Did you watch the new persuasion movie, and if so, do you have thoughts? I’ve only seen review headlines, but one basically said “this is not just one of the worst Austen adaptations ever, it’s one of the worst movies ever.” So uh. Seems like it’s not going well.
I haven't watched it. Members of my Jane Austen bookclub are watching it and commenting and finding it interesting and not too terrible. I think for people who have been around for a while in the fandom/academia combination that is JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) there is a tendency to take every adaptation with a big grain of salt. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it will get new people exposed to and interested in the books.
There was a very real option for this adaptation to have a narrator to voice all the snark that the modern audience could hope for (Jane Austen could be brutal in her letters and her narrators are usually more not less engaged in sarcasm than her characters.) but they chose to give Anne the "agency" of doing this herself. Which is a choice that empowers her, yes, but that is frustrating because the whole point of the story is what it is like to be a powerless person in this world.
They also had an opportunity to deal with the issue of slavery, because it comes up obliquely in Persuasion, but instead they chose to comfort modern audiences with colorblind casting.
There was a lot of pearl clutching when the Roczema adaptation of Mansfield Park (1999) came out and re-opened a discussion of the link between the text and what it has to say about the oppression of women and the subtext of slavery. Edward Said and other academics had brought this up many, many times, but putting it a movie that got a big budget and appeared in theaters was a different story.
The novel of Mansfield Park uses the language of slavery and abolition to discuss the plight of a white woman (Fanny Price) whose only power is that of refusal (what part of "no, no, no no, oh my goodness no!" do you not understand) who is nearly forced into marriage with someone she doesn't want to marry because of pressure put on her by natural father and her adopted father. This is an unjust parallel, but it was also the parallel drawn by many white abolitionists (Charlotte Bronte draws a very similar parallel in Jane Eyre, though she doesn't go so far as to name the novel after the famous judge who made an anti slavery ruling) and early feminists who were before and after Austen. When the 1999 adaptation came out it dragged all of this up again, wrecking people's nice ideas about Jane Austen and the society in which she lived. One fifth of the British economy was derived from the transporation and sale of people. A huge amount of wealth was derived indirectly, from the labor of enslaved people. Literally every wealthy man in Austen is implicated in that. Even in Persuasion, there is Mrs. Smith's "property" in the West Indies:
There was one circumstance in the history of her grievances of particular irritation. She had good reason to believe that some property of her husband in the West Indies, which had been for many years under a sort of sequestration for the payment of its own incumbrances, might be recoverable by proper measures; and this property, though not large, would be enough to make her comparatively rich. But there was nobody to stir in it. Mr Elliot would do nothing, and she could do nothing herself, equally disabled from personal exertion by her state of bodily weakness, and from employing others by her want of money. She had no natural connexions to assist her even with their counsel, and she could not afford to purchase the assistance of the law. This was a cruel aggravation of actually straitened means. To feel that she ought to be in better circumstances, that a little trouble in the right place might do it, and to fear that delay might be even weakening her claims, was hard to bear.
And all of this is sorted out by Anne and Captain Wentworth after they are married. So this is an Austen hero helping a poor widow, but helping her to what??? What sort of property in the West Indies "though not large" would make her comparably rich? Well it was likely land that was leased to a plantation for sugar production, a brutal industry with dangerous and grueling work, where the conditions were disease ridden and people were worked to death and replaced so fast that the market for slave labor was so pressed for fresh people to enslave that they began to try to improve their condition, marginally in order for them to be able to have families and for their children to become slaves. Modern chattel slavery was born in the West Indies and it was being propped up by absentee landlords who were getting rich vicariously in Britain, Like Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park and to a lesser extent, Mrs. Smith at the end of Persuasion.
As far as I can tell this new adaptation of Persuasion has nothing to say about this. They have gone halfway to Roczema territory by reworking the heroine to be more palatable to modern audiences. Roczema's Fanny Price quotes Austen's juvenelia and participates in a lesbian flirtation with Mary Crawford. It was spicy stuff aimed squarely at getting up the nose of people who saw Jane Austen as safe, romantic, archly funny stories and nothing more. Color blind casting in this Persuasion adds a further dimension of white washing any actual nuance or rebellion within Jane Austen's text, in favor of making modern audiences more comfortable and in the name of inclusivity:
“When the suggestion [colorblind casting] came up, my reaction was ‘Sure,’” [Screenwriter Ron] Bass recalls. “Because it’s not an issue in her time. Her time wasn’t about racial issues. Because, of course, there weren’t other races that were involved in the world that she was dealing with, so the idea of colorblind casting [worked]. Henry Golding could play Mr. Elliot because it doesn’t really matter. And Nikki could play Lady Russell."
OK, first of all this is wrong on so many levels. There were absolutely non-white people in all levels of British Society, and of course, their exploitation made the world in which she lived possible. Like I said, Jane Austen made slavery the premise and central metaphor of Mansfield Park. I do not have faith that an adaptation based on such completely ignorant assumptions about British society at the turn of the 19th century, is going to do anything positive for appreciation of the novel or Jane Austen.
What does it mean that Charles Musgrove, a landed respected yeoman farmer is played by black man, who is the descendant of enslaved people in the Caribbean? What does it mean, that Mr. Elliot, the man who declines to stir on behalf of his old friend's widow who wants to get a plantation up and running in the West Indies, is played by a Malaysian man (Malaysia was part of the British empire in Victorian times)? What does it mean that Lady Russell, whose entire presence in the novel is about the power of polite society to control and destroy people's lives is played by a woman who is Nigerian by birth and who grew up in West Indies?
All three of these characters have power over Anne Elliott who is played by a white woman. What is the message there? Why not just make Anne Elliot black and make Lady Russell white? Wouldn't that make us more inclined to understand the power imbalance in their friendship? If you are going to be colorblind then go for it, you know.
The screenwriters absolutely had an opportunity to find the nuance and rebellion in Jane Austen, to see the off-stage injustices that were happening, not from the POV of Mrs. Smith, the entitled white woman for whom they were nothing but a sore point, not because she wanted less slavery but because she wanted MORE; and give us something new. If you are going to change the text and modernize Jane Austen, while leaving it in its period setting, at least make her feminism intersectional! Could not Mrs. Smith decide that her land in the West Indies is better off in escrow than being a place where human beings are treated like animals? Or perhaps have it be that Mr. Eliot has made the conscious decision to keep it in escrow rather than deal with the moral consequences of selling it. I'm just spit balling here but it isn't that hard. Once you start fiddling with the text, you can do just about anything you want.
