“I may be wrong, but I doubt that Jane Austen would have quite approved of the movies.”
That’s how James Bowman, film critic at the American Spectator and author, kicked off the much-anticipated “Jane Austen on Film” Center for Constructive Alternatives lecture series on Sunday, March 7.
Bowman’s lecture focused on the major moral theme in Austen’s novels: the “I was wrong” moment. This moment is crucial to the success or failure of any Austen film adaptation.
“As I see them, her novels all focus on a moral moment that can only be called dramatic, which is why they are adapted to the screen so well and have taken on a moral cogency,” Bowman said. “This is what I call the ‘I was wrong moment.’ All her characters have to suffer through them.”
Austen’s moralism is particularly relevant today in a time of ideological zealousness and unwillingness to admit error, according to Bowman.
Austen can then be seen as a moral guide in an age of ideological “wokeness,” Bowman said.
Junior Aidan Cyrus said he thought Bowman made a compelling point.
“Bowman’s understanding of Austen’s catalog of virtues is really compelling, particularly his account of wrongness and the struggle our modern sensibilities have with being wrong on occasion and then admitting that failure,” Cyrus said. “He presented Austen as an important moral thinker, who is a part of a tradition that, if recovered, could prove useful in changing the moral discourse.”
Austen’s moral theme emphasizes the virtues of self-command and self-awareness, especially in her heroines, Bowman said.
“There’s another reason why she might not have approved of the movies. This lies in the central paradox of Jane Austen’s novels,” he said. “She certainly approved of sincerity. But there was another virtue that she prized even more highly — the antithesis of sincerity — that is, the virtue of self-command.”
Bowman said self-command was especially important for women because the expression or giving away of their feelings would often lead to “unchastity and ruin.” Marianne Dashwood, in Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” is an example. Instead, women in Austen’s time had to be cautious in how they expressed themselves in order to protect their reputations.
“Our first requirement in appreciating her either on page or on screen is to try to understand the importance of the kind of moral seriousness that Jane advocates: the repression of powerful emotion,” Bowman said.
Thus, many of Austen’s heroines possess this characteristic. Elinor Dashwood in the same novel, “Sense and Sensibility,” expresses the self-command of which her younger sister, Marianne, is incapable.
However, self-command is not the same as self-assurance, as Bowman pointed out.
“Self-assurance is self-command but without the other great Austenian virtue of self-knowledge. Self-doubt is the trial through which all Jane Austen heroines have to pass through,” Bowman said. “Just as self-assurance is characteristic of all her villains, self-doubt is characteristic of her heroines.”
Bowman said that Austen’s novels “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice” have been adapted to film the most because they contain so many “I was wrong” moments. The 1940s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” lacks a certain depth, precisely because the moments in which self-awareness dawns on the character are comical, rather than convicting.
“The film skates over all the emotional depths of the novel,” Bowman said. “It treats it as something like a rollicking comedy of manners.”
Bowman was careful to point out that Austen was not a social satirist. Her novels are meant to be moral guides, particularly to a woman’s task of acting prudently in matters of love and marriage.
“Austen would have envisaged her characters as more stiff than we see them today. People see her as a satirist of social class difference,” Bowman said. “But Jane Austen has no political axes to grind. She takes distinctions of social class for granted.”
Associate Professor of English Dwight Lindley asked a question about Jane Austen as a moralist during the Q&A portion of the lecture.
“There’s moralism and then there’s moralism,” Lindley said. “And with Jane Austen, you don’t really feel her moralism as a burden. Why do we like Jane Austen’s moralism and don’t feel it as sermonic? There are many other kinds of films and novels that are trying to do something similar but we can’t sit through them.”
Bowman replied that Austen, unlike other filmmakers and writers, is “so obviously sincere” that it doesn’t feel like moralizing.
“She’s engaged in these issues,” Bowman said. “She’s showing how people actually make decisions, good and bad, and showing it in a way that’s sympathetic. She understands how minds are working. She’s not laying down the law and saying, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ It’s not preaching.”
