don’t like you anyway!” [cries]
Miss O: Exactly. There are just a lot of WORDS going on in that fight.
Miss B: Wickham is so Snidely Whiplash in this part. I kind of love it. But also…fifteen. Ick.
Mr. Wickham
Miss O: Lady Catherine’s got crazy eyes. She’s like Marty Feldman.
Miss T: Why are putting out and being put out such different things?
Miss B: Well, you can do both.
Miss T: But hopefully not at the same time.
[Lizzy and Co. tour Pemberley]
Miss T: Maybe we’re going about all this wrong. Find a nice house and see if the guy who lives there isn’t totally repulsive?
Miss B: And ask whether we can come over and take a tour. I’ll try it next time.
Miss T: The housemaid sounds a little like Gollum.
Mrs. B: …and kinda looks like her, too.
[Darcy + pond]
Miss T: Doing okay over there, Miss O?
Miss O: I am doing GREAT. Really, really well.
Mrs. B: Wait, which actor is that?
Miss B: Colin Firth!
Miss T: HAVE YOU TAUGHT YOUR MOTHER NOTHING?!
[SCANDAL!]
Mrs. F: What’s up with Kitty’s hair?
Miss B: 1995.
["Lydia, get away from the window!"]
Miss B: What’s he so afraid of? Snipers?
Miss O: Snoopers.
Miss B: At least she’ll be okay in an earthquake, I guess.
[Breaking news!]
Miss O: Lizzy needs a sports bra. Always running!
[Plot happens. We get sucked in.]
[KISSING.]
YAAAAAAAAAY!
Mrs. F will be back later with her thoughts after the first time. Thanks for tuning in! Until next time.
Welcome to Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s deflowering—er, inaugural viewing of the Pride and Prejudice 1995! This weekend’s liveblogging event will be narrated by Mrs. F herself, along with Miss Osborne, Miss Ball, and bosom friend Miss Tarango. And burritos. And wine. We know what’s good for us.
Shall we begin?
Miss O: If this were a drinking game, we’d have to drink every time Mary opens her mouth.
Miss B: We could MAKE it into a drinking game…
[The Misses Bennet attend a ball]
Miss O: Two dances! Oh my!
Miss T: That’s like second base, basically.
Miss O: Bingley’s such a dork. And dude, Darcy’s a douchebag.
Miss T: Yeah, they were going to call it Douches and Prejudice, but the alliteration just wasn’t the same.
Mrs. F: Well, Jane Bennet has a thick neck.
Miss B: But it’s long!
Mrs. F: But it’s thick.
Miss B: But it’s so long!
["I'll never dance with Mr. Bennet ever ever ever!"]
Mrs. F: Aaaaand that’s what we call foreshadowing.
Miss B: You guys, Denny’s totally cute.
Miss O: He is! But that other guy, he’s totally the Clint Howard of the BBC.
Clint Howard
[Lizzy catches Darcy playing billiards]
Miss O: She doesn’t even say anything. So weird.
Miss T: Well, she did just see his balls.
[One-Armed Jane and Naked Firth pose for a picture]
Miss O: Wait, let’s rewind and pause…I want to see him more naked than that.
Mr. Darcy has good hygiene.
Mrs. F: I actually think he’d act this so much better now. Here, he’s just doing being dour. His smolder has gotten way better.
Miss T: Yeah, but they totally could have showed his butt right there.
[Mr. Collins...exists]
Mrs. F: You know, at least we can say our mothers have never tried to pimp us out to our cousins.
Miss B: Score one for Mom.
Miss O: I don’t know; I wouldn’t put it past my mom. And I have second cousins who are married.
Mrs. F: …To each other?
Miss O: Yup.
Miss T: Those pants are really unflattering. Tight in all the wrong places and loose in all the wrong places! And men really shouldn’t wear white pants anyway.
Mrs. F: Especially when they look like diapers.
[Mr. Collins proposes]
Mrs. F: That man needs a PowerPoint.
[Mr. Bingley leaves Netherfield]
Miss T: *gasp!* He didn’t even send her a text!
Mrs. F: Ugh, who wants to get married when you have to wear one of those bonnet-y things?
Miss B: Oh, is that the deal?
Miss O: So you don’t drive the men crazy with your hair?
Mrs. F: Just the single ones, I think.
Mrs. T: We wouldn’t want to drive the single ones mad. Don’t want to seduce them.
Miss B: We don’t?
Aaaand we’re out! Check in tomorrow, 12ish-3ish PST, for part 2!
Well, we’ve finished the novel, people, so let’s get down to the real work: Mansfield Park 2014, the mega-budgeted star-magnet “romantic” “comedy,” which draws unprecedented, gender-balanced crowds to the multiplex but also woos critics with its profound insights on the human instinct to escape the ha-ha! The Oscar (whichever one you like) shall be ours, and we can all crowd up on the stage in dresses that make us look way worse than any self-respecting famous person, because we have dressed ourselves and are concerned that we may have lost our $4 Target earrings on the way up the aisle! They will probably have to play us off with music, because we are loud and difficult to corral and probably waving at Colin Firth!
Are you with me, Austen Nation?
By which I mean, it’s been well-documented that the most recent adaptations of Mansfield Park have been…odd. To be fair, it’s not an easy story to adapt: there’s a play, and then there isn’t a play, and then adultery, and then some goody-two-shoes get married (goody four-shoes?). The End! We’re just waiting for the agents’ calls to pour in!
But really. I think we can do better. So let’s talk casting.
Fanny Price: I keep coming back to Zoe Boyle, Downton Abbey‘s Lavinia Swire, for no reason I can quite put my finger on. Who can play virtous yet inert, and make us like it? Readers?
(Fun fact: Just this evening, I learned that the 1997 theatrical-release Fanny is, in fact, Frances O’Connor and not Embeth Davidtz, Mark Darcy’s snooty law partner in Bridget Jones’s Diary ["To Mark and his Natasha!"]. For YEARS I’ve thought this. And I’ve seen the movie!)
Edmund Bertram: I have to support the existing choice of Jonny Lee Miller on this one, though it’s primarily because of his performance as Mr. Knightley in the most recent BBC Emma. Handsome and kind, yet vaguely judgmental? He does that so well. (See also: I am trying VERY hard not to suggest Dan Stevens, especially considering the next entry down. But Dan Stevens, you guys.)
Mary Crawford: Hayley Atwell in the 2007 BBC one sounds like strong work to me, and I hate to typecast the Downton crowd—but my imaginary Mary has, since she first stepped onto the page, been Michelle Dockery. (My brain is a nerrrrrrd.) Tell me I’m wrong.
Henry Crawford: Everybody I can think of for this is either Too Much (Ryan Gosling, self? REALLY?) or an infant (Matthew Lewis!). And here I thought brainstorming hot British actors would be my shining moment of usefulness. Help me, readers! You’re my only hope!
Lady Bertram: This really COULD be Embeth Davidtz. I hope she likes pugs.
Mrs. Norris: Julie Walters. Imelda Staunton. Brenda Blethyn, reprising her role as Mrs. Bennet. Who knew middle-aged lady actors were Britain’s top commodity?
Readers, who would you pick, for these characters or any other? Let’s hear it!
What with Miss Ball’s recent Mansfield Park deflowering, (and some of you got deflowered along with her, I know), it’s been a confessional little old time over here at Austenacious. And since they say confession is good for the soul . . . or catching, at any rate . . . I too have a confession to make. I’ve never read Pride and Prejudice!
Ha, ha, no, psych! I’ve read all Jane Austen’s major books many times, I’ve read Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon each more than once, I’ve read Jane’s History of England—I’ve even read the Juvenilia, which are pretty hilarious and a lot less refined in more than one way, if you know what I mean. I’ll admit that I haven’t yet read the complete Letters, but that is not my deep dark secret. No, gentle readers, the secret that I have hidden from you all this time . . . is that I have never seen the 1995 BBC Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice. Nope! Never seen him jump into the lake even once! (How do I know he jumps into a lake? Have you met yourselves at all, AustenFirth fans??)
“But how can this be, Mrs. F?” I hear you cry. “Were you not raised by a good, Austen-lovin’ mamma?” Well, I was. But those were different times, and I was raised on the clean, wholesome 1980 BBC version, always dear to my heart. I did see 2 minutes of the 1995 version when it first aired, and, bear with me here, I thought Jennifer Ehle was far too sappy to be Lizzie. No Colin Firth onscreen, and I didn’t stick around.
Well, that was 1995 and this is 2012. And here I am, ready to give this another try. Miss Ball and Miss Osborne will be on hand to laugh at my ignorance. And if you haven’t seen the Colin Firth version recently, say this year, you can laugh along with them! We’ll be liveblogging Pride and Prejudice this coming weekend:
4/28, 12-3 pm, PT: Episodes 1-3
4/29, 12-3 pm, PT: Episodes 4-6
Will my curmudgeonly heart stay true to Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul, or will I be swayed by the wet, billowy cotton of Colin Firth? Stay tuned! And come on, I know you all need a refresher course, right? I mean, can you think of a better way to spend the weekend?
See you on Saturday!
…and they all lived judgmentally ever after.
We’re done! We finished! We read a very long Jane Austen book, and all we got was this satisfyingly growing Mansfield Park tag! (This is the kind of thing that thrills your average Austen blogger.) And, you know, a string of posts and thoughtful discussion. Which brings me to another thing: You guys are the BEST. Thank you so much for reading along, and chatting it up in the comments, and being hilarious and heartfelt and wonderful. The Austen Nation is the best nation, I think, and I’ve been to Austria, where they have cheese inside sausage inside bread! So.
Having now read every word, I think what makes Mansfield Park hard to swallow isn’t just Fanny’s insistence on being a total doormat (unless, and this is to her credit, somebody’s trying to force her down the aisle); it’s that nothing about her changes. Every other Austen protagonist–and protagonists generally, because this is fiction and there has to be an arc somewhere–learns something. Grows up. Sees the error of her ways. Stops chasing the handsome rogue and falls for the old dude. SOMETHING. Fanny does none of those things. Personal change doesn’t seem to be the point for her, somehow, which begs the question: What IS the point? Mrs. Fitzpatrick suggested that perhaps everybody ELSE is changed because of Fanny’s golden presence, but upon further reflection, I don’t see it; the only character redeemed at the end is Tom Bertram, and that’s thanks to the power of the almighty virus more than anything else. Readers?
That said, I enjoyed it, in a pleasant and immediate kind of way. Fanny and Edmund’s “romance” aside—I’m not sure what “a classic romance” means to the good people at Oxford University Press—Jane’s ear for terrible people being terrible kept me entertained and ready for scandal to strike at any moment. Personal journeys of growth aside…that’s good enough for me, sometimes.
Various and sundry final thoughts:
For all the crap Fanny takes nowadays about her shrinking-violet ways, her dear Edmund is, I think, way worse. He’s controlling; he (I think) knows he’s wrong about Mary, but refuses to pull the plug; he says he loves Fanny, but constantly abandons her; “I could never marry anybody but Mary Crawford,” he moons, twenty pages from the end, and I want him to go to Thornton Lacey AND STAY THERE.
You guys. Maria lives happily ever after (or something)…with Mrs. Norris! I subsequently die of joy.
Sue me; I still like Mary Crawford, “maybe it would be okay if Tom died, because then Edmund could have his money!” comment and all. She’s shallow, but she’s (usually) neither malicious nor clueless—the two great sins of Austenian women. She’s neither rewarded nor truly punished in the end, which seems fair, and I hope she lives to liven up many a party. By which I mean “novel.”
And now, let’s all have snacks (BYO) and read something trashy!
Class dismissed.
Thanks to Mr. Miller for pointing us to Lizzie’s new video blog. Can’t wait to see how it comes out! (Re the statistics on single men of good fortune, see our informal sample. Regression analyses to come. Or possibly not.)
(Click here for video.)
That’s Vol. 3, Chapters 3 – 13, or regular chapters 34 – 44. Oy with the multiple editions, Jane!
So. Last week, everybody was horrible to Fanny about refusing Henry Crawford’s proposal. This remains the case. HOWEVER. There’s knowing you’re not into a guy who’s kind of a tool, and then there’s doing everything you can to AVOID being into a guy who maybe acted kind of like a tool once but has since proven pretty stellar. Guess which one our dear Fanny chooses?
And look: I know a little of what’s coming. This is not my first Jane Austen rodeo, and I know that in her world, handsome gentlemen who look too good to be true usually are. But for just this shining moment, when he comes to visit her and get her out of the hovel and walk arm in arm along the waterfront and say nice things to her little sister, would it kill her to get over herself and think maybe? Isn’t it possible that a guy could be kind of a jerk, then have a change of heart and prove his excellence? Wait, I think I read a book once that went kind of like that. IT WAS CALLED PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.
Also, let’s talk about Fanny’s Stockholm Syndrome. On one hand, of course her parents’ house is cramped and crowded and noisy; that’s why she was shuttled off to Mansfield in the first place. Nobody (except Fanny herself) expects her home visit to be all puppies and rainbows and high degrees of female accomplishment. But it’s not only the shrubberies that she misses—she loves Lady Bertram! She misses Mrs. Norris! This is the talk of a crazy person, which I might have thought was my newfangled modern brain talking, had not half the characters in the novel tried to point it out to her as well. Apparently the occasional fire in the East Room means true love.
And finally, a few assorted points:
- It is my dearest hope that Susan Price will accompany Fanny back to Mansfield, take one look at the whole situation, and drag her sister off to become pirate queens on the Thrush or something.
- “Fanny requires constant air and exercise”? REALLY, JANE? The girl who can’t make it past the cattle guard?
- Heh, Mr. Price is gross.
I am pleased to announce that the official Austenacious Mansfield Park read-along will, barring unwanted advances from a handsome scoundrel or a particularly vexing ha-ha, conclude Wednesday, April 18! Get your final chapters in now, folks, and bet on who Fanny ropes into marrying her with the power of her deep passivity.
