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Or take Jane Austen. Please. Sorry, couldn’t resist that one—must have been
the Twain influence. Surely Pride and Prejudice stands as one of the seminal
works of English letters. That does not, however, make it untouchable. Perhaps
no novel has been more touched. As I mentioned earlier, Elizabeth-and-Darcy
spin-offs seem to be a major growth industry. Most of those books, mercifully,
will sink with little stain left on the culture, but one or two will likely hang
around. More importantly, how many romance novels are informed by Austen’s
great book? And to what extent do they color our understanding of the original?
Then there’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding’s melding of Pride and
Prejudice with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. What’s that you say? Fielding is no
Austen? And neither is Anita Loos? Perhaps. But they’re pretty darned funny;
you’ll have to give them that. Moreover, Fielding’s rather obvious borrowings
from Austen and Loos remind us that all three are writing the same novel, a book
called Modern Romance. All three proved highly successful in their own time,
were scorned as each age’s version of chick-lit, and made witty, satiric
observations on contemporary mating rituals. Her book forces us to reconsider
the earlier ones through its reworking of themes and situations in the context of a
different age. Do we subscribe to the gender roles and centrality of marriage that
inform Austen’s novel? How does Bridget’s active role in courtship shed light on
Elizabeth’s societally enforced passivity? Given the change toward career
women, how do we feel about the 1925 gold-digger model as represented by the
wonderfully named Lorelei Lee, a character who seems to exist in perpetual
anticipation of Marilyn Monroe to arrive on the scene and play her? Fielding
reminds us that our views of women have changed, and that our readings of her
famous forebears may, therefore, also have changed.
The word for the day, class, is intertextuality. It comes to us compliments of
Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Russian formalist critic, by way of the structuralist
thinker Julia Kristeva, who coined the term, and has to do with how texts speak
back and forth to each other. Bakhtin, in fact, gave us the term “dialogism,”
speaking of the “dialogic potential of the novel,” by which he means the capacity
of novels to carry on an ongoing conversation. The two terms overlap a good
deal, differing perhaps in the marginally greater sense of conscious decision
making implied by “dialogism.” For our purposes, the important notion here is
of a conversation among texts across time.
Isn’t that discussion a little one-sided? Don’t the older texts do all the
talking?
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no, it actually doesn’t work that way. The
model that instantly comes to mind is something like a lecture hall, with the
grizzled old-timer telling the assembled up-starts about how good it was in the
days of yore. If that’s the model, then the seats are full of hecklers. A more apt
image, though, is more along the lines of a graduate seminar. One discussant has
some priority, in this case temporal, having arrived at the gathering somewhat
earlier than the rest, but everyone is bringing questions, insights, critiques, and
information to the seminar table. So it is with novels. Take the case of Bridget
Jones’s Diary: yes, it draws upon those earlier novels about women, love, and
independence, but in doing so, it also provides commentary upon and, in a sense,
revision of those works. Fielding forces us to revise our thoughts about Austen
and Loos. Bridget’s greater social mobility and self-doubt cause a
reconsideration of both the limitations and the accompanying self-confidence
that the social order affords Lorelei Lee. To be sure, she’s less a free agent in
terms of where she can go and what she can do, but those restrictions make her
surer of the ground beneath her feet. Bridget’s anxieties are in some ways a
product of the greater freedom of the contemporary woman. The outcomes
Bridget seeks also differ from either Lorelei’s or Elizabeth Bennet’s. A man, yes.
But a man is not the end of the story in the 1990s. Men sometimes prove
faithless (as we’re reminded by Daniel Cleaver), human life tenuous, and in any
case a woman needs a career as well as domestic bliss. Oh, we find ourselves
thinking, that’s something Austen didn’t know. All three writers examine
women’s roles within the restrictions of their respective societies, and since the
societies are quite different from each other, so, too, are the issues and stories
that result.