Hello everyone! Hope you all had a good holiday break and the massive reinstatement of lockdowns didn't get to you too much. Its been a while but with a pandemic, not much has really happened since the last time I wrote.
We read Sense and Sensibility for November and then took a break while one of our book club members had a baby. I didn't make a post about S&S because I wrote one for it back in 2019 when I studied it in my adaptation class. If you want to read it, click here. We moved on to Pride and Prejudice for January, which turned out to be a fluke choice in our order because January 28th was also the 208th publishing birthday of the novel. Fun fact!
Because Pride and Prejudice is so familiar to us book club ladies we didn't have much discussion on it much past disparaging the 2005 adaptation. I find fans of Austen fall into different camps when it comes to P&P; either you're a 1995 version fan OR a 2005 version fan OR you've never read the book at all and have only watched the movie. The last one makes me grouchy. Personally for me, I like all the things and don't have a favourite of the adaptations and will always promote that the book is better than everything.
I could go on and on about the adaptations in this post, but I am not going to. I know I like to bring them into the mix when I blog, but not today. Instead I want to write about an exercise my professor had us do in my adaptation class that had to do with the first line of P&P: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." The line is presented as an omniscient presence in the book, but if you were to adapt it to the screen then attributing it to one of the characters could change the context of the line completely. For example, if it was Elizabeth's line she could be thinking of it in terms of Jane and Mr. Bingley in an on-going reflection of the novel's events. If it was Mrs. Bennet's line then it would likely be in refence to her sole goal of the novel - marrying her daughters off to men of money. Even more interestingly would be having the line said by Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Her intent behind the line would be the life-long plan she had for Darcy to marry her daughter and the implication that the Bennet family was a bunch of grubby fortune hunters.
There is also the way in which that line could be adapted as well. Perhaps a voiceover by one the characters, or a third-party narrator. Maybe even just as a script overlay onto the opening scene or titles of the film, or show. Or just a simple black screen with words fading in and then fading out before the main show even starts. These adapted choices would also change or alter the intention behind the line to cast a specific light on the story. Even such an iconic statement can be twisted or interpreted in so many different ways as to make something wholly new of it.
Another thing I want to point out --which has been done a lot on the internet already, but it never hurts to bring it to the forefront again -- is the way in which Mr. Darcy respects the word 'no' from a woman. When he makes his second proposal to Elizabeth near the end of the book he says: "My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever." He literally tells her that if she says no to him a second time that he will cease to pursue her. That is one of the most perfect examples of consent I've ever seen or read and it was written in a time in which many woman did not get a choice.
Austen wrote of strong women. And the men, while also strong, did not overpower them. The choice was ALWAYS to the women in her stories. Her main characters always find love AND money. Her heroines never marry out of convenience or to their detriment, but she does tell those stories in the side plots of characters like Charlotte Lucas and Lydia to show that the world is not always sunshine and rainbows. There were all sorts of circumstances a woman could end up in, but for her main characters, there was always a light at the end of the tunnel and that gave her readers hope.
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