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I have a confession to make (or maybe it’s not a confession because I’m not super subtle about it), I read Jane Austen and her associated works for romance; sue me! This semester I feel as if I’ve been very focused on class dynamics, stylistic choices, and historical accuracy, but somewhere in there I lost the reason why I even picked up Jane Austen in the first place: the love stories. Sitting in class today while listening to myself analyze why it’s socially acceptable for a servant to kiss someone instead of talking about why I think it’s really exciting that they were kissing, I came to this realization that I had completely lost some of the simple joy in Austen while analyzing it. Reading Longbourn has been really fun for me, and while the cool and smart reason would be because of the interesting ways in which different worlds (the world of the rich and the world of the servants) are created and traversed by different characters, the real reason is because I NEED to know if James and Sarah are going to end up together. Reading Longbourn has reminded me that, yes, romance can exist in the bounds of Jane Austen, and it’s okay if I spend most of the book living for the slowburn of James and Sarah because they’re really cute together and I’m always a sucker for a grumpy-sunshine trope.

As such, I decided to create a meme really going back to my roots. It’s based on the sad hamster memes where first someone states something and then the sad hamster is supposed to be your disappointed reaction to it. I decided to create this meme where someone, perhaps a real historical accuracy Jane-ite, is saying that romance can’t exist within the bounds of Jane Austen, and then I’m reacting to it in front of Pemberley because it’s THE place for me in Austen, holding Longbourn because it’s the book that fills my romance-loving soul and reminded me of my Austen roots, Ao3 because it’s the place to really get the mushy gushy romance content for Austen that I want, a tote bag with the hand flex and “you have bewitched me body and soul” quote to represent my favorite movie of all time which gives both the Austen content and mushy romance content (I love the US ending and will die on that hill), and a letter that has the first proposal from Darcy to represent that romance does exist in Austen and it’s legal to like those parts of the book best. Don’t get me wrong, I do love a good analysis, but I think sometimes it’s okay to enjoy a piece of fiction and not tear the romance to shreds for the sake of historical accuracy or making a point about Austen’s motivations which I have definitely been guilty of. 

On that note, I have a confession to make about a discussion we had in class like a month ago and brought up again in class today as a fact that we agreed on, but I actually have disagreed with it this whole time and I need to put it out there. I do not agree that Elizabeth fell in love with Darcy because of his owning Pemberley. I think Elizabeth fell in love with Darcy because of the Darcy he is at Pemberley. When she arrives at Pemberley she makes some comments about how lovely it all is, but she still doesn’t want to see him. She starts to feel a bit more amiable towards him only after the housekeeper tells stories of him, but up until she runs into Darcy, she’s reflecting on how glad she is that he’s not coming back until the following day. It’s easy to attribute her love of him to Pemberley, but it’s more complicated than that. After the visit with Georgiana, we get this quote: “As for Elizabeth, her thoughts were at Pemberley this evening more than the last; and the evening, though as it passed it seemed long, was not long enough to determine her feelings towards one in that mansion; and she lay awake two whole hours, endeavouring to make them out”. Her thoughts were not “of” Pemberley, they were “at” Pemberley which I think is a really important distinction because the paragraph would still function with “of Pemberley”, but Austen specifically doesn’t write that here. Also, the rest of the passage goes on to list off his qualities that she’s beginning to fall for and not once does she mention his riches, even in a like, “What a good bonus!” way.

I’m going to plug the musical below here again (it’s really good), so if you start at 1:24:04 and watch to 1:28:13 there’s a song called “That’s Not the Man That I Know” that I think really captures this whole idea. The tone of the song starts very combative, like Lizzie is battling with the idea of the Darcy she knows and that of the Darcy she’s hearing about. She softens a bit for a second where we get the “oh he has a nice house” but she goes right back to the combative tone upon seeing him. If it had truly been the house, she would have completely softened to him the moment she recognized that Pemberley is quite nice. However, the tone doesn’t soften to a real affectionate tone until he’s conversed with her aunt and uncle and invited her to dine with Georgina, real evidence that Darcy at Pemberley really isn’t the man she *thinks* she knows and this to me shows that the real Pemberley effect is that of Darcy at Pemberley, NOT the riches which Pemberley represents.

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Bridgerton is just socially acceptable Jane Austen Fanfiction, change my mind.

I have a friend who is really into Dungeons and Dragons and one of the most interesting things I’ve learned from her because of this is how mainstream role playing games have become. There’s a TV show on Amazon Prime called Vox Machina that’s actually based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign called Critical Role that was streamed on Twitch and as a Podcast on Spotify. In other words, a game of roleplaying between a few friends has become a popular TV show for people who don’t even roleplay to enjoy. Naturally, when I heard about The Good Society, I was curious to see what content is out there on the internet. So, I searched it up on Spotify and, lo and behold, a podcast of people playing The Good Society does exist. Each episode is approximately 4 hours long, and I unfortunately do not have the time to dedicate to listening in full. However, the latest episode (from December of 2020) is titled “Zombies”, so I had to at least give it a brief listen (Here’s a YouTube link to a video of them playing through this episode, but I listened in Podcast format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TiAgFD4DMw&t=9256s). In the episode description itself it’s called a “one-shot” which I feel like I only ever hear applied to fanfiction (more on that later though). 

I started by listening to the first 10 minutes. In those we got an ad break, a brief introduction of the players, and also a song meant to give an overview of the game containing the lyric, “ballers gonna ball”? Then they start to move into the full description of characters, kind of along the lines of what we did in class today. At this point, I learned that they were combining legitimate expansion packs with names like, “Sense, Sensibility, and Swordsmanship” and “Pride, Prejudice, and Practical Magics”. I really needed to see what was going on when they threw all these things together so I just skipped to a random point in the podcast and tried to figure out what was going on. I landed around the 2 hour and 33 minute mark where they are in the letter writing part of the game. This was really interesting because the letters are very “in character” interactions where the players are all talking in accents and using not super modern vocabulary where the rest of the game seems like just a lot of friendly chatting and hanging out. I stuck around just for long enough to find out that they’ve come up with a character who’s going to bring some zombies into the house that’s central to their game. At this point I’d listened to ~30 minutes of this episode so I called it a day, but it was definitely fun to listen to them really get into character and then work together to set some things up and then get in character again and it kind of made me want to play too. 

All I could really think the whole time I listened (and when I first was reading about this game) was that it felt very fanfiction-esque? These characters felt a little more different from Austen characters than our characters, maybe because the players are more experienced and had more time to develop the characters’ personalities, but when we were playing in class today, I felt like if you changed a few names we were just writing Elinor Dashwood/George Wickham fanfiction. When I first heard “Jane Austen roleplay” I thought it was a crazy idea, but the more I learn about it I feel like it’s just Jane Austen fanfic in a collaborative way and I kind of love it.

Having heard about the Dungeons and Dragons show I started to think about what a The Good Society show would look like, but then I thought: Bridgerton exists. Would the writers of Bridgerton call what they did roleplaying? Probably not. But I bet they did sit down together and do almost exactly what we did in class today, coming up with characters and relationships and finding ways to sort of connect them based on that. That kind of got me thinking about the like levels of social acceptance of these things, so I made a meme.

The template here being where as you go down the diagram the description is supposed to be of cooler and more “mind-blowing” things, but all of the items are sort of interlinked as like small steps up from one another. Seriously though, why don’t we call Bridgerton Jane Austen fanfic? I don’t mean to suggest that all regency-themed things are Jane Austen-based; she did not invent the regency. But, the tropes and character hallmarks utilized by Austen show up again and again in fanfic, in romance novels, and yes, even in Bridgerton, whether it's in the meddling mother characters or the brooding rich men. I'm not sure whether we like to pretend we're totally original or admitting to writing fanfic is still too socially unacceptable, but on some level, the background in which modern-day regency romance is set is the world created by Jane Austen, and I think as long as the regency romance genre is around we’ll always be able to find a new bit of Austen within it.

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This week’s selection is a TikTok thirst trap of Daniel Cleaver formatted in a series of clips with Beyonce’s “Donk” playing in the background. It starts with a clip where Daniel Cleaver (played by Hugh Grant in the 2001 Bridget Jones’s Diary movie adaptation) has fallen into the lake and is standing half-submerged and soaking wet with a half-buttoned shirt. While I think we’ve learned that the internet loves a man in a half-buttoned wet shirt, I do find it interesting that where we trace that to (for this class at least) is the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy has the wet shirt. As a matter of fact, BBC Darcy is the same actor who plays Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’ Diary. The first clip is meant to draw the audience in, so it’s typically the clip a creator thinks is most persuasive (the most attractive video of an actor/character). Thus, the creator must have thought Cleaver in a Darcy-esque wet shirt moment is the most attractive scene of his character. To me this begs the question, do we find Wickham (Cleaver) most attractive when he is most like Darcy (which we’ll get back to)? Or, more generally, why are we finding Cleaver attractive at all?

I wouldn’t be so curious about a one-off thirst trap because there’s always someone who’s going to find a character attractive (even the ones the general population loathes), but when I searched Bridget Jones’s Diary on TikTok, I’d say a solid 50-60% of the videos were Daniel Cleaver thirst traps. If we’re reading this as a Pride and Prejudice adaptation, he’s Mr. Wickham, so Mr. Wickham thirst traps should be 50-60% of the Pride and Prejudice media. However, when I went to find a Mr. Wickham edit, I was incapable of it despite searching under three different hashtags and being on the lookout for any Wickham from any close-to-book adaptation. So, Wickham is not attractive, but Cleaver is, even though they’re meant to be the same character?

The easiest answer for this difference is the obvious one, that Hugh Grant is attractive enough to make most media consumers forget about Cleaver’s unsavory characteristics. This seems probable, but I think there’s a bit more to this. The first layer for me is the likeability of the main girl character which Wickham/Cleaver is wronging. Personally, I don’t like Bridget. I feel bad for her, occasionally I even empathize with her, but I don’t like her and I can see how other people would feel the same way. Elizabeth Bennet, on the other hand, is one of my favorite book characters. We talked in class today about Bridget being a sort of anti-hero, which I definitely see, but there is a solid amount of TikToks which idolize Bridget, so I’m not sure if we can totally mark down the lessened Cleaver hate as more hate towards the person he’s wronging. Also, as someone who dislikes Bridget, I still dislike Cleaver, so that can’t be the only reason.

The next layer is perhaps that Cleaver’s wrongs are less severe than Wickham’s in the book. He didn’t elope with her younger sister, but Cleaver did make really awful comments about Bridget’s body, just be a generally bad boyfriend (dismissing her wishes, shirking family obligations, etc.), and cheat on her! I feel as if that’s about equivalent, especially for modern day, but there may be people who feel differently.

The final layer that I come to then is kind of calling back to my previous point of who the wrongs are directed at. If we look at Wickham eloping with young girls, then there is an argument to be made that a large part of Wickham’s problematic behavior is directed at Darcy because of his attempting to elope with Darcy’s sister and begging/scheming for money. Cleaver wrongs Darcy by being the man his wife cheats on him with, but arguably the responsibility is at least shared between Cleaver and Darcy’s wife. Meanwhile, Darcy’s sister would have been too young and naive to know better, so that’s definitely on Wickham. Therefore, does the internet like Cleaver more than his Wickham equivalent because he wrongs Darcy less? Is it easier to focus on his looks/charm and glaze over the rest when Darcy (whose edits make up the rest of the Bridget Jones TikTok presence) is not being as grievously wronged? And, to call back to my original question, do we find Wickham (Cleaver) most attractive when he is most like Darcy? I don’t want to reduce all media consumers to Darcy-mania, but I feel as if there’s an element of it here. He’s found more attractive when he’s wronging Darcy less and when he’s doing Darcy things (like being soaking wet from a dip in a lake/pond). This, to me, suggests that Darcymania can spread even into pieces of media more abstracted from the source text where even characters who are very loosely based on Darcy get preference and the characters around him feel the effects of that.

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This week, I decided to make my own meme. I used a template of “I bring a sort of X vibe to Y that Z don’t really like”. The original meme actually reads “I bring a sort of 'we should all quit' vibe to the workplace that bosses don't really like”. It’s been around for a while, but gained popularity on TikTok fairly recently where people cover up sections of the sentence and turn it into anything they’d like from fan content to funny stories from their own life. I decided to make this into a little piece of commentary on the experience of a romance reader with Jane Austen because, as someone who is a big romance novel fan, Jane Austen novels often feel like you’re getting so close to exactly what you want, just for the “interesting” part to be skipped over (This is why fanfiction and the Pride and Prejudice 2005 end credit scene are perfect to me, and I will die on that hill). Don’t get me wrong, I still have an appreciation for Austen novels and Pride and Prejudice is up there in my top 3 favorite books, but it’s not because I see them as the romance novels I typically go for. Honestly, I can’t call Jane Austen novels romances. You certainly get bits and pieces of it, but they aren’t fully about romance.

What was really fun about this template to me though was how putting Jane Austen in to fill the last blank makes it sound as if Jane Austen herself is purposefully removing the romance from the books and toying with the romance readers. I think I can agree with that on some level. We’ve talked before about how there’s an idea that Jane Austen is purposely depriving her readers of the romance aspects they are looking for. To me, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more of a situation where romance is just not that important to Austen. I think she knows that she’s excluding something, it’s on purpose, but I don’t know if it’s with malicious intent so much as with a lack of interest in it. I wasn’t really sure how to feel on this point though until in Secrets in the Snow, where we get a bit of a look into Jane Austen’s life. It’s a YA novel and a murder mystery so things are probably dramatized, but as far as I understood from class today it seems to be overall a pretty accurate depiction of her circumstances. Assuming the book is an accurate representation of her life, I can understand why romance may not have been all that important to her. She seems to have been living comfortably (at least not poorly enough to be desperate to marry) and mostly free to write as she pleased, which seemed to be her real goal in life. She didn’t want any of the things like money or companionship which might entice other ladies of the time to marry, and it’s entirely possible she didn’t ever really fall in love (the whole Tom Lefroy thing would be amusing for me, but seems not super realistic). Because of this, I do think that Austen is purposefully excluding romance, but it’s not meant to be a vicious dig at romance readers; if it’s anything it may be a situation where she sees it as being below her. However, the structure of this meme does function in a way where if people see Austen as a more vicious/cruel being they can definitely get that from this meme too which I liked when making it.

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I read fanfic instead of studying for biochem, sue me

For this week’s Tumblr, I read/sampled (one I couldn’t finish and one I haven’t finished yet) four fanfics. Fanfic as a space is something I’ve discussed previously on Tumblr in a Sense and Sensibility post, but I discussed the idea of a fix-it fic then. This time, however, I read a variety of fanfics that seem to use the formula we started to touch on in class of Pride and Prejudice and (Fill in the blank). I really like this formula; as a fan of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it’s hard not to. An idea was introduced right at the end of class of this “and” adding something in which reveals more about the story. Harding probably thinks this reveals the inner hatred and fear, but I’d argue it can reveal a variety of things. We discussed in the very beginning of class the idea of violence being written into Jane Austen and, as I said then, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies we see a good amount of violence. I’d argue this violence has been there all along in the vicious banter Lizzie and Darcy engage in- adding the “and Zombies” simply allowed audiences to see it play out in a physical way. Fanfic takes this idea of adding something in a variety of directions, and I think each one I read, despite solely sticking to fanfics in which Elizabeth and Darcy end up together (I have strong opinions about coupling off properly),  reveals/unravels something unique in or about Jane Austen’s writing or story which you might not get in Pride and Prejudice itself. 

My favorite read was Neither Duty Nor Honour which I’m going to call Pride and Prejudice and Single-father Darcy. This fic exists in the world/story of Pride and Prejudice, but if Darcy had married his cousin and had a daughter with her before she died. I will confess to being a sucker for a single father romance when done well (which this was) but besides the overall fun time I was having, there’s a really interesting plot divergence when Georgiana Darcy comes with her brother to Netherfield. Wickham then cons Lydia Bennet into helping him meet with Georgiana in secret. Both Lydia and Georgiana think he’s in love with them, but he’s just in love with Georgiana’s money. Luckily, Lydia overhears a conversation of his and saves the day. This fanfic, besides the adorable development of Darcy and Lizzie’s relationship, reveals a potential for Lydia to be something other than the silly girl she seems to end up doomed to be forever in Pride and Prejudice. I really liked this because Lydia has felt very annoying to me, but on some level I always felt that if one of her plans had failed she could have turned out as a sensible girl. We get a characterization of Lydia here that kind of “reveals” an idea in Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Bennet sends Lydia to Brighton in hopes to, “teach her her own insignificance,” which in this fic is made possible by the addition of the Single-father Darcy. Overall, my biggest complaint is that it felt rushed; I would have gladly read 17 more chapters of this fanfic.

A really cute read was some say it makes the world go round, some say that's absurd which I’m calling Pride and Prejudice and Modern-day Wedding Planning. This is a modern au (au means alternate universe, so basically you can put any characters in just about setting/fictional or real world) where Jane and Bingley are getting married and Lizzie and Darcy (Will)  have to help them with wedding planning but end up falling in love. There are a lot of really cute odes to the book such as Darcy and Lizzie’s favorite wedding venue option being “Gardiner house” and Darcy’s tailor being called “Rosings and Park” where the tailor himself is a very Mr. Collins-esque character. There was also a comment at the end about a “Palmer-Jennings confrontation” which is an ode to Sense and Sensibility. This fic had a lot of content from Darcy’s point of view, which I think we get a little of in FID in Pride and Prejudice but nothing like, “Will would’ve agreed to go for a dip in shark-infested waters if Lizzy suggested it.” It was overall really fun and sweet and I think adding the Modern-day Wedding Plan really allowed me to see a bit of the kind of mushier and cute side of Pride and Prejudice because all this fic really did is take the Darcy musings from the book like, “Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her” and reveal/amplify them into 6 chapters of adorable fun.

I’m not going to linger on this one for long because I actually couldn’t finish it. It’s called An Ever-Fixed Mark and I’m calling it Pride and Prejudice and Soulmates? I was really excited about this one because it centers around the premise of soulmate marks (a trope where soulmates have markings that help them recognize/find each other), but I quickly realized that it’s more about playing with the idea of soulmate misunderstandings than getting Darcy and Lizzie together. The first four chapters are long and Lizzie and Colonel Fitzwilliam got engaged because the name on Lizzie’s wrist is Fitzwilliam (which is OBVIOUSLY Fitzwilliam Darcy but she hates him so she marries the Colonel instead) at which point I got annoyed because I’m here for the Darcy and Lizzie content. The fic does bring up Udolpho so I can tell the author did their time-period research or at least has read other Jane Austen, which I can admire, but I wanted to get to the good stuff, not sit through Lizzie’s first marriage. I can’t really tell what this fic reveals because I didn’t finish it, but I will say that it’s probably the closest to Austen’s style as any of the fics I’ve read have gotten so if you are less passionate about a Lizzie/Darcy pairing this may be a good read for you!

Finally, I’d like to give an honorable mention to the fic I’m still reading, That First Meeting, which I’m calling Pride and Prejudice and Rom-com Bookstore Meeting. This is a fic set in the Pride and Prejudice with the same plot but Lizzie and Darcy bump (literally, I love Hallmark tropes) into each other in a bookstore before Bingley arrives at Netherfield. I’m really enjoying it thus far (six chapters in). It’s cute, but still feels somewhat book accurate. As I’ve not finished it I can’t say with certainty what it reveals, but the mushier side we found in some say it makes the world go round, some say that's absurd is definitely here. Every chapter (thus far) is from Darcy’s perspective, so that also reveals/assigns a bit more of his feelings in situations where we might only get a facial expression in the book. I also wanted to mention, there is an interesting parallel that makes me wonder if the author has read Northanger Abbey. When they meet, Lizzie asks Darcy if he likes novels because, “I have found that most men consider novels to be rather frivolous and unworthy of their time.” This was already feeling very “Jane Austen manifesto about novels” in Northanger Abbey, but Lizzie then goes on to recommend a gothic romance to Darcy which sealed the deal for me on this being a crossover. Needless to say, I’m excited to see where the rest of this fanfic goes!

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Over spring break, I watched the movie Unleashing Mr. Darcy. The moment I watched the trailer, I knew I had to see it for myself. I’m a big Pride and Prejudice fan and a big fan of Pride and Prejudice adaptations, so believe me when I say I wanted to like this movie…but I just couldn’t. It was almost as if the makers of this movie couldn’t commit to this being an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice? I think it’s easiest to explain by showing, so I’m going to do a summary and as I go I’ll focus on a few scenes to analyze and give some time stamps so you can watch the scenes for yourself!

The movie centers around Lizzie Bennett, a private school teacher in Washington DC who’s side job is being a dog handler/walker (the joke here being that Lizzie is fond of walking in the book, just not with dogs). She gets fired from her teaching position for refusing to let Grant Markham pay for his son to pass her class and becomes a dog handler for a family friend in New York full time. Shortly into her dog handling career, she meets Donovan Darcy, a judge for dog shows who she immediately hates. The first time she runs into Darcy in New York was the scene in the trailer that caught my eye. They do a typical Hollywood meet cute where she bends down to pick up her bag and sees his dog first but then realizes who the owner is. They immediately start fighting but calm down a bit at the start of this clip: 16:20-16:38. What I really like about this clip is the wildly out of place, “My good opinion once lost, is lost forever”. They are fully in the 21st century, but Darcy pulls this direct quote from the book out of nowhere and it sounds so wrong for the era. The follow-up, “What does that mean,” from Lizzie being answered with, “Nothing,” was the cherry on top. With this book quote, I’m fairly certain they’d committed to making a Pride and Prejudice adaptation here, but it doesn’t work in the context of the movie. I think I could have liked this quote’s inclusion, but it makes no sense. In the book, the quote is foreshadowing to what we later learn about Mr. Wickham’s past, but in the movie Mr. Wickham (who I think is supposed to be represented by Grant Markham but my only evidence is that he’s the “villain”) doesn’t have the history with Mr. Darcy to make the quote relevant, so having it in there does nothing for the plot and just makes the movie look silly.  

As the movie continues, Lizzie and Darcy keep meeting and they’re caught “canoodling” at a dog spa (he’s brushing a piece of fur off her face). That brings me to another thing that made me strongly dislike this movie, while at dog shows Mr. Darcy flirts with her through dog descriptions. I know what you’re thinking, how could you do that? Watch this clip and experience the weird eye contact for yourself and then try to deny that Darcy is somehow describing her and a dog simultaneously (28:14-28:30). When Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice I don’t think she meant for Darcy to come across as someone who would flirt with Lizzie using dog descriptions, but somehow these producers got that message and I really wish they hadn’t! But in another point for why I think they couldn’t commit to this being an adaptation, the other judge in the clip is named Mr. Bingley but he is not Darcy’s best friend who falls in love with Jenna (Lizzie’s sister). I’m just confused on why they would make a character named Bingley but not have him be the character of Bingley in the book.

After this, Lizzie has to stop being a dog handler because Darcy is a judge and people think it’s a conflict of interest. She ends up staying in New York, dog sitting for Darcy, and gets invited to his estate for a charity gala through her sister Jenna and Henry. While at the estate, Markham shows up and Darcy almost fights him (something about Hollywood loves to make Jane Austen men fight, but that’s another conversation), and afterwards Lizzie and Darcy end up kissing on the dance floor (clip: 1:09:00-1:09:30). There’s some weird scene where Darcy tells Henry the kiss didn’t mean anything and Jenna overhears. So, Lizzie and Jenna leave, but as they’re leaving Darcy does the whole proposal of insulting Lizzie while professing himself in love with her and rounds it out with the gem, “I’ve decided that we belong together” (clip 1:12:20-1:13:00). I kind of see how this is supposed to be the first proposal from the books, but I hated it. It just felt like unnecessary conflict whereas in the book at least Darcy had actual concerns about her family and connections that were a little vain but valid. 

After Lizzie returns to New York, Darcy sends her a letter. This is another point that I found really weird for them to take directly from the book. It’s the 21st century, you’d think he’d send a paragraph text. Instead, there’s a letter. I think this really emphasizes the importance of the letter in the book. We talked a lot about the letter in class today, one of the points mentioned being about how putting his thoughts on paper and then handing it to Lizzie is a way of distancing himself from the communication and closing off opportunity for rebuttal. This is really shown here where not only is it not a text so Lizzie can’t respond immediately, but he also has it delivered so he doesn’t see Lizzie face to face. The makers of the movie really captured the distance from Darcy that the physical letter creates by using a letter in what’s supposed to be the 21st century, but it’s so out of place for the rest of the movie that I have a hard time appreciating it. However, their inclusion of the letter (while leaving out half of the rest of the plot) does show its importance, even if it’s poorly done.

Finally, the typical Jane Austen ending happens and everyone gets married, yay! Honestly, I was just kind of happy the movie was over. Them refusing to give the actual names to anyone but Darcy and Lizzie, completely erasing some of what I think are the most compelling parts of the plot like Mr. Wickham’s history with Darcy’s sister, and randomly throwing in quotes and letters directly from the book got on my nerves. If you want to watch a good and fun adaptation, go watch Pride and Prejudice: A New Musical, it’s a quality production that isn’t afraid to commit to being an adaptation (*cough* unlike the movie I just spent 2 hours of my life on *cough*). But, if this sounded great to you and you just can’t get enough of these two and their weird dog-centric relationship, never fear, there’s a sequel!

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Here we have a Tik Tok which I randomly scrolled upon two nights ago (whether it got added to my favorites collection is between me and whoever is monitoring my Tik Tok activity). This Tik Tok is fairly simple, but it’s really funny to me. It starts with a picture of a bunch of nurses/doctors running with a stretcher captioned, “she’s losing blood what’s her type?!?”, then the next slide is a collage of nine photos of Matthew Macfayden’s Mr. Darcy from the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie (1 of the 9 photos being the Hand Flex itself). The joke here is that the doctors were asking about the patient’s blood type and instead we are provided with the patient’s type in men (Type, according to urban dictionary, is “a preference or what you look for in a significant other”). This is accompanied by lyrics from the song Soaked by Shy Smith (feel free to look up the lyrics, but I’m afraid of Tumblr’s moderation). This template with the play on the word “type” is used across Tik Tok for all sorts of characters and celebrities both real and fictional (Please read “all sorts of characters” as “I’ve seen a Simon from Alvin and the Chipmunks one under the same sound”). I’d categorize this template as one of the many varieties of thirst traps which the internet has to offer and just thinking about Mr. Darcy in the context of a thirst trap is incredibly funny to me. This thirst trap in particular was really good, I think, in its use of the song Soaked because two of the included photos are of him obviously having just come out of the rain (part of what I like to call the Wet Darcy Effect) and even though I don’t think that’s what the writer of the song was going for I like to imagine it was. The fact that the Hand Flex got its own picture in the collage also really made this Tik Tok complete for me. Side note: When I first watched the 2005 version I didn’t really care about the hand flex, but my mom pointed out that it’s probably the only time in this era that a man and woman would be making skin to skin contact except for maybe dancing (even then they should technically be wearing gloves). So, the hand flex is meant to be a sort of reaction to sparks Darcy is feeling just by helping her up into a carriage…I was soon converted to a Hand Flex fan. This is a really good example for me though of what we started to get into at the end of class today with “Darcymania”. What is it about Mr. Darcy that makes him such an object of internet fascination? Jane Austen wasn’t exactly writing him to be some sort of incredibly hot heartthrob with crazy sexual appeal; he’s just described as a handsome rich man with a tendency to be incredibly awkward and possibly even proud in social situations (which during regency times made him a catch for sure, but modern standards tend to be raised past money). And yet, the Wet Darcy Effect has spread its ripples of staring at soaking wet regency men through popular media from TikTok thirst traps to Bridgerton (see image below).

I think there’s definitely a level of adaptations having influence here, especially with something like Mr. Darcy in the rain or in a pond that never actually happens in the book. But, there’s also something to be said about Mr. Darcy the book character. As an avid romance consumer, I do think there’s something incredibly romantic about falling in love with someone you’re determined to hate, as Mr. Darcy does in the book. Even in the first few chapters we’re getting lines that are certainly making my heart melt like, “Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.” Additionally (as we’ll get into later so I don’t want to spoil it too much) he’s willing to accept the consequences of his actions and rectify them for her. If we’re thinking about Mr. Darcy with a sort of “I can fix him mindset”, then I’d argue he does the fixing by himself by the end of the book. I wish I could come to a conclusion on why the internet has made the jump from “Mr. Darcy is a good romantic interest” to “Let’s make thirst traps and put him half-dressed on candles like you would with religious figures (see below)”, but I cannot. As someone who has personally made the jump from “Hey, he’s kind of an intriguing character” to “my roommates buy me things with his face on them”, I can kind of see the appeal, but crossing the line to sexualizing him and making thirst traps has never once occurred to me so there’s definitely still some missing pieces.

Here's the Tik Tok link for crediting purposes:

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As I believe I’ve mentioned previously, I have read Sense and Sensibility before. What I have not mentioned previously, out of respect for spoilers, is that when I finished Sense and Sensibility, on a January evening in 2021, I promptly slammed the book shut and stormed into my mother’s room to rant. What could have earned this book a 3.5/5 rating (note: my rating scale sometimes extends to ∞/5 so this is a very low score) and the comment, “Excuse me? What was that ending???” in my Google Sheets reading log? Simply put: it was Elinor and Colonel Brandon not ending up together.

I will readily admit that I got into Austen for the romance; it’s hard not to when your first exposure to her works is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and you’re a romance-obsessed 16 year old. Thus, a pairing of characters which I deemed unsuitable entirely ruined most of my enjoyment of the book at the time. This year, I decided to read Sense and Sensibility with a more open mind and a determination to like Edward as a love interest. Unfortunately, Edward still fell (quite) short for me. As someone who sees a lot of myself in Elinor with a brother who has Marianne tendencies, I can’t help but wish Elinor the absolute best. I just wanted to see her hard work constantly caring for her sister (who gets herself into such avoidable trouble) pay off. Yet, Marianne somehow ends up with the best option, and reluctantly at that! At this point, I should state that I cannot possibly do justice to the level of research (read: obsession) I have done into this in one Tumblr post. Here’s a meme I threw together that I think encapsulates it (picture me as the guy in the tie, my annotated book as the board behind him, and my roommate as the woman just barely in frame) (I’m serious, my roommates did not know the plot of Sense and Sensibility before this week):

Despite my best intentions, by the middle of Volume 2 I was highlighting every phrase that I thought could possibly mean that Elinor and Brandon were meant to be together- some may call it willful misunderstanding, I call it careful analysis. Example 1: Of Mrs. Dashwood saying that Marianne would be happier to marry Colonel Branon than Elinor, “Elinor was half inclined to ask her reason for thinking so, because satisfied that none founded on an impartial consideration of their age, characters, or feelings, could be given (254) .” Was this likely meant to serve as a way to show Mrs. Dashwood’s over-sensibility and lack of sense for basic facts like age? Yes. Does the word “feelings” at the end of this quote send me into a tailspin of possibilities of what that could mean? Also yes. In the interest of your time, I will not put them all here, but I have a collection of quotes which I am willing to share. Additionally, as proof that there are other believers out there, here is a reddit thread about them for your perusal, and my favorite comment!

I could say much more on the subject of Elinor and Colonel Brandon themselves, but I’m going to restrain myself here and focus more on the fanfiction which I provided as the center for my post today. This fic is titled Added Sensibility and is a 19 chapter WIP (work-in-progress). For those unaware, fanfiction is a wonderful online world of writing where anything can happen to any character that has ever existed. Do you think Harry Potter’s  Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger should have ended up together? There’s fanfiction about that! Do you wish Rey and Kylo Ren of the Star Wars Sequels got to live happily ever after together? There’s fanfiction about that too! This last example would be what is termed a “Fix-it” fic in the fanfiction world. These are based on the idea that if you think something went wrong somewhere in a piece of fiction, you can go back and “fix it” for yourself… and the entire internet. Elinor and Colonel Brandon ending up together is something I would deem to be a “fix-it”. Thus, I went straight to AO3 (Archive Of Our Own- a popular fanfiction publishing website) and searched for Colonel Brandon/Elinor Dashwood. Side note: This was actually the second fic I tried for this week’s post. The first was only 6 chapters but wrapped up quickly with Marianne running away to join the feminist movement along with Colonel Brandon’s ward. It was not what I wanted, so I gave Added Sensibility a try even though I would normally not touch a WIP.

I can attest 10 chapters (the equivalent of 134 ebook pages on my phone) in that this is a great read. It’s not Jane Austen, no one will ever be able to replicate her masterful use of language to create layer after layer of sharp wit, but it’s pretty good in my opinion. There’s enough plot and character development present so that it’s not a totally 2d story, but the main focus is on their developing love story, starting from when Elinor and Marianne go to stay with Mrs. Jennings in town. What really caught my attention (besides my glee at someone having written Elinor and Colonel Brandon together pretty much exactly the way I wanted it) was the characterization of Mrs. Jennings. The author once writes of Mrs. Jennings, “The woman was the complete opposite of an enigma, and yet, Elinor struggled to comprehend her thoughts.” In class we talked about how Mrs. Jennings seems to be so close to “getting it” sometimes, but then she just turns back into this very flat and gossipy character. In this fanfic, the author seems to go through with it and gives her more dimension and credit for intelligence than I think Jane Austen ever meant to, but it brings me back to when we talked about the idea that you can pull any character out of an Austen novel and write a novel on them. This fanfic really supports that for me. While Elinor and Colonel Brandon were characters who have had their characters decently sketched out in Sense and Sensibility, this fanfic gives dimension to other characters, like Mrs. Jennings, who previously were more of the backdrop for where the Dashwoods existed. I do think Jane Austen is rolling in her grave over the amount of ungloved hand contact and improperly private conversations that occur in this fanfic, but I will 100% own to being the target audience for the American ending of Pride and Prejudice (2005), so all the mushy gushy affection in this fanfic is right up my alley. Overall, I would recommend this fanfic and I will be finishing it in my free time!

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This post is for a niche audience of people who like both Ted Lasso and Sense and Sensibility. Luckily, I am one of those people! In this Tumblr post, the author suggests that Ted Lasso actually has romantic side plots based on Sense and Sensibility by placing side by side images of the characters from the Sense and Sensibility 1995 adaptation and from Ted Lasso. (Warning: Spoilers ahead for Ted Lasso and Sense and Sensibility) For those of you who haven’t seen Ted Lasso, it’s a show about an American football coach who is hired by the owner of a British football team, Rebecca, to coach her team in the hopes that he will fail and upset her ex-husband who was the former owner. As the show goes on, Rebecca comes clean to Ted and decides that revenge is not the best option. Rebecca and Ted become friends, as do Rebecca and Keeley. Keeley is a character who starts as the shallow but sweet girlfriend of Jamie Tartt, the narcissistic star player of the football team, but as the show goes on she is revealed to have much more depth to her and she eventually stands up to Jamie as he is generally a bad boyfriend and begins to use other girls to make Keeley jealous and make himself look more popular. Following this break up, Keeley begins to date Roy Kent, a much older grumpy football player who has been telling Keeley that she could do better all along.  Rebecca is generally very reserved about her personal life, but as she and Keeley get closer they share a friendship in which they each share their emotions in a way that Rebecca rarely does with anyone else.

I think this Tumblr user means to suggest that the writers of Ted Lasso wanted Rebecca to represent Elinor, Keeley to represent Marianne, Jamie Tartt to represent Willoughby, Roy Kent to represent Colonel Brandon, and Ted Lasso to represent Edward Ferrars. I can’t speak for what exactly the writers were thinking, but this is a really compelling idea for me. Obviously, Willoughby in the book was not a football playing womanizer…but Willoughby did use Marianne’s innocence against her and was a bit of a player generally in the same way that Jamie takes advantage of Keeley in the show. Elinor wasn’t exactly the high-powered owner of a football club like Rebecca, but she does have a tendency to conceal her emotions from everyone except Marianne on rare occasions in much the same way Rebecca conceals her emotions from everyone except Keeley. Roy Kent is definitely the grumpy older man who’s been there for Keeley all along in the way Colonel Brandon is there for Marianne. There’s also a scene where Keeley is reading Sense and Sensibility which makes me wonder if the writers were including that as a little inside joke for themselves. Ted Lasso as Edward is a bit of a stretch for me just because Edward in the book is quite reserved whereas Ted in the show is probably the most outgoing character. Additionally, I have not finished the show, but I do know that it doesn’t end with everyone paired off as they are in Sense and Sensibility. Despite the different ending, I really like the idea that even if they aren’t specifically advertising it as an adaptation, Jane Austen is still influencing the media of today (for reference: the last season of Ted Lasso ended in May of 2023) by plot lines, tropes, or even just by reference to her works!

I swear to god if those men in the Ted Lasso writers room pull out a sense and sensibility themed plot.

The older more emotionally reserved leading lady who conceals her emotions but desperately wants love.

The younger hopeless romantic who wants to be swept off her feet.

The hopless romantic enters into an exciting world wind romance with a rich attractive partner who showers her with attention and gifts. Unfortunately, they have a public scandal which they had already done once before and they choose their reputation over our leading lady.

Eventually, the hopeless romantic realizes that the grumpy old man who’s been looking out for her and allows her to be herself while grounding her is the one for her and they end up happily together.

Back to our other leading lady.

She ends up with the kind man who does not appear to be agreat romantic lead but boasts a quiet intimacy that makes people attach to him, including a previous relationship that is still prominent in his life. Everyone notes how good of friends they are because no one suspects there could be anything but friendship - they continuly miss chances and hold emotions close to their chests. Both putting others needs before their own happiness. Our leading lady eventually lets her guard down and allows herself to express her emotions to him instead of keeping them to herself. They too end up happily together.

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This week's find is an edit of 2007 Northanger Abbey movie to the song Seven by Taylor Swift. The TikTok shows different clips of Catherine, Henry Tilney, and General Tilney as the lyrics run along the bottom of the screen in a stylized white font. Edits, generally, can be a range of things, but in my research are typically videos in which footage from a movie, TV show, or celebrity is cropped and rearranged to align with a chosen song. Taylor Swift songs themselves are becoming increasingly popular in mainstream media, but have been popular for quite a while in the #booktok and fandom scene on TikTok and Youtube. This song in particular, Seven, can be found in edits for everything from Harry Potter to Five Nights at Freddy’s. Typically, it is used to highlight an unhappy home life with the phrase “your house is haunted” and an escape from that home life with another character in a platonic or romantic relationship with the phrase “I think you should come live with me”. 

For Northanger Abbey in particular, I think this song was an interesting choice. With the first line, “I think your house is haunted,” over a clip where Catherine is talking to Henry Tilney followed by a clip of Catherine walking through what I assume is Northanger Abbey (side note: I have not watched the movie, but I did some IMDB sleuthing), it sets up Henry as the “your” in this song and thus the idea of Henry Tilney’s house being haunted. This brings us back to the idea we discussed in class of Jane Austen flipping the tone of the novel from a story about a naive girl on vacation to one of a gothic novel as Catherine arrives at Northanger Abbey. Northanger Abbey is described in a large amount of detail as Catherine tours it, but also in how Catherine sees it at night and daydreams about it. Northanger Abbey, in this way, builds up to this sort of scary haunted house in the mind of Catherine. Following this line is, “your dad is always mad and that must be why,” with a clip of General Tilney storming around a corner. In most edits, the creators use mad in a sense that I usually think of it, as being angry, which I think applies to how the General looks in the scene. However, while I was considering this edit, it seems like maybe there’s a double meaning here. As Catherine builds up this haunted house in her mind, she becomes convinced that General Tilney murdered his wife. She starts to obsess over all of his actions, turning what could be construed as pretty typical behaviors to evidence that he must be coping with murdering his wife. Mad, aside from meaning angry, can also mean crazy, something that could probably be used to describe someone who’s murdered his wife. I don’t often think about this meaning of the word “mad” but I think it’s a really interesting application here, whether the creator meant to use it in both of its meanings or not. After this is the line, “I think you should come live with me.” This follows with more scenes of Catherine and Henry Tilney together (side note 2: my best guess based on the emotions of the recurring scene shown of Catherine and Henry talking is that it is when Catherine tells Henry she thinks his father murdered his mother, I could be very off here because I haven’t finished the book, but I wanted to put an official guess out there for when I do watch the movie). As I have not finished the book, I can only really hazard a guess based on previous edits I’ve watched, but I think the general meaning of the rest of the video is to (hopefully) convey how Catherine and Henry find happiness in being together despite the sort of haunted sadness permeating Henry Tilney’s home.

And for some added enjoyment, here is some other Northanger Abbey media I found that made me giggle and I would analyze given more time:

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This meme comes from Sparknote’s Twitter three years ago. It depicts Batman, who is labeled as Jane Austen, slapping Robin, who is labeled as “anyone named Richard”. I chose this meme because the very first thing I highlighted in Northanger Abbey was in Austen’s description of Catherine Morland’s father as, “a very respectable man, though his name was Richard.” On the topic of names, I don’t actually know why Jane Austen seems to think so ill of the name Richard, but based on my brief perusal of Google it seems like this is not the only time in her works that Austen names a character Richard and then proceeds to insult them. It may seem like a bit of a stretch to think that Austen is categorizing characters based on their name, but considering that two of the characters in her works described as being the most beautiful and accomplished are both named Jane (Jane Fairfax of Emma and Jane Bennet of Pride and Prejudice) it doesn’t seem too out of her realm. 

Besides Austen’s peculiar use of names lore, I wanted to use this meme and the quote it represents to discuss the kind of humor Austen employs. This sort of humor, the one-off lines/insults that she drops and moves on from quickly, is something that I’m really beginning to appreciate from Austen, especially after seeing her Juvenilia where it’s almost nothing but these quick quips. For example, in The Beautiful Cassandra, where Austen describes Cassandra eating pastries, refusing to pay for them, and knocking the cook down and then, in the next sentence, Cassandra just moves on to her next adventure of the day. Austen does something similar a few more times in the following chapters of Northanger Abbey, my favorite of which being in her description of Mrs. Allen, “whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them.” This is such an, for lack of a better word, efficient insult. It’s brutal, straight to the point, and paints a vivid picture of her character without using many words. Then, she moves back into listing off characteristics as if she didn’t just tear down Mrs. Allen’s character in one sentence. I actually found Austen through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which is an interesting perspective to come from because when I then read Pride and Prejudice I really felt the sort of undercurrent of violence/sharp wit after having seen the conversations played out as sword fights, so I have been aware of Austen’s sort of sharp wit and humor for a while. However, I do feel like it’s a bit more obvious in her Juvenilia and Northanger Abbey thus far than in some of her later works, so I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate it now.