Inside the Austen fan
Ms Carroll, seated centre, at the Austen Ball in Canberra.
La Trobe University academic Laura Carroll – who teaches Jane Austen, film adaptation and women’s writing – takes her role as a cultural analyst to heart.
While other academics explore historicist, post-colonial and post-Foucauldian approaches to Austen’s six novels – Ms Carroll recently added to her research repertoire a Regency-style dress which she wore to the Jane Austen Festival Ball in Canberra.
The ball was part of a festival where she mingled with other Austen fans to better understand how it feels to be a heart-struck fan from the inside. The festival included workshops on etiquette, music, and a dinner with Regency-era recipes.
Following another wave of Austenmania – with the screening earlier this year of Lost in Austen – Ms Carroll canvassed the views of the women who are not content to be passive readers, but who want to fully immerse themselves in the manners and feelings of the time by dressing up in period costume.
She also interviewed them by email after the ball in an empirical study of Austenmania in Australia, the results of which she will report to an international conference in July, at Jane Austen’s home in Chawton, Hampshire, where there is a research centre devoted to Austen and other women writers.
Ms Carroll will also talk about Austen readers who get involved in historical re-enactment at a ‘Reworking the Regency’ conference to be held at the University of Melbourne in October.
Ms Carroll has a few hypotheses she wants to test. She believes the novels are popular because they are comedies, have happy endings and solve problems.
‘Beyond that, they describe a social world in meaningful detail. Everything that’s in the novels has significance that can be translated to the readers’ own lives,’ she says. Austen oft en includes readers amongst her characters and these have become emblems of an inner life – desires and imagination – that were not historically allowed.
‘Everyone thought the Austen hype would phase out aft er the miniseries but in the last three years there have been at least 30 sequels published or produced,’ she says.
The latest is a must for cross-genre aficionados – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – now a book and soon to be a movie. Other readers can take their choice from a host of titles that privilege the male characters. Mr Darcy takes a Wife is a soft porn sequel while Mills and Boon is off ering rewrites of the novels from the male hero point of view.
‘I’m irritated by this kind of stuff ,’ Ms Carroll says. ‘I force myself to read them but they’re generally dreadful. I try and put that aside.
‘What I love is the process of ordinary readers taking back the right to have their own take on Austen.’
Some fans post ‘mash-ups’ on YouTube. These are re-edited collages of bits and pieces of Austen movies put to popular songs which rearrange elements of the stories to have them turn out in different ways.
Ms Carroll sees this as a democratic reclaiming of Jane Austen from the Hollywood juggernaut. Some fans have taken their adulation so far as to call themselves ‘Janeites’.
‘They use her first name to indicate a more deeply personal intimate friendship. They read with such passionate attention that they find different enjoyments in the text to the more detached reader.’
Ms Carroll has 60 people in her La Trobe course on Austen. Two are men. And there weren’t a lot of men at the Canberra Austen festival either, she says. However, she has seen US films of Austen gatherings and there appeared to be a lot more men dancing with women fans than was the case at the Canberra ball.