What About Jane?

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It is a rare thing indeed for an artist, especially one who’s been dead for almost 200 years, to command 21st century popular culture dominance. Nonetheless, novelist Jane Austen is enjoying more popularity now than she ever did during her lifetime. Over the last few years especially, her works (and her life) have spawned countless movies (i.e. The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane), television series (on PBS and BBC for starters), self-help books (Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating), and novels (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) in addition to blogs, interest groups, YouTube videos and even Bollywood adaptations. In a culture where most new artistic productions are co-opted from previously published materials, Jane Austen has become the number one It girl when searching for smart, spunky and independent female characters. Which begs the question, what are we to make of her longevity? And, in particular, is she the closest thing that we have now to the steady creation of an independent female (and dare I say feminist) character, especially in a climate that seems to be averse to them?

Last year, the formidable New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis became one of the most prominent voices to repudiate sexism in Hollywood and the lack of complicated, leading representations of women in blockbuster films. In one of her most widely referenced articles last year, “Now Starring at the Movies - Famous Dead Women,” she writes about how other than female-driven movies such as Twilight or any number of Sandra Bullock-led films, the most popular female centered movies are those based on the life of a famous dead woman:

“For actresses, it is no longer enough to be young and beautiful onscreen, they have to be dead and famous, too - one of history’s immortals…You can’t blame filmmakers (or actresses) for raiding crypts. It’s rarely been more difficult to be a woman in the movies than now, particularly in the United States, where for the past few decades most blockbusters and microbudgeted D.I.Y. enterprises have been overwhelmingly male.”