Movie Quote of the Day (‘Metropolitan,’ on Jane Austen)

[Two of the more intellectual members of the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack” of debutantes and their dates are discussing novels they’ve recently read.]

Audrey Rouget [played by Carolyn Farina, right]: “By Tolstoy, War and Peace and by Jane Austen, Persuasion and Mansfield Park."

Tom Townsend [played by Edward Clements, left]: "Mansfield Park? You've got to be kidding.”

Audrey: “No.”

Tom: “But it's a notoriously bad book. Even Lionel Trilling, one of her greatest admirers, thought that.”

Audrey: “Well, if Lionel Trilling thought that, he's an idiot.”

Tom: “The whole story revolves around, what? The immorality of a group of young people putting on a play.”

Audrey: “In the context of the novel it makes perfect sense.”

Tom: “But in the context of the novel, then nearly everything Jane Austen wrote is near ridiculous from today's perspective.”

Audrey: “Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from Jane Austen's perspective, would look even worse?”— Metropolitan (1990), written and directed by Whit Stillman

I couldn’t help feeling amused by last week’s conjunction of events: Turner Classic Movies’ scheduling of Whit Stillman’s movie during the holiday season, and this past month’s 250^th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen.

But I really chuckled when I heard this exchange. In a 2017 appearance at Arizona State University, Stillman disclaimed any notion that his first film, an indie movie darling set during Christmas break, was an adaptation of Mansfield Park, let alone that Austen had “inspired” this film.

Whatever. Given that the filmmaker's last movie to date, Love and Friendship (2016), was an adaptation of Austen’s unfinished epistolary novel Lady Susan, I don’t think he would deny that she was a formative influence on his sensibility.

Take another look, then, at the above sample from Stillman’s unabashed talkfest. What a slyboots he is—ribbing the very book that furnished the ethical conflict of his own movie.

I must confess that when I first saw this comedy-drama 35 years ago, I felt deep ambivalence. 

My upbringing was blue-collar ethnic, not WASP upper class, and if I spoke the way that Audrey and Tom do here (let alone their earnest philosophical friend Charlie about “Fourierism”), my friends would have handed my head to me. 

In fact, I wondered back then how many students even at elite college campuses talked about such subjects in their dorms instead of their classrooms.

But the more I thought about this movie’s young people, the less removed they seemed from my own experience.

Pampered and privileged as these preppies were, they shared many of the insecurities of my lower-middle-class set: clinging to one’s social circle, longing for someone who may or may not like you in return, wondering where the money would come to pay for the clothes and activities that would keep you in your clique, and making sense of your parents (or, as the cynic Nick says, “The most important thing to realize about parents is that there is absolutely nothing you can do about them”).

The very thought of it might puzzle my group—and the Sally Fowler Rat Pack subset of what Charlie christens “the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie”—but the values that Jane Austen extols in her social satires apply as much to all classes and regions in modern America as in the novelist’s Regency England: sincerity, thoughtfulness, and decency.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Clueless,’ Comparing Two Forms of Futility)

Cher Horowitz [played by Alicia Silverstone]: “Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.”—Clueless (1995), written and directed by Amy Heckerling (1995)

Thirty years ago this month, Amy Heckerling’s loose contemporary version of Jane Austen’s novel Emma was released. It remains clever in its own right, well worth watching and re-watching (unlike, say, Pauly Shore movies). 

And, if it gets kids interested in reading Austen, as well as Hamlet (a play that Cher, astonishingly, knows well enough to identify the source of a famous quote), so much the better.

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on Memory)

“How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind! If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak—and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul! We are to be sure a miracle every way -- but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.”— English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park (1814)

The image accompanying this post shows Frances O’Connor as Fanny Price, the character who says the above words, in the 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park.

Quote of the Day (William Cowper, on the Perils of ‘The Castaway’)

“No voice divine the storm allay'd,
         No light propitious shone;
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,
         We perish'd, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.”—English poet William Cowper (1731–1800), “The Castaway” (1799)
 
I know what you’re thinking: that picture sure doesn’t look like any William I know. And you are right.
 
A week ago, after not encountering it since it first played in theaters, I watched the 1990s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee.
 
It includes this scene with Kate Winslet, in one of her earliest screen roles, as Marianne Dashwood—who, in a display of her sensitive, romantic, at times overwrought, temperament, reads from this Cowper poem—an embodiment of her emotional crisis of the moment. (Austen, it turns out, greatly admired Cowper's work.)

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on a Great Benefit of Chaperoning Youths)

“By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many douceurs in being a sort of chaperon, for I am put on the sofa near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like.”—English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), letter of Nov. 6, 1813, in Letters of Jane Austen, edited by Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (Brabourne Edition)

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on the Difference Between Pride and Vanity)

“A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”— English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on Staying at Home)

“Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”— English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Emma (1815)

COVID-19 proves that, in this case as in so many others, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Sorry, Jane!

Quote of the Day (Blythe Roberson, on a Jane Austen Film Adaptation in the Distant Future)

“Persuasion (2017): Released in the year 2117, this rare film adaptation of ‘Persuasion’ tells the story of an extremely elderly (twenty-seven-year-old) spinster who reconnects with her naval-officer ex-love. In this updated version, the Navy guys are always talking about how sea levels have risen, like, five whole inches in the past year alone, which maybe doesn’t sound that bad, but it is.”— Blythe Roberson, “Shouts and Murmurs: Future Austen Adaptations,” The New Yorker, Aug. 7-14, 2017 issue

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on Memory)

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”—English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park (1814)

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on Why ‘Everybody Likes to Go Their Own Way’)

“Everybody likes to go their own way—to choose their own time and manner of devotion.” —English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park (1814)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on Jane Austen)

"Miss [Jane] Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop." — Anthony Trollope, “On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement” (1870), in An Autobiography: and Other Writings, edited by Nicholas Shrimpton (2015)

Today marks the 200^th anniversary of the death of English novelist Jane Austen. As I read this short appreciation by Anthony Trollope, it occurred to me that, if you changed “Miss Austen” to “Mr. Trollope” and the female pronouns to male ones, you could just as easily have been talking about the Victorian novelist as the one who wrote of the Napoleonic Era. Indeed, a number of contemporary readers have deemed him “a male Jane Austen.”

Trollope’s openness to her virtues as a writer was by no means a given. In The Way We Live Now, he depicted Lady Carbury, a beginning female writer, with some compassion, but even more irony. Aware that she is not possessed of much ability, Lady Carbury feels compelled to write as a 43-year-old widow who wants to ensure that her grown children are decently provided for. She might not succeed through talent, but she can through still-considerable attractiveness and charm used on male editors and critics who can give her book more attention than it deserves .

Thought of another way: Trollope doesn’t think Mrs. Carbury has earned her way, but Jane Austen most definitely has. Take a look at the half-dozen books she churned out in the last four years of her life—including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility—and see if he wasn’t right.