Northanger Abbey Book and 2007 Movie Discussion

hello everyone today I'm going to discuss North anger Abby by Jane Austin and it's 2007 ITV adaptation originally I was just going to talk about the film but then I decided to reread the book to refresh my memory on what that was like and now I have a lot more to say to begin I'll share some of my thoughts on the book North anger Abbey was written in 1803 but published in 1817 after Jane Austin's death it's different from her other novels in that it is primarily a satire of trendy Gothic literature it tends to be a bit divisive um some some readers really like it and others do not others consider it one of her inferior works the story centers around Katherine Morland a naive girl from a large country family who is obsessed with reading popular Gothic novels she's invited by an older childless couple to Come Along on their trip to beath and there she's introduced to two different families the Tes and the thorps she quickly develops a partiality for Mr Henry tilney and is delighted when his father invites her to come stay with them at their home North anger Abbey which she fancies to be a place brimming with mystery and secrets I read this book a few times in my teens and for years I have told anyone who asks that that I actually really like North anger Abby if I were ranking Jane Austin novels I wouldn't put it at the top Pride and Prejudice persuasion and Emma Shuffle around for first second and third place but I enjoy it a lot so it's quite a surprise to me that this time I didn't have as much fun with it as I anticipated maybe it's just a matter of poor timing maybe I wasn't in the mood for this kind of thing right now I I don't know it is a relatively short book yet it took me an awfully long time to get through it there were sections I found tedious it wasn't as amusing as I remembered I didn't like Henry till me as much as I used to and I just wasn't feeling Jane Austin's snarky criticism of all her characters the protagonist Katherine Morland is kind of silly but I like her anyway she's a good-natured modest girl with no ego who struggles to Fathom how disingenuous some people can be she's not an especially Dynamic heroine but she grows a lot makes the right decisions eventually and sticks up for what is right so I get a little miffed sometimes when Austin takes shots at her a lot of the first half has to do with Catherine wanting to become better acquainted with the tilney and and being styed by the intervention of her worldly new friend Isabella Thorp and her brother John I cannot stand either of these manipulative characters they are despicable people and as a teenager who sympathized to a certain extent with Catherine's struggle against peer pressure and passive aggressive bullying and maybe not having the best judgment when it came to picking new friends I wanted to hurl the book across the room every time I read it now it does occur to me that the subject matter here is kind of trivial so much is given to Catherine wanting to go for a walk with the Tes and not being able to and taking forever to recognize that certain people are awful when it is abundantly clear to the reader from the get-go and when you consider all of this and how much attention is given to it and that there's not really any attention given to anything else you might find yourself thinking is this all this book is about there aren't really any villains here just people guilty of unladylike or ungentlemanlike conduct which in the Regency world is a really bad thing and should be a really bad thing in our world as well but standards have changed well let's not get off on that tangent Isabella is a typical Austin badir John Thorp is a jerk Captain tilney is a jerk General tilney is an oppressive shallow boar and proof that good breeding does not necessarily a good man make see also Sir Walter Elliot and a half dozen other Austin characters on the flip side we have the tyy siblings Henry and elanar but mostly Henry who is a good guy he's humorous and kind and forgiving and he likes Katherine from the start but the way he's amused by her ignorance and overactive imagination and takes it upon himself to educate her and open her eyes I don't know I for the first time in my life I read this book and was like he's kind of condescending Austin often uses him as her mouthpiece so Henry says a lot of outrageous things loaded with irony that confuse his listeners who are not clever enough to get what he's really saying or catch on to the fact that he's making fun of them in fiction that kind of thing is entertaining in real life I find it kind of obnoxious and rude um someone who says the kind of things that he says I would probably say oh doesn't he think that he's the smartest person in the room and he loves to hear himself talk but let me reiterate I did not think this when I read the book book years ago this was a new thing and it did not last the duration of the book Henry redeems himself in my eyes later when he catches Catherine about to do something stupid he handles the situation very smoothly he gently admonishes her knowing that she's mortified and then goes out of his way to reconcile and restore their relationship so that's nice and he is a good guy and I'm totally okay with them ending up together so don't get me wrong I haven't had a complete reversal here I did enjoy the book still I wasn't miserable reading it and there's no denying Austin's Talent her Pros is as witty and sharp as ever and in this case it wasn't as important to her to tell a complex narrative as it was to poke fun at Gothic novels and the people who read them and also the people who make fun of the people who read them in the second part of the book Austin gets to have her cake and eat it too um if you're familiar with Gothic tropes whether you like them or not this aspect of the novel should be quite entertaining especially chapter 6 where Austin eases us into a Flawless imitation of the very novels she's been mocking okay I have now spent more time talking about the book than I intended so we're going to switch gears and talk about the film now and let me pause to issue a slight spoiler warning if you haven't read the book or seen the movie and you would like to and you don't want to know too much about anything proceed with caution there are only two major North anger Abbey adaptations I'm aware of the 1987 BBC One starring Katherine Schlesinger and Peter F and this 2007 ITV one that stars Felicity Jones and JJ field years ago I saw a few minutes of the 871 it didn't do much for me and since most people don't like it I don't have much interest in watching the whole thing the 2007 one I saw when it debuted on public television in 2008 as part of a Jane Austin series and I liked it a lot we all did my mom my sister my friends at school who hopped on the period drama bandwagon with me we had many enthusiastic discussions in study hall about which Heroes we liked best who we would marry Etc Henry tilney always rated pretty highly mainly because JJ Fields portrayal was so very Charming um I'm 99% sure that I was already familiar with the book when I saw the movie so I recognized the changes but for the most part they didn't bother me at the time they bother me a little more now but bear in mind I watched this literally 2 hours after finishing the book and that is hardly fair the fact that it makes a number of changes comes as no surprise once you find out that the screenplay was adapted by Andrew Davies who has written a great many wonderful costume dramas but who also has a reputation for taking liberties with the CL Classics and making them a little sexier whenever possible admittedly I am a massive hypocrite when it comes to this issue because sometimes I'm perfectly fine with his changes and additions and I embrace them and other times I object to them it is very much a caseby casee basis kind of thing a lot of it depends on just how far in a certain direction Davies goes there are a few things here that Austin did not write and perhaps never would have written so Davey's being behind this is a plus and a minus he has a knack for making literature come alive broadening its appeal for modern audiences and writing smart sassy period appropriate dialogue and interesting scenes that make romantic Hearts go pitter patter but when you watch an adaptation of his you should be aware that what you're about to see may be quite different from its source material this film directed by Jon Jones is under 90 minutes long even shorter without the censored bathtub scene which is not in my version and it speeds things up a lot the storytelling is condensed um not severely you don't feel like you're getting Whiplash watching it but it is it moves at a quick pace and that's probably to make room for all the new more romantic material there are several laid fantasy sequences added where Catherine plays a terrified but excited victim and the men she Encounters in real life play various roles most of them Sinister Davies also added several romantic touches most famously the proposal and kiss scene at the end of course Austin didn't write anything like that her novels are famously minimalistic when it comes to that kind of thing because contrary to the common misconception they are not romance novels so purists understandably object to love scenes sex scenes and overly demonstrative PDA in Austin adaptations I do too sometimes but this scene is awfully cute and fun so I always give it a pass so the story and the dialogue are condensed but the drama is dialed up everything is on steroids characters reactions bath culture where every place is insanely crowded and the men all act like wolves the extent of Isabella's crime against her fiance the way the general kicks Katherine out it's like they looked at everything in the book and said okay but how can we make it more extreme the performances are all spoton though and they did a fine job with casting these British costume dramas are often a good place to find budding stars and here we've got a couple big ones Catherine is played by Felicity Jones who is now an Academy Award nominated actress for the theory of everything and known in mainstream circles as JY erso in Rogue one I think she makes a perfect Catherine hitting the right notes at every stage of the character's development JJ field plays Henry tilney I suppose he's not as widely known by people who don't watch costume dramas like this he was everywhere for a time uh he doesn't seem to have broken into the mainstream circuit um well he's been in a couple of things the biggest Hollywood movie I know he was in was Austin land where he was great as a Mr Darcy parody his Henry tilney is a lively pleasant person way more Smiley than most Austin Heroes tend to be and the antithesis of the brooding byonic type field uses his face a lot that sounds weird he exchang is many Sly or amused looks with Catherine they are both expressive and have lovely chemistry they just twinkle at each other a lot and it's very Charming co-starring as the insufferable Isabella is Carrie Mulligan she's a Bonafide movie star now twice nominated for best actress and appearing in one big film per year her portrayal of Isabella is maddening but that's the way the character is supposed to be despite Mulligan being two years younger than Jones the fact that she's taller and dressed with more sophistication makes her seem older and more knowledgeable about the world at least more knowledgeable about some things and Liam Cunningham plays General tilney I do think he hams it up a bit but I'm not sure what an actor is supposed to do with that character he's all flattery one second and an overbearing parent the next and it's kind of he's a strange character as for other featured characters John Thorp is a creep Captain tyy is irritating he's so smirky and elanar is probably the most wholesome character in the whole thing consequently she's a little dull but she's easy to like now I did something I don't usually do because it feels awfully nitpicky as I was watching the movie and taking my notes I wrote down every change addition omission rearrangement of details what have you that I felt um Jane Austin or an avid fan of the novel would raise an eyebrow at and next to it I put a big fat X and let me tell you by the end of the movie I ended up with a whole lot of x's some of these changes are not that big a deal like John having his eye on Catherine before his sister is introduced to her this is till portrait still hanging in her chamber instead of in elan's room Henry catching Catherine already inside the mother's room instead of outside it some of the changes generate more drama like Henry leaving after chewing Catherine out rather than still being there to show there are no hard feelings this way he is absent for two turning points and Catherine is in despair right up to the end thinking that he's still angry with her another change to up the drama is that General tilney kicks Catherine out in the night rather than sending her off at 7 in the morning this makes her journey home more alarming it also makes him seem like more of a monster but it doesn't really hurt anything but there are other changes I had some beef with for one reason or another things that made me say why did they have to do that for instance it's John Thorp who puts the idea of a skeleton in the TIY family Closet in Katherine's head rather than her foolishly inventing it herself we're in on the fabrication about Catherine's presumptive inheritance early on rather than it being left as a reveal at the end instead of Isabella just flirting shamelessly with Captain tilney Davies takes it to another level by having them hook up and then Captain tilney is like I'm not going to marry you for one thing this scene does make the adaptation a little less familyfriendly for another I'm not sure that it's something that Austin was implying could she have been implying that this happened maybe there's a precedent for it she has things like this happen in um other books but I doubt it the way people discuss it I I just get the feeling that we're supposed to believe it's bad enough that Isabella was being unfaithful in spirit if she had also been in faithful Unfaithful indeed uh I think that there would have been a lot more outrage one thing I really disliked this time was that Henry partly justifies Katherine's suspicions about his father and mother this got a big what from me because the whole point is that Catherine got this notion that something nefarious happened from all the books she's read and just ran away with it not considering that the facts don't support the theory and she's doing injury to the man she loves by having Henry say well actually you're kind of right I don't know it doesn't sit well with me the adaptation also cuts out any reconciliation between Henry and the general Catherine and Henry just get married without his consent and we see General tilney fuming on the grounds of North anger Abby and that's not how it goes in the book it's not the end of the world and maybe they felt they had made him too mean to deserve such an outcome but the book's ending has more finality on that point whereas the movie makes well made me ask so now what are they never going to talk to him again because that's not really something I want to root for so as a romance a romantic comedy a Regency costume drama the movie is fun it's even delightful as an adaptation well it's kind of doing its own thing sometimes just because it's not 100% faithful though doesn't make it a travesty the characters are pretty much spoton and the story for the most part is intact but there are many little changes and and depending on how much you care about that this film may or may not be for you I do like the film though as long as I don't dwell too long on certain aspects those are my thoughts on North anger Abbey I hope you enjoyed this video I'd love to hear any thoughts that you have on the book or the adaptation or both so please feel free to share those in the comments below and I'll see you next time thanks for watching bye

Channel: Jerome Weiselberry

Views: 1,691

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Id: hFt-sKhQN7M

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2023