Jane Austen in Hollywood
Sometimes, to reverse an old adage, you can judge a book by its cover—or at any rate, in the case of Linda Troost’s and Sayre Greenfield’s Jane Austen in Hollywood, by its dust jacket. Two thirds of the book’s front is taken up by a pencil sketch of Miss Jane herself, mired over her soles in wet concrete outside the Chinese Theater. Around her a crowd of admirers press in, kept from trampling the fresh mud—or the start—by fat theatrical ropes.
On the one hand this is very hip and engaging. It makes us into one of these enamorazzi, simultaneously watching Jane and Jane’s fans (versions of ourselves). We know the Janeite crouching under the ropes waving an autograph album, the anchorwoman with feline nails and a well-coiffed head who shoves her mike right into Jane’s left ear, and the tank-clad gal-with-heaving-bosom behind Jane, sunglasses hiding the real object of her attention (us? Jane?). We become, whoever we are, part of the cover’s crowd, as Linda Troost puts it no less than twice in her ten-page introduction entitled “Watching Ourselves Watching,” “fans” of Jane Austen (1, 8), those who are “enamored” (2) or “in love”(4) with her. On the other hand, our engagement in this visual apotheosis of Jane Austen into Hollywood starlet, raises the same quite serious questions Jane Austen in Hollywood does without really answering or even systematically addressing them. The first is the issue of audience, the second is the problem of faithfulness.
Let’s reconsider that group of Austen-maniacs on the front again. Three of the dozen or so faces are clearly female, seven are clearly male, two or three are androgynous, all are white. No one is under twenty, only one obviously over forty. Though all the women on the cover carry recording devices, none carry books or paper clearly intended for scholarly purposes. Neither of the visible notebooks has any writing on it, and one is intended only to reduplicate, for the third time on this cover, Jane Austen’s “autograph.” No one on the dust jacket is clearly the kind of writer or critical thinker the contributors (all female) to Jane Austen in Hollywood seem to be. So who are these people on the book’s cover? The demographics for the movies? The book’s audience? Both?
One of this book’s curiosities (is it a flaw or a strength?) is the very same unfocused and perhaps mistaken sense of its own audience. It wants to court “fans” who, I’d be willing to bet, would appreciate the gushy introductory paragraph to Rebecca Dickson’s “Misrepresenting Jane Austen’s Ladies: Revising Texts (and History) to Sell Films” which begins, “A consumer’s prefatory note to filmmakers: in spite of the dismayed nature of this article, please understand just how much I enjoyed each of the recent Austen-based productions” and ends with, “I vow to spend a substantial amount of money on” any future film based on an Austen text (44). Such readers might also be willing to pass over the statistical idiocy inherent in extrapolating anything important from an exercise which asks only thirty-two freshman to regurgitate plots and choose favorite characters in Sense and Sensibility—the research fundamental to M. Diana Casey’s argument in “Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility as Gateway to Austen’s Novel” for using Austen adaptations pedagogically. I suspect few “fans” of this sort, however, will want to spend the intellectual capital to wrap their minds around H. Elisabeth Ellington’s provocative study of commodified landscapes in her “‘A Correct Taste in Landscape’: Pemberley as Fetish and Commodity,” or try to grasp Devoney Looser’s complex and subtle investigation of the films’ feminism in “Feminist Implications of the Silver Screen Austen” (which means they will miss Jane Austen in Hollywood’s funniest moment—Looser’s debunking of uninformed nostalgia by recollecting for us “those halcyon days of the French Revolution” [161]). Nor would they be likely to read far enough to finish, let alone appreciate, Deborah Kaplan’s excellent closing essay, “Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women and Courtship in Two Film Adaptations,” whose thesis calls into question the assumptions of the book in which it appears by pointing up what Austen adaptations really do to Austen’s novels: “harlequinize” them, reduce them to the courtship plot that sells to the likes of those depicted on Jane Austen in Hollywood’s dust jacket.
Kaplan’s article focuses that niggling one feels reading Jane Austen in Hollywood. Over and over, writers for this book conjure up the specter of the texts on which the films were based—or with more naiveté, their author—then attempt to evaluate or analyze the product based on its “likeness” to the novel, which it purports to represent. The question nearly every article poses is, “Is this what Jane Austen intended? Does it adequately represent the novel she wrote, its interests, its focus, its historical moment, its politics?”
The picture on the dust jacket of Jane Austen in Hollywood shows Austen as she never could have been. Floating above Austen’s head is her “signature.” We know it’s supposed to be Austen’s autograph because it’s there again below her in the wet concrete, just as Marilyn Monroe’s or Heddy Lamarr’s was, but we’re not given a faithful reproduction of Austen’s signature. Her Christian name, that private taxonomy Austen knew only an Isabella Thorpe would co-opt, here is in retro-font, circa 1930s Hollywood: only Austen’s last name appears as a facsimile of her handwriting. The effect is heightened by what we know, if we think about it, of Austen’s “portraiture.” The image of Jane Austen that Dane E. Lavin, the cover’s artist, reproduced for Jane Austen in Hollywood is not taken directly from the only face-forward portrait we are certain is of her. That one, as one critic argued a few years ago, was too ugly and hard-featured for our late-nineteenth-century forebears who commissioned a revision of the half-finished water-color Cassandra Austen made. In this version of Austen, her features are softened and rounded, her eyes made larger, her curls corrected, her dress molded more gracefully, her perhaps self-righteously folded arms moved into a languorous draping over the back of a chair made curvy in the style then popular, unlike the chair with its stiff back in the original drawing. The doe-eyed, disconcerted but hardly repulsive Austen on the cover of Jane Austen in Hollywood reproduces this translation—the Victorian Austen standing upright, a little thinner, a little less graceful of arm, just as misleading because she stands just where and the way we want her to.
It is well, I think, to remember that Jane Austen was never in Hollywood—Hollywood wasn’t in existence in her lifetime, of course, but I mean that in the same metaphorical sense that the editors of Jane Austen in Hollywood meant it. Metonym can have dangerous implications: Austen is no more an image than a text, and in any case, these films are not the texts she wrote any more than the “Austen” on the cover is Jane Austen, despite the presence of her imprimatur. There is nothing wrong with adaptation except when we expect it to be the thing and not a single, interpretive gesture with an agenda and time of its own. That, I think, is Kaplan’s point, and one well taken. If anyone who buys this book will read that far.
