Pride and Prejudice V: The Jane Ultimatum

My vacation this year consisted of a marathon of Shakespeare plays and lots of hippies, yuppies and yippies. I took a break from the Bard to see a movie. In a town built on live theatre, the movie selection is slim pickins, but there was Becoming Jane, the prequel to a series of movies that fall slavishly at the feet of the sarcastic authoress and her much idolized leading villain Darcy, not as she wrote him, but as we interpret him, courtesy of Colin Firth. And who doesn't love Colin Firth, really? Girls, if you actually read Pride and Prejudice, you will realize it's not Darcy you're in love with. It's Colin...


So, back to Jane Austen: There has to be a reason she never got married that has everything to do with ROMANCE and nothing to do with FEMINISM(working title). Dudes, what is our obsession with Austen? Let's just say, as the movie ever so subtly concludes that she did write the greatest novels in the English language. WHY do you care so much that she apparently never had some kind of witty repertoire with a misunderstood British hottie? What's next, the "true story" of how Mary Shelley actually did steal body parts from corpses to create her very own Frankenlover but they could never be together because society just couldn't accept their love so she dropped him off in Antarctica and wrote a book based on her life?
As great as that movie could be (Kiera Knightly as Shelley, Russell Crowe as Frankenlover), it's about as based in reality as Becoming Jane. Watching that movie was like watching the Titanic, but without the steamy car sex scene. You know this ship is going down.
Austen lovers, a word of advice: you need to pick the Jane you love. Is her writing great because of the clever dialogue and the convenient resolutions via marriage device or is it great because of the subtle social criticisms that are thinly veiled behind the Victorian facade? If you want to love every word Austen ever wrote, go right ahead. But realize you either love the earliest form of harlequin novels or you love the adamant feminist.
Disclaimer: (spoiler alert!) I actually really liked this movie. I love Anne Hathaway and this version of P&P, for that's really all it is, actually does pay tribute to Austen's penchant for irony and acknowledges the dire situation of women for which a profitable marriage was the only solution. I just thought it was a stretch. Some guy she knew in passing and wrote a few lines about in some casual notes to her sister is somehow her great unrequited love? Oh wait, he named his daughter Jane. Undeniable proof. I think we just can't stand to imagine that Austen could write great love stories without falling in love. Or maybe we just can't stand to think that her stories aren't about love at all.