My first in-depth introduction to Pride and Prejudice fans came from YouTube. While I’m sure I had read a simplified version of the book and had probably watched at least one movie version, it was The Lizzie Bennet Diaries that made me really understand the hype around the story. Over the course of a little under a year, from April 2012 to March 2013, a small cast of actors transformed the story in several key ways that made it incredibly palatable to a modern audience.
The first notable change is the motivation of Mrs. Bennet. Instead of dealing with complicated inheritance laws, the Bennet sisters are plagued with the same student loans and unemployable degrees that so many students have. They live at home because either they can’t find a job or because the jobs they do have don’t pay much. Mrs. Bennet is never seen onscreen, but it’s clear from Lizzie’s impressions of her that she desperately wants her children to be financially stable (even if she’s still just as annoying as she is in the book). The production also cut down on the number of sisters, making Mary a cousin and Kitty a cat. Racial diversity was introduced, with the Charlotte Lucas becoming Charlotte Lu, and Mr. Bingley becoming Bing Lee, both played by Asian American actors (along with their respective family members), and Colonel Fitzwilliam becoming Darcy’s college friend, Fritz, played by an African American actor. Mr. Collins isn’t interested in marrying Charlotte, but she is definitely settling when she accepts a job at his tech startup. Jane gets to have her own ambitions in the fashion industry, even though she remains sweet and kind. Lydia is still "untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless" (Austen 298), but videos on a second channel provide more insight into her motivations than Elizabeth’s limited perspective can provide in the book.
Most cleverly, the production made use of social media, creating accounts on multiple social media platforms for all the characters. As events would happen, I remember anxiously checking twitter and the videos to try to figure out how the adaptation was going to handle things like the Lydia-Wickham situation (spoiler: the unmarried pregnancy was changed to a sex tape that Wickham threatened to release before Darcy bought the footage and destroyed it).
I’m normally the first person to advocate for just letting teenagers read the source material, and to see this kind of thing as pandering. But in this case, these 100 videos really felt like a display of love for Austen. In my opinion, this adaptation is an excellent example of Jane Austen fandom being incredibly transformative and creative. By changing things, this adaptation was able to connect with me, at a time when I was overwhelmed with homework that made me hate the idea of reading 19th century fiction for fun.
Have you ever found a fanwork that made you then become more interested in the source material?
I agree with your comment that fanwork can breathe new life into the material and make it accessible in a new way; that’s one of the reasons I’m indebted to Tumblr and AO3, even as they can be irksome to use now and then. In many ways I think fanwork can bridge narrative gaps in the original story, and I love it for that. And of course general fan fiction and alternate universes and tweaking stories just a tiny bit, like what if Elizabeth had said no the second time, what if Ruth hadn’t said anything about Madame to Kathy — ideas like this are so incredibly interesting to me, and they definitely give me a greater love for the source content.
ReplyDeleteI actually watched The Jane Austen Book Club after it was mentioned in the reading we did, and it made me very curious to pick up Austen’s other books so I could see how well the movie compared (I think I’m bringing them with me on spring break). This was a fanwork with a huge budget, but I heartily believe it is fanwork nonetheless. Another creation I hold dearly are a collection of fanfics exploring Harry Potter alternate universes, specifically the ones written around a single thing happening differently to change the story. These fics go through the entirety of the Harry Potter books, and seeing the differences and the obvious care with which the fanfic author took with said books makes me value both more. Fanwork is, quite simply, marvellous.
I think it’s great when an adaptation or extension of an author’s source material can get more people interested in it! I have personally seen this in Harry Potter, where a few fans have created videos illustrating stories of the Marauders (Harry’s father and his friends). Although I had already been interested in the series for a while, it reignited my love for the Wizarding World, especially at a point in which no new content was being created.
ReplyDeleteWhen there is no new content, either in the world of Harry Potter or Jane Austen, online communities can become central to maintaining excitement about the story. Although Jane Austen’s works have been around much longer than the internet has, social media has become a space to discover communities of people with similar interests. As Deborah Yaffe put it in “Among the Janeites”, “No junior Janeite need curl up alone with her book in a dark corner. She can start a blog, join the online Janeites discussion group, or hang out at the Republic of Pemberley” (xvi). She also, however, mentioned feeling that she had lost a sense of ownership in her love of Austen; it was no longer a personal quirk, but a common treasure. I have seen this prevalent in today’s online fandoms when fans praise themselves for being one of the first to have “discovered” the content- there is a sense of pride and sorrow in having to share this content. In the ability to create communities and to share fan’s interpretations of source material, social media is a great place for fans to go to share their passion.