episode 15 transcript
Ryan:
I'm here with Kirsten Hall, who is a doctoral candidate at the university of Texas at Austin. She is also a [Graduate] Fellow at the Austin Institute and the managing editor of the Genealogies of Modernity Blog. Genealogies of Modernity is a project cosponsored by Beatrice Institute and the Collegium Institute for Catholic thought and culture in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. Kirsten has been involved in two Collegium Institute seminars on Genealogies of Modernity, and in past summers, her work specialized in eighteenth-century literature and culture. She has published widely, not only on eighteenth-century literature, but also on nineteenth-century literature and religious culture; she contributes regularly to the Genealogies of Modernity Blog, and occasionally to other publications, such as The New Atlantis, reaching a broader public with her writing.
So, Kirsten Hall, welcome!
Kirsten:
Thank you, Ryan. Thanks for having me here.
Ryan:
So in eighteenth-century England, when you arrived in London, you would go around leaving your calling card at your friends and acquaintances houses to let them know you were in town, and your calling card would have times on it when you were available to receive them. And presumably, then, this helped manage the potential for a constant stream of social engagements. It reminds me, then, that it's now common for faculty at my university, and I assume elsewhere, to auto-sign their emails with what you might call a “digital calling card,” saying that they answer emails between nine and five on weekdays or at given times. And this is very much a human resources kind of initiative to promote a healthy work-life balance. But at the same time, I see many of these faculty engaging on social media, in a professional or semi-professional capacity, in the evening, on weekends, and so on. So what would a digital calling card look like for social media?
Kirsten:
With calling hours, there's a time limit set. So when you would go to pay a call at a newly-arrived acquaintance in town, you would have around 15 to 20 minutes, say, to catch up with them. And then it would be socially understood that the meeting was over, and you just wouldn't overstay your welcome. But there was a sense that 15 minutes was the time, and it wouldn't be rude to leave after 15 minutes. And I think something like that would be helpful, so that you're not stuck, for example, in the Twitter feud that could last for hours, and it's a sign of cowardice or something that you decide to duck out.
Ryan:
Okay, it's interesting, because if we're thinking of social media as asynchronous, which it often is, then imposing a two-hour window each day when you're available on social media is more a practice of self-discipline. But in Twitter, as I am beginning to learn as a recent entrant into that space, things get a little more synchronous, and there is a way in which, if you're out of an exchange, you might be out of the conversation.
Kirsten:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's fully demanding of our time, and it's not just about self-discipline anymore that you continuously pick up your phone, but it's that you are expected, if you were to actually engage with people over Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, that you have to be constantly vigilant in order to be a part of this exchange.
Something I've been thinking about is the way that the eighteenth century and the seventeenth century became obsessed with how time was measured. It wasn't really until this period that it was possible for you to track time down to the minute, and even the second, because time-keeping technology was improving a lot during this period. The time was regulated by the church bells in the village, for example, that would maybe mark the hour or something like that.
Ryan:
You could have your own personal time regulation now.
Kirsten:
Exactly. And it was still very expensive, and it was not quite accurate, but you could get within five minutes of accuracy, and this is an unprecedented way to experience time in human history. So I've been thinking about this with social media—just that it is so time consuming and everything's happened so rapidly. I think a lot of people, just their experience of social media is that it's this inhumane timescale that your attention is constantly being demanded, your response to texts—like, if you don't text back within five minutes, it's considered rude, because you have your smartphone on you at all times. Or even with email, you're expected to respond within 24 hours. And it's just such a huge demand on our time. I wonder if we're undergoing a sort of similar crisis of timescale. Things have just sped up so quickly.
Ryan:
One of the strongest talking points of early Protestant reformers was the recent revelations of forgeries by humanist textual critics. So, for example, Lorenzo Valla revealed that the Donation of Constantine, this document that for centuries had grounded the Roman Catholic Church’s claim to temporal authority, had been a forgery. And so this Protestant sense of critical superiority continued well into the enlightenment and into religious discourse in the Church of England in the eighteenth century.
So why are forgeries making such a comeback, particularly among the supposedly enlightened Protestants of the eighteenth century? I mean, for example, Horace Walpole claimed that the novel, The Castle of Otranto was a translation from a medieval manuscript. And maybe this was just a clever satire, but many serious forgeries were perpetrated, such as James Macpherson’s supposed discoveries of the works of the Scottish Gaelic bard Ossian. Shouldn't these enlightened Protestants have known better?
Kirsten:
It's funny you bring up the poems of Ossian, because there's still actually some debate, as far as I understand, as to whether these forgeries are real or not; we're not entirely sure of the extent to which MacPherson just made them up and the extent to which they were actually based on a sort of medieval, ancient, Gaelic poetic tradition. So we still have not figured it out. Other cases, like what you were saying about the Walpole novel, those cases are more clear-cut. My theory about why forgeries were so popular and why they captured people's imaginations was that there was a crisis, in the eighteenth century, about what it meant to live in the modern world, and the relationship between ancient learning and modern, how those two fit together, built off of each other. This, in the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth century, was known as the “quarrel of the ancients and moderns.” It started in the French Academy, and then went over to the English Channel. And in England, this culminated in an episode that's now called “The Battle of the Books,” and that title comes from a satire that Jonathan Swift wrote as his contribution.
In “The Battle of the Books,” we have this allegory about the library books in St. James's Library in London having a battle. Pages are flying everywhere, and ink is being spilt, modern writers like Hobbes and Locke are sparring with ancients like Aristotle and Cicero. And the whole satire is structured, itself, as an incomplete manuscript. At the end of the satire Swift writes “the rest is missing” in Latin, so we actually don't know how the battle turns out, who's victorious, the ancients or the moderns. Which is interesting, because Swift himself was on the side of the ancients. And just to a sense of what was at stake in these two positions and what they were arguing about—so the ancients were rooted in this older, humanist, Renaissance ideal that wanted to resurrect ancient learning. So poetic practices, rhetorical practices for the education of statesmen and public figures. They thought, let's take the treasures of the ancients; we can't really improve on them. This is an heirloom that we've been given. And we're going to make the most of it and keep the torch of ancient learning alive.
And on the other hand—so this was, I should clarify, this was during the days of Oxford and Cambridge, where this whole debate broke out was in these learned university communities. Oxford at this time was mostly a training ground for public figures. So you either trained for the Church, or trained to become an academic, or it would prepare you to become a member of parliament and an active public figure, a sort of gentlemanly man of letters. Letters training. But their scholarship was not always very rigorous, because they didn't care about the scholarship per se. They cared about, “How can I use these ancient authors to live my best life?” So those were the ancients.
On the other side were the so-called moderns. They believed that it was possible to surpass ancient learning. This was especially the case in the natural sciences, where they figured that all of the new developments and empirical philosophy and investigations of the natural world had far surpassed anything that the ancients had come up with. So they believed in the possibility of progress, that the modern world was going to be better, more enlightened than the past.
They were also interested in creating these new historiographical methods and practices. Richard Bentley was a well-known philologist, and his goal was to try, when he was learning about the ancient world, not to cherry pick from the ancient tradition and say, “Okay, this will help me be a better person living in the contemporary era.” He was actually wondering, “What would it be like to live in the ancient world? How can I reconstruct ancient Rome as accurately as possible?”
And so, this is when this battle about forgeries takes place. The Christ Church academics had just commissioned (this was a common practice—you would have these translation competitions)—they had just commissioned the translation of this text called The Epistles of Phalaris, of, supposedly, this ancient text. But Bentley discovered, had good reason to believe based on his philological investigations, that this text was in fact a forgery. So this was an episode in the battle of the books where Bentley humiliated the academics at Christ church, exposing their new translation as inconsequential: they couldn't even notice that this wasn't actually from the ancient world. And in some ways, the ancients, the Oxford wits were like, “Well, it doesn't really matter. If there's pedagogical and life value in this text, it doesn't greatly matter if it's a forgery.”
So at the summer seminar that we did, we read Nietzsche’s texts about antiquarians versus genealogists. And I've been thinking lately about how the battle of the books is an interesting intervention in what Nietzsche wrote. So in Nietzsche, the antiquarian is digging around in dusty tomes. There's no real use for why we should become these philologists who understand the ancient world. And then you have the genealogist, on the other hand, who is using history for life and undermining some of these mythologized origins. So it's interesting to me how the moderns, in a way, these progressive, enlightened figures, become, in Nietzsche’s handling a hundred years later, the Nietzschean antiquarians, who are just digging around in ancient history and there's no real use for it.
Ryan:
So, as I understand it, in this quarrel, the moderns were not defined so much then by a rejection of ancient books, right? One of the hallmarks of their research was that their scientific forays into historical criticism raised doubts for them about whether the opinions of the ancients were as settled and durable as their proponents made them out to be. In some cases, the moderns exposed the prize texts of the ancients, but more commonly, wasn't it simply a recognition that the ancients had their own quarrels? I mean, at least that's what seems to be happening in Swift's “Battle of the Books.” When I got to the end of reading “The Battle of the Books,” I scratched my head, because I was like, “Wait, didn't I learn that Swift was one of the ancients?” But he seems to have this very lively sense of contestation. And so isn't Swift really a modern, and aren't we heirs to Swift's vision of genealogical anxiety?
Kirsten:
Yeah, I would say so. I mean, that was also something I was struck by in “The Battle of the Books”—the degree to which Swift seems fully aware that there's something to the modern position, that our knowledge of the past is radically incomplete. I mean, there's even a tension within the modern position, that the classical philologists like Bentley believed, that with the logical practice and modern historiographical practice, they could actually learn more about the ancients than the ancients knew about themselves.
But at the same time, through that kind of inquiry, they were realizing all of these gaps in the historical record, that a lot of what we thought we knew about the ancients was either incomplete or some kind of forgery. So I've been toying with the idea that the reason why the moderns ended up going with this position of “We have to stick with modern progress and modern learning!” is because they realized how incomplete our knowledge of the ancients was, that we couldn't rely on them for our cultural engagement and innovation, because it was so incomplete. It wasn't that they had faith in their own progress per se. It was that that's all they have. They don't actually have an ancient record to draw on, so I would call that a genealogical anxiety that we have to stick with modern learning because what we know about the past is so incomplete. Yeah. I'm not sure if that's the same thing that motivates us right now, if why we believe so much in the progress of modern learning is because we have a sense of an incomplete past, so much as we actually do believe that we are better than what came before us.
I think—maybe this is not the greatest example, but I think about this with teaching undergrads. I was TAing an American Lit class a couple of summers ago, and we were reading some Puritan theological text from early America. And one of the students commented that, “Now that we are experts on Calvinist theology… how silly for them to believe these things!” So the student thought that she was an expert on Calvinist theology because she had only read one sermon, and assumed that because what had happened in the past was somehow in the dark ages or something.
Ryan:
So this brings us to the larger question of genealogical anxiety. I think this is beautifully put by a contemporary philosopher, and I want to read a little bit of a quotation from her. But I, as I take it, these questions were questions that really were arising in the eighteenth century among scholars on both sides of this debate. And it's basically like, “What if I'm just lucky that my intuitions about the deepest structures of life are correct because I was born into a family and a culture that just happens to hold the correct beliefs about reality? And so, how am I to defend my deepest intuitions when they're just a result of genealogical luck?”
I think Srinivasan puts this really well. She says,
Of course my beliefs seem true to me, my values seem genuinely valuable; they are, after all, my beliefs and my values. But wouldn’t my beliefs also seem true to me even if I believed the opposite? If I believed in the inferiority of women, wouldn’t I do so with just as much conviction as I in fact believe in sexual equality? If I thought of the world not in terms of justice and rights but in the more ancient terms of honour, shame and pride, would I not feel that these concepts are the ones that get at the deep structure of morality?
What am I supposed to do with this other me, this shadow me, this me who believes the opposite of everything I believe, who values what I disvalue, who articulates the world in terms of concepts that are alien to my own? What if she is the right one, and I am the shadow?
And I take it that this is a really emergent question in the eighteenth century especially, and it comes to a head in the way that the eighteenth century is returning to not just classical literature, but the heroes of classical history, the moral exemplars of classical history, who were not Christian. How were they grappling with these issues of genealogical anxiety?
Kirsten:
Oh, that's such a great question. So in the first chapter of my dissertation, which I finished a while ago and still need to return to, I've been looking at one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century, called Cato. It was a tragedy. It was essentially the Hamilton of the day. The founders of America loved it. George Washington staged it at Valley forge to rally the morale of the troops, and Patrick Henry's famous “Give me Liberty, or give me death” is a sort of adaptation of this line. So anyway, it was this immensely popular play. Most scholars look at it from the perspective of its significance politically. It's complicated, because it united opposing wig and Tori sentiments, somehow. They each claimed it for their own side. But really, beyond the political significance, what I've been looking at is the figure of Cato the Younger. So this play dramatizes the final hours of Cato's life at Utica, and, famously, Cato ended his life by suicide.
And so this becomes a profound problem for the eighteenth century. They really admired Cato, but at the same time, they could not endorse his suicide. So, Joseph Addison, who was the author of the play, his cousin Eustace Budgell, this was actually years after Joseph Addison died, but Eustace Budgell got into a lot of financial trouble. He got involved with this free thinker and these inheritance issues. So his life was sort of falling apart, but he decided in 1737 to commit suicide by drowning himself in the Thames. When they finally found his body, they also discovered, when going back to his house, that he had left a suicide note that read, “What Cato did, and Addison approved, cannot be wrong.”
So he had justified his suicide based on his cousin’s play. And what's troubling about that is that it was this universally admired play. And if you actually dig into the homiletic literature in the eighteenth century, Cato and Addison's play are evoked all the time. So, on one hand, you have clergymen who are saying that Cato is more instructive than most sermons that you hear preached from the pulpit. But on the other hand, you have other clergymen saying, “No, actually, this is a horrible example to set, and you can't portray Cato as this hero, because he kills himself at the end. And in this moment of pride, he wasn't able to wait for God and for the plan of Providence to determine the course of his life. And he was overwhelmed by suffering, and rather than endure the suffering, he decides to end it himself.” So it's read as this moment of either pride or a cowardice, or usually the two combined. And so, to get to your question about genealogical anxiety, though, there is a sense that Cato is this really admirable figure and that he had actually come really close to Christian revelation in a lot of ways. And this was similar to other ancients. Socrates is another great example. Cicero is often invoked.
Addison, the author of Cato, wrote a periodical called The Spectator. And he's always invoking the names of ancient figures like Socrates and using them as his moral exemplars, and saying “You know, Socrates was a better Christian than all of you, but he did not have divine revelation.” So there's this kind of profound inequality that Socrates and Cato happened to be born in the wrong century but they came closer to Christian revelation, and actually made better use of what they could gather from a natural theology, just by observing God's created universe and natural law and observing some kind of moral principles and whatnot, that they came closer to being better Christians, even though they were born simply at the wrong time than most Christian.
Ryan:
And to be clear, he's not an opponent of Christianity. He genuinely thinks that it's divine revelation. And so it's not that Christianity is the reason that people are less virtuous.
Kirsten:
Right. That's correct. He’s thinking of it as an inheritance that you've been—or you could think of it as the Parable of the Talents. My other favorite eighteenth-century writer, Samuel Johnson, was haunted by the Parable of the Talents and thought he had made profound misuse of the gifts that he had been given, so he was convinced that he was going to hell. But anyway, you can think of the talents like the Christian who happened to have been born in the year 1712, right, has been given this great inheritance and is expected to make much use of it. Someone like Socrates, born before Christian revelation, has been given little, but has invested his few talents.
Well, I think that's the situation Addison is driving. It is using these ancient figures to shame Christians, and saying “If Cato could become such a great hero, even without the benefit of Christian revelation, he could get so close and live something that was so close to your Christian life—you, modern, English, depraved freethinkers and deists, you have Christian revelation; you have this knowledge, you have the light, but you have rejected it.” So he’s using these ancient figures to shame Christians. And this is not just Addison; this happens in all sorts of sermons from the eighteenth century.
Ryan:
Why do you think Cato is no longer performed? I mean, I tried to find a video of the play, and even on the very pricey theater video database that I have a subscription to through Pitt, there's never been a recording of it.
Kirsten:
I know. I would love to see a production of Cato. Unfortunately, eighteenth-century drama is just not in vogue right now. It's very rare to see plays from this era staged.
Ryan:
Why do you think that is?
Kirsten:
Well, I have friends who work on modern drama and are drama historians, and they love to say all sorts of mean things about eighteenth-century theater. Like, “It's all bad; it's not very good. It's just not as profound. There are all these comedies that have no substance to them.” Maybe I'm misrepresenting what they've said about eighteenth-century drama. But I also think that a lot of it, people just don't read. And a lot of it is also very topical, too. So, unless you're really immersed in eighteenth-century cultural history or political life, it's sometimes hard to pick up what makes something funny or pointed or profound.
Ryan:
But I think that, as Americans, Cato, as a tragedy, speaks to us still, because it has these rousing speeches in defense of liberty and that showdown between liberty and death.
Kirsten:
Yeah, so the thing with Cato, even when it was first performed, people really admired, they loved the speeches. The speeches were excerpted all the time, but as a play, it was a failure. I think it was Edward Young who commented that watching Cato was like watching marble statues on the stage.
Ryan:
Okay, now I propose a flash session of the game “Would You Rather?”, where you have to pick between two often undesirable options or two wonderful options, that you would never in real life want to choose exclusively. You can answer it simply and move on to the next one. Or you can elaborate; it's up to you.
Kirsten:
All right! Yeah, I love this.
Ryan:
Would you rather be marooned on Robinson Crusoe’s Island or the island on the TV series Lost?
Kirsten:
Well, life would be a lot more interesting on the Lost Island. It depends on whether I get companions there or not. If I were on the Crusoe Island, I'd be totally alone, and that would be horrible. If I were on the Lost island, I would have friends, but there'd be a lot of terrifying things happening. But I would probably also get bored on the Robinson Crusoe Island, so tentatively I would say the Lost Island, just because it would keep life more interesting.
Ryan:
Would you rather attend a ten-day retreat with the Jane Austen Pineapple Admiration Society, or spend ten days at ASECS, the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies annual conference?
Kirsten:
Is there a really a Jane Austen Pineapple Appreciation Society?
Ryan:
Yes, they dress up in Jane Austen costumes and do Jane Austen things.
Kirsten:
Oh, is this the Jane Austen society of North America?
Ryan:
This is the British version of that.
Kirsten:
Ah, okay. Yes, I am familiar with the American Jane Austen Society. It's actually similar to the Robinson Crusoe question. The Jane Austen society is a little bit more like Lost. Like you never know what's going to happen. And there are always people wandering around in bonnets asking if you've read Tom Jones yet and wanting to see if you'll dance or if you have opinions about Mr. Darcy emerging from the lake in a wet shirt. The ASECS has a lot less variety, but it would be a lot more predictable and more professionally austere and respectable.
Ryan:
Jane Austen's juvenile novel Love and Freindship [sic] or Whit Stillman’s 2016 movie based on it?
Kirsten:
Whit Stillman. I really love Whit Stillman. He tweeted recently about how he wants to film a Samuel Johnson movie, and I'm completely there for that. I don't know if it's going to happen, but I hope it does.
Ryan:
He tends to eventually do what he says he's going to do.
Kirsten:
Yeah. I just have to get in from the ground floor, you know?
Ryan:
Samuel Johnson's dictionary or the Oxford English dictionary?
Kirsten:
Samuel Johnson's dictionary, absolutely. I held one of Johnson's dictionaries for the first time last year. I take my students to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the archives there, and we have a class and I call up books from the archive and they get to learn a little bit about book history. And so I called up a Johnson dictionary, and it is this mammoth, like I was afraid I was going to drop it, but it's just so big and so weighty and it felt like the closest I could come to a physical encounter with Samuel Johnson himself.
Ryan:
Would you rather have the diary keeping habits of Samuel Pepys or James Boswell?
Kirsten:
James Boswell. He's a better storyteller than Pepys is. He writes his diaries in dialogue sometimes. So it's more fun to read.
Ryan:
Oh, and I was just going to ask which would you rather read, but you've answered that! George Eliot or T. S. Eliot?
Kirsten:
George Eliot.
Ryan:
Would you rather have gout, the quintessential disease of the eighteenth century, or a mild depressive-anxiety disorder, the quintessential disease of the twenty-first century?
Kirsten:
I would rather have… I would rather have melancholia, I think—which is also the great affliction of the eighteenth century! James Boswell and Johnson. Though, this is one area where I'm especially glad to be living in the 21st century— Johnson was, you know, haunted by inner demons his whole life, and thought that he was going to go insane and was going to entirely lose his rational faculty. So I'm glad that we have better understanding of mental health, even if it has a long way to go.
Ryan:
So the debate over the splendid vices, these are the pagan virtues, and the core of this debate, which goes all the way back to Augustine, is whether virtuous acts are meritorious and are truly conducive to the good if they do not have the aid of divine grace. And it seems especially relevant today, because I think for those of us who have a foot in the rarefied world of elite culture, which is often considered to be the most staunchly secular part of contemporary American society, it's really remarkable how much virtue we find in that world. There are many occasions in which my colleagues, who are not practitioners of any religious tradition, have been Christ to me. And I looked to certain of my friends who do not see themselves as participating in a religious tradition as real exemplars of virtues that I want to acquire and that I fail to embody.
So in the eighteenth century, when there really were no professed atheists, and the closest thing you could find were freethinkers, and freethinkers themselves could be devout Christians at the same time, this puzzle played out more in the classical imagination, right? Where somebody like Cato is looking over our shoulder and we're hoping to live up to his example of authenticity or fortitude. What can that debate teach us about the real-life experiences of the pagan virtues, the splendid vices?
Kirsten:
Well, first of all, I think it's important not to take for granted this question of “Is it possible to be a good person if you're not a Christian?” This was a central debate heating up eighteenth century Europe. Before that it was more or less safely assumed in the Western tradition that—and this goes back to the splendid vices debate—that if you are going to be a truly virtuous person, it has to be animated by God's grace and your knowledge of revelation. Otherwise things that you do that are seemingly meritorious are actually not meritorious without God's grace, because if you were sinful and fallen, nothing that you do on your own has any merit.
So, because of the influence of freethinkers—they were called freethinkers because they didn't want to be constrained by any notions of authority or previous traditions—they just thought, “Let's just start from square one. And let's just ask the questions that we've always assumed that we know the answers to.” And so one of those big questions in ethics in the eighteenth century was, “Is it possible to be a good person without being a Christian?” And this was incredibly disturbing to many people. And this is not a disturbing question to us anymore, and rightly so, I think, in a lot of ways. Like you were saying, there are plenty of non-Christians who have these great virtues, that we would wish to aspire to be more like them. We see the ways in which we fall short and they succeed.
Ryan:
So, switching gears, Stanley Kubrick's classic science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the end of it, in the finale, David Bowman, who's the last surviving astronaut on the Discovery One, after he endures a psychedelic descent through Jupiter's atmosphere, he finds himself in this room, lavishly decorated in eighteenth century style. What's going on?
Kirsten:
Well, this was something that was very perplexing to original viewers of the film back in the sixties. I think some of the reviews stated that it really flipped people out when he arrives in Jupiter and it's something that is very similar to earth. In fact, it's the most stuffy, polite, elegant, civilized image that you could confront when you're out in the vast wilderness of the unknown in space.
My theory—and this moment in 2001 has become my personal manifesto about why we need to care about what happened in the eighteenth century—I think that this room in 2001, decorated in eighteenth-century style, is a metaphor for progress and social inquiry. So it takes us back to the debate about the ancients and the moderns. The modern side, we just need to keep progressing. So maybe the wisdom of the ancients is that even if we do continue to progress, we still end up back where we were hundreds of years ago. So I think that it's this moment of what the theater historian Joseph Roach calls the “deep eighteenth century.” He says that the deep eighteenth century is the eighteenth century that still exists with us. It's a sort of series of recurring performances that we continue to enact, every day. And just at a very surface level, we see this with the genres that we read today, the most popular genres. So without the eighteenth century, we wouldn't be reading novels. We wouldn't really be reading newspapers. Online periodicals are just the product of the eighteenth century. So we still inhabit that space, in a lot of ways.
Ryan:
Would this be the answer to why the period of the period costume drama is so often the eighteenth century? Or do you see something else going on there?
Kirsten:
So often in the eighteenth century?
Ryan:
Yeah.
Kirsten:
I would argue that there isn't enough eighteenth-century period drama. I think the last couple of decades have been mostly focused on nineteenth-century period drama, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, technically. I mean, she's the closest we get to eighteenth-century period drama. My theory is that we are hopefully going to go through a renaissance of eighteenth-century period drama soon.
If anything, The Favorite is some indication. I think it's a very funny movie, and it gets closest, in some ways, to capturing a comedic eighteenth-century sensibility, but there's so many wonderful eighteenth century comedies like Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, Humphry Clinker and Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett.
There are all of these wonderful comic novels that the past couple of decades, which have prioritized earnest, deeply felt, romanticized period dramas just hasn't had a taste for, so I'm hoping that's coming around the corner.
Ryan:
And when you say comic, I think you're using the colloquial sense of that. That they're laugh-out-loud funny. I watched The Favorite shortly after watching Mania or Maniac… but it was another, it was the Emma Stone, psycho, slapstick comedy. Which was really fantastic. And then this eighteenth-century period piece was with Emma Stone, and it's just slapstick all over the place. Is that consistent with the eighteenth-century comic novel, or is there something—what’s going on there?
Kirsten:
Yeah, I wrote about this in my review of the new adaptation from this year of Emma, which I had a lot of high hopes for because the previews made it look extremely funny and fresh. And Austen is often undersold as a comic writer. Like I said, they tend to be sentimentalized, romanticized. When people think of Jane Austen, they usually think of Keira Knightley emerging in a rainstorm with Mr. Darcy. And, you know, Mr. Darcy saying “You have bewitched me, body and soul”; they think of Colin Firth emerging from a pond in a wet shirt. Jane Austen has become this kind of romanticized writer. But she's very funny. Her social satire is very sharp. So when I saw the previews for Emma, I'm like, finally, here is the movie that will remind people that Jane Austen is funny and will help them to see that when they're encountering her novels.
Ryan:
What about Austenland? Have you seen that?
Kirsten:
Yeah, I enjoyed that.
Ryan:
Is that consistent with Jane Austen's sense of satire?
Kirsten:
Yes. I actually think it is in some ways more than the new adaptation of Emma. So the key to Jane Austen sense of humor is about—and this actually goes back to her admiration for Henry Fielding as a novelist and satirist—distinguishing reality from delusion. Jane Austen is interested in exposing affectation and vanity, so all of the lies that we tell ourselves, and exposing that kind of folly to ridicule. So in Austenland, this woman really idolizes Jane Austen, and goes on this fantastic vacation to this resort that pretends to be a version of Regency England, and she's forced to confront her sense that this is just an illusion that she's living through, that there's nothing really authentic about this experience, that she's surrounded by people who are play acting. And so, I think that this is a really clever twist on Jane Austen's own sense of humor, which is distinguishing between when people are being affected, when something is not as it seems. And virtue and wisdom are learning to distinguish between falsehood and reality.
Ryan:
A reader of yours asks, “Austen is the mother of realism, and we wouldn't have Henry James without her, but she has a reputation now for being good escapist reading. It seems to me that it's more than playing up the romantic elements and stressing the relatability. We also portray her novels as a safe escape from reality.” And she references the Jane Austen Society retreats and things. “To what extent do you think this is also due to movie adaptations?” Or what do you think is going on there?
Kirsten:
Yeah, I think the impetus behind Jane Austen as escapist reading tends to be this reading of Jane Austen as, like, “Oh, there were simpler times, when men would court women, and everything was much clearer and times were easier.” There's actually been a lot of this surrounding quarantine at the moment. People love to talk about how quarantining has forced us to return to these simpler, Jane Austen-esque times when the most dramatic thing that happens to us is that we go on a walk or a turn around the block. So I think people have turned to Jane Austen as an antidote to their busy, highly structured lives.
Ryan:
Well, my middle-school daughters have been reading [Pride and Prejudice] in a quarantine reading group with some friends. I asked them early on who their favorite character was, and they both said Elizabeth Bennett. And I said, “Well, and who else? Like who’s your second favorite character?” And they both said Mr. Wickham!
Kirsten:
Wonderful answer.
Ryan:
And then as it gradually dawned on them, the true character of Mr. Wickham, they were disillusioned. It was actually, I think, anything but comforting.
Kirsten:
Oh, I'm so glad to hear that.
Ryan:
Jane Austen is still disturbing people, even in quarantine.
Kirsten:
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that.
Ryan:
Kirsten Hall, thank you very much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
Kirsten:
Thank you. It's been a delight, Ryan. Thanks for having me.