Whether you've read and watched Pride & Prejudice a million times or you only know vaguely about the plot, most people have heard the iconic first sentence or one of its adaptive counterparts:“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Pride & Prejudice has been popular since its publication in 1813. Countless adaptations and appropriations have been made, ranging from historical to modern fiction, from television to movies to apps. In this project, I will look closely at the modern-day adaptation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. All the characters translate easily. Elizabeth becomes Lizzie. Darcy stays Darcy. My favorite name changes are Charles and Caroline Bingley; they become Bing and Caroline Lee.
Before we dive in, it is crucial to understand adaptations themselves.
What is an adaptation?
In Oliver Lindner and Pascal Nicklas's Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts, Linder and Nicklas tell us that
[a]daptation and appropriation have famously been seen as siblings–if not [fraternal] twins–by Julie Sanders.
[...] her distinction between adaptation and appropriation is one rather of degree than of kind: adaptation is more faithful to the original, closer to its source,“it signals a relationship with an informing source text or original,” in an adaptation we can identify “move-ments of proximation or cross-generic interpretation."
Compared to that, an appropriation is the “wholesale rethinking of the terms of the original," a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain. [...]
The differentia specifica in this comparison is the distance to the original.
So to paraphrase, anything using the Pride & Prejudice story and frame is an adaptation. An appropriation of the text would be something more like the novel Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James, which is set six years after the ending of Pride & Prejudice. It uses many of the same characters but tells a different story.
Why The Lizzie Bennet Diaries?
In the video above, Julie Salmon Kelleher speaks about the relationship of the self to the internet and how in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, we don't necessarily get to experience all of Lizzie's inner thoughts like we do in the book. Kelleher talks about how Austen invented the concept of free indirect discourse. In a nutshell, this is the idea of receiving a character's thoughts as they think them in the third person point of view when you'd normally only get them in the first. Because Lizzie controls the content of her videos, she sometimes chooses to leave certain information out. I'll talk more about this topic later when I discuss the vlog series at length.
