Landscape and Austen
Jan. 26th, 2015 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeSomewhere back near the beginning of time (it sometimes feels like) I took a graduate seminar on Landscape and Literature, with a focus mainly on the 18th Century (although the 19th and 20th centuries did get a look in). It was not as interesting as it might have been -- the professor, Leo Braudy, was not noted for the excitement he generated -- but it did have its points.
I thought of that course again on re-watching the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice (the one with Keira Knightly). I did so because it seemed to me that at many cases where Austen set a scene indoors, the movie gratuitously set it outdoors (sometimes jettisoning a good line in the process: there was no space for Mr. Bennett's "I have two small favours to request. First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the present occasion; and secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the library to myself as soon as may be", as Elizabeth had stormed out of the house to a duckpond). Occasionally a scene which Austen set outside (Darcy delivering his letter to Elizabeth, Lady Catherine delivering her interdiction to Elizabeth) was set inside, for no obvious reason I could see. Sometimes the landscape seemed to invade the indoors: the Bennetts' house seemed to have pigs in the background unpredictably.
These weren't the only arbitrary changes which seemed to be aimed principally at foregrounding the picturesque. Why did the Gardiners go to the Peak District rather than having their planned tour to the Lake District cut short[1]? Why was Darcy's set of miniatures by the fireplace (restrained, in good taste) changed into a sculpture gallery? For that matter, how did Darcy know that by wandering out at the crack of dawn he would find Elizabeth outdoors the morning after Lady Catherine had visited? (In the novel he is in London at the time, but I do not begrudge the simplification to the director of his being at Netherfield and coming over; but as a reasonable man he would have ridden over no earlier than mid-morning, on any reasonable expectation of getting access to Elizabeth. Indeed, he shows as much restraint and decorum in the book as one might expect, coming over with Bingley in the afternoon after his arrival back down from London.)
Given the generally positive critical response to the film, It's beside the point to note that I wasn't impressed. What is more interesting is to consider why such an extensive amount of swapping of locales took place, and why it might have an impact on what is designed into the book.
Some changes may have been to speed things up by avoiding a more lengthy setup, or to provide for comic relief by showing people listening at keyholes.[2]
However, there are two things to think about beyond that.
First, Austen's society (as she presents it) has a very organized relationship to the countryside. Most of society's life takes place indoors, but the willingness to explore the countryside, to go in search of the local sublime, had been introduced in the late Eighteenth Century. (It is still notable that Austen's list of the places the Gardiners visit is entirely artificial: " Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth, Birmingham".)
By modern standards the action of Pride and Prejudice is claustrophobic. The only real stress on the outdoors is the organized park at Rosings, and the better designed one, artifice imitating nature ("in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned") at Pemberley. Even there, Elizabeth's thought (omitted, as far as I could tell, in the film) "And of this place, I might have been mistress!" is triggered not by the landscape but by the interior (and the prospect of the landscape from the interior): "it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendour, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings".
The exception to this are the two walks, set up at the end of the novel, arranged so that Jane and Bingley can converse with some privacy but also with some decorum (i.e. they can be observed at a distance, in principle), which happens to provide the same privacy for Elizabeth and Darcy, much as taking a walk in the garden allows Lady Catherine some privacy with Elizabeth. (The aborted trip to the Lake Country is the other absence here: a trip with the observation of the natural as its end.)
Secondly, Austen's world is not outwardly dramatic: indeed, the urge to be dramatic or to make any sort of scene is anathema to her set of values.[3] Likewise, it's worth noting how many things Elizabeth keeps private, even secret, in the course of the novel. (One of the things the movie gets wrong is the scene with the letter, where Elizabeth lets her aunt and uncle and Darcy all know the contents of the letter; in the novel, she tells Darcy only and precisely because he is there and her uncle is not; it's telling that it is this one slip in her ability to keep a secret which leads to the successful unfolding of the rest of the book -- the first point she actually trusts Darcy. This novel could be subtitled "The Education of Elizabeth Bennett". But I digress.) In this context, the fine details of the interior (to the person) life, observed or taking place in the conventional (physically) interior settings of parlour, library, or dining room, are everything.
Personally, I don't think that the changes are the result of any thematic thought by the filmmaker. I think that he just liked dramatic sets (and his backdrops tend to be cluttered and busy: compare the depiction of the dance where Darcy first appears with that in the BBC series, or the ongoing chaos of the Bennett's residence). If he's going to have a dramatic proposal (he trashes Elizabeth's comprehensive reply to Darcy in favour of more heightened give-and-take), counterpointing it with a dramatic storm and a natural backdrop just allows him to heighten the mood.
[1]So that the film can show a completely unnecessary shot of Elizabeth in a wild location in the Peaks. The film drops out Mrs. Gardiner's background in Derbyshire.
[2]Humphrey: "I should never have thought you would have done anything so undignified as to stoop to keyholes, uncle.
Tyson: "No, no, no. The door will be ajar, my boy."
In the household as shown in the film, any sane person would conduct private conversation only in whispers, and probably in the middle of a field where they could look around for eavesdroppers.
[3]My favourite comment on Elizabeth's manners remains Cabell's: "And when we sanely appraise the most cried-up writer of genteel "realism", matters are not conducted much more candidly. Here is a fair sample : 'From the very beginning of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike, and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.' It is Miss Austen's most famous, most beloved, and most 'natural' character replying not by means of a stilted letter, but colloquially, under the stress of emotion to a proposal of marriage by the man she loves. This is a crisis which in human life a normal young woman simply does not meet with any such rhetorical architecture. . . So there really seems small ground for wonder that Mr. Darcy observed, 'You have said quite enough, madam'; and no cause whatever for surprise that he hastily left the room, and was heard to open the front-door and quit the house. . . Yet, be it forthwith added, Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, and even Miss Austen, were in the right, from one or another aesthetic standpoint, in thus variously editing and revising their contemporaries' unsatisfactory disposition of life.
I thought of that course again on re-watching the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice (the one with Keira Knightly). I did so because it seemed to me that at many cases where Austen set a scene indoors, the movie gratuitously set it outdoors (sometimes jettisoning a good line in the process: there was no space for Mr. Bennett's "I have two small favours to request. First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the present occasion; and secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the library to myself as soon as may be", as Elizabeth had stormed out of the house to a duckpond). Occasionally a scene which Austen set outside (Darcy delivering his letter to Elizabeth, Lady Catherine delivering her interdiction to Elizabeth) was set inside, for no obvious reason I could see. Sometimes the landscape seemed to invade the indoors: the Bennetts' house seemed to have pigs in the background unpredictably.
These weren't the only arbitrary changes which seemed to be aimed principally at foregrounding the picturesque. Why did the Gardiners go to the Peak District rather than having their planned tour to the Lake District cut short[1]? Why was Darcy's set of miniatures by the fireplace (restrained, in good taste) changed into a sculpture gallery? For that matter, how did Darcy know that by wandering out at the crack of dawn he would find Elizabeth outdoors the morning after Lady Catherine had visited? (In the novel he is in London at the time, but I do not begrudge the simplification to the director of his being at Netherfield and coming over; but as a reasonable man he would have ridden over no earlier than mid-morning, on any reasonable expectation of getting access to Elizabeth. Indeed, he shows as much restraint and decorum in the book as one might expect, coming over with Bingley in the afternoon after his arrival back down from London.)
Given the generally positive critical response to the film, It's beside the point to note that I wasn't impressed. What is more interesting is to consider why such an extensive amount of swapping of locales took place, and why it might have an impact on what is designed into the book.
Some changes may have been to speed things up by avoiding a more lengthy setup, or to provide for comic relief by showing people listening at keyholes.[2]
However, there are two things to think about beyond that.
First, Austen's society (as she presents it) has a very organized relationship to the countryside. Most of society's life takes place indoors, but the willingness to explore the countryside, to go in search of the local sublime, had been introduced in the late Eighteenth Century. (It is still notable that Austen's list of the places the Gardiners visit is entirely artificial: " Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth, Birmingham".)
By modern standards the action of Pride and Prejudice is claustrophobic. The only real stress on the outdoors is the organized park at Rosings, and the better designed one, artifice imitating nature ("in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned") at Pemberley. Even there, Elizabeth's thought (omitted, as far as I could tell, in the film) "And of this place, I might have been mistress!" is triggered not by the landscape but by the interior (and the prospect of the landscape from the interior): "it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendour, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings".
The exception to this are the two walks, set up at the end of the novel, arranged so that Jane and Bingley can converse with some privacy but also with some decorum (i.e. they can be observed at a distance, in principle), which happens to provide the same privacy for Elizabeth and Darcy, much as taking a walk in the garden allows Lady Catherine some privacy with Elizabeth. (The aborted trip to the Lake Country is the other absence here: a trip with the observation of the natural as its end.)
Secondly, Austen's world is not outwardly dramatic: indeed, the urge to be dramatic or to make any sort of scene is anathema to her set of values.[3] Likewise, it's worth noting how many things Elizabeth keeps private, even secret, in the course of the novel. (One of the things the movie gets wrong is the scene with the letter, where Elizabeth lets her aunt and uncle and Darcy all know the contents of the letter; in the novel, she tells Darcy only and precisely because he is there and her uncle is not; it's telling that it is this one slip in her ability to keep a secret which leads to the successful unfolding of the rest of the book -- the first point she actually trusts Darcy. This novel could be subtitled "The Education of Elizabeth Bennett". But I digress.) In this context, the fine details of the interior (to the person) life, observed or taking place in the conventional (physically) interior settings of parlour, library, or dining room, are everything.
Personally, I don't think that the changes are the result of any thematic thought by the filmmaker. I think that he just liked dramatic sets (and his backdrops tend to be cluttered and busy: compare the depiction of the dance where Darcy first appears with that in the BBC series, or the ongoing chaos of the Bennett's residence). If he's going to have a dramatic proposal (he trashes Elizabeth's comprehensive reply to Darcy in favour of more heightened give-and-take), counterpointing it with a dramatic storm and a natural backdrop just allows him to heighten the mood.
[1]So that the film can show a completely unnecessary shot of Elizabeth in a wild location in the Peaks. The film drops out Mrs. Gardiner's background in Derbyshire.
[2]Humphrey: "I should never have thought you would have done anything so undignified as to stoop to keyholes, uncle.
Tyson: "No, no, no. The door will be ajar, my boy."
In the household as shown in the film, any sane person would conduct private conversation only in whispers, and probably in the middle of a field where they could look around for eavesdroppers.
[3]My favourite comment on Elizabeth's manners remains Cabell's: "And when we sanely appraise the most cried-up writer of genteel "realism", matters are not conducted much more candidly. Here is a fair sample : 'From the very beginning of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike, and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.' It is Miss Austen's most famous, most beloved, and most 'natural' character replying not by means of a stilted letter, but colloquially, under the stress of emotion to a proposal of marriage by the man she loves. This is a crisis which in human life a normal young woman simply does not meet with any such rhetorical architecture. . . So there really seems small ground for wonder that Mr. Darcy observed, 'You have said quite enough, madam'; and no cause whatever for surprise that he hastily left the room, and was heard to open the front-door and quit the house. . . Yet, be it forthwith added, Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, and even Miss Austen, were in the right, from one or another aesthetic standpoint, in thus variously editing and revising their contemporaries' unsatisfactory disposition of life.
