Happy things and laughter

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935), summer flowers, a natural garden scene

Dear Friends,

I’ve two subjects tonight.  To begin with, happy things.

Today I continued writing the book. I managed to add only a few sentences, perhaps got into a second paragraph, but I am disciplining myself so that I can hope what I write is not something that weeks from now will be rewritten so thoroughly as to be utterly different and in another place in the work altogether. Instead it’s closer to a final draft.

I am doing this by thinking ahead first, having a plan of sorts, following it. It goes slow as yet because I have to keep so much in my head and having read through but some of the criticism on S&S for a half a week in mid-May, I’ve forgotten a lot.  I am you see beginning with the opening of Chapter 2 which is to be a presentation of Austen’s book which conveys the tones of the book and its quality, for these are central to any effective, successful film adaptation.  At the same time I have to be moving forward to discussing the 5 movies, and to write two sentences today I had to read part of an article on Christine Edzard’s adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit, skim-read into the middle of Hutcheon’s excellent A Theory of Adaptation.  I also listened very carefully for the first time to the whole of interview Andrew Davies and Anne Pivcevic gave, which is recorded as part of the features material in the British DVD of their 2008 S&S.

Nonetheless, I am feeling this experience as a happy thing. Hours go by and maybe I’ve hardly written much at all; probably I’ve allowed myself some distraction by fixing one of my blogs or reading a file, or looking at the stills of these movies — some of which I seem never to tire of.  And while this is going on I’m feeling happy, happy about what I’m donig, good about the eventual product.

I don’t always feel this way about what I’m writing. I didn’t over the Clarissa paper as the man running the panel was at first discourteous to me and condescending and then continually pressured me to make sure it wasn’t over long.  (And to add frustration to hurt, our panel had one woman who took so long and was so unprepared that there was no discussion afterwards and had I not gone 2nd I doubt I would have been able to give my paper.)  Sometimes I discover I dislike the book I’m asked to review or find the review I write is not appreciated; the work is then an irritant or I become emotionally sore.  Happy things are when I love my subject, and am feeling treated with respect and friendliness.  My half-biography and songs by Anne Finch, "Apollo’s Muse" was a happy thing.  Some of the reviews I’ve done for Jim May have been very happy things. I loved writing the paper on Northanger Abbey as gothic: the three women running the panel were so kind and the whole experience cheering and provided me with a feeling of self-esteem as I gave the paper and because of the congenial discussion afterwards.

Well The Austen Films is turning into a happy thing. I do love these books and these films.

I turn to laughter.  Sometimes when I think about our two cats, Ian, the boy, and Clarissa, the girl, I just laugh and laugh. Especially Clarissa:  she is the most determined, tenacious, stubborn, aggressively affectionate, tenderly loving of cats. Lithe, small, active, she leaps ahead and will try to get what she wants against what she knows to be whatever we are trying to do. We had to shut her and Ian in the back half of the house when the man came to fix the porch. Well when we opened the door to the back part of the house, she sped out like lightning, and then dove under the couch and fought us holding onto the couch feet to stay where she was. She didn’t want to be in the back of the house and that’s that.  I laugh at her helplessness I suppose, it’s an endearing trait I fear — when accompanied by her others.  Sometimes when I’m swimming in the gym I remember her antics and start to chuckle away irresistibly.

Ian doesn’t make me laugh; rather he can touch the heart with his cautious hiding ways.  He scrounches before you to get what he wants. Self-possessed he still comes over for affection and at night in the bed is still my cat lover, stretching his body out alongside mine with his paw gently on my face.  Jim too another photo of him today:  the paperback Clarissa and the whole Richardson section is on a bookcase near JIm’s chair in the front so it’s easy to take such a photo. Ian likes to lay between the rows of books on top of the bookcase; the books form a very long narrow rectangle inside of which is a long corridor of space.  He lays there hiding and also watching the sky, for it’s also on the other end near a window.  He had just got up and was looking at Jim reading or on his computer:

What made us laugh at little is his size.  Clarissa is an enormous paperback of 1500 pages, a folio size.  It barely accommodates his paws.

We compared it to a photo Jim took of Clarissa on Clarissa about 8 months ago when they were both about
5-6 months old.

                                                     

Her whole body is perched on the book.

We also compared their expressions, hers as usual a kind of yearning, his contemplative, relatively expressionless.  How are these pictures part of a blog dedicated to Reveries under the sign of Austen?  Jane Austen it’s said kept a copy of Clarissa in her and Classandra’s bedroom, on top of their bureau. We are told that she too found writing her books happy things and would get up from her chair and laugh and walk about and then sit down again. Olivia Williams in Miss Austen Regrets plays the part too nervously to get across this Bachelard-like state of deep-musing reverie, but I prefer its intense seriousness to the insouciance of Anna Hathaway’s enactment of a woman at her desk writing:

Olivia Williams as Jane Austen writing (Miss Austen Regrets)

Cheers tonight,
Ellen

The Sense and Sensibility Movies: deep patternings; an Austen do

Dear Friends,

In the past two days I have corrected and polished a second filmography, this one organized by the source text, and put it on my website; continued watching the 5 S&S movies back-to-back, measuring the second hour of all against one another to see where the movie had reached (so to speak) by the end of the second hour, and then the third hour or part of 4 of them against the last 20 minutes of the fifth (the 1995 Thompon-Lee S&S is but 134 minutes), and finally watched just the fourth part, a last half hour of one (the 1981 BBC S&S is a half hour longer than Constanduros/Giles 1971 and Davies/Pivcevic 2008 S&Ss). 

Today I went to the Washington area JASNA regular June meeting, this year held at Tudor Place, once the mansion set in gardens fo a powerful southern dynasty (related to Curtis/Lee/Washington clans) and now a tourist attraction in northern Georgetown. And this evening I came across a description of another woman’s writing which made me understand this blog and Ellen and JIm have a blog, too and two better.

I’ll begin with the description or rationale first.  In his literary biography of Hester Thrale Piozzi, Wm McCarthy devotes the first chapter to the first two great books by her that he discusses:  her book of poetry (not published, or published in but a few scattered fragments) and her autobiography, today known as Thraliana (the name she gave it, put I suppose on the outside of her notebook covers). With some small changes of titles and references, his description of her Thraliana may be used as a description of this and Jim and my new blog, plus what’s left of the old one:

"her writing workshop, the birthplace of An Austen Miscellany, of plans for other books, and of stray sentences which ended up in other articles. It is also the place where … she talks of herself about herself and her intimates. In it she makes a room of her own, articulating sentiments not welcome in the public world, and conducting a love affair … She learns to delight in her book’s variety, and to delight in it as her own variety: ‘strange Farrrago as it is of Sense, Nonsense, publick, private Follies – but chiefly my own — & the little Heroine. She learns to relish her own agility .. to enjoy even her own faults .. to rise, indeed, to sublime arrogance … She enters also her resentments of family and friends … As her private book, Austeniana gives her power; she could make of it what she wished, and no one could interfere. Everyone knew that she kept it, and people sometimes hinted a wish to read it, but she showed it to no one.  She enjoyed the power of her secret .. asserting from to time that her volumes might be read .. but must never be printed …’
 

Piozzi’s Thraliana is a writer and reader’s autobiography

Hester Thrale Piozzi, 1793 (by George Dance)

This blog and the one that went defunct are mine.  So now the subheader of this blog will be a writer’s workshop.

The second filmography now up on my website is useful to me because it represents an outline of my book.   I will organize the book by chapters, all but the introduction and last chapter dedicated to one of Austen novels and the movies adapted from it. The introduction I have planned to write after Chapter 2 or maybe 3: there I will rewrite the paper I tried to write for Abigail (for a collection of essays on film adaptations, the invitation what set me off on this project) and define and describe the three main types of film adaptation, look at what qualities the Austen ones specifically share.  The last chapter will be (I hope) a description of what sets the Austen movies apart from others — if they can be set apart (which remains to be seen). 

When I chose stills for the filmography by type, I chose stills that recur throughout all the films, regardless of type: two women talking intimately to one another in a deeply supportive way. 

Elizabeth and Mrs Gardiner talking

When I chose stills for the filmography by source, I chose stills that show how different are the specific elements in each film, what stands out in them as individuals. 

Emma tears her shoelace; she is the only trickster among the heroines

So they become a kind of pictorial elaboration of two different ideas about the films: what unites and what separates them.

I am relieved to say that the second hour of each film does not end on the same climax.  Had they, I might have decided I was going mad to think so, or movies are strange species indeed; and the third part, and in one case (the 1981 film), a fourth, differs too.  On the other hand, there were still striking similarities at the same time as none of them opted for Austen’s structure.  The end of Austen’s volume 1 puts before us the shockingly painful episode (especially the first time you read it and it comes as a surprize to you as well as Elinor) of Lucy informing Elinor that Edward has been engaged to Lucy for the past 4 years; the end of Austen’s volume 2 puts before us Lucy’s exulation over her invitation to come and stay with Fanny Dashwood and Elinor’s abject despairing surmize that yes now Lucy will bond Edward permanently to her once again as she will have a chance to be with him continually.  The 1971 S&S has a brilliant long series of scenes between a complex malacious and angry and desperate Lucy (Francis Cuka) and intensely controlled Elinor (and Joanna David is too controlled to affect us enough), but these are not the climactic conclusions of the 2nd or 3rd of its four parts nor the end of its first or second hours.  And none of the other S&Ss gives Lucy a comparable role in length of time or powerful presence.

To summarize, the second hour of the 71 S&S ends with the scene in the book where Edward breaks in upon Lucy’s exultant over Elinor to confide in her and finds Lucy unexpectedly there, and has to endure Marianne barging in with painful misunderstandings and faith in him.   The second hour 81 S&S ends on a visit by John Dashwood to Elinor who has just listened to Colonel Brandon tell her the melodamatic story of how Willoughby seduced and abandoned Eliza Williams and told her what Marianne needs most is a real friend: it’s darkly ironic or is supposed to be, because John Dashwood is anything but a real friend, and his advice to Elinor to marry Brandon is yet another instance of his obtuseness which functions a cruel.  The second hour of 95 S&S ends on the powerful scene of Elinor crying frantically over Marianne who seems to lay dying, begging Marianne to leave she, Elinor, alone; she has borne all and can carry on bearing, but to bear it alone is too much to ask. 

Emma Thompson as Elinor at breaking point

The second hour of 08 S&S ends on the dreadful first avoidance and then reactive humiliation of Marianne by Willoughby at the London ball (a terrible Tuesday).  (The 08 film often uncannily resembles the 71 film which I doubt either Daves or Pivcevic saw: the end of the second episode of the 71 film is a version of this scene where Willoughby tries to signal Marianne to play a game of politeness with him and pretend they are mild acquaintances but finds she cannot play such insincere games so abruptly turns round and decamps.

By contrast, the second hour of the 00 I have Found It, a Tamil musical, an Indian film closes at the second hour with a terrific upswing in the fortunes or our heroines:  our Elinor character, Sowmyra has gained her job and is suddenly promoted, and her boss vouches for her and her family so they can get a mortgage and move to a nice apartment to live in, and we see them arrive with their belongings by truck, settle in, and on the balcony hug one another while fireworks are set off in the sky. 

The Dashwood women rejoicing

At the end of a second hour the western films show excruciating pain and/or embarrassment, hard irony, betrayal; the Indian a Providential design intended to show the workings of God Who in the next episode kills off the John Dashwood character and makes the Fanny Dashwood character dependent on the charity of our Dashwood women; they then decline to take back the house which the John Dashwood character, of course at heart really a good man, had left to them in his will.

The third part of four of the films is of different lengths (71 S&S has 45 minutes, 81 S&S had 2 30 minute, the 95 S&S has 20 minutes, 00 IHFI has 50 minutes, and the 08 S&S an hour), while the fifth (81 S&S) has yet another half-hour of denouement.  Here it’s a matter of comparing what is in these final episodes, and what is cut, what is added, and how the different movies are shaped according to their themes, moods and internal psychological patterning.

I will reserve details for the book, only saying that in this third part, short or long are some revealing parallels between all of them (once again). For example, all five films have Brandon and Marianne drawing gradually (or in the case of the hurried 95 film quickly) together (over books, over poetry, over music, over deep congeniality finally revealed) and Marianne either ready to fall in love or gradually doing so with Colonel Brandon before Edward returns to Elinor for the penultimate climactic scene of intense reaching out in love:  in the Tamil film, it is the Marianne character, Meenu, who must aggressively insist to the Colonel Brandon character, a man crippled by war, and genuinely not handsome, Captain Bala, that she loves him (at which he declares himself no longer to be a disbeliever in God’s goodness) but the scene still occurs before the Edward character, Manohar, returns to Elinor (Sowmrya) in a scene modelled on the Edward/Elinor scene in the 95 film. The last half hour of the 81 S&S closely resembles the feel and pattern of events of the last 20 minutes of the 95 S&S.  In none of the films is Marianne married off suddenly to Brandon based on esteem, gratitude and the pressure and approbation of her family, with the assumption that love must come later, given the man’s character. 

Revealing differences include these:  the 71 film alone has the comic actress, Patricia Routledge (very great) retell the scenes where Edward is exposed and defies his family and so spares us the jarring exaggeration of the dramatized scenes of the other, and substitutes an extra invented one of Edward in a broken down room in a poor inn and Elinor’s visit to him. 

Robin Ellis as Edward stopping from reading in the inn he hides away in, 71 S&S

All but the 95 film has Willoughby come to confess (and there he does not come because the film lacks time for it), but all four do it in quite a different mood, with different emphases. 

Yet the motif of Elinor facing someone and enduring it is common throughout all the films; here is the 81 Elinor (Irene Richards) fiercely facing Willoughby

It is a climax similar to the snubbing at the ball for the 71 and 81 S&Ss, but a coda in the 95, 00, and 08 films, with the illness of Marianne and Elinor’s vigil taking precedence over it in the 95 and 08 S&Ss.  I’m going to argue that only in the 08 S&S does Elinor succeed in dominating the film so that by the end it has become her agon and ordeal and that this is largely the result of invented montages by Davies throughout

Elinor takes her drawing of Norland mansion in expensive frame down and replaces with her drawing of Barton cottage in a plain frame — and Hattie Morahan’s performance.

These findings bring me back to my idea of close reading the films to show them as individual works of art; at the same time I must admit there is a deep romance patterning which will they nill they shapes these films and makes them feel quite similar as do the P&P films; by contrast, the Emma films feel quite different and I expect to find different deep structures.

Lastly the JASNA tour and luncheon.  It went all right. I was nervous the day before when I thought about going, and had a period of intense anxiety. But in the event I did fine:  I went on my own by train and then foot.  The real problem here was the walk from the Dupont circle station to Tudor Place and back again was very long. So my feet, lower back, and later (when Jim and I also walked in old town) hips and thighs ached. I have taken two powerful muscle relaxants this evening.  The group of women (and a couple of men) included people of all ages from mid-20s to 70s, though the common age was around 50 or so. The tour was informative: this is a house turned into a tourist place about 30 years ago; from around 1805 or so when it was first built until the 1930s it was inhabited by 6 generations of one powerful southern dynasty, pro-confederacy, related to George Washington, the Custises, Lees. There was the usual worship of wealthy and famous people’s objects, particularly much piety, as is so common, over anything having to do with Washington himself and Lee: the house was first built for the step-granddaughter of Washington.  There were many different layers and eras of history to see in the disposition of the rooms, various technologies, things (like toys) as well as cultural remnants.  The most revealing were those rooms renovated around 1914 and what could be seen of life then. 

Really creepy was that the family through all those years kept minute and accurate records of themselves, their doings and thoughts and left not one record of the names or lives of 3 generations of slaves (who slept in huts around the house).  The guide suggested, well, they were ashamed; to which the reply could be not ashamed enough not to sell their slaves (there are records of this outside the house) and exploit them ruthlessly.  6 generations of white lived there and kept obsessive records of themselves, took pictures, 3-4 generations of black slaves and two of black servants and not one iota of a record. It seems that when the black people were no longer enslaved, they were allowed to live in the attics.  We saw a kitchen-dining area the servants used as of the 1890s.

Two incidents the guide told of were interesting: from this house the family watched the British burn down much of DC in 1812.  I wondered if the slaves were at all encouraged to try to revolt during this time, but the woman said she didn’t know and couldn’t imagine what such a life was like (with slaves — that was her standard reply about slavery, which cut off talk).  During the civil war, the woman who was mistress at the time had to allow union soldiers to live there; meanwhile her two nephews who supposedly for a prank dressed up as union soldiers and went into a union camp one night, were caught at it and hung the next day as spies.  Something of the ferocity and hatreds a civil war engenders was caught up in this story.

The tour took about an hour. I asked questions and so did a couple of other people. One woman I got friendly with walked with me in the garden and then sat with me for lunch. Judith was her name, a ballet teacher who also gives lectures on dance.  The lunch was picnic sandwiches in a room off the garden sloping down to lower Georgetown. It was pleasant at the table (though the talk about books such as it was was demoralizing in the way people objected to "heavy" detail in any books), and the talks by the organizers were reasonable (plans for other meetings, one person had died and was commemorated).  I thought to myself I could come again and while I was the first to leave, I left when everyone else was getting ready to go. I was rare for not having come by car so I didn’t have to walk back to the garage (where most of them ended up leaving their cars).

My worst moment came when Judith, the woman befriending me, persisted in asking me if I wanted a lift.  She kept saying that she lived in Arlington and would drop me off at an Arlington station. I at first didn’t say yes or no, but then demurred, mainly because she was so vague about "dropping you off." I feared she would leave me at some station in Arlington from which I could get lost.  I have a problem about imprecision and getting lost. Had she named the station and suggested the line I could take home, I would have gone.  I told myself maybe this way I shall make a contact to see again. But she never got concrete and it makes me nervous to feel I am unsure where I am and how to get back home.  Jim always gives me precise instructions; oftentimes I practice going places and I did have a map with me from google showing how to get to the place and back.  She did not offer to drive me back to Dupont Circle which I hesitatingly nearly suggested.  This would have taken her out of her way. I felt ashamed of myself walking back that at 62 I still could not dare to just take such an offer and che sera, sera.  

However, this was mended as a feeling when I reached Jim who picked me up at the King Street station (after I phoned him from the station as we had agreed to). Jim said there were no Arlington Metro stations for the yellow and blue lines which come to Alexandria. There were only orange line stations which take you elsewhere or to Maryland. So I would have been stranded unless she offered to take me wholly home. Probably I would have gotten onto to the station before I realized I was on a wrong line and then had to buy tickets into DC again and back and that certainly would have made me very stressed and upset.  So my caution was right. And the woman was very opinionated: I admit I’m not used to quick replies which by loudness and declamatory statements don’t give me a chance to talk back:  she had strong opinions about which sequels were good (JA Book Club which I said I liked she pronounced awful) and which films she disliked (she was an advocate of faithfulness as a criteria).  So I was peaceful, read Howards End once I got to the train, and made my way back calmly and was happy to be back with Jim, Izzy, and our two kiitten-cats, Clary and Ian.

I was disappointed that there does seem no way to join a reading club or group from these JASNA large meetings. Perhaps if I keep coming I will meet someone eventually who can clue me in to a group.

So that’s my Austen budget of thoughts, study, conclusions, and dos for tonight.

Ellen

The Elusiveness of Movies; Austen filmography by type

Dear friends,

The days go by and I don’t start writing the text of my book. I just can’t seem to get into my head all at once what I need to to write. There is just so much in each movie. Right now I’ve read through all my old blogs on S&S, and am slowing making my way through my outlines of the five movies and notes on top of the outlines. I’ve read through two sets and have three to go. 

On top of this I find that continually something I think is true about a movie is not. I decided that I would watch the 5 movies once again, back to back so to speak, one hour of one against the same one hour of the other, and so on through all five.  I would have sworn the pace of the 5 movies of S&S was so different, and to be sure many of the incidents and nuances and feel of the 5 are different and this is testified to by my careful notes where I write down what i literally see and hear, plus my sten transcriptions of the screenplays and capturing of stills.  Now though careful watching and timing (ignoring the artificial divisions set up by TV program slots), and I discovered that one hour in on all 5 (whether a faithful, commentary or free type adaption) and I was at the same climax of the story considered as romance: Marianne has become deeply smitten love with Willoughby, Brandon is heart-broken, and we are just before or just after he has abandoned her. Now this is not Austen’s climax at all; while it’s a powerful incident in the middle of volume 1 of Austen’s S&S, the climax of volume 1 is Elinor being told by Lucy that Lucy and Edward have been engaged for 4 years.  I assume they must diverge now but who knows? Perhaps a watching back-to-back of the second hour of all 5 in a row will show me that they all 5 are at a second high point in some archetypal romance drawn from Austen’s novel.

Again and again in my study of movies I have found that my first impression of what I saw is wrong or wholly inadequate to what was put in front of me.  I’ve reread all my blogs on S&S and my original proposal and the paper I attempted to write for the 19th century editor (what started me on this project in the first place) and sometimes I think I have parts of my book all done: they need finding, rearranging and rewriting and expanding.   Now though I realize that what each is is on an isolated aspect of the movie I was able to observe, and may in its emphasis mislead the reader about what the experience of the movie taken as a whole or gone along temporally is like.  How can one get hold of a moving target so filled with different elements all at once.

I did make a www.jimandellen.org/austen/Filmography.htmlfirst filmography and put it on my website:  all the Austen movies available on DVD or videocassette organized by type. In a couple of days I’ll put up a second filmography of them organized according to their eponymous book or major source.

In the meantime I do silly but cheering things. After l cleaned out, paid someone to rebuild the porch and paint the floors and walls and turn it into a room one can sit in at night (I felt profoundly ashamed of its state as a rotting filthy shed for years), I’ve fixed the pictures on my walls of my study so they are now more things I love today.  

I’ve put Jim’s picture from his office (felucas framed in a lovely soft blue) in the front room which is turning (one-third of it) into his work and play room.  In my own I’ve taken down all Pre-Raphaelite pictures which I’ve come to see as unhealthy, and put up lovely impressionist pictures of snow (by Pissarro and Monet), landscapes by favorite women painters, 18th century rococo pictures, Constable, Gainsborough and Hubert Robert landscapes, photos of friends up and down and around my windows, some local pictures of Alexandria, one wall for favorite movie stills (several of Ronald Colman and from Talk of the Town, beloved moments from plays we’ve seen), the postcards of the Landmark places we’ve been (up and down alongside the wall by my Trollope books), memorabilia from times at the Trollope Society and with John Letts (a photo of a house Trollope rented in 1880 which I visited due to him), and 5 stills from the Austen films, all of favorite moments with heroines at the center. 

Do you want to see these last?  Well, one is one I’ve often put up; Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland looking up at her gothic room, so I’ll skp that but show the other 4 even one should be no surprize::

Facing me on the wall near by, higher up and enlarged:

Catherine Walker as Eleanor Tilney talking deeply supportively to Catherine Morland just after she tells Catherine that Isabella Thorpe was "in" way over her head with Eleanor’s mean low brother.  I went to a lot of trouble to get this half of a still and have decided to make it my userpic for a while.  I do love this character and Walker’s performance as her.

Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet revelling yet contemplative in the beauty of the natural world. Who would not love this?

And over on another wall enlarged:

Sophie Thomson as Miss Bates looking up to the sunlight as she is treated with unexpected kindness and deep courtesy by Mr Knightley.  Thomson plays the role in a way that makes me remember lines by Wordsworth important to me:

There is a comfort in the strength of love;
‘Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would break the heart …

and Juliet Stevenson as the ironic wry Mrs Elton (see Diana, and you thought I’d appreciate Mrs Elton, I do  –in Stevenson’s incarnation)

Jim and I together worked at this workroom to remove wires from the floor; it’s still not catproofed but is closer to that.  Since we will no longer use a server, he’s changing our ISP to telephone cable and now we’ll have more bandwidth and Isobel will be able to watch far more sports and dance and TV than she has been able to. We too.

I’ve kept busy on lists in the early morning, 1 to 3 postings, brief to each of the 3. For reasons I don’t understand (as most of the time I’m the only one writing and have no idea if anyone at all reads what I write and can’t get rid of the moritifying conviction that at least a few people laugh at me about which I can’t prevent myself from caring), for reasons I say I don’t understand, writing this way cheers me in the morning, though it sometimes takes an hour and a half.  I need companionship, even imaginary.

Letters are for me not substitutes for friendship, but the experience of friendship itself.  I’ve been reading Nicola Beauman’s The Other Elizabeth Taylor, about the novelist who wrote The Soul of Kindness (deeply bitter bleak book), In a Summer Season, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (from which a film was adapted). I’m loving it mostly because of the inner life of this woman which I recognize parts of my own in: for Taylor letters provided the finest truest friendships as they allowed people to learn about one another, share things, support one another in a kind of intimacy of the private self not readily possible face-to-face.  She stayed home to write, to delve into her mind and imagination and live with other fine spirits through books and art.  No wonder I love her novels; this is my comfort book just now. 

Beauman also reveals ET was a communist, for many years the lover of Ray Russell, a thwarted gifted man (shunted aside by the strong class hierarchies and coteries of the UK), her husband also had more casual affairs; Taylor has two abortions rather than give birth to Russell’s sons.  She was an overt atheist, mostly kept away from all that hurts in the world; it’s often said Virginia Woolf (her The Years got me through one summer) and E. M. Forster (note to self, must read & see Howards End as sister book and film to S&S) influenced her, closer influences: Ivy Compton-Burnett’s depictions of the realities of private and family life and Elizabeth Bowen’s books ( especially The Death of the Heart (which I’ve read and love and know is one of the great women’s novels of the 20th century).  In A Wreath of Roses Taylor discusses the difference between women’s novels and men’s and why and how men get away with keeping recognition and respect from women’s novels.

Am I off-topic?  I think not.  Jane Austen helped invent the woman’s novel and she wrote honestly and never ridiculed the kind or what is good, is fundamentally an austerely ethical writer.  My other comfort book and new friend in a book is a near contemporary or hers, Sara Coleridge (born 1802, STC’s daughter), about whom I’ll put a foremother posting on "Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two" in a week or so.  Here I’ll just end on a poem from her Collected Poems (published for the first time more than 150 years after her death):  it’s in rhyme royal:

"To My Son"

Love to admire – avoid depreciation
­Base is that alchemy which turns pure gold
To copper in the servile estimation
Of men who but with others’ eyes behold, ­
Who seek the brightest things to dull and tarnish,
Dull stuff of their own mint to brighten up and varnish.

Love to admire – the sun at noon-day blazing
Blasts the beholder’s eye with light intense:
But sun-bright excellence rewards our gazing,
Imparts new vigour to the inward sense.
Wish to admire, to love, to hope, believe,
All that thou hopest, lov’st, thou shalt in time receiye.

Th’admirer all that he admires possesses ­
Unnumbered treasures for his treasury hath:
Is owner of a thousand gifts and graces,
Which are but thorns in Envy’s painful path:
Resides in an Elysian summer calm
While round his happy head blow countless gales of balm

Some men there are, who deal in moderation
Only to gratify immoderate spite:
Make a man’s obvious virtues a firm station,
Whence they take aim to fetch him from his height;
They grant a little to deprive of much,
And numb the gen’rous heat with their torpedo touch.

Dread not an argument, but bravely say
‘Tis victory by truth to be subdued;
But, if thy tongue and not thy mind gives way,
Then bear the victor’s scoff with fortitude:
View it as martyrdom for truth’s dear sake,
A mild refining fire and temper’s easy stake.

Dread not a laugh – contemn th’ unmeaning sneer
Of men who with no finer sword can fence. –
A laugh, the last thing we learn not to fear,
Is oft the dullard’s substitute for sense.
Laugh thou when Pride and feeble Mimicry
Seize Mirth’s gay mask and wear it all awry.

True irony is but a form of reason,
An argument in gala clothing drest, –
But they who breathe March winds in sunmler season,
­And vent mere rancour in the form of jest,
Deserve no credit in their serious vein.
Their earnest is a jest which merits but disdain.

How oft we grieve that a friend’s inward wealth
Of small account by loveless crowds is made!
Yet who seek glory from their strength and health,
Or pine to have their heavy coffers weighed?
They that possess, the inward jewel, worth
Have present heav’n within and gain thereto th’ earth.

For me not beneath the light of common day,
And not to eyes by common beams enlightened,
That jewel doth its brilliant hues display:
‘Tis by an inward luminary brightened;
And they who those pure beams participate .
None can see that fair which they illuminate.

Goodness is never perfect in one mind,
But widely o’er the earth in parcels spread:
As gold, in fragments to the streams consigned,
Was ne’er discovered in its mountain bed,
So hope not thou, ere from this earth ascended,
To find all virtues in one mortal mansion blended.

Yet some all moral good and evil find in masses
Which no opposing quality doth leaven:
Mankind at large they place in two large classes
The heavenly – and the sort devoid ofheav’n —
Sure they see double in their partial kindness
For Virtue on one side have nought but total blindness.

Learn to be true, for ’tis consummate art
From all untruth our thoughts, words, acts to clear:
­Detect the falsehoods of the cunning heart,
Which least of all is with itself sincere:
Small need hast thou with others to eschew
The base deceiver’s way while thou to self art true.

Dare to be good; dare to admire; know the jeerers and despisers and sarky, those who ridicule, mock, and dismiss (the way Elizabeth Taylor’s books for example were by many reviewers) are small and mean, sort of Blifils (Henry Fielding’s term) who hate what is fine because they are not that but living by sordid bullying ways themselves.

E.M.

Typologies: planning what comes where in order to start

"Texts are assumed to be not windows, but paintings that invite readers to look at or into them, not through them" (Leitch, "12 Fallacies of Film Adaptation Theory")

Dear Friends,

I am quiet and my days pass quietly.   I find that I’m not missing teaching and am neither more or less lonely than usual.  A student whom I’m mentoring came to my house yesterday and we had a great couple of hours together. I found another use for my Clarissa paper: I was able to show her how to do a proposal and then a paper out of it by showing her my proposal for that and then my paper.   Beautiful time.

Jim and I have been emptying out this workroom by getting rid of a huge computer and monitor; he picked up all the wires on the floor and rationalized them. I rearranged some of my pictures, put new ones up, like this of Austen gazing out at the landscape by Cassandra, a water color of it.

I put it high up on one wall, to the corner. Overviewing yet looking away.  Perfect. Two new Poussins (meditative landscapes, one I’ve put just below), two local pictures of Alexandria Old Town (one a street in snow — one we walk through not infrequently).  I rearranged to be more consistent too:  all the movie pictures on one wall, and a new Gainsborough with the 18th century rococo landscapes in another area.

Travellers Resting in a Landscape

Izzy and I have gone to a couple of superb movies: Is Anyone There? last week (very moving, about dying, and how hard it is to make a living and maintain affection in life — Michael Caine, very great); and this one Every Little Step, a documentary of the auditioning story across many months for the revival of Chorus Line. The movie became a metamovie about the desperate need for a job and success for each contestant as they were gradually eliminated until the very end.  All three of us have been to the Austrian embassy twice this week. Tonight it was a stunning treat:  Hans Gal, a German Austrian Jewish musician wrote music and a script for a half-mocking set of songs while in a Scottish internment camp and this was recreated at the embassy. A crowd of people were there.  To see the human spirit manage these kinds of ironies with high art; it reminded me of Paradise Road where the women so much worse treated (killed, raped, tortured) nonetheless created and those who survived persevered with making a chorus and singing.

The pussycats continue to develop distinct personalities and we all form a family.

Inwardly I’ve been bothered by by my not going on to do direct study and write.  The problem is the plan. What to do first and then second and how to go about it.  I again faced how important it is to define what I have in order to tell my story.  So I returned to the vexing problem of categories.  As I used to write on my old blog, in order to do a close reading of a film, as with a book you should first ask what genre it belongs to.  We must understand and can judge a thing only by its own peculiar aims.  I originally came up with a tripartite scheme for film adaptation:

1) the apparently faithful or transposition:  the film-makers have attempted to match the original story, and to reproduce most of the characters and stayed with the central dramatic turning-points of the novel and famous lines, with some allowance for modernizing interpretations and necessary as well as advantageous alterations filmic media provides;

2) the critical or commentary type:  the film-makers intend considerable fidelity, but attempt this through departures from the original which often include altering central pivotal events (an event perceived as crucial) and the way in which the events are presented dramatically, in order to comment on, critique or alter Austen’s theme by making emphatic or highlighting specific aspects of her original novel.  Signs of this is the invention of a new character; a major change in the story or character switch or alteration; some technique which does not have an equivalent one in the book (voice-over and journal or letter writing where there is none in the major source text);

The slide between the apparently faithful and commentary: on the other hand, if a commentary, the 07 MP is unusual for its ambivalence and even hostility towards social life; now that is in Austen. Wadey’s Fanny and Edmund are escaping after the strains of her birthday picnic (the event is moved to another place in the story and Edmund made more sympathetic to Fanny’s desire to retreat).

3) the free adaptation or analogy:   film-maker has abandoned historical costume drama, but reproduces enough recognizable idiosyncratic analogous hinge-points, individual characters, character functions from the source novel, and overt (unsubtle) thematic intersections between the movie and source novel to make the film manifestly intelligible as an adaptation; in addition, the source novel is often explicitly discussed by characters in the film.

The problem for me has become that the type 1 and 2 are not distinct enough. Davies may be said to do Type 1, but he is ever pushing the envelope; his presentation or enunciation sometimes changing the spirit (there’s a mystique or undemonstrable characteristic) of the original book in his film.  Clarissa 1991 is a commentary because of the major change of having Belford kill Lovelace, the dropping of Morden, and change in Anna’s character: now that last is my subjective judgement, and it may be said that otherwise every effort is made by the film-makers to be faithful and their interpretation of the book is accurate.  And what does one do with a film like Lost in Austen: it does fits both commentary and free adaptation, but then is it not a pastiche, and is that a genre or a type of adaptation?

I  knew of Dudley Andrew’s (transforming, borrowing, intersecting — and these don’t work except as techniques within an adaptation) and of course Wagner’s (which mine correspond to).  Now this week I came across new articles & books which proposed other schemes.

I was not at all persuaded by Kamilla Elliott’s in Rethinking Novel/Film.  They solve the problem of half-accusing the film-makers of disingenuousness by not referring to how much the film has literally taken over. She instead makes the categories correspond to the film-makers’ deeper transformative techniques: psychic, ventriloquist, genetic, de(re)composing, incarnational, trumping. The trouble here is she has no literal features by which she can split and lump; it all comes down to her interpreting a film first.

Genette (in a book and quoted by others) calls all films adaptations and divides them all up into 6.   He collapses the faithful with the commentary in his first category: intertextuality (actual presence of one text in another). His second and third seems to me to refer to devices within the films: paratextuality (framing and defining devices), metatextuality (one text refers to another without necessarily citing it).  The last two are different means used by free adaptations:  hypertextuality (any means by which you unite text a to text b), architextuality (generic cues and conventions)  Film adaptations would be hypertexts. His terms are not commensurate.

Troost (in an article for Cartmell’s Cambridge Companion) invents again 3 types; Hollywood style (1940s and 96 Miramax Emma); heritage style (1970s BBC); fusion  of Hollywood and heritage (86 NA; 99 MP; 05 P&P); imitation (free adaptations Clueless and I have found it) The way she comes up with putting films into the categories is through broad responses, and she is reductive. Then she backtracks and says  95 P & P&P are both entertainment and heritage.  Trouble with her categories is they depend on her insights and are also based on a kind of caricature impressionistic criticism. Her idea seems to be that fusion combines Hollywood style (free) and heritage (solemn serious accuracies attempted). It’s really a condescending essay looking at films as cynical commodities sheerly.

Then there’s Leitch (Film Adaptation and Its Discontents) whose types seemed better or more accurate than mine for a time:

1) celebrations:  these subdivide into curatorial (BBC mini-series), replication, homage (one film adaptation recreates previous), heritage (museum aesthetic, Jewel in the Crown and 1998 Elizabeth).  Canonical books found here, pictorial realizations, liberation of material the original had to repress. He proposes the umbrella term literalizations, and says they correspond to Kamilla Elliot’s incarnation

2) adjustment: promising text rendered more suitable.  This is also what Elliott means by genetic (getting at deep underlying narrative structure and keeping that so 1940 P&P does that); McFarlane talks of the story and its enunciation (presentation, the discursive level and Davies 08 SS has a different presentation than conventions for Austen’s). So we have subtypes of compression, expansion, correction (correcting what are seen to be flaws in original, includes adding happy ending), updating, superimposition (stars imposed, stars themselves insisting on certain things), censoring, unacknowledged coauthors (like Emma Thompson for the 2005 P&P), a company’s or group’s house style (1940 P&P a MGM film, a Greer Garson film, an Olivier film, Merchant Ivory films; BBC style), antihouse or budgetary constraints, superimposition of generic conventions (film made to conform to popular film genre, for teen audience work repackaged)

3)  de(re)composing: film and book decompose, merge, and form new composition at underground levels of reading. Film a composite of textual and filmic signs merging audience consciousness together with other cultural narratives so we can’t tell what is book and what films.  Example:  I have found it.  So this subdivides into neoclassic imitation (West Side Story, Ian McKelln in R3), reverence includes satiric bent so Clueless a neoclassic imitation (this is like Griffith’s idea of adaptation as imitation, an aesthetic problem solved & communicated through many artistic choices. He sees these as also incarnations (?).

4) revisions (transforming the text); they seek to rewrite the original, now in imitations the past is the measure of the present; here the reassessment is primary. They seek to alter the spirit as well.  1999 MP, Branagh’s Henry V.  Some of these import historical events into novel. 1931, 41 versions of Jekyll and Hyde, explicit critiques of Victorian mores.

5) colonization: corresponds to ventriloquist, empties out novels signs and fills them with new filmic spirits, a composite of film and book. Ruby in Paradise, Lake House.  Vessels to be filled with new meaning, can be ideological critique and go in another direction entirely.  Nair’s Vanity Fair, Bride and Prejudice, Kuroawa’s Ran

6) (meta)commentary or deconstruction. He puts Jane Austen in Manhattan here. These can fictionalize problem of adaptation and staging, examine problems of arranging pre-existing material

7) Analogue: Bridget Jones’s Diary, Metropolitan (criteria is the analogy is discontinuous, and episodic) Unintentional analogues: Tevre’s Daughters by Sholem Aleichem

8) Parody and pastiche:  Lost in Austen.  Jameson:  pastiche is imitation of peculiar mask, speech in a dead language, neutral practice of mimicry, no ulterior motive to satirize, devoid of laughter at object or any onveniction alongside abnormal tongue you have chosen a healty linguistic norality exists.  Blank parody.  films have embedied parodies in them, Holmes movies are parodied.

9) secondary, teriary or quaternary imitations: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason which is both a sequel to an adaptation film and an adaptation of a sequel book. Why not allow (as there are such things) where the adaptation focuses on the characters rather than replaying the story line

10) allusion.  What we have is microtexts embedded in the film’s larger structure

It would be hard to find a film that did not freely mix different strategies.

So where will this from Clueless go? We have a version of Mr Weston courting Miss Taylor with occupations and personalties changed, and it didn’t actually occur before us in Emma.

After puzzling over this for days, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that like Genette’s, Leitch’s represent different approaches to film-making rather than sticking to minute parallel criteria.  I can use the three part scheme, saying simply that sometimes a film hovers; I can call Lost in Austen commentary as a type, pastiche as its genre. Like the 1940 P&P is a commentary but its subgenre is screwball comedy.  The 1981 S&S is faithful and it is mostly poigant melodrama in genre.

I did like this from Leitch:  there is far more than one precursor text, and we should pay attention to a film’s other precursor texts. Here I come up against the problem that I don’t know how to close read two different sets of stories and characters, especially when the teams of people making them are made up of different individuals.  But thinking about this I think I can discern alikeness in David Giles’s choices of films and work, Denis Constanduros, Alexander Baron and so on, and what I can discern if more general will have to do.

If I return to my original idea of not organizing my book around Austen’s novels (so it would be six chapters for the six books and maybe a 7th for films that don’t correspond to a single book), how do I organize it?  A vast chapter on 12 transpositions won’t do and it would be boring to go on about the older mini-series; as a group unless I did startlingly good close readings, I’d have nothing new to say, and I know so many readers don’t see what the literary-filmic critic sees, so who am I writing to?  What publisher would pay for this?

The opening chapter should outline the movies by types and describe the three types effectively.  Then separate chapters on each set of movies arranged by major source book by Austen.  These chapters could have for lines of argument what distinguishes each subset and what that shows us about Austen both from what’s put in and what’s left out.  How do I cope with the reality that  the 1971 S&S, 1972 Emma, and 1981 S&S all form a group by virtue of Constanduros’s presence in all three.  The criss-crossing and grouping of other films has this problem. The 1940 P&P is a precursor of the 1996 Miramax Emma but also the other screwball comedies in the free adaptations, including (in spirit at least) the 1995 Clueless. 

I have to make up my mind that I have to lean on a few characteristics in close-reading too: say female narrators and voice-over as special to the Austen films. One real problem is how much space it takes to do close readings of films. There’s too much to say.  Mise-en-scene takes up everything from what is in the picture, to the angle, to the light, the music (about which I know so little) to the acting and each shot has this immense amount. So many questions. Is it true that films owe so much to novels or is to to painting they owe (costume drama especially) or drama, the stage — as the heart of the film is still the close encounter, the scene.

The above picnic in the grass from Kubrick’s 1975 Barry Lyndon alludes to George Seurat’s La Grande Jatte (see the configuration of the women to the side) as well as a couple of impressionist paintings (the group in the center). The woman’s hat is pure Gainsborough studio. I also note that the recent Aristocrats has a still very like this (it’s in our archives under "Aristocrats"), not that the director there had BL in mind particularly, but that this sort of thing became part of the grammar of the costume drama. I hope I’ve helped myself by writing this out tonight.

I have to face that I need to watch more movies during the day to get more evidence.  There is how a particular film has a director, writer, producer and different major actors and so to look at other films by all these people. Luckily I seem to have seen a number by or with each by now:  the BBC and Miramax people and quality film adaptations do repeatedly go for an interlocking group of individuals. I don’t mind spending time this way at all. I just loved Stanley Kurbrick’s Barry Lyndon which I spent three nights watching this week.

Then there is the problem of distinguishing the Austen movies.  Surely this is the last chapter.  What beyond the books makes them a distinct subtype. One thing is the unusual amount of movies attempting apparent fidelity.  Another may be the cross-borrowing (so in the 1995 Sense and Sensibility Brandon gives Marianne a piano, a completely transformed version of Frank Churchill giving Jane Fairfax a piano in Austen’s Emma — though I noticed this in Raven’s Pallisers (he borrows from other novels by Trollope occasionally, as Dolly Longestaffe for example from Trollope’s The Way We Live Now throughout the series). is that enough?  No. A certain kind of landscape. A certain kind of dialogue, prevailing mood?  That we go to compare them with the book and in the case of other books people don’t usually think of the book and are not aware it’s an adaptation.

This is a key still to them all: it recurs with people and without:

95 S&S, Dawn after Marianne’s near death

Raining out now. About 1:30 in the morning.  Ian mewing outside my door. I have managed thus far this summer not to put the air-conditioning and rely on my two fans. Nick unwell or not going to post to me (or lists or blog) for weeks and weeks again perhaps.  It frees me up. I wasn’t liking David Powell’s Man of the People: Charles James Fox, who needs this slick, cagily worldly spirit; there’s just not enough about the man’s inward life: Powell tries to imitate Strachey without the genius. I’ve switched back to Nicola Beauman’s literary biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor and am trying Joanna Trollope’s The Rectors’ Wife (about which I shall write on WTTTA or Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two), but I shall miss him, especially as once he was when we originally met, our first bout of togetherness and talking of books here on the Net, and as he occasionally has been again.  Oh yes.

Well tomorrow Jim will show me how to put up a new document onto my website using different software. I’m going to put my filmography of the Austen films on my website. I know there is one on the JASNA page, but that is organized by book. I’ll organize mine by my tripartite division and arrange it more concisely.

Ellen

The Cinematic Austen: life as study, reading, writing

As I remarked to Judy, this autobiographical blog might not seem so different from the impersonal or essay one (Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two).  Why?  Because what I like to do best is read and study and take notes; also after an initial deeply pleasurable watch (or not so great but interesting enough and in my area), watch movies carefully and take down the transcripts and make notes (capturing stills as I go).  Jim said on our holiday in Vermont last year, "Ellen is doing what she likes to do best," and there was a picture of me reading away.

So on these beautiful early summer days I am going out to walk with Jim (lovely last night in old Town), movies with Izzy, gym, and occasionally playing with cats (sleeping with them nightly and they keep me company in my dawn reading) and Jim and I and sometimes Izzy eating and drinking and talking.  I actually ironed one of Izzy’s blouses, and then shopped with her and we got the first things we saw at Macy’s for her: elegant silk black suit and soft turquoise blouse; for me it took a little longer, but not much: a nightgown and light robe for me.  Two concerts with Jim, one with Izzy and Jim.  We all worked over the four weeks and succeeded in a slow motion fixing of our porch in several stages.  But what does not change and goes on for hours each day is staying in my room between two fans and reading books on Austen and right now her S&S and then skimming and rereading film studies of Austen films, a few general but most of them about the Sense and Sensibility films.  This is a report of what I’ve come up with in the last three days or so.

:
One of many beloved stills of Hattie Morahan as Elinor, 08 S&S

First, The cinematic Austen by Monaghan, Wiltshire and Hudelet. This is the book I read carefully before skimming through all the essays I have on the S&S films.

I recommend it as a film study as well as for what it reveals about Austen and the films under discussion. In brief, the aim in all but two is to move from screen to page, not page to screen. They study the movies to see what they teach us about the texts, and we learn a good deal.  They also look to see the interlationships between movies and successfully (this is hard) the interrelationship of a novel with the movie adaptations.  The latter is achieved by creating some precise definitions of what we mean by cinematic and some precise definitions of what is done in a verbal text and then comparing and seeing what we can learn about both.

Wiltshire shows us how recent movies made a use of old light (candles, early versions of gas lamps) and says this has become a trait shared by Austen films, a mark of them.  I qualify this by saying it’s found as early as 1981 and intermittently in the 72 BBC Emma and 79 BBC P&P.  He suggests when film brilliant it reflects back on pastness of past, uncovers hidden sources of her art — in light, overhearing use of light and darkness, mise-en-scene in Austen brought out (how her descriptions are pointed at objects and heavily psychologized) — including its subjectivity instead of visuality.

Hudelet shows how Austen has micro-intensity, enhancement of details and nuance, close up reactions in her scenes. She tells us what the soundtrack of the best movies teaches us about Austen.  She also is alive to how the treatment of space in films has changed recently. We’ve gone well beyond no longer treating space as a stage.

Yes, I’d say the visions are themselves continually on movement and re-angled. She’s not articulate enough here but she’s right.  Izzy and I saw Is Anybody There? this weekend and it shows this new use of space frequently. A good start in the Austen movies is Wright’s 2005 S&S and then watch his 2007 Atonement.

Like the Indian critic whose book on Indian films included a long section on the use of mirror, Hudelet is good on mirrors in these films.  (See http://www.jimandellen.org/austenblog/930.html )

By the way there is but one scene in all Austen which has mirrors — if Diana reads this I would be grateful for correction — it’s in Persuasion where Admiral Crofts tells Anne he is embarrassed to be surrounded by so many mirrors. Hudelet’s arguing Austen’s specific kinds of themes and unfolding of characters lend themselves to sophisticated filmic techniques:  flashbacks within flashbacks, epistolarity, mirrors, optical games. She argues that the movies don’t impose a truth on an Austen text but rather convey the evolution of the text, the variabilities of readings, of imaginary visions produced by the novel.

Monaghan’s conservative politically and persists in writing fidelity criticism; he begins with Austen’s text and evaluates movies in accordance with how close they come. He does it rigorously and you learn a lot about the books as he sees them and the movies more objectively (paradox here).  Tellingly and quite unconsciously he reveals the rigidity of literary schemes when he comes to discuss Persuasion, his Anne Elliot becoming a sort of rigid conception he can beat liberal literary critics of the film and book with; he can also one-up Rozema by taking her at her word and showing the ending of the original book does not fit the film she made and that we can see cowardice and a need for a wide audience prevented her from changing the ending to one more appropriate.

Jumping to Wiltshire at the end, it’s a superb essay (he is so smart) but like so many critics, he has decided the three recent films of 2007 (90 minutes) are available for bashing and faults the 2007 Persuasion for changing the ending of the film as it’s not like the book’s inner structure, but the film provides a different set of themes and emotions (he admits all films do to some extent) which makes its choice of ending appropriate for it. He’s not having that and in this essay he returns to an insistence on fidelity as partly an evaulative standard.  Much food for thought here too (and nothing of the rigidity of Monaghan): he says you must look at all the films in terms of source book because simply that’s its source, but also one another.  Good comments: points out how there is reversal of Austen’s project in 95, 00, 08, Perkins says she means to feminize men and make women at the center

The penultimate essay is by Hudelet and concentrates on the free adaptations, Indian, I have found it, and modern California, The Jane Austen Book Club, to make some superb points about adaptation as such. For example, that it’s ubiquitous (think of operas, theme parks, radio plays, stage plays) and commits "the heresy of showing that form can indeed be separated from content.  At the opening of the book Monaghan takes an older argument first found in Jonathan Miller that shows that adaptations in films are not distinct species which we can’t compare to texts:  at the heart of our understanding of both are conceptions and emotions and understandings in our minds and it’s that that we write out of.  This is repeated in a book by Kamilla Elliot — better known than Miller’s Subsequent Performance which seems only to be quoted for his (out of character with the rest f the book) bashing of TV adaptations 🙂  She shows why and how Austen’s texts have come to be available for so many cultures, how they function to be applied to diverse cultures and their needs.

Unfortunately Frances Cuka’s performance as the fiercely angry malevolent and yet poignantly desperate Lucy (gratingly insistence to Joanna David as Elinor) is not well known, nor Patricia Routledge as Mrs Jennings in comic anguish, messenger telling (reliving) scene where Edward is ejected from home by mother and sister:

both from the71 S&S by Denis Constanduros

A less positive aspect of this was brought up by Diana in her excellent blog (The Selling of Jane Austen) where I contributed a reply that paraphrases and coins phrases from Barthes which Hudelet takes over:  "Jane Austen" becomes a vague sort of sacralized myth which is made up of books (which perceivers align with Austen), films, box office stars, paraphernalia; this site or imaginary exists to be appropriated.  And of course unscrupulously sold. And that’s what you can see in meetings (& editions) increasingly.

*****************

Older volume JA goes to Hollywood edited by Troost and Greenberg has a number of the essays very good in the sense the films are carefully studied and understood, but they can go no further than criticizing the films for not being like the book on the grounds of their interpretations of Austen (which are not always correct) and their ideas about what these interpretations mean culturally. Forever left without bringing film in to play with novel filmically and that’s what Cinematic Austen tries to do.

The best I found in the older volumes in general and just on S&S:   Devoney Looser in Troost and Greenberg on the real feminism of the films; Tom Hoberg in 19th century women’s novels on film, ed B. Lupack for his genuine generous insights into the 1981 and 1995 S&S; he shows flaws but also the strengths of both movies.

Diana Fairfax as Mrs Dashwood given a number of her own scenes in 81 S&S, strong presence, made intelligent and reasonable and emotional, supportive of Edward, memorable

An intriguing new book:  Judith Mayne’s Private Hotels, Public Films. She says she is going to analyze film adaptations from the point of view of how one is meant for a private experience and dwells on the private a lot, and the other experienced as a social experience and directed to uphold social life. I can see she also treats of interiority in these forms.  I was drawn to it because I noticed a discussion of the 1991 Clarissa (which I had missed) as well as several of the Austen movies.

Joss March on Dickens and Edzard’s Little Dorrit:  what matters most is the emotional tone of the work; if that is lost, if novelist’s viewpoint not absorbed into emotional life of film, work is lost.  A scene a writer never wrote gives us visual and aural equivalents of words author did write; apparent distance can conceal extraordinary sensitivity to text. So despite it’s being a comic drawing room play, Constanduros gives us the long trips and a deeply musing sensitive Marianne whose Cassandra act in the drawing room defending Elinor is one of the great climaxes of the 71 film:

Ciaran Maddan as Marianne in carriage driving away from Norland

A.A. Milne in his preface to his play, Elizabeth Bennet, how important and justified it is for an adaptor to draw out the implications and flesh out characters in the original text.

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On Austen’s Sense and Sensibility:  Gene Ruoff’s book:  the whole of Ruoff’s book on S&S seems to me absolutely accurate — and important for a comparative study of the film;  in particular the comment:  Austen has not yet managed to free the representation of women’s lives from the hegemony of men’s stories, p 109.  He brings out how memory is so central to Austen’s MP, and how many times Fanny appears compared to Elizabeth Bennet in P&P:  Stuart Tave’s analysis dwells on memory; well, the 1983 BBC MP is drenched in memory filmic techniques and Fanny as voice over narrator; deep past of Anne Elliot suggested in traumatized diary representations of Wentworth and Anne in 2007 Persuasion.

Emma Thompson as Elinor captures Susan Morgan’s idea about  Austen’s S&S best:  perplexed, thinking, doing right insofar as she can.  Lonely too but controlled and therefore not dependent on contingencies of the moment until a real crisis occurs.

And finally an intriguing way of justifying intertextual studies galore in films and novels too by Jocelyn Harris in Jane Austen on Screen, edd. MacDonalds. her idea is films and novels are so disparate there’s no use analysizng for fidelity in effect; the film is an imitation of the book in another media.  18th century idea of imitation as articulated by Dryden begins her analyses and then what she does is meditate the work (film or book) out of what her own richly stocked mind can draw from intertextuality.  It makes me want to reread Forster’s Howards End and then rewatch the Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala film for Emma Thompson as Margaret Schlegel/Elinor Dashwood the way I watched Mira Nair’s Namesake for Tabu as Ashima/Elinor Dashwood.

Tabu as Ashima at job at Digital Software when she spies Mano (Edward character) walking across the lobby.

Perhaps I’ll come back later today to say add comments (details from Looser’s essay).  Harriet Margolis in the MacDonald Jane Austen on Screen volume suggests that we who write on the Net about Austen are all recreating her as validly in our way as any academic scholar, money-making film- or sequel-maker.  She denies the debate over how to talk about Austen is a question of commercializing but one about power and control.

Miss Drake — who we all recall (Gaudy Night anyone?) took decades over her dissertation 🙂

Dreaming the Austen movies: Lost in Austen (1)

Dear Friends,

To explain to Diana (or if I may, Miss Shuster-Slatt), the kind of writing I mean to put on this blog first I will differentiate this from the previous blog (Ellen and Jim have a blog, too) and then provide a description, analysis, and meditation on the latest mini-series, Lost in Austen both below and in the comments to this reverie-blog.

So, when I wrote www.jimandellen.org/austenblog/701.html "Dreaming the Austen Movies" on my old blog, I wrote an essay on the in-depth reach of costume drama, especially in the subgenre the Austen movies, and then did talk of how I dreamed about them in my sleep.  I provided a still of John Carson as particularly beautiful (actually caught from the 1972 BBC Emma.

For this Reverie under the Sign of Austen, I will instead this morning first say as I woke up in the dawn I realized I had been dreaming that the actors from Lost in Austen had been filming the movie in my house for several nights, and half-believing it as I went about my daily activities. Then I offer another still, a particularly evocative one for me — among the many oneiric ones in the film:

And out of that, an description, analysis and evaluation of Lost in Austen.

On the weekend I watched the opening 2 episodes of Lost in Austen. The opening prologue, paratexts, and repeat of prologue is very powerful for an Austenite or Janeite.

We see a book coming out of a bag and then as the words (voice over) starts, we see a woman reading P&P in a familiar Penguin edition).  She speaks in a deeply sonorous tone:

It is a truth generally acknowledged that we are all longing to escape.

[then begins a sequence of clips which are set up to recall different Austen movies]

I escape always to my favorite book Pride and Prejudice [her voice becomes ever so slightly choked with emotion]. I’ve read it [turning of pages heard] so many times now, the words just say themselves in my head [warmer and warmer]

[Insert we see a man dressed in 18th century clothes on a terrace looking out at a beautifully set up countryside: this is an exact quotation at least of the 1981 S&S where Brandon (handsome Robert Swan) so looks out]

and it is like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there

[scene of her dressed in an outfit that recalls one of Jennifer Ehle’s only she’s walking down a stone stairwell that is very like one in the 1983 BBC MP where Mary Crawford wears the colors she has on]

It’s become a place I know so intimately I can see that world I can

[she is now running down the stairs, and has an outfit precisely like Ehle’s; she and we see the man on the terrace from afar, now close up from behind and he begins to turn and resembles Colin Firth]

I see Mr Darcy …. whoooo! ….

[back to modern scene of her on couch and she shuts book to stop herself]

Amanda. [we hear a car starting up and she breathes hard …]

Now where was I? ….

Then come a series of comic paratexts which like those in the 1979 P&P anticipate the story. In this one Jane will marry Mr Collins.  After the paratexts a reprise of that opening, only this time preceded by her at work (montage of stress, anxiety, people coming to her telling her absurd stories as she writes on the computer, in the noisy streets, in the bus trying to read P&P and home again …

I know that Austen is no escape, but this does call to my heart as I read Austen for refuge too, and I feel I know it by heart, and the appeal to how it resonates somewhere, as well as the quotations of effective moments in previous films is superbly right.  I would be a hypocrite were I to say otherwise.

The movie is a kind of Jane Austen meets Mark Twain.  Elizabeth Bennet comes to her house and tricks Amanda Price into taking her place. Prince and Pauper. Arriving and unable to go back, Amanda is a irritant who brings another world’s perspective (but not satiric or burlesqueing the characters) and gets in the way of the story so as to disturb and make it end differently.  A mix of Connecticut Yankee in King’s Arthur’s Court and Six Characters in Search of an Author.

They have chosen actresses and clothes which recall the 95 P&P more than any other film, but for example the Bennet house corridor is precisely that of the 79 P&P.  A metamovie you might say 🙂  The anamesic music which plays at the opening of each part is exactly that which plays at the opening of the 95 P&P. I suppose they paid a lot for that.  It’s strong rousing music.  For transcripts and stills and more themes, see

Lost in Austen:  The Harrowing of Amanda’s Dream

Lost in Austen:  We must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives.

Andrew Davies usually gets strong active rousing music for his film adaptations, especially when it’s by a woman and is about romance and subtle and delicate. Immediately he tries to attract viewers who would not normally pick up a woman’s novel or think of a novel of sensibility as somehow without strength or vigor.  In his Daniel Deronda he chose an operatic score, and in NA kept the background black with a white script and chose eerie music in a minor key.

But here the overt important thing is he repeats the music of the 95 P&P which was (as he knows) an important sociological event in the growth of recent Austenmania. I have girl students who will say they love Austen’s P&P and when I question them, they admit they have not read her book but rather watched his movie over and over — he makes it Darcy’s story as much or more than Elizabeth’s.

Lots of jokes over clashes in outfits – she is dressed supersexy for the era.

It’s very clever and at first works self-reflexively wittily (and some of the principals are very good — Alex Kingston as Mrs Bennet, Hugh Bonneville as Mr), but it falls off as the writers have to come up with a different story and they make one which doesn’t cohere either with Austen’s own characterse (which doesn’t matter that much) and also with the characters as they’ve reimagined them.

As I recall it seemed to me to fall off as the new changes in the story engendered by Amanda’s presence) were worked out.  Now I’m thinking that by having Jane marry Mr Collins, the writers bring home that Bingley was wrong and create a real result from his having abandoned Jane and allowed himself to be persuades. The importance of virginity or chastity is not gone from us for the movie actually uses the same device as Burney (!): we are to believe Mr Collins and Jane are not going to bed  with one anotther, doubtless to save her vagina up for who? 

This time I was wondering if I was missing the satire, if there was more than I thought in a muted way and am seeing some of this in the way Darcy is treated.  He is also made to suffer for his arrogance and we are made to see it as arrogance.  For example, his famous insult is clearly overheard by Amanda, meant for her (in the way it is in Bridget Jones’s Diary)

To conclude:  returning to the out-of-proportion popularity of P&P to the other novels by Austen: when I reread it last summer to teach it for the first time I became aware of a difference between it and the other 5.

It omits social minutiae; it is very bare of any kind of outside sociological and other detail which the later 3 books are rich in, and is intermixed with the stories of S&S strongly.  The last book, NA (published last with P) has as much aesthetic as social detail.

I did a study of abridgements once and read articles on them: what’s done is more than cut chapters; they also thin out the text to remove all detail of an informative kind, much nuance from history. 

I believe one of the way Austen "lopp’d and chopp’d" P&P was to cut this kind of detail and that is also why it’s so popular. The short talks and papers on it were often good: they saw the obvious symmetries and many missed the darker currents altogether. Not hard to do really.

So Lost in Austen can readily present the Austen house and Netherfeld and all the rest of it cut off from the nightmare of history at the time.  This book lends itself to the wild romance vision of Joe Wright.  And it’s been adapted at least 10 times since 1939 – though one might suggest that early movie was not as  popular as people suppose since the next Austen movie was not until 1971 and the choices were Persuasion & S&S.  P&P wasn’t done from 1939 to 1979 – not in a full length movie form.

The early choices of actors for the BBC series also shows that Austen was not regarded as supreme and requiring box stars after the 1939 (where you do have them).

And for myself, well the sense of the experience at night while dreaming made me happier during the days, and I’m a little sorry I now have a grasp on reality more precise. I probably won’t be able to have exactly these sets of lovely images (for that’s what dreams are) floating in my head again.

Ellen

A journal of spontaneous thoughts and record of Miss Drake’s existence & that of her family & friend

Dear Friends,

Last night I wrote my first entry and how I meant to use this space for spontaneous thoughts as they come to me (to save them) and as a record of my doings (to remember).  I didn’t say how I came to decided to write here, and divide my writing on the Net into a blog for informal essays on my interests (which you see up in the corner) and journal of my personal life.

Here is what happened and why I’ve chosen to do what I’ve done:

Thanks to Fran (a good friend on WWTTA), the Admiral and I discovered a virus had infected one of the 3 servers Jim has set up beyond our Chicago network “solution” to keep extra copies of all he, I, and Yvette do. It turns out that she didn’t avail herself of server4 nor emacs (a way of putting things on our website) so she will not have to change her presence on the Net at all (she posts to the net much fiction and poetry as well as having a blog). The alert was the new photo I put onto my first page of my website: it contained a script which this virus on the server was sending out.

Luckily (we all try to see a bright side, even me), the virus seems to have infected the server in early May, and the script could only be sent out to those parts of my website I updated since around May 1st. Very very few in comparison to what’s there. In fact I have stopped adding to my website much; I write mostly on this blog. But I had revamped and changed the Clary material (though much that I did I did before May 1st); had been evaluated so changed my CV, and for teaching I was updating regularly a few pages. Anway we cleaned out all this on the website entirely. It took hours. The website need not change at all as it is recorded or kept (or whatever is the appropriate word) in our domaine at Chicago (Network Solutions, jimandellen.org).

But if anyone should get any message about my website that there is something risky there, please to let me know and he and I will go after the particular script that escaped our notice.

The malice of this ought to astonish us. Server4 is a lost case. Jim says the virus is made out of a Java script in such a way that he cannot reach or dig it out; it has destroyed everything in server4. Think of someone dying of small pox covered in those hideous sores.

So we have shut down server4. The problem was "Ellen and Jim have a blog, too". While everything we do is on our JimandEllen.org account at a Chicago site (not infected, a major commercial place), the blog is not. It’s been just on server4. So now we had to find a way to reinstate this blog up to today and move elsewhere to continue. The reinstatement would not have been a real blog but only a record of what was that appears the same :). So we decided against that as it was so hard to do anyway.

We then did something I know we should have done months ago. I had separated out all the postings I wrote on Austen, women’s novels, memoirs, poetry and films; on Trollope and the 19th century; on the 18th century; reports of conferences I’ve been to; blogs on costume dramas, film adaptations and contemporary art films Yvette and I go to. He’s written a script and I will put these separately on single pages in the different sections of my webiste (I have sections on Austen, Trollope, conference papers, women’s poetry, and the films will go with the part of the website called “Writing on the Net”).

The blog at wordpress will not have diaries entries and only be situtational: I will situate with a minimal autobiography of how Yvette and I or he and I or all three came to go to this play or that museum, and then proceed to the matter.

This blog will be a separate blog as a journal of my life.

I do know that Ellen and Jim have a blog two will be the less without the deep personal musing, and this one won’t have the extensive talk about books, plays, movies, pictures &c.  But as many people know who practice of keeping the personal to a minimum when you talk about literature or art, the average person and certainly editors do not feel this way. 

Literature and art is therefore the lesser. I got bitter attacks on the first Trollope list when I first started to post there for telling of the origins of my reading perceptions. I don’t get invited to most big literary blogs because I’ve persisted in this.  I will — as I cannot but — tell something, but not as much, partly because it does take strong energy.

The sicknesses of viruses are the sicknesses of human nature. I read in a column by Katha Pollitt how a respected organization of peopel who call themselves the National Alliance for mental illness calls the US way of treating such illness “disastrous” and gives it a D, this quite apart from the slashing of services (very bad for you if you can keep away) in recent decades. Not that the malice which makes this kind of virus seeks mental help: no rather probably the kind of people who do this do perfectly well in society, thrive, like Rigaud in Dickens’s Little Dorrit.

A further problem: The scheme Jim concocted to transfer the UK videotapes Judy sent me won’t work because it’s dependent on using my old computer. After all he didn’t quite believe it was as gone as I claimed; now he has his proof. We still are unable to watch the videocassettes sent from the UK & we can’t transfer them to MP2 into a external hard drive because the old machine insists the hard drive is full when it’s nearly empty. Jim says someone is trying to invent something we could use, so our problem is shared by others. We may hope we may eventually or sooner than that be able to transfer the tapes to MP2s.
 

Miss Drake

A Diary of Thoughts & Doings

Dear Friends,

This is the first of what could be a series of diary entries. I’ve opened a new blog with my husband, "Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two" (a sequel to "Ellen and Jim have a blog, too").  "Ellen and Jim have a blog, two" is meant really to have essays and meditations on topics where I don’t try to work out problems and thoughts or feelings. 

"Reveries" is to record what I do and think as the days and nights go by, with an emphasis on travels in real space and travels in books, art, and movies. I thought I might bring in my daily experiences and memories in deep past too, but am not sure how much. The truth is I often don’t care about the here and now beyond that it be comfortable and pleasant for me to read, write, and study — and nowadays watch films in.  Most of my memories are painful and perhaps embarrassing or too personal (or for others tiresome) to read. When I do meet with friends in cyberspace or the physical world, or teaching I might talk about that.

I’m not sure. I know I love having a blog to write more freely than the kind where I stick to one topic in, and that I write it in the spirit of my original blog.  To an or imagined friends.

So here goes for the first posting here,
Miss Drake