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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“You assume just because I hate something I don’t want to do it?”
Following Katherine Voyles’ insightful essay about why nobody can seem to agree on what the 2022 adaptation of Persuasion is supposed to do, this essay explores another question: why do we all keep watching Austen film adaptations, even when we don’t like them? The first filmed Austen adaptation was released in 1938, with a television movie of Pride and Prejudice, and it seems we haven’t stopped watching Austen since. There is a huge variety in what Austen adaptations look like, although each decade seems to hold onto a unique idea of Austen. Carrie Wittmer of Vulture offers a chronology of Austen adaptations, where she traces the themes explored in different…
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Carrie Cracknell’s Anne Elliot is a Girl with a Rabbit
As Katherine Voyles’ insightful essay on the discourse around Persuasion (2022) demonstrates, historical inaccuracy has been pegged as one of Carrie Cracknell’s unforgivable misdeeds, especially related to the use of contemporary language and even the protagonist’s bangs. Yet when I finally watched the film, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Cracknell draws on the visual and literary culture of Austen’s era in the choice to associate Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson) with animals. When Anne first introduces her family, she is carrying a pet rabbit who will be by her bed, on her lap, and in her arms, when she breaks the fourth wall. In her first conversation with Lady Russell (Nikki…
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(Not) Persuadable: The Discourse About Persuasion
The conventional wisdom around the most recent cinematic take on Jane Austen’s Persuasion (2022) hardened almost immediately. Too Fleabag-y, too Bridgerton-y, and not Austen-y or Persuasion-y enough to tempt me was the consensus. I focus here mainly on U.S. based publications and reactions, but British GQ sums up takes from Britain’s papers. It’s worth slowing down to examine these takes in some detail to get a sense of the discomfort with this particular modernization of an Austen novel. And it’s worth thinking through why not just this modernization but modernization full stop is so fraught when it comes to the figure of Austen and the particularities of her novels. Doing…
