Sense and social distancing: 'Lockdown has given me a newfound affinity with Jane Austen's heroines'
In the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, during yet another interminable evening, Caroline Bingley, all dressed up with nowhere to go, wanders about the drawing room of her country house. She walks past her sister who simply sits and yawns, past her brother-in-law Mr Hurst who has collapsed drunk on a couch, past Mr Darcy who has his nose buried in a book, until she stops and puts a proposal to their guest, Elizabeth Bennet.
“Let me persuade you to follow my example and take a turn about the room,” Miss Bingley says. “It’s so refreshing.”
It’s a memorably absurd moment capturing the lives of the Regency-era idle rich, and a line my sisters and I used to trill aloud with laughter as we watched and rewatched the show as kids.
But revisiting the series in the sixth week of coronavirus lockdown, I discovered a newfound sympathy – affinity even – for every character battling tedium in that room. We are all Mr Hursts and Caroline Bingleys now. These days, I only envy Miss Bingley for having a room large enough to take a refreshing constitutional in. Bully for her.
Though never far from cultural ubiquity, the works of Jane Austen are having a real moment thanks to the pandemic.
Stills from the 2005 film version showing Mr Darcy and Elizabeth romancing from a sensible six feet apart are being memed as models of physical distancing. His repeated nervous inquiries about whether her family “are in good health” is now, as writer Hannah Long pointed out, a strong opening for all your work emails.
All of a sudden, period dramas have become extremely relatable. Ceaseless hours indoors with your family? Fretting about falling into financial ruin? Feeling an outsized thrill at a neighbour who stops by to visit? There’s an Austen for that.
I have been bingeing a suite of the best adaptations during my own period of isolation, starting with the acerbic new adaptation of Emma and then ploughing through the back catalogue of series and films. I had read all the books one winter, living in the US after the election of Donald Trump, and found them brilliantly escapist, a tonic for an anxious mind. Hoovering up all the screen adaptations this time, I, like many others, are seeing the characters’ lives anew.
“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings,” Fanny Price says straight into the camera in 1999’s Mansfield Park, and I felt her gaze right on me.
In these stories, people’s lives are shaped by domestic confinement and social inhibition. Lives are lived on top of each other. Think of poor Mr Bingley trying to overcome the insane awkwardness of proposing to Jane Bennet while her sisters and mother wait pressed to the door in the next room.
Not exactly my situation, but life has certainly shrunk lately. For many of us, the jobs and social lives that occupied us have either disappeared or gone online, and our home lives have become all-consuming. Adult kids are living back with their parents, share house occupants have no escape from
one another, and all of us are discovering new intimacies – and indignities – by having to spend almost every minute in such close quarters.
The inherent suffocation of a life lived almost entirely within the same four walls has given me fresh appreciation for why characters like Elizabeth Bennet and Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood find a simple walk so electrifying. It gives them freedom and perspective. “Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?” Austen muses in Pride and Prejudice.It’s also a chance to steal a private conversation.
It all feels so familiar right now – at a time when a walk may be our only time outside the house, and our only legal pretext (in some states) to meet and download whatever crumbs of gossip our friends might have stored away. As my colleague Ellen Leabeater wrote last week, they’re also one of the few options left for a date; a new generation of singles walking slowly, at a distance, sizing up potential objects of affection.
That celibacy, or at least drastically reduced physical contact, has been forced on so many people by this pandemic gives us all a new affinity for Austen’s young characters. The best adaptations thrum with romantic yearning and a sense of delayed gratification, which is to say, they are spectacularly horny. Bosoms heave, undershirts cling to sodden, hairy chests and yet characters cannot act on all that pent up thirst. In the new Emma, Mr Knightley seems to be driven almost literally mad with desire, wandering through the night after a ball where he dances with the titular heroine. You just know Mr Wickham would have sent a lot of unsolicited dick pics if he could.
All that romantic turmoil and deep lust is immensely soothing to watch. “Feeling horny is one of the only ways I can relieve anxiety and boredom,” the illustrator Lisa Hanawalt wrote in the New Yorker this week about her desire to rewatch Pride and Prejudice, obsessing over the smallest touch. “Fictional romance is my escapist distraction from this tragedy and it’s stupid, but I feel powerless to stop it.”
Relatability aside, the reliable romantic fulfilment and neat narrative closure of Austen’s works is also why I keep seeking them out right now. I can’t understand why people are spending nights watching Contagion or 28 Days Later – if I want horror and fear I can read the latest news about morgue trucks parked in Manhattan streets, or look at graphs depicting soaring unemployment. None of us know what happens next. At least immersed in Jane Austen’s world, if only for a few hours, I know how it ends.
The best adaptations thrum with romantic yearning and a sense of delayed gratification, which is to say, they are spectacularly horny