Okay, people. Let’s talk about civilized.
We, as Jane fans, get called civilized all the time. ALL the TIME. It’s in the news (to the extent that Janedom is in the news); it’s on the Web; it gets tossed around in casual conversation like it’s nothing. And, of course, it’s only right. If anybody is civilized, we are civilized.
Take this quotation from an old New York Times article on the appeal of Jane (circa 1995, so interestingly pre-Austenmania):
“The company of women is so droll,” [interviewee Barbara Stewart] said. “We get so satiric when we get going. That’s what reading her is like: being with great women. Like a great, great lunch. Life is so tawdry and rude and coarse, and this is so civilized.”
Well, sure. Jane was nothing but civilized, right? I mean, everybody in her novels wears those pretty and definitely un-boobalicious Empire-waist dresses, and then drinks tea! And the ladies are always smart and well-intentioned, and the men are never skeeves or sexual predators! And, nobody ever thinks of making catty comments, veiled or otherwise, about anybody else! Nor does anybody deserve said catty comments, ever! Clearly.
And the ladies of Austenacious, well. Let me tell you: we are the souls of civilization. No rudeness or coarse language, gluttony or sloth or envy here. Of COURSE we don’t talk about Colin Firth’s hindquarters, or anybody else’s! What do you think, we were raised in a barn? We are ladies, and we lunch, and our meetings feature more pearls than an oyster boat. And makeup. Always, always makeup. You can tell, of course, because of the courtly nature of Austenacious itself. Nothing but brawling and Boob Aprons and manly reading porn and men in showers here!
So, really, it’s just nice to be recognized, don’t you think? And now, let’s meet in the drawing room for some—ahem—wholesome entertainment. We’ll bring the tea.
Recently I’ve been pondering this quote from Northanger Abbey, which is surprising full of clothes.
It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.
Do women like their friends to look shabby, worse than them? Obviously, women these days fall on a broad spectrum of caring about their appearance, but I think the more a woman cares about her appearance, the more she cares about her friends’ appearances, and the more she wants them to look fashionable (whether goth, moth, preppy, etc), so as not to embarrass her. I think wanting to look better than your friends is on a different axis altogether, one more to do with self-confidence and all that. We probably need a graph or a Venn diagram to settle the question, and an Internet quiz you can take. Maybe later.
Having come to that conclusion, I think Jane Austen was there ahead of me, and she was talking about a frivolous b-word like Isabella Thorpe, and not any of us. Oh no. We are nice girls, and not being as innocent as Catherine Morland, we know quite well what men want to see in our clothes. Jane Austen, for all her delicacy, is perfectly clear about it, and so is Mrs. Bennet of all people. I present to you, in fact, what Mr. Wickham was no doubt thinking when Lydia “tucked a little lace.” Note, this is NOT safe for work!
Today we lucky ladies at Austenacious have the golden opportunity to bring you an exclusive interview actor/writer/producer/personal heroine Emma Thompson, whose Oscar-winning screenplay for Sense and Sensibility and general sense of brilliance has made her an icon for smart girls everywhere. We sat down at Austenacious Studios for a brief chat:
Emma Thompson: Hello! I’m Emma Thompson.
Austenacious: ….
ET: Hello? I’m Emma Thomp—Hey! What are you doing on the floor?
A: Nothing.
ET: Are you trying to kiss my feet?
A: No.
ET: Yes, you are. Stop that.
A: They smell like roses after the rain.
ET: Get up.
A: Right. Let’s see. Ah, yes: In 1995, you wrote an Oscar-winning screenplay of Sense and Sensibility, as well as portraying the sensible Elinor Dashwood in the film. Can you tell us about your relationship with that character?
ET: Oh, yes, well, I’d always felt that as a woman who processes things quite intellectually, that Elinor is still quite capable of having an emotional life, and so—
A: —of course. You bawled your eyes out. It makes so much sense.
ET: Yes, and—
A: —was it you-know-who?
ET: Excuse me?
A: You-know-who. He Who Shall Not Be Named.
ET: I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.
A: Your ex? Does all the Shakespeare? To work out his pain over losing you?
ET: Ah, Kenneth.
A: Sssh! Beware the Death Eaters!
ET: That’s Ralph Fiennes. You’ve got it all wrong.
A: No, that’s just a coincidence. We called him that before the movies! Honest! What we’re saying is that he’s stupid. Stupidity is the point.
ET: ….okay, though Voldemort is in fact not stupid. I—I thought we were here to talk about Austen?
A: Who?
ET: Jane Austen?
A: Oh. Right. Say, what made you decide to grow your hair out?
ET: [Sighs] Well, I got tired of the idea that a woman of a certain age should have short hair, and I thought I’d challenge the the social norms surrounding middle age and sexuality—
A: That is so brave.
ET: —and also I was starting to be indistinguishable from Hugh Grant, at first glance.
A: No!
ET: Yes.
A: Well, yes. But wasn’t it all part of Operation: How Hughie Got His Groove Back?
ET: I’m not familiar with that particular operation.
A: We thought it was philanthropy on your part.
ET: Getting back to the subject, I was so proud to have worked with him on Sense and Sensibility. I’ve always loved Edward Ferrars, and I thought Hugh brought such a believable sensitivity to the role.
A: Sure, whatever, but tell me: when you and Helen Mirren have sleepovers, do you dress up your Oscars?
ET: That is totally not your business.
A: We’re just saying: We would. Of course, neither of you have really braid-able hair, so that‘s out the window…
ET: I have to go now.
A: But wait! I haven’t given you my resume yet!
ET: Is that my bodyguard at the door?
A: We could do this every day!
ET: We really couldn’t.
A: Don’t you need a personal pencil sharpener? Award-polisher? Sycophant?
ET: Goodbye.
A: Wait! Someone told me the other day that I look just like Hugh Grant, too! I know you can’t resist a good cause!
Note: This interview is entirely a work of fiction, and is in no way meant to reflect on Ms. Thompson. In fact, it would probably be better for everybody if it also did not reflect quite so strongly on the staff of Austenacious.
Sometimes the answers are even better—in comic value, if not in orthographic correctness—than the questions.
(Sure, she could have been. Hooray for honest questions?)
(Oh, Yahoo! Answers, why can’t I quit you?)
We have spoken before about Jane Austen’s individualistic punctuation. Many of us feel that Austen’s incessant dashes, and other weird habits were ebullient—that we’d like to be as free as she was, even if our ever-copyediting hearts might tidy things up a little bit for other people.
Now there is a fracas afoot regarding Austen’s punctuation! Word on the street is that two chapters of the original manuscript for Persuasion will be on view at the British Library from November 12 to April 3 as part of the Evolving English exhibit. (Hey everyone, field trip!) Well, there has been back and forth about Miss Austen and her punctuation. Here’s Roger Walshe, curator of the exhibit:
Austen hardly punctuates at all, so what you get is a much more urgent form of language which becomes more restrained when it is edited. There tends to be an awful lot of clauses and sub-clauses. There is the odd comma, but they aren’t always in the most rational places. There are no paragraphs. It’s like she’s telling a story rather than writing one. The amazing thing is that there are so few corrections. You can imagine her thinking through a scene and then rushing to write it down. That’s possibly why the dialogue works so well, and why [film adaptations] are so successful.There is a real sense of urgency – more so than the slightly more restrained form you get from the novels.
This has led to snide comments about people’s comma usage and spirited rebuttals about artistic license (which take a comment of Walshe’s quite out of context). I’m kind of expecting that we’ll next see something about Jane Austen being the foremother of lolspeak and generally informal writing habits online, like abbreviations and the elongation of words to suggest tones of voice. (I feel impossibly elderly writing that, but wtf, i can roflol all night looooonnngggg. Righhhhtttt.)
All I’m saying is, I love to see a good comma fracas, and especially one where Our Girl Jane takes center stage! People getting passionate about language, that’s what we need! I hardly even care what they say—it just does my heart good—. With extra dashes!—
Fangirls, prepare yourselves: there’s a new and potentially fascinating interdisciplinary star on the horizon. I was browsing the finance papers today, as one does, and came across this interview in Capital—you know, where we get all our Austen news—with playwright/finance reporter Felipe Ossa regarding his new play Monetizing Emma, recently premiered at the New York Fringe Festival. And now I’m feeling a yen for the stage.
The titular Emma here isn’t, incidentally, our Miss Woodhouse—rather, she’s a high-school student, an investment for a bank hoping to cash in on her future success in this rhythmically Austenian speculative econ drama. Which, just so you know, is totally our new favorite genre. It’s Austen meets Wall Street…FROM THE FUTURE! We approve.
In a refreshing turn of events, Ossa’s take on Austen isn’t about plot or character—this is no monsters-optional, chronologically challenged Pride and Prejudice reboot. Like many playwrights, he’s a words guy, and he’s taking Jane’s prose and holding it up to a whole new light. As noted in the article:
“I had no idea how to mimic Austen until I drove to Montreal in ’06, a seven-hour drive, and I listened to Persuasion on tape, and I think it was Diana Rigg who was narrating. And I completely understood how beautiful Austen’s rhythms are. And I started to hear the monologue in my head. Not the words but the rhythm, the syntax. That was a pivotal point: This stuff is exciting! I was thinking about Janeites who would recite Austen or reenact Austen.”
So clearly, what we have our hands here is a man of discerning tastes. Persuasion and Diana Rigg? Presumably, Anne Eliott fighting crime in go-go boots, with the kind of verbal specificity that’s so satisfying on the stage? I think Ossa is our kind of man. (Perhaps we should ask him about his mutton chops.)
So, readers, check him out—and let the Austenacious Drama Club meetup plans begin.
This week, world-wandering elder brother Mr. Ball has hung up his top hat and arrived at the family country house for a much-deserved furlough from the competitive world of international diplomacy. The whole clan is sequestered away, in fact, for a period of long carriage rides, late-night Whist (aka Scrabble), and the kind of family togetherness that only a trip to the country can bring, for better or for worse.
As any young lady returned to her family after a season away will find, there’s something about suddenly having parents and an elder brother very present that makes one’s role in life perfectly clear: come hell or high water or long periods of living independently, little sisterhood is forever.
As far as Jane goes, I think I’m doing all right. So far, I’m pleased to report that I have not yet run off to Scotland or to the seashore with any older men, only to need rescuing/marrying at gunpoint, nor have I injured myself and fallen head-over-heels for any dreamy scoundrels on horseback. I haven’t played the pianoforte in an inappropriate manner. I haven’t become “often a little unwell,” nor have I become (more so than usual) “always thinking a great deal of my own complaints”. There may have been a little bit of running wild—of which the Morlands surely approve—but have we mentioned we’re at the country house? Who do you think I am, Mary Bennet?
On the other hand, my brother hasn’t bought me any pianofortes, nor has he leapt up to defend my honor. To be fair, though, he hasn’t forced me out of my ancestral home and into a pauper’s cottage, either.
I say we’re even…as long as he lets me call shotgun on the way home.
Mariella Frostrup over at The Guardian recently wrote this in an advice column:
Despite achieving a position in the modern world where we are not only self-supporting but also increasingly outshining the men, we act like a gaggle of competitive girls whose most important goal is how blokes view us. Female-to-female behaviour hasn’t evolved much since Jane Austen’s day and the sad result is we continue to fail to provide sisterhood.
The rest of the column is similarly depressing. Mariella does suggest that the 40-something woman who feels life is slipping out of her grasp should age gracefully while at the same time make a noise, and “Rage, rage, rage when they attempt to turn out the light.” Sounds like a plan to me.
What about this talk of lack of sisterhood, now and in Jane Austen? Surely Jane and Cassandra Austen themselves are in the Sisterhood Hall of Fame? And Jane wrote about all sorts of sisters. Here’s Lizzie and Jane Bennet: “. . . do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept the man, who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?” Not the words of someone who’s putting a bloke above a sister. Elinor and Marianne are another loving pair of sisters, though it’s true that Marianne does put her romantic notions above Elinor’s feelings sometimes. But isn’t that her great failing, what Jane Austen is warning us against? It’s also true that there’s some unpleasant sisters in the books. Maria and Julia Bertram certainly get into a catfight over Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, and, more chillingly, Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, and Mrs. Price take their separation from each other with perfect calm. As with the Elliot sisters in Persuasion, Austen seems to assume that there’s no reason that sisters would hang together, if circumstances or temperament didn’t allow it. And it’s true that we see very little genuine womanly friendship in Austen: Lizzie and Charlotte Lucas and Catherine Morland and Eleanor Tilney are the only examples I can think of. I guess it would make sense when getting a husband was like getting a job that you mightn’t be very nice to the competition, especially in a limited pool. So, I concede, Austen was pretty cynical about the whole sisterhood thing.
But what about now? Miss Osborne, Miss Ball, and I don’t have any sisters. We came together as Beloved Sisters through a shared love of Jane Austen, eating, and talking smack. So we can’t comment on the modern state of sisterhood between actual sisters. But between women in general? I think it’s a pretty mixed bag. I personally haven’t seen much catfight action, have you? And also, isn’t it a bit sexist to assume that women should get along all the time? As if men do!
OK, obviously it’d be nice if we all got along. As it says in our header, Jane will keep us together. This may be terribly ironic, considering the above, but I suggest we try it. Send loving thoughts to all those of your acquaintance, even if there are few people you really love, and still fewer of whom you think well. It’s either that or back to the meat market, apparently.
Photo credit: ©David Stephensen. Used under Creative Commons licensing.
Lovely Jenn over at Citivolus Sus asked us whether she was the only Austenite who like beer. Well, I hardly think so. She even posted recommendations on which beers go with which books. I am, sadly, allergic to beer, but I do like to eat and drink (and travel), so here are my own recommendations on the right ambiance for each book. I won’t insist on Regency dishes. I won’t even go into the hardback/paperback split, and how the musky odors of old books bring out the woodier notes in certain pinot noirs, changing the whole dynamic. Just imagine Giles twittering on in the background, and making you read your Kindle only on the airplane, eating airplane food.
Northanger Abbey has a hard feeling, and such sharp edges and corners. So I see it as going well with Chinese food. I’m not particular as to the dish. Something spicy hot, perhaps with fermented black beans in it. You should drink lots of jasmine tea and get a really surreal Jane Austen fortune cookie afterward. Try to be in a restaurant that at least has Chinese people in it. No P.F. Chang’s, please. If the people are speaking Mandarin or some other form of Chinese, this is a bonus.
Sense and Sensibility: What a weird book, foodwise. There’s no doubt it can be unsettling to the stomach. I think a nice butternut squash soup. Or maybe Welsh rabbit. Orange food is called for, apparently. Orange juice? Sure. Maybe you should be in Orange County, too, whatthehey. Or in any one of these fine Orange places.
Pride and Prejudice: There is no wrong thing to eat or drink with Pride and Prejudice, right? And no wrong place to read it. For all that I have to say: No junk food. Do not insult Miss Austen with McDonald’s, or I will kill you. There are some things beyond even irony. If you must have a specific setting, I seem to see you in a wonderful Belle Epoque patisserie in Alexandria, sipping your tea and eating French/Egyptian sweets. It’s probably sunset or something, too.
Mansfield Park: Somehow, I see Mansfield Park as going best with Indian food. A good rogan josh and a steaming cup of chai make a nice counterpoint to the sometimes startling flavor of this book. You should be somewhere rainy. By the ocean.
Emma is a summertime book. Think a picnic lunch on the lawn, with strawberry shortcake. Please be nice to Miss Bates. Do try the cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, and make the Assam tea strong, with plenty of cream. As long as you sit in the sun, you may be anywhere you like.
Persuasion: This is also a book that makes me want to feel cozy and warm. It has, yes, autumnal overtones. A traditional Irish dinner followed by a really good whiskey, and some chocolate cake, maybe? Please curl up on the couch and enjoy a roaring fire while you read.
Lady Susan and The Watsons: You really should be absolutely drunk to read these, and possibly high on opium as well.* I don’t mean this in a bad way! Absinthe, I think, is the way to go. If you want to smoke a hookah and be in Istanbul as well, just to get the feel right, we’re down with that.
Sanditon: With its emphasis on health fads, I do see Sanditon as a breakfast book. You can do the straightforward hippie thing with yogurt and granola, or go all ironic with croissants and coffee. I seem to see you doing this in Paris, I don’t know why. Can you even get granola in Paris?
As a final note, I feel that all Jane Austen is most properly accompanied by chocolate. Dark, rich, delicious chocolate. Any other suggestions are optional. Readers, what do you think?
*Austenacious does not endorse the use of illegal drugs, even if they are picturesque. Note that absinthe is not illegal in the U.S. anymore. Yay!
Photo credit: ©Ed Yourdon. Used under Creative Commons licensing.
We open on a multiplex movie theater. MISS BALL and MISS OSBORNE sit in the audience, watching the movie raptly. On the screen, CILLIAN MURPHY sits in a hotel bar, talking with a blonde woman in an unnecessarily complicated cocktail dress.
Miss Ball: This is awesome, but I feel like that chick is waaaay too nerdy for this.
The blonde continues to flirt.
Miss Ball: Why do I get the feeling she’s going to start spouting sermons?
The blonde gives Cillian her phone number.
Miss Ball: Does she play the piano?
Miss Osborne: SHHHHH.
Miss Ball: I don’t know why, but I get the feeling she wears contacts.
LEONARDO DICAPRIO arrives onscreen.
Miss Ball: Oh no. Ohhhhh, no. No no no no no no.
Miss Osborne: WHAT.
Miss Ball: This is suddenly a horror movie.
Miss Osborne: Why?
Miss Ball: MARY BENNET IS FAKE-SEDUCING A MAN IN A HOTEL BAR!
People, it’s true: if you’ve seen Inception—and I hope that you have—let’s take a trip down bit-part memory lane. Remember the woman in the hotel bar, who gives Fischer (Murphy) a fake phone number, just as Cobb (DiCaprio) shows up? That is one Talulah Riley…also known as Mary Bennet in the 2005 big-screen Pride and Prejudice. Think about it: dye the hair brown, switch out the dress, add some glasses, and hand the girl a book of sermons. Voila! Nobody wants your concertos here!
And you thought Inception was mind-boggling before.
