Plot devices not needed to make a Jane Austen novel readable: Savage sea monsters. Zombie infestations. Marauding ninjas.
At least that’s what Nancy Mayer, facilitator of the Atlanta chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, thinks.
Granted, those devices have moved a spate of recent pop adaptations of Austen’s classics. But they are as much contrivances, Mayer said, as suggesting that the heroine of “Emma,” is not in fact Emma but Jane; that Wentworth had a tawdry tryst with Louisa to get back at Anne in “Persuasion”; and that socially awkward Mary Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice” is the true alter ego of Jane Austen herself.
The latter ones particularly “run counter to lifelong-held beliefs about Jane Austen,” Mayer said recently in an e-mail.
Indeed. But those heretical takes on Austen’s works will be exactly the topic discussed today when the Atlanta Austen group plays host to Arnie Perlstein, a self-styled Austen provocateur and regional coordinator for the Miami-Fort Lauderdale Austen Society chapter.
Perlstein has come up with a number of “shadow stories” he believes are hidden in Austen’s classics. And they are enough to make a purist’s hair curl.
“You can read a novel romantically or skeptically,” Perlstein said. “I see these as darker feminist complaints about men behaving more badly than you ever dreamed of.”
Perlstein is no trained scholar of the literary classics. He is, however, a highly opinionated attorney whose addiction to the Regency classics began after his wife made him see the film adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility.” He finished off all the other Austen vehicles powered by Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow and Colin Firth before turning to the actual novels. That’s when he discovered the “double stories” embedded in Austen’s work, he said. On Listservs he shared these theories online with other Janeites, as they are called, including Mayer.
“There are quite a few who think Perlstein’s arguments are fascinating and agree he might be on to something,” Mayer said in an e-mail. “Not all agree as to the extent of these shadow stories or allusions, but some do. Others refuse to read anything he writes.”
But, Perlstein said, Mayer has, on occasion, defended his right to interpret the work as he sees it.
“I have a hard time believing that Austen would write books in a code which couldn’t be read for 200 years,” Mayer wrote. “I don’t think Mr. Perlstein spends enough time studying the time period.”
So what does this instigator think of all of those zombie versions of Austen’s work?
“Anything that drives people to read Austen is a good thing,” he said. “But they’re not for me.”
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