No X-Rated Version of Austen on British TV, Fans Cry

A British screenwriter’s idea for an X-rated TV version of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” has not unexpectedly provoked cries of protest, not to say outrage, among Austen fans in Los Angeles.

According to a column in the Guardian, Andrew Davies intends to portray Austen’s “pent-up sexuality” with sex scenes and a shot of the hero, Mr. Darcy, in frontal nudity.

Miss Austen’s millions of contemporary readers will perhaps not approve of such a candid treatment of the early 19th-Century novelist’s staid romantic interludes between Mr. Darcy and the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. As I recently recalled, the two lovers were in fact not lovers but carried out their discreet romance through a series of elegantly phrased conversations conducted mostly on long walks. Their engagement is accomplished without so much as a kiss or even an embrace, as far as the reader knows, and we are not present at the consummation of their marriage.

That Austen’s story could be defiled by nudity and visual sex is no less than appalling to Diana Birchall, a past president of the Jane Austen Society-Southwest. “This is so utterly out of keeping with the spirit of the novels,” she writes, “that one is left virtually speechless and unable to respond to the idea. . . .”

Birchall suggests, however, that many Janeites have probably speculated about the time and place of the consummation and admits that she herself has imagined that it took place at an inn, since Derbyshire was more than a day’s drive from Longbourn.

Such speculations, it seems to me, are likely to go beyond the mere facts of time and place and to produce visions of the act itself. Is that not a fair subject for a contemporary treatment of the story? After all, the couple are married.

Evidently Austen expected her readers to supply such titillating details, since, as Birchall points out, she said she did not write “for such dull elves as have not a good deal of ingenuity themselves.” Birchall comments: “Most Janeites, rather than seeing the spectacle of Mr. Darcy rampant, would prefer to leave these things to the imagination.”

More offensive than the idea of an X-rated “Pride and Prejudice,” says Birchall, is Guardian columnist Ray Hattersley’s suggestion that in her advice to Elizabeth--”You must not let your fancy run away with you. You have sense and we expect you to use it”--the word fancy refers to sexual desire and it (in use it ) referred to a contraceptive device.

“What kind of hellacious, pernicious, chuckleheaded, deconstructionist reasoning could lead this gentleman to suggest” such a thing? Birchall wonders.

“However, a good Austenite ought to recognize irony, even when misapplied. Let us charitably hope that Mr. Hattersley’s tongue is in his cheek.” (As an occasional reader of Mr. Hattersley, I can guarantee that it is.)

As an example of Austen’s attitude toward sexual license, Birchall quotes the remarks of Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park” on the elopement of Mrs. Rushworth and Henry Crawford:

“Fanny felt herself never to have been shocked before . . . she passed only from feelings of sickness to sufferings of horror; and from hot fits of fever to sickness to cold. The event was so shocking, that there were moments even when her heart revolted from it as impossible--when she thought it could not be. . . . It was too gross a complication of evil, for human nature, not in a state of utter barbarism, to be capable of!”

It seems to me that Austen is laying it on a bit heavy here. She seems fond of elopements without benefit of clergy. The same thing happened to the wanton Lydia and the duplicitous Mr. Wickham in “Pride,” but Elizabeth is happy to embrace her sister when her sin is set right by marriage.

I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if Lydia’s became the central role in a contemporary version of the novel. Surely Lydia’s illicit romp with Wickham would make a more entertaining movie than Elizabeth’s immaculate affair with Mr. Darcy. After all, action is what movies are all about.

Meanwhile, Angelo A. De Gennaro objects to my saying that I would “keep an open mind” about the X-rated script. “The reason seems obvious to me. Jane Austen’s novel, besides being a classic, has also a message: There is no civilization or decent society without some restraint. And what does Mr. Davies do? He replaces Miss Austen’s message with his dogmatic theology: Let us live like the brute beasts and, not being human, let us feed on sex alone.

“Mr. Smith, how can you, a man of sensibility and great decency, be open-minded before this desecration of art and civility? It is a mystery to me.”

It’s a mystery to me, too.