Jane Austen의 영원한 유산

2013 년 1 월 28 일, Jane Austen의 가장 사랑받는 소설, 자부심과 편견의 발행 200 주년이되었으며 소설이 등장한지 2 세기가 지나자 Elizabeth Bennet과 Darcy의 팬들과 Darsten의 팬들과 Austen 자신이있었습니다. 일년 내내 파티에 올랐다. 미국과 영국 전역의 미디어, 아카데미 및 지역 도서관은 1995 년 이래로 프라이버시와 편견의 BBC TV 미니 시리즈가 오스틴의 화려한 포스트 모던 유명 인사를 시작한 리젠시 축제 및 기타 오스틴 테마 행사를 후원 해 왔습니다.

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소설가로 200 년이 넘게 명성을 쌓았으며 그녀의 작품은 수익성있는 대중적인 인기로 여러 번 부풀려졌습니다. 그녀의 조카 인 Jane Austen의 회고록 (1870)은 개인적으로 관심을 끌었고 1890 년대에 소설은 휴 톰슨의 매력적인 삽화로 가장 자부심과 편견을 다시 출판했습니다. 20 세기에 새로운 팬들은 Laurence Olivier와 Greer Garson이 주연 한 MGM의 Pride and Prejudice (1940)를 통해 Austen을 발견했습니다. 1990 년대부터 그 영화의 재방송과 대형 스크린 및 텔레비전 용으로 제작 된 새로운 버전의 재방송으로 오스틴은 낭만적 인 추리와 친숙 함, 경멸, 심지어 조롱까지 모든 것을 갈망하는 수많은 새로운 관객을 만들었습니다.

The novel itself became the toast of the London season in 1813 when Annabella Milbanke, the earnest and intelligent young woman soon to marry the poet Lord Byron, judged it “a very superior work,” the “most probable” fiction she had ever read. (She especially admired Mr. Darcy.) In print ever since, it has influenced the lives and language, as well as the dreams and aspirations, of generations of readers and writers. Arguably the first Austen sequel—revising, refocusing, and perfecting the courtship plot of the first of her six published novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811)—Pride and Prejudice continues to generate versions and variations and to keep the author’s name, which was unknown in her lifetime, in the limelight.

In 2013 a mixed lot of books and films targeted the segment of the book-buying public sometimes referred to as “Janeiacs.” The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by biographer Paula Byrne was published in January, and in April an unusual study by political scientist Michael Chwe praised Austen as a pioneer of game theory. Meanwhile, self-mocking self-help books, fan fictions, parodies, and books about Austen’s fandom continued to glut the market. Moviegoers anticipated an upcoming new version of Persuasion (published posthumously in 1817), as well as Death Comes to Pemberley, an adaptation of a 2011 sequel to Pride and Prejudice by the crime novelist P.D. James. Austenland (2013), based on a 2007 novel about giddy antics at a Jane Austen theme park, was already drawing fans to cinemas. On television a vlog, Emma Approved, was forthcoming from the makers of another successful vlog, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012).

Scholarly celebrations in 2013 included a conference at the University of Cambridge, while at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, Eng., an international conference on women’s writing of the “long 18th century” was entitled “Pride and Prejudices.” Aficionados of costume, country dancing, and romance could attend an Austen summer camp in Connecticut; the yearly Jane Austen Festival in Bath, Eng.; the Grand Jane Austen Ball in Nürnberg, Ger.; or gatherings in Pittsburgh, Hyde Park, Vt., and Canberra, Australia.

Despite the international interest, there was some insistence on Austen’s being still, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “England’s Jane.” The U.K. in February issued six stamps illustrating the six novels (four stamps were issued for the Jane Austen bicentennial in 1975). In early July a 3.7-m (12-ft) statue of actor Colin Firth, the Mr. Darcy of the 1995 miniseries, rose from a lake in London’s Hyde Park to promote Drama, a digital TV channel dedicated to British programs. The fibreglass figure, according to a spokesman, represented more than that production’s most celebrated scene (which Austen never wrote): “We’ve got a wet shirt on him, we’ve got sideburns. He’s portraying many of the Darcys that have appeared over the years in film and TV adaptations.” In a quieter move, Ed Vaizey, the British minister of culture, barred the export of a ring that had belonged to Austen, which the American singer Kelly Clarkson had bought at an auction in 2012 for £152,450 (about $237,000). Finally, the Bank of England chose Austen to “grace” the new £10 note. The sketch of Austen on the proposed bill provoked protests from the faithful, who argued that the likeness used is a deliberately prettified portrait, that the big house portrayed is her brother’s, and that the “Austen” maxim recommending reading quotes Caroline Bingley, a character who only pretends to read. Skeptics asked, Will the new bill misrepresent Austen as the for-profit Jane Austen industry so often has done?

Since 1995 “Jane Austen” has been—in addition to a “classic” writer’s name—a commercially successful brand and a contested signifier, widely understood to mean upper-class English attitudes and values, “high” culture and English literature, and nostalgia for a prettier, simpler world. Ironically, especially for people who have not actually read her novels, the Austen “brand” has also represented scorn for all of the above, as well as romance (with a leer) in tight trousers and plunging décolletage.

The story of dowerless Elizabeth Bennet (no beauty), who snags Darcy and his beautiful grounds at Pemberley, has merged over the years with the equally improbable story of the country parson’s spinster daughter who wrote six small novels about decorous virgins and—after dying poor and obscure—became a household word. Narratives akin to Pride and Prejudice about poor but clever girls who get transformed into “something,” as Elizabeth puts it, are tales of wishes fulfilled, society turned on its head, and, in the end, virtue and love conquering all. By the middle of the 18th century, Englishwomen such as Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, and Fanny Burney and the Anglo-Irish Maria Edgeworth were writing romantic narratives that combined domestic comedy and social satire. Pride and Prejudice, when it appeared, was not new, merely superior—written in “the best chosen language.” Readers were delighted to recognize Elizabeth and Darcy and their embarrassing relatives as literary types and interesting individuals; moving in and out of her characters’ minds, the witty narrator of their story made them probable, plausible (as people said), and realistic.

William Dean Howells claimed that he could feel the fresh winds of revolutionary democracy sweeping through the love story of Elizabeth Bennet, whose happy marriage forces the well-born Darcy to accept as his relatives not only her vulgar mother and sister Lydia but also Wickham, who was the son of Darcy’s father’s steward and had tried to seduce Darcy’s sister. If it is hard to do a political reading of Austen’s “light, and bright, and sparkling” second published novel, it is equally hard to read it as apolitical. It is, rather, at once conventional and revolutionary, romantic and antiromantic, meta-Romantically—and delightfully—divided. Its deepest moral message may be to avoid self-seriousness.

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” feckless Mr. Bennet asks. If it is not the moral of the story, it is not a point to be dismissed. To submit to being laughed at by the neighbours and to anticipate laughing back is the basis for modern democratic comedy, as opposed to courtly comedy in which the jester trades places with the king. Toward the end of her story, Elizabeth reflects that Darcy “had yet to learn to be laught at”; we, as readers, understand that under her tutelage he will learn that. The reader learns to laugh a little at Darcy as well. Austen’s irony attracts us still, but her balance and poise often elude readers—driving some people to the grotesque excesses of sweetening her stories into banality or scrawling virtual graffiti on her image.

Two hundred years after Pride and Prejudice was published, it speaks to a culture that is often ambivalent about both love and literature and is simultaneously nostalgic for tradition and disdainful of it (one favour distributed at a Jane Austen conference was, reportedly, a lacy thong). Jane Austen’s books remain more readable than those of most of her predecessors, contemporaries, and even her snappiest imitators. Informed by a rich tradition of plays, novels, satires, and romances, Austen’s genius is still legibly extraordinary.