from Elise Walter, Education Intern
Why read Jane Austen? Why adapt her novels? Why teach them?
Austen wrote in turn-of-the century England with a special focus on the gentry class. Her ladies and gentleman lived by strict codes of conduct based upon wealth, rank, and reputation. It is difficult to build a bridge between Austen’s world and ours. We don’t speak the way that Austen’s characters speak. In modern-day United States, women have economic and social freedoms unimaginable to the Jenningses and Dashwoods. Still, Austen’s novels are adapted into new languages and new medias to satisfy a thriving, Austen-hungry audience.
Austen wrote about people. Her novels are built upon dialogue. Her works are some of the first examples of literary realism, in which writers focused on accurate depictions of daily life instead of high drama. These qualities make Jane Austen’s novels ripe for adaptation and discussion.
Northlight Theatre’s Artist Engagement series and Masterclasses give students a glimpse into the lives of artists living with Austen’s words and stories. Actors become teachers and students learn to embody 19th-century English characters from the experts. In a recent Artist Engagement class, held in the hour before a student matinee of Sense & Sensibility, actors Diane Mair (who plays Lucy Steele) and V Craig Heidenreich (Sir John Middleton) introduced North Shore high school students to the lives of Austen’s characters. They were taught how and when to bow and curtsy to their peers: who is worthy of acknowledgment? Who is low-status, and can therefore be ignored? Students were divided into families and assigned an income. Based upon that income, “parents” arranged marriages for their “children.” Low-status “parents” struggled to find an advantageous match for their offspring, while wealthy families searched for matches that would protect and enhance their wealth. Students experienced the urgency and frustration of balancing ambitious hopes and strict hierarchies, and began to make connections between Sense & Sensibility and their day-to-day lives. They began to understand Austen’s world, and the process an actor must undertake to live realistically in that world.
After matinees, students and actors discussed what the students have just seen. Sense & Sensibility sparked conversations about adaptation and context. How much does an actor rely on Jane Austen’s novel, and how much is left behind to suit Jon Jory’s streamlined adaptation? Students noted a similarity between Austen and Shakespeare: both canonized writers who wrote heightened language and stylized characters. The actors were thoughtful: in some ways, Austen’s characters are enormous and comedic, like some of Shakespeare’s best-known creations. In other ways, the characters in Sense & Sensibility require thoughtfulness, subtlety and restraint in ways that are difficult to imagine today.
Sense & Sensibility is a highly entertaining, highly complex story where larger-than-life, Falstaffian characters like Sir John Middleton mingle with nuanced, restrained characters like Elinor Dashwood. Jane Austen trains us to read human behavior in context: Sir John can afford to be jovial; Elinor must guard herself to maintain her reputation. Modern audiences don’t use Elinor Dashwood’s vernacular, but they do speak her language. Gentry culture has been replaced by middle- and high-school culture, ruled by a different kind of social hierarchy. The pressure to marry well has been replaced by the pressure to get into a good college and succeed.
In both worlds, the promise of stability is enticing and restrictive. The idea of independence is at once thrilling and stressful.
The chance to explore these similarities physically and interactively also highlights the ways the world has changed and evolved since Jane Austen wrote Sense & Sensibility – for better or worse.
