The Occasional Critic: Pride & Prejudice, Who Wore it Better?

Here at Ulterior Colors, we have on staff a person whom I have come to regard as "The Occasional Critic." She looks remarkably similar to me, but her tone is definitely more opinionated than mine. She hopes not to offend but to illuminate. I find that I agree with most of her views on various movies, but as she is not a regularly published critic, I felt called upon to feature her here, because otherwise, her unique perspective would go unrecorded.

A prejudiced critic suitable for every occasion

Like Elizabeth Bennet of Pride & Prejudice, she goes by different nicknames depending on the person speaking to her. She could be a Beth, or a Lizzy or a Miss Liz, but in Critic mode, she is known as Liza. I wasn't aware until recently, of Liza's thoughts that compare and contrast the two filmed versions of Pride & Prejudice-- one produced as a mini-series by the BBC, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth-- and the newer feature film released in theaters with Keira Knightly and Michael McFadden. I came across an involved email discussion with a friend of hers who preferred the second film to the first, and Liza was just not having it. As I said, she knows her own mind when it comes to movies.

This is Liza's side of the exchange. If you find yourself wanting to comment back, either in agreement or with a "nay", you know what to do. If you find yourself wondering how Liza could have spent so much time discussing movies by email, know that I was wondering the same, myself. Obviously I need to give her more to do around here.

Liza prefers a laptop computer for important missives

She writes:

I like the BBC version (we'll call it "the series") better. But, I guess the movie version was good in and of itself, if one had never read the book. I didn't like the look of its production straying from the Austen template, even if the director set it further back in time on purpose. It looked more fitting to the Brontës: cruder, muddier and meaner, in spite of Elizabeth traipsing around with six inches of soiled hem in the series. That wide shot of Keira Knightly standing on the cliff with her hair and dress whipping around her while she is lost in melancholy thought isn't the best interpretation of her character. That shot could be of Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, or of Jane Eyre upon the northern moors of remote Yorkshire, and not of Elizabeth Bennett in the pastoral shires scattered near lively London. 

Elizabeth the Precarious? Nay, Elizabeth is always sure-footed

And Elizabeth just isn't melancholy in temperament, is she? That's how the whole movie struck me--  melancholy. I thought that some of Austen's other books had hints of melancholy, but their main tone is upbeat and comic, or at least sardonic, when they move into distressing scenarios. Mansfield Park seemed like a departure for her, roaming to the edge of Brontëland, but even that one never went to any excesses of Romanticism. In Austenland, if someone flings themselves onto a rainy slope and falls down, it won't be caused by terrible imperatives of the soul, but because a besotted young girl like Marianne Dashwood keeps doing that to the chagrin of her family, yet is happily rescued by Austen in the form of suitors at both times. But when Jane Eyre exiles herself out into the rainswept moors, we nearly lose her to a fate worse than death (to Charlotte Brontë)-- an ejection out of England to the other side of the world as a missionary's wife. When Emily Brontë's Catherine Earnshaw crosses the moors to find Heathcliff, in nothing but her nightgown, Jane Austen would have rolled her eyes. It's one thing to let your afternoon dress get a little dirty as you make your way to your sickly sister. It's quite another to clamber wet t-shirt style at night to your adopted brother.

Jane Austen, looking not too unlike Liza's friend, who is actually named Darcy, and who wrote her master's thesis on Mrs. Bennet. The other friend who preferred the movie version will remain unnamed. 

Austen would never have approved of any of her characters making scenes, even in private. I wonder if part of the reason that this movie adaptation has caught on so much with teens is due to that borrowed melancholy and rainy background. There's also more sexual tension in the movie than in either the book or mini-series. You can imagine the Twilight moments between this Darcy and Elizabeth, when they might be strolling in the woods, suddenly growing fangs for each other. 

The Colin Firth series shows the attraction between the two, but you don't sense that there was more than a really great mind-meld (and heart) about to happen. There are no vampires here. In fact, Northanger Abbey is about a young girl who needs to get over the Gothic books she reads that inspire her belief in ghosts, which nearly costs her the positive regard of her fiancé.

Unlike the smilingly chaste, sober and intellect-driven characters in the series, the movie version leaves us with no doubt that Darcy and Elizabeth got a Pemberly groove going on after the wedding. A post-nuptial scene of this kind wouldn't be realistic, because "Miss Austen" wouldn't have known how to write one beyond a misty imagining, as far as we know. She doesn't give us reason to believe that she knows any further, and keeps that issue to herself.

Source: Pulp the Classics

Overall, the movie lacked the exquisite, socially restrictive tension that the miniseries achieves. I'm not sure that people who see the movie will come out of the theater with as full an understanding of just how cramped and stilted everything was for those characters, with the prevailing excessive attention to courtly manners of that time. There is a sufficient level of manners in the movie, but there is also a scene of Mr. Bingley coming right into Jane Bennet's sickroom while she's in bed. This shocked me because it would have shocked Jane Austen. Another unsettling scene is of Mr. Darcy marching into Elizabeth's room at the inn, to deliver his confessional letter, that made me look away because it broke the spell. Austen would have been scandalized at such a breach of boundaries by the irreproachable Darcy, but worse, it diffuses the tension that Austen carefully builds with her narratives. By the time the suitor comes to declare himself to the girl, we're all bated breath and tied up in our seats. Having a young man stride into a private bedroom where the girl is alone, before any sort of understanding has been reached, lets out our corset strings too early. Austen doesn't write bodice-rippers, but at least we feel that her main characters will have a greater ease of breathing in their new life upon engagement and marriage.

Reading Jane Austen can make us think about things her characters do not, because those things are beneath their notice. Even though Jane Austen chose not to bring those things to theirs or our attention, being a modern reader, I do notice them. For instance, I notice the tacit acceptance of the whole class system, and how much of their lives is made possible by invisible, off-stage servants. There is no curious nor compassionate interest in the strata of society made up by the villagers of these estates-- the people that we don't ever meet in her stories-- such as the farmers, the milk maids, and the families of the house servants, that would all be living nearby and going to the little church, where the book opens. There is also little portrayal of how much of their lives that the landowner would be expected to govern. 

Was I not definitive enough?

I don't think Mr. Bennet could have spent so much time just reading in his library or puttering in the garden, unless Austen had allowed him that liberty simply for the sake of his somewhat dotty personality. As the landowner, he'd have to be concerned with crops, disease among the animals, and any births, marriages, illnesses or death among the servants and their families. He would have to know if the parson were in good standing with the church and would also need to know theology well enough to gauge if the preaching included any sort of unsanctioned philosophy or politics that might threaten his holdings, or the social structure. He would eventually be apprised of a scandal between the laundress and the stable boy and have to mete out discipline.

Jane Austen only focused on, and rightly so, from a narrative standpoint, the lives of her own class and its own pickles. She doesn't give voice to anything outside of her experience, and I think that's what makes her observations and voice so strong and effective to this day. She doesn't stay rigid with her views, and sometimes changes her sentiments from one book to the next, but there's never a point when I stop and think, "Oh, she's really showing her ignorance, here." Instead I know I'm being entertained by a master storyteller of the parlor, the drawing room, the ballroom, the dining room, a carriage and a country lane. There is rarely any reference to what goes on in the kitchen, the stables, the washroom, or the chicken coop. So, when "movie Elizabeth" is playing on a swing in the barnyard, I didn't buy it, even if that might have been the norm for a young girl. It's as if the director moved us out of Austen's world on purpose. He wants to serve us watercress sandwiches made from coarse brown bread, and that just leaves me feeling like I wasn't at a proper tea.

Does Jennifer Ehle concur? Quite.

A director and his team can have liberties with the text, and the actors can have liberties with the script, but they need to keep it within the literary world provided them, or else the energy leaks out. If we see Elizabeth lazing on the swing like a child, carefree in bare feet, with a greater amount of physical outlets for a young, active body, then it diminishes our sense of oppressive boredom and lack of useful purpose for most girls of her class. Without that sense we can't fully understand what makes the idea of being the mistress of Pemberly seem like such a fantastic life to enter. When Elizabeth is touring Pemberly, and reflects that she 'could have been the mistress of all this', she is not revealing a regret stemming from avarice. Instead, we can imagine Elizabeth doing all sorts of activities that she would thrive on, instead of just hanging out at home waiting for something to happen. We can guess that she might be involved with Darcy on the runnings of the estate and have opinions to voice, and social events to arrange, and children's education to oversee. They would not be the lackadaisical "governors" that her parents were, or completely self-centered, like Bingley's sisters, who simply want grander surroundings. 

My imaginings of all that come out of Elizabeth's frustration and embarrassment of her parents, the Bennets, and how their frailties and mismanagement impact the lives of their daughters so severely. When the offer by Darcy of marriage comes along, we can gather up much hope for her future domestic happiness, which is why their mutual misunderstandings are so grieving to witness. The idea that someone of her elevated character would miss out on Pemberley, and that the place might be bestowed on someone as mean-spirited as Miss Bingley, feels nearly tragic. 

In Jane Bennet's case, it feels tragic that she would miss out on having someone adore her, the way Bingley does, but you sense that their greatest happiness would come from just enjoying each other's company, and would be torn away only when the family or the estate is in need and to attend to them like the good angels they are. They're not quite right for overseeing a place as far-reaching and stately as Pemberley. 

Keira Knightly and Matthew McFadden,  Focus Films 2005

In the movie version, Darcy and Elizabeth leave us with a picture of their 'incandescent happiness', which fits Jane and Bingley better, because the pool has been lit up with candles and now Darcy can go around in his nightshirt and she can sit in a robe and they can smooch and all is respectable. This is more like a first date on "The Bachelorette" show, rather than a Jane Austen novel, where these sorts of intimate moments were never depicted. If the Darcy couple stays this relaxed and swooning, Pemberley might fall into decline.

The BBC series ends right after the double wedding, because we don't need to travel all the way to Pemberley for a peek at the honeymoon. We are satisfied that Elizabeth will always be industrious and full of good sense, unlike her mother, and will provide a good foil for Darcy's brooding. She won't allow him to shut himself up in his library, as her father does, even if she has to provoke him into coming out. We're confident that while Elizabeth is alive and in charge, Pemberley will see its 'golden age'." 

Chatsworth House of Blakewell UK, used for set location of Pemberley