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The Jane Austen Society of Australia
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Book review
Recreating Jane Austen
by Brian Wiltshire
Cambridge University Press, 2001
Reviewed by Pamela Nutt
It is not only Jane Austen’s novels that we are interested in: Austen herself is
our concern. Note the number of biographies of Austen in recent years, and note how the
Austen revealed through them differs from account to account, as do the recreations of the
novels, from prequels to sequels, in films, mini-series, appropriations and
transformations.
John Wiltshire’s book examines this phenomenon in a scholarly and challenging
manner. He, too, offers his own recreation of Jane Austen and her work in order to move
his book into the ‘mainstream of current Austen commentary’. He does this in a
number of ways, examining works by, about and related to Austen, examining their
connections and placing them in either traditional or subversive roles. In doing so, he
identifies the need by some to idealise the author and her work and by others to see her
in more radical ways. In explaining his own view, he draws substantially on the works of
psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. This analysis of human development from a basis of the
mother-child relationship allows Wiltshire to explore the ways we read Austen, the
relationship of author and characters to the worlds they inhabited and the relationship
between writers of texts, their predecessors and their readers/viewers.
The book is an integrated approach to many things Austen. Neither sentimental in a
Janeite fashion nor acerbic in the D.W. Harding tradition, Wiltshire analyses readings of
biographies, novels (both Austen’s and those of others: his critique extends to Helen
Fielding’s The Edge of Reason) and film.
In what ways do we understand Jane Austen through biography? Wiltshire identifies a
past ‘which can only be captured through a kind of make-believe’ and which
demonstrates in its presentation the strong need to understand that past in particular
ways. How much romantic nostalgia is evident in both rewritings of Austen’s life and
the reworkings of her novels found in the recent filmed versions? How much do these
recreations depend on the need to be seen as progressive or subversive in order to appeal
to contemporary sensibilities?
Wiltshire argues that even Rozema’s Mansfield Park, with a Fanny who
‘reflects back to the audience’ a heroine whom they can admire, concludes with a
romantic view of future fulfilment. Rozema’s dark view of Mansfield Park as an
exploration of imprisonment and slavery is one thing. Austen’s subversion, argues
Wiltshire, is to be found more often in ‘the psychological violence of woman against
woman’. The reading of Fanny as a ‘wild thing’ and a representation of the
author at bitter odds with the society in which she herself feels confined does not,
argues Wiltshire, allow the artist ‘to preserve her own true self’.
So, are Austen and her novels to be seen as evidence of ‘rebellion against
conformity’, radically subversive, a ‘projection of contemporary anxieties and
controversies on to the texts’? Or are we to approach Austen with a celebratory
attitude to the books and the worlds they represent? Either response, argues Wiltshire,
becomes the repository of projections, yearnings and ambitions.
Wiltshire makes extensive use of the psychoanalytic theories of Winnicott to resolve
this tension. The interdependence of an individual (be they author or a character within
an Austen novel) and a group is best expressed in the mother/child relationship, where
society is represented by the mother who sustains the infant’s emotional life,
moderating its violent and destructive impulses. Thus, Emma at Box Hill represents for us
the dilemma of an individual in society who must live in and accept that society yet must
also scrutinise it. The same may apply to Austen herself. This uncomfortable
juxtaposition, of an author and her characters who must live in and accept a society and
who at the same time are compelled to subject that society to intense scrutiny,
fascinates.
Wiltshire sees this tension more sharply and consistently presented in the original
works than in contemporary recreations. In analysing the nature and function of these
reworkings, he explores Austen’s own relationship to Shakespeare. While acknowledging
a possible debt to elements of Shakespeare’s plays (it is possible to say ‘She
really knew her Shakespeare well’) Wiltshire sees the debt more in the development of
the ‘inner voice’ in narrative, which achieves for Austen something akin to the
achievement of the soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays. Thus, successful adaptations,
whether Austen’s of Shakespeare or that of Clueless, are found not in the
‘mimicking of the original, but (in) a new independent work of art that can stand
comparison, which prompts in readers a sense of deep similitude or affinity, but which
rarely resembles the original in any obvious way’.
Once again, this is tied to a reading of Winnicott which leads Wiltshire to define the
influence of one author on another in the mother/child/milk/solid food relationships.
Solid food ‘offers much more resistance to incorporation’. In terms of the
artist, this requires ‘much more creative and psychological labour to
incorporate’. The opposing concept of ‘idealisation’ leaves one work much
more dependent on that of another. It is a diminishing process.
Wiltshire engages in a conversation with his readers. His use of parentheses
communicates immediacy and reveals his own enthusiasm. In a reference to ‘Fanny
(oops! Frances)’ Burney, or to ‘Frank (frank! – Austen never misses a
trick)’ Wiltshire demonstrates his consciousness and enjoyment of an audience –
indeed, significant portions of this book are based on papers presented at various
conferences.
Recreating Jane Austen is a book which requires of the reader more than just a
good working knowledge of her novels and their adaptations in contemporary film. An
awareness of the differences between, for example, David Nokes and Claire Tomalin as
biographers is useful, as is an understanding of D.W. Harding’s 1940s essay, Regulated
Hatred. Familiarity with the works of a range of more recent critics is implied –
Julia Prewitt Brown, Marilyn Butler and Jocelyn Harris, for example. Such works are
readily available and familiar to many of Austen’s readers. Donald Winnicott, whose
theories Wiltshire uses to expound and classify processes of recreating Austen, is less
accessible. Thus Wiltshire spends some time outlining significant aspects of
Winnicott’s ideas.
My first response to seeing this book – and its cover is itself an interesting
representation of recreating Jane Austen – was one of unbridled joy and expectation.
Here was a work which would provide substance for electives in the new NSW HSC syllabuses,
where both the Emma/Clueless transformation and the Davies-scripted mini-series Pride
and Prejudice (‘The Individual and Society’) are set. It certainly does
this, but I would not actually recommend it to my students. It needs to be read and
understood as a whole, not merely for its comments on individual texts. Better for
teachers to consider, reflect upon and absorb it into their own ways of approaching text
with students. And, as a partial, prejudiced and ignorant psychologist, I was beginning to
wonder how many times I needed to hear about Winnicott’s theories concerning infants
and mothers’ milk. The analogy, although central, was laboured.
However, readers will be challenged to think about the processes at work in
‘recreating Jane Austen’ and led to understand the artistry of Austen and its
relationship to representations of her life, her world and her novels.
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