Making Modern Classic Characters

Austenesque authors have, in recent years, begun to explore the concept of extracting classic characters from their Regency worlds and inserting them into (usually) modern environments. ’Tis neither my place nor my inclination to assess whether these variations from tradition are appropriate or not. Of course, I sent the Bennet Wardrobe protagonists and antagonists all over the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, so that horse may already have left the barn.

Any writer seeking to position Darcy, Elizabeth, Jane, Bingley, Fitzwilliam, Georgiana, and Wickham in a time frame other than the Regency faces a critical “situation.” Readers have a Canonical setting of the Year Ten or Eleven. Austenesque consumers take the non-canonical but accepted timeframe as gospel. There is a wave of resistance.

On top of that, the moment authors step past 1820 (or, realistically, 1811), they must face another double task…

1. Creating an accurate and logical historical world to provide an environment within which the characters must live to express their truth.
2. The characters themselves, in the process of expressing their truths, must interact convincingly within their surroundings.

While we are familiar with Miss Austen’s leading characters, we ultimately only understand them within the semiotic framework created by the Mistress: the discursive debate between power and powerlessness, wealth and poverty, the city and the country, and the gentry and trade. The relations of men and women were governed by an individual’s position within the larger social scheme. The questions of disease and inheritance limited propriety and sexual probity. Greater sexual freedom was accorded to men of the upper classes as well as men and women of the lower classes who had no property to pass along to succeeding generations.

Understanding these more modern memes is unnecessary to appreciate the set-pieces through which Canonical characters move. What was in the Canon is because it could be no other way. The Regency shapes these characters as surely as the Marines mold their recruits. Austen, since she was writing for a Regency audience of the upper classes, did not need to explain the world within which her people existed.

Darcy is a man proud of his heritage and position. He has found security in propriety’s armor. He never questions his own power. It is simply his due because of his birth. Others are lesser than him, not because of a defect, but rather that is merely the nature of early Nineteenth Century Britain.

A side note: the ton frequently comforted itself on the exploitation of the lower classes by embracing their form of Social Darwinism, a late Nineteenth-Century philosophy propounded by H. Spencer for his wealthy confederates. Why that appeals to modern readers is another column.

If anything, Darcy is a caricature, the exception painted to act as a mirror within which the true nature of the ton was reflected. The decadence of the Ten Thousand—and implicitly the Prince Regent—plasters giant colorful gouts on the canvas when it encounters Darcy’s moral certainty.

Elizabeth is the antithesis of the expected Regency gentlewoman. She is neither meek nor submissive. Her Regency accomplishments are few—none of us see Elizabeth Bennet painting a table, stitching a fireplace screen, or netting a bag. Her post-Betty Friedan achievements are numerous—she is well-read, curious about the natural world as well as politics, opinionated, athletic, and so on. She is a “new” woman, much more so than Charles Bingley was a “new” man, determined as he was to go backwards in time from the Industrial Revolution.

We could go on exploring the nature of ODC and others as they stood in the Regency for eternity.

However, translating the characters directly into the modern era has its dangers.

With the elimination of coverture in the late Nineteenth Century and the adjustment of divorce laws, dropping Darcy and Elizabeth into twentieth-century Times Square can be a hazardous undertaking. Other advancements—the advent of women’s voting rights, the removal of racial and gender barriers in education and employment, and the removal of paternity questions in light of modern science—mean that modern renditions must carefully translate the characters, making them modern while retaining their recognizable essence.

Edward Steichen, The Flatiron (1904)

Would a Darcy born into post-World War II privilege be the same sort of man as one born shortly after the American Revolution? Would he have enlisted—if American—to serve in Vietnam or sought ways to evade the war? Would he act with a social conscience, or would he have held in disdain those who did not win the birth-parent lottery as being deficient in character and capability?

While a Napoleonic-era Elizabeth Bennet may seem refreshingly radical to a twenty-first-century reader accustomed to limpid Regency Romance heroines, would the same woman have embraced the Equal Rights Amendment movement in the 1970s? Would she have sought a career, or would she have been content to remain at home, raising her family, battling loads of laundry, school projects, and broken adolescent hearts? Would she have found Darcy’s efforts to redeem himself compelling enough to earn a second chance at her heart, or would Elizabeth have cut him loose in favor of Fitzwilliam, now no longer bound to marry for wealth?

Thus, authors seeking to insert the eternal relationship story into modern times must evolve these characters to make them consonant with their forebears and, thus, recognizable to readers. They must be able to inhabit the world into which they were born, or they will never be convincing. Two wonderful Austenesque Authors have successfully done just this: Beth Auron in her remarkable Longbourn’s Songbird and the late Barbara Silkstone in her lighthearted mysteries involving canine psychologist Lizzie Bennet and a modern property magnate/knight Fitzwilliam Darcy.

That requires doses of relevant information about the times into which the characters have been placed. The social, economic, political, and geographic factors that shape the historical context upon which the characters must stand need to be presented to readers who may not be thoroughly familiar with the time period. Only then may the characters be allowed to step onto the stage.

One other item: authors must offer believable language that positions the story appropriately. Words anachronistic in the Regency suddenly become “okay” (pick any time in the United States after the Election of 1836) if geographically sound. Characters can tell lazy footmen to “move their asses” (The Bennet Wardrobe, Volume Seven, The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion) if they have spent time in a future. Others can understand “closure” (The Bennet Wardrobe Volume Five, The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn) if they have become acquainted with Carl Jung.

However, that context must be firmly established. An example of this would be the window within which the readers view the last stanza of Volume Five of the Bennet Wardrobe: The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn. This final book within the volume is set at the Beach House in Deauville in 1944, in the months immediately following D-Day. To set the stage for the final crisis, some background information must be provided. Please consider the excerpt below from The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn.

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Books mentioned in this column:

The Bennet Wardrobe Series

https://mybook.to/BennetWardrobeSeries

Longbourn’s Songbird by Beth Auron

Mr. Darcy’s Dogs by Barbara Silkstone

Ghost Flight: A World War II Pride and Prejudice Variation

https://mybook.to/GhostFlightPandPVar

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This excerpt from “The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn” is ©2018 by Donald P. Jacobson. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any form, either print or electronic, without the expressed written consent of the creator is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.

Chapter 35

The Beach House at Deauville, August 19, 1944

….

In the twelve years since that remarkable month spent at Madras House, Lady Matlock had lived her dowager’s life in Deauville, London, Paris, New York, and Selkirk. That meant she had stood as nana to her grandchildren as they tumbled through the yards fronting the great estates and later strode across the stages at Oxbridge and the Sorbonne—even the young ladies. She had readily sponsored Liam Wilson’s boys: one to earn his doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago under Professor Fermi and the other matriculating at the University of Edinburgh before moving on to medical training at The London[EP1] [DJ2] . She imagined both were employed in the war effort. However, isolated as she was in Occupied France, she had no idea what either was doing to bring the conflict to its conclusion.[i]

What little communication she had had with her relations passed through various neutral countries. Mail would arrive, hand-delivered by Portuguese, Swiss, Spanish, or Swedish couriers. Hitler’s armies blocked the reach of the Five Families. Still, the Trust’s factors in Lisbon, Berne, Madrid, and Stockholm controlled items desperately needed by Berlin’s thugs: tungsten, iron ore, hard currency, and access to South America. While neutrality had its uses, these more pragmatic reasons conferred an aura of invulnerability upon those serving the Families, granting protection in the invisible but deadly game being played between the British SOE, the German Abwehr, and the American OSS.[ii]

She had long recognized that her own immediate security in Occupied France depended upon the strength of her friends in the power centers behind Hitler’s regime. The relationships forged in the heady days before World War I—and later in the twenties—transcended politics and national borders. Lady Matlock was unabashed in leaning on the Krupps and Thyssens to prevent her deportation from her home to a detention camp. Her continued independence to this point of the war had depended on the fact that the little man and his coterie of sycophants were still in awe of the Kaiserreich’s elites—the old Prussian military officer corps of vons and unds[EP3] [DJ4]  as well as the industrialists—who had helped the Nazis in the 1930s when they seemed to be the only answer to the aristocracy’s fear of a Communist revolution.

Sadly, they had believed they could control Hitler’s excesses, the verbalization of which had endeared him to German masses frightened by the Depression and feeling displaced by change in a modern world. Once he had eliminated all his competitors— several of whom the elites had depended upon to keep him in check—’twas too late. However, ten years later, she knew that the level of disdain in which the remaining betters still held the grasping criminality of the regime was only increasing as the cities were reduced to rubble and the Allies tore gaping chunks out of the flanks of Festung Europa.[iii]

Thus, Kitty put up with the inconvenience of infrequent letters passed through multiple mail drops between London and Deauville. Any deeper attempt to communicate with Fitzwilliams, Gardiners, Bingleys, Darcys, or Bennets could expose the House to the [EP5] [DJ6] gestapo’s undesirable curiosity. The Germans had become especially sensitive after the June 6 landings.

And even more so after the bungled attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20; that marked the first day of the Nazis’ war upon Old Germany.

As Hitler recovered from his injuries, Himmler had unleashed the SS upon any threats to the regime—real or perceived. The black-shirted, jackbooted wearers of the death’s head had expanded their murderous excesses over the past four weeks from the wealthy suburbs of Berlin and Munich into the occupied territories. Most of those arrested had not been involved in the actual plot, but with the Allied forces streaking out of their Normandy beachhead, the SS and the gestapo were in a fever trying to settle old scores as quickly as they could before their targets slipped through their fingers behind the olive-drab protection of dozens of enemy divisions.

Her lifeline—and perhaps more—was now in danger. Roving SS execution squads had harassed even Herr von Steiger as he traveled from his Alpine fastness across France to the Channel town. Only his Swiss passport and his strategic use of Reichsführer Himmler’s guarantee of safe conduct saved him from internment in a concentration camp or worse. What he had carried in his briefcase was valuable beyond comprehension.

Kitty had been undisturbed to this point, as she had been since the spring of 1940. She had continued in Deauville; cut off from the rest of the Families. Well, not totally isolated.

Maggie and Jacques’s son, who was Eloise’s husband, periodically checked in on Kitty and his aged father to make sure that the two old friends were safe. Maxie took every precaution because nobody wished to tempt the weaker of the neighborhood’s residents to try to collect the hundred-thousand-franc bounty placed on Commandant Maxim’s head by the frustrated gestapo. To his credit, Maxie had tried everything short of kidnapping his beloved Aunt Kate—and mother-by-proxy—to encourage her to leave Deauville before the French government capitulated in June 1940.

Her demurral had been both realistic and personal. “Maxie, you are my most-loved friend’s son. Would you have me abandon your father? You know he will never leave Maggie. Jacques’s greatest wish is to rest next to her in the dunes by the beach. Besides, if I leave, who will act as your alternate method of communications with SOE?”

And, thus, Kitty stayed. As Deauville was of no strategic importance, the town was spared the worst efforts of both the Axis and the Allies. The urgency to move the Wardrobe, which had been an impossible fantasy for years, had declined since June, especially as the Allied forces had finally achieved the long-awaited breakout through the hedgerows surrounding their beachhead along the Channel. The rumormongers had held that it was just a matter of days before the last of les Bosches[EP7] [DJ8]  would pack up and scurry back toward the Rhine.

Kitty believed this to be a pipedream as Hans Richter, the Kommandant’s adjutant and her official minder, had kept her abreast of the latest military scuttlebutt. He advised that the Allies were much more intent on pushing toward Paris to liberate the most significant symbol of the French Republic. She trusted his word for another reason: the woman with whom he had fallen in love.

Lydia Georgiana Wickham.

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[i] The elder was stationed in Alamogordo, New Mexico working on the Manhattan Project under Professor Oppenheimer. His younger brother was an infectious diseases specialist attached to SACSEAC…Supreme Allied Commander, Southeast Asia Command (Lord Louis Mountbatten).

[ii] Special Operations Executive. British secret organization that coordinated with Resistance Groups in WWII. The German organization is untranslatable. The American Office of Strategic Services was coordinated by General William Donovan. The OSS later evolved into the modern Central Intelligence Agency.

[iii] See The Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934.

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