-
4. Austen, Class, and the American Market
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 Austen, Class, and the American Market Carol M. Dole As each newJane Austen production reaches the market, culture critics and film reviewers have struggled to understand this sudden fascination with a world nearly two centuries in the past. Widely divergent theories have been proposed for the outpouring of such adaptations on big screen and small in the 1990s. Film industry watchers point out how easily the novels of a writer who is "her own script editor" can be brought to the screen (Lane, "Jane's World" 108) and note the hunger in some segments of the audience for an alternative to "big-screen explosions and computer wizardry" (Maslin).l Among cultural analysts, one set of theorists proposes that we are in search preCisely of what we have lost, of a "comforting, orderly world" Qames) where a strict system of manners like that operating in Jane Austen's novels might help us avoid being "bewildered by the moral and social universe" (Rothstein)2 In contrast, many of the filmmakers involved in the Austen projects point to their relevance to today's world: Sense and Sensibility screenwriter/star Emma Thompson insists, "people are still concerned with marriage, money, romance, finding a partner" (quoted in Kroll 67), and director Ang Lee asserts that there are restraints today just as in Austen's world (quoted in "Austen Anew"). This variety of opinions suggests that adaptations ofJane Austen's novels hold a mirror up to our own society even while not seeming to do so. Beyond the Empire-style dresses and baronial estates is an inflexible and complex social system that may be more like our own than we can easily acknowledge. This essay will argue that one of Jane Austen's chief fascinations for American audiences in the 1990s is her keen analysis of the vicissitudes of class, a topic which American films in particular have resisted confronting openly In The Imperial Middle, his 1990 study of class in America, Benjamin DeMott argues that film participates in a myth of classlessness promulgated by American culture at large. Like political speeches and Polish jokes, films Austen, Class, and the American Market 59 engage in the American habit of "talking class while denying explicitly or implicitly that class is meant" in an effort to cope with the national paradox "that they belong to a class society that is nevertheless highly gratified by its egalitarian ideals" (DeMott, Imperial 26). Both in his book and in a 1991 article in the New York Times, DeMott demonstrates how routinely class barriers are obscured in recent Hollywood films. One method of disposing of class barriers is to demonstrate that "social strata are evanescent and meaningless " ("In Hollywood" 22), as in Dirty Dancing (1987), Pretty in Pink (1986), and other teen films where a merit-based order replaces the original class lines. Another is to show class boundaries to be easily permeable. In the hit Working Girl (1988), for instance, Melanie Griffith is able in just months to shed her Staten Island accent, her working-class boyfriend, and a position in the secretarial pool to take over her boss's position and lover. Likewise, in the 1990 blockbuster Pretty Woman, the raucous prostitute played by Julia Roberts is transformed in just days-with the aid of a shopping spree and a lesson in table manners-into a discreet woman who can win a wealthy CEO. In other films, such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and Platoon (1986), class issues are raised only to be dismissed (DeMott, "In Hollywood" 22). American films, by and large, participate in the national dogma of individual achievement that has helped us remember the name of Horatio Alger long after boys stopped reading his books. This ethic of individualism, combined with our democratic ideals, fosters a myth of classlessness deeply ingrained in our culture. Jane Austen, with her sharp sense of class distinctions and scant tolerance of social climbers, would at first glance seem unlikely to appeal to the mainstream American movie audience. In fact, however, the "notorious instability of her novelistic irony" (Poovey 173) gives Austen's treatment of class a doubleness that makes it uniquely appropriate material for audiences trained to evade their own strong class assumptions. Jane Austen's novels are very particular about the determinants ofclassmoney most of all, but also landed estates, titles, family position, and inheritance rules-which are essential to their courtship plots. In spite of her almost unparalleled attentiveness to class issues, however, Jane Austen's attitude toward...