allanhunter.net Blog

This posting is on a temporary blog - since I’ve mislaid my actual blog in the attempted upgrade of the site.  I’m not sure how that happened.  I know that if one goes to H2o town (if you google Allanhunter.net and click not on the first listings but the h20 ones) you’ll find all blog entries thus far. So the data is not lost. How they got the blog there I’ve no idea.  Who ‘they’ are, I have also no idea.

However - PBS offered us their version of what is probably Austen’s most complex and subtle novel, and they turned it into something very one dimensional.  In fact I was bored. The actress who played Fanny Price - it’s a measure of how unappealingly she played the role that I can’t recall her name and can’t be bothered to find out - gave us no inner tension, no sense of beleaguered moral purpose and I wondered why I watched at all.  She simply scowled. The clincher for me was that all the ‘dramatic’ moments were signalled to the viewers by the greater volume of stirring music.  But stirring music is not a replacement for excellent acting or good direction.

I could complain about the liberties taken with the book - Fanny doesn’t get sent back to her family at all, and so she suffers in no conceivable way for her failure to accept Henry Crawford - but the main violation is that we are allowed to hear the Crawfords speak in private.  We therefore know their motivations.  Most of the book is predicated upon us NOT knowing their motivations and thus being as lost as everyone but Fanny seems to be.  That lets all the tension out.

The result is a program that has all the subtlety of a sit com, in which our prejudices must always be readily fuelled and easy identification of characters is essential.

A novel of tension and real drama it this reduced to a rather suburban romance.  What do I mean by this?  Consider the Bertram family. One daughter runs off in an adulterous affair.  The other elopes with the worthless Mr. Yates (hardly mentioned in this production); the heir is a dissipated wretch, and Edmund, the one good one of the bunch, nearly gets seduced from both his calling as a clergyman and the person who really should marry him.  Edmund and Mary Crawford are a recipe for misery. The question that lurks behind all this is basic to Austen - who is going to inherit the estate?  Who will look after the hundreds of laborers and tenants such an enterprise requires?  If the Bertrams don’t pay attention they’ll ruin more than themselves.

The triumph, of course, is that Fanny saves the day simply by being herself.  In the war between vicious, indulgent London and the impoverished Prices at Portsmouth we’ll notice that the two ‘bad’ Bertram girls are replaced by the two ‘good’ Price girls.  It’s a metaphor of the need to look after traditional values that Jane Austen held so dear.