Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a great novel
partly because it tells a good human and romantic story which is
also the vehicle for profound moral reflection. Pardon me if that
sounds too obvious to need saying. I would have thought so too. But
Deborah Moggach who wrote the screenplay for and Joe Wright who
directed the new movie version of Pride and Prejudice
appear to have forgotten it. They have given us the human story all
right, suitably amped up for the big screen. I am not one of those
who thinks that Keira Knightley is too pretty for the role of
Elizabeth Bennet, and her star-power is a definite asset — that of
Matthew MacFadyen’s Darcy somewhat less so. Add to the beautiful
set of her jaw a quantum of lush photography and soaring emotions
and you have a lot to work with, but the film-makers have left out
the moral dimension altogether. The result is a badly unbalanced if
visually impressive film that ends up being a vulgarization of Miss
Austen’s novel.
When I say they have left out the moral dimension, I mean they
have left out the morality that Jane Austen would have understood
and that, naturally enough, she put into the novel. But the film
substitutes for it a typically Hollywoodish moralism in the form of
an implied critique of Regency England’s social order. It is
important to understand that this is desperately unhistorical. It’s
true that the first social critics as we recognize them were around
at the time. In particular, the French Revolution had spawned
revolutionaries in England like William Godwin and even feminists
like Mary Wollstonecraft. But Jane Austen was not such a social
critic, given to glib formulations about “society” and its
shortcomings. She was utterly at home with her society and with its
morality and accepted it as her own. The novel is in fact on one
level a kind of taxonomy of moral types according to the categories
generally accepted at the time. The whole point of Elizabeth
Bennet’s initial rejection of Mr. Darcy has to do with a deficiency
of manners which she loudly proclaims to his face without realizing
that her own moral judgment is to be faulted for being too hastily
arrived at.
You won’t understand any of this from the film. It is clear that
its Elizabeth doesn’t like Mr. Darcy at first, but this is only
because of his behavior to her and her sister and not because he
has fallen short of a more generally implied social standard. She
is also under a misapprehension about his behavior toward Mr.
Wickham (Rupert Friend), whom she likes. But that there might be
anything more than personal preferences and real or imagined
personal slights in all this the film gives us no hint. Jane
Austen’s Elizabeth disapproves of Darcy not just because he is
disagreeable to her but because he has behaved in a way that she
and her society believe is objectively wrong. The fact that, two
hundred years on, it is considered tasteless and tactless to be so
“judgmental” about people does not mean that you can just leave all
that kind of thing out and still imagine that you have anything
more than the hollowed out shell of Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice.
The film’s own morality is also rather an annoyance. You may not
have heard about it before, but back in those days there was a lot
of sexual repression about. In fact, it was everywhere! The new
film’s authors think it important for us to be reminded of this
from time to time with shots of a pig’s testicles as he wanders
into the Bennet family’s parlor, or of the extraordinary collection
of nude paintings and frescoes and statuary thoughtfully pored over
by Elizabeth Bennet on her visit to Pemberley after her rejection
of Darcy’s proposal. Her obvious regret and heartache as she looks
first at the racy images and then at a bust of Darcy suggest,
absurdly, that she doesn’t know whether it’s missing out on him or
the sex that she most regrets. Likewise, the emphasis given to the
preemptive self-defense by Charlotte Lucas (Claudie Blakley) for
agreeing to marry the awful Mr. Collins (Tom Hollander) smacks of
an inappropriate and anachronistic feminism. “I can’t afford to be
romantic,” she says, conveniently forgetting that Elizabeth can
afford it no better than she, though she is so far “romantic” as to
refuse a man whom she thinks she cannot love anyway. Charlotte
doesn’t quite blame the patriarchy for making her accept Mr.
Collins’s proposal, but that or something like it is implied for
today’s audience. The giggly girlishness of Jane (Rosamund Pike)
and Elizabeth as well as their younger sisters is also an implied
critique that is nowhere in the original.
“Don’t you dare judge me,” says Charlotte, just as if she had
never noticed that in the world she supposedly inhabits people
“judge” each other all the time. It is expected of them, just as
they themselves expect to be judged. As a result of the omission of
this vital element of the novel, we don’t have enough of a sense of
the social context in order to understand how it is that the family
consider themselves “ruined” when Lydia (Jena Malone) elopes with
Mr. Wickham — or how Mr. Darcy saves them from ruin by paying off
Wickham. “This is grave indeed,” says Darcy at the news, but we
just have to take it on trust. A similar lack of context leaves us
unsure whether Darcy’s mention of a “lack of propriety” in
Elizabeth’s mother, sisters, and even her father — who, by the
way, is portrayed by Donald Sutherland as a virtual dotard — is
meant to strike a chord with us, as it undoubtedly does with
Elizabeth. Or is it just Darcy being tactless and arrogant? With
Jane Austen, you always know, too, that personal fulfillment only
comes through the faithful application of the moral principles that
are upheld by the dominant culture. Without any such culture of our
own, and little idea of what it might look like even if we had one,
how can we even properly feel what the human story invites us to
feel?
