It’s been a few months since I’ve done one of these, so here’s the previous posts as a refresher course. New thoughts below the cut.
This is a difficult part of the story to adapt, because so much of it is waiting for the other shoe to drop, and unlike, say, The Search For Lydia in P&P, the surprise/suspense value of what the men are getting up to offscreen is real. The series of shocks that starts with Willoughby’s snubbing of Marianne, and continue with Brandon’s revelations about his ward, and the public reveal of the Edward-Lucy engagement, is closer in effect to Darcy’s first proposal and letter, than to news of Lydia’s elopement.
-It might be interesting to have Elinor and Marianne drop off their mother’s jewelry for cleaning at the start of their stay in London, and put their meeting with Robert Ferrars, chooser(chuser?) of toothpick cases, as part of that incident.
-I imagine them arriving in a snowy, sparkling winter-wonderland version of London, regardless of historical accuracy. Marianne’s gung-ho to be there, and Elinor despite her misgivings, is relatively pleased. There should be a sense of anticipation, a sense that exciting things are about to happen.The turning point is the Dashwoods’ first big party in London, where we see them, dazzlingly beautiful in their best dresses and simple jewelry, two Cinderellas, one of them knowing her Prince isn’t there, and grudgingly resigned to it, the other desperately looking for him in every corner, and not finding him.
–After this, the weather turns wet and slushy and gray, but Marianne’s desire for fresh air and the out of doors leads to several instances where the two sisters go out riding, on horses rented by Mrs. Jennings as a treat for her young friends. About which, more later.
-When it comes to the Miss Dashwoods sending out letters, I think it’s important that Elinor come off as polite, genteel and distant in dealing with the servants, and that Marianne go out of her way to be friendlier to them, even when she’s disappointed by the lack of letters from Willoughby. Marianne is just such an enormous pain in the backside to Elinor and Mrs. Jennings when she’s unhappy that she needs to be nice to *someone* to keep the audience from wanting to strangle her with both hands.
-We see Willoughby watching the Jennings house in Berkeley Street, waiting until the ladies have gone, and then going into the house, asking if the ladies are in, and leaving his calling card with a more mournful expression than the situation really seems to call for. To someone who doesn’t know the story, this moment should seem odd, but not shocking. With good editing, it may seem ambiguous as to whether he’s avoiding the ladies or not. Not long after this is the party where he snubs Marianne. I think 2008’s decision to have Marianne basically faint into Brandon’s arms is cute but a bit over the top. It might be worth showing Brandon with Mrs. Jennings on the other side of the room, watching the scene between Marianne and Willoughby unfold while Mrs. Jennings yaks away. At some point he leans over and says something to Mrs. Jennings, we cut back to Marianne and Willoughby, and by the time Willoughby has left the sisters, Mrs. Jennings is approaching to take them home.
-I’ve given a fairly detailed account of the sequence of events that leads up to Willoughby writing his last letter to Marianne, in a previous post, in the context of characterizing Miss Grey. Marianne’s receipt of it goes as in most versions, where she’s practically out of her mind from grief. It is this part of the series where the irony of Marianne whining to Elinor and Elinor whining to the audience, in her voiceover capacity, is at its most pointed.
-Marianne goes out for an early gallop in the park a day or so later to relieve her feelings, which leads to her witnessing the Willoughby-Brandon duel from a distance. Unlike 2008, this is conducted with pistols, but we bend the protocols of the period, where men usually turned and fired simultaneously on a count of three, into something where they take turns firing, kind of like this take on the Sir Mulberry Hawk-Lord Frederick Verisopht(1) duel from Nicolas Nickleby, except of course that no one is hurt in the S&S duel. Willoughby shoots first, and Brandon doesn’t even twitch as the ball whizzes past his ear. Then he levels his pistol at Willoughby and waits…and…waits…and waits, spaghetti western style while his opponent and their seconds get increasingly antsy. Then he shifts his aim upwards and delopes by firing over Willoughby’s head. I will point out that this is a scene that could benefit from a fairly intense soundtrack and that the harpsichord has kind of a tinkly, twangy sound that might work for something in the Morricone vein. Just sayin’.
–Marianne is stunned and shocked at the time, but fumes about it later to Elinor, when they’re out on some errand. On a particularly wet, nasty day where few people are out and about, they run across Brandon, and Marianne insists on walking with him (which of course drags Elinor along as a matter of propriety), even though he says that where he’s bound for is not a suitable place for them. Marianne confronts him about the duel, and he grudgingly tells them the story of his ward (who, as stated in past posts, is not the child of his lost love in this version but of a deceased fellow officer) and of Willoughby’s seduction of her.(1.5) He finishes his story in front of a lodging house in Cheapside, a respectable merchant-class part of London. This is where his ward is staying(2), while she recovers from the birth of her child. Do you think she is well enough to receive company? Marianne asks. Elinor tries to discourage her, obviously worried, as the audience is, that Marianne’s just going blubber embarrassingly all over the place and upset Eliza. Marianne says that she knows what the poor girl is feeling and wants to help her. On condition that they not discuss “a certain gentleman” with his ward, Brandon invites them in and takes them to Eliza.
–This is an important milestone in his relationship with Marianne, where he sizes her up and seems to have a better understanding of how she will behave in a certain situation than the sister who’s known her since she was born. Possibly Marianne realizes this at some level. In meeting Eliza, Marianne, for once, actually holds herself together pretty well-she’s not cheerful, but she’s polite, rather cordial in the way we’ve seen her be towards the servants. She doesn’t even break down when she asks for and receives the chance to hold Willoughby’s child, she just looks rather sadly into his little face.
-The big scene where Elinor, Edward and Lucy meet takes place on St. Valentine’s Day. It was already customary by the Regency for lovers to exchange small gifts on this day,(3) so possibly Mrs. Jennings should make some teasing reference on the subject to Elinor or Lucy, without implicating Mr. F.
-The scene where Lucy and Elinor talk in the park about Lucy’s engagement occurs in this version with Elinor loafing around on horseback, while Lucy walks beside her. This allows us to visualize the moral superiority Elinor feels to her rival, and also allows her to emote to the audience without being blatantly obvious from Lucy’s POV. Marianne is of course riding around the park at a gallop, trying to relieve her grief.
-The 2008 miniseries does a really great job with Nancy blurting out word of the secret engagement to Mrs. Ferrars and Edward standing firm in his commitment to the woman he no longer loves. It really sells a conflict which is not necessarily obvious to a modern audience, and should be our role model here, except for one thing. The 2008 miniseries portrays Edward as a fairly conventionally heroic figure in general so at this point in the story he’s just doing what comes naturally. In our imaginary version, this scene feels more like an affable but aimless man suddenly taking a stand.
-Marianne is as shocked as anyone by the news of Edward’s engagement, and as in the scene with Eliza, we see an early glimpse of a better person. Elinor manages to get her to keep quiet about her-Elinor’s love for Edward, by reminding Marianne how embarrassing and uncomfortable she-Marianne found everyone’s sympathy after the business with Willoughby.
-After a passing reference to having gotten Eliza and her child away to the countryside safely, Brandon lays out his plan to give the Delaford living to Edward in the presence of both sisters. Marianne gasps, and bolts from the room, unable to contain her emotions. Elinor explains that Marianne has had a kind of sentimental fantasy of Elinor and Edward being a couple due to imagining love all around her-Marianne in the days when she and Willoughby were together. She-Marianne has been very upset by news of his engagement. I’m very sorry to have caused her more grief, Brandon says, but if Mr. Ferrars is to marry, all his friends must do what they can for him. Yes, we must, says Elinor, looking away from him. He goes on to talk about the tininess of the income that goes with the living, and how little more he can do for the cleric who takes it up, but his voice fades to the background and the music swells, as Elinor continues to look away. Possibly we get an imagine spot of Lucy and Edward at Delaford Parsonage, either here or when she gets news of Lucy’s marriage.
–I find Brandon’s insistence in the book on making Elinor be the one to tell Edward about the living kind of contrived. You could maybe have him come along with Elinor but have Elinor doing the initial talking, Edward getting the wrong idea about her and Brandon, and Edward bristling a little, which Brandon later writes off, in a conversation with Elinor, as just a healthy young man’s dislike of being indebted to someone he doesn’t know well. In a version that leans into the comedy of people mistakenly thinking Elinor and Brandon are an item, this might be a very charming sequence.
—However, since the internet is overrun with idiots thinking Brandon really *should* be paired off with Elinor, who thinks he’s kind of a fool for dueling Willoughby, or worse, think he should be paired off with her forty-something-year-old mother (and thereby severely reduce any chance he has of producing an heir for Delaford(4)), and since I’ve gone to all the trouble of deaging him and gutting the private conversations between him and Elinor, we are not doing that. Instead, Elinor tells Edward about the living in a private conversation. On both sides, there is obvious regret that they can’t be together, but on his side, there’s a sense of new maturity and strength in accepting that Lucy has a prior claim on him. Possibly it is here, rather than in his proposal scene at the end, that he makes the following excuse for his prior conduct: “I was simple enough to think, that because my faith was plighted to another, there could be no danger in my being with you.”
—-Towards the end of the conversation, Lucy comes in with Robert Ferrars. Robert is very jocular about it: Just trying to convince her to give you up for your own good, wot, but of course she’s not having it, he says. Of course not, Lucy says, and gushes over Edward. She and Robert shouldn’t be overtly flirting at this point, but people who are new to the story should feel that they are somehow well-suited to each other, and it should be a struggle for more experienced viewers not to interfere during that week or two where the n00bs think they’re doing something unique and transgressive by shipping Lucy/Robert.
-Most version only include passing references to the news of Willoughby’s marriage; I think it might be interesting to actually show parts of it. Regency weddings were as a rule not very grand by the standards of later eras in the English-speaking world, but with Miss Grey’s wealth and need to announce her proprietorship with regard to Willoughby, I think there is reason for it to be more ostentatious. Elinor and Marianne watch the new couple leave the church. Why torture yourself like this? Elinor asks. Why watch? Possibly in voiceover, she adds some period-appropriate version of: why drag me here? Because I would never truly believe it if I hadn’t seen it, Marianne says. Deep in my heart, there would always have been some doubt.
-It is a cold, wet, miserable spring, and most of our characters prepare to go to the Palmers’ house, Cleveland, for Easter. The book implies, and the calendar I link to below in the footnotes states, that the women arrive at Cleveland maybe as late as Good Friday or Holy Saturday. For reasons that will become more obvious in the next post, I would rather have them set out for Cleveland a bit before Palm Sunday.
(1) Yes, that is Italian Mr. Darcy as Sir Mulberry Hawke and Italian Mr. Bingley as Lord Frederick Verisopht. In case you were wondering.
(1.5) I’m not a fan of the sequence in the book where he up and tells Elinor, on his own initiative, about that time Willoughby seduced his ward, with apparently some vague hope of making Marianne realize Willoughby isn’t worth the grief. Jane Austen was a great writer and a great psychologist, but we also know from her letters that she was a rather catty gossip, and at the time she wrote S&S and P&P, she didn’t seem to grasp that upright, uptight, introverted men like Brandon and Darcy did not go around spilling their families’ darkest scandals to young ladies at the drop of a hat. Emma is the only novel where it really works. Knightley telling Emma about the Frank-Jane secret engagement is something he does because he’s a family friend who wants to comfort her, with no hope of romantic return, about something he thinks will greatly upset her.
(2) In the book, Brandon has sent Eliza to the countryside by now. We could, using this article which works out the S&S timeline, and which I’ve relied on heavily in writing these posts, construct an entirely different miniseries, simultaneously more Dickensian and more grimly humorous, where we follow Eliza as she elopes with Willoughby around the time of Papa Dashwood’s death; Edward visiting Lucy Steele, the fiancee he no longer loves, while Marianne and Willoughby meet and fall in love; Willoughby courting Miss Grey and dueling with Brandon while Marianne longs to make contact with him-Willoughby, and so on. But that is not the project I have set myself here.
(3) I don’t know what to make of Austen’s decision to set this event and Mr. Elton’s proposal in Emma on February 14, with Fanny’s disillusionment with her family in Portsmouth also occurring around this date in Mansfield Park. Rule of Funny, perhaps.
(4) Not that important to us, I know, but very important to people of his time.
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