Mansfield Park Mis Priced - Road to the Middle Class

In the golden age of Hollywood the culture snobs like you and I would always sneer at the costume dramas: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France presented with a hairstyle and small talk right out of 1930s popular culture.

There was one comfort. The BBC would never stoop to that sort of thing. Nor would Masterpiece Theater. At least, not when dramatizing Jane Austen.

But as my sister and I watched the one episode production of Mansfield Park last night on PBS we felt that we were watching a Hollywood costume drama.

Of course, it is ridiculous to attempt a vast novel like Mansfield Park in one episode. A novel of relationships cannot be crammed into two hours like an action drama. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try.

But to make the prim Fanny Price into a bit of a pouting slut with flashing eyes, when the whole point of Fanny is that, as the poor relation, she cannot afford even one lapse from irreproachable behavior; to make Lady Bertram, the indolent and self absorbed mother of four wayward rich kids easily tempted by the false intimacies of a rashly conceived project of amateur theatricals, into something of a shrewd judge of character who knew all along that Fanny was in love with her cousin Edmund; to show the characters of a comedy of manners cavorting around an English country house without manners and without decorum; this is to miss the whole point of Jane Austen.

Fortunately, there is still the book. And there is also the 1983 BBC production available on DVD, “faithful to the novel and soooooo booooooring,” thank goodness.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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