compassionformypoornerves

[compassionformypoornerves]

In the 2005 ‘Pride and Prejudice’ film, there are hints of life downstairs; in 2013 author, Jo Baker, hops on the Downton-Abbey-esque-train by highlighting the seemingly invisible hands and feet of the Longbourn estate’s real caretakers in her novel Longbourn. Baker creates an entire world below the feet of the five Miss Bennets, scratch that, she enlightens the Janeite and urges the Janeite to not forget about and pass over the lower classes who made Austen’s beloved, Regency lifestyle possible.

I am reminded that Kierra Knightly was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ for her stunning portrayal of Lizzy Bennet. Knightly did not win, but if she had she would have waltzed onto the stage, received her golden trophy, and then thanked everyone in her community who helped her get to that stage: she would have thanked her cheerleaders, her family, her co-stars, her directors, her costume-designers and make-up artists, her mentor figures when she was young, her inspirations for pursuing this career, and she would have totally thanked Jane Austen herself. She would have done all this reflective thanking because no one, not even Lizzy Bennet, is self-made. If it takes a fairy-godmother to make a dirty-maid into a princess-worthy-Cinderella, then it definitely takes a few maids to make a goddess out of a Lizzy.

Baker’s spin off of Pride and Prejudice captures what Austen’s only hinted at. Longbourn provides the reader with a realistic outlook on the grotesqueness of being human. There are bodily odors and liquids and menstrual blood and pig feces to be cleaned white and away through laundering done by Sarah and Polly. There are cracked hands itchy with chilblains, and there are hairy men (well there is Mr. Hill who is a closeted homosexual married to Mrs. Hill) and a skinny young lad who hails from a poor farmhouse (well there is James Smith who really is the illegitimate child of Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Hill). There are black servants (Ptolemy Bingley) and reminders that the Bingleys are the Bingleys because their money is in sugar and slaves in the Caribbean. Their life is comfortable because someone else’s life is not.

Comfort is a word, a feeling, a state of being, that we’ve discussed in class since it often appears in Austen’s novels. Every character seems to be seeking comfort in some form or another. Yet with a little thought it appears to me that if everyone in the world was held with the same level of comfort, the Earth would cease to spin at all, so have some “compassion for (insert any character’s) poor nerves.” Sarah, our current heroine, needs some compassion for her indecisive feelings and decisions caught between Ptolemy and James and Lizzy. Sarah has been born into an unprivileged space. She has no surname, she has little to no protection (she has no fort to come to with her little given comfort) beyond serving the Bennet family. Will Sarah find the comfort to dull the drudge of her life in sticking by Lizzy Bennet’s side or marrying into the Bingley estate’s servitude or by staying with her own little family, with the Hills and Polly and the mysterious, clumsily-ostentatious James?

*reads like fan-fiction I rate it a 5/10

[compassionformypoornerves]

If Helen Fielding’s ‘Mark Darcy’ is to be equated with Mr. ‘Fitzwilliam Darcy’ and is to be played by—none other than Britain’s favorite, handsome, son—Colin Firth for both the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and also for the film rendition of Bridget Jones’s Diary, then one can obviously conclude that B.J’s Diary is a spin off of Austen’s P&P and this leaves ‘Bridget Jones’ to fill some magnificent shoes for who should be the Miss post-modern ‘Elizabeth Bennet.’ And the woman who looks, talks, and acts alongside Mr. post-modern Darcy is a perfectly self-conscious, self-defeating, fag-aholic, low-key alcoholic, clumsy, slightly-dysfunctional, slightly overweight, only daughter, simp-of-a-woman…meet Bridget Jones. (Oh and in the film B.J. is portrayed by Renee Zellweger who had to fake a British accent for the part and gain forty pounds.)

Bridget Jones couldn’t sharpen her knife at Darcy even when she desperately wanted to. She could never say to his face: 

From the very beginning—from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. (Lizzy at-ting it after Darcy offers her a marriage proposal in chapter 34).

And Bridget is 10 years Lizzy’s elder! In my opinion, the only time that Bridget comes close to the status of a Lizzy Bennet is when she blows of her boss, Mr. Daniel fuckboi Cleaver, in saying “Thank you, Daniel, that is very good to know. But if staying here means working within 10 yards of you, frankly, I'd rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein's arse.” But of course, at this point she’d already succumbed to much simping and succumbed to being Daniel’s pretty, little, out-of-sight-side-hustle…and she even later falls for him again.

Bridget Jones is more of the everyday, normal woman, who goes and reads Pride and Prejudice wishing they were in the shoes of Elizabeth, so that they’d get the chance to fall for the cold, haughty love of some handsome Mr. Darcy who also happens to come with a nice price tag and thusly security for a comfortable life. I am not sure that any Darcy, Fitzwilliam or Mark, would actually fall in love with a Bridget Jones, but at least she makes us readers feel a bit better about ourselves…by helping our silly, little brains feel seen: we are all trying our best to achieve what we think we want and need and doing a clumsily, terrible job at it. And the rom-com ending does offer us some moment of hopeful relief.

#janeausten #helenfielding #bridgetjones #bridgetjones’sdiary #mrdarcy #markdarcy #pemberly #lizzybennet #elizabethbennet #lizzyanddarcy #romcommaterial #austencritique #britian’sbeautifulboy #colinfirth #reneezellweger

[compassionformypoornerves]

Personally my FAVOURITE lines in Austen’s Northanger Abbey are from the narrator saying “Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel, that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty” (Austen 170) and the final adieu: “I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience” (Austen 174). 

So there is a bit to unpack here:

Why don’t British men have eyebrows or lips?

Bad guys do not have to look like the Norse god Loki with long hair wearing weird crazy green outfits in order to be “bad.”

General Tilney sucks…and honestly Mr. and Mrs. Morland suck as well for not permitting Catherine’s marriage to Henry Tilney until his father, the mean ole captain, had yet to give consent to the marriage.

Austen’s narrator is truly not advocating for “parental tyranny”—as is seen in the narrator’s opinion of Captain Tilney from Catherine’s fantastic, gothic-romantic, delusions of the captain murdering his wife, Catherine “scarcely sinned against his character.” But maybe Austen’s narrator is advocating for some filial disobedience or rather independence within Northanger Abbey. Maybe, Austen, herself, is fed up with this British high-brow but no brow society with proprieties of consent and respect towards superiors even when they act like “low-key-Loki” absolute bitches.

[compassionformypoornerves]

Maybe because Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso the heroine of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), my subconscious brings to the forefront the popularizing baby Yoda memes (especially since the establishment of Disney+ with the Mandalorian show)…, but Felicity Jones also plays the heroine of the 2007 film rendition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey…Miss Catherine Morland. 

On page 51 of the Norton ed. of  Northanger Abbey, Catherine Moreland’s beloved, Henry Tilney, argues to her that “man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal.” This may be a bitter pill to swallow, but in the late 18th C this may have been much closer to true than it is today: women were not flattered with much security or safety in their life choices except within a refusal (i.e. refusing a marriage proposition or refusing a life of harlotry or servitude).

In order to grow in relational, emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual…intelligence one must learn the power of a positive NO! We—Northanger Abbey reader—see Catherine’s transformation into this maturity—or coming of age—when she begins to start advocating for herself and expressing her truest opinions and wants and needs (i.e. be gone you beastly, gaslighting John Thorpe; no Isabella I will not grant your greedy narcissism anymore favors). Or in the famous words of Gandalf the Wise, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” Like a baby Yoda transforming into an old wise Jedi-mentor, Catherine learns to quit consenting her good NO! to these darned Thorpes, becoming a more empowered—Rogue One—woman for it, and teaching all us readers to do the same and set in some healthy boundaries!

[compassionformypoornerves]

Oh how our sweet, innocent, naive heroine of Northanger Abbey--the one and only--Miss Catherine Moreland would agree with the gothic morbidity of being “disheveled and slightly bloody,” and oh how exciting, attractive, and sexy that is.

I imagine Catherine’s soul, after she lays eyes on Miss Tilney and Henry sauntering down the street from her window in the gig and longs and requests her driver, the “rattle,” Mister John Thorpe, to halt and allow her to be off with those whom she obsessively pines for, and against her will and consent, he rapes her wishes and kidnaps her, driving off faster and farther away..., to be crushed, thrown upon the ground and possibly “disheveled and slightly bloody.” But take cheer, because our wholesome heroine finds some glimmer of solace in the hopes to later tour the gothic edifice of Blaize Castle and to imagine it like those castles that pass before her eyes whilst absorbed in reading her current favorite indulgence: the gothic novel, Udolpho. 

And as I have learned in the University of Virginia’s English Literature course on Jane Austen--titled Jane Jumps the Shark--Northanger Abbey is both a parody of gothic literature and one can find the narrator advocating and arguing in favor of women reading novels.