Jane Austen in Hollywood

12. Feminist Implications of the Silver Screen Austen

12 Feminist Implications of the Silver Screen Austen Devaney Looser InJanuary of 1996, Time ran a television review with the headline "Sick ofJane Austen Yet?" For many months in 1995 and 1996, British and American viewers found themselves asking, "Why Austen?" and "Why now?" Attempting to answer these questions, as Louis Menand has suggested, "is an invitation to punditry it is probably wise to decline" (15). As the existence of this collection of essays itself demonstrates, however, a number of pundits have happily ignored Menand's advice. Periodicals from The Progressive to The National Review, from Rolling Stone to Town and Country, from People to The Wall Street Journal have recently given over space to Jane Austen. This array of publications alone demonstrates the conflicting ideological forces propelling the Austen revival. Though I do not pretend to have the key to all Austen mythologies, I argue in this essay that Austen's reemergence demonstrates progressive, feminist elements at work in popular culture, rather than simply tolling neoconservative bells. Austen's popularity has resonance with contemporary Western liberal feminisms, particularly as a result of the ways in which her texts have been consumed and interpreted anew by public intellectuals and mainstream critics alike. Most of the recent Austen adaptations are, to my mind, relatively faithful (albeit decidedly contemporary) interpretations of Austen's women and their feminist leanings. At moments when the adaptations modulate characters differently or when scenes are added or changed, however, we can see preCisely how the adaptations contribute to a "mainstreaming" of feminism. Austen herself was involved in mainstreaming feminist ideals when she wrote her novels in the early 1800s. Her return as an ideological factor in big- and small-screen feminist representations in the late twentieth century is not an identical phenomenon, but it is an important similarity that has gone largely unremarked in the popular press. 160 Devaney Looser In trying to answer the "why now" part of the "why Austen" equation, some have claimed that such attention is Austen's birthright, while others have shown that Austen has never exactly disappeared from the public eye. Austen's film and TV repackaging is no grand departure from industry business as usual, promoted by some old-fashioned media hype. James Collins concludes as much: "The BBC is always filming something by Jane Austen. . . . Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant are both English. How remarkable is it that they're making a movie like Sense and Sensibility?" (70). Collins remarks that we are not likely to see the headline "ENGLISH ACTORS WEAR PERIOD CLOTHES AND SPEAK WITIY DIALOGUE" anytime soon (70). Though there is truth in this, the headlines have in fact appeared on "Austen-mania"-the recordbreaking audiences the BBC attracted in England and that A&E found in the United States. The Wall Street Journal, in its front-page assessment, argued that today's Jane-mania is wholly "cash driven" (Stevens 1; see also the response byJohnsonA19). Surely, however, our explanations for Austen's popular resurgence must go beyond either the so-called universal appeal of Great Literature or the insidious market forces of late capitalism. None of these theories seems compelling enough to explain away four feature films, two television miniseries, and bestsellerdom-not to mention the flurry of "Darcy Parties" thrown in the UK in the summer of 1996 (in which groups of women got together to play and replay their videotapes of Colin Firth diving into the lake, The Guardian reported). Even the Socialist Workers' Party Marxism '96 Conference got in on the action and featured a session on "what is so great about Jane Austen" alongside its workshops on post-Fordism and flexible labor. If the late Victorian and Edwardian eras provided the locus of cultural nostalgia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then Regency England seems to have resonance for our own fin de sitcle. One glaring difference in the ways Austen adaptations have been written about, compared to those of E.M. Forster, Henry James, Edith Wharton, or even Shakespeare, is the tendency to label the Austen revival as part and parcel of a conservative cultural turn. This phenomenon is worth troubling over. Those who speculate on the cultural forces that contribute to Austen's current popularity often assume that it provides further evidence of herand our-conservatism. Austen's fictional worlds are seen by many as providing an escape or a form of wish fulfillment (McGrory). Lionel Trilling gave this version a voice two decades ago, when he suspected that his...