Literary Ramblings: Feminist Fan Fiction (a Review of Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies)
Literary elitists may snub their noses at fan fiction in general, and if you read any of the trash people often post on various blogs and websites, you might understand why. Such fan fiction though is only a sample of the literature that falls under this category and should not define how academia views fan fiction on a whole. In fact, some of the oldest, most highly syllabized literature fit’s the definition of “fan fiction”. Homer is oft attributed for writing both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but critics have often suggested that the later of the two works was not written by the same person at all, making it the first known example of fan fiction. Virgil followed the pattern and penned a Latin epic of his own, which continued the story of the fall of Troy, calling it The Aeneid. Dante then, several centuries later of course, invited The Aeneid’s author to guide him through The Inferno, placing his classic work within the framework of fan fiction. Shakespeare likewise adopted the story of Anthony and Cleopatra and Milton would earn his spot in the annals of the literary canon with his detailed account of the creation story in Paradise Lost. Even the New Testament could be viewed as a piece of fan fiction when juxtaposed next to the Old Testament. The literary merit of these works is not in question, and though defining them as fan fiction may seem insulting to some, the inverse could be argued: these works complement fan fiction and assert its literary merit. Each of the aforementioned authors were inspired by other works and brought their own ideas to the literature which stirred them. Sometimes fan fiction can serve to bring something new to the original material, much as a musician might do by covering a song, or put a fresh face on dated material. Such is the case with Seth Grahame-Smith’s re-imagining of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which he has titled: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Austen’s original piece carried with it certain feminist overtones which over the passage of time have been dulled by the progress of the feminist movement. Ideas which were forward thinking in Austen’s time seem, to contemporary readers, more than a little conservative and even backward thinking. In Grahame-Smith’s re-imagining of Austen’s novel the many action sequences, though laughable, heighten the feminist overtones of original work and give the female characters even more authority, independence and personal strength than they were offered in the original piece, performing a facelift of sorts on the original text and bringing the intended feminist themes back to the surface and relighting the feminist intent of the original text.
One of the feminist themes that is brought out by the Grahame-Smith’s zombie narrative within the novel is that of conformity to the patriarchal panopticon. In one sequence the novel’s protagonist, Elizabeth, a woman who is fully trained in the ways of the dark art of death, leaves her home in the company of her sisters, armed only with ankle daggers whilst travelling through zombie infested lands, despite the fact that “muskets and Katana swords were a more effective means of protecting one’s self”, and the only reason Elizabeth and her sisters didn’t carry these weapons was because it was “considered unladylike; and having no saddle in which to conceal them, the three sisters yielded to modesty.” Being very much aware their social settings and how people would judge them, the women in the novel feel compelled to conform rather than be able to properly defend themselves, illustrating how conforming to the patriarchal standards is not only on a par with the dangers presented by zombies, but outweighs this life-threatening issue. Such instances of selecting wardrobe never carried such extreme implications in the original text and it is instances like these where Grahame-Smith uses the freedom offered by the fan fiction medium to draw out and highlight the feminist undertones of the original text that have been muted through time.
Grahame-Smith’s reinterpretation of Austen’s novel also transforms Mr. Bennet’s role in the narrative. In the original novel Mr. Bennet is described as a studious intellectual who scoffs at the giddiness and superficial lifestyle his wife has successfully encouraged three of his five daughters indulge in. In the original novel Mr. Bennet served to undermine and mock the shallow and trivial life often indulged in by the ruling class women of the era. In Grahame-Smith’s version though the father takes a more aggressive role in discouraging his daughters from adopting the patriarchal template which women were expected to fulfill. Rather than simply mocking his daughters, he encourages them to become more independent. When Mrs. Bennet begins daydreaming about marriage for her daughters and asks her husband if he would not consider his daughters, Mr. Bennet states that he “would much prefer their minds be engaged in the deadly arts than clouded with dreams of marriage and fortune”. Rather than see his daughters lose their identity by accepting the chain of patriarchy via marriage, Mr. Bennet wishes to see his daughters become independent by being able to physically defend themselves and occupy themselves with study, rather than romance. Mr. Bennet is opposed to the patriarchal definition of what a woman should be in both novels, but in Austen’s original text he offers only a passive mocking of trivial nature of womanhood in Austen’s era , where Grahame-Smith employs the fan fiction format to create a Mr. Bennet that takes a more active role in discouraging his daughters form indulging in pettiness and instead hopes to bring equality for his daughters, and in turn women, as he helps to train them in the “dark arts”.
The novel is peppered with instances such as these, female characters that are bolder and stronger (Lady Catherine for example has a small armada of ninjas to protect her, not that she needs it being fully trained herself) than those who populated the original novel, and though Grahame-Smith’s prose does not blend in with the original text very well (indeed even sticks out like a burqa in a stripe club at times), it add a funs, fresh and jovial nuance to a text that in its original form may seem ,to young contemporary readers at least, laboriously long and drawn out. Grahame-Smith’s zombies are as spoon full of sugar in Austen’s medicinal literature. Older fans of the original text may see Grahame-Smith’s work as vandalism, but it is much more than that. It is a post-modern work that openly indulges in appropriation of Austen’s text and the likes of George A. Romero to create a work that turns an arguably dull piece of classic literature into a feminist piece that entertains at the base level whilst satisfying on a more academic basis as well.