A-Z Challenge: Jane Austen

My friends would call me a hypocrite if I didn’t write about Austen in this challenge. After all, I did get a bunch of us to form a book club in her honor… initially. We’ve since moved on to other books. 🙂

But yes, Jane Austen remains an important figure in my life. It was one of her stories that got me hooked on the classics. A childhood friend once gave me a children’s comic version of Pride and Prejudice and Captains Courageous. Of course, being the romantic that I am, chucked Cheyne’s story and delved right into Darcy’s. I mean Lizzie’s.

After that, I got my hands on Persuasion and then Sense and Sensibility. I remember reading Persuasion back in 6th grade and ending up being confused about what happened. Sense and Sensibility was a different story. I didn’t know about shipping back then, but I shipped Elinor and Col. Brandon hard that first time I read it. And THEN I saw the movie with Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson and everything made sense (but I still shipped them both).

It wasn’t until college that I finally got my hands on a copy of Emma, but she annoyed the hell out of me with her meddling, so I dropped it, picking up where I left off years later when we finally started the book club. Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey I didn’t bother with because reading the summaries at the backs of the books already made me yawn. I got copies of the BBC movies, so I consumed those instead.

Thanks to the book club, though, I was forced to read all six of Austen’s novels, which was a good thing because the stories made more sense to me the second time around and not just because I had a better grasp of Austen’s language; it was because the struggles of each of the characters became more understandable and relevant. Italo Calvino says it best in Why Read the Classics?

In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty—all things that continue to operate even if the book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. If we reread the book at a mature age we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us.

The complexities of societal norms and expectations regarding love and marriage and children especially of a culture so different from my own were a mystery to my 12-year old inexperienced-in-life self, but facing them again at a more mature age allowed me the opportunity to really get to know the characters and therefore appreciate their stories more.

Austen is known for her irony and her wit, but all I could see was how well she was able to reach women from this day and age and still have them sighing and crying and gushing over her characters. Of course, the ladies loved Fitzwilliam Darcy and his grand gestures of love for Elizabeth Bennet (but some say Austen ruined men for the ladies. In any case, Austen’s characters connected with the readers whether they were doing something grand like Darcy or Col. Brandon or Henry Crawford (whom I wanted Fanny to end up with), or something simple and subtle like Wentworth noticing how tired Anne was and suggesting she ride with his sister instead of walking. In everything that Austen’s male characters did, there was romance. And in everything that her heroines did, there was courage.

click the image for episode 1 😀

Her stories, most especially P&P, have spawned so many adaptations and retellings, the most recent of which might be Hank Green and Bernie Su’s production of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (YouTube). Before that, there were Bride and Prejudice (P&P Bollywood style), Lost in Austen and Pride & Prejudice (2005 with Keira Knightley) among many others. Adaptations for other Austen novels include Emma (two versions: Gwyneth Paltrow and that Underworld girl) and Clueless (Alicia Silverstone); Sense and Sensibility (with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet) and From Prada to Nada (Camilla Belle and Alexa Vega); Persuasion (two versions: Ciaran Hinds and Rupert Penry-Jones as Capt. Wentworth); Mansfield Park (loved the version with Frances O’Connor) and Northanger Abbey with TV movies.

Aside from Shakespeare, Austen’s the only other classical author I know whose works have continued to make such a huge impact on the modern age that they’ve spawned countless versions across all types of media. I love her; that’s all I really wanted to say.

or Capt. Wentworth 😀

Sembreak 2012

I’m off to the city in a bit to run some errands and check in at the hotel my friend and I are staying in prior to our flight tomorrow. We’re both from the outskirts of the metro, so we decided that staying in a hotel closer to the airport would be more convenient and a great way to kickstart our vacation.

Destination:

 

Beautiful Coron. [Photo borrowed. Click image to go to source.]

I can’t wait. 🙂

[I just hope that by the time we land tomorrow afternoon, the skies will have cleared up.]

 

Sembreak fun part 2:

The weekend after I get back from Coron will have me going back to the city for the last of my Jane Austen book club meetings. We’ve decided to do it with a bang, so we’re checking in at a two-bedroom suite at The Malayan Plaza Hotel in Ortigas for an overnight stay doing nothing but eat, drink wine, and, of course, talk about Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, our two favorite Austen novels.

If everything goes well, then this will, by far, be the best sembreak in my life. 🙂

Mansfield Park

It’s about a place. In the province *ahemcountryahem* with posh people. Who are bored.

Seriously.

The classics are already difficult enough to read with its antiquated prose and lengthy accounts of so and so’s goings about, but if the story itself is sleep-inducing, then it’s a wonder these texts are still in print. Mansfield Park? Yup, perfect example.

Let’s see. Jane Austen spends half the book just talking about what the Bertrams and their cousin, protagonist Fanny Price, are doing with their new “neighbors” the Crawfords. Everybody is charmed by the Crawfords except for Fanny who thinks that Henry and Mary Crawford are just awful spoiled city people whose education ruined them into having such evil virtues. Having been born and raised in the city, I take great offense at this.

That practically was the whole point of the entire book: that the city life presents nothing but corruption and evil and vanity and that those who live in the city are doomed to live such immoral lives.

Where does Austen get off saying such things? It’s disturbing. Here I was, perfectly content with fantasies about meeting my own Mr. Darcy, and then there she goes ruining it with Mansfield Park and all its stuck up conservative ideals. Bitch got burned bad, and she unleashed it in her writing.

Pardon the language, please. I just still can’t get over it.

Read more after the jump. This is all basically stream of consciousness with very little revising and editing done.

Sunday randomness

I’ve got one more thing to finish for work tomorrow, but I can’t bring myself to finish it. Here I am, then, trying to get some writing and thinking out of the way.

My next book club session will be on July 14. We’ll be discussing Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. I’ve seen the Billie Piper and Frances O’Connor movie versions, and the only things I liked in those movies were Jonny Lee Miller and Alessandro Nivola in the O’Connor version.

That said, I’m only in the first half of this lengthy and boring novel. I love Austen, I do, but Fanny Price is just way too blah for my liking. Emma was the most annoying character, but at least she was lively. I’ve got a few questions already for the book club, some of them clarificatory questions, some of them discussion ones.

1. What did men have to do to get ordained? Edmund was said to go into the clergy, but I don’t remember any mention of him going into formal “training” or going into a “seminary” to be a clergyman.
2. Why was Mrs. Norris so annoying?
3. Manners were constantly spoken of. What was the consequence of having bad manners then? How did the stiff and polite manners/practces transition into the modern age?
4. Why did Austen seem so against modernization in this novel?
5. Why did Austen say that the Crawfords were brown/black? Mary was described as having “lively dark eye, clear brown complexion, and general prettiness” while Henry was described as “not handsome” and “absolutely plain, black and plain.” I think I’m missing a cultural thing here.

Okay, that will have to do for now. Back to work.