Edward Said and The Way We Read Now

John Sutherland offers an analysis of the influence of the late Edward Said on film adaptations of English literature ( TLS , March 18). Said, for instance, argued in Culture and Imperialism , from a couple of passing references to the Betram family’s holdings in Antigua, that Mansfield Park was funded by sugar plantations worked by slaves. “Yes, Jane Austen belonged to a slave-owning society.” When Austen’s novel was made into a film in 1999, director Patricia Rozema gave a Saidesque tilt to the story: “At the beginning of the film narrative, as Fanny is being transported by coach from Portsmouth to Mansfield, she hears from the harbour the lugubrious chanting of ‘black cargo’ on the way to their West Indian hell. The sound echoes ominously throughout. Recurrent scenes in the film stress the centrality of Antiqua (notably a family sketchbook, depicting the Betrams’ slaves being lashed and Sir Thomas being sexually obliged by one of his luckless black chattels.) In a direct echo of Said’s ‘Yes, Jane Austen belonged to a slave-holding society,’ Rozema’s Edmund Bertram is made to say ‘We nall live off the profits, Fanny, even you’ – a line that might qualify for the least likely ever to have been written by Jane Austen.” When critics of the films complained that slavery, very marginal in the book, had taken over center stage in the film, Rozema insisted, “I actually believe that Mansfield Park was Austen’s meditation on servitude and slavery . . . She was kind of exploring what it is to treat humans as property, women, blacks, and the poor especially.” (Austen herself explained in a letter that her book was about “ordination,” which perhaps Rozema would see as some kind of confirmation of her point.)

Sutherland concludes that for all of Said’s errors in detail, “at the very least [he is] making points that one really ought to consider,” and he argues that Mansfield Park and Vanity Fair (another classic novel Said-ized in recent film) can take care of themselves. But that conclusion assumes that viewers of the film might also be inspired to read the actual book; and, goodness, what are we to tell the poor fellow who searches in vain for Austen’s description of that sketch book? What of the English literary tradition is being communicated to a generation exposed to this tradition, if at all, only through film? Besides, this method of “reading” (or adapting) undermines the very purpose of reading. We read old books, as CS Lewis said, to be liberated from the tyranny of our own times and our own ideas. Inevitably, we bring our obsessions to the books we read, but reading is only valuable if we give it room to address our obsessions in ways that we’ve never considered. Reading and looking into a mirror are different things.