EvelynHartogh writes:

Becoming Jane manages to satisfy fans of the life and literature of one of England’s most influential authors, Jane Austen. With much relatively accurate biographical detail and an understandable poetic licence this is a dramatic, moving and deeply enjoyable film.

In many ways, this is a fetishist film for lovers of the genre of the late eighteenth-century historical romance and the cult following Jane Austen inspired after her death.  Today, Austen is frequently interpreted as an early feminist, a forerunner to the early twentieth-century first-wave suffragettes (right-to-vote feminists) and the late twentieth-century second-wave equal-pay feminist movement.  In this biopic, she is viewed in the context of what has become known as contemporary third-wave feminism – the counter-culture Do-It-Yourself movement of the Western world, where women, having gained essential human rights, yet still feel their voices are marginalised and discounted as secondary to patriarchal, sexist mono-culture.

The issues of class dominating Austen’s novels are touched on in this fictionalisation of her first marriage proposals and her first loves. Amid the oppression of women in her era and the prejudice of class bigotry, she is seen as being caught like a fly in ointment within the social mixing of the middle-class with the upper-class, titled nobility (considered essential to the English nobles after what happened to the French nobility when they cut themselves off from “the people” and thus incited a revolution that ended with their own heads being cut off).  Austen herself does such things as “visit the poor” and thus although she exists at the cusp of the upper-class, she is more portrayed in the void between pragmatic desire for social climbing and her unpopular belief in social justice and equality.

Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada) shows an incredible maturity and depth in her portrayal of Jane Austen.  While the script takes the story in a direction both reminiscent of both Greek Tragedy and Mills and Boon, Hathaway’s complex performance saves the film from cliché.  At first, the film seems to take a similar direction to Shakespeare in Love, liberally dotting the narrative with incidents and scenes familiar to any readers of Austen’s fiction.  However, while the story initially depicts life as it  is - namely a series of events rather than a story arc - Becoming Jane develops into a grand love story.

Marriage becomes a complex social act more tied to economic comfort than desire.  Jane finds herself with the choice of a loveless, yet wealthy marriage proposal or facing social ostracism by following her heart.  In a twenty-first century context, this story cannot help but have feminist undertones, and even analogies to queer relationships because Jane must choose between being true to herself, or choosing to deny her own desires in order to gain social approval.

This story of Jane’s life suggests that, rather than being inspired by her own experiences, Jane’s novels were born out of all the ways in which she had wished her life had been.  Her loss becomes the impetus to write about how women of her era must tiptoe around social convention and suppress their desire for independence.  She thus becomes a tragic Romanticist who realises early on in her life that her imagination itself is contrary to social custom.

Jane envisions a better world than the one in which she lives – an act considered politically radical in Romanticist utopian literature.  Her vision becomes radical because it upholds an ideal not present in the lived experiences of others, and thus suggests a more ethical and reasonable world is possible, and that our own customs are far from civilised.  Early twentieth-century reactive Modernist movements sought to engage more with the horrors of war and post-colonialism and rejected the Romantics as dreamers rather than doers, much in the same way as the 1979 (Summer of Hate) Punk movement reacted against the 1969 (Summer of Love) Hippy movement.  Both Modernism and Punk seem in retrospect more radical than Romanticism or Hippy culture, but utopian ideals are necessary and indeed the foundation for being able to express a dystopian reality. Idealistic novels such as those from Jane Austen may have inspired a whole genre of lightweight ‘Chick Lit’ but they also catalysed more bitchy, politically critical and controversial work by women.

The greatest tragedy of Jane’s story is that the dilemmas she faced almost 200-years ago, remain relevant for many women today.  Although women in the West have the vote and equal pay, they collectively still earn less than men and are drastically under-represented in positions of power.  The status of women remains tied to the social position of their fathers, and husbands, and brothers, while class divisions and cliques still exist as visible boundaries to the lone woman.  However, the joy of this film is that it demonstrates it is possible for a woman who feels so powerless, to nonetheless engage with the world by writing her thoughts and sharing her experiences and hopes.

Becoming Jane fictionalises Austen doing readings of her early writing to an audience of critical men - even though she was famously anonymous and wrote in secret for many years until her brother ‘outed’ her while drunkenly boasting at a poker game.  This poetic license is not at all wasted, however, instead serving to demonstrate how little the attacks on women writers, and thinkers have changed in the last century.  This is a film that will resonate with many women who wish to be taken more seriously and not have their views dismissed and discounted because of their gender or low income.


Becoming Jane
2007

Director: Julian Jarrold
Screenwriters: Kevin Hood, Sarah Williams
Cinematographer: Eigil Bryld
Editor: Emma E. Hickox
Original Music: Adrian Johnston
Cast: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith, Joe Anderson
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