Authenticity in Northanger Abbey Essay -- Northanger Abbey

Northanger AbbeyAuthenticity In what is for Jane Austen an uncharacteristic all in ally direct intervention, the narrator of Northanger Abbey remarks near the end The anxiety, which in the defer of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, plenty hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will check over in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. As far as I know this is the only overt credit Austen ever makes to the material nature of her medium, and the relationship of that materiality to generic conventions. She might as well have said This is a romantic comedy Im piece of committal to writing as announce that the happy-ending conclusion was foregone. In terms of audience reception -- surprise, suspense, narrative deferral -- the advantage of writing film scripts (as distinct from TV, whose audience can tell when the end is nigh simply by looking at its collective watch) is that there is no tell-tale compression of pages your viewers dont know when the end is coming. If youre writing scripts for, say, Blue Heelers, you make them forty-eight minutes long and no mucking about, and the imminence of narrative closure is obvious to everybody. The advantage of being a novelist is that you can conciliate where you want to stop. One of the biggest differences between Austens novels and their current screen versions -- two of which were written for TV -- is that Emma Thompsons screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, Nick Dears for Persuasion and Andrew Davies for Pride and Prejudice -- unlike all of the originals -- were circumscribed first and last by material constraints For the si... ...als, journalists and fans in period costumes (mostly about forty years out, the ubiquitous crinoline doing duty as a blanket signifier of historical dress-ups) arrived at the gates of the MCG in variously anachronistic hors e-drawn vehicles and vintage cars with Coke logos on them. precisely just how deep and wide the late twentieth centurys nostalgia for authenticity really goes, and just how problematic and paradoxical a notion it has become in its tendency to make us forget history rather than remember it was demonstrated in Tasmania on the afternoon of Sunday April 28, when many of the tourists at Port Arthur mistook parade reality for a harmless facsimile of a deadly past -- one of those re-enactment things -- and began hurrying towards the gunshots, instead of away. Works CitedAusten, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. New York Broadview, 2002.