The Heart of Austen

I read the book 'Austenland' some time ago and just watched the movie.  The book wasn't bad and the movie was ridiculously delightful, in a nerdy, over the top silly sort of way, perhaps a modern Northanger Abbey?  The plot centers around the thirty something Jane who is unlucky in love and dreams of finding a modern Mr. Darcy.  In her obsession with all things Austen, she seems to have developed a few unsettling habits hoping to approximate her beloved era as much as possible, perhaps to an unhealthy extreme.  She spends her minuscule fortune and in a last desperate leap at love, decides to spend a week living out her dream.  A nerdy little romance plays out, worthy of an Austen book in itself, and all is happily resolved.  It isn't classic literature or moving cinema, just a happy bit of fluff that pokes a bit of fun at the modern Austen craze and perhaps even modern civilization itself, but hardly the source of great philosophical realizations, or is it?

The movie is delightfully satiric when it comes to modern obsessions with all things Austen, especially the romanticization of her witty but cutting social commentaries.  It has succeeded as much as Miss Austen herself, whose books, while humorous, are full of social commentary on her times and humanity in general.  This little gem of a movie likewise reveals something we moderns so ofter overlook: the search for the real.  In a world wherein we feel compelled to create ourselves, to be unique yet all the same, to have no opinion not sanctioned by social approval, and to acknowledge nothing as Truth save that which is dearest to ourselves, this movie throws our shallow reality in our face as suddenly as being smacked with a glove.  Jane doesn't want Jane Austen or Mr. Darcy, she wants real, true, deep things, things that mean Something.

The success of Miss Austen is in her creation of real characters, not fluffy bits of nothing that fall in love and live happily ever after.  Her heroines are flawed, they suffer, they sin, they make mistakes, but they also learn and grow, just as real people should.  Or at least they would in a world that made any sense.  But our world, or rather our perception of it, doesn't make any sense.  We are as feckless, flighty, and vain as Lydia Bennet, Mrs. E, Lady Catherine, Isabella Thorpe, the Crawfords, Mr. Wickham, and dozens of other characters in the Austen canon: characters who do not grow, change, or improve, but rather distort reality to explain away their own discomforts and shortcomings.  We are now a world of such whining, bitter, discontent, and vacuous entities.  And like Miss Austen, 'Austenland' is determined to laugh in the face of the absurd and call us to better ourselves and our world thereby.  Bravo!