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I recently saw Miss Bennet:
Christmas at Pemberley, and found the following rave review to be spot-on:
https://www.portlandmercury.com/theater/2019/12/19/27663874/miss-bennet-christmas-at-pemberley-review-is-this-how-jane-austen-nerds-fall-in-love It’s
easy to understand why this play has been staged all over the country in both
2018 and 2019, and bids fair to become an annual national holiday tradition. And
it didn’t hurt that all the performers in this recently concluded Portland
production, but most of all Mary as played by the force of nature known as
Lauren Modica, were uniformly excellent.
This is that rare sequel to a beloved
original which creates its own independent vivid dramatic reality, and doesn’t
rely on frequent winks at highlights from the original for its force and
appeal. The winks (as when Mary expresses snarky pride at her piano playing, her
playful riposte to the public humiliation she suffers at the hands of her sarcastic
father) are few and far between, and are carefully chosen for most telling
effect. Lauren Gunderson (who co-wrote this play with Margot Melcon) is justifiably
already famous as a very gifted young playwright; and, as a rabid Shakespeare
lover, I’m sorry I missed The Book of Will at OSF this past summer, and
hope it’ll have another run soon somewhere I can go see it).
Miss Bennet
reflects the authors’ canny sense of plot construction and pace, and reliably
consistent, even (yes, I’ll say it) Austenesque, sharp wit. And I felt
throughout the play, in plot twists like the misdirected love notes, the subliminal
presence of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. That demonstrates that
Gunderson and Melcon really did their homework – I can’t be offbase in inferring
that they recognized (as Sir Walter Scott was the first to suggest 2 centuries
ago) Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedy as a key source for Austen’s
most beloved romantic comedy; and their reboot of that “merry war”, but this
time with their own original sparring lovers, Mary and Arthur, is a worthy
successor.
In choosing Mary Bennet as their
heroine, they avoid the trend of typical P&P fanfic sequels, which apply variations
to the original story, with little or no basis in the original text. Instead, Gunderson
and Melcon follow in the footsteps of Prof. Steven A. Scott, whose 2002 essay, "Making room in the middle:
Mary in Pride and Prejudice”, was the first to make a case that there
was more to Austen’s Mary Bennet than met the eye; and then, in 2008, the late
Colleen McCullough’s The Independence of Mary Bennet, which presented
Mary as a heroine in a sequel that takes her far afield from Longbourn and
Pemberley. So, there’s both textual justification and precedent for
elevating Mary to the unlikely status as heroine.
I also have a horse in the Alt-Mary race.
In 2010, I first presented my own alternative view of Mary, as one cog in what
I call the “shadow story” (or alternative fictional universe) of P&P that I
claim Austen deliberately created. The primary
means of access (to each of Austen’s six shadow stories) is by reading most of
the narration in the novel not as objective reality (as they’re generally
read), but as a subjective reality filtered and distorted through the proud, prejudiced
and therefore fallible mind of the focalizing heroine. So Eliza Bennet, in that
alternative plausible interpretation, is still a smart, but nonetheless essentially
clueless, young woman, from one end of the novel to the other.
So I say it’s up to the reader to figure
out who the shadow Mary is, by avoiding getting trapped inside Elizabeth’s
often jealous, dismissive, uncharitable view of her. And here’s the crux. In
the shadow story of P&P, Mr. Darcy does not actually reform and repent from
his selfish ways after Elizabeth rejects his first proposal, he merely pretends
to do so. And in that dark alternative reality, I see Mary as a feminist, selfless, would-be
protector of her elder sister Elizabeth; Mary is (like her creator, Jane Austen,
as characterized long ago by Mary Russell Mitford) the “sharp poker” sitting
quietly by the fire unnoticed, the sharp eyed observer who sees through Darcy’s
sham reformation, and tries her best, albeit unsuccessfully, to warn her
all-too-trickable Elizabeth off from his dangerous charms.
So I believe it is Mary who
is the unnamed girl at Longbourn, who, when Darcy shows up there for the first
time near the end of the novel, and Elizabeth wonders whether he still has
feelings for her, whispers in Elizabeth’s ear the line in the novel you never
hear in any of the film adaptations:
“The men shan’t come and part us, I am
determined. We want none of them; do we?”
But,
alas, Elizabeth by then has had her resistance so thoroughly shattered by Darcy’s
relentless manipulations and stage management, including her “unplanned” visit
to Pemberley, and his “accidentally” meeting her there, and so she does desperately, even cravenly,
want Darcy, and is deaf to Mary’s whispered warning.
As you might have guessed by now,
there are a dozen other major differences between the great love story
of P&P that everybody knows and loves, and the shadow story of that same
novel that I believe was Austen’s greatest cautionary tale. But the shadow
story is also a love story--- although n a very different way, in that it centers
not on Mary, but on another unlikely heroine - Charlotte Lucas (who, notably, is utterly absent from Miss
Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley) and her undying, highly romantic
love for her beloved, Elizabeth! But that is another story……. ;)
So although Gunderson’s and Melcon’s
vision of Mary is a departure from the normative reading of Mary, it is not the
Mary of the shadow story I see. Let’s call it an “upgrade” of the Mary of the overt
story. Nonetheless, I don’t hold that as a flaw at all, because (as I said at
the start) Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley is an authentic,
successful work of sophisticated romantic comedy entirely in its own right! In
other words, it would be great theater to watch and enjoy even if Pride and Prejudice
had never been written --- although, of course, it would surely not be
selling out theaters around the country if not for its unique pedigree!
As to that independent reality of Miss
Bennet, perhaps the best aspect for me was that this sequel to Pride and
Prejudice presented us with an organic family dynamic that is convincingly
enacted by the ensemble. That Mary and Arthur are both engrossed by the
theories of Lamarck which preceded Darwin’s, in regard to the effect of the
environment on heredity, is, it is clear, a metafictional wink by the authors
at the complex family ecosystem which they have successfully set spinning onstage.
[SPOILERS follow for the ending of Miss
Bennet, although not shocking spoilers, for those who have not seen the
play yet]
[SCROLL A LITTLE MORE]
The end point of that evolutionary process
is reflected as the curtain falls on the unexpected, heart-warming harmony that
prevails among Lydia, Mary, Jane, and Elizabeth, and the men who belong to the
latter three. Lydia comes around to wanting to be a real sister, and in a surprisingly
plausible way; and Elizabeth and Lydia show newfound respect and admiration for
Mary.
So it is not only that Mary emerges
from the wings of Austen’s novel to take center stage. It’s that we also see her
as the catalyst who sparks this positive revolution in the Bennet family. This
new Bennet family happy ending brings to mind a bit of wit in P&P about
Lady Catherine --- she who would, by self-profession, have been “a great
proficient” in music:
“…whenever
any of the cottagers were disposed to be quarrelsome, discontented, or too
poor, she sallied forth into the village to settle their differences, silence
their complaints, and scold them into HARMONY and plenty.”
In
short, Gunderson and Melcon are skilled enough as theatrical “composers” that
they did not need to scold their characters into plenty of familial
harmony, because that harmony arises organically, as it does in Austen’s
original, through an artfully constructed chain of plausible character
interactions.
One last point, which I hinted at in
my Subject Line, before I close. Being a hardcore pun-nerd, I was particularly
struck by one early exchange between Mary and her future husband, Arthur, which
I now quote here (no, I don’t have perfect recall, I found an online version of
the play text in Google Books!). This is the moment when the leading man
haltingly begins to court the leading lady:
ARTHUR:
….And. That is to say…I do hope to hear more from you. You are so very full of SONG.
MARY:
Sometimes I am. And sometimes I am full of things much less pretty.
ARTHUR:
You see to me…enough of.. prettiness.
MARY: I
mean my TEMPER. I know I have one and I have yet to learn how to MANAGE it.
ARTHUR:
The Beethoven’s a good start.
She
smiles.
MARY: You
are wittier than you think, Mr. de Bourgh.
ARTHUR:
I don’t know if one can take credit for unconscious wit.
MARY:
And yet people take credit for things far less compelling.
While watching, I asked
myself why Mary smiled, and what “wit” Arthur was so modest about? Upon quick reflection,
I found this to be a subtle pun, as Mary’s struggle to manage her own “temper” surely
relates to the ‘well tempered clavier’ that Mary repeatedly plays
during the play, during her Beethovenian struggles with her tumultuous feelings.
(Here’s a link to a great explanation of what this musical term means: https://www.piano
tuners.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
)
That got me thinking…when I got
home, I checked, and saw that the word “temper” is a subtle but pervasive keyword
(get it?) in P&P (as it is in all of Austen’s novels --- not surprising given
that there are major characters who play the piano in 4 of the canonical 6!),
in that it refers to the contrasting tempers of certain characters, most
notably the unforgiving temper of Mr. Darcy, versus the easy, pliant tempers of
Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley.
And so, with that Bachian pun in
mind, I had to laugh at the following early assessment of Mr. Darcy by
Elizabeth Bennet as she learns about him from Mr. Wickham, which I now read
with new eyes:
“I
should take him, even on my slight acquaintance, to be an ILL-TEMPERED
man.”
I.e., not
a “well-tempered” man at all! And that’s another way of stating the fork
in the road that divides the paths to the overt story and the shadow story. In
a nutshell, the question is whether Darcy’s character will be, or not be, brought
into harmony after Elizabeth rejects him the first time, or will it instead remain
in dark dissonance.
Given the profundity of the musical
metaphors that echo throughout the entirety of P&P (most of all in the
salon at Rosings when Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s merry war of words about her
piano playing and his people skills reaches a peak), we can also read, with new,
admiring eyes, Elizabeth’s earlier, sarcastic snap judgment on her sister:
‘They found Mary, as usual, deep in
the study of thorough-bass and human nature’
When we
recognize that it was Jane Austen herself who was usually deep in the study of
these same endlessly fascinating subjects, including most of all the difficulty
of knowing the hearts of other people and ourselves, it is fitting that we see
Mary as a self-portrait more in harmony with her creator than her more flamboyant
sister Elizabeth.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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