A SLENDER GIRL AND A THIN PLOT: STARVATION AND SPECTACLE IN PERSUASION

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Bonnie Blackwell is an associate professor of English at TCU, where she teaches eighteenth-century literature, critical theory, women's studies, and film. She has published in journals such as ELH Genders, and Women's Writing; her essays focusing on film have appeared in Camera Obscura and College Literature She is currently completing a book on Swift and Modest Proposals. Notes 1 Deborah Kaplan finds “harlequinization” marring the film versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, by which she means that “like the mass-market romance, the focus is on a hero and heroine's courtship at the expense of other characters and other experiences, which are sketchily represented” (178). Andrew Higson's “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” while not a reading of the Jane Austen boom, makes many salient points about “the nostalgic gaze” of Merchant Ivory productions which applies to the films I'm examining here. In particular, I have been persuaded by Higson's diagnosis that the films' use of “commodification, exhibition and display” creates a sort of “heritage space, rather than narrative space: that is, a space for the display of heritage properties rather than for the enactment of dramas” (109, 112, 117). 2 In a lecture at Chawton in July 2003, Andrew Higson disputed the common application of the term “failure” to Persuasion. He pointed out that it was made quite economically for BBC television and then released theatrically in the United States. The film had already recouped its production costs with advertising at the time it was aired in Britain, so its admittedly modest box office take represented a profit many times over its original cost. The standard definition of a box-office failure is that the film does not recover its cost at the box-office and may take some time in the rental, VHS and DVD sales markets to break even, a definition that clearly does not fit Persuasion. However, neither its critical reception nor its box-office take could compete with the warm critical and financial reception of the other Jane Austen adaptations, up until Patricia Rozema's widely reviled Mansfield Park (1999). 3 In a popular account called The Golden Cage, Hilda Bruch describes anorexics as locked in a “struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that their parents, or the world around them, has to offer…In genuine or primary anorexia nervosa, the main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence and effectiveness” (qtd. in Bell 17). 4 “Popular since the Renaissance, a syllabub is a drink made of hot, but not curdled, milk or cream mixed with brandy, table wine, port, sherry, hard cider, or beer and sugar, beaten to a froth with whipped cream floated on top” (Trager 162). 5 Cf. The description of Jane Fairfax: “Her height was pretty, just such as almost everybody would think tall, and nobody could think very tall; her figure particularly graceful; her size a most becoming medium, between fat and thin, though a slight appearance of ill-health seemed to point out the likeliest evil of the two” (Emma 149).