Melodramatic, selfish, pouty Mary Musgrove is the only Persuasion (2022) character who says anything meaningful about Regency womanhood that is congruous with gender expectations today. Her lines in Carrie Cracknell’s adaptation are like Reductress captions, with just a little less of the same satirical punch. Although she is portrayed as childlike, a desirable Regency trait for women since it meant they were innocent and subordinate, she instead uses this quality against prescribed gender roles. The choice to cast Mary McKenna-Bruce intentionally aligns the character with an actress who, until recently, was a child star in the popular British children’s show Tracy Beaker Returns (2010-2012) and its spinoff The Dumping Ground…
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In the Eye of the Beholder: Georgiana and her Portrait
If season two of Sanditon showed us anything, it is that the eyes are easily deceived. After a season full of emotional manipulation through gaslighting and rakes disguised as men of gentility, the final episode retained a few surprises, including the revelation that Charles Lockhart (Alexander Vlahos) himself was the heinous family relation after Georgiana’s inheritance. Although intended to shock, Charles’s spurious character was present in early episodes, and not just through the ton’s discomfort with his eccentricity. His applications to paint Georgiana (Crystal Clarke) seem altruistic, yet they display an underlying misogynoir that limits her self-expression. In the context of Sanditon’s historical fiction, Georgiana’s power over the portrayal of…
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لوگ کیا کہیںگے / Log Kya Kahenge
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), describes a society whose members, constantly fearing the loss of personal reputation, ask themselves this question like a reprimand: What will people say? The title’s timeless alliteration also displays how words shape reputation’s near relation–memory. Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable (2019), a retelling of Austen’s novel, explores the way in which language impacts cultural and personal memory. Set in Pakistan in the early 2000s, the novel follows Alys Binat and her sisters as they navigate the marriage market, female identity, and British and Pakistani influences on their self-expression. Kamal translates “What will people say?” into Urdu: ” کہیںگے/ Log kya kahenge” (35). She applies a post-colonialist perspective to…
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Privileging the Male Perspective: Wendy van Camp’s The Curate’s Brother
Wendy van Camp’s The Curate’s Brother: A Variation on Persuasion (2015) traces its literary ancestry back to fanfic more than the Regency novel. Whereas the Sir Walter Elliot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) reads through centuries of his family’s published lineage, the modern reader of Camp’s novelette skims through just over a decade’s worth of literary internet culture deceptively packaged as a period piece (Persuasion 1). Fanfic may have been coined in the 1930s, but according to Stephanie Burt in “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction”, the digitized fanfic that we recognize today began in 2007 (The New Yorker). Notable for its interactive qualities, fanfic allows writers and readers to mold literary…
