Victorian female writers are undoubtedly more culturally relevant today than Victorian male writers. Jane Austen isn’t Victorian, I know, but she’s so culturally relevant still that she informs how people see the Victorian era that came after her very strongly. Far more people today are actively reading Jane Austen and the Brontes than Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy (or George Elliot). Really, Jane Austen and the Brontes probably are the most widely read today pre-1900 fiction of any genre period. On Goodreads, which for better or worse is the best way to see what people are reading now, Pride and Prejudice has 2.8 million ratings, while Romeo & Juliet has only 1.9 million. I’m going to lump Little Women and Emily Dickinson in with Jane Austen and the Brontes, and now we have the entire pantheon of 19th century women’s literature for the 21st century.
The cultural vision of the 1800s is greatly informed by these books: upper class bored and tortured girls with fainting spells, byronic proto-Edward Cullen suitors for people who started with Edward Cullen, tea parties with delicate tableware. It’s not necessarily wrong but it’s extremely warped by backreading the current cultural space of the books back onto them. Basically all of them have been made and remade into films and TV shows every few years and that makes it really easy to see what I mean.
I haven’t watched Apple TV’s (?) Dickinson (2019) as I don’t want to be forced to detonate the vest in the Barnes and Noble leatherbound classics section but I have watched the teaser trailer. In the teaser trailer, Hailee Seinfield as Emily Dickinson says as some party music plays in the background “I have one purpose, and that is to become a great writer.” In the vision of Apple TV, Emily Dickinson is a tortured hot teen who cannot become a famous writer because she is a woman. The trailer focuses on her “wild antics” while preemptively quoting a very misleading portion of Dickinson poem “Wild Nights” seemingly as a defense against their extreme misreading of her biography. The show isn’t about Emily Dickinson in any meaningful sense, obviously, but it uses the cultural space of Emily Dickinson as dramatic irony for all of the interactions with the haters that she has throughout the show: she (the heroine, as you’ve heard of Emily Dickinson) produced poems that you heard of and maybe have read! So the heroine is triumphing over the stuffy culture.
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) is kind of the same thing; it plays up Jo March as a writer and makes the story about her writing about their domestic struggles. The movie begins with her going to a stuffy old fashioned male publisher who cuts out the sentimental ending of her story to make it more short and shocking. Towards the end, she goes back to him with the start of a book titled “Little Women”, about the life of her and her sisters, and the stuffy publisher rejects her, until his young daughters find it and ask him “what happens to the little women we need to know!” and he is forced to publish it for capitalist reasons that he cannot understand personally. Little Women (Alcott/March) is for the girls, the girls like it. The movie ends with Jo March watching her book being printed. It’s harder to complain as much about this film’s compared to Dickinson (2019) because Jo really was this kind of character in the novel: rebellious and a writer, but it still does focus on that element above the other ones they could have chosen. It’s a very faithful adaptation of the book; Emma Watson, one of the crown jewels of the white girl all-star team that they assembled for this film, as Meg almost feels wasted because Meg is boring and kind of a bitch in the book and they keep it that way here. It has one really interesting adaptation of the book of making Jo’s marriage metatextual. Alcott famously didn’t want to marry Jo as Little Women was being published, but was forced to due to pressures from her readership. In Little Women (2019) Jo still marries the same random professor character that she does in the book she publishes, but it cuts between her marriage and a conversation with the publisher where it’s clear that the real Jo in the film doesn’t marry anyone at all. It’s a really interesting choice that you could think about from a lot of different angles but the one I’m taking here is that it uses the same dramatic irony of cultural space as Dickinson (2019); you know Little Women is a famous book, and that informs how you have to read this scene.
Emma (2020) takes on a completely different aspect of the cultural space of the Victorian female writers. It doesn’t have anything to do with the act of writing, but a ton more to do with the act of being Victorian. It’s an extremely faithful adaptation of the original Emma in terms of plot. Where it differs is the aesthetic focus which is where the movie really shines. Jane Austen was never as concerned with the setting of her stories as she was with the dialogue and the character struggles, and they use all that struggles but backfill them in a setting of the upper class Victorian as we romanticize it today. Really plays up the delicate tableware. It takes the tumblr Victorian light academia aesthetic to it’s minmaxed conclusion. Almost every shot has rebloggable clean sunny pastels. Where the film really shines is the moments where it pushes the boundaries of that. It relishes the scenes where the Victorian pastels are tarnished by the dirtiness of the physical world beneath it. There’s a random nude scene early in the movie when Mr. Knightley is getting dressed in his fancy Victorian clothes, Harriet’s face is coated with sand when she plays a game with the other children, and Emma has a nosebleed that’s smeared across her face during the proposal scene that’s the climax of the movie. The manicured green estate lawns are also contrasted with weedy but still green countrysides, the trees are wild but old, bigger than anything we have in America or at least the Midwest. It’s a very interesting dynamic to backfill on top of the Austen plot. It’s not nearly as playful as Austen normally is; I wondered early in the movie if Clueless (1995) was a more spiritually if not literally faithful adaptation of Emma than this is. But it’s still pretty playful.
The Brontes have not been adapted recently, since the first tumblr high schoolers finally graduated college and became a demographic of their own. I mean there are really only two books of theirs that get frequently read, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but it still seems a little strange to me. They have their cultural space as sisters that write together under female names, they probably get read more than Little Women by Little Women (2019)’s audience which has its own reputation for being trite and for children, but there just hasn’t been an adaptation of either book yet. There’s also a legacy of adaptations, where adaptations are somewhat adapting other adaptations. Definitely the case where Little Women (2019) is in some ways adapting Little Women (1994) which brought its own white girl all star team 25 years earlier. Emma (2020) feels like an adaptation of the BBC Jane Austen. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights don’t really have the same legacy of adaptations, as far as I know.
Anyway. Talking about these three films was really to talk about the cultural space of the Victorian female writer which I think is clear now. The cleanness of the Victorian world, and the pretty dresses, as well as the rebellion against the social norms that those pretty things came with, are what appeal to girls today. As I alluded to before, it really is the natural followup to Twilight, which is just a Jane Austen novel typed in giant font and some added vampires to stretch over four books. I tweeted a year and a half ago: “there’s something very sad about modern shut-in teenage girls reading Victorian novels of passion stifled by cultural sterility for the sake of a sterility that today’s culture is lacking” which I’ll stand by now as I finish writing this medium piece. Enough of the snow of the past has fallen over the 19th century to make it clean and playful, nothing truly bad could have happened there compared to our world today. And nothing truly bad ever happens in Jane Austen novels. Today’s world doesn’t have the subtle social dynamics of ballroom dancing and courtship rituals, we freed ourselves from those things for reasons these very novels write about. But the simplicity and charm of these novels makes them a source of the desire to return to that sterility for today’s girls. Female Victorian writers appeal to today’s tumblr girls to them not really because females then and now uniquely share a desire for subtle social dynamics, but also because Victorian female novelists are appropriated as a kind of provable early girlboss by a separate cultural movement and there’s just more exposure to these few visibly very female books. I don’t know if it’s necessarily bad but I just wish there was more variety. Please read Middlemarch I promise you’re ready for and you’ll like it.
