I’ve been on a big Timothy Hutton kick lately, so naturally I had to go watch Ordinary People, the famous 1980 film for which a young Hutton won an Oscar. Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, Judd Hirsch, etc; they’re all fantastic. Actually, Hirsch doesn’t really rock my world–I think I’ve seen better psychiatrists on screen before–but the rest of them are such deeply felt performances that I couldn’t even bring myself to scoff at the emotional tribulations and petty problems of wealthy American suburbanites. You’re rich! You have no material wants! And okay, you’re in a life-destroying emotional hell caused by severe trauma. That actually is a real problem.
If I’d read the original novel by Judith Guest, instead of watching the film version directed by Robert Redford, I could have stopped there for my contribution to the women creators roundtable, but I didn’t, so I have to go another direction. What’s sort of been on my mind is the extraordinary subtlety of Ordinary People: it’s brimming with delicate, minute observations of the interactions of people, the better to show how fragile they are, how broken the Jarrett family is. In the middle of the film, there’s a perfectly awful conversation between Moore and Hutton’s characters, a scene in which the mother and son, who have practically no relationship at all, try to reminisce; in just a few seconds, it goes horribly sour and becomes apparent that these people, who have lived in the same house for years, do not have emotionally compatible memories of the past. They can’t connect.
The delicacy of the filmmaking reminded me of the experience of reading Jane Austen novels. In popular culture, at least, Austen’s works are mainly considered in terms of their romantic appeal–and I will say now that as I love subtle, understated passion in fiction, I think Pride and Prejudice is among the most totally awesome romances I’ve ever read–but there is also the manners part of her comedies of manners.
Once, when I was enthusing about the Regency Romance queen Georgette Heyer to a fellow bookseller, I said that she was all the fun of Jane Austen, but purely fluffy. He, an aspiring horror writer, replied that he thought Jane Austen was fluffy. If you’re oriented towards Kafka-esque horror, I guess that makes sense, but if you read Austen in the right mood, she can make your skin crawl without needing any addition of fucking zombies. (I’ve been predicting for years that the next natural step after the publishing boom of sexy vampire romance porn and werewolf romance porn was zombie romance porn, but this wasn’t quite was I was expecting.)
Actually, one of the biggest differences between Heyer and Austen, aside from the fact that the former was a twentieth century writer who ruled the romance genre spawned by the nineteenth century novels written by the latter, is that Heyer likes everybody. Her books feature plenty of dumb, petty characters who screw up life for her heroes, but she treats them gently. Heyer’s work is happy, and in her romances, which are deeply pleasurable fantasies, she chuckles at human foibles and leaves it at that. Austen is more cutting, less forgiving of fault, and the constraints of social expectations bind her characters more tightly. Her novels are not narratives of rebellion, nor anthropological studies, but observations of the way people live and feel within the existing frameworks of a society. Possibly I’m just reinventing the English Lit 101 wheel here, but man, that’s huge; that’s why we still read Austen. Somewhere between the psychological freakout of The Yellow Wallpaper and the extraterrestrial thrashing ooze of Lovecraft, there is the horror of going down to have breakfast with family members who think more about flossing their teeth than about your inner emotional life. (Parts of Ordinary People remind me of parts of Persuasion. You may get out alive; you may even get out sane, but you cannot get out of these scenarios without personal damage.) In terms of their literary worth, creeping insanity and New England towns that worship tentacled alien gods certainly have their merits, but most people probably deal more with the minor and major horrors of human dealings than with those first two things.
Austen doesn’t just reflect social mores in her books; she offers harsh judgement on people and behaviors, albeit discreetly voiced. It requires relatively close reading to get all that, as her prose is both precise in meaning and complex in structure. That’s part of the modern-day fun in reading these books, of course. Elizabeth and Darcy wouldn’t be half so romantic if they communicated in simpler language; it’s all about the delicacy and the intricacy of their conversations and abbreviated meetings, right up until their restrained-but-heartfelt mutual agreement of affection in the finale. I haven’t read all of Austen’s novels, but the same restraint ruled in Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, so I think it is kind of her thing. Encounters with nineteenth-century gothic romance have made it clear to me that the emotional restraint is definitely an Austen-specific thing, too, not a period feature.
…
My sister makes fun of the Keira Knightley movie version of Pride and Prejudice for being so emotionally naked; personally, I liked it because it had big, smelly-looking pigs running around in the yard and there was a lot of mud. What it lacked in mannered restraint, it made up for with literal earthiness; I thought that was kind of neat. There have already been like five billion screen adaptations of that book, most of which didn’t have goddamned Colin Firth; at least the Knightley version had some sort of unique concept in that it substituted minutely observed detail of the physical reality of middle-class country life in Regency England for the novel’s minutely observed detail of the social interactions of the middle class in Regency England, which played to the strengths of the adapting medium and still left a lot of space for unsaid feeing. It’s a film; can you blame them for wanting to make it atmospheric? And I suddenly realize I’ve come round full circle and am again talking about a movie with Donald Sutherland in it.
Speaking of questionable adaptations, though, anybody see that hideous recent Marvel comics version of Pride and Prejudice? I wish they’d beaten Grahame-Smith to the zombie pastiche thing, at least, since putting zombies into everything is I think Marvel’s main sales strategy these days.
"at least the Knightley version had some sort of unique concept in that it substituted minutely observed detail of the physical reality of middle-class country life in Regency England for the novel's minutely observed detail of the social interactions"
Have you ever seen the movie version of Persuasion? Its US release was '96, I think. It took the phys detail to the point of grim & gritty (pardon the phrase) and made a point of playing up griminess. I think the idea was to counterprogram the first wave of sunshiny Austen adaptations.
"Somewhere between the psychological freakout of The Yellow Wallpaper and the extraterrestrial thrashing ooze of Lovecraft, there is the horror of going down to have breakfast with family members who think more about flossing their teeth than about your inner emotional life."
I think that's a very interesting point. Any examples from Austen?
I usually think of social horror as involving embarrassment, and more likely to show up in a comedy story, but it sounds like you have something quite different in mind.
There is, in fact, a Pride, Prejudice and Zombies graphic novel forthcoming…(not from Marvel, though, I don't think).
Cerusee, if you are into the idea of Austen and horror, you've got to read Northanger Abbey. It's her book-long sneer at gothic romance. It may be my favorite of her books; it's hysterical.
I kind of like the Jane Austen with zombies book (or the few pages of it I've glanced at.)
I saw an excerpt and it looked funny, but I hope it's not the same thing all thru the book. For an article, fine, but longer than that and the joke has to go some place.
I think it is really just the one joke. It's funnier as a concept than it is to read the whole thing, maybe. But…I kind of like one-liner conceptual art, if it's funny enough. And this is pretty funny.
Tom, I saw a version with Amanda Root from 1995, which came highly recommended by fans who'd seen all three of the screen versions; that may be the one. It's extremely faithful in spirit, and though I wouldn't have called it grimy, my impression was that it was not a prettified setting.
I read (and watched) Persuasion most recently, so that's the one that's standing out in my head right now: Anne is trapped in a household with a father and sister who don't value her as a human being and who have absolutely no interest in anything she might feel or think. They don't make her scrub out the ashes from the fireplaces, or beat her, or lock her up, or any of a number of gothic things; nor are they clever or malicious or motivated enough even to deliberately hurt her. They simply treat her like a walking piece of furniture. Years before, Anne turned down a chance to marry someone she loved and possibly could have had a satisfying emotional relationship with; it is increasingly unlikely that she will ever have a chance like that again. In her time, place, and social circumstances, there aren't any good outs for her besides marriage for love, and so there is in her current circumstances the potential for an entire lifetime of empty, routine interactions with people who control her life but don't care about her. You can and could play up the absurdity and soullessness of a lifestyle ruled by manners and appearance but lacking in real emotional meaning, if you wanted to be satirical, but Austen is playing it straight, and when you take that idea seriously, it's just terrifying. Soul-killingly terrible.
I think that the social horror of embarrassment, which makes me shudder (I can't stand humiliation comedy, which as you might imagine seriously messes up my ability to enjoy most sitcoms), is something a little bit different, although it's related.
Noah, yeah, I've read Northanger Abbey. It wasn't as satirical as I had been led to expect, but it was pretty amusing.
I've just never been that into zombies–or anything paranormal, for that matter, with the possible exception of ghosts–so cute new applications of zombies just kind of leave me wondering when everyone else will get as bored with them as I already am. Eh.
"I saw a version with Amanda Root from 1995 … It's extremely faithful in spirit, and though I wouldn't have called it grimy, my impression was that it was not a prettified setting."
That's probably it. I remember something about seeing skin pores and rubbish of some kind lying in the corner, but my mind may be playing things up. Yeah, I'd go with nonprettified even if not absolutely grimy.
"You can and could play up the absurdity and soullessness of a lifestyle ruled by manners and appearance but lacking in real emotional meaning, if you wanted to be satirical, but Austen is playing it straight, and when you take that idea seriously, it's just terrifying."
Does reading the book really inspire fear? I have to admit my familiarity with Austen is very low. But something can be presented as dismal or repellent without being presented as terrifying. How does Austen bring out the scary aspects (as opposed to dismal, repellent, objectionable, etc.) of the woman's situation?
You mentioned "The Yellow Wallpaper." As I remember, the story makes itself scary by taking the attitudes you describe in Persuasion, or something like them, and using them to put the central character in an extreme situation. She's not just part of the furniture, she's actually locked away for life. But Austen doesn't go in for that kind of stuff, or such is my impression.
Apologies if I misremember "Wallpaper." It's been a long, long while since I read it.
I have to say, I don't really think Austen goes for horror in persuasion. More sadness, I think; it's a very autumnal, sad book (though with a happy ending, of course…and a lot of satire which I found very funny.)
Tom, your memory of Wallpaper is pretty much correct, I think. It's psychological gothic in a way that's pretty different from Austen.
I guess I may not really agree with you, Cerusee, that you can have the horror without some gesture towards absurdity. Someone like Sartre, for example, is all about the mundane horror of everyday existence…but he can't really get there without tossing in some horror tropes. I think if you strip out the absurdity/awe from horror, you end up with desperation and depression…which are certainly valid emotions to discuss in art, but just aren't quite the same thing as horror.
Northanger Abbey is funnier as satire if you know a little of the books she is satirizing or parodying–like Ann Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho or Walpole's Castle of Otranto. It's pretty funny regardless though.
I don't think she does try to bring them out–when I said reading her in the right frame of mind can make your skin crawl, I wasn't trying to argue that Austen's actually a horror writer, but that the situations that she describes have horrible aspects; whether Austen intended it or not, contemplating them frightens me. It's not flat-out existential crisis, but sometimes I think it's in the neighborhood.
The Yellow Wallpaper is creepy and ambiguous; I think it's unclear whether the narrator is insane or not–I tend to think she is, and of course the idea of going insane is very frightening itself–but I seem to recall that she's definitely been locked away, for whatever reason. The unsettling thing to me about Persuasion is not that there's a physical threat, or a loss of physical freedom, but that she has no room to maneuver within the social framework and within her family. Austen treats them seriously, no picking at the artifice of social constructions. They are psychologically real to the people in them, but they can still fail those people. Anne is described as being intelligent and capable of fine feeling; never-ending, daily interactions with a family that fails to provide any kind of intimacy or love of intellectual stimulation has to be tortuous for her.
"but that the situations that she describes have horrible aspects; whether Austen intended it or not, contemplating them frightens me"
Being frightened doesn't really have all that much to do with horror as a genre, I guess is maybe the point? Zombies don't actually scare me especially. The argument you're making is basically that Austen's dry social realism is more frightening than what you find in the horror genre, which seems reasonable enough.
Yeah, I think that might be it. I like mystery and science fiction a great deal, and there's some cross over with horror for both those genres, but I'm not into horror as a genre in its own right, so the workings of it are not so familiar to me. I guess that's where my friend and I split off–social realism didn't have much impact on him, so neither did Austen. Whereas, while works of horror certainly can scare the shit out of me, the impact quickly fades if there isn't some connection to reality as I perceive it. Insanity frightens me because I could go insane; zombies don't, because I don't believe I'll ever actually be attacked by a shambling wreck of rotting flesh.
I actually think George Romero is not unlike Austen in a lot of ways; they're both about satire and character studies. I mean, the point of Day of the Dead isn't that you might turn into a zombie, but that we're pretty much zombies already.
"the point of Day of the Dead isn't that you might turn into a zombie, but that we're pretty much zombies already."
that's more social satire, isn't it? I mean, as in the underpinnings of a society getting satirized, whereas I gather Austen is more comedy of manners, if I have the term right. More about how individuals react in their particular silly ways to social rules/realities that the book may look at in detail but doesn't really question.
Yes, that's a nice distinction.
Tom, I love that version of Persuasion. I rewatched it recently and I think you're right that there was trash/rubbish in one or two corners. Definitely skin pores.
Cerusee, I think Austen does bring the creeping skin crawly fear. There is no escape for some people, like Anne. Have you read Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall? I think it's a more extreme fear-inducing story but similar to Austen.
See, I think the Bronte's *do* do horror…but they're really quite different from Austen (and not just because they hated her.) The Bronte's are all really into fairly explicit brutality and gothic nastiness. I don't think I've read Tenant, but it's about emotional abuse, right? To me that's kind of different from Austen, where the problem isn't abuse so much as it is being ignored…and, actually, being forced to live with people who are idiots.
Also, I think it's important that in Persuasion, it's Anne's aunt (who actually cares for her) who is the one who really makes her miserable by preventing her from marrying. It's persuasion (by a loved one) which is the tragedy, not being forced to live with idiots (though, of course, that's bad too.)
I haven't, but it sounds like I should (and I can complete my Bronte sisters scorecard!). It popped up as a Netflix recommendation after a bout of watching Austen adaptation, and it looked like an interesting piece of work, although probably not a feel-good one.
I liked Kate Beaton's take on the Bronte canon.
I just remembered that Georgette Heyer wrote a miserably claustrophobic murder mystery about being trapped by an unloving and dysfunctional family, Penhallow. It's a good read, but it's depressing, and everybody in it is horribly flawed; the ones who aren't nasty are self-delusional to the point of dumbness. It's so unlike her other works; I wonder where it came from.
Noah,
Tenant is a lot less gothic-over-the-top than the other Brontes. I don't like Charlotte (at all), never got into Emily, but I love Anne. I think she's more sophisticated and more similar to Austen (it's about normal lives, even though it is kind of horror).
Maybe I should go reread it before I blather more. A good excuse to reread a favorite. Yay!
Cerusee, that carton is hilarious. I love it.
That cartoon is great. Maybe I'll have to read Anne now.
I haven't read Emily in a long time, but I did appreciate the fact that she made fun of Jabez Bunting and used words like penetralium.
I love Charlotte, though. She's funny and mean and captures utter despair as well as any writer, I think.
I should reread Wuthering Heights too….
Noah, I agree about Charlotte Eyre, though I'm going by Jane Eyre only — really by its first half, I think the book starts high and runs steadily downward, hitting a point of crappiness halfway thru.
I liked Gaskell's Life a lot.
Judging by the Beaton cartoon, maybe I should check out Anne's stuff sometime.
I enjoyed the end too, actually. All the stuff with that crazed missionary who wants to marry Jane; I thought that was great.
I don't remember the missionary, just a legacy that someone inherited and how it solved everything.
See, and I remember the missionary and not the legacy. I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy.
The legacy is ridiculous…and is connected to the missionary (turns out he's her cousin)…Villette is Charlotte's best novel…and Wuthering Heights rocks…Plenty of gothic horror in both though.
Anyone read Charlotte Dacre- "Zofloya" is the one I read. 18th century horror–reads somewhat like "social realism" if I remember right…until the protagonist actually encounters the devil (if I remember right…)…Austen's period–but real horror tropes. I found it kind of funny, because there's a slow simmer build-up where you could realistically be scared…but the payoff (ooo…the devil!) isn't actually scary (because of what Cerusee suggests–no chance of this actually happening)