Jane Austen in Hollywood (review)

REVIEWS 121 Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1998. vii + 202pp. US$27.50. ISBN 0-8131-2084-5. Complete with an appendix ("Austen Adaptations Available on Video"), a listofselected reviews, articles, and books written between 1995 and 1997, and two dozen well-chosen stills from the six recent adaptations, this collection of thirteen essays will prove of interest to readers of Jane Austen and to students of contemporary culture. Almost all contributors are English professors, and all, with the exception of one of the editors, are women. But if the latter fact supports the view that women mainly account for the Austen phenomenon—for the increase in membership of the Jane Austen Society of North America, for the Colin Firth parties that were held across England during the showing of the BBC serial Pride and Prejudice , and for the success of fictional sequels such as Janet Aylmer's Darcy 's Story and Emma Tennant's Pemberley—the role of rapidly changing technology also needs to be recognized, as the editors make clear: "Specialized TV networks, instant books of the screenplays and of the filming process, vidéocassettes, CDs of the soundtracks, and official websites all collaborate to allow those enamored of Austen to indulge their taste further" (p. 2). The attraction of the adaptations may result from what Cheryl L. Nixon sees as the "balancing" of the courtship hero (p. 22f). What we have in the BBC and A&E Pride and Prejudice, according to Lisa Hopkins (in "Mr. Darcy's Body: Privileging the Female Gaze"), is a film "unashamed about appealing to women— and in particular about fetishizing and framing Darcy and offering him up to the female gaze" (p. 1 12). Alone of the novel's characters Darcy undergoes major changes, and these changes—Darcy fencing, Darcy bathing, Darcy diving into the lake—all represent a man whose desires are only with difficulty repressed, a man who will become worthy ofElizabeth only when he learns to release his emotions . Also humanized along late twentieth-century lines, as Nixon, Hopkins, and Devoney Looser (in "Feminist Implications of the Silver Screen Austen") variously show, are the unprepossessing heroes of Sense and Sensibility. In Emma Thompson's screenplay for Ang Lee's film of the novel, Edward Ferrars (played with signature charm by Hugh Grant) and Colonel Brandon (played Byronically by Alan Rickman) are recast as men of feeling, capable of communicating with children (i.e., Margaret Dashwood, to whom Thompson gives a much expanded role). The nurturing abilities of the two heroes seem especially tailored to contemporary ideals of masculinity. "In this day of cultural fantasies of Mr. Mom and of what Nancy Chodorow has called equal parenting, is it any surprise," Looser asks, "to see these heroes so updated?" (p. 172). Hopkins argues that the appeal of the Austen adaptations to women is scopophilic—a reversal of Laura Mulvey's proposition concerning the dominance of the male gaze in cinema. But a privileging of the female gaze is not enough to mollify the suspicions of several contributors, who find the films at fault because they misrepresent Austen's social and moral vision, or falsify history , or betray her feminism. Rachel M. Brownstein, for example (in "Out of the 122 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 Drawing Room onto the Lawn"), notes that whereas "Austen's irony was a moralist 's, postmodern irony [in the adaptations] refuses to acknowledge the moral" (p. 20). Like Rebecca Dickson (in "Misrepresenting Jane Austen's Ladies"), Brownstein is troubled by the ways in which the films distort Austen's nuanced critique of romance, providing instead "a single obvious, reiterated moral: that lovers deserve to enjoy one another, as viewers deserve to enjoy movies" (p. 20). Nora Nachumi (in '"As If!': Translating Austen's Ironic Narrator to Film") agrees, observing that Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility "actually celebrates the conventions of romance the novel condemns" (p. 132). Equally critical is Deborah Kaplan in "Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women, and Courtship in Two Film Adaptations ." Deploring the "harlequinization" of Austen texts (p. 178), Kaplan objects to the glamourizing of Colonel Brandon, who in the novel is part...