The Dangerous Book for Girls: Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice

Monday 28th January 2013 saw a momentous occasion in the history of publishing, literature, feminism, and the fundamental identity of English prose.  I am referring, of course, to the passing of the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice.  Since this blog is named after (for my money) both the best dramatist and the best novelist in the English language* it seems only fitting that I honour Ms Austen with my own small tribute.

That, and I made a New Year's resolution to update the blog twice a month and I've only got a few hours left to think of ideas.

In all seriousness, this 200th anniversary lark is kind of a godsend for the thematically-frustrated blogger - I could talk about Pride and Prejudice for hours.  (I won't.  Maybe.)  I first read it when I was thirteen, which I think is the perfect age at which be struck by the pure, unbridled pleasure of reading Austen.  You will only read something for the first time once, after all, and coming to Austen with a head full of academic theory or wet-shirt-joke-pop-cultural-osmosis can get in the way of the fact that Austen is fizzingly, deliciously, deliriously enjoyable.  It also marked the first time I committed an act of academic defiance upon being told something was too difficult for me (the second, and only other, was doing far better in my university final exams than someone who spent three years in a cycle of putting on plays, staying up until 3am watching Disney films, necking Red Bull and writing essays in an hour had any right to do).  I remember very clearly the evening I decided I would embark upon what would surely be a formative moment in my development both as an intellectual, and as a woman.  (I must have been a delight for my parents.)  The BBC was broadcasting the final five books of its Big Read series, an attempt to whittle down the nation's hundred favourite books, and the top two spots came down to Pride and Prejudice and Lord of the Rings.  Since then I have read both, and if I say that only one of them induced me to throw it against a wall in frustration because of the fucking Council of Elrond, you will be unsurprised at my retrospective rage when that book won.  Anyway.  Prompted by the vague notion that Pride and Prejudice was not only clearly very good but seemed to carry an intellectual weight that struck a chord with my self-important thirteen-year-old heart, I expressed an interest in reading it.  "Maybe wait a couple of years," suggested my parents.  "You might appreciate it more when you're older."  I was, naturally, furious.  Imagine my (unfounded and confusing to all others) triumph when the book box in my classroom next Monday morning yielded a copy of the very novel.  "Look," I said, brandishing it, "I'm going to read it."  "Oh, well done," said my mother vaguely, which was not, I admit, the reaction I had been hoping for.

I needn't have worried.  From the minute I turned the first page and read that elegant, arch, oft-imitated, never-surpassed opening sentence, Jane Austen settled irretrievably into my heart.  Every subsequent sentence rang clear as a bell - even when I wasn't sure what Jane was actually on about (for god's sake, what is a syllabub?).  Incidentally, I still have that first copy, initially borrowed from school and later definitively nicked when I decided rather unfairly that no-one else would want to read it.  And Pride and Prejudice is the gift that keeps on giving - in the nine years since (there's a terrifying thought), I have picked it up at least half a dozen times and found something new each time.  It's not always a comfortable experience.  Imagine my horror at the age of seventeen, having systematically devoured every other scrap of Austen I could get my hands on (pro tip: the juvenilia, so not worth the time) realising that Austen was the most unflinchingly callous writer I had ever encountered.  Who else writes that fat people in mourning don't deserve sympathy because they're too ridiculous?  But Austen's morality code is based on being smart, not nice, and I don't mean book smart, but street smart: Lydia Bennet isn't 'bad' because she likes flirting with boys or anything so prudish. (Austen basically defined flirting in print, after all, just look at Catherine getting flustered by Mr Tilney's views on landscape painting in Northanger Abbey.  Woof.)  Lydia doesn't get to be a heroine because she has no idea how to handle herself in the society she was born into; Austen's leading ladies all learn how to navigate the choppy waters of the social and sexual minefield that is the mixed metaphor they call life.  It's a tough life with limited options, says Austen, and you have to be tough to survive it.

Not everyone likes Austen, of course, often because of this relentlessly controlled pragmatism that plagues the pages of what would otherwise be early-nineteenth-century rom-coms.  Charlotte Bronte didn't like Jane Austen.  She wrote a letter complaining that reading Austen was like finding "An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with near borders and delicate flowers - but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy - no open country - no fresh air - no blue hill - no bonny beck." Well, no offence to Charlotte Bronte, but bollocks. (Maybe a bit of offence to Charlotte Bronte - I did cry upon finishing Jane Eyre, but with relief).** Bronte's criticisms amount to the idea that Austen is a series of miniatures, unrealistic and restrained, that all end in - pure fantasy! - marriage.  We won't dwell on the fact that this comes from a writer who literally wrote the book on how you can change a brooding, gambling, womanising misanthrope through the love of a good woman (but only if he's blinded to make up for the social inequality between you).  Austen is precise, economical.  She does not waste words on those who need not have words wasted on them.  Every sentence is beautifully constructed and furthers the story she is telling.  

Yes, her books all end in marriage to solvent men - but crucially, they end in marriage on the heroine's own terms.  No-one would call Austen a feminist, partly because it would be a pointless anachronism, but more partly (you know what I mean) because Austen's happy endings are deeply pragmatic affairs.  Want to have a comfortable life in early nineteenth century England, free from smallpox and gum disease? Marry a well-off man.  Want to have a happy life in early nineteenth century England? Marry a well-off man that you love.  Austen doesn't stint on letting us know how unlikely this outcome is.  Lizzie and Jane Bennet get lucky: they have the writer on their side.  Their three younger siblings present the shadow of a much more likely fate - one shotgun married to an unfaithful rake, one prodded into spinsterhood without a second thought, one sentenced to reform through hanging about with her clever, well-married sisters.***  There's a moment in Pride and Prejudice that I've always found telling - after younger sister Lydia (possessed of "animal spirits", nudge nudge wink wink) elopes with proto-lad Wickham, apparently scuppering all chance of a respectable match for Lizzie, she reflects on the man she herself has lost in the process:  

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both. By her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance. But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.

It's the "judgement, information and knowledge of the world" bit that gets me.  To Charlotte Bronte, no doubt, it sounded passionless, even calculating.  To me, it is a painful insight into the psyche of both a character and writer who found themselves trapped in circumstances in which they could never be their best selves.  Lizzie hasn't just fallen for Darcy as a man, but the life he brings with him, his ability to bring her a world that she wishes to - and cannot - be a part of, looking on from rural Hertfordshire.  In Austen, marriage exists to free its participants - male and female - from versions of themselves they have constructed to navigate the complex onslaught of the social, sexual and financial mores of everyday life.  Marriage is a refuge for honesty, a place that people arrive at when they come to understand themselves most truly, either singly or with the help of a partner.  In the former case it is treated, time after time, as a matter of revelation: Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park finds "exactly at the time when it was quite natural it should be so" that he's gotten over Regency vamp Mary Crawford and wants to marry Fanny Price, Emma Wodehouse has the sudden sparklingly blinding insight that Mr Knightley "must marry no-one but herself", Marianne Dashwood's trials with Willoughby allow her to emerge sharper and surer of herself, and ready to marry Colonel Brandon.  In the other instance, of a couple growing together, Pride and Prejudice is only the most obvious example, trading off its protagonists' titular flaws against each other; Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have a profound effect on each other during and after their eight-year separation, Mr Tilney leads Catherine Morland deftly towards maturity by subtly (and flirtatiously) cutting away the language of gothic romance she has surrounded herself with.  All are instances of characters finding "knowledge of the world" through their partner and becoming, in the process, the fullest and richest version of themselves they could be.  I don't find that passionless at all.  I find that thrillingly, embarrassingly romantic.

And, in essence, that's what Pride and Prejudice does.  It teaches.  It is an unfailingly, uncomfortably honest book - lies and self-deceptions unravel at speed and Lizzie comes face to face with not only her own failings, but her sisters', her friend's, and her beloved father's.  Reading it is a self-exmaining experience: at the age of thirteen, the tang of well-deserved romance was delicious, at seventeen, I desperately craved Austen's pithy detachment from the world she lived in, at twenty-two, the age I am now, I think I'm finally beginning to understand what she's on about with this companionship and knowing yourself business.  I'm wrong, no doubt.  I'll come to it again in five year's time and my sympathies will lie with Caroline Bingley or Charlotte Lucas or Mary Bennet.  The day will come, I fear, when I find myself in agreement with Mrs Bennet.  But I don't mind.  In these moments of revelation about myself, I come the closest to being an actual Austen heroine that I'll ever get.****

*Sort of by accident, actually.  I swear, at the time I just liked the name, and it wasn't until my mother innocently enquired as to the literary origins of the nomenclature that I understood I was now committing acts of breath-taking arrogance unconsciously.

**Really.  I was in both an airport and my teens, and the heady combination of jet-lag, hormones and interminable religious imagery made me burst into tears on closing the book.

***Actually, Austen apocryphally told her uncle that Mary and Kitty do get married after the book ends, the former to one of her uncle's clerks and the latter to a clergyman near Pemberley, which sounds like Austen placating a tipsy, sentimental uncle to me.

****Apart from the time I got soaked in a downpour on my way to a restaurant where a group of friends were, walked in dripping, apologised for my appearance, and was answered by my best friend staring at me and shouting, "You look amazing!  You look like Lizzie Bennet!" But I think she was drunk.

The Hobbit: Dwarves are Heroic and In No Way Intrinsically Hilarious Because of Their Height (spoilers)

Spoilers! Heavy, heavy spoilers for The Hobbit.  But it has been around for 60 years so it's your own fault, really.

I swear to god, I have three draft posts sitting in my Posts folder, none of which were good enough to publish, even by my admittedly lax standards.  Please don't hurt me for my accidental five month hiatus.  I'm very sorry and it won't happen again (maybe). (To cut a long story short, life happened in the form of me starting an MFA and even when your MFA is in professionally playing Let's Pretend - or as it is officially known, Theatre Directing - it is still an MFA and demands much more of your time than watching X-Men cartoons and smoking out of your bedroom window.  Who knew?)

But I'm here! I am back this New Year because there has just been so much pop culture of late and I cannot possibly let it go by without whipping up a few rounds of my signature cocktail of capital letters and inappropriate drooling.  Where to begin? There's last autumn's telly-land, which saw The Hour pick up steam after a shaky start dicking about with an organised crime storyline that was somehow less believable than having a Soviet spy in the midst of a fairly inoffensive BBC news programme (um, spoilers?); however, after hanging in there only to see what the offspring of Anna Chancellor and Peter Capaldi might be like and how soon it would be taking over the world, the last two episodes were absolute barn-stormers.  Merlin ended for good with both a bang and a whimper and this truly is a tragedy for those who stuck with it from the beginning.  Although I don't think Arthur took his top off once last season, so maybe it is time to move on.  There's a whole new Twilight film to mock, coming hand in hand with the blessed knowledge that there are to be no more, hallelulah praise the Mormon Jesus that spawned this dust-bunny of menopausal fantasies and unfulfilled life prospects in the first place.  Christmas Doctor Who was tentatively promising for the coming season, starring not only a new companion but Lesbian Silurian and Lesbian Cockney, who are much more likely candidates for a spinoff than John Barrowman ever was.

But before any of that, there is a film that must be talked about.  A film that I have looked forward to, not with the pants-wetting fist-biting glee of The Avengers, but with something far more likely to warm the cockles of my Middle-Earth-loving heart.  And boy, were my cockles warmed.  I'm talking, of course, about The Hobbit.

Un petit confession, as the French say.  I love Lord of the Rings.  That's not the confession.  The confession is that I love the films.  Burdened with an English student's guilt over enjoying an adaptation before reading the source material, I turned to the books at the tender age of thirteen and commenced a three-month project of staring in horror at the bricks of text in front of me listing rhyming dwarf-dad name after rhyming dwarf-dad name.  Why was there another song in Elvish? Was I supposed to read it? Sing it? Perform an interpretative dance to it? Had it really been going on forty pages and these people were still talking about events that not only had we never encountered, but never would and would have no bearing on the plot? Even I have a saturation point when it comes to fantasy.  I OD'ed hard on A Song of Ice and Fire, making a headlong dash through the three-and-a-half-thousand odd pages of the first four books only to have some kind of breakdown around the beginning of the fifth and hurl it across the room crying, "I simply can't bear learning any more awkwardly partnered Latinate and Anglo-Saxon names!  Bear me to the fainting couch, I believe I have the vapours! AND WHO THE FUCK IS ARTHUR DAYNE?" At some point, I will pick up the fifth one again.  When the screams of beloved murdered characters have stopped echoing in the wind.

As always, I digress.  I was saddened that I did not love reading Tolkien because I had very fond memories of The Hobbit being read to me as a child.  The Hobbit is a very simple children's story, certainly not one that seems a natural fit for a series of of epic films.  But Peter Jackson cottoned on to something very clever with the LOTR films, which is that Tolkien is simply not a natural storyteller.  The universe he creates is rich in character and landscape, the morality of the books cleaves to something undeniably decent and stirring.  But by Frodo's quivery bottom lip, he cannot string a story together in a compelling way.  Peter Jackson, however, can.  Peter Jackson can sustain a story as complicated and rich as this one over nine hours and not lose anything from it that was worth keeping.  (Except the Houses of Healing in Return of the King.  That could have been kept in favour of a bit of Liv Tyler looking wry, surely.)  So if Peter Jackson turns to me and says, "Y'know, there's a lot of stuff I wanted to put in those films but couldn't", I am actually more than happy to hand him my copy of The Hobbit and say, "Okay, Pete.  Go to town on this."

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is still Tolkien's Hobbit.  It is not, as some have suggested, Lord of the Rings 4.  Which would be silly anyway, as The Hobbit is set 60 years before. Tch.  At its centre is the comfort of home, the bigness of the world, the notion that it is small acts and small people that stand against the dark.  The Hobbit is a (relatively) small story set in an epic fantasy universe and that is exactly what Jackson delivers.  When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he could not have known what it was the beginning of, what Middle Earth would grow to be.  Most of us reading The Hobbit for the first time did not know either - it is rare to find someone who read Lord of The Rings before its predecessor.  But we do know Lord of the Rings now.  Either we have read it or seen it or simply become unavoidably aware of it through pop cultural osmosis.  It would almost be impossible, I think, to create a version of the Hobbit in which we weren't watching it looking for the links with the story and universe we already know, and in which I wasn't asking the question, "Does Benedict Cumberbatch look sexy as a dragon?"*  Jackson has embraced this and turned The Hobbit into a kind of three hour bubble-bath for Lord of the Rings fans with a butler on hand to drop a chocolate into your mouth every now and then.  It is audacious, visually stunning, funny and, above all, surprisingly charming.  Sorry, just gagged on my own gushing there.  Let's fix that.

It's not perfect by a long chalk.  I've seen it twice and it doesn't stand up to second viewing in the way that the LOTR films yield endless delight, especially if you are a bit drunk and making once of your friends drink every time Gollum switches personalities.  After the initial thrill of being introduced to a whole new raft of characters to shout "take your shirt off" at during inappropriate moments, the second viewing had me checking my watch during the long (long, long) first hour and a half.  Then it starts getting really good (like, really good) and it's all slightly obscene looking Goblin Kings and Andy Serkis and fire and eagles and eagles on fire (except the last one) and then it ends.  Gah.  So the second one better be really good is all I'm saying because I remember the plot of The Hobbit as being there's some short dudes who go and get a slightly shorter dude and there's a dragon and some trolls and some goblins and a ring and then the dragon dies and everyone drinks lemonade. Most of those plot points have already been covered in great detail.  Peter Jackson better have something fucking spectacular up his sleeve (actually we already know he does, it's called LEGOLAS).  So if you weren't a fan before then you definitely won't be converted by this but if you were, then see it once in the cinema and then wait for the DVD so you can identify hilarious moments of homoeroticism with your friends (they really need some more women in this universe).  Also, see it in 2D and normal frame rate.  It seems much more like a film and less like a game of 'That was CGI, that was pyrotechnic, that was CGI'.

But.  Enough beating about the bush.  No, that wasn't a euphemism.  Because I know what you really want, you filthy little blog-readers you.  I know what you have been waiting for all these months, and frankly, it disgusts me.  If you think I am going to make a fool of myself disclosing the most intimate struggles of my shattered psyche in the consideration of whether it is a crime against all that is right and good to look at Richard Armitage dressed up as a dwarf and wonder whether a new and disturbing fetish has been awoken in me, well you can look elsewhere for that kind of smut because you won't find it here.  Nor will you find musings on whether Peter Jackson watched North and South before filming started and was so hopelessly smitten with Mr Armitage that he decided to put in a frankly alarming quantity of shots in which Thorin Hardwood or whatever his name is stands atop a rocky outcrop brooding so furiously on his lack of kingliness that Viggo Mortensen is considering suing.  Nor will I comment on how the background music seemed to so taken with him that the Latinate (Elvish?) chanting during that bit at the end where stands up on the tree to take down the Orc-Video-Game-End-of-Level-Boss might as well have been shrieking, "RICHARD ARMITAGE! STANDS ON TREES! RUNS THROUGH FIRE! HE IS MANLY WITH MAN PAIN IN HIS MAN EYES!"  I'm sure at some point they were considering having him saving some baby orphans from the flames on his way to the fight but it was cut for time (it was the only thing cut for time).

Nor will you be hearing anything from me about the startling coincidence that sees the three most eligible dwarves - Thorin, Suspiciously Attractive Dwarf (Kili, played by Being Human's Aidan Turner) and his brother/boyfriend** Less Attractive but Still Doable Dwarf (Fili, played by Dean O'Gorman) - sporting a noticeably smaller quantity of prothetic nose and beard accessory than the rest.  James Nesbitt as Bofur, whilst hiding his everyman charm beneath a hat that I thought was going to take flight and a moustache that looked sad independently of Nebitt's own facial expression, could still legitimately have replaced all of his lines with "I'm James Nesbitt.  And now you want to have a pint with me."  Elijah Woods puts in a brief appearance as Frodo and I had to stop myself from standing up and congratulating Ian Holmes on having such a fine-looking nephew and asking if the cheekbones ran on the other side of the family and, if so, were there cousins? (I, by the way, was convinced that Elijah Woods has a painting in an attic somewhere looking like shit because as far as I could tell, he hasn't aged a day, but everyone disagreed with me on this point and said he looked haunted by the loss of times past.)  All this and the elves won't even make a proper appearance until Part 2.  (Although special points for Flight of the Conchord's Brett Mckenzie reprising his internet-stealing silent cameo from Fellowship of the Ring complete with a new elvish name that means 'singer' and even more special points for Lee Pace who you probably know as the guy who made pies and resurrected the dead in Pushing Daisies as LEGOLAS' DAD ON A FUCKING ELK LOOKING FABULOUS.)

So put that in your elongated Gandalf pipe and choke on it, good reader.  The various aesthetic qualities of the cast will emphatically not be reflected on in any way, not even how good Saint Cate Blanchett is at turning slowly in a shimmery dress (twice).  This is a new, more mature Jane Shakespeare and you can take your filthy gutter-dwelling minds elsewhere for that kind of thing.  Also Martin Freeman just deserves, like, ALL THE HUGS and those pointy little hobbit ears are really working for me.  He is everything you could want and more (less? There's a height joke in there somewhere) as Bilbo, and I very much admired his choice to play his scenes with Thorin as a particularly egregious rom-com. ("I'm just a hobbit.  Standing in front of a dwarf.  Asking him to love him.")

All in all, I really liked it the first time and bit less the second time but, as you can tell, I'm loving the prospect of cracking out the wine and settling down with the DVD to holler in a manner most women reserve for the stripper on their hen night.  Bring on Part 2.  In Pete We Trust.

*In the event, we will have to wait until the next film to find out, and yes, I am aware that Smaug will be CGI and not Cumberbatch in a dragon suit but it should be.
**Seriously, what's the deal here?  I'm pretty sure they're related in the book but they seemed to spend an awful lot of time going off to bond and then coming back looking flustered and out of breath.  Why were they the only two dwarfs up in the middle of the night tending the campfire?  Why were they sharing an eagle when there were clearly enough for everyone to have their own?  If they weren't looking out for the horses, then what were they doing? It's a conspiracy.