Anyone likely to be watching Becoming Jane, Julian
Jarrold’s attempt to imagine a historical love affair between a
young Jane Austen and an impecunious Irish lawyer in 1795, is
likely to know in advance how it comes out. Though he’s got a lot
of nerve, Mr. Jarrold hasn’t got quite enough to make one of the
world’s most famous spinsters into a happily married lady. The
suspense lies in our waiting to see not if but how the lovers will
be parted. In this respect, if in no other, all honor to Mr Jarrold
and his screenwriters, Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood. They have
given us an ending that, for its high moral tone and sense of duty,
Jane Austen herself might have been pleased with. Otherwise, the
movie is a load of sentimental rubbish.
From one of Jane Austen’s letters, we know that she met “a
gentlemanlike, good-looking pleasant young man” named Tom Lefroy
around Christmas time, 1795, when she had just turned 20. She
danced with him at three Christmas balls and probably flirted with
him. She seems never to have seen him again. Everything else in
Becoming Jane is made up. And it is made up in
particularly unbelievable ways. Its Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway)
boldly strides forward to bat in a men’s cricket match, scores
several runs and afterwards rushes down to the river to see the men
bathing naked. She attends a boxing match and otherwise behaves as
no respectable lady, let alone a moralist like Jane Austen, would
have done in 1795. These are not minor liberties but evidence of a
basic failure to understand the history ostensibly being
presented.
Interestingly, the problem with the film is basically the same
as it was with the most recent movie adaptation of Pride and
Prejudice — whose plot Becoming Jane in many ways
sticks close to as its way of suggesting that that novel could have
been autobiographical.
That is, it imposes 21st century standards on an 18th century
story and so makes a nonsense of it. Both movies suggest that
sexual “repression” is the key to understanding their heroes and
the society they live in. Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) in Mr.
Jarrold’s movie becomes attractive to Jane because of his
reputation as a rake. She is supposedly hungry for the “experience”
of the world that her repressive society has denied her. She wants
to write fiction, but Tom points out to her that she has to have
more of this precious “experience” — which is obviously a code
word for sex — before she can write it. Accordingly, he presents
her with a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as if it
were the Kama Sutra — a forbidden book that the
repressers-in-chief would have been scandalized to know that she
was reading.
If the authors think that such a man is anything like Mr. Darcy
of Pride and Prejudice, apart from not being rich, it
could explain a lot about where they went so wrong.
Not only is Tom’s idea of “experience” — and in particular
sexual experience — as the foundation of art highly dubious in
itself, not only would it have been unknown in England during the
Napoleonic era, but it makes no sense at all without the myth of
“Victorianism” — historically two generations later in any case —
as we have retrospectively imagined it. In fact it is most unlikely
that even the Victorians were ever shocked by the idea of the act
of sex itself. Jane Austen would certainly have read Tom
Jones without having been told about it by her hopeful lover
or anyone’s thinking it particularly daring for her to have done
so. And the idea of her having been titillated, as she is
represented as being in the film, by Tom’s reading to her an
account of swallows mating from a book of natural history is
ridiculous. Like most people in the 18th century, she lived close
enough to nature to have been thoroughly familiar with the sexual
behavior of animals.
This is so obvious that we are forced to the conclusion that
Becoming Jane has made not the slightest attempt to
imagine itself back into Jane Austen’s time. Instead, it drags her
into ours and so makes her utterly unlike what we know she was.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to do, but we know at the
outset that it is false as hell. The people in Jane Austen’s time
simply didn’t go around thinking that all they needed was to loosen
up sexually and allow women more freedom to choose their own
destinies. Certainly Jane Austen didn’t. The beliefs about sex and
families and money that people held in Jane Austen’s time may have
been benighted, but they really did hold them. Not to give them
credit for this but instead to treat them as if they were children
who simply didn’t know any better — as if they could have been put
right by any prematurely “experienced” high school girl of today —
is worse than philistinism. It is an act of historical
vandalism.
