INTERACTIVE AUSTEN: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LIZZIE BENNET DIARIES AND THE POSTMODERN AUDIENCE. Janette Duval. A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

Transcription

1 INTERACTIVE AUSTEN: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LIZZIE BENNET DIARIES AND THE POSTMODERN AUDIENCE by Janette Duval A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2014

2 Copyright 2014 by Janette Duval ii

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4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to express her gratitude to her thesis committee for all of their time, attention and guidance on this project, and special thanks to her peer editor, Jeanette Vigliotti, for her tireless encouragement and support. Last, but not least, the author wishes to thank her entire family for their patience and support. iv

5 ABSTRACT Author: Title: Thesis Advisor: Degree: Janette Duval Interactive Austen: An Analysis of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and the Postmodern Audience Dr. John Golden Master of Arts Year: 2014 The aim of this study is to reveal how LBD adheres to postmodern tenets while also being ultimately suspicious of these principles. This suspicion of postmodern principles is reflected in the interaction between the main subject of the videos, Lizzie Bennet, and the audience. This examination invokes the questions of when, where, and how the audience experiences LBD. This illuminates the manner in which LBD functions as a postmodern literary text and how this text is critical of its digital composition. v

6 INTERACTIVE AUSTEN: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LIZZIE BENNET DIARIES AND THE POSTMODERN AUDIENCE INTRODUCTION... 1 CHAPTER 1. ARE THE SHADES OF PEMBERLY TO BE THUS POLLUTED? AN ANALYSIS OF TIME AND SPACE IN THE LIZZIE BENNET DIARIES And of this Place, Thought She, I Might Have Been Mistress : Lizzie s Heterotopic Bedroom Out of Time: Displacement of Time and Its Consequences The Narrative of Webcam: Changes in Perspective CHAPTER 2. SPECTATORS AND SPECTACLE: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF AUDIENCE AND CHARACTER Talking to You: Spectators and Participants The Spectacular Lydia Bennet CONCLUSION WORKS CONSULTED vi

7 INTRODUCTION Each epoch seems to possess its own version of Jane Austen and the digital age is no exception. Austen has not only endured the digital age, but thrives within it, evidenced primarily through the proliferation of Austenian adaptations. In April of 2012 web entrepreneurs Hank Green and Bernie Su adapted and fully modernized Austen s Pride and Prejudice into an interactive web series called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, hereafter referred to as LBD. This adaptation is interactive because the audience experiences all three modes of engagement: telling, showing, and participating (Hutcheon 23). The aim of this study is to reveal how LBD engages the postmodern audience by adhering to postmodern tenets of interactive media while ultimately also being suspicious of these principles. This examination invokes the questions of when, where, and how the audience experiences and engages with LBD. This will illuminate the manner in which LBD functions as a postmodern literary text and how this text is critical of its digital composition. Chapter 1, Are the Shades of Pemberley to be thus Polluted?: An Analysis of Time and Space in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, explores the questions of when and where the audience encounters LBD. These questions necessitate the examination of the concepts of time and space. I will use Foucault s theory of heterotopia to demonstrate the disjuncture of locatable space in LBD. LBD s refusal to adhere to the unification of space reinforces its classification as a postmodern literary text. When applied to LBD, 1

8 Jameson s scholarship on simulacra and simulacrum reveals that the concepts of past and present time also refuse unification. As the primary subject of the videos, Lizzie s character is fragmented through the digital dislocation of time and space. Despite adhering to the postmodern theories of Jameson and Foucault, Lizzie s ultimate decision to end her vlogs signals her restoration of unity. Lizzie s active choice to end her videos and reclaim unity reveals the underlying culturally conservative criticism that is at work throughout the series. Chapter 2, Spectators and Spectacle: A Critical Examination of Audience and Character in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, will situate the character of the audience in relation to the postmodern spectacle. The scholarship of Guy Debord is essential to this examination. This chapter will explore how Debord s theory of society of spectacle is employed and critiqued through its presence in LBD. As an interactive web series, LBD demands an active audience. Here it is important to acknowledge that all readers of texts are active readers; however, as an adaptation told through the dynamic media of YouTube, LBD necessitates that readers interact with the series through all three modes of engagement: telling, showing, and participating. LBD is hardly Austen s first foray into the Internet. Websites like The Republic of Pemberley Wattpad and others serve as discussion forums for Austen fans across the world to engage in discussions about Austen s works. Kylie Mirmohamadi evokes the immediacy with which Austen s works are called up and disseminated: In a digitally-connected world, today s Janeites not only can call up onto their fixed mobile screens countless images and works by and about their literary idol, they can fill their days and nights at the keyboard discussing 2

9 her and writing their own contributions to the boundless narratives that continue to spin themselves around [Jane Austen] in cyberspace.... This online activity [takes] place within an ever-growing world of reference and inter-reference, which draws from the global range of literary, visual, cinematic, and electronic sources. (2) Contemporary Austen fans are able to interact with the text and create their own versions of her narratives by participating through a range of online platforms. The chapters that follow situate LBD within current discourses of adaptation studies, literary studies, and digital studies. As a transmedia adaption, LBD is located at the intersection of the three aforementioned fields of studies. Therefore, this study builds upon and refers to scholarship from each of these fields. Through postmodern scholarship, the aspects of time and space have undergone a dramatic shift in conceptualization. Foucault s and Jameson s theories of time and space reveal how LBD problematizes traditional notions of time and space. As an interactive web series the time in which the videos take place is complicated by the assumed immediacy of the Internet and the distance imposed through the serialization of the narrative. The reinterpretation of time and space situates this adaptation within postmodern discourses, thereby solidifying its place within postmodern digital culture. The central question of this analysis will be quite similar to the quintessential question that is commonly associated with Austen s works. Using Trilling s Why We Read Jane Austen as a theoretical backdrop, I will reorient his argument to fit the current contemporary moment and answer the following question: Why do we engage Austen online? A simple answer to this question is that the location of the Internet provides 3

10 unprecedented access to Austen s texts as well as spaces to disseminate opinions on these texts and interact with them. The question of Austen s popularity must be reframed as the question of what allows Austen s narratives to function so well through digital media. As an Emmy award winning, interactive web series with more than one million views on YouTube, LBD demonstrates the remarkable success of the first incorporation of Austen into contemporary digital culture. While many scholars and critics have remarked upon the beneficial, detrimental, and transformative aspects of cinematic adaptations of Austen, little scholarship exists that explores the implications of the introduction of Austen to the digital frontier of cyberspace. This analysis is indebted heavily to explications by Kylie Mirmohamadi, Maddelena Pennacchia Punzi, and Claire Harman. Each of these works elucidates how digital technologies have shaped Austen s narratives. An in-depth evaluation of LBD reveals that Austen s introduction into cyberspace activated the advancement of her text by appealing to contemporary culture through its oscillation between repetition and difference, and familiarity and novelty (Hutcheon 114). To examine fully the way in which Austen functions in postmodern culture, it is first necessary to analyze how past audiences have interacted with Austen s texts. This will elucidate how the digital age alters reader experience with the narrative. When Jane Austen s brother, Henry, wrote the first biographical note about the author, which was to be included in the posthumous publications of Northhanger Abbey and Persuasion in He assured Austen s readership that she lived an uneventful life focused on literature and religion. Indeed, Henry and his siblings believed that the story of their sister s authorship would fade from interest in their lifetime. Yet, Austen s success still 4

11 continues to grow 200 years after her death. Austen s popularity now spans tens of thousands of books as well as over 50 works of cinema and television. Austen has become an infinitely exploitable global product. Austen s fans, also known as Janites, are the product of Janeism, a phenomenon that grew out of the emerging consumer culture of the Victorian age, and have endured and evolved over the past two centuries. There have been two watershed events that have catapulted Austen s fame throughout the past two centuries. The first is Edward Austen- Leigh s publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen in The second is the successful BBC television miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice in In the preface to Jane s Fame, Harman remarks: Over the last hundred and fifty years almost every major writer has recorded an opinion of Jane Austen and, as Lionel Trilling remarked, it is possible to say of Austen as, probably we can say of no other writer that the opinions which are held of her work are almost as interesting and almost as important to think about, as the work itself. Jane Austen will not come out first, second, or third in any arrangement of the greatest novelists, but has attained iconic status. How did she get to be this special, this useful to the culture, this important to a nation? (xx) While Harman s final question here about Austen s remarkable popularity has been asked before by many other scholars and critics, her word choice is especially interesting. She remarks that Austen is useful to culture (xx). This suggests that Austen s texts have the ability to influence culture. In the case of LBD, contemporary culture is incorporated into the adaptation by situating the narrative within the present moment. 5

12 Contemporary culture is hyper-visual. This is quite obvious when one considers the numerous film adaptions of Austen s works. Austen has moved off page and into visual media. While many scholars and critics have grappled with Austen s adaptation to film, few by comparison have addressed how Austen is functioning online. Austen s ability not only to maintain her popularity online but to increase her popularity necessitates an examination. Harman is among the few scholars examining how the Internet is shaping Austen s texts. She states: The Web-connected world allows full indulgence of readers identification with the author and her works; there are hundreds of Austen blogs and sites in the blogosphere Austen s novels are valued as self-help literature and dating aides. Austen seems to proffer not just a read, but a creed: a whole way of life. (xviii) The Internet has offered Janeites a forum for the communication and evaluation of an Austenian creed or way of life. Haman s observation about the power of the Internet subtly anticipates the inevitable wholesale cultural interpretation of Austen s narratives. Harman gestures towards the Internet s ability to function as a doorway to a fully immersive reading experience with Jane Austen s works. Therefore, the reader is able to continue a highly individualized, personal experience with Austen both on and off the page. In doing so, readers have re-appropriated the text to the realm of self-help literature. Therefore, the narrative is no longer just a satire or a comedy of manners, but a personally instructive text. Readers are able to possess, internalize, and interact with Austen s text in an unprecedented manner. Of course, this way of reading by 6

13 reappropriating Austin s narratives as self-help literature is highly suggestive of reader response theory, which peaked in the 1980s. This type of reading undoubtedly opens Austen s texts up to new interpretations. While Harman views the Internet as responsible for the transformation of Austen s narratives into self-help literature, the Internet also has offered Austen s narratives a brand new frontier in which to be examined and evaluated. In order to examine how LBD is situated within digital culture it is necessary to first explore the trajectory of Austen from the page to the Internet. In 1938 Austen s Pride and Prejudice jumped from the page to the silver screen; this was followed closely by Emma in 1948, the television series of Pride and Prejudice in 1952, and Emma in In the years between 1967 and 1980 Austen dominated television through the miniseries of Pride and Prejudice in 1967, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion in 1971, Emma in 1972, Pride and Prejudice in 1980, Sense and Sensibility in 1981, and Mansfield Park in By 1995 the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice had solidified Austen s place within contemporary visual culture. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield examine what aspect of Austen s narratives has been so appealing to contemporary readers by observing that: Austen assists in her own modern-day success by providing us with experiences we are not used to, allowing a reactionary escapism to a simpler time as it was lived by a comfortingly wealthy and leisure class. Among the greatest attractions of Austen s culture whether presented by book or film may be its devotion to manners. In recent years we have realized that the post 1960s culture has lost some of its grace our fascination with Austen taps into our fascination with social polish In an 7

14 era of tell-all biographies and talk shows that exploit that all too easy impulse for self-exposure, it is difficult not to yearn for some greater degree of reticence in social society. (4-5) The Lizzie Bennet Diaries denies its audience this reactionary escapism to a simpler world; however, it does allow for an escape into an alternate space and time. This time and space is more capricious and unstable than the original text. For Austen s current audience escapism is only the precursor to the more significant process of worldbuilding. It is through this process that the reader/viewer is able not only to engage with the text, but to claim it as a personally useful artifact with which to interact. This connection between reader and text fosters active audience assistance to advance the plot; this type of audience is called a participatory audience. The audience plays a role, just like all the other characters. For Troost and Greenfield the contemporary world has lost its polish so readers must return to the highly polished world of Regency England. Bernie Su and Hank Green, creators of LBD, revise Troost and Greenfield s analysis by placing contemporary culture on top of Austen s original text. The audience does not return to the refinement of Regency England, however LBD still exhibits a culturally conservative message. Here, it is necessary to examine the theoretical framework that surrounds the field of adaptation studies in order to understand how LBD both departs from Austen s original text and reflects its underlying conservative morals. Born out of cultural moments, adaptations never are a nostalgic return to the past, but rather a postmodern rewriting of it. Therefore, these adaptations must be studied in order to understand how contemporary 8

15 culture functions. Austen s introduction to the digital, web-connected world through The Lizzie Bennet Diaries has changed the way her audience encounters her narratives. Adaptations have long suffered the reputation of being sub-literary for two distinct reasons. First, their subject matter, which is borrowed from the source text, is often regarded as subordinate. Second, the medium of adaptations often is viewed as inferior to its original source. It is the aim of adaptation studies then to devote serious scholarship to works of adaptation. Through the influences of the emerging ideologies of postmodern and poststructuralism, this field of research has begun to find legitimation within the humanities. Therefore, adaptations are no longer seen as sub-literary or parasitic, but as a hybrid construction that demands legitimate analysis of its own (Stam and Raengo xvi). Reflecting the hybridity of its creation, adaptation studies is a field that encourages the convergence of many interdisciplinary fields such as new media studies, literary studies, and cultural studies among others. This multi-dimensional analysis of adaptations also has opened the door to what literary theorist Simone Murray calls the concepts of audience agency (2). She states, The discipline s long-standing and increasingly theoretically uncomfortable privileging of a specific subset of print texts [was severed] in favour of an inclusivist conception of adaptation as a freewheeling cultural process (2). As the academic discourses surrounding adaptations have changed over time, so too have the audiences of these adaptations. The advent of new media like television, film, and the Internet increase audiences exposure to stories, and therefore the ways in which audiences understand these stories (K. Thompson 79). The pleasure of adaptations is derived from their mixture of repetition and difference, of familiarity and 9

16 novelty.... Repetition brings comfort, a fuller understanding, and the confidence that comes with the sense of knowing what happens next (Hutcheon 114). It is through the medium of film that Austen s texts first were adapted. Troost and Greenfield note that, Changes to Austen s texts made for the differing tastes and politics of the modern audience bring out not only the conflict between two distinct eras or philosophical stances, but between two modes of reception: reading versus watching (8). Troost and Greenfield postulate that adaptations of Austen fulfill a distinctly different function than her text. Austen has been re-appropriated in order to fulfill the expectations and desires of contemporary culture. Therefore, Austen can be examined as much a part of 21 st century culture as she is of 19 th century culture. As a product of transmedia storytelling, LBD has challenged the methods of traditional, textual storytelling. Additionally, the hybridity of adaptations problematizes the definition of what is considered literature. While printed literature is not a truly stable medium, LBD demonstrates a new and dynamic instability achieved through its digital mode of creation. The Internet as a mode of transmitting literary texts fosters this instability and reveals that the definition of literature is in the process of an unprecedented redefinition. In Literary Intermediality, Maddalena Pennacchai Punzi explains: Over the last two or three decades, in fact, the rapid spread of digital technologies has been creating an increasingly closer inter-connection among the so called new media, speeding up the movement of the message through the whole communication system. Images, sounds, written texts recorded in language of binary digits can freely circulate in 10

17 media as different as the radio and television, personal computers and mobile phones, digital fax machines and so on. It is the conversation of the analog to the digital literature : the book as we have learnt to know it - an object made of a number of pages where a sequel of letters is printed and spatially arranged in lines forming columns to be read according to a linear and sequential logic - becomes only one of the many possible information storage devices It is almost a commonplace that the very concept of literature has become more and more difficult to pin down. (12-13) Digital technology has provided an open space where literature is shaped, produced, and understood. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as a compilation of vlogs, is a postmodern text and can be defined as a literary text. The definition of literature depends on how somebody decides to read, not on the nature of what is written (Eagleton 7). The hybrid construction of LBD reflects the openness of the multiple, digital platforms from which literature texts can be produced. Despite being a postmodern literary text, LBD is closely related to Austen s original text. Throughout the series dialogue between characters is often direct quotes from Pride and Prejudice. Bernie Su s and Hank Green s preservation of a culturally conservative message also reflects the link between Austen s narrative and LBD. LBD s connection to the original text is evident in the opening line of the first vlog in which Lizzie s says It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife (Austen 1). From the outset, LBD connects itself with its source text and is aware of its status as an adaptation. While an 11

18 adaptation needs to be accessible for both knowing and unknowing audiences to be successful, LBD assumes what Hutcheon calls a knowing audience, an audience that experiences an adaptation as an adaptation and knows its adapted text, thus allowing the latter to oscillate in [their] memories with what [they] are experiencing (121). As an adaptation, LBD engages with audience expectations through a set of norms that guide [their] encounter with the adapting work [they] are experiencing (Hutcheon 121). LBD s audience interacts with the narrative through all three of the modes of engagement: telling, showing, telling, and participating. 12

19 CHAPTER 1. ARE THE SHADES OF PEMBERLY TO BE THUS POLLUTED? AN ANALYSIS OF TIME AND SPACE IN THE LIZZIE BENNET DIARIES I ve been watching a lot of my videos and it s been illuminating. - Lizzie Bennet, Revelations, Episode 94 And of this Place, Thought She, I Might Have Been Mistress : Lizzie s Heterotopic Bedroom The main content of LBD is located on the YouTube channel called, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The 100 episodes that compose LBD are the web logs or vlogs of the video s main subject, Lizzie Bennet. These episodes were uploaded every Monday and Thursday from April 9, 2012 through March 28, The episodes record Lizzie Bennet s life as a 24-year-old graduate student in the field of communications. Lizzie is the modernized version of Jane Austen s heroine Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. Throughout this documented year, Lizzie experiences the same, albeit modified, modernized situations that her counterpart Elizabeth encountered two centuries prior. In her videos, Lizzie talks to the audience about her life. While Lizzie s friends and family occasionally appear in her videos, the vast majority of the videos are told through Lizzie s point of view. When events occur off camera, Lizzie allows the audience to experience them through her description and her use of costume theater, which consists 13

20 of characters wearing uncomplicated costumes and reading scripts written by Lizzie (J. Thompson 17). LBD was created by Bernie Su and Hank Green. The two met at a bar during a Google event in California. Hank pitched the idea of a modernized vlog adaptation of his and his wife s favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice, to Su (J. Thompson 30). From this conversation, LBD took shape. Green and Su assembled a small team and began to adapt Pride and Prejudice for the video-blog format. This project of revision and adaptation reflects that of the original text. Pride and Prejudice began as a manuscript called First Impressions, which Austen revised extensively from the late 1790s until it was published in 1813 under the title Pride and Prejudice. Green and Su s continuation of this process highlights the mutability of this literary text. Unlike Austen s original project, Bernie and Su adapted Pride and Prejudice to the new and dynamic mode of video logs. LBD demonstrates the contemporary audience s desire to place Austen in a present space, thereby negating historical cultural examination. By adapting Pride and Prejudice for the digital realm, creators Bernie Su and Hank Green allow for the evaluation of contemporary culture instead of using the past as example. Unlike Pride and Prejudice, LBD is not concerned with 18 th century England. It is solidly situated within its contemporary moment of Through its digital construction as an interactive web series LBD functions as a visual representation of a postmodern heterotopic space, which resists definitive location. To understand how LBD occupies this space the cultural translation of the narrative to fit the present moment needs to be examined. James Chandler remarks on this aspect of rewriting contemporary culture into 14

21 past fiction in his book England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. He writes: The historical novelist, one might say, is not only using ancient subject matter, trope and topos. That is, if he is, copying ancient manners as he sometimes puts it, his sources for these manners represent them in a manner-that is an ancient manner-that leaves them unintelligible. The further step required, therefore, is to copy ancient manners in the modern manner. (142) In this statement Chandler espouses the need for cultural translation in order to make the manners of ancient novels intelligible. In the case of LBD this translation allows for the analysis of contemporary conduct. This cultural translation appears to be necessary for LBD to be intelligible for contemporary readers; however, this adaptation does not reassess ancient manners in the modern manner. LBD takes Chandler s idea of cultural translation a step further shedding the ancient manners and completely modernizing the content. Despite, this the plotline is maintained. Therefore, LBD is in communication with both the past of the original text and the present moment of the web-connected world. The space of the Internet has offered Austen s texts a particular space in which to be set: a heterotopia. In order to analyze this space it is necessary to refer to Foucault s Of Other Spaces in which heterotopias are defined as places or spaces not governed by the heterogeneous laws of real spaces. In order to understand how the Internet functions as a heterotopia it is necessary to revisit the original definition of heterotopia from Foucault s Of Other Spaces essay. He explains: 15

22 I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. (3-4) Because of its variability and adaptability, the Internet can be understood in terms of heterotopia. It is a space that has been radically othered and displays the convergence of counter-sites. The counter-sites of the public and private realms is especially apparent through the narrative of LBD. Lizzie s bedroom, a traditionally private space, is the primary location of the majority of the vlogs, which are products for public consumption. This creates the mixed experience of the heterotopia. Both the audience s perspective and Lizzie s own perspective are subjected to this mixed experience. Therefore, two layers of heterotopia are at work within the web series. It is first important to examine the primary source material to explore how Lizzie Bennet occupies this heterotopic space. At the very beginning of the web series we are presented with the image of Lizzie Bennet filming herself for a school video blog assignment. After she looks directly into 16

23 the camera and echoes the infamous first line of Austen s original narrative she states My name is Lizzie Bennet and this is my life. By introducing herself to the camera Lizzie is conscious of the fact that she is experiencing her life in a virtual space of the Internet. By the middle of the series Lizzie explicitly references this doubling experience of space by stating it seems like these videos are bigger than me now. Lizzie recognizes her life occurring within the videos as separate from herself. This directly echoes Foucault s image of the mirror as heterotopia. Here, Lizzie Bennet s vlogs take the place of the mirror. Lizzie sees herself in the video blogs, where she is not. The vlogs are a virtual space that open up behind the surface. Through the vlogs Lizzie discovers her own absence from the place where [she is] since [she] sees herself over there (Foucault 4). Therefore, Lizzie is constantly involved with heterotopia throughout filming of the narrative. Her vision of self is divided as a result. It is not until the final video, video 100, that Lizzie announces that she is ready to make a big change and end her videos. By doing so, Lizzie reclaims her unity and rejects the disunity imposed on her through the digital media of the videos. This action demonstrates LBD s underlying culturally conservative message. The audience of LBD also experiences heterotopia through Lizzie s vlogs. This experience differs slightly from Lizzie s. For the audience, the story is positioned at the convergence of fiction and reality. LBD is distributed by the interactive web video production company called Pemberley Digital, the name of Mr. Darcy s estate. While the character of Darcy in the web series owns this company, it is also the actual company run by Bernie Su and Hank Green. The existence of this company creates the experience of heterotopia for the audience as it synthesizes fantasy and reality. The characters each 17

24 maintain multiple social media accounts on Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, and LookBook to further this mixed experience for the audience. As these two of fantasy and reality collide they create a fictional world that is from its inception in contact with and shaped by the real world. LBD therefore is never fully the property of fiction or reality. Rather, it belongs to both simultaneously. Consequently, the blending of fiction and reality creates othered spaces that cannot be located definitively, yet [they] exist (Chun 243). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries occupies a heterotopic space, which postmodern audience is able to navigate this space easily, because it adheres to contemporary conceptions of time and space. Out of Time: Displacement of Time and Its Consequences Time within The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is also an especially important aspect to examine. Just as the concept of space is understood through the postmodern critical framework, time must also be examined through the same lens. Although the viewer is watching the video in the present moment, the moment of the video is always already passed. Lizzie Bennet is part of both a moment that is present and a moment that has already passed. The inclusion of Q&A videos throughout the series demonstrates Lizzie s awareness that the story develops through her narration of past events. These videos allow both the audience and Lizzie to acknowledge the disunity of time. In the first Q&A video Lizzie thanks the audience for watching her videos so far and encourages them to ask her more questions on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+ and of course, right here on YouTube. Lizzie s display of appreciation for her audience and her invitation to ask further questions suggests she is aware of the temporal position of the audience as 18

25 both present and past. She anticipates that the audience may need to ask questions about the video they just watched, which chronicles a past moment in her life. By occurring outside the flow of the other videos, the Q&A videos highlight the separation of past and present. Instead of portraying a historical society onto which the present is written, LBD operates inversely. It depicts a contemporary society onto which the past is written. Throughout the web series the original plotline is maintained, albeit modernized, and characters occasionally quote lines directly from the original text. The Lizzie s opening line in the first video evidences this palimpsestic creation. This connects the past to the present moment, and reveals the liberation of time. This disunity of time allows the postmodern audience to interact with LBD in the present and Austen s original narrative. Frederic Jameson comments on the effects of this convergence in his book Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. He states, The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time (198). Jameson anticipates what Trilling gestures towards in his assessment: the creation of a time that is modeled on a past moment, but does not have an origin. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries exemplifies this moment of time that is divorced from both past and present. As the aforementioned Austen s original text has been culturally translated to fit the present moment, LBD also is situated at the crossroads of past and present. It is never quite a part of the current moment or the past moment. Jameson remarks on this as the insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgic mode (199). Jameson furthers his analysis by stating that, the past as referent finds itself 19

26 gradually bracketed and then effaced all together (199). Here, Jameson is stating two contradictory postmodern tendencies: the past colonizing the present and the present effacing the past. The relationship between past and present is constantly involved in this struggle. The result of this struggle is the postmodern privileging of the hyper-real over the real. This positioning of hyper-real over real is present in many of the cinematic adaptations of Austen s narratives, but it performs differently in LBD. As an adaptation, LBD is directly connected to the past through its source text. Summoning small portions of the source text permits LBD to engage with the nostalgic mode. In Episode 1 Lizzie references the opening line of Austen s text It is a truth universally acknowledge that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife (1). This connection between the original text and the adaptation is carried throughout the series. During a session of costume theater in Episode 15 Jane plays the character of Darcy, who is thinking about the pleasure a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow (Austen 26). In Episode 32, Turn About the Room, Lizzie and Caroline discuss the events of the previous night noting Darcy s reaction to their walking around the room together, you re either walking together to banter about secrets or because you are aware your aimless strolling around the room shows off your figures. If the first, I would be in your way. If the second, the view from here will do. This echoes Austen s original You either choose this method for passing the evening because you are in each other s confidence, or because you are conscious that your figures appear to greatest advantage in walking. If the fist, I should be completely in your way, and if the second, I can admire you much better as I sit by the fire (57). While not being a direct quote, it not only 20

27 maintains the original structure of Austen s text, but it also conveys the same message. Following this conversation Caroline remarks that Darcy s good opinion once lost is lost forever (Austen 58). In the penultimate video Darcy reveals that he cannot locate the specific moment he changed his mind about Lizzie because, he was in the middle before [he] knew [he] had begun (Austen 392). These moments recall the past through the source text, but they are adhered to a revision of the original narrative. The present moves the past forward, but the past is constantly being rewritten to fit this mode. The postmodern audience craves this experience of nostalgia. They want characters they can identify with and stories they can engage in while they fulfill their desire for nostalgia. Despite Jameson s condemnation of the nostalgic mode and his caution that the past as referent would eventually be effaced all together, the postmodern audience demands this immersive nostalgic experience, which is only accessible through the effacement of the present by rewriting the past. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is so popular with contemporary audiences, because it has answered this demand. The Narrative of Webcam: Changes in Perspective In her thesis, Mixing Media: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries as a Postmodern Adaptation of Jane Austen s Pride and Prejudice, Marloes Hoogendoorn successfully argues that the renaming of the narrative from Pride and Prejudice to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries centers the focus of the narrative on the transformation of Lizzie Bennet above all else. Hoogenboorn states, In the title of Pride and Prejudice, the two sins are named that must be overcome by both Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. Here, playfully pointing back to the tradition of the Bildungsroman, the creators show this will be all about Lizzie s development (11). While Hoogenboorn views this focus as a return to a historically 21

28 popular genre, she neglects to examine the ways in which this new inward focus on the individual is product of postmodern digital culture. The transition in focus from redemption to formation reflects one of the largest changes that was necessary in order to contemporize the story. Bernie Su, co-creator of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, states that, one of the challenging thematic changes we had to consider in our series is to incorporate the fact that women in the modern era have many more choices in life than in the 18th century; therefore, the focus of the series becomes Lizzie s search for where she belongs, rather than her quest to marry for love (Green, Introducing Lizzie Bennet ). Lizzie must determine where she belongs within the digital world, and in her own personal world. Lizzie s digital life evolves across multiple online platforms. In a similar way, the dissemination of the story is scattered across various online mediums. This multifaceted distribution of the story across multiple mediums fulfills a two-fold purpose. It adds depth and dimension to the characters; it also aids in the development of the plot. The characters and the plot move forward through mediums outside the primary narrative. The space of the video blog is the web-connected present, but this space converges with the past through the overlaying of Austen s text onto the serialized narrative. The heterotopic space of the Internet needs to be examined to understand how it affects the postmodern audience s experience of Austen. The Internet provides new platforms through which Austen s work can be examined. As a product of transmedia storytelling, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries utilizes various Internet platforms to communicate the story. In his book Convergence Culture Henry Jenkins defines transmedia storytelling as Stories that unfold across multiple 22

29 media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story] world (334). Andrea Phillips also offers a definition of transmedia story telling in the preface to her book A Creator s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. She writes, New platforms and business models are emerging, gatekeepers are falling, and those possibilities can take your breath away. Creators are learning how to spin these platforms together into complex, integrated works in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - that s transmedia! (xi). Two forms of transmedia storytelling exists: franchise transmedia storytelling and integrated transmedia story telling. Franchise transmedia storytelling occurs around a story, as is the case with the Harry Potter series, where the narrative exists on its own before the transmedia aspects develop around it. Integrated transmedia storytelling occurs along with the development of the narrative as is the case in LBD. Therefore, this is the form of transmedia storytelling that this study will examine. In her book, Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheson defines integrated transmedia storytelling as a mode of storytelling in which the story is not whole broken into pieces and spread across multiple conduits to the audience (182). This is manifest in LBD s construction. The core content of LBD is contained in over 100 YouTube video blogs, which total over ten hours of visual material. Additionally, Lydia Bennet also receives her own YouTube channel on which she produces 29 videos that she describes as just like Lizzie s but way more awesome (Episode 1). Georgiana Darcy and Maria Lu also produce 10 videos on their own YouTube channel. Additionally, the characters maintain other online mediums like Lookbook, Twitter, and Pinterest. 23

30 The audience of LBD experiences the video blog through the lens of Lizzie s web-cam in her bedroom. The web camera projects a first person point of view on top of Lizzie s own first person perspective. The medium of the web camera calls the relationship between truth and fiction into further question as the audience must trust that the perspective offered is an accurate view of Lizzie s reality. The public is invited into Lizzie s bedroom, a typically private space, through the lens of the webcam. Lizzie s sisters and friends gain admittance to her bedroom through her bedroom door and thereby Lizzie s bedroom becomes a social, public space. In his essay Eden By Wire, Thomas J. Campanella states: Web cameras enable us to select from hundreds of different destinations, and observe these at any hour of the day or night. The power to do so represents a quantum expansion of our personal space-time envelope; web cameras are a relatively simple technology, yet they are changing the way we think about time, space and geographic distance for better or worse we have come to trust the images delivered to us by [web cameras] it is difficult, if not impossible to separate truth from fiction This is an epistemological issue. What is the integrity of knowledge received from a web camera, and how are we to verify it? (275) As the primary agent of mediation in LBD, the web camera problematizes the perspective of the narrative as it is only able to communicate the material placed in front of it. The viewer is only permitted access into the private realm of Lizzie s room and so only receives the information provided by Lizzie. Most episodes feature a segment of costume theater in which Lizzie and a cohort act out certain scenes that occur in the world outside 24

31 Lizzie s bedroom door. These scenes are offered through the perception of Lizzie Bennet instead of the third person omniscient narrative perspective of Pride and Prejudice. and her various counterparts throughout the series. In Episode 15, Charlotte and Jane directly confront this issue of authenticity. The two film a video without Lizzie, because they feel that Lizzie isn t being particularly comprehensive with her commentary regarding her last video. Following this pronouncement, Jane states that Lizzie sees what she see. These two statements highlight the subjectivity of the Lizzie s viewpoint and the limits of the web camera s perspective. The audience members rely on the web camera to provide them access to Lizzie s intimate perspective; however, they must also be constantly aware that this perspective can be flawed. The medium of the webcam reinforces the conflict between Lizzie s flawed perspective and reality. The limited nature of the webcam and confessional narration reinforces the conflict between Lizzie s skewed perspective and reality. The tension between perspective and reality is borrowed directly from the original text as Darcy proclaims Elizabeth s one natural defect is her willful misunderstanding of the people around her (Austen 59). While the novel resolves Elizabeth s flaw through Darcy s letter and her visit to Pemberley, the resolution in LBD is achieved through these interruptions into the videos by Jane, Charlotte, and others who question Lizzie s viewpoint. Not only do these interruptions allow for Lizzie s firsthand critique, they also permit the audience to acknowledge that the perspective of the web camera aids in creating a limited perspective for the audience. Although the web camera provides a contemporary storytelling device, it is utilized to highlight and communicate Lizzie s penchant for willful misunderstanding of people and situations. The inability to 25

32 accurately locate time and space in LBD reflects its position as a postmodern text that is also critical of the 21 st century. 26

33 CHAPTER 2. SPECTATORS AND SPECTACLE: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF AUDIENCE AND CHARACTER It s ok. It is okay. I am trying to get better at opening up and talking to people talking to you. And it actually feels good, so thank you for listening. - Lydia Bennet, Revelations (Episode 94) Talking to You: Spectators and Participants As an interactive web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, imagines a very specific type of audience, one that participates in the narrative. This audience experiences all three modes of engagement: telling, showing, and participating. Hutcheon notes: All three of these modes are immersive though to different degrees and in different ways: for example, the telling mode (a novel) immerses us through imagination in a fictional world; the showing mode (plays and films) immerses us through the perception of the aural and the visual.... The participatory mode (videogames) immerses us physically and kinesthetically. But if all are, in some sense of the word immersive, only the last of them is usually called interactive. (22-23) LBD combines all of these modes of engagement. LBD engages the telling mode through its connection with the original text and its preservation of the original plotline. The showing mode is employed in the visual display of the YouTube videos. Finally, various 27

34 online platforms such as the Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts maintained by story characters demonstrate the participatory mode by encouraging audience members to interact with these accounts. While LBD is less kinesthetically interactive as a videogame, it presents a unique opportunity for Austen s postmodern audience to personally and physically interact with this adaptation by clicking and linking their way through it. This new interactive format demands that the audience learn new navigational strategies and accept a new and altered relationship with the creator of the work; in return they are given new kinds of encounters with virtual and fictional worlds (Hutcheon 137). The audience members of LBD are not voyeurs; they are connected to the narrative through their interaction with it. This interaction between audience and narrative is evident through the Twitter event Touring San Francisco, Lizzie s Q&A videos, and the existence of character maintained social media accounts. In all of these instances the viewers are compelled to interact with the narrative as it unfolds, and in doing so they further their immersion in the story. This type of audience is produced by a participatory culture. Henry Jenkins, a comparative media studies scholar, defines participatory culture as follows: Participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices. In participatory culture, members also believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another. ( Interactive Audiences xi) 28

35 The qualifications for participating in LBD are low. All anyone needs to do to be part of this participatory culture is watch the series and express their thoughts and feelings online. Moreover, a viewer only needs to watch a single video to be considered part of this culture. Typically, licensing arrangements restrict the distribution of the narrative across multiple platforms to protect the monetary investment of large production companies. Licensing limits what can be done with the characters or concepts to protect the original property (Jenkins, Convergence Culture 107). Transmedia storytelling aims to challenge these boundaries and encourage the spreading of the narrative across multiple mediums so various elements reach out to new audiences (J. Thompson 11). Additionally, this mode of storytelling permits fuller development of characters and experimentation of concepts. Given the advantages of transmedia storytelling and the popularity of LBD it is clear that: Soon licensing will give way to what industry insiders are calling cocreation. In co-creation, the companies collaborate from the beginning to create content they know plays well in each of their sectors, allowing each medium to generate new experiences for the consumer and expand points of entry into the franchise. (Jenkins, Convergence Culture 107) The term co-creation affords the audience the same role as the writers and producers in the construction of the narrative. The necessity of the audience in the development of the plot creates a dynamic bond between the narrative and the audience. To further explain this relationship, Andrea Philips states: 29