The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Becoming Jane: Now I’ve Experienced It

August 21st, 2007

The title irked me. The trailer irked me. The entire implication that, if it weren’t for meeting the “love of her life,” Jane Austen couldn’t have written her novels—or even been a complete person—irked me. So why did I go to see Becoming Jane anyway? Well, first off, you know I enjoy criticizing films, especially when they tread on what I consider to be my turf. Secondly, it features dance scenes with fiddler Aidan Broadbridge, whose live music I’ve frolicked to during New Year’s Eve parties for dance-nerds.

Notice that my love for Jane Austen’s novels is not one of my reasons for going to see Becoming Jane. Dormouse suggested that it might be better off for me and for my fellow moviegoers if I regarded the movie as being about a random person who just happened to have the name of Jane Austen. And, actually, I don’t mind a movie that fictionalizes a writer’s (or any historical figure’s) life in order to make a good story. Go right ahead. What I do resent is that at least the latest two films benefitting from Austen-mania (the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice and Becoming Jane) have ignored Austen’s wit in favor of sweeping romance; in other words, I don’t mind that the life being depicted isn’t really Austen’s, but I do mind that the writing being depicted isn’t really Austen’s.

Because the young woman played by Anne Hathaway is supposed to be a writer, I do resent the moments in the movie that suggest that she drew her inspiration directly from—no, directly copied—real people and conversations in her life. Sure, all writers work from experience—you can’t avoid it. But not all experience is empirical, though the popular creative writing theory of today would have us believe so. Experience doesn’t have to be seen or touched or overheard in order to be real. To have a character in Becoming Jane, and a male character at that, utter the phrase “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” and then to see “Jane” scribbling it down in the next scene (never mind that Sense and Sensibility was written before Pride and Prejudice) makes her into a mere scribe. Would a film ever cast an iconic male writer in this light? Probably not.

To be fair, Becoming Jane does at least address the “writing comes from [empirical] experience” assumption that underlies its story and dialogue. Young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy, before he sweeps Jane off her feet, tells her that, in order to become more than an “accomplished” young lady writer, she must experience the wider world, thus to attain the scope of “masculine” (yep, he uses the word) writing. Then he gives her Tom Jones. What the heck? It is a truth universally acknowledged that Tom Jones is not exactly a portrayal of realistic experience. Anyway, after reading Tom Jones for herself, Jane does get to offer a comeback to Lefroy, but it seems a bit confused, perhaps because, plotwise, the most significant effect of the novel is to awaken her sensuality.

The Knightley Pride and Prejudice and Becoming Jane do have in common that they’re mostly about mud and sex (never the two at the same time, though—we wouldn’t want to offend the audience’s sensibilities too much). Sure, mud and sex existed in Austen’s world, and it’s fine to acknowledge that. What I react against is, again, the emphasis on empirical experience as the only experience that matters. Pretty much, the movie boils down to “Jane wants Lefroy because of sex, but she ultimately chooses not to marry him because of mud.” Poverty, the film tells us, equals mud—Jane’s mother has to dig her own potatoes because she married a poor clergyman. Now, Jane is willing to endure mud for herself, but when her decisions threaten to leave others wallowing in the dirt, she has to stop and reconsider actions driven by sexual attraction and romance.

(By the way, I do credit the filmmakers with choosing the perfect operatic piece to underline the sexual themes of the movie: “De vieni non tardar,” from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, which, as a voice teacher once told me, is all about sex. If you know the words and their subtext, it works perfectly—for what the movie’s trying to achieve, anyway. If you don’t, it may seem odd that Jane is so moved at hearing a fat middle-aged lady sing a random song.)

Anyway, to return to the art/experience theme . . . a potentially interesting twist occurs when Jane meets Mrs. Radcliffe, author of Gothic novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho. Radcliffe lives a quiet life, and Jane makes the rather obvious comment that her lifestyle contrasts so greatly with the supernatural content of her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe points out that imagination can supply what is portrayed here as a deficit of experience. Argh. This is making me want to do some breakin’ down of the binaries, if you know what I mean. Why do imagination and experience have to be portrayed as separate sources of inspiration? Anyway, most of the potential complexity the scene contributes gets squelched because Jane seems more interested in Mrs. Radcliffe’s personal model of combining marriage and writing than she is in learning anything about writing itself.

I do think that Becoming Jane does an admirable job of portraying the difficult economic negotiations of late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century marriage—for men, as well as women. It just loses credibility in the reasons for Jane’s and Lefroy’s attraction to each other (except for the aforementioned sexual attraction). It’s not exactly a meeting of like minds. When, in Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy says that, between them, Mr. Wickham and Mr. Darcy have just about enough goodness for one man, she wasn’t suggesting that filmmakers try to make one man into both Wickham and Darcy. As appealing as actor James McAvoy is, even he can’t make oscillations between Bad Boy and Misunderstood Gentleman entirely convincing. It seems like, plotwise, he could have just been poor, rather than dissolute to boot. Ah, but then we wouldn’t have the “widening” of Jane’s experience. Grr.

Of course, even the film can’t argue that the happy-ending-marriages in Austen’s novels were based in empirical experience, since Austen herself never married. What does the movie do instead? It suggests that Austen’s endings were a way of giving her characters the good things that she never had. I don’t think the screenwriters intended it this way, but for me, it comes off as suggesting that Austen’s novels were a kind of adolescent wish-fulfillment, which is about as insulting as you can get toward some of the wittiest and most insightful novels in the English language.

There were parts of the movie that I still enjoyed, but in order for me to turn my feminist and aesthetic indignation off, it would have needed to forsake all pretense of being about a writer at all, let alone a writer named Jane Austen.

Final Random Observations: (1.) I like the score for the movie. Might have to buy the soundtrack, and not just for Aidan Broadbridge. (2.) Even though he isn’t conventionally handsome (but he is a skinny Scotsman, so I of course like him) and though his character is a little schizophrenic, James McAvoy does a good job with the soulful glances at his ladylove. Unfortunately, since she’s played by Anne Hathaway, whose eyes are a bit unnerving, she can’t reciprocate very well.

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