Austen and Arrogance and Exploitation

I am less than thrilled to see that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen/gore flick mashup novel that came out earlier this year, is receiving sequel treatment in the form of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

"Whaaaaat? But it's about clever Regency ladies fighting zombies! Why the hate?" you may ask.

Hey, I love clever ladies kicking ass, too! But I love clever ladies kicking ass in the real world. The "Austen & Male Rewriter & Monsters" formula is no way empowering. Quirk Books, a male-edited and owned publishing line, is hiring male authors to co-opt women's fiction and marginalise women's voices to achieve press, visibility and shitloads of money. And I mean shitloads of money. New York Times-bestseller-list, movie-deal shitloads of money.

And they do it by stomping all over women's genre fiction. The authors handwave a bit about how Austen is a "brilliant" writer and blah blah blah, but far more frequent are comments such as:

"Traditionally, men tend to avoid Austen, dismissing it as chick-lit. Certainly, the BBC's acclaimed adaptation in the 1990s did nothing to counter this with its almost gratuitous shots of Colin Firth in his britches, designed to draw in the oestrogen-fuelled female audiences."

(Anthony Harvison, some idiot reviewer)

NOW WE KNOW: Colin Firth diving into a lake in old-fashioned trousers = sop to the hysterical underpants-flinging girls. Halle Berry's boobs in Monster's Ball, Mena Suvari's boobs in American Beauty, Brenda Vaccaro's boobs in Midnight Cowboy = Oscar-winning art. Got it.

"Most people have a great sense of humour about it, particularly the 'Jane-ites', who must prefer this to the 60th or 70th Mr Darcy's private thoughts collection that seems to come out every year."

(Seth Grahame-Smith, co-author, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies)

He is referring to the female authors have been writing derivative fiction based on the works of Jane Austen for at least 160 years. Pemberly.com, a Jane Austen fansite, has a list of 68 sequels and continuations, 61 of which were written by women. The first was published in 1850. Re-envisioning and rewriting Austen's novels is not some new edgy trend; it's just that the media has only started to pay attention to it now that male authors are co-opting it and putting it into traditionally male frameworks. "I think we've started a mini-trend of literary mash-ups," Grahame-Smith said in a BBC interview. No you haven't! And you know you haven't, because you were talking about all those other lady-penned reworkings like five seconds ago!

Solution
So ladies, I think we need to do some co-opting right back.

Presenting...

Saving Private Ryan From Her Dead-End Desk Career
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Tailored Trousersuits
Full Metal Jacket and Cubic Zirconia Earrings
Gladiator Sandals are Actually Really Uncomfortable
Dye Hard: One Knitter's Craft Fair Struggle
The Great Escape out of a Lower Salary Band
Blade Runner, Speed-Skating Ice Dancing Champion

Let's go, big movie houses! I can knock out a few spec scripts by Monday.