Watching Jane Austen

The other night, I re-watched my DVD of Joe Wright's 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice (with Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen). I've seen it half a dozen times or more, and the first time I saw it, I found it refreshingly modern, if perhaps a little rough around the edges. I hadn't then seen the famous PBS version starring Colin Firth and had nothing to compare it with except for the novel itself--nor had I much experience at that time in "seeing through" in the Hillmanian sense.

It may be that I'll end up doing revisionist readings of many of the books and films I've read, and this may be inevitable for an educated viewer, but it's sometimes disconcerting, as if a whole other film existed beneath the surface of the one I thought I was watching. It's tiresome, too, because, well--does one ever reach the bottom? I was certainly surprised at some of the details that jumped out at me this time; it's not that I didn't see them before but more that I didn't gloss over them this time in favor of simply following the story.

It's perhaps an unavoidable result of getting older that you also bring more of your own experience to bear on any text and therefore find more points of correspondence between fiction and life. Sometimes I miss being able to approach things more naively because a well-developed critical eye can be such a nuisance. It complicates experience rather than making it more fun and enjoyable--but so be it, I guess. You can't unsee things.

In the film, I noticed such things as gestures--a hand near the mouth or placed on a hip, a foot pointed just so; an expression that seemed at odds with the tenor of a scene; a bit of dialogue that grated; a pinafore worn by a particular character. I noticed the way a few of the characters reminded me of people I know and how scenes brought to mind incidents from my own life. Sometimes it was the smallest things: a character's look of lingering regret, a hand imperceptibly brushing the back of a dress, a handkerchief tossed into a crowd of soldiers, the unnatural pallor of a face. I was startled at the power these things suddenly had to kindle my own associations. I almost felt that someone had opened a window into my own life, with a surprising degree of accuracy.

My regular readers may remember that when I reviewed Peter Jackson's Hobbit films, I followed a sort of polytheistic reading of the characters. That is, I didn't see the characters as one-dimensional and continuous but rather as inhabiting different roles depending on the scene and the other characters with whom they interacted. This was a depth psychological reading based on the idea of the multiplicity of complexes and traits that make up an individual. I found myself doing the same thing with Pride & Prejudice, for it seemed to me that its characters moved in and out of roles in a way I hadn't quite noticed before.

The eldest daughter, Jane, seemed at times an ingenue blooming with her first experience of love and at other times something more reserved and unknowable, a watchful presence on the edge of things; Lizzie had a similar quality of seeming both to inhabit scenes as a daughter of the household and to stand outside them with an ironic, even supercilious air. The iconic scene of her standing on a rock at the edge of a precipice made her look more like a goddess in some high place, a figurehead on a ship, than a young woman contemplating her future. Even a minor character such as Georgiana, Mr. Darcy's sister, shows characteristics of a fluid personality, seeming to morph from innocent girl to someone with unusual forcefulness of character with one short line of dialogue and change of expression.

I admit I had never before given the film full credit for what seems to me its "coded" quality: of the way in which someone crossing a small bridge can seem to symbolize so much more; the way kisses can suddenly seem less than benign; the way an invisible Shakespeare-like gender shift sometimes seems to occur, transforming the import of a scene; of the way in which two characters difficult to tell apart begin to tug on my attention. (Why did the director choose to make the two youngest Bennet girls so much alike? When they're at rest you can see that they're different, but they are so rarely still that they could be mistaken for twins.) Some of the details are incongruous for no discernible reason. I found my attention drawn to things that seemed awkward and out of place, as if the film were a costume sewn so hurriedly that its uneven thread caught your eye before anything else.

Pride & Prejudice is, of course, a story about the politics and social games of engagement and marriage. A male acquaintance of mine once said he didn't care for Miss Austen because she made relations between the sexes seem so passionless, but this film takes in both the drawing room and the kitchen garden and injects a mood of earthiness into all the flirtations and jockeying for favor. In today's atmosphere of "total freedom" the constraints put on the characters' behavior and the many rules of propriety they're expected to observe may seem quaint to an unacceptable degree. I wonder, though, how much freer many of us are. In my experience, breaking out of a role, choosing freely, or trying to chart my own course has often seemed an exercise in overcoming one obstacle after another. This is much more of a problem now than it was when I was younger, ironically--or perhaps I was just not aware of it then.

Sexism, still as alive and well in the 21st century as it was in the 19th? The difficulty of being independent in a married world? Something to do with personality type? Some other explanation? Search your own heart and your own experience, and consider.