Wednesday
Two years ago, not realizing that the PBS Sanditon series was going to experience a second season, I expressed my dissatisfaction. When Charlotte doesn’t marry either of the two very attractive prospects available to her (for her part, Austen never gives us more than one attractive bachelor per heroine), I speculated, “Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to capture the disappointment we feel over Austen’s own unfinished ending.”
It’s not that I was demanding a traditional marriage plot. I would have been more than happy with a bildungsroman (growth story). To elaborate, feminist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an influential book, sees the marriage plot warring with the bildungsroman in much of 19th-century women’s fiction, with the marriage plot invariably winning out. Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre may flirt with the bildungsroman, she observes, but in the end the marriage plot wins the day, with the protagonist dwindling from hero to heroine. Jane Eyre may undergo remarkable growth in the course of Charlotte Bronte’s novel but, on the last page, she is triumphantly proclaiming, “Reader, I married him.” Elizabeth, meanwhile, must curb her satiric tongue—what we love best about her—once she is engaged to Darcy. A pretty good joke at his expense*, one that could prod him to grow, never sees the light of day.
My problem with season #1’s conclusion was that Charlotte appeared to be heading back to an obscure life in the country, where she would be unable to exercise her powers in any way that we could see.
But now that there has been a season #2, and with a season #3 on the way, I’m more forgiving. We are getting the marriage plot after all, with all the perils that go with it. And who knows—Charlotte may end up as a hero rather than a wife in the end. Or perhaps she will be an equal partner with a husband. After all, that architect from season #1 is still around while Charlotte has good design ideas and admirable drive. I could imagine them as joint partners, something like Dorothea Brooke and Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
I noted in my previous post that, since Jane Austen didn’t complete Sanditon, the filmmakers aren’t bound to a specific ending. In the first season, as I observed in my post, they mostly rearrange previous Austen characters and plots. Part of the fun for Janeites like myself is recognizing when they do so. In fact, I called them out as I watched the series with my wife and mother, and they—perhaps because they are Janeites themselves or perhaps because they were being nice—didn’t complain.
For instance, I noted that Charlotte starts out as a Catherine Morland type (from Northanger Abbey), and that her relationship with Sydney Parker has an Elizabeth-Darcy vibe. The filmmakers have also drawn a lot from Mansfield Park, with Edward and Esther Denham at one point resembling the Crawfords. Lady Denham, meanwhile, echoes various tyrannical widows, like Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. Like Mrs. Ferrars, Lady Denham has control of her estate and can disinherit if she chooses (and in fact does so).
Season 2 continues with some of this rearranging. Charlotte’s sister is invited to Sanditon like Fanny Price’s sister to the Bertram household, although the two have more in common with Elinor and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. Sense and Sensibility may also have inspired some of the backstory of Mr. Colbourne, the estate owner who (spoiler alert) does not, in the end, propose to Charlotte: just as Colonel Brandon’s first love runs away from his brother, whom she is pressured to marry, so Colbourne’s first wife runs into the arms of the unscrupulous Captain Lennox, before returning to her husband to give birth and die. (It doesn’t, however, appear that her tomboy daughter will suffer the fate of Colonel Brandon’s ward, who is seduced and ruined by Willoughby.)
Captain Lennox, meanwhile, has some of Wickham’s debt issues in Pride and Prejudice, although in the end he is far more malicious, resembling Mr. Eliot in Persuasion. Mr. Eliot, like Lennox, has eyes for the heroine (whose desires point in another direction), and, like Mr. Eliot, he ruins (or attempts to ruin) other people. Meanwhile, the West Indian colony of Antigua, which appears in Mansfield Park, continues to play a role: Georgia, mixed-race heiress and ward of Sydney Parker, is still with us. Sydney, meanwhile, takes a trip to Antigua (like Sir Thomas Bertram), where he dies of yellow fever.
But for all that, the series is also moving in a very Victorian direction. This Sanditon, for instance, has a far more positive view of the governess profession than Jane Austen ever did. It’s more Bronte-esque than Austen-esque. Here’s how Jane Fairfax in Emma, perhaps speaking for Austen, tells Mrs. Elton how she sees the profession:
When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something—Offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect.”
“Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave-trade…”
“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies. But I only mean to say that there are advertising offices, and that by applying to them I should have no doubt of very soon meeting with something that would do.”
Sanditon’s Charlotte, on the other hand, sees the job as a possible future and means of independence. As I recall, on her way to Mr. Colbourne’s estate she first encounters his dog before meeting him on horseback, which is how Jane Eyre first meets Rochester. Edward Denham, meanwhile, has turned into a Wilkie Collins-style villain (I’m thinking of The Woman in White) as he secretly feeds her opium to convince her and the world that she needs to be locked up in a madhouse. There’s also something Dickensian about the woman he impregnates, who ends up running away from her child.
By the end of season #2, it sounds as though Charlotte, now twice crossed in love, is considering marrying a neighboring farmer. This of course cannot stand as the filmmakers are unlikely to go in a Thomas Hardy direction. There’s far more energy to be found in resort towns, like Sanditon and Bath.
I have no problems with the televised Sanditon. Austen herself was moving from a classical 18th century sensibility to a more Romantic one in her late fiction, with Anne Elliot—in her last completed novel—marrying a risk-taking captain rather than a landed squire. Sanditon, meanwhile, was venturing into the very un-Austen territory of real estate. Who knows where the author would have ended up?
*Elizabeth’s joke: Austen tells us that
Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin.