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SEX AND SENSIBILITY

STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE | January 11th 2008

DG Jones/Flickr

A pleasure to see so much Jane Austen on television and film, says Stephen Hugh-Jones, and it would be even more of a pleasure if modern adaptors could get the social nuances right, and the sexual ones in proportion ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I'm married to a ghost. Well, the simulacrum of one. Jane Austen's, to be exact. My wife once lived in the house in Winchester where the novelist spent her last weeks. The two women hardly look alike, but whenever the modern one appeared at her front window, the tour-guided Japanese and Americans dutifully raised their cameras. Perhaps she should have stuck to the place: at even a modest fee of a few pennies per tourist/shot, she'd be making a good living these days. Whatever may be happening to the rest of British manufacturing, the Jane Austen audiovisuals industry is in fine fettle and pouring out new products.

ITV, Britain's main private-sector television chain, better known for its sitcoms and unreality TV, launched three Austen adaptations last year: "Mansfield Park", "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey". The BBC on January 12th completes transmission of its three-part version of "Sense and Sensibility". On the big screen, 2005 brought a lush version of "Pride and Prejudice", and British cinemas last year followed with "Becoming Jane", which purported to describe Austen's personal life.

There's been plenty more. And enjoyable viewing most of what I've seen has been. But "products" and "purported" are indeed the words. Austen, an acute observer, would not have expected the sensibility, or the prejudices, of the early 19th century to be those of the early 21st. But she might have hoped those of her time at least to be understood, and where appropriate respected. If so, her spirit will have been disappointed.

The costumes and the furnishing, I'm told, are duly in period. Handsome young men in knee-breeches, young bosoms barely restrained by Empire dresses, no doubt look very much as they did then. The endless dances are presumably choreographed as their originals were, and quite possibly better performed. Horses are horses. But the adaptors go cheerfully astray in their sense of class, a key element of Ms Austen's books. And woefully so in their sense of sexual practice, a very small element indeed.

Don't blame the script-writers if their miracles of compression at times produce phrases that Jane Austen not just didn't use--fair enough--but couldn't have, since they hadn't been invented. Nor yet the casting directors if British drama schools have taught too many young actresses to pronounce the word you as yeeuh, like receptionists at some Essex dental practice. These are trifles, and it was ever thus. No one blames Shakespeare if Richard III, indeed star-cross'd Italian lovers, use the language of an Elizabethan playwright; and any director is provably mistaken who thinks that Britain's classes and masses sound today as they did when Shaw wrote "Pygmalion", let alone a century before that.

But oh dear, the locations. Jane Austen herself was the daughter of a country clergyman; his parish at Steventon is some 25 miles from my home, the house at Chawton (shown above) where she wrote about a dozen. Both are modest places. So are her women. Their young men tend to be grander. But she did not stray far above the class to which she belonged: her characters are of the gentry and squirearchy, plus the odd baronet, but not grandees. And except for Bath, and London (which she never visited), her settings, however she may name them, mostly reflect her gentle native Hampshire or areas nearby.

If only today's directors and cameramen were so modest. But no. The young men's houses are not those of country squires, more like ducal palaces. Mr Darcy, who wins Elizabeth's Bennet's heart in "Pride and Prejudice" was indeed richer than most, but untitled. Yet for his northern seat, Pemberley, the 2005 film used Chatsworth (shown, right), which is literally the home of dukes, those of Devonshire. In last year's "Northanger Abbey", one shot of that house suggested to me nearby Arundel Castle, it too owned by dukes, those of Norfolk. I was wrong, but not wildly so: it was in fact Lismore Castle, the huge and spectacular Irish seat of, again, the dukes of Devonshire. Interiors too are often shot in grand houses, with decor, furnishings and family pictures far beyond any squire's means.

In the new "Sense and Sensibility", the family home that our heroines have to quit when their mean brother inherits, is in fact magnificent Wrotham Park, near London: built, it is true, by untitled Admiral Byng (the one executed in the 1750s pour encourager les autres) but splendid enough for any earl, rather than the equally untitled squires who in fiction owned it. Conversely the Devon cottage to which our heroines retreat--in the book, a fairly new one, half a mile of fertile, plainly docile fields and woods from the mansion of the family friend it belongs to--has been downgraded into a crude, ancient, maybe smuggler's cottage on the wildest part of the Devon coast.

The issue isn't one of infidelity to Jane Austen. It is the disconcerting clash between the characters and their properties: they are of one class, their homes of another.

The issue of sex goes deeper. Andrew Davies, the successful script-writer--and, yes, he mostly deserves to be--of more than one such adaptation, thinks it his business to put back the sex that Jane Austen left out. Charlotte Bronte, inaccurately, accused her of knowing little of the female heart. Davies's concern is femininity well below the belt. Jane Austen indeed knew little of this, and female sexuality is indeed not an invention of the late 20th century. But it was ludicrous to start the Beeb's new "S-and-S" with a scene better suited to some soft-porn movie, even if it did not morph into the routine gasping-'n'-writhing footage that today's film-makers presumably can hire by the orgasmful.

The issue again is not fidelity to Austen. It's the importation of 21st-century sensibility into a society that did not share it. Sure, her age had its sex, its seductions and its licentious side, what age doesn't? But that wasn't the side that she was writing about. The result again is discord. I've nothing against gasping or writhing, nor against ducal magnificence--in their proper place. But are they really needed, even in 2008, to sell Jane Austen?

(Picture of Chawton by bods/Flickr; Chatsworth by AndrewNZ/Flickr)