The Jane Austen Society of Australia

Extracts from Sensibilities
December 2002

Volume 25
December 2002 ~ Read online Extracts from all articles.

• ‘Such a transformation!’: Translation, Imitation and Intertextuality in Jane Austen On-Screen - Jocelyn Harris 
• They Also Serve who only Stand and Wait - Pamela Whalan 
• Teaching Jane Austen in Communist China - Val Horniman 

Papers from the JASA Conference 2002 Jane Austen: ‘With Regard to Education ...’

• Jane Austen, Distance Education, and the Technology of the Book - George Justice 
• Old Dogs & New Tricks: Austen’s Female Elders - Devoney Looser 
• What did Jane Austen learn from the Theatre - Penny Gay  
• ‘Fair Seed-Time had my Soul’: The Romantics at School - William Christie 
• The Effect of Education, I Suppose: How the Movies Taught Emma to be Clueless and gave Fanny a Tongue like a Guillotine. - William Phillips

‘Such a transformation!’: Translation, Imitation and Intertextuality in Jane Austen On-Screen

Jocelyn Harris spoke to the Jane Austen Society of Australia in June 2002. This paper will shortly be published in full as a chapter in Jane Austen On-Screen, edited by Gina and Andrew MacDonald for the Cambridge University Press. The volume will also include a chapter by Penny Gay.

When audiences demand ‘faithful translations’ of Jane Austen on-screen, they may be asking the impossible. The very selectivity of translation makes ‘fidelity’ to Jane Austen unlikely, while cinematic characteristics such as spectatorship, commercialism, visuality, idealism, realism, velocity and a perceived need for ‘relevance’ open up even wider distances from her texts. Intertextual references ensure that the novels are always in view, but I shall argue that the best ones ‘imitate’ her, capturing the spirit of the text through a different medium. They highlight difference rather than sameness, they comment on Jane Austen’s pastness, they acknowledge shifts in our thinking about the world, or satirise modern times, as I shall explain in relation to Emma Thompson’s and Ang Lee’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY*, Patricia Rozema’s MANSFIELD PARK and Amy Heckerling’s CLUELESS.

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They Also Serve who only Stand and Wait

Pamela Whalan presented this paper to the Jane Austen Society of Australia meeting, August 2002

For those who grew up in Post WWII Australia – a time of full employment, a 40 hour working week and a time when all workers were paid a wage based on the cost of living with a skill factor added – it was the exception, not the rule, to have a domestic servant. If a man did not mow his own lawn or a woman did not do her own housework they had to have a pretty good excuse, otherwise they were branded as lazy. So when reading a work such as Emma in which a person as grindingly poor as Miss Bates had a servant, it is necessary to make a giant cultural leap. When Mrs Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, is so worried about what would happen to her family if Mr Bennet dies, it seems realistic that if she would only get rid of the butler, the cook, the two housemaids and the housekeeper, the wages saved would keep the family in comfort for many a year: and by having something to occupy her time in attending to the housework, she would not only be wealthier but also healthier. Learning about the need for, the conditions and the cost of keeping domestic servants, helps us to understand the living conditions of late 18th century England. It also gives an appreciation of the way in which Jane Austen uses servants as a literary device to increase her readers’ understanding of the traits of her main characters.

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Teaching Jane Austen in Communist China, 1990-1996

Val Horniman presented this paper to the Jane Austen Society of Australia meeting, October 2002.

In 1980 the idea of teaching in China wouldn’t have occurred to me if senior Chinese lecturers in English, here for post-graduate study at the University of Sydney, hadn’t urged me to apply. My main experience had been high school teaching but at the time I was liaising with them as an Education officer of the Commonwealth Department of Education and teaching English to adult migrants at night. They insisted, and how could I refuse when they offered to arrange it and I could get leave without pay? So, in 1981 I taught for a semester at an institute in Chengdu (in SW China), and the following year a short intensive course in Shanghai. In both institutes I taught English language to post-graduates preparing to study abroad, and English literature and essay writing to 4th year English major students who would graduate as English lecturers. I found that I much preferred teaching literature. Inspired by the students’ response, I glimpsed literature’s potential to widen their horizons. I longed to encourage Chinese students to think in a more scholarly way about literature as a creative art and to enjoy it. I planned to retire early (by the end of the 1980s) so that I could return. 

Meanwhile, during the mid 1980s I studied Chinese History with Dr John Wong, at the University of Sydney (for a second Master’s Degree). This was an academic delight. Dr Wong appreciates both Chinese and Western points of view as he understands original documents in both languages. 

When I returned to China between 1990 and 1996 I mainly taught English literature to 4th year English major graduating students, and English literature in tandem with a course on ‘Western Thought and Culture’ to post-graduates. In the last academic year when I was asked to teach a course on ‘The Bible As and In English Literature’ I coordinated this with the other two post-graduate courses.

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Jane Austen, Distance Education, and the Technology of the Book

George Justice, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri – Columbia, is the author of The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Delaware Press, 2002) and the co-editor of Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He has begun editing (with Devoney Looser) a volume of the letters of Samuel Richardson for Cambridge University Press’s forthcoming complete works of Richardson, and is co-editing an edition of Frances Burney’s third novel Camilla. He is co-editor of The Eighteenth Century Novel, an annual publication, and is the book review editor for the Jane Austen Society of North America.

While browsing your web page this spring to familiarise myself with your Society (and what an impressive Society it is), I noted with pleasure that your group for ‘younger Jane Austen enthusiasts’ is called ‘Mrs Goddard’s School.’ However, I fear that Mrs Goddard herself would not be happy with the subject matter of my talk. I am going to suggest that Austen presents her novels as a superior form of education to that which students like Harriet Smith could receive in schools like Mrs Goddard’s. The Novel—an innovative literary form tied up intrinsically with the expanding literary marketplace of the eighteenth century—provides education that rejects the traditional educational institutions of the day in favor of the development of a reader’s ‘information’ and encouragement of her or his ‘reflection.’

As a university professor, I am able to do what I love everyday: I can read, write, and teach young people about the pleasures of literature. And I can encourage my students to develop their knowledge: knowledge of literary forms and traditions, knowledge of the history of British culture, and knowledge about themselves and the world around them in moral and political senses. Jane Austen herself, however, might have been skeptical about what schools, colleges, and universities offer to young people.

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Old Dogs and New Tricks: Austen’s Female Elders

Devoney Looser, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri Columbia, received her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1993. She is the author of British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670 – 1820 (John Hopkins University Press, 2000), named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2001. Looser is the co-editor of Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and the editor of Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism (St Martins, 1995). She has published work on Jane Austen and film, and she serves on the board of directors of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She has held teaching positions at Indiana State University, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Arizona State University and Louisiana State University. She is currently working on a book on British women writers and old age, 1750-1850..

There is a story told by the writer John Glassco about his interactions with Man Ray and Gertrude Stein at a party in Paris in the 1920s. Ray, having just discovered Jane Austen’s novels, contemplates doing a painting of her looking at a mushroom. He explains, ‘The focus of the whole thing will be the mushroom . . . It represents the almost overnight flowering of [Austen’s] genius – also its circumscribed quality, its suggestion of being both sheltered and a shelter’ (Glassco 96). Glassco, an uninvited guest at Stein’s party, listened appreciatively to Ray’s description. Stein noticed Glassco and approached, asking, ‘Do I know you? . . . No, I suppose you are just one of those silly young men who admire Jane Austen’ (96). Glassco reports that he replied to her, ‘Yes, I am . . . And I suppose you are just one of those silly old women who don’t.’ (97).

I would like to take Glassco’s insult to Stein far too seriously and examine something few scholars have previously explored—Jane Austen and ‘old women’. Would an old woman be silly not to admire Austen? Did Austen appreciate old women? What is old in Jane Austen’s novels and what constituted old in her culture? In what follows, I consider Austen in relation to other women writers of her day and look at their productivity and treatment as they aged; I discuss what old age meant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; I look at characters who remark on age and aging in Austen’s novels; and I end with a consideration of old maids in Austen’s day and in her novel Emma.

Austen is not an obvious candidate for studying old age. She did not live to old age, dying in 1817 at age 41.

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What did Jane Austen Learn from the Theatre?

Penny Gay Penny Gay is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney and current Head of School. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, and has been teaching and writing about Jane Austen since the 1970s, having also published extensively on Shakespeare, particularly from the aspect of performance history. Her new book Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge University Press) combines her love for Austen’s works with her passion for the theatre..

... ’tis plain, then, all the world, from Youth to Age, 
Appear in Masks – Here, only, on the Stage, 
You see us as we are: Here trust your eyes; 
Our wish to please, admits of no disguise. 
(Epilogue, Hannah Cowley, The Belle’s Stratagem)

Doesn’t the episode of the theatricals in Mansfield Park prove Jane was ‘anti-theatrical’? Not at all! recent biographies have highlighted the fact that Jane Austen was fascinated by theatre from her childhood. She read plays, she watched and took part in the Steventon family theatricals. As an adult she went to the theatre whenever opportunity arose. Experience, especially when it is eagerly sought out like this, is educative, it influences our way of thinking about the world. So, what might Jane Austen’s known experience of theatre and drama have taught her – particularly, in relation to her chosen avocation as a writer?

I’m going to suggest three things: wit, dramatic structure, and the infinite gradations of interpersonal dynamics – how people act, speak (or stay silent), look and move in social situations. I’ll briefly demonstrate this by looking at the characteristics of the plays we know Austen knew, and relating them to aspects of the novels – as I’ve done at greater length in my book, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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‘Fair Seed-Time had my Soul’: The Romantics at School

William Christie William Christie is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, editor of the cross-disciplinary journal Literature and Aesthetics and president of the Dylan Thomas Society of Australia. He has published widely on the literary culture of Romantic Britain (including Jane Austen) and looks forward to six months as a visiting fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2003.

Perhaps the most characteristic contribution of the Romantic poets to education or educational theory was their insistence on childhood as a special period in and of itself – and, with that, on the centrality to proper development of imaginative experience of all kinds. The Romantics, it is often said, ‘invented’ childhood: 

the notion of the child, not simply as distinct, but as somehow unique, qualitatively different from (and in some senses superior to) the adult becomes prominent only with Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and it is largely through Romantic literature that childhood has gained the central position it continues to hold in the Western cultural tradition.¹

For this reason, however, formal education or schooling was often seen by the Romantics as inimical to a proper education (what their German contemporaries called Bildung). Education as an Enlightenment project – the broad cultivation of the mind and heart, fitting one ‘to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war’ (Milton)² – had from the beginning always been larger than mere schooling, and even the great educational theorist John Locke had doubted the efficacy of sending a child to school.³ But the Romantic imagination required nurturing in ways that were alien to the methods and demands of any systematic pedagogy. The more closely we identify Romanticism with an exultant individuality, the more likely we are to find education as schooling demonised as ideologically homogenising and oppressive.

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The Effect of Education, I Suppose: How the Movies Taught Emma to be Clueless and Gave Fanny a Tongue Like a Guillotine

William A. Phillips William Phillips is Foreign Professor in the Department of British / American Studies at Aichi Prefectural University, at Nagakute-cho (Nagoya), Japan. Though a long-time Austen enthusiast, he is a late arrival to the study of her work, having become intrigued by the spate of film adaptations that appeared in the 1990s. Himself the product of a village childhood and a rather eclectic education, he has written and presented on the films as well as the connection between Austen and Barbara Pym. In addition he has published or presented on such topics as American Musical Theatre, AIDS Education in Japan, and the use of Readers’ Theatre and Film Criticism with ESL / EFL students..

I must confess that when I looked over the list of distinguished speakers for this conference, I instantly felt like Robert Martin at a Hartfield whist party. Where would I even begin? Flinging aside the chance to be ‘a degree or two nearer gentility,’ and clinging to the assurance that I would be perceived as ‘so very clownish, so totally without air’ (E, 32).1 I decided I would begin by singing (readers are mercifully spared the act if not the lyric). 

I feel half Tijuana, half Boston; 
Partly Jane Fonda, and partly Jane Austen 
But alive, but alive, yes alive.

I chose this brief example because it is the only song lyric that I know from a popular culture source which mentions Jane Austen. It also serves to make a couple of introductory points.

The source is the musical play Applause, which won the American Tony Award for best musical for 1970. It had music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams and a book by Broadway legends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The first item of interest to us is that it is an adaptation – this time FROM a movie, the Academy Award winning film for 1950, All About Eve, directed and with a screenplay by Joseph L. Mankeiwicz, itself based on the story ‘The Wisdom of Eve’ by Mary Orr, which first appeared in the May, 1946 issue of that literary paragon, Cosmopolitan magazine. The significant idea here is that the practice of adapting material from one medium of cultural expression to another seems likely to be always with us. The practice is, in fact, as old as literature itself. More than 4000 years ago, Sumerian deluge myths evolved into the story of Noah and the Ark in Genesis. As long into the future as we tell stories, adaptation seems destined to be a vehicle for turning someone else’s story into one’s own and for one’s own particular purposes. 

The second point about the brief snatch of song lyric above is that it tells us something about the image of Jane Austen among creators of the popular arts in 1970, at least in the United States – that Jane Austen was symbolic of high culture and prim, virginal propriety. This ‘time bound’ quality of popular culture is something that I will return to shortly.

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12 January 2003

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