irony house

I have a problem. This problem is conventionally referred to as “Jane Austen.”

Perhaps I am just desperately trying to compensate for the gaping abyss in my life that is the absence of my dearest Friends House, but I am embarking on the six-hour Pride and Prejudice miniseries. Yesterday I watched the Keira Knightley version, and while I love the music in that one and I approve of some of the casting choices (I am probably the only straight woman in the world who doesn’t think Colin Firth is all that) there are some serious issues with it and blah blah I’m a purist.

This sort of dovetails with something else I did recently: I saw the Sex and the City movie yesterday with my sister. (Brief review: far too long, but entirely what one would expect.) Unlike my Jane Austen love, I am not really proud of my interest in Sex and the City, a pretty unhealthy but addictive television show. I wonder what Jane Austen would say about Carrie Bradshaw. Austen didn’t like rich people much, or premarital sex. But they do have something in common: They both offer the modern woman a chance at traditional love. Or, at least, I think that’s why both are astounding popular these days.

Pathetically, I have drunk the Kool-Aid on both counts. Pride and Prejudice is the only novel I feel I have inherited from my family — it’s my great-uncle’s favorite book, it was my grandmother’s favorite book, my aunt and mother forced it on me. My mother bought me a copy from Publix, I think, which looks like a trashy romance novel — and has the trashy copy on the back to boot. “Marry. Marry well. Marry rich.” “Will any of the Bennet sisters find true love and fortune?”

A few months ago I watched Becoming Jane, a completely untrue movie about Jane Austen’s life. So, this movie was marketed at people like me and I hate being predictable but I freakin loved it, mostly because James McAvoy is desperately attractive. But it was a sad movie, and that was intriguing. I think too many modern spectators forget that things were actually terrible for the women of Austen’s novels. They lived constrained, dependent lives — and they were obsessed with marriage, if only because marriage was the only power a woman exercised in her entire life. Austen shows the marriage market for what it is — not an exercise in love and romance, but a trade of money and power — but usually, because they’re novels, with a happy ending.

The modern woman seeking love. The vague plot of Becoming Jane is that Jane Austen falls in love but since their parents don’t approve and they have no independent wealth, they can’t get married. At some point, the man (played by James McAvoy) asks her at a ball if she’s dancing with passion to seek a husband or a lover, and she’s suddenly transformed from confident to vulnerable. She responds, “Rest easy, Mr. LeFroy, I have no expectation on either count.” I have been thinking about that line a lot. At the risk of sounding too MCM, I think it problematizes (I’m purposely leaving out a direct object). It represents to me some sort of glitch in the system between the modernity and the tradition (is tradition the right word? maybe I really mean “fantasy”).

I think that’s the reason women watch Sex and the City, anyway. Or read things like this. I feel like there’s something terribly wrong with the prevailing paradigm of romance and dating right now, but I don’t know what to do about it.

Anyway I have no idea why I just wrote all of that.