What is the main lesson we take away from Jane Austen? I know novels aren’t manuals, but the Austen industry encourages a certain self-help approach to its products – and Austen herself was full of what we no longer call bossy opinions. From the books, there are endless shrewd judgments about how to be a woman of substance. From the screen adaptations, we learn just how nice it would be to have a big house in Derbyshire. There is the general rule of true love overcoming all obstacles. But there is also this: that there is no worse fate to befall a woman than to fail to lock down a man.
Two new Austen adaptations are heading our way: a Netflix miniseries of Pride and Prejudice, and a new movie version of Sense and Sensibility. They join Too Much, Lena Dunham’s new show that riffs on our relationship with romcoms – how we use them as templates and ideals – a clear nod to Sleepless in Seattle, except with Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility as its urtext rather than An Affair to Remember.
In Dunham’s show, Jessica, played by Megan Stalter, sits around with her family discussing the relative merits of Greg Wise v Alan Rickman while the 1995 movie airs in the background, ensuring that when the heroine moves to England, her experiences unfold in tension with what has come to be seen as Austen’s platonic ideal. It’s a meta-treatment of the genre, while the two forthcoming adaptations are typical period pieces; but while these projects differ, what remains curious, more than 200 years after Austen was writing, is that the underlying assumption remains the same: effectively, that there is no better story for a woman than one that ends in a marriage.
Before I go further, I should say that, per the unwritten constitution of Britain – which mandates the holding of strong feelings about Austen by all citizens – I loved Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and have opinions about all the other adaptations that are the only correct opinions to have. For example, it hardly needs saying that Gwyneth Paltrow was terrible as Emma in the 1996 movie, and also that we have that particular adaptation to thank for the perfection of Sophie Thompson’s Miss Bates (specifically, the scene where she is insulted on Box Hill).
It is also true that romcoms, particularly Austen adaptations, hit you differently when you’re more interested in Jennifer Ehle than Colin Firth. There are no gays in Austen, obviously – although Mr Bingley is quite the fancy little gent and half of Austen’s women are cranky enough to have made excellent lesbians – but when you look at Austen from the point of view of someone not really implicated in the goals of the story, you see things slightly differently. That we still cleave to this model of marriage as a woman’s crowning achievement makes for excellent drama and who doesn’t love a love story? But at the risk of being the scowling lesbian at the feast, the sheer, centuries-long uniformity of the emphasis has a cost at the back end that we don’t really talk about.
Which brings me to another TV show, one that examines, in brilliant, horrifying, anxiety-inducing detail, a strange side-effect of the assumptions underpinning the romcom. Fake is an Australian drama based on Stephanie Wood’s 2017 viral piece in the Sydney Morning Herald that she turned into a bestselling memoir, and in which Birdie Bell, her alter ego, falls in love with Joe, a man she meets on an online dating site. Wood/Bell dates him for over a year, during which time he presents himself as a brilliant businessman and property developer. It is only later, and after a series of sadistic deceptions, that Joe is revealed to be a lying grifter living under a piece of tarpaulin by a creek. And here’s the point: the reason the heroine ignores the red flags is because she is 49 years old and everyone – everyone – in her life is telling her, directly and otherwise, that she is defective until she gets married.
I am not a straight woman but I found myself identifying hard with Birdie and, through her, Stephanie Wood, particularly on the subject of being uncomfortable at weddings. In Wood’s case, the experience was one of being made to feel like shit as the only single straight woman with no children; and for me and every gay person I know, there are memories of all those weddings we went to in the 1990s and early 2000s at which it never struck anyone present as remotely weird, or grotesque, that we were participating in an event from which we were legally barred. (Marriage, which entails hundreds of rights, privileges and financial benefits, became legal for same-sex couples in 2014 in England and Wales, and a year later was legalised in the US by the supreme court.) Not very romantic, huh.
None of this is Austen’s fault, or Dunham’s, and in fact I would say that Dunham’s engagement with romcom history is shot through with a sensibility I’d call gay-adjacent. (This in stark contrast to most writer/directors in the Austen film and TV space who – how to put this – are so straight they probably enjoy the window displays in Oliver Bonas.) Meanwhile, the greatest irony of all is that Austen, who remained unmarried, intended her novels to espouse a philosophy of only-marry-for-love, not marry-at-all-costs.
Then, as now, that message buckles under a different value system, one that balances a woman’s worth on whether she has kids or is married. But as we look forward to a bunch more products driven by Regency-era values that are also our own, it’s worth remembering the flipside to the insistence that every good story ends with a wedding. In Wood’s case, the greater deception was not that she was taken in by a conman, but that, because of the excessive pressure on her to find a man, and in defiance of every instinct in her body telling her to run, she happened across a dangerous loser and – romcom-primed – conned herself into falling for him.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
