Thursday
I was fully expecting a satisfying Jane Austen-like marriage to conclude PBS’s six-episode version of Jane Austen’s Sanditon, which means that the ending came as a shock. Here are some of my thoughts on that score.
Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to capture the disappointment we feel over Austen’s own unfinished ending. To Janeites like myself, her dying before completing Sanditon is an absolute tragedy. Austen was venturing into new territory with Persuasion and Sanditon, leaving behind gentry dramas for new enterprises (the military, real estate). Anne Elliot’s life as a sailor’s wife will be far more unsettled than the predictable futures of Catherine Morland, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and Emma Woodhouse. If Sanditon’s Charlotte marries someone in the boom-and bust-real estate market, then all kinds of things are possible. Alas, we’ll never know.
But perhaps the Sanditon filmmakers were just setting us up for a second season. Charlotte will apparently not be marrying into the Parker family, but there’s an up-and-coming builder/architect in the picture. Like Persuasion’s Captain Wentworth, he is a self-made man who has confidence in his abilities. Will he come for Charlotte now that Sidney has abandoned the field.
To be sure, this character doesn’t show up in Austen’s novel. Because Sanditon is unfinished, the show has a lot of freedom, and it takes full advantage. It mostly does so, however, by rearranging previous Austen characters and plots. I share a parallel example in support of my view that this was a wise choice.
My youngest brother is a member of Madison’s First Unitarian Society, which several years ago confronted the problem of having outgrown their Frank Lloyd Wright church. An addition was necessary, but how does one add on to a national monument?
The architect chose to gesture towards the Wright style without slavishly imitating it. It’s partly appreciative homage, partly a new building in its own right. The Sanditon show struck me as doing something similar.
The show is filled with gestures towards the other novels. Charlotte most resembles Catherine Morland in that she is a young, enthusiastic, and somewhat naïve observer of a resort town (Sanditon aspires to be Bath). But there’s also an Elizabeth-Darcy vibe in her relationship with Sidney Parker, who however also has a Colonel Brandon-like past.
The show’s Lady Denham has echoes of Austen’s tyrannical widows, Mrs. Ferrars (Sense and Sensibility) and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Pride and Prejudice). Like Mrs. Ferrars, Lady Denham has control of her estate and can disinherit if she chooses (and in fact does so). She’s more down-to-earth than either of those two, however, maybe a bit like Mrs. Jennings in Sense and Sensibility. For that matter, the enthusiastic realtor Tom Parker resembles Mrs. Jennings’s son-in-law John Middleton.
Edward and Esther Denham, who are half-brother and sister, are not unlike the fast-living Crawfords in Mansfield Park. Unlike that novel, however, the Henry-like Edward doesn’t ruin the woman who, against all propriety, falls in love with him (his half-sister in the show, the married Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park), although he comes close. Esther Denham escapes, somewhat like sister Julia Bertram escaping her family’s blow-up by marrying a nobleman who happens to be handy. While we are just okay with the Julia-Yates marriage, however, we are genuinely happy for Esther and Lord Babbington. Their wedding helps console us (although not entirely) for Charlotte’s lack of one.
Clara, the poor relative dependent on Lady Denham’s bounty, is just as cold, shrewd, and manipulative as Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility. Were it not for Lady Denham’s miraculous recovery, Clara would pull off a version of Lucy capturing Robert, Lady Ferrars’s heir. Or to shift novels, she is Mrs. Clay in Persuasion, fully outplaying Mr. Elliot, even though he thinks he’s the one calling the shots.
While the show’s mulatto heiress shows up in Austen’s Sanditon, she plays only a small role. As I watched, however, I thought of Patricia Rozema’s film version of Mansfield Park, which shows the probable horrors occurring on the Bertrams’ Antigua plantation. While I disliked the Rozema film for turning Fanny Price into Elizabeth Bennet, I thought the slave allusions were good, with Austen giving out subtle hints that Fanny is anti-slavery.
In other words, I don’t see the liberties taken by Sanditon as out of line. Just because we don’t see couples making love on the floor in Austen novels doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. A smart television version of Northanger Abbey plausibly imagines that Isabel Thorpe has such a fling with Captain Tilney before he throws her over. And who knows what all Lydia and Wickham do?
In the show’s ending, Sidney goes from Darcy to Sense and Sensibility’s Willoughby, sacrificing the woman he loves for a rich woman. To be sure, Sidney does it for a noble cause, which makes it all the more heartbreaking. Like Elinor for Willoughby, we feel a pang for Sidney.
Pangs are okay, but an Austen work that ends with the jilted heroine returning to her dull life in the country doesn’t feel very Austen-like. In fact, it feels like the ending of Northanger Abbey except without Tilney showing up. We can imagine how the immediate future will be for Charlotte by looking at how Catherine Morland responds to her forced return home:
Catherine’s disposition was not naturally sedentary, nor had her habits been ever very industrious; but whatever might hitherto have been her defects of that sort, her mother could not but perceive them now to be greatly increased. She could neither sit still nor employ herself for ten minutes together, walking round the garden and orchard again and again, as if nothing but motion was voluntary; and it seemed as if she could even walk about the house rather than remain fixed for any time in the parlour. Her loss of spirits was a yet greater alteration. In her rambling and her idleness she might only be a caricature of herself; but in her silence and sadness she was the very reverse of all that she had been before.
No wonder I was bummed out by the ending. Furthermore, informed sources report there will be no second season. Phooey!