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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(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…
