“As
Kathryn Sutherland writes in her introduction to a splendid new edition of the
“juvenilia”: “Jane Austen’s earliest writings are violent, restless, anarchic
and exuberantly expressionistic. Drunkenness, female brawling, sexual misdemeanour
and murder run riot across their pages”. When I was a schoolteacher, nothing
gave me more pleasure than shocking cynical teenagers by teaching Austen’s
early works. Without knowing the identity of the author in question, though
recognizing the eighteenth-century style of the work, the students were
invariably delighted by the irreverent, Monty Pythonesque absurdity of the
comedy. The knowledge that this was the work of an early-teen Austen, known to
them only as chronicler of the marriage plot, increased their pleasure.”
It
happens by serendipity that my attention was brought to the fiction written by Austen
before her six complete, published novels by recent news reports that filming (in
Ireland) of Whit Stillman’s upcoming adaptation of the early twenty-something Jane
Austen’s short epistolary novella Lady
Susan is now complete. For reasons known only to Stillman, it is entitled Love and Freindship, thereby creating confusion for Janeites who might recognize this
as the title of one of JA’s earlier Juvenilia, which has a completely different
plot from Lady Susan. But the good
news is that release of the film cannot be that far off in the future.
As
far as I can gather online, which is not much, the following IMDB blurb makes
it sound like the film will stick to Lady
Susan: “Set in the 1790s, Love and Friendship centers on beautiful widow Lady Susan Vernon,
who has come to the estate of her in-laws to wait out colorful rumors about her
dalliances circulating through polite society. Whilst there, she decides to
secure a husband for herself and her rather reluctant debutante daughter,
Frederica.”
That
sounds pretty bland, which I hope is not matched by the tone of the film itself.
I.e. I hope the full-bore sociopathy of Lady
Susan is faithfully preserved by the cleverly subversive Whit Stillman. And I
am looking forward to seeing it, with cautious optimism.
The
serendipity of these two recent online pieces about Jane Austen’s juvenilia for
me is that it raised in me renewed hope that film adaptations like Stillman’s,
watched by viewers who read pieces like Byrne’s, and editions like Sutherland’s
and Alexander’s, will help project into the wider Janeite world (which still
widely subscribes to the Myth of Jane Austen that Byrne touched on one aspect
of, as quoted above) the radically unsettling notion of a young adult Jane
Austen writing a story told from the point of view of an amoral, witty,
sophisticated sociopath whom you would expect to see as the protagonist of a frankly
subversive text like Liaisons
Dangereuses. Definitely not your grandmother’s or your schoolchild’s Jane
Austen.
This all
also got me thinking yet again about the awesome power of that Myth to make
Janeites believe ten impossible things before breakfast, and to blind them to
what would otherwise be obvious in her writings, had they been written by
another author. I.e., when I think about the high B.S. quotient of scholarly
and lay opinions that Jane Austen as an adult put aside her “childish”
anarchism and became a political and religious conservative who wished to
preserve the status quo in sexist Regency Era England, and who would never
never never put any sex in any of her novels, I want to laugh—except that this
blind acceptance of such a distorted view of Jane Austen—like the cow-like
expression on the Bowdlerized version of the hard-edged countrywoman whom
Cassandra sketched, that the Bank of England wants to put on the new 10 pound
note---is absurd beyond a laugh, as Jane Austen herself might have put it. It’s very very sad.
To be
more precise about how the Juvenilia fit into the Myth of Jane Austen, the
whopper that has been sold to an unsuspecting Janeite world is the still mostly
universally held notion that:
ONE: Jane
Austen, between the ages of 13 and 18, wrote a number of short pieces of
Juvenilia which (it is also universally recognized) are filled with every
variety of social mayhem, including violent murder—all presented with an over
the top, unapologetic, exuberant, almost savage glee and wit, that could only
come from the pen of a teenaged genius of a girl who reveled in letting the
dark side of her imagination run wild and free. She was reacting to the
pervasive hypocrisies and cruelties of the supposedly mature, Christian, and
benevolent society into which she was born, and she took no prisoners
whatsoever; and
TWO:
A few years (we don’t know exactly how many) after her last Juvenilia, Catherine or the Bower, she produced a
startlingly mature novella, Lady Susan (broken
off abruptly as if in midstream, just when it was getting really complicated
and interesting, as if she suddenly became bored with the writing, and wanted
to get it off her desk) which, in a much more polished style, nevertheless
continued that same spirit of dark anarchy and rebellion against prudent
societal norms which suffuses all the Juvenilia; but then; and yet,
mysteriously,
THREE:
The Austen family (most of all that arch-deceiver, James Edward Austen Leigh, JA’s nephew), joined by the mainstream of modern
Austen scholars like Deirdre Le Faye, has managed to convince the Janeite world
that Jane Austen abruptly abandoned the divine madness of her youth and early
adulthood, and that she suddenly started writing novels which were
diametrically opposed to those earlier productions. Instead, they are supposed
to demonize the two characters from Austen’s novels who most closely remotely
resemble Lady Susan’s smooth, sophisticated sociopathy: Lucy Steele who comes
from the gutter (Sense &Sensibililty)
and Henry Crawford who comes from elite society (Mansfield Park)—both of them relishing their power to manipulate
others with ease.
Whereas
Occam’s Razor would dictate a much simpler one-step explanation for what we see
in Jane Austen’s six novels, all published after she was 35 years old—which is
that she NEVER gave up her youthful perspective, but became such a masterful
writer in her maturity that she was able to hide the savagery of her satire in
plain sight just beneath the surface of her novels, and preserve it safe from
censorious critics who would have crucified her, and kept her novels from even
being published, had she been as overt in them as she was in Lady Susan and her
Juvenilia.
So,
it should be really interesting to see if Stillman really dishes out a
cinematic version of Sevigny’s phallic lobster (Google to see what I am
referring to), and raised a bunch of Janeite eyebrows wondering what exactly is
going on in an “exploitative” adaptation of “poor Jane Austen”.
I personally
can’t wait, and have every hope that Stillman’s film will be very very
subversive, and will therefore then be greeted with howls like nothing we’ve
heard since Patricia Rozema gave us her 1999 Mansfield Park with Sir
Thomas Bertram as a savage monster raping his slaves on his Antiguan plantation—an
interpretation of MP that is ENTIRELY supported by the text of the novel
itself, when read with proper sensitivity to JA’s subtextual hints.
Bring
it on! And let the real Jane Austen finally be seen for who she was as a precocious
;teenaged writing rebel, and who she remained till her dying day as a subtle
mature writing genius rebel.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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