Breaking faith with Jane Austen (National Post, November 16, 2005)

Pride and Prejudice, arguably the most-loved novel in English literature, is a magnet for film and TV directors. Understandably: The story of middle-class Elizabeth Bennet and the aristocratic Mr. Darcy -- his pride, her prejudice -- and their tortuous path to union is the paradigm for the romantic-comedy genre women adore. The adaptation now opening in theatres is the seventh to be made since the 1930s.

Indeed, Jane Austen can be said to have invented the scrappy, oddly matched couple (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy being its epitome), whose initial antagonism unfolds after multiple vicissitudes into an ideal love blending intellectual friendship and a devotion based on common values.

The ending of Pride and Prejudice is such a gratifying aesthetic and moral experience that whenever I re-read the novel, I find myself irrationally anxious that this time the excruciatingly deferred plot resolution may prevent Elizabeth and Darcy's triumphant merger. (The BBC's 1995 series teased out that tension over the course of its languid trajectory. But no two-hour movie has convincingly managed the feat.)

This latest version's promotional ads reveal another problem. Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist, is played by Keira Knightley, a radiantly beautiful actress, who would be irresistible to the haughty Mr. Darcy even is she were draped in sackcloth and ashes, let alone the enchanting 18th century ball dresses they've tricked her out in. No one can doubt for a second, beholding such feminine allure, that Mr. Darcy will eventually succumb to her charms.

What a capitulation to our near-pathological Western obsession with beauty. For in the novel, it isn't Elizabeth's "charms" Darcy succumbs to at all. He succumbs to her wit, her emotional intelligence and her values of family loyalty and social responsibility. In the novel, it is Jane, Elizabeth's sister, who is the conventional heroine. It is Jane who is beautiful, charming and fetchingly, biddably feminine.

Elizabeth is merely pretty, not beautiful. Yes, she has "fine eyes," but it is her strength of character that win the heart of Mr. Darcy, a landed gentleman so far above her in social and economic status, and with so wide a field of more "suitable" possibilities at hand, that any relationship at all was unlikely.

What makes Elizabeth unique is her satiric perspective and her courage in voicing it, a compensatory gift associated with lesser, not greater beauty. Better, she is a woman who can laugh at herself as well as mock the pretensions of society's hypocrites -- of her own class and those above her station, for status is no guarantee of behaviour. But edginess, considered social capital for Elizabeth's successors, today's comic romantic leads, was a huge social risk for Elizabeth.

Darcy's initial humourlessness -- "Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!" -- is a crime in Austen's miniature world, and a clue that he is not worthy of her creator's beloved Elizabeth. Darcy needs social correction in order to sheathe his moral uprightness in the human warmth she deserves. This is a correction Elizabeth is well equipped to provide, through their letters, and above all through their elegantly nuanced, self-revelatory conversations. Conversation, not bared midriffs, was the aphrodisiac of 18th-century courtship, and successful or unsuccessful love in Austen's work is always linked to one's social communication skills.

But no matter how diligently this film exploits Elizabeth's clever repartee, her mature social judgment, her strength of character in confronting her own shortcomings, the romance's progress is bound to be so over-shadowed by Knightley's overt sexual allure, absent in the novel, that Elizabeth's exquisite singularity as a literary creation will be quite lost on the viewing public. She will be one more adorable romantic heroine, in whose pretty hand the futilely resistant male is comic putty.

I'll see the film anyway, and probably love it. But I'll feel guilty about it. For in assuming that nothing short of physical perfection could have moved Darcy to transgress social barriers, or exchange the chilly isolation of his pride for the true civility born of mutual respect and intellectual parity, the film has already broken faith with Jane Austen's favourite character.

Any ordinary-looking woman with brains and a sense of humour can identify with the novel's Elizabeth. Keira Knightley's Elizabeth can only inspire fantasies. It would seem that Jane Austen, an unworldly gentlewoman under the thumb of the 18th-century "patriarchy" had nobler expectations for relations between the sexes than the "enlightened" 21st century aesthetes who make the romantic comedies she inspired.

© National Post 2005