Interesting article on Jane Austen and fanfiction response

From something I read on HuffPost Books by Bill Deresiewicz, provocatively titled: Jane Austen Porn: We're All Guilty

Pornographic Austen? The LA Times reported this week about a "raunchy new version" of Pride and Prejudice that promises lots of kinky sex, "the book Jane Austen would have written, if only she'd had the nerve!" The obvious thing to say about this is that it reaches a new low in Austen-exploitation, even worse than Pride and Predator or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. [Another obvious thing to say is that clearly the LA Times doesn't get out much on the internet if they didn't realize until now that *gasp* people actually write Jane Austen NC-17 fanfiction]. There was no shortage of kinky sex in the novels of Austen's time -- adultery, voyeurism, incest, rape. If there's no sex in her books, that's because she wanted us to understand that love is about something more than two bodies slamming together, and also because she respected her characters too much to violate their privacy. Apparently, that's more than some people are willing to put up with now.

But I also believe something more interesting is going on. I was thinking about this last month as I went around the country to promote my own Jane Austen book, A Jane Austen Education, especially the night I appeared with Karen Joy Fowler, the author of The Jane Austen Book Club. Someone asked us about the fan fiction, whether we liked to read those sequels that people were always publishing. Another wanted to know if we'd heard about the opera someone was making from Emma. A third brought up the movies.

And that's when it hit me. Jane Austen is an author, uniquely [well, not uniquely. Obviously, Bill Deresiewicz must not have encountered a little phenomenon called Harry Potter fanfiction], whom we all feel the need to possess -- which means, to rewrite, to retell. It's not enough for us to read her stories, we also have to turn them into our own. After all, that's what Fowler and I had both done. She wrote a very Austenian novel about people reading Jane Austen, and I wrote a memoir about the ways that reading Austen changed my life, a book that traces the arc of an Austen novel (first you grow up, then you fall in love). Movies, miniseries, fan fiction, stage adaptations, operas, zombies -- now this, the X-rated version. Everyone wants to play.

So what's going on? George Eliot is equally great, but we don't do this with Middlemarch. Mark Twain is equally beloved, but we don't do it with Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. We don't do it with Dickens, we don't do it with Shakespeare, we don't do it with anyone except Jane Austen [see Harry Potter, above]. Surely it's because she has an unsurpassed ability to make us feel as if we know her characters as well as we know the people in our own lives. They're friends of ours -- no wonder we want to keep gossiping about them.

What's really interesting is that Austen's impulse to write began with her own response to the things she was reading. Before the novels came the juvenilia -- satirical skits and sketches she produced as a girl for the entertainment of her large, literate, fun-loving family, some of which were written when she was no more than twelve and all of which were wicked parodies of the fashionable fluff that people read at the time. But she read it, too, otherwise she could never have known it well enough to send it up as brilliantly as she did. She probably would have rolled her eyes at the zombies, and Porn and Prejudice, or whatever they're calling it, would certainly have raised a smile of contempt, but our helpless need to write back to her novels, to answer story for story, to keep the conversation going, she would have comprehended very well indeed.

You know, that is a very good point that hadn't occurred to me before. Why Jane Austen and not Dickens? Or the Brontë sisters (Is there Brontë fanfiction? Can someone point me to it?)

Thoughts?

Homophobia at Starbucks

I've been keeping a very careful eye on this story today:

I Know Starbucks is Not an Anti-Gay, Homophobic Company (by Policy)…. BUT…

The letter was written by golfshirt6 (see the original post here), but the post that is garnering all the hits (above) was written by her wife. And boy, it's going viral quickly. The post, in thirty hours, has gotten about 15,000 hits, and is being Tweeted and Facebooked everywhere (including Starbucks' Facebook page itself). And Starbucks is noticing. Their Twitter feed today is mostly responses to it (e.g., we're looking into it, because we want to resolve this right away. This is NOT what our company stands for.) The original poster reports that she just got off the phone with Starbucks corporate, so apparently some action is being taken.

See, this is why we need to get ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimation Act) passed that the Republicans keep shooting down. No one should be berated in front of customers and then fired for their sexual orientation.

I will be exceedingly interested to learn more concerning Starbucks' corporate response. So far they seem to be doing well, although obviously this is a huge black eye for their company. But this is a great example of how a bystander can stand up and say, "This is NOT okay." And make a real difference.

Good luck to Jeffrey. And Starbucks, gee, I sure wouldn't like to be your public relations manager today.

Edited to add: Here's Starbucks' initial response.

Edited to add again:: The blogger has now been connected with Jeffrey, the man who was fired, and he has written a letter to her. See here.