03.11.07
“Of Windows and Country Walks”
Pidduck, Julianne. “Of Windows and Country Walks.” The Postcolonial Jane Austen. Park, You-me and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds. Routledge: New York, 2000.
(review by Leah)
In her article, “Of Windows and Country Walks,” Julianne Pidduck discusses women, windows and space in most of the 1990s Austen adaptations. Pidduck writes that “the recurring moment of the woman at the window captures a particular quality of feminine stillness, constraint, and longing that runs through 1990s film and television adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels (116). In order to support her claims, Pidduck analyzes several scenes from most of the 1990s adaptations; however, for this review I will focus on Persuasion. Pidduck writes that the
“1990s adaptations refigure Austen’s characters and situations through a contemporary liberal feminist sensibility. These works highlight the precariousness of their heroine’s situations through their exclusion from property ownership; the romance’s desiring narrative tug towards heterosexual courtship and marriage is inextricable from historical property relations. In this sense, the gaze from the window may also be read as acquisitive” (118).
Pidduck asserts that the 1990s adaptations explicitly highlight male and female relationships in the early nineteenth-century through window and property shots.
Pidduck writes that in 1995’s Persuasion, “the woman at the window encapsulates a gendered ‘structure of feeling’ at work in Austen and in costume generally—a generic spatiotemporal economy of physical and sexual constraint, a sumptuous waiting barely papering over a baroque yet attenuated register of longing” (117). In doing so, the film presents the viewer with a unique set of questions concerning gender power-relations and colonialism (117). In conjunction with this, the casting of stereotypical attractive males enhances the ownership over females in the adaptations (117).
Pidduck discusses this trend in films such as the 1990s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and argues that in Persuasion, “the possibilities of the sea and travel as escapes from the traps of conventional English bourgeois morality are prominent” (129). Indeed, the films scene in which Anne Elliot searches the streets of Bath for Captain Wentworth illustrates Pidduck’s ideas, as she asserts in her article (129). Anne is trapped in her house, restrained from being able to go to Captain Wentworth as he roams the town at his leisure. Pidduck writes that this scene “conveys a profound sense of the physical and social constraint of a certain feminine experience” (129). Pidduck argues that this “profound sense” does not depart from Austen’s Anne, as she is restrained by her family throughout her life.
Pidduck also analyzes Persuasion’s opening in terms of spatial and political themes. Pidduck writes that “the romance and promise of empire speaks through the idyllic movement-image of the sailing ship that bookends the film” (129). This opening emphasis on the sea as a metaphor for freedom and conquest also highlights Anne’s physical and emotional imprisonment later on in the film.
Pidduck also discusses Anne’s sea-walk at Lyme with Henrietta. In the scene, a boy runs past Captain Wentworth and Louisa, as the camera stops following the boy and films Anne again (132). Pidduck writes that this scene
“expresses several intersecting spatial power relations…This boy’s headlong run (what or who was he running from or to?) functions within the visual economy of the shot as a kinetic counterpoint in the plodding narrative progression, the class- designated perambulation of the protagonists” (132).
While visually appealing to the viewer’s romantic and nostalgic sensibilities, this scene also works to enhance Anne as a member of a slower sex, which physically disables her.
I thought that Pidduck’s essay was an interesting one; I’d like to focus on a theme such as this for my paper. I liked how Pidduck discusses the political and social implications of scenes, as well as how they work visually. I would use this article for my paper.