On Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

nb: This was originally published on March 8, 2016 as part of a roundtable. You can read the entire discussion here: https://nassrgrads.hcommons.org/2016/03/08/pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies-roundtable/

Jane Austen famously humble bragged that Pride and Prejudice was “rather too light, bright, and sparkling; it wants shade.” Burr Steers – the director and screenwriter of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – seems to have taken this statement at face value and given his big-screen adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s mashup bestseller that missing shade (and not in the Paris is Burning sense of the word; Austen is already the queen of that kind of shade). As someone who is fascinated by Jane Austen’s afterlives and the ever-expanding world of Austen adaptations, I was perhaps overly optimistic about this latest iteration, which I hoped would combine the novel’s delights with the campiness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Instead, this version felt heavy, dull, and flat.

Near the end of Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, her engrossing history of Austen’s reception in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Claudia L. Johnson remarks: “Jane Austen’s celebrity today is categorically different…in that it is so commonly mediated through screen adaptations. And if this remains the case, Janeism in the future will be a different thing.” This has become increasingly clear in the last decade or so of film and TV Austen adaptations and homages, most of which feel ever more distant from their source material. I think it’s difficult to overstate the influence of the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, and I’m not unconvinced that most subsequent “adaptations” of Austen’s 1813 novel take the film version as the ur-text, in lieu of Austen’s actual text. (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ lackluster Darcy dutifully jumps into a lake while wearing a billowy white shirt.) Don’t get me wrong – I’m not an Austen “originalist.” I do not believe that any text is static or open to only one correct interpretation, and I definitely believe in the creative value and legitimacy of what Henry Jenkins and others have termed “participatory cultures.” For example, I think “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” is one of the best Pride and Prejudice adaptations out there – its creators are clearly smart, thoughtful readers of the novel, but are also not afraid to innovate with the story and adapt it for twenty-first century social mores (and social media).

But what I’m a little apprehensive about is how Austen is increasingly separated from her work. In a movie like Austenland, for example (full disclosure: I haven’t read the book on which it’s based), Austen herself is barely invoked, instead heralded primarily via the material trappings of her books: country homes, empire-waist dresses, and what has perhaps become her most famous byproduct: a lifesize cardboard cutout of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. “Jane Austen” has increasingly become a talismanic phrase that conjures exactly the opposite of “zombie mayhem,” hence the seeming comic potential of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ Eisensteinian montage of the Bennet sisters lacing up their corsets in one shot, and slipping daggers into their garters in the next (never mind the distracting polyester sheen of said garters).

But of course what this reductionist view of Austen as the writer of HEAs (happily ever afters) and balls misses is precisely what is already present in her writing: the violence. In Cults and Cultures, Johnson details how Austen was particularly popular with World War I soldiers, as exemplified by Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “The Janeites,” which Johnson argues offers “an intensely tragic reading of her novels.” For Johnson, this story helps reveal that “Austen’s novels are about nothing if not the perils of living in a confined, narrow, profoundly bruising place where experience unfolds under the aegis of ordeal, where vulnerable, deferent young protagonists with next to no autonomy are exposed to adversities so brutal that they cannot be essayed, much less assailed directly. In Austen’s world, that narrow place is called a neighborhood; during World War I it is called a trench.” As Virginia Woolf put it: “Here is Jane Austen, a great writer as we all agree, but, for my own part, I would rather not find myself alone in the room with her.” The undead hordes in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies might gruesomely embody the threats latent in Austen’s fiction, but they lack her devastating bite.