I really should know better by now.
But I never seem to learn.
Watched 'Becoming Jane' finally and was, predictably, angered. The only thing that saved me from wanting to burn the dvd was James McAvoy, who was very cute and did very well. Beyond that...
The entire premise of the movie-- and that of so many other books and other movies these days in this Jane Austen mass media craze we've entered into-- makes me angry. How many rivers of ink have been spilled now, I wonder, on trying to find the "inspiration" behind Jane Austen's works, the real-life Mr. Darcy she based her character on? It's disgusting and stupid and offensive. You know what I'd like to see if we're on this whole hunt-for-inspiration thing-- let's go search out Shakespeare's inspiration for his characters or Dickens' for his or Willkie Collins' for his! Why is it the women authors whose biographies are attempted to be found in all their novels-- from Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte (altho' admittedly Charlotte Bronte's novels are, to an extent, clearly autobiographical) or Emily and Anne Bronte's. I'm going to throw out an idea that may sound crazy-- maybe Austen and the Bronte sisters and other female authors used their imaginations to come up with their stories. Shocking idea, I know, since who uses imagination in writing a novel? Obviously, people only ever write novels based on their own personal experience; all novels are autobiographical. Dickens really was Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and Charles Darnay, didn't you know? /sarcasm. Let's just stop with this whole 'Jane Austen must have had a secret love affair that inspired her to write Mr. Darcy's character' crap. I think it's entirely possible-- make that probable-- that she based Mr. Darcy on the admirable qualities taken from a number of young men she knew, all put together into one very perfect whole-- plus Pemberley. That's what she did with her other characters, as far as we know, and yes, with a good dollop of imagination and genius mixed in. Why oh why can't we give female authors- and Jane Austen, in particular- the credit for having any imagination or creativity at all?! Why is it so hard to imagine that, maybe, a young woman is perfectly capable of imagining what a hero should be? And while we're at it, why aren't people so obsessed with finding out the real-life inspiration for Mr. Knightley or Henry Tilney or Edmund Bertram or Edward Ferrars or Captain Wentworth?! No, no, it's all this juvenile fascination with Mr. Darcy and this insistent belief that, apparently, Jane Austen wasn't capable of inventing a hero as good as Mr. Darcy is and so must have based him on some real-life man. I admit that I'm quite in love with Mr. Darcy myself, really, but can we get over this obsession with the inspiration behind him? I think that Jane Austen was a genius, a genius who wrote about what she knew, in settings that she knew, yes, but whose plots and characters were, essentially, creations of her own lively imagination and wit. For God's sakes, let's stop reducing her work to a 'my heart was broken so now I will use my pen to vent my emotions' thing.
Which brings me to my next problem- the movie and people in general, seem to have this idiotic notion that Jane Austen's novels are 'Romantic' in the sense of the Romantic poets, those flights of sensibility that glory in emotion. They're not. They're 'romantic' with a small 'R' only in so far as they deal with courtship and marriage but since that was basically all a young lady was allowed to do, let's not make too big a deal out of it. Of course women wrote about courtship and marriage; it was basically their entire life back then! women could hardly write about war since they were, as much as possible, screened from it, or politics, since they were not allowed to participate in it. The only thing that makes Austen's novels 'Romantic' with the capital 'R' is that they just happened to be published in the same time period as Wordsworth and Coleridge were publishing. But if you read them, her novels are about society and manners, in an ironic way, and about rationality more than emotion. She doesn't celebrate excessive flights of emotion-- as anyone who's read 'Sense and Sensibility' should know. Her novels are much more the product of the previous decades- the 1790's and the first decade of the 1800's- much more the product of writers like Burney and Fielding and Johnson than on anything ever written by Wordsworth. She's an Enlightenment author, not a Romantic one, if we must label her. So for the movie to say that her novels are about 'the heart', that's a simplistic and inaccurate generalization. That's what WE think her novels are about because we live in a Romantic age and so when we read her books, we read them for the romance and the love story and we ignore the other parts that don't quite fit with our own Romantic sensibilities. Her novels are as much about the head as the heart, indeed the entire point of all her novels is that a happy marriage must combine the two-- not so much transports of passion but rational affection and esteem. Look at her books and how she writes about the couples with the transports of passion: Wickham and Lydia (now there's an ideal marriage for you!); Marianne and Willoughby; Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford; Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford, even Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, etc. Happy endings, all, I'm sure. /sarcasm. Oh she shows that purely head-based or Rational marriages isn't right either- Charlotte and Mr. Collins being the prime example-- but the entire point is that marriage, at its best, should be a combination of both-- Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have both head and heart, reason and emotion, as the basis of their marriage and that's what makes it work, what makes it the happily-ever-after ending. Her message is never 'I don't care if we're broke and living in a hovel as long as I'm with you, my darling!' which would be the Romantic message; her message is that even lovers need to have something to live on, basically.
As for my smaller problems- where the hell did this dumb brother, George, come from? Also this Mr. Wisley whose proposal she accepted, only to change her mind and run off with Tom Lefroy? To the best of our knowledge (that's pretty good), the only proposal Jane Austen ever accepted was that of one Mr. Harris Bigg-Wither and she did change her mind the next day (which ended the house visit nice and awkwardly but that's another story.) Also, the whole thing toward the end of that young lady claiming she's Jane Austen's biggest fan and all that-- stupid. Jane Austen wrote anonymously and the knowledge of who she was only became public knowledge to the point that some random girl could come up to her, after her death. So any stranger coming up to say she was Jane Austen's biggest fan would have been talking to Jane Austen's grave or her ghost. It was an open secret within Jane's family and other close friends but to the general public? Hardly. Which brings me to my next problem with the movie- that they focus so much on Jane Austen intending to write for a living. To the best of our knowledge, she didn't have any such intention. If she had, she would have been wildly (not to say, crazily) over-optimistic and Jane Austen was a realist, if nothing else. This isn't today where it is entirely possible to make a living as a novelist; Jane Austen isn't JKR (God Forbid!) or Dan Brown. (*twitches at the very thought since those three names in the same sentence strikes me as mildly sacrilegious*) If Jane Austen had ever had any such intent, she would never have sold the rights to her books for the pittance for which she did sell them. She wanted them to be published, yes, but I would highly doubt that she ever expected to make enough money to pay for her own dresses and bonnets for six months, let alone make enough to live on. (And she would have been right; she never did.)
And aside from that, the script was clunky and bad, I thought, veering improbably (and very awkwardly) from real dialogue to stilted speech that was the script-writers trying way too hard to sound like Jane Austen in her letters. Anne Hathaway's acting was uninspired and she somehow managed to seem entirely too silly and stupid to write a novel worth reading, which is amazing given who she was playing and the fact that I think Anne Hathaway's not a bad actress. Also, I suppose some understanding must be given to the fact that the costume designers were trying to make Anne Hathaway look good-- some, but that doesn't justify the anachronistic colors-- but her dresses shouldn't have been so almost uniformly dark-colored. She should have been wearing the pale pastels and light muslins that were de rigeur for unmarried young ladies, not navy and red or other dark, dramatic colors. I'll only point to the costumes of the BBC/A&E 'Pride and Prejudice' and how they dressed Elizabeth for what Jane should have been wearing.
Going to watch some 'Pride and Prejudice' to calm my soul and then going to attempt to get some more work done.
Watched 'Becoming Jane' finally and was, predictably, angered. The only thing that saved me from wanting to burn the dvd was James McAvoy, who was very cute and did very well. Beyond that...
The entire premise of the movie-- and that of so many other books and other movies these days in this Jane Austen mass media craze we've entered into-- makes me angry. How many rivers of ink have been spilled now, I wonder, on trying to find the "inspiration" behind Jane Austen's works, the real-life Mr. Darcy she based her character on? It's disgusting and stupid and offensive. You know what I'd like to see if we're on this whole hunt-for-inspiration thing-- let's go search out Shakespeare's inspiration for his characters or Dickens' for his or Willkie Collins' for his! Why is it the women authors whose biographies are attempted to be found in all their novels-- from Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte (altho' admittedly Charlotte Bronte's novels are, to an extent, clearly autobiographical) or Emily and Anne Bronte's. I'm going to throw out an idea that may sound crazy-- maybe Austen and the Bronte sisters and other female authors used their imaginations to come up with their stories. Shocking idea, I know, since who uses imagination in writing a novel? Obviously, people only ever write novels based on their own personal experience; all novels are autobiographical. Dickens really was Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and Charles Darnay, didn't you know? /sarcasm. Let's just stop with this whole 'Jane Austen must have had a secret love affair that inspired her to write Mr. Darcy's character' crap. I think it's entirely possible-- make that probable-- that she based Mr. Darcy on the admirable qualities taken from a number of young men she knew, all put together into one very perfect whole-- plus Pemberley. That's what she did with her other characters, as far as we know, and yes, with a good dollop of imagination and genius mixed in. Why oh why can't we give female authors- and Jane Austen, in particular- the credit for having any imagination or creativity at all?! Why is it so hard to imagine that, maybe, a young woman is perfectly capable of imagining what a hero should be? And while we're at it, why aren't people so obsessed with finding out the real-life inspiration for Mr. Knightley or Henry Tilney or Edmund Bertram or Edward Ferrars or Captain Wentworth?! No, no, it's all this juvenile fascination with Mr. Darcy and this insistent belief that, apparently, Jane Austen wasn't capable of inventing a hero as good as Mr. Darcy is and so must have based him on some real-life man. I admit that I'm quite in love with Mr. Darcy myself, really, but can we get over this obsession with the inspiration behind him? I think that Jane Austen was a genius, a genius who wrote about what she knew, in settings that she knew, yes, but whose plots and characters were, essentially, creations of her own lively imagination and wit. For God's sakes, let's stop reducing her work to a 'my heart was broken so now I will use my pen to vent my emotions' thing.
Which brings me to my next problem- the movie and people in general, seem to have this idiotic notion that Jane Austen's novels are 'Romantic' in the sense of the Romantic poets, those flights of sensibility that glory in emotion. They're not. They're 'romantic' with a small 'R' only in so far as they deal with courtship and marriage but since that was basically all a young lady was allowed to do, let's not make too big a deal out of it. Of course women wrote about courtship and marriage; it was basically their entire life back then! women could hardly write about war since they were, as much as possible, screened from it, or politics, since they were not allowed to participate in it. The only thing that makes Austen's novels 'Romantic' with the capital 'R' is that they just happened to be published in the same time period as Wordsworth and Coleridge were publishing. But if you read them, her novels are about society and manners, in an ironic way, and about rationality more than emotion. She doesn't celebrate excessive flights of emotion-- as anyone who's read 'Sense and Sensibility' should know. Her novels are much more the product of the previous decades- the 1790's and the first decade of the 1800's- much more the product of writers like Burney and Fielding and Johnson than on anything ever written by Wordsworth. She's an Enlightenment author, not a Romantic one, if we must label her. So for the movie to say that her novels are about 'the heart', that's a simplistic and inaccurate generalization. That's what WE think her novels are about because we live in a Romantic age and so when we read her books, we read them for the romance and the love story and we ignore the other parts that don't quite fit with our own Romantic sensibilities. Her novels are as much about the head as the heart, indeed the entire point of all her novels is that a happy marriage must combine the two-- not so much transports of passion but rational affection and esteem. Look at her books and how she writes about the couples with the transports of passion: Wickham and Lydia (now there's an ideal marriage for you!); Marianne and Willoughby; Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford; Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford, even Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, etc. Happy endings, all, I'm sure. /sarcasm. Oh she shows that purely head-based or Rational marriages isn't right either- Charlotte and Mr. Collins being the prime example-- but the entire point is that marriage, at its best, should be a combination of both-- Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have both head and heart, reason and emotion, as the basis of their marriage and that's what makes it work, what makes it the happily-ever-after ending. Her message is never 'I don't care if we're broke and living in a hovel as long as I'm with you, my darling!' which would be the Romantic message; her message is that even lovers need to have something to live on, basically.
As for my smaller problems- where the hell did this dumb brother, George, come from? Also this Mr. Wisley whose proposal she accepted, only to change her mind and run off with Tom Lefroy? To the best of our knowledge (that's pretty good), the only proposal Jane Austen ever accepted was that of one Mr. Harris Bigg-Wither and she did change her mind the next day (which ended the house visit nice and awkwardly but that's another story.) Also, the whole thing toward the end of that young lady claiming she's Jane Austen's biggest fan and all that-- stupid. Jane Austen wrote anonymously and the knowledge of who she was only became public knowledge to the point that some random girl could come up to her, after her death. So any stranger coming up to say she was Jane Austen's biggest fan would have been talking to Jane Austen's grave or her ghost. It was an open secret within Jane's family and other close friends but to the general public? Hardly. Which brings me to my next problem with the movie- that they focus so much on Jane Austen intending to write for a living. To the best of our knowledge, she didn't have any such intention. If she had, she would have been wildly (not to say, crazily) over-optimistic and Jane Austen was a realist, if nothing else. This isn't today where it is entirely possible to make a living as a novelist; Jane Austen isn't JKR (God Forbid!) or Dan Brown. (*twitches at the very thought since those three names in the same sentence strikes me as mildly sacrilegious*) If Jane Austen had ever had any such intent, she would never have sold the rights to her books for the pittance for which she did sell them. She wanted them to be published, yes, but I would highly doubt that she ever expected to make enough money to pay for her own dresses and bonnets for six months, let alone make enough to live on. (And she would have been right; she never did.)
And aside from that, the script was clunky and bad, I thought, veering improbably (and very awkwardly) from real dialogue to stilted speech that was the script-writers trying way too hard to sound like Jane Austen in her letters. Anne Hathaway's acting was uninspired and she somehow managed to seem entirely too silly and stupid to write a novel worth reading, which is amazing given who she was playing and the fact that I think Anne Hathaway's not a bad actress. Also, I suppose some understanding must be given to the fact that the costume designers were trying to make Anne Hathaway look good-- some, but that doesn't justify the anachronistic colors-- but her dresses shouldn't have been so almost uniformly dark-colored. She should have been wearing the pale pastels and light muslins that were de rigeur for unmarried young ladies, not navy and red or other dark, dramatic colors. I'll only point to the costumes of the BBC/A&E 'Pride and Prejudice' and how they dressed Elizabeth for what Jane should have been wearing.
Going to watch some 'Pride and Prejudice' to calm my soul and then going to attempt to get some more work done.