Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 68

Pride, Prejudice & Feminism: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (Part Two)

In Sunday’s blog post, I talked about how I’m enjoying The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, YouTube’s modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The most interesting aspect of this series to me is how updating a famous 200-year-old story by and about a woman forces us to examine how women’s roles have changed in the last two centuries. The intertwined concerns of gender and social class permeate Austen’s novel: the central problem of the novel is that Mr. Bennet has the misfortune to have sired five daughters, all of whom must be provided for, while his modest family estate is entailed upon the nearest male relative. In other words, he is prohibited by law from leaving any of his wealth to his daughters, and of course there is no possibility of women of their social class being allowed or able to earn an income. The only possible solution is for all of them to marry, or for some of them to marry well enough that they will be able to support their unwed sisters.

This is obviously not a concern that translates well to the twenty-first century. This was one of the creators’ reasons for reducing the number of Bennet sisters from five to three (as co-producer Hank Green explains here). The modern Bennet girls will earn their own way in the world, although there’s some concern that with Jane’s ambition to be a fashion designer, Lizzie’s graduate degree in Mass Communications, and Lydia having been relegated to community college because her grades aren’t good enough to get into university, they may not be able to support themselves comfortably in a faltering economy. They worry about student loans and being underemployed. And the differences of wealth and social class between the Bennet girls and their admirers still exist. In one video Gigi Darcy, happily babbling about her family’s winter place in Colorado, innocently asks Lizzie, “And where does your family ski?” — a question that illustrates as well as anything the minefields of class in a supposedly classless society.

But though financial pressures exist and Mrs. Bennet would like to see her daughters marry rich men, marrying “up” is no longer seen as a career move. Mrs. Bennet’s obsession with marrying off her daughters is always presented as a personal oddity rather than the pressing economic necessity it is in Pride and Prejudice.

This, in fact, is the underlying message of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries for those who are familiar with the original: Times Have Changed. Young women, you no longer need to find a man to support you! You can support yourself, and marry only when you find someone you genuinely want to spend your life with, rather than someone who can support you, or a distant cousin upon whom your family’s property is entailed. Let’s be honest: marriage for love, as we practiced it in the 20th century (and continue to practice it in the 21st) certainly has its shortcomings, as evidenced by the divorce rate. But anyone who thinks we need to get back to the “good old days” when a more “traditional view of marriage” prevailed really needs to read their Jane Austen. Marriage in the past was a business arrangement, in which the personal happiness of either partner (but particularly the woman, who unlike her husband would have fewer interests outside the home, no career, and less freedom to pursue extramarital affairs) was a secondary concern.

Jane Austen herself turned down a proposal of marriage from a not-particularly-appealing suitor (much as Elizabeth Bennet turns down Mr. Collins) knowing that by refusing him, she was passing up the chance of greater financial security not only for herself but for her family. In a letter written several years later to a niece who was considering a marriage proposal, Austen urged her “not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.” But even as she was apply this to both her own and her heroines’ lives, Austen was keenly aware, as her fiction makes clear, that “marrying without Affection” was the lot of many women of  her time, for practical reasons.

Elizabeth Bennet, of course (like thousands of heroines of genre romance that have sprung from the plot outline originally laid down by  Austen) is offered the best of both worlds. After her initial dislike of Darcy turns out to be based on, well, pride and prejudice (on both sides), she is given the opportunity of marrying a man who is both personally appealing to her, and wealthy enough to offer all the security her family could ever desire. The same is true of Jane’s match with Mr. Bingley. But other characters — Charlotte and Lydia — do not fare so well. Charlotte marries the pompous Mr. Collins for security and seems moderately happy; Lydia impulsively elopes with penniless and shiftless George Wickham, whom she adores, and finds that his charm quickly wears thin and married life is less idyllic than she had imagined.

What of their twenty-first century counterparts? Modern Jane Bennet’s story has just reached its conclusion with yesterday’s Episode 92. As in the original, she and Bing are reunited after misunderstandings. But rather than the couple riding off into the sunset to become master and mistress of a country estate, their relationship is resolved in a way that makes it clear that Jane’s career is just as high a priority to her as her relationship with Bing, if not higher. Jane may be the sweetest and most tractable of the Bennet sisters, but she is assertive and insists on an equal partnership. And though we haven’t yet seen the resolution of the Lizzie/Darcy relationship, no-one who’s watched the series can doubt that Lizzie will maintain her independence in whatever romance emerges.

It’s Lydia’s story that’s the most poignant element of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and that most sharply points up the changes in society since 1813. Modern party-girl Lydia, self-absorbed and always out for a good time, occasionally gives her viewers glimpses of the insecurity beneath her bravado — her early videos imply, though never directly state, that it’s not easy being the least obviously bright and talented of the Bennet daughters, nor being the odd girl out of Lizzie and Jane’s tight sisterly bond. There are hints of wistfulness beneath her bubbly exterior that never appear in Book-Lydia (at least, not as seen through Elizabeth’s narrative point of view).

In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia runs away with George Wickham, a handsome militia officer whom Elizabeth briefly admired but for whom she later lost all respect, thanks to Mr. Darcy’s revelations about Wickham’s unsavory past. Lydia writes home that they are going to Scotland to be married, but in fact they go to London, where they live together for a couple of weeks until Mr. Darcy tracks them down and essentially pays Wickham to marry Lydia. Throughout, Lydia seems unaware of the disgrace that living with a man before marriage brings not only upon her but upon her whole family; she appears to have been initially deceived into thinking they are to get married immediately but when no wedding is forthcoming Lydia seems unconcerned. She assumes that they will marry at some point, not knowing that Wickham is keeping her as mistress while trying to keep his options open in hopes of finding a wealthy wife — after which point the discarded Lydia would be shamed for life and valueless on the marriage market. When they do marry, Lydia does so gleefully and without the sense of shame her family feels would be appropriate, and takes great pleasure in her new marital status — until the romance has dimmed and Wickham’s charm has worn thin.

How to translate this situation to the twenty-first century? Obviously, Lydia and George living together would have no shock value at all today, and throughout the series fans speculated about how Lydia might be disgraced. In The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Lizzie briefly dates handsome swim coach George Wickham, and does indeed begin to see him in a new light after Darcy reveals some facts about George’s past. After Lizzie and Lydia have a nasty quarrel, Lydia runs off to Las Vegas, where she happens upon George and their relationship begins. That relationship unfolds under the watchful eyes of the internet, since George begins appearing in and even orchestrating Lydia’s videos, but without the knowledge of Lizzie, who has stopped watching Lydia’s videos since their argument.

The videos Lydia makes with George are some of the most interesting of the series, since on one level everything that happens between the couple can be seen as a typical romantic cliche. On another level — one viewers were quick to comment on — the relationship appears manipulative and even emotionally abusive (it’s interesting to speculate whether viewers would have been as quick to accuse Wickham of setting up an abusive dynamic if they had not had previous knowledge of book-Wickham’s evil ways). Lydia diminishes almost visibly before the viewers’ eyes, her trademark “totes adorbs” personality becoming muted and quiet, her usually vivid wardrobe replaced by drab and baggy grays and blacks. In a final video, with George absent, Lydia offers a moving testimonial to how much George loves her and how their love has changed her for the better — yet it’s hard to watch her declaring this when every non-verbal clue is shouting the opposite.

It’s the last of Lydia’s videos because the next thing to hit the internet is a website (available online for a day or two before it’s ever mentioned in the videos, and sure enough, it took fans no time to find it and react) offering access to a hot video of YouTube star Lydia Bennet baring all. No actual video appeared on the site, only an email address and a countdown clock, counting down the days until the “Lydia Bennet tape” would become available.

Fan reaction to this revelation was fascinating. The show’s producers and writers had, of course, chosen the perfect scandal to expose Lydia and her family to public shame, and reveal Wickham’s manipulative colours. In 1813, the greatest scandal imaginable for a young woman of good family was for everyone in the community to know that you were having sex outside marriage. In 2013, when everybody assumes you’re already doing that, the greatest scandal is for the community to be able to actually SEE you doing it.

Almost all fans immediately assumed that Wickham was advertising and releasing the video without Lydia’s knowledge or permission, either exploiting a tape they had made together and meant to keep private, or possibly even taping her without her knowledge. Only a few fans opined that Lydia might have been complicit in the video release (and Lizzie herself, upon learning of it, makes the same assumption, only to be excoriated by viewers).

In fact, if Lydia had been involved in the release of the video, the story would have remained truer to the original. Lydia and George deciding together to parlay Lydia’s YouTube popularity into internet stardom via “adult” videos — having a laugh and making a quick buck along the way — would be a better modern equivalent to the couple who run away and live in sin together, heedless of the consequences, in Pride and Prejudice. In this sense, Austen’s Lydia is almost more empowered and independent than her twenty-first century counterpart: rather than being the nearly-innocent victim of an abusive opportunist, book-Lydia is a knowing partner in crime. Book-Lydia would be more empowered, of course, if she were deliberately flouting social convention because she genuinely believed that marriage didn’t matter and that she had the right to sleep with whomever she wanted, regardless of what the neighbours thought. Book-Lydia is no fearless defier of convention, though; she is almost unbelievably stupid, appearing not to recognize or understand the social censure to which she is opening herself. And, of course, that very stupidity and lack of regard for the consequences makes it impossible for her sisters to ever like and respect her, or for the reader ever to view her as a really sympathetic character.

YouTube Lydia is a very different young woman, despite her superficial similarity to her book-original. Though less academically inclined than her sisters, she is never presented as stupid, and beneath her brash exterior is an obvious core of sweetness and vulnerability. Society has changed a great deal since Austen’s day, but not so much that a respectable young woman can become an online star of naughty videos and retain the approval of her family and friends. For Lydia to retain and strengthen her relationship with her sisters — and the fans’ approval — she has to be an innocent victim (suggesting that perhaps our perception of to what degree young women control their own sexuality, while it has come a long way since 1813, may still have some distance to go). Sure enough, Lydia turns out to know nothing about the adult website, is horrified at the thought that George has violated her privacy, and is immensely relieved when the site is taken down without any incriminating video being released to the public (as yet viewers have not been told how this was accomplished, though of course we have our suspicions). After the crisis, Lydia retires (temporarily, fans hope) from appearing in Lizzie’s videos and makes no more of her own, suggesting that the experience has not only scarred her but forced her to reconsider how much of her life she wants to share with the public.

What I found particularly interesting about this entire story arc was that a few fans, even after the illicit video site had been revealed, were suggesting that the story might still end with Lydia and George together, as in the book. Some Austen purists protested that keeping them apart was too big a deviation from the original. But it seemed obvious to me that the sympathetic way in which Lydia’s character had been developed (due at least as much to Mary Kate Wiles’s excellent acting and onscreen charm as to the writing) made this impossible. In 1813, if a man took advantage of you, stole your innocence and shamed you in front of the community, your best case scenario was that he would then marry you. Legal marriage would offer you protection in the eyes of society — even if it offered little in the way of love, congenial company, or protection from domestic abuse. In that sense, women in the 1800s hadn’t come all that far from Biblical times, when the law required a rapist to marry his victim. Those laws seem repugnant today only because we’ve forgotten that in a pre-feminist world such a marriage, unpleasant as it was, really was your best possible outcome.

Thank God — and I say that with all sincerity, believing God to have been behind the feminist movement — this is no longer the case. No-one would suggest today that if a young woman’s boyfriend made compromising pictures and video of her available on the Internet without her consent, her best course of action would be to marry him. The Wickham experience has been shown to be traumatic and probably life-altering for Lydia (we have yet to see what new version of Lydia might emerge from this experience, and very few episodes left in which to see it). But viewers have no real doubt that the Lydia they’ve come to love will emerge wiser and stronger, and certainly with no need of George Wickham in her life.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries series has so much to offer — but really, if keeping Lydia free from marriage to George Wickham were all it offered, it would still be enough. Enough to remind us that although all feminism’s battles have not yet been won, we have come an impressive distance in 200 years.

February Book Reviews

Here’s the wrap-up on all the books I read in February. Once again, I’ll put your name in the drawing for a free book if you like or subscribe over on YouTube, or if you share this video on Facebook or Twitter.

Writing Wednesday 22: What’s in a Name?

My reflections on Pride and Prejudice and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries will continue later in the week, but as it’s Wednesday, it’s time once again to focus on a less classic work of literature: my current work-in-progress. Although, apropros of this week’s topic, I wonder how different P&P might have been if Austen had chosen a name other than “Mr. Darcy” for the hero of her romance? Is the name “Fitzwilliam Darcy” inherently sexy, or has it become that way only because of two centuries of connotation? It’s hard to know at this distance, but I find as a writer some names are far more attractive than others, and if a character isn’t working for me, changing his or her name may be the easiest way to think about the character differently. As I explain in the video above, it certainly worked (unintentionally, in that case) for Jacob John in That Forgetful Shore. Now I’m trying to harness the power of name changes intentionally in the new novel.

What do you think? How much difference do character names make to writers? To readers?

Pride, Prejudice, & Social Media: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (Part One)

So, as I was saying last week, I’ve been rereading some classic literature this year, and what inspired me to pick up Pride and Prejudice was how much I’ve been enjoying the YouTube adaptation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. In this series (which by now comprises 90 episodes, usually about four minutes long, and has taken us a bit more than three-quarters of the way through the plot of Pride and Prejudice), Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bennet is a twenty-first century grad student in Mass Communications. Too poor to move out on her own, she lives at home with her two sisters, Jane and Lydia, a charming if somewhat detached father, and a mother whose constant obsession is seeing her daughters married, ideally to wealthy men. Oh, and it all takes place in California.

The synopsis makes it sound like it could be a nightmare for serious Austenophiles (a group in which I don’t include myself). But in fact, the modernization is so fresh, fun and well-done that it’s won the admiration of a large body of fans (well over 150,000 YouTube subscribers), many of whom are huge fans of the original source material and who like what the writers and actors are doing with Austen’s story.

Changes are inevitable, of course. Families of five being unusual in this day and age, there are just three Bennet sisters (bookish, ponderous sister Mary has been transformed into bookish, insightful cousin Mary, while Kitty becomes the family cat with absolutely no loss to the story, as Kitty Bennet does virtually nothing in P&P). Appropriately for twenty-first century California, there’s a bit more racial diversity in the mix: Charlotte Lucas is now Charlotte Lu, and is not just Lizzie’s friend but also the skilled video producer who edits Lizzie’s vlogs (and ultimately goes to work for, rather than marrying, the still-pompous Mr. Collins at his digital media company, Collins & Collins). Charles Bingley, the wealthy neighbour Jane Bennet falls in love with, is now wealthy medical student Bing Lee (still with a scheming sister Caroline). Darcy’s amiable cousin Colonial Fitzwilliam is now Darcy’s amiable (and dreadlocked) friend Fitz, who is removed from the romantic machinations of the plot not by financial considerations (in P&P, Elizabeth admires Colonel Fitzwilliam but he frankly tells her that because of his position as a younger son he is obligated to marry a wealthy woman, which puts him out of the running for any of the Bennet sisters and which Elizabeth accepts as a simple fact), but by a more modern twist: he’s gay. And George Wickham is not a militia officer but the coach of a college swim team.

Despite all the changes in trappings, the characters are, at their core, essentially the same people. Jane Bennet, in her new guise as an aspiring fashion designer, is still the sweetest human being and the kindest big sister imaginable. Lizzie remains smart, funny, sharp-tongued and a bit cynical, prone to judging too quickly and listening too little. William Darcy is still wealthy, aloof, attractive, arrogant, generous, and so socially awkward you want to suggest he needs a little therapy. And Lydia Bennet, the character I find most intriguing in this remake, appears at first to be a perfect modern translation of book-Lydia. Substitute partying, picking up guys at clubs, drinking and recreational drug use for her nineteenth-century counterpart’s obsession with buying bonnets and flirting with officers, and you seem to have the same Lydia as ever. In the early Lizzie Bennet videos, Lydia bursts into the her sister’s vlogs with a voice and attitude that seem to perfectly echo the self-centred narcissism of Book-Lydia. Even when she begins shooting and posting her own vlogs it takes awhile to see that there might be something beneath the party-girl exterior. It’s with the development of Lydia’s character that I first began to think of the whole Lizzie Bennet phenomenon as “brilliant” rather than just “entertaining.”

I say “the whole Lizzie Bennet phenomenon” because one of the most intriguing things about this series is how the creators use social media to tell the story. The premise is that Lizzie makes twice-weekly vlogs chronicling events in her own and her family’s life: other characters (Jane, Lydia, Charlotte, Bing, Caroline, Mr. Collins, Wickham, Fitz, Darcy and his sister Gigi) occasionally appear in Lizzie’s vlogs, while some of these same characters and others we never see onscreen (primarily the Bennet parents, since almost everyone else has appeared in the videos by now) are represented by Lizzie dressing up in costume and satirizing them (often roping others into doing “costume theatre” with her). You could watch all 90 of Lizzie’s videos and follow the main thread of the story without needing any other information, but for the benefit of more obsessive fans, each of the characters has Twitter accounts and some also have Tumblrs and Pinterest boards. And of course they’re all on Facebook.

In addition, Lydia has a substantial series of spin-off videos, while two other minor characters, Maria Lu and Gigi Darcy, have had more short-lived video series (Gigi’s videos were particularly crucial in revealing a key plot point). Fans can choose to what extent they wish to engage with the “transmedia” aspects of the story and enjoy added value (like Gigi’s Instagram snaps of herself, Lizzie and Darcy touring San Francisco while Lizzie is interning at Darcy’s company, Pemberley Digital).

Telling the story through the medium of vlogs and other social media forces us to call into question the conventions of storytelling in a way we rarely do with novels. When Austen released Pride and Prejudice exactly 200 years ago, the English novel was a relatively new art form, and writers were still to some extent working out the bugs of how this type of narrative worked. Austen told her novels using the invisible third-person narrator who would soon become so familiar to novel-readers, but in earlier drafts of Sense and Sensibility she played around with the epistolary form that had been so popular in novels of the previous century (like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela). Charlotte Bronte, writing 30 years later than Austen, used a first-person narrator who is keenly aware of her audience, addressing them directly with the famous line, “Reader, I married him.”

We have become so used to novels as a way to tell stories that we rarely ask ourselves (as I did when reading The Bobbsey Twins at age 10) “How can this narrator know everything that happened and be able to report all these private conversations word for word?” Today only the most literary of authors bother to play around with or draw attention to these familiar storytelling conventions: most writers and readers treat them as given.

The Lizzie Bennet fandom can be counted on for at least one good online argument after almost every video is posted (particularly in recent weeks as the plot has intensified) centring around the question, “Why would Lizzie post this on the internet?” If we suspend our disbelief and treat these as if they are a real young woman’s vlog posts, then troubling questions arise about whether she is violating her friends’ and family members’ privacy by posting the vlogs, sometimes without the permission or knowledge of the people who appear in them. These questions are addressed to some degree in the vlogs themselves, but are the subject of far more heated debates among fans (and became even more pointed when Gigi Darcy’s videos, ostensibly corporate promotional videos designed to highlight a new “storytelling app” called Domino, began revealing private conversations with her brother, with Fitz, and with George Wickham). The answer is, of course: these videos have to be posted in order to tell the story. Telling a story in a new way raises new questions about the process of storytelling itself and the conventions we all take for granted. (How old were you when you noticed that when people on TV sit down to dinner, they all sit on the same side of the table?).

Releasing the story as a bi-weekly series in a forum that allows for significant viewer interaction (much more so than with television, for example) is both contemporary and oddly traditional. Jane Austen’s novels were published as complete books, but other nineteenth-century authors, like Dickens and Trollope, released many of their stories as newspaper serials, which meant that the stories unfolded before readers’ eyes much as The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are unfolding for viewers, with the accompanying back-and-forth of reader response and opinions – which in the nineteenth century generally took the form of obsessive super-fans writing letters to the author begging him or her to get the reader’s favourite couple together or kill off the villain.

Telling a story in this way in today’s social-media environment gives viewers unprecedented ability to respond, and they do, in floods of comments on each video as well as on Twitter and in other social media. (And, of course, as I am doing on this blog). I’d love to know how much, if at all, the direction of the story has been affected by viewer response. Obviously the creators had Austen’s novel as their basic template, though they’ve shown that they’re not afraid to deviate from her plot, and the overall story arc must have been well in place when the project started. But have any developments been influenced by audience response? I’d particularly like to know whether Mary Kate Wiles’ brilliant portrayal of Lydia, and the degree to which many viewers fell in love with her, influenced the way her storyline developed.

It’s Lydia’s story that makes the most significant deviation (so far) from Austen’s plot, and draws our attention most sharply to the feminist questions underlying the novel and any attempt to update it for today’s world and today’s woman. This, to me, is the most intriguing aspect of this series, but as this blog post is already far too long, I’ll continue this exploration in a second blog post later this week. 

Searching Sabbath 06: Creation

This week I continue on with my series of blog posts and videos exploring the fundamental beliefs of my church, how I understand them and where I stand in relation to them.

None of the beliefs I’ve posted about so far have made me feel as vulnerable as posting this one about Creation. That’s because Seventh-day Adventists hold to a very traditional, literal interpretation of Genesis and believe in a recent six-day Creation. And I have a lot of struggles with that belief, for reasons outlined in the vlog above.

By posting this video and blog I feel like I’m opening myself up — to disapproval from fellow SDAs for whom belief in a literal Creation week is an article of faith not to be questioned, and to scorn from others who can’t believe I would belong to an organization that believes something so “backward” and scientifically unsound.

The irony is that this isn’t something I’ve ever talked about or posted about before and wouldn’t have addressed now if I hadn’t committed to exploring every one of my church’s beliefs in this series. It’s an issue that arouses tremendously strong feelings both from those who believe in Creationism and those who attack it, but to be honest it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. I know for some people this is the question that has shipwrecked their faith or otherwise provided a real turning point, but I find it rests quite well with me to leave it in the “Questions I Don’t Know the Answers to” category. I have no trouble believing that God created this universe … I’m just sketchy on the exact details of how God did that. To be honest, I’m fine with not knowing that.

But a lot of other people are probably NOT fine with me not knowing that, and think it’s of vital importance that I get this sorted out one way or another. I can only say, “Don’t hold your breath.” There are a lot of things higher on my Get It Figured Out list than the issue of when and how God created this world.

In a fun twist, this week’s video is set up as my end of a dialogue with fellow Adventist writer Ed Dickerson, whose Grounds for Belief series of videos about the Genesis narrative I’ve been watching on YouTube. I’m intrigued by the idea of hearing his responses to some of my questions … the only downside being that planning out the video this way made it considerably longer than usual. I try to keep these in the 3-4 minute range but this one is 8 minutes long. Hope you get a chance to watch it though. When Ed posts his response I’ll post that here too.

Writing Wednesday 21: Words With Friends

Today’s video is about something that I’ve always been richly blessed with: good writing friends. I’ve always been fortunate, at various stages of my life, to have found good friends who liked to write and who provided support for my writing. Sometimes that came in the form of joining a formal writers’ group, like the Newfoundland Writer’s Guild which I belonged to for many years. Other times it was just good luck — like when Kerry Schafer moved down the road from me in Oshawa and we discovered our mutual love of writing. Kerry’s novel Between was just released this week, and in the video above I talk about the thrill of finding Between in my local bookstore, as well as giving some shout-outs to other writer friends. I encourage every writer to find a network of supportive friends — and yes, that includes internet writer friends too!

Classics in Midlife

I’ve mentioned over at Compulsive Overreader, but not here, that one of my reading goals this year is to read or re-read several “classic” novels that I either never finished, or didn’t appreciate as fully as I should have, when I was younger. I started with The Great Gatsby, inspired not by the fact that there’s a movie coming out but by the fact that John Green covered it in his all-too-short “Crash Course: Literature” series, which led my son Chris to read it and rave over how great it was. I had to read Gatsby for a college lit class and remember being pretty unimpressed by it, but with my 15 year old enjoying it I thought it was worth a second try. To my surprise, I liked it a lot better this time around.

Next, I tackled Les Miserables, having loved the stage musical many times and recently watched and loved the movie. I did read the book many years ago, but found it boring and confusing. This time, to my surprise, I loved it and couldn’t put it down. Yes, there are lots of windy, wordy digressions into topics that have little to do with the story but that Victor Hugo found fascinating, and I did a bit of skimming in those places, but overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Heartened, I went on to the book I’m now rereading — Pride and Prejudice. This one is a bit different in that I did like P&P when I first read it (and again when I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, of course) but it had been a long time since I’d read the original book, and while I’ve been watching the fabulous Lizzie Bennet Diaries series on YouTube (a modern updating of P&P as a 21st century vlog, about which I’ll be blogging more later) it’s occurred to me that I’ve forgotten a lot of the plot, so it was worth a re-read. And once again, I’m finding myself very absorbed — and enjoying sharing the reading experience with Emma, who also wanted to try reading P&P because she’s been watching Lizzie Bennet along with me.

I’m impressed how much more I’m enjoying all of these classics than I did on first reading and it makes me wonder: have I somehow become a more mature reader in middle age? Am I better suited to reading these books now than I was in my teens and twenties? I posed this question on the book discussion thread over on Ship of Fools and someone replied with a story of a friend who teaches a Shakespeare class at the local seniors’ centre and says she wasn’t really mature enough to understand a lot of what Shakespeare was saying when she wrote her dissertation in her 20s.

It made me think that maybe, at least for some readers, classic literature does improve with age — not the book’s age, but our own. Which makes it pretty ironic that the only exposure a lot of readers get to literary classics is forced reading in school — at the very time of life, and in the very setting, where they’re least likely to appreciate them.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean I’m going to stop teaching the works of literature that are on the curriculum, nor that I’m not thrilled when my kids start tentatively searching out literary classics on their own, as they’ve been doing (I certainly didn’t encourage Chris to read The Great Gatsby, or Emma to read Pride and Prejudice, although I certainly try to fan the flames of that interest when they do start reading those books). But I do think it would be great if everyone had another try, in later life, at a book they tried to read or were forced to read as a young person, just to see if maturity has ripened their appreciation at all.

As for me, I’ll let you know how it goes when I get to Hemingway ….

Searching Sabbath 05: The Holy Spirit

This week on the vlog I’m talking about the Holy Spirit, which, perhaps surprisingly, I have a lot less angst about than I do about God the Father and Jesus. I mean, it’s not that I fully understand Who or What the Holy Spirit is. I know that as Adventists we do believe the Holy Spirit is a Person, the third Person of the Godhead, and I know lots of the texts that support this view. But for me, as I think for many Christians, the idea of the Spirit has always seemed a bit remote and theoretical. I realize that any sense of “God’s presence” I ever have in my life must be the Holy Spirit, but I think far more about Jesus, and sometimes about God as a Father (or Mother) than I do about the Spirit.

I guess there are Christians whose religion is very Spirit-focused, like charismatics for example. I’ve spent a lot of time around Pentecostals and visited many Pentecostal services, though I’ve never seen anyone “slain in the Spirit” so I guess I haven’t been around that much. As I mention in the video, Adventists don’t accept the more ecstatic “gifts of the Spirit” such as glossolalia and the like, as being true manifestations of the Holy Spirit. When the apostles start  ”speaking in tongues” in Acts 2 it seems pretty clear that they’re speaking actual languages that the listeners can understand, not ecstatic babble. The Adventist position on gifts of the Spirit is that they are useful things given to edify and evangelize, which excludes many of the more charismatic charisms. Having done a bit of reading, study and talking to people on this issue I am not as hard-line as some Adventists would be about it: I don’t believe the Holy Spirit manifests Himself (Herself? there’s a little bit in the video above about the Spirit and gender) in ecstatic speech or fainting spells, but I also don’t believe, as some SDAs and other non-charismatic Christians might, that these kind of things are of the Devil either. I just think these are manifestations of something human, the way some people’s religious experience expresses itself (especially when they are part of a community where this is normalized, encouraged and even taught) and, like most things, people can use them in good, bad, or neutral ways.

I suppose mystics, in any tradition, know something about the Holy Spirit too, because it seems to me that visions or voices or any sense of being directly in the presence of God, must come from the Holy Spirit. But that whole area of religious experience is pretty much uncharted territory to me. I’ve occasionally felt moved to lift my hands during a particularly powerful worship song, but I’ve never felt overwhelmed by the presence of God, as so many Christians seem to have felt as some point in their lives. I know my William James (secondhand; I’ve not read him myself though I keep meaning to) but ecstatic and mystical experiences do not appear to be for me. And that’s OK. I think it means, though, that I don’t feel a strong investment in the what I believe about the Holy Spirit — I can accept that the Spirit is a Person of the Godhead and one of the doctrines of the church, but unlike my beliefs about Jesus, it’s not a deal-breaker for me.

Speaking of deal-breakers, next week should be fun: Creation. Tune in again!

Writing Wednesday 20: How Much is Too Much?

In this week’s Writing Wednesday video blog, I change direction a bit. For the last few weeks I’ve been talking a lot about doing historical research and how that impacts the story. Today I’m talking more about editing the writing itself, and focusing on one of my biggest pitfalls: over-writing.

By over-writing, I mean saying too much. Telling rather than showing; explaining things to the reader rather than trusting that the reader is smart enough to know what I mean.

Obviously this is partly a matter of personal style, and also a matter of era you’re writing in — as I say in the video, nineteenth-century writers believed in telling the reader everything, whether you need to know it or not. I think it’s also a matter of the kind of writing you’re doing. I believe one of the key differences between literary and commercial fiction is how much the writer trusts the reader. In commercial fiction, it’s far more acceptable to spell things out for the reader, whereas the further you go along towards the literary end of the continuum, the more emphasis is placed on being subtle, allusive, hinting at things rather than laying it all out. This results in a lot of literary fiction that’s very terse, spare, and in some cases completely loses me as a reader, because I can close a book and find myself asking, “Wait, what just happened?”

(Interestingly, there are modern literary writers who are very subtle, trust the reader so completely that I’m never sure what’s happening in any given scene, and yet also manage to write novels that are as long, rambling and discursive as any nineteenth-century tome. Yes, Mr. Chabon, I’m looking at you).

I tend to think of my writing as somewhere in the middle of the continuum from commercial to literary fiction, and I find myself always having to curb the tendency to write too much, explain too much. Almost everytime I read through a draft of my work, I end up crossing out with my red pen the last sentence of several paragraphs, because that sentence is the one where I tend to explain what just happened and what you were supposed to get out of it. And nearly every time, it’s unnecessary. I’ve already shown you; I don’t need to tell you too.

In the video, I give an example of how this works with a particular scene in the part of the story I’m currently working on. As with all revisions, I still don’t know if this is the right decision or not — but it’s the one I’m going with for now.

Searching Sabbath 04: Jesus

In this week’s video I’m addressing the fourth of my church’s fundamental beliefs: our teaching about God the Son. Or, as I like to call Him, Jesus.

The actual text of our belief statement says: God the eternal Son became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Through Him all things were created, the character of God is revealed, the salvation of humanity is accomplished, and the world is judged. Forever truly God, He became also truly man, Jesus the Christ. He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He lived and experienced temptation as a human being, but perfectly exemplified the righteousness and love of God. By His miracles He manifested God’s power and was attested as God’s promised Messiah. He suffered and died voluntarily on the cross for our sins and in our place, was raised from the dead, and ascended to minister in the heavenly sanctuary in our behalf. He will come again in glory for the final deliverance of His people and the restoration of all things.

As the video above makes clear, I’m just crazy about Jesus. More than anything else, admiration for the person of Jesus as described in the Gospels, and dedication to His teaching, define my faith. And I’m not alone in this, of course. Not only is Jesus central to the faith of many if not most Christians, Jesus also has a lot of fans in the non-Christian world. People of all faiths and people of no faith at all admire the Man from Galilee, even if — and there’s obviously a crucial question here — their interpretations of who He was differ widely.

My beliefs about Jesus are pretty basic mainstream Christian beliefs, as are those of my church. I believe — we believe — that Jesus was the divine, eternal Son of God, who took on human form in the Incarnation, was both fully God and fully human, lived an exemplary life of love and self-sacrifice, died in a way that somehow (I don’t know how) makes forgiveness and new life possible for all of us, and rose again to live eternally.

I can’t explain most of this and I will admit to taking a lot of it on faith. As a story, it makes sense to me. I want to believe in a God who becomes one of us, and so I do believe. I am not the person you want for a serious debate about Christology from a theological point of view. It makes sense to me at some basic, gut level, and so I believe it while admitting there’s much I don’t understand.

I do think it’s important to keep both those sides of the picture — Jesus as God, Jesus as Man — in balance. Jesus as only God — Divinity simply pretending to be human — loses sight of the fact that Jesus is our example; His life shows what a human life at its best can look like. Jesus as only Man, only the great moral teacher whose divinity was tacked on by overenthusiastic later followers, can be a great inspiration (and is to many) but lacks the power to show us what God is like. I am happy when people share my admiration for Jesus even if they don’t share my beliefs about His divinity, but Jesus’ divinity is key to my concept of God. Without Jesus, I don’t think I’d be able to believe in the God of the Bible at all.

Once again, though, it does all come back to the Bible. As I’ve said before, I’m inherently suspicious of Christians who claim to follow Jesus, rather than following the Bible, because what do we know about Jesus outside the Bible? If we’re to curb that tendency we all have to re-create our own Jesus in our own image – from hippie-peacelovin’-Jesus to a tough, manly Jesus who can kick  your butt — we can only do it by revisiting the Jesus of the Gospels, who so stubbornly refuses to fit into our tidy definition boxes. And if we are to take from Jesus our picture of what God is like, we’d better be able to trust the documents that tell us about Jesus.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 10-15 years reading up on debates and research about the “historical Jesus” and the historicity of the Gospels. While, at the end of the day, I can sleep quite peacefully without knowing for sure whether the Genesis creation narrative is literal or mythical (more on that in a future week), I can’t have that same laid-back attitude to the Gospels. I have to know whether I can trust their stories — and, after a very long process, I have come to believe that the Gospels are trustworthy, but always with the awareness that I am still, to some extent, believing it because I want it to be true. Because the Gospels are how I learn about Jesus, and everything else I believe on is built on that foundation. My hope, you might say, is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.

There’s so much more I could say, but I’m trying to keep these short — and as you can see, the video (which covers some of this same territory but also talks about whether Jesus is, in fact, my Boyfriend) already went a bit long this week. Comment if you’ve got something to add; I’m always happy to continue discussing these topics in the comments section.