Re-

I have struggled some with what to call the various texts we read in the first unit of the "Jane Austen Meme" class. P.D.James' Death Comes to Pemberley certainly seems like a sequel or continuation, but it also re-interprets Austen. James seems so much more interested in secondary characters and in the servants in particular. Mysteries need more characters, but noticing that Elizabeth is more involved in her servants' lives than Mr. Bingley's sister, Mrs. Hurst--who doesn't factor into this novel at all--seems to underline an interest in those individuals who support the lifestyle of the landed gentry in the early nineteenth century.

Nancy Butler and Hugo Petrus's graphic novel seems clearly like a re-telling in a visual mode. But again, it re-interprets certain characters by presenting their personalities through images. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (by Seth-Grahame-Smith) seems more like what we might call a mash-up: it takes the original and adds the new element  of zombies. But, like the previous texts, it gives us new interpretation in doing so. In Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding takes up themes of the original, creating an entirely new story. But her novel still, I would argue, asks us to then look again at Austen's original--to re-view or re-see--and ask some new questions.*

Why am I so interested in this prefix this week? The premise of this class is that writing requires revision--a word I've already tossed around above. Looking at again. Revising your own work isn't the same as revising or retelling someone' else's story. That is, you are starting with your own ideas and going back to look at them again--to make them better and more clear.  But maybe there are more similarities than at first appear. Are you the same person you were when you wrote the first draft? I'm not trying to get too philosophical here, but our ideas are changing all the time. Importantly, once you've written down your ideas and they aren't in your mind, they exist outside of you. And that changes them in an important way: You can look at them as if they belonged to someone else. What I hope you will find is that also means they become flexible and more easily manipulated. Once the ideas are in the first draft, you can think of them as building blocks to be re-shaped and re-arranged to get to the clearest expression of your ideas.

The Oxford English Dictionary** gives this as a definition of the prefix "re": 1. With the general sense of ‘back’ or ‘again’ . . . . 2. Prefixed to ordinary verbs of action (chiefly transitive) and to derivatives from these, sometimes denoting that the action itself is performed a second time, and sometimes that its result is to reverse a previous action or process, or to restore a previous state of things.

That all fits with what I've written except those last two parts about reversing a previous action or restoring a previous state. It makes me wonder whether rewriting and revising our writing isn't, perhaps, about trying to get back to the purest thoughts we had before we ever wrote anything down?


* Was Elizabeth so aware of the rituals and rules of courtship as Bridget seems to be? Was Elizabeth as obsessed with her weight? Is Austen's eighteenth/nineteenth-century character actually more modern than Fielding's?

**This a resource you should know and use. To access it go the Ou library home page (libraries.ou.edu). Sign in. In the middle of the page, go to "Databases" and then to "O." Click the "E-Reference Materials" tab and scroll down to the dictionary.

Gossip

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a writer taking up the subject of Jane Austen must allude to the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Ok, that's done (if awkwardly) and I can move on. I can't help but wonder if Austen's style, and the fact that there have been so many who have written so well on Austen is a stumbling block--like the perceived necessity of misquoting the first line of Pride and Prejudice--in writing about Austen. I know it has been for me! Since beginning to teach this class  I have hardly written a word on this blog about Austen. And yet, as I discover in class every day, there is still so much to say . . . .

In reading the first few chapters this time around, I found my self thinking about gossip. At the beginning of Chapter 3 the Bennet girls and their mother are wondering about Mr. Bingley. But this soon transforms into the whole community wondering and gossiping about the new arrivals. Notice how many times "report," "intelligence," and "hearing" or "heard" show up through here. The Bennet ladies "accept second han-hand intelligence" about Mr. Bingley from Lady Lucas's "report." Mr. Bingley "has heard much" about the Bennet girls." Everyone is alarmed by a "report" that Mr. Bingley will bring twelve ladies to the ball, but later they "hear" that only his sisters will accompany him. During the ball a "report" enters "general circulation" about Mr. Darcy's wealth.

While we often think about how Austen creates the characters of Elizabeth and Darcy--and how we follow Elizabeth's thoughts in particular--when we think about this novel, before we ever find out any thing specific about either of them the voice of the community is well established. Who gives these reports? Who circulates this information? We only know in a few cases.  Like the "truth universally acknowledged" some information seems to float through this book without any real source.

This raises many questions: Is the community more important for Austen than her main characters? To what extent are her readers part of this community? Is she making the reader part of the community by giving us this seemingly free-floating information? So many Austen readers note with admiration that she creates a little world in which we live as we read her novels. The creation of this world has, in part, to do with creating this community voice that makes us feel like we, too, live in Meryton. Does gossip make us feel like we belong? That raises so many more questions--am I the only one thinking about Facebook right now?