The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen

Janeites at the Keyboard

K. Mirmohamadi

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137401328
• eBook ISBN: 9781137401335
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first scholarly study to explore the ever-expanding world of online Austen fandom and fan fiction writing. Using case studies from the Internet writing community and publisher, Wattpad, as well as dedicated fan websites, it illuminates the literary processes and products that have given Austen multiple afterlives in the digital arena.

1

Jane Austen’s Adventures in Wattpadland

Abstract: This chapter explores the place of Jane Austen and her work on Wattpad, an online literary community which launched from Canada in 2006. From paranormal and fan fiction, to werewolf, historical, romance, ‘chick lit’ and even a substream of Mormon faith-inflected stories, Austen-related work abounds in ‘Wattpadland’. This chapter offers close readings of a number of Austen-themed fictional works published there, such as a Pride and Prejudice update novel by a commercially published LDS [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] author, and amateur fan fiction involving werewolves, time travel and even the members of the boy band, One Direction.

Mirmohamadi, Kylie. The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137401335.0004.

The ‘cover’ of My Wattpad Love, a 2012 Watty Award-winning story with over 9 million ‘reads’ to date, depicts two young people in interior nightscape, the girl reclining on her stomach on her bed, the boy sitting on the edge of his, balancing an open laptop. They are staring fixedly at their computers, an electronic glow illuminating their faces, physically separated but occupying a shared space produced by the screen and their immersion in the same reading experience. This image, both appearing on and depicting Wattpad, an online reading and writing platform launched in Canada in 2006, captures the self-reflexive nature of the digital literary circuit. A Wattpad reader (who is one of many, given the astronomical numbers of ‘reads’ and votes recorded against some of the stories), typically a young woman under twenty five,¹ opens the application on a smart phone or tablet, or locates the website, and encounters the protagonist of this story doing exactly the same thing. In the narrative, Julie Jones is ‘surfing on the internet’ after midnight one Saturday, ‘lying on my stomach moving my finger along the pointing device of my Hp laptop.’ Having exhausted her supply of ‘paper books’, she was searching for ‘those so famous online books’, but finding them inaccessible because of their price point and payment processes. She ‘was about to give up when I saw an orange icon and the word free. I clicked on it and the internet explorer showed me wonderland: Wattpad. My eyes widened in shock as I read the web sites mottos: unlimited stories, free eBooks, free download for your phone. As I scroll down the page, I discovered many stories.’ After spending the first few days being a ‘silent reader’, Julie creates an account and is ‘soon fanning people and commenting on stories to show my support. A month later, I was an addict. I checked wattpad three times per day to see if the stories I was following were updated.’²

The promise of ‘unlimited stories’ that so enchanted this character is significant in the ethos of electronic reading in general, and the Wattpad platform in particular. The New York Public Library’s Digital Publication mobile application [app] ‘Biblion’, for example, speaks of the ‘boundless library’, referring to the move beyond the material accoutrements of the codex, but also suggesting the textual infiniteness attributed to the World Wide Web. In addition to acting as a repository for exponentially growing numbers of stable, scanned digital text, the Internet presents the possibility of hosting and generating seemingly endless versions of text and intertext, linked through hypertext, and looping and transforming in ways that reflect the repetitive behaviour associated with constant updating and checking, comment and response. While Wattpad’s reach is global – its advocates are justifiably proud of its multilingualism and the possibilities it offers for literacy and literary activity in developing countries – its vision extends beyond that. With the tech visionary’s fondness for ever-expanding systems, Wattpad’s co-founder, Allen Lau, enthused in an interview:

I do see the world becoming like a solar system where the centre of the universe is writers, readers and the social network – the community. Then there are stars or planets rotating round the centre of the universe and traditional publishing is one of those, options for television are another. There are many other planets that we haven’t discovered yet.³

For all the appeal to ideas of boundlessness, Lau’s evocation of the networked literary community at the centre of this universe highlights how Wattpad is simultaneously imagined in reference to places that rely upon borders for their existence and meaning: community, city, village, nation. Julie’s fictional description of Wattpad as a ‘wonderland’ is a suggestive one, for the platform is often represented as an amalgam of geographic place and discursive space, where (not unlike Austen’s few families in a ‘country village’, or Anne Elliot’s ‘little social commonwealth[s]’)⁴ people gather and from which stories emanate. This imagining of virtual space in terms of shared communal and physical places occurs across online Austen fandom. As discussed in Chapter 3, these geographies locate and gather online fans and visitors within republics, libraries, and assemblies, allowing them to orient themselves within a borderless and limitless cyberspace through reference to discrete, locatable geographic points and communities.⁵

Media commentary, reflecting the company’s own emphasis and perhaps also answering cultural anxieties about potential isolation in the computer age, emphasises the potential for community in Wattpad. The sidebar text of a 2009 profile claimed that ‘Wattpad enables users to access their own community-created library of a variety of published works on their mobile phones.’⁶ Wattpad’s Nina Lassam appealed to the idea of social literary activity which has experienced renaissance through the Internet, when she claimed in an interview that it is ‘all about making reading more of a social exercise and opportunity because that’s what these teens are used to with Facebook and all these other vehicles to socialize.’⁷ Its unofficial patron and ambassador, the Canadian author Margaret Atwood, evoked a twenty-first-century Republic of Letters when she enthused that ‘somewhere out there in Wattpadland, a new generation is testing its wings’. Participants on the site take up this national metaphor by referring to themselves and other readers as ‘Wattpadders’, as if their online literary activities have bestowed upon them a form of citizenship.⁸

This chapter looks at the intersecting space in which this Wattpadland – virtual, constantly proliferating, apparently boundless – shares territory with Austenland, a principality defined by a single ‘life in small things’ (to borrow from the subtitle of a recent biography)⁹ and originating in a finite number of texts. Through close reading of and reference to Austen-inspired fiction, this and the following chapter look at the versions of Jane Austen that can be found on Wattpad. They also take this fiction as a case study in an account of new and developing reading practices generated on and by the Internet.

In a broad sense, I borrow from Rebecca Black’s characterisation of adolescent online fan fiction sites as ‘affinity spaces’, by tracing how (especially young) readers are drawn into Wattpad by multiple and sometimes transient literary desires.¹⁰ This chapter tracks the ways that Austen and Austen-inspired texts function in an intertextual environment in which urtext mingles not only with tribute text, but also, in ever-widening circles of reference, with further texts inspired by those tributes, both written and visual. Realising the theoretical conjecture that the ‘text becomes the intertext’,¹¹ Austen spin off fiction on Wattpad, across a wide span of genre – including romance, paranormal, young adult, time travel, historical and religious – sits, undifferentiated, alongside public-domain Austen text, imported via Project Gutenberg, Lau remembers, in ‘the very beginning’ when textual traffic on Wattpad was light.¹²

In the Wattpad environment ‘JaneAusten’, ‘Classic author’, is listed as a member since 2 July 2013 and her location, appropriately enough, is identified as Winchester. Under this profile, which can be followed like any other of the Wattpad writers, her major novels can be accessed in the platform’s characteristic chapter form display. In late July the company’s blog invited submissions of ‘reimagine[d] and reinvent[ed] book covers’ for classic texts, including Austen’s, as ‘part of a project to help readers across the globe enjoy the literary classics in new ways, including on their phones and tablets.’¹³ This proximity of Austen and spin off text is typical of digital environments, where visual conformity and the ability to generate, collate and reorganise large amounts of text flatten more traditional distinctions between different types of texts. The Bloomsbury eBook version of Laurie Viera Rigler’s The Complete Jane Austen Addict, for example, contains her two spin off novels ‘and Jane Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice’.

The youthful, textually promiscuous environment of the Wattpad platform means that, unlike the fan fiction and spin off narratives encountered on dedicated Austen fan sites, readers may arrive at Austen-inspired text by a different route; their fondness for werewolf fiction, for example, a desire for the ‘clean’ stories penned by LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) writers, or a preference for fan fiction based on the British boy band, One Direction. Wattpad, in other words, shifts the reception context away from the confines of literary Austen fandom and places it in a universe of visual, aural and literary texts in which a Taylor Swift video, an Ang Lee film or a BBC adaptation is positioned as being equally Austenian as an excerpt from Pride and Prejudice. This is reflected in the spatial arrangement of the website ‘page’, in which the written text is counterbalanced on the periphery with paratextual material, often conflating the literary with the filmic and televisual.

I take as my texts a number of Austen spin off stories on Wattpad, chosen for their representative nature, in terms of delivery systems, genre, themes and relationship to urtext. Like most fiction on Wattpad, these stories were published in serial form and, as a consequence, only one of them – Turning Pages by Tristi Pinkston¹⁴ – was completed at the time of reading.¹⁵

This story is centred around the bookish character of Addie Preston, who works at a library in a ‘small Massachussetts town’, and is dealing with the death of her father in an automobile accident, and the imminent loss of the old library building, which is source of both solace and memory for her. When Blake Hansen, ‘fresh from Kent State where he received his degree in business management’ joins the library staff to facilitate the transition, and takes the job as assistant librarian that Addie expects to be offered, the inevitable tension arises. Over the course of the story’s action, Blake reveals himself to be more sympathetic than his demeanour (and literary tastes) first suggested and, once Blake and Addie have disposed of their initial, inappropriate romantic matches and aspirations – his with Tara, a career-obsessed lawyer to whom he is engaged at the story’s beginning, and hers with Rob, the brother of her best friend Melanie – they declare their love for one another.

The story is additionally propelled by a number of relationship dramas and crises: the struggles of Addie and her stepmother and her siblings with their grief and a financially-necessitated house move, and an episode in which Melanie elopes with her boyfriend, who has been pressuring her sexually, despite her having taking (along with Addie) a chastity vow. She returns home, reputation and virtue intact, after realising her mistake. In the penultimate chapter, Addie discovers that, thanks to money donated by the library’s long-term client, Mrs Harlowe, the old library building is to be converted to the children’s wing of the library, and she is to be instated as head children’s librarian. The novel further resolves its tropes of loss and the need for self-knowledge by flagging emotional healing in Addie’s family of origin, and uniting the young characters [Addie and Blake; Melanie and Blake’s housemate, Chase] in appropriate, and presumably lifelong union. Addie, for her part, ‘knew this wasn’t just a fling for him [Blake], and it wasn’t for me, either. This was something permanent, something real, something forever.’

Turning Pages is laced with Austen echoes, references and themes. ‘Addie’s’ website lists the ‘threads of Jane Austen’ running through the book, pointing out the ‘subtle’ and more explicit connections between Turning Pages and the major novels, though it draws most heavily upon Pride and Prejudice. In this way, Pinkston re-situates Austen’s characters, plots and sometimes words, in a particular contemporary America. The most obvious parallels are between Addie and Elizabeth Bennet, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Janeites at the Keyboard
• 1  Jane Austens Adventures in Wattpadland
• 2  Reading (Austen) on Wattpad
• 3  Thanks for Fanning: Online Austen Fan Fiction
• 4  Canon can only get you so far: Janeites Read and Write The Bennet Brother
• (No) Conclusion
• Appendix: The Bennet Brother
• Bibliography
• Index