Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture

Introduction: The Jane Austen Phenomenon: Remaking the Past at the Millennium

Introduction The Jane Austen Phenomenon: Remaking the Past at the Millennium 7 Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson Jane Austen’s novels have never been out of print, so it seems strange to speak of an Austen revival. Nevertheless, a revival that some have termed “Austenmania” has produced a virtual industry flourishing widely in the United States and England, spawning in recent years nineteen film and television adaptations of this author’s work, and over one hundred continuations , rewritings, and sequels of Austen’s now almost two-hundred-year-old novels. This is a phenomenon not limited to the filming and screening of Austen’s work because it spreads from Hollywood to movie theaters, television , bookstores, boutiques, and onto the Internet—from Clueless (Amy Heckerling’s updated twentieth-century version of Emma); to the television serial based on this film; to the cross-marketing of such tie-ins as Clueless and Pride and Prejudice dolls, music to read Austen by, and organized tours of Jane Austen’s England. Reaching an even larger population are the Webbased Austen discussion groups such as the “Republic of Pemberley” that extend effortlessly and limitlessly out into cyberspace. Even though the world that Austen’s novels represent is ostensibly located in the time, space, and conventions of early-nineteenth-century England, the story of Austen’s recently exploding popularity across a proliferating variety of media and technologies (film, Internet, tourism, television) is an event, or rather a constellation of events—in other words, a phenomenon that has crystallized at a particular moment in our own contemporary culture.1 Furthermore , Austen’s novels, by far the most consistently (even obsessively) remade , provide a model and an incentive for the vogue of updating other classical texts into contemporary media, such as those of Henry James or of the eighteenth-century French writer Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. 1 Each of the following chapters explores diverse media representations of the past, particularly, but not exclusively, through the classical novels of Austen and, specifically, in relation to contemporary culture. We examine filmic, touristic, cyber, and literary strategies that these Austen adaptations have deployed in order to return to a past and to a sense of history. But, we are consistently attentive to the fact that this “past” is always in the process of being reinvented; for the past is remade from the perspectives of current cultural and social ambitions, politics, desires, market strategies, and historiography . This concept of “remake” thus denotes two different and complementary meanings that correspond to the major foci of our study. The past is made again—re-made as in a repetition, a re-presentation—and yet the past is always made anew. In the nature of all “heritage” productions is an attempt to promote a sense of unbroken tradition that confirms national identity and ostensibly works to repeat, to remake the past in film or through other objects or activities that represent a particular moment in the costume, speech, behavior, setting, or plot—in other words, a moment that has already gone by, already disappeared. Yet, either explicitly (such as in the film Clueless or as in the case of the revisionist Mansfield Park or Metropolitan ) or implicitly, all these films—along with their accompanying products and activities—remake the past in the sense of making over, of shaping the past in the new fashions, styles, and desires of the present. The “Austen Phenomenon,” in short, is about makeovers. The striking surge in Austen’s cultural capital has been most commonly explained away as “nostalgia,” but such an explanation is at best a circular response, begging the question of what we are nostalgic for and why now. When academic and journalistic commentators designate the interest in Austen as an escape from modernity into some idealized past, such a response offers little explanation of what it is specifically that readers and viewers are seeking, and, moreover, what it is that they find. From somewhat diverse disciplinary (literature, film studies, history, geography) and cultural (English, French, American) perspectives, the present volume answers the principal question: What speaks so effectively and eloquently in these remakes to present-day needs and fantasies? What plots, what texts, what scripts are these films, rewrites, and objects (re)making? The answer to these questions involves identifying the tendencies of our own contemporary moment that keep returning to but also that keep making over texts of Jane Austen as well as other earlier texts in the likeness of late-twentieth- and early-twenty...