Jane Austen Summer Program: Lecture & Work Study groups (2)

Mrs Gardiner (Joanna David) and Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle) walking together at Pemberley (1995 BBC/WBGH P&P, script Davies

Dear friends and readers,

My final account of the Jane Austen Summer Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’ve two lectures, one panel, a play, a movie not shown, and the study groups to tell of. As I wrote a couple of days ago, the building was two floors, and two rooms upstairs were Netherfield and Longbourne, and two below Pemberley and Rosings, with the participants divided into four study groups. In the Longbourne room Virginia Claire Tharrington had spread out on several tables her collection of editions of Pride and Prejudice: she had tried to obtain a copy of every edition of Pride and Prejudice printed, including children’s versions, graphic novels, and translations. These were revealing to examine — covers, printing, packaging.

Perhaps of the panel on film adaptations, and time set aside to screen Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (why that one was never said as there are more interesting ones), the less said the better, but as the panel and movie itself gave rise to some stimulating talk in the study groups and were connected to one of the two lectures, I’ll at least offer a general account.

On Friday night, a group of graduate students performed a play Ted Scheinman had adapted from Austen’s Juvenilia (mostly Love and Freindship and My Beautiful Cassandra). Years ago I’d seen Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala’s film adaptation of Austen’s mock play of Grandison (Manhattan), and I expected this re-making to be a burlesque amid some story with relevance to us today; instead the players mounted what felt like an 18th century afterpiece, wacky farce like Tom Thumb or the Dragon of Wantley. This kind of playlet was enormously popular in the 18th century and if Austen’s burlesques resembled those, she was intuitively recreating.

An attempt was then made to screen Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Alas, no tech person was available at all, and it seemed there had been no trial run with the DVD on hand and the computer. They were unable to get the two sound tracks running: one for voice and the other for music. The people involved did not know that there are three tracks used for the dance sequences in these films: one for speech, one for dancing, and one for synchronization. At first there seemed little regard for the reality we could not hear any of the words, but then when it became obvious the audience cared about that, attempts were made to make the DVD work – by enlisting audience members. Suffice to say that not many people had stayed for the film anyway (this was a crowd who knew the 1995 BBC/WBGH P&P and while obviously having seen Wright’s film, professing to dislike or disapprove of it), and the few who were there left before the end of a half hour. We stayed a bit longer as I had not watched the film in a while and knew a lecture on the costumes in it was coming up.

The visionary, softly musical, reflexive opening (2005 P&P)

The same problem was part of what went wrong with the panel the next day Saturday morning — absolutely no effort or money had been expended in tech help. This was supposed to be a panel on Austen and film adaptation. Inger Brodey had prepared a couple of montages of the same dialogue as dramatized across several of the P&P films, but with no tech person there, and no pre-rehearsal of the equipment, she was defeated by a lack of sound altogether or her inability to sustain the same size sequences. (Since paying people were paying $500, and most were paying, each there should have been money to set aside for this kind of help.)

This inability to do what was supposed the center of her presentation, was compounded by her insistence to at least two of us that we not prepare anything to say and her refusal to tell us what she had prepared as prompts for the audience to talk about. I asked three times. Another panelist who told me she had watched Wright’s film and taken a couple of weeks and prepared a short paper could not give her findings at all. Luckily Prof Brodey had ready more than her montages; she had picked several quotations. One of these asserted that no film could produce an experience commensurate with what a verbal text could present (an old-fashioned anti-film point of view), so I was able to present for 5 minutes or so the heads of topics of the talk I had prepared anyway, showing how Andrew Davies in the 1995 P&P had in fact used the resources of film (voice-over, flashback within flashback, montage) to create a genuine visualized and dramatic filmic epistolarity and interiority. I linked the episodes in the film which used this — from the end of the 3d part on — to the genuine epistolarity of the novel; and to uses of filmic techniques in other adaptations of other books. But when I tried to answer questions and explain simple terminology (language terms is one way of acquiring tools for understanding) like auteur, Prof Brodey objected so the discussion could go no further than the brief explanation.

Since audiences love nothing better than discussing films and seem to be more comfortable discussing details in them even if they lack adequate vocabulary, nonetheless when the audience was invited to talk, interesting talk emerged about the opening of Davies’s P&P with two males on horseback (Darcy and Bingley’s relationship) and how this anticipated the emphasis in the film on Darcy’s ordeal and a concluding scene where Darcy apologizes for Bingley for lying to him about Jane’s presence in London and gives Bingley permission to ask Jane to marry him, and further in the Pemberley study group, the two graduate students, apparently like many younger viewers, much taken by Wright’s P&P, continued the discussion in the Pemberley study group by showing how indeed Wright had focused not on Darcy’s journey, but Elizabeth’s. We compared Elizabeth’s gazing at Darcy’s portrait in the 1979 P&P (Fey Weldon), the 1995 and Wright’s and found Weldon and Wright’s to be much more focused on Elizabeth’s consciousness and Wright’s on her sexual desire.

Wright’s Keira Knightley is mesmerized by a statue whose gentilia are evident — Penelope Wilton the Mrs Gardener this time

At first the groups had been conscientious in responding directly to a lecture or panel before, or to the topic suggested for the hours (say Money and Land; or Mothers and Daughters) and the same people went to the same room, but by the third day the groups were breaking away to indulge in literary gossip about the characters as related to the people there at the temple and to try the variety of scholars in charge of a conversation as well as particular women who seemed to be stars in the Austin, Texas. I thought the topic of Mothers and Daughters most fruitful in both Longbourne and Pemberley. it’s a truth not universally acknowledged that one sees mother-daughter pairs at JASNAs and in the Longbourne group, we had three such pairs (including yours truly & Izzy). Many of the participants identified as mothers or at least discussed what was a good mother (or bad one), less talk about the daughter’s point of view — which I suggest Austen identified with. We did find an intelligent maternal figure in close alliance with Elizabeth and Jane in P&P: Mrs Gardiner who appears to be one of the original correspondents of First Impressions (the 1st title for P&P). The first volume begins with, and the second volume, ends with ironic and slightly bitter accounts of Mr and Mrs Bennet (in the second he says to console yourself you may die first) and the third with the Gardiner’s presence.

1979 Weldon’s P&P: the scenes between Mrs Gardener (Barbara Shelley) and Elizabeth (Elizabeth Garvie) are given full weight

In the Pemberley group we also discussed free indirect discourse and how this affects our response to the characters and Austen’s narrator. Close attention was paid to the text so we could discuss where we might think Austen’s presence, where her narrator’s, and where her characters’ could be discerned. As usual it was asserted she invented this mode. Nonsense. It comes naturally to subjective novels and begins around the time epistolary narrative emerged as a dominant mode; the first person to use it artfully and consistently is Madame de Lafayette in her La Princesse de Cleves, which Austen would have known and was influential, much read and discussed by women readers especially, translated into English quickly. In general the Pemberley group’s leaders had prepared statements with either passages from the books, or sequences from a movie (Joe Wright’s was the favorite of the graduate students) picked out for everyone to discuss together.

The one lecture on the film adaptations was on Joe Wright’s 2005 P&P — probably the choice of this one had been to shore up memories of it for the one lecture on costume drama: Jade Bettin’s “The Placement of Waist.” She said the costume designer is charged with capturing the essence of a given character in a specific scene. An actress (or actor) or powerful presence on the crew can make a difference. In 1940 Greer Garson insisted she would not look well in the 1790s Empire line dress; the costume designer was Adrian (who did the costumes for the Wizard of Oz) and he acquiesced.

Darcy (Matthew Macfayden), Bingley — and Miss Bingley (Kelly Reilly) as first seen.

But the clothes in a film reflect just as much the specific time period (day, week) in which the film is made and aired. So Elizabeth I in armor before her armies one day, she was back into comfortable clothes until she told herself she had to do this. And the vision of the director or script-writer (and allowed budget of the producer). Joe Wright wanted a film with a contemporary feel so many of the costumes are in many of their parts inaccurate. Like Ang Lee, Joe Wright does not like an empire line, and Wright insisted on de-emphasizing the waist-lines of his heroines altogether. Prof Bettin took us through slides of the costumes of each actor revealing how each fit the character in the book, as Wright saw her (or him), as befitted the particular actor and also as a way of alluding to other movies and historical figures at the time. Wright did not want an effeminate film and dressed Keira Knightley in men’s clothes, men’s boats; only Rosamund Pike as the sweet Jane was allowed to wear apppropriate hats, a pelisse, and hair-dos. Kelly Reilly as Caroline was made into a feline sex-pot. The materials used were very expensive for some of the actors and characters: brocades, exquisitely textured dandy-like colors. Wright was trying for a mood too (Elizabeth barefoot on a swing). Prof Bettin remarked (in a kind of special pleading) we should remember that what we see in fashion plates does not reflect what real people usually wore; expensive clothes were precious and worn rarely.

Beautiful, appealing, historically accurate — and a motif through the films of the heroine bringing home books in solitude — Anne Elliot would not have been so expensively dressed

From the Feature on the DVD of Wright’s movie I watched on my own long ago I know he does not like Austen’s book, much prefers DH Lawrence’s version of sexuality and thought letters the most boring of ways of telling a story. Other people in the audience seemed to want to object to this costuming on grounds of their own, but were given no time to voice their objections.

Doug Murray’s lecture, “‘The eyes have it: The male and female gaze in Pride and Prejudice”, was the last talk we particpated in. We had to go home directly afterward. As it seems to me it was the best of the group, Izzy and my conference may be said to have ended very well. It was done in Rosings, so Izzy and I missed but one room: Netherfield. Prof Murray’s talk combined interesting modern perspective based on some old-fashioned close-reading. He said he wanted to speak of the power of the humane eye; understanding the theorists of the gaze can enrichen our reading of Austen’s novels. Laura Mulvery famously argued that the gazes gratified by movies are those the male wants to see; it’s his eye that is pleased as the (young, beautiful, thin) female is the character gazed at. Foucault argued that in the long 18th century the gaze became a way of controlling people; they were the first to go in for surveillance in prisons; they isolated and punished any deviations.

Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle) opens P&P with her studied glance at Darcy and Bingley on horses below)

Prof Murray then discussed two of the novels. P&P is a novel with spies everywhere in which news follows fast. Lady Catherine is the interrogator of the novel; its panoptic center. Elizabeth needs escape from this, subverts her power by seeing for herself. Prof Murray thought Jane Bennet showed scopophilia, but it seems to me she tried hard to avoid the central light, and without money, once Bingley leaves the neighborhood. I’d say Jane is scopophobic. Anne Elliot craves invisibility in Persuasion where the panoptican is said to be Sir Walter. Now it’s Mr Elliot and Mrs Clay who don’t want to be seen. Again it seems to me the power center of Persuasion is Lady Russell (as the counterpart of Lady Catherine de Bourgh). Information in both novels felt as precious and sensible, but Lady Russell is not manipulating it the way Lady Catherine would like to.

1996 Persuasion: Lady Russell (Susan Fleetwood) photographed rightly showing her concern for Anne (Amanda Root)

Tellingly (it seemed to me) this paper reflects our own paranoid era, with its massive spying on people which you could use against them. Prof Murray suggested evasion and privacy come at great cost. (Someone, not he, suddenly brought out the feeble justification for the massive surveillance of US citizens that we have to pay “for safety.”)

As Izzy remarked perhaps the best part of the conference was the good talk we had with like-minded people, the acquaintances we made, sense of common grounds of friendship. Another lingering after-effect is when I now watch the dancing in films set in the Regency period I can recognize what steps they are taking. This week watching Andrew Davies’s Vanity Fair, for the first time I was able to appreciate which dance he had chosen for the characters and why and how these were shot.

Well, we said goodbye to those we could and hurried back to our car for our long trip home.

Ellen