Pride and Prejudice and Marketing

When Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was published, I bought it on my Kindle and found it pretty amusing. It seemed a spontaneous uniting of two elements I like — Jane Austen and zombie survival stories — more of an homage than a high-concept gimmick.

Then the publisher, Quirk Books, announced Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and I not at all interested, even though I like sea monsters, too. It seemed that the re-imaginings of Jane Austen novels was less spontaneous than I had thought.

And now comes Android Karenina, supporting that no matter how this began, it is now an empty gimmick, living not so much on loving literature enough to have fun with it but on the recognition that there is money to be made. Confirming this is Pride and Prejudice: Dawn of the Dreadfuls.

I am a writer and I work in publishing (at a company that has published a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the comic series Wonderland), so I’m of two minds about this. One mind is definitely larger than the other — and that is the part that disdains a lack of literary integrity and produces works that have little value beyond the monetary. But the other part is the part that knows how difficult it is to make money writing and publishing books and thinks, Well, it’s better than starvation wages, right? My larger mind keeps answering, No, not really, and that’s a false dichotomy, anyway.

Fair enough, larger mind.

Also, in considering this spate of rewrites of classic novels, I’ve become uncomfortable with the gender issues at play. Though Jane Austen’s novels and Anna Karenina were for a long time (and still are, in good English and Comparative Literature departments) considered simply great literature, they’re now seen as being of the feminine sphere (Anna Karenina was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, after all!) and, thus, niche. The way to make these feminine novels appeal to a wider audience seems to be to insert elements that traditionally have appealed to males — mostly genre elements that give rise to physical action and gratuitous violence (which, I acknowledge, were fun in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but now this whole endeavor seems to have become gratuitous gratuitous violence).

I know that making statements like this get a lot of pushback from women who protest, “But I like zombies and sea monsters and steampunk!” Look, so do I. (Except for steampunk. I’m sick of that, but mostly as a fashion trend, not a concept.) However, I still must acknowledge that taking novels about women in a domestic context and turning them into genre fiction makes me uncomfortable as a trend — to me, it’s saying, as so much in culture does, that what has traditionally been female is inferior.

Related Posts: