Bicentennial Essays on Jane Austen’s Afterlives

Annika Bautz, Sarah Wootton, Annika Bautz, Sarah Wootton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000692655
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This collection is concerned with the changing approaches to Jane Austen, her writings, and her afterlives, over the past two hundred years. It reflects on, and broadens understanding of, the cultural reach and reimaginings of Austen in view of the bicentennial celebrations of her published novels from 2011 to 2018.

The ten contributors to this collection re-engage with key debates over Austen, her continuing appeal and significance as an author and a lucrative brand, and her cultural ubiquity. These essays are concerned with Austen's national and international reputation; her critical reception; creative appropriations of her writings; and Austen's afterlives in popular culture, in visual media, in ephemeral publications, in stage, in film, and in musical versions. Together, these essays by experts from across the UK, North America, Australia, and Scandinavia advance innovative readings of Austen's novels and her transmedia legacies and shed new light on some of the complex reception processes that emerge from the study of this enduringly popular author. They also set out possible paths for scholarship on Austen in coming years.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

Austentatious: Comedy Improv and Austen Adaptation in the Twenty-first Century

Susan Civale

ABSTRACT

Recent decades have seen Jane Austen move outside the classroom to assume a pop-culture presence through a proliferation of virtual, visual, and textual adaptations, spin-offs, sequels, mash-ups, and fan-fiction, along with websites, blogs, and merchandising. Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel, a one-hour comedy play performed in the style of Jane Austen, offers an addition to Austen’s literary legacy. Since the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe, this improvisation troupe has been staging Austen’s “lost” works, by drawing a title from a collection of audience suggestions, and launching directly into the action. Austentatious blends narrative and gags, Regency and popular culture, “Austenspeak” and modern slang. Critics may regard it as another reductive appropriation, but, as this essay suggests, Austentatious marks a significant intervention in Austen’s afterlife. Both send-up and celebration, this improvised comedy trades in familiar tropes: feisty ladies, matchmaking relatives, and romantic entanglements. These clichés are played for laughs, but Austentatious also lampoons the textually promiscuous nature of Austen adaptation, and the “free” treatment of Austen by academics. Austentatious parodies not only the original novels but the phenomenon of (Austen) adaptation itself - whether high-brow or low - in the twenty-first century.

Introduction

Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel debuted at the Edinburgh Festival in 2012 with a six-person ensemble, but has since grown into a troupe of eight that regularly performs at London’s Leicester Square Theatre and tours the UK. The one-hour comic play is premised on the scholarly discovery – explained at the start of the night by fictional Austen expert Dr. Sam Patton, PhD – that Austen penned not six but over six hundred works of fiction. Each unscripted show is built around an audience-suggested title of a “lost” Austen novel drawn at random and then enacted over a series of short scenes created on the spot. These scenes typically involve two or three players, though others can enter the action (and those on stage can exit) as they like. Usually lasting for no more than three or four minutes, a scene ends when a member of the company, theoretically off-stage but congregating visibly to the sides of the scene, walks across the front of the stage. At this point, the lights dim momentarily until a new scene commences with a different combination of actors taking the stage. The scenes assemble a narrative which both imitates and mocks the qualities of an Austen novel.

Fast paced, farcical, and hilarious, Austentatious blends narrative and gags, Regency and popular culture, “Austenspeak” and modern slang. Critics of “Austenmania”, or the “Austen Industry”, may regard it as another instance of reductive appropriation. Austen adaptations have long stood accused of repackaging her sophisticated social satire into escapist, sentimental pap, and then marketing it to a consumer audience with an insatiable appetite for empire waists, dashing suitors, and happy endings.¹ However, as this essay suggests, Austentatious marks a significant intervention in Austen’s literary legacy. Part send-up, part celebration, this improvised comedy trades in familiar tropes: feisty young ladies, matchmaking relatives, and prying servants, as well as inheritances, letters, and romantic entanglements. These clichés are played for laughs, but Austen is not the only target. Mixing contemporary cultural references (everything from Game of Thrones to Beyoncé to Yom Kippur) with a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Regency dialogue, Austentatious lampoons the textually and temporally promiscuous nature of modern Austen adaptation. Moreover, by bookending the performance with the remarks of Dr. Sam Patton, Austentatious pokes fun at academics as equally opportunist. Austentatious ultimately does not spoof Austen’s six novels so much as parody the phenomenon of Austen adaptation itself, and the dynamics of cultural appropriation – whether high-brow or low – in the twenty-first century. Yet, through a new variety of long-form improvisation, Austentatious celebrates the collaboration, creativity, and fun involved in this most irreverent recreation of Austen. Though this essay focuses on the comedy improv show Austentatious, the framework of interpretation used here could be applied to other contemporary adaptations.²

Parody of Austen

Following the classic Austenian plot structure, Austentatious includes an introduction of the main characters, the development of one or more conflicts, and a happy resolution of these conflicts which culminates in at least one marriage proposal. Set in 1814, the selected title is improvised by players dressed in period garb and conversing in Regency parlance. However, as one Guardian reviewer noted, “the Austen connection could be overstated”, and knowledge of Austen’s fiction is not necessary to enjoy the show.³ Although the language, setting, and costume seem ostensibly “Austen”, the pretence of historical or literary authenticity is quickly undermined. Austenian syntax intermingles with modern-day colloquialisms and cultural references; outlandish plot twists and anything-goes humour derail any hint of realism. The absurdity of these juxtapositions makes clear that this is not a period drama but a parody. As “a form of repetition with ironic critical distance”, Austentatious fits Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody which, like other types of adaptation, derives pleasure from its tension between the familiar and the new.⁴ As a parody it also provides a critique of the original text by “voicing what the text silences or marginalizes”.⁵

Through a teasing, light-hearted parody, Austentatious highlights some of the absences in Austen’s novels. For example, “Man-Feels Parts” opened – to riotous laughter – with the announcement of Lord Beaverbrook’s prostate exam results.⁶ Combining a suggestive name obviously out of place in Austen’s writing, and a routine medical screening that postdates the Regency period, the joke plays on the lack of sex and bodily functions in Austen. The players often riff on these lacunae through bawdy gibes and gestures. In another performance, for instance, a male character commented on the physical allure and marital eligibility of a rival who had a “cracking undercarriage”.⁷ This use of innuendo may recall Austen’s own symbolic rendering of sexual power. In Northanger Abbey, for example, the whip-smacking, aggressive horse riding of John Thorpe marks him as a mercenary predator. Here, however, the players maximise the comic effect by making the sexual reference explicit (through gesturing toward and looking at the actor’s groin), the context ridiculous (discussion of this character’s “undercarriage” continues at length in later scenes), and the subtext homoerotic rather than heterosexual (this discussion takes place between men).

Austen’s attention to the marriage of young ladies and the antiquated mores of Regency society also come under fire. The “Invasion of the Bonnet Snatchers”, as per its title (which is a pun on the 1956 sci-fi horror film), replaces the perils of alien invasion with the stealing spree of a spurned suitor who, in cahoots with his manservant, purloins Sally Hepworth’s 17 bonnets. This substitution serves to mock and trivialise Austen’s provincial world and its outdated social conventions. In this world, the most exigent threats relate to the prospect of an unsuitable conjugal match, and the greatest fears revolve around the shame of walking outdoors with one’s head exposed. In “Man-Feels Parts”, a bachelor who is proclaimed universally unattractive is later pursued, through seductive flattery, by one of the unwed women in the village. When he wonders at her change of heart, she explains: “I knew how rich you were. That made you handsomer”.⁸ The comment drew laughs because it so shamelessly announced the character as a fortune-hunter. But it also pointed more obliquely to the way in which Austen contrives to unite a penniless heroine with a worthy, wealthy, and attractive gentleman, and thus manages to resolve the thorny issues – raised early and sustained through much of the narrative – about class and gender inequalities in Regency England. The implausibility and incongruity visible in these examples indicate the way Austentatious makes light of the limitations of content, scope, and theme that are associated with Austen’s oeuvre, and turns them to comedic effect.

Parody of Austen “Heritage” Screen Adaptations

Austentatious parodies not only Jane Austen’s fiction, however, but also modern adaptation of it, and specifically “heritage” screen versions. Heritage Austen includes such middlebrow favourites as Andrew Davies’s BBC serialisation of Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Douglas McGrath’s Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow (1996). In contrast to the “sumptuous affairs”, “glamorous costumes”, and “antique furniture” of heritage productions, Austentatious offers only token attempts at historical accuracy.⁹ In fact, Austentatious makes a spectacle of its inauthenticity. A few floor-length frocks, tailcoats, and top boots pass for Georgian attire; a handful of chairs on stage and a rotation of basic props like shawls, hats, and books suffice to set the scene. Moreover, a faux Regency phraseology impertinently blends millennial slang and gestures (such as high fives) with nineteenth-century drawing room formalities. Through its minimal stage design and obvious anachronisms, Austentatious announces itself as a travesty, rather than the real Austen. By self-consciously exchanging the visual, discursive, and textual elements of Austen’s world for the prevailing twenty-first-ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Bicentennial Essays on Jane Austen’s Afterlives
• 1 Austentatious: Comedy Improv and Austen Adaptation in the Twenty-first Century
• 2 Morbid Curiosity and Monstrous (Re)Visions: Zombies, Sea Monsters, and Readers (Re)Writing Jane Austen
• 3 Mediations on Value in Mansfield Park, or Jane Austen Tries to Balance the Books
• 4 Philadelphia and the Making of Jane Austen in the United States, 1816–1838
• 5 Austen’s Late-nineteenth-century Afterlives: 1890s Introductions to Her Novels
• 6 “Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt And Misery”: Jane Austen and Escapism, from Trench Warfare to YouTube Fanvids
• 7 The Problem of the Jane Austen Musical
• 8 Austen Approved: Pemberley Digital and the Transmedia Commodification of Jane Austen
• 9 Interpretations of Jane Austen’s Irony on Screen and in Translations: A Comparison of Some Samples
• 10 Revisiting Jane Austen as a Romantic Author in Literary Biopics
• Index