Embarking On A Course of Study

Oh Dear: Jane Austen's Rogues and Romance Game on Facebook

Ladies and Gentleman (are there any gentleman following Austen-related blogs?) - Facebook, along with the BBC, has a new game: Jane Austen's Rogues and Romance.

My first reaction after watching the trailer - yikes. I want to be excited, because you can enter the world of Austen's Pride and Prejudice in a way, short of a hologram deck like on Star Trek, but it's also a game - with points and items to collect and stuff and it just feels - ick.

And you know, at some point, there's money involved if you want to play at a certain level. Which, technically, is what Austen's time period is about. If you wanted to 'play' at a certain level of the marriage market, you had to have money.

I'm going to try it out and maybe my icky feeling will go away. We'll see.

I do think there's a point when Austen can become too commercial and I don't want that to happen. That said, I would definitely pay good money to go to an 'Austenland' like in the Shannon Hale novel (which I read once a year and still absolutely love - if you loved it too, there's a sequel out now: Midnight in Austenland!).

You can call me a stick in the mud. It's okay. I deserve it.

Here's the trailer and the link to the game. Let me know what you think of it!

 

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on YouTube

I was reminded of this new version of Pride and Prejudice by a friend on Facebook the other day. I should have shared it with you much sooner! It's been up on YouTube and Tumblr since April. There are about 25 episodes; they have just finished Chapter 6 if you'd like to follow along with Austen's text.

What is it, you ask?

It's a modern adaptation of P&P told by Lizzie Bennet (The spelling should be Lizzy; it so annoys me when people spell it with an 'ie' but perhaps they are trying to set this character apart. Whatev.) via a video diary, and supported by the characters' social media streams. The only characters we see are Jane, Lydia, and Charlotte. In the modern adaptation, Charlotte is the videographer/editor of the videos and there are only three sisters, with Lydia being the youngest. Lizzie is a grad student going for a degree in mass communications, so the videos are sort of a project.

You can find the website here.

I wasn't taken by the first video, but thought I should watch all, even the ones I'd already seen, again, before reporting to you. I can see that the younger crowd would find it cute and funny, but I have to say I didn't. There's something about it that seems forced. The humor especially. Characters say and do sort of exactly what you expect when it comes to going for the laugh.

There are a few surprises, but not enough for me. The best parts are when they don costumes and read from scripts Lizzie writes to reenact scenes between her parents or Bing Lee, Darcy, and Caroline. Since they are self-conscious by nature because of what they are, a reenactment, they worked.

I just couldn't get into the one-sided aspect of the diary. In the book, we do get Darcy's and Bingley's perspective somewhat and that's missing from these diaries. Palpably, by the time you get through 10 or 15 of the videos and keep hearing about dinners or parties via Lizzie's perspective or Jane's or Lydia's. There are ways that that could be achieved in these videos - at one point Bing Lee (that's what they're calling him) Caroline are at the Bennet home for dinner. It would be very easy for Lizzie to have taken her phone down and surreptitiously filmed part of the dinner or the predinner conversation. Or part of the bar scene when they went to a bar after. Or leave the camera on, throw a sweatshirt over it and give Bing Lee and Caroline a tour of the house, including her room.

I find the perpetual filming in her bedroom in the same spot with a sister running in now and again repetitive and boring. Others have mentioned this in their comments on the videos and the creators have said there will not be a Darcy or Bing Lee diary. I wouldn't want yet another onesided diary, but they could make an appearance now and again. It would be welcome.

The sisters themselves are also stereotypically portrayed. In this day and age, for Jane to be so wide-eyed and innocent and Pollyanna just seems unbelievable and silly. Lydia is portrayed as a wild child (underage drinking, stealing her mother's Xanax) and slut.

Maybe I'm off on what the 'kids today' are saying but her 'wh-at?' and 'holla' and holding her hand up for high fives, also her winking, pouting, bare shoulder, and hair tossing for the camera are beyond over the top and painfully lame. Lizzie is a bit too sarcastic. Austen's Lizzy had more heart and humor. Only Charlotte, though just as sarcastic, seems to come off true. The actress captures the character's no nonsense, realistic attitude.

There are also the worrying Q&A videos where some questions and comments sound like people have no idea that this is a take on Austen's novels.

Feel free to disagree. I have impossibly high standards when it comes to fan fiction or, now, fan video, related to Austen. If the project brings new readers to Austen, wonderful. But they should read the books, not depend on these videos as giving them the whole story.

(POSTSCRIPT, 7/13/12 - Due to calls for it by fans, Episodes 26 and 27, and it looks like the upcoming 28, have featured Caroline and Bing Lee. I watched them, but they felt tacked on and didn't really flow. There was a super weird dynamic to the one with Jane and Bing Lee. He was funny and animated and she seemed even more weirdly, inhumanly angelic and subdued.)

Here's a fun game you can play - one of my friends, who also is an avid Austen fan (we've both read the novels many times and enough fan fiction to choke a horse, whatever that means), said she couldn't stop watching how Lizzie's eye making is constantly changing. She said it was highly distracting. See if it bothers you too!

Decide for yourself. Here is the first video: 

Jane Austen's Grammar Trick for Creating Character

A pair of academics, Mary Margolies DeForest and Eric Johnson at Dakota State University, wrote a computer program to analyze the frequency of Latinate words in Jane Austen's novels.

Let's just pause here to admire how these two think and have chosen to spend their time.

They discovered that Austen used more Latin-based words - classified as Latinate, the language of Ancient Rome.  As opposed to Germanic, from which the English language is derived (technically Anglo Saxon.)

The difference:

Germanic - abandon, ache, allegiance, anger, beseech, beacon,

Latinate - relinquish, pain, fidelity, rage, inquire, signal

You can see a chart of the words compared here.  Usually the longer the word - Latinate; the shorter - Germanic. But you can see in the chart that isn't always true.

BACK TO JANE AUSTEN:

Here's the abstract from the Oxford Journals:

"English has two main sources for words: German and Latin. Distinct from each other, they have polarized our language into high diction and low (‘diglossia’). Latinate words denote the intellectual world; Germanic words, the physical. Latinate words are indicators of status and education. Austen painted and delineated her characters by giving their speeches different densities of Latinate words. Higher densities of Latinate words sometimes indicate intelligence and moral seriousness, at other times, they expose a character's formality or hypocrisy. Lower densities indicate lesser intelligence or, in the case of sailors, humble birth. The characters whose densities are very close to the narrator are Austen's four great heroines, Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot."

So Darcy and Sir Thomas Bertram, for example, use a higher percentage of Latinate words, 28% and 29% respectively - to give a sense of their arrogance and how pompous they are.

The lower classes or people in emotional distress use less complicated sentences and smaller, often monosyllabic words. More Germanic. . For example, when Lizzy receives Jane's letter informing her of Lydia's 'elopement' with Wickham, Lizzy's percentage drops from 25% to 9%.

Marianne, during her time with Willoughby, slips almost seven percentage points. She's also at about 25%.

That's also an interesting note - Austen's narrators usually have the same percentage as the main character. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, the narrator is at 26% and so is Elinor.  Lizzy Bennet is at 25% and so is the narrator.  Same for Anne Elliot - 24.4%, narrator 24.3%. This was a very clever way of making the character sympathetic to the reader.

It's a fascinating project and I'm sure we all wish we'd thought of it. 

Though, we didn't really need more proof that Austen was a genius.

You can read their article here: Computing Latinate Word Usage in Jane Austen's Novels.