Culture in its manifold and blurred forms works either explicitly or implicitly from an
occupation with the past as a way to lean into the futures contained in its present. Given this,
how is it that we now seemingly encounter so many images of the past that instead collapse the
future into an undifferentiated present—one that eternally turns and returns away from intrinsic potentialities for new thinking, living, and being? This study will outline this mechanism of historicity in late capitalism through a case study of Jo Baker’s 2013 historical novel and partial spinoff of Pride and Prejudice entitled Longbourn.
Longbourn is firstly about the servants of Longbourn, the Bennets’ estate in Pride and
Prejudice. It is centered on the lives of Sarah, a young maidservant adopted by Mrs. Hill, and
James Smith, a mysterious newcomer to the estate. Their adventures parallel the events of Pride and Prejudice. We will examine how the course of Longbourn’s plot generates a specific kind of simulation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Further, we will see how Longbourn shapes that simulation into a referential ethos so as to reconcile radically different social realities under the continuous banner of Western post-Enlightenment liberalism. First there will be a short, schematic description of this form of representation, followed by a close reading of Longbourn’s initial sketches of the Bennet family. Then we will more rigorously clarify Longbourn’s mechanism of simulation, and finally, we will briefly explore the effect that this has on Longbourn’s own themes and implications for today’s political-cultural situation.
To properly understand the mechanism at work in Longbourn, we must begin with the
idea of representation. It is a unique characteristic of the modern age that all fields of
representation, long corralled to disciplinary specificities such as the political, social, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, and many others, have seemingly been converging upon a totalizing singularity of social experience, where all these fields become inextricable from the other. The ever-shifting terms of representational democracy and the liberal art of government compose a machine whose function is to sink itself by any means necessary into the very ways that we think about what is good, what is beautiful, rational, just, and above all, natural.
In short, the late capitalist mode of liberalism is a complex that attaches to and structures
bodies at the level of our very ability to think about what is human and what constitutes desire.
This machine is a machine of form, a machine of the gestalt. The product of this machine is the gestalt of temporal continuity in culture, reconciling our time with past oppressions in order to render invisible the concept of revolution, break, or discontinuity. Simulation is this machine’s primary apparatus. Late capitalist historicity, then, generates images ‘of’ the past that actually do nothing but absorb past struggles and make the now feel like it has been here forever. It must incessantly reanimate old forms in order to assure us that we are still ‘democratic,’ ‘Western,’ and ‘human,’ despite fundamental changes in the meaning of all of these terms.
The functioning of this machine thus creates a peculiar kind of metatextual resonance that
is revealed in uncovering the temporal gestalt. This resonance can best be encapsulated by a
clause that occurs near the end of Longbourn: “It was better this way” muses Mrs. Hill, the
Bennets’ head maidservant, about her son, born from an affair with her master Mr. Bennet (222). Beyond simply being a melancholy self-assurance from a fragmented woman, these words seem to inundate the novel itself. We will see that the lingering question of time’s necessity is posed to character and reader alike in this sentence: “It,” seemingly the form of mediation itself, was (or is, or has always been) better this way.
Now, with this theoretical position schematically outlined, we are able to take a look at
Longbourn. The first reference in Longbourn to a location in Pride and Prejudice’s setting,
occurring in the first sentence, is Hertfordshire. The narrator floats past the serving staff, already laboring before dawn, past the Bennet spouses, to their sleeping girls, “all five of them sleeping in their beds, … dreaming of whatever it was that young ladies dream” (Baker 3). Before the end of the first page, the narrator has already contrasted Sarah—beginning the “dismal prospect” of “the weekly purification of the household’s linen”—and the aristocratic comfort in which the Bennets are embraced (3). The Bennets’ performance begins in dormant comfort, Sarah’s in grueling labor.
Indeed, it is at “four thirty in the morning, when… [Sarah] start[s]… work” (3). Sarah is
introduced before her masters so as to indicate the proper protagonist, but the reader is
conspicuously left with some timeless guests in her mental background. The narrator continues: in the midst of hard work in preparation for laundry day, Sarah “slip[s]… in hogshit,” and drops a heavy yoke holding full buckets, spilling all of their contents (4). The contrast between the Bennets’ coziness and Sarah’s rough mundanity comes to a climax here, suggesting a critical view toward the Pride and Prejudice’s Bennets’ complete lack of appreciation for the servants’ hard work.
Compare this initialization of Longbourn to Pride and Prejudice’s famous opening line:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (1). As E.M. Halliday remarks in “Narrative Perspective in Pride and
Prejudice,” the narrator begins by “not yet observing the characters but gazing off into the
middle distance for some reflections on life in general,” which is a comparatively impersonal
initialization (Halliday 77-8). Once one reaches Pride and Prejudice’s opening dialogue, one
sees that its first sentence contains a “tough yet gentle irony” that will come to be constitutively incorporated throughout the novel (78). Longbourn also starts off ironically, but in a different tone than that of the ‘original.’ Longbourn’s irony provides both a reference to and a departure from Austen and her style. The Bennets are identified, but the contrast that creates the irony is not “tough yet gentle” as much as it is just tough (78).
Longbourn, in the first few pages, establishes not just what it is, but what it isn’t in
relation to Pride and Prejudice: it isn’t a story about the Bennets’ almost fairytale lifestyle, as
Austen writes it, in which they do not work in any menial capacity (if at all). The protagonist(s)
of Longbourn will generally not spend their time in daydreaming reveries about their
relationships, friendships, marriages, etc. Instead, the navigation of their relationships will
usually be accompanied by backbreaking labor, with the same level of vocal appreciation for it
from the Bennets as in the original Pride and Prejudice. In addition to Sarah’s work at four thirty that first morning, she still has a laundry day to perform. Not far into the morning, “her own [hands] were already raw” (Baker 6).
Once Longbourn’s protagonist is introduced, the narrator is able to move on to the peculiar side characters that are the Bennets. The first Bennet to have dialogue is Lydia, who, in a place “by the kitchen fire, feet tucked under her… sipp[ing] sugared milk,” expresses to Mrs. Hill, the head maidservant at Longbourn: “‘You don’t know how lucky you are, Hill. Hidden away all nice and cozy down here,’” to which Mrs. Hill responds, “‘if you say so, Miss Lyddie’” (5). Compare this introduction, steeped in Lydia’s famous impetuosity, to Pride and Prejudice’s introduction of Lydia, in which Mrs. Bennet says to her, “Lydia, my love, though you are the youngest, I dare say Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next ball,” to which Lydia responds “I am not afraid; for though I am the youngest I’m the tallest” (Austen 5). The first thing that Longbourn demonstrates of its Lydia is an expression of her selfishness and her lack of comprehension of the servants’ hard lives.
In Pride and Prejudice, on the contrary, her confident first lines are intertwined with Mrs.
Bennet’s foolish misunderstanding of Mr. Bingley, Lydia’s nascent character, Mr. Bennet’s
intentions, and many other subjects. There is certainly pride in Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia, but its presence is diluted by the novel’s dialogism. There is still much to be learned about this image of Lydia after her introduction on page 5 of one’s first reading of Pride and Prejudice.
Contrarily, Lydia’s existence is already revealed in Longbourn as based off an already-fully-formed character. This signification presupposes a familiarity with Lydia as cultural icon that is not present at the same point in the original—yet it is a presentation already more real.
This status as already-fully-formed adds a special tone to the scene: in contrast to Sarah’s
early morning labor and the Bennets’ unconscious comfort, it is now somehow the servants who “don’t know how lucky… [they] are” (Baker 5). The young Bennet Lydia makes herself out as the underprivileged while Mrs. Hill is the one who is cozy—this scene likely set mere minutes before Mrs. Hill joins in on laundry day’s hand-scathing labor. Here we find the first positive structuring in Longbourn of a Bennet as subject. Simultaneously, we find a callback to and challenge directed toward Pride and Prejudice’s social order, using Lydia as a vehicle.
Another example of the appropriation of Austen’s Bennet children occurs in a dialogue
between Sarah and Polly: Polly’s actual name is Mary, same as the middle Bennet sister. When
she was adopted by Mrs. Hill and raised to be a maid, she had to be renamed: “it’s only ‘cos of
Miss Mary that I have to be called Polly even at all” (Baker 7). While standing as an
establishment of perceived class reality of the time, the reference also serves a few more
purposes. It impels the reader firstly to acknowledge some kind of abstract existence for Mary;
secondly Mary’s existence in this narrative universe; and thirdly, it forwards an implicit claim
that this is the same Mary that occurs in Pride and Prejudice, and not some other Mary with other personality characteristics. Whatever characteristics that are accorded to Mary (or any
other of Austen’s original characters) appear to be framed such that they reach back and affect
the readers’ perceptions of the Mary (and others) of Austen’s work, even in a relatively indirect
first reference such as this one.
The dual introduction of Elizabeth and Jane, two of the most central characters to Pride
and Prejudice, is composed of their simultaneous reproach of Lydia for her insulting comments about Mr. Hill, the head, and at this point the only, manservant. The fact that “Jane and Elizabeth spoke at once” is an almost trite reminder of their relationship as it is by the end of Pride and Prejudice. The level of unity established in a single utterance constructs an image of their sisterly bond whose character is completely plain only to those who have already completed Pride and Prejudice (Baker 15). Against the triteness of their introduction, they both remain quiet for the rest of the short chapter. While the narrator must have the reader know that this is the one and only sisterly pair, this pair cannot have center stage as they do in the novel that is their referent. That would draw too much attention to the unstable nature of the reference itself.
The establishment of Elizabeth and Jane’s close relationship in Pride and Prejudice is of
course more organic. Their discourse while alone is one of the first indicators of their balancing, mutually understanding, and comfortable relationship. As Elizabeth says ribbingly to Jane: “well, he [Bingley] certainly is very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a stupider person” (Austen 9). This is another indication that the Bennet sisters in Longbourn may somehow be tainted by their status in Pride and Prejudice as “completed” characters, in the sense that the book is complete, written, and canonical. It is part of the mounting ‘evidence’ presented to the reader of Longbourn’s verity, or otherwise its faithfulness to a supposedly well-known and occupied conceptual location.
In these first pages, the narrator has needed to introduce both its own characters and
signal an entire other work, which occupies a different world—or is it the same? Some might
simply say that this is the same world, but others might claim that writing Pride and Prejudice in any format, direct or indirect, would be something only possible from the pen of Jane Austen herself. In this view, these Bennets and this estate are not really the same. But why would any of this be of significance in the first place? Why might one not want to think these are the same characters?
It simply takes a shift of perspective to see that the difference between these two
alternatives is falsely constructed and ultimately serves a certain relation of power. In his essay
“The Precession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard provides a perspective that will prove useful to us. Baudrillard wrote this essay in order to express a trend in culture that had begun to supplant what he had earlier identified with capital. Just as the use value of an object is supplanted by exchange value in social relations of production, the general equivalent of signification has supplanted the referent or real in the realm of sociality. For Baudrillard, the possibility of signification as such is unilaterally annihilated. This constitutes the end of representation and the beginning of simulation, in which “the sign… [is] the reversion and death sentence of every reference” (6). Simulation is constituted by “the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences,” including the economic, political, social, libidinal-somatic, and technological (2).
It is important that Baudrillard’s concept of simulation be understood in its full nuance.
Baudrillard complicates the traditional definition of simulation, “to feign what one doesn’t have” (3). For him, “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (3), meaning that “It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (2, emphasis mine). It is no longer possible to refer to a real thing at all, once semiotics comes on the scene—representation begins to completely and exactly eclipse what is represented, and so the difference between them becomes indistinguishable.
Once a thing or process may be imitated perfectly, to the point where it is treated the
same as a real thing or process, we have come to the point where the simulation is real and the
real is a simulation (there is no difference). Furthermore, simulations are intentionally set up to make the real appear as if it were still “intact in its ‘virginity’” in order to erect and preserve a “reality principle” that amounts to a simulation’s ethos or claim to authority (7). The goal of this is to deter any resisting impulses away from the power that is hallucinatorily contained in
simulation.
One of Baudrillard’s clearer examples in the essay is the thought experiment of a
simulated robbery. He suggests that one “Organize a fake holdup,” complete with convincing but harmless weapons, hostages that are in on it, and a ransom (20). The consequence is obviously that others will react as if it were a real holdup. Ultimately, he says, “Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based” (21, emphasis author’s). Simulation even leaves open the question of whether “law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation” (20, emphasis author’s). If there is no ability to assess difference, then “it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real,” thus turning the simulation into a manufacturing process of the hyperreal, which cannot be distinguished from simulation (21, emphasis author’s). The semiotic becomes “a determined power that can only reign over a determined world” (21). Baudrillard sees new processes of postindustrial production, so-called ‘immaterial labor,’ or informational, digital capitalism emerging in concert with traditional production, as the “‘material’ production… of the hyperreal itself,” where “the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself” (23, emphasis author’s).
The final piece of this puzzle is the question of the temporality of simulation, which
Baudrillard addresses in the context of ethnology. He summarizes the way that the Tasaday
people, an indigenous tribe of the Philippines, had begun to “disintegrate immediately upon
contact” with modern society (7). This tribe was subsequently returned to what had been their
home, “in the depths of the jungle,” and this was done, according to Baudrillard, in order to
“become… the model of simulation of all possible Indians [sic] from before ethnology” (8,
emphasis author’s). The people ‘live’ on in ethnology’s model. Ethnology as simulation is able
to resurrect the referential, which has been buried “in the glass coffin of the virgin forest,” “the
‘brute’ [sic] reality of these Indians [sic] it has entirely reinvented” (8). Ethnology thus forms its reality principle, which works as a simulacral ethos in order to convince others to accept its
constitution of a “past” as truly being of or about the past, rather than something that exists now, within specific power structures, as our present and (as long as we remain tied to this
mechanism) our future.
While this analysis is partially indebted to Baudrillard, the brand of nihilism expressed in
“The Precession of the Simulacra” is counterproductive to this project. It is in identifying and
challenging this temporal machine that we might come to terms with it and utilize its methods for some kind of post-nihilistic resistance to neoliberal governing logics of the human and of desire. In a more restricted sense, we might claim that simulation of this form—a textual machine that produces a reality principle out of simulations of historicity—constitutes something like an intertextual simulation. Perhaps even a hyper-textuality, intended separately from Gérard Genette’s original conception (in some sense a particular form of Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality), has come into its own (Genette, 1-2).
Thus, we have arrived at the constitution of Longbourn’s world as a hypertextual
simulation of Pride and Prejudice. The truth of the matter here is not simply that querying the
truth of representation is the wrong way to approach historical representation, but that the fact of the query exposes an intense desire to remake the historical in the image of late capitalism. We invent the romantics and the supposed ideals of the Enlightenment in the act of referencing them from our historical context. Longbourn’s Bennets and their estate, all their high-minded social prescriptions (hypocritical in Baker’s framing), are a simulation of those of Pride and Prejudice, and with equal measure, Pride and Prejudice itself is simulated in Longbourn. Pride and Prejudice is reanimated as Longbourn’s shadow in the same moment that Longbourn is animated as that of Pride and Prejudice, throwing the difference between canon and popular, high and low culture into indistinction. The result of this indistinction is an erasure of temporality, of difference, that simulation aggressively manufactures as hyperreality.
From the perspective of modern society, Pride and Prejudice has become Longbourn’s
reality principle, but also, much more radically, the reverse is true: Longbourn has become the
reality principle of Pride and Prejudice. The two novels are simultaneously contradictory and
interdependent. The real effects of this are not felt until we see the greater themes that
Longbourn puts forth.
The novel is full of commentary on class and queerness that only make sense now that we
have seen how the two works are mutually constructing. For example, Sarah is helping with the Bennets’ going to a ball at Netherfield. While they are inside having a good time, she stands outside and daydreams in this fleeting free moment. She thinks to herself that “she could just not get over how dull the people were,” these members of the gentry whom she serves (Baker 128). She goes on to say that “all of them with the same old freckles and wrinkles and bad breath and smallpox scars and limping gout… [with] the same old opinions, … the very same conversations, … year after endless year,” are unbearably boring (129). This rumination suggests by negative a kind of dignity and interest appropriate to the working class’s relative variation. From another perspective, this is the narrator’s attempt to articulate a perspective that might have actually been held by one of the gentry’s servants at this time.
As another example, the subplot of Mr. Hill’s homosexuality: while he does marry
Margaret, who had recently given birth to James Smith and soon after becomes Mrs. Hill, “he
had his own arrangements” through which Mrs. Hill understood she would not have any more
children (Baker 219). Mr. Hill had married Mrs. Hill partly in order to console her for losing her child because of the illegitimate status of his birth, but even more, he marries to find a secure closet. This was a time when homosexuality was a hanging offence.
Perspectives such as these converge on a single effect when considered in the context of
the more general hypertextuality that is occurring. This convergence is essentially the insertion
of contemporary values into a non-historical history, a representation that is really an altogether new presentation. The reminder to the reader is constantly that the narrative is firmly within the gentry’s society of decadence, and yet this period-accurate performance somehow coexists with the insertion of contemporary value judgements against that same decadence. This move, while not wrong in a practical sense, dons a kind of floating authority that need not stop at Pride and Prejudice but extends through the system of equivalence into the possibility of canon, of the West, even of the human itself. This enables the reader to reconcile her existence as belonging to these mutually complicit traditions despite supposedly being against the rampant abuses, such as slavery, the aristocracy, wage labor, sexual oppression, and structural racism, that provided its foundation. Both of the above examples of the plot’s movement beyond what it simulates as Pride and Prejudice serve to confirm Longbourn’s place within contemporary liberal values, which will slowly reformulate every form of oppression into more and more subtle, decentralized structures. Longbourn reaches outward with this move to make a space for itself in a protocological society of perpetual branding and control.
By way of conclusion, a final note of textual comparison. While Pride and Prejudice
wraps up with “the attachment of the [Bennet and Darcy] sisters,” the “intimate terms” of the
Gardiners, Mr. and Mrs. Darcy’s marriage, and other happy feelings of resolution (Austen 297), Longbourn leaves off its tension between Mrs. Hill and Mr. Bennet with them together in Mr. Bennet’s library, “sipping wine and eating cake and being old” (328). Mrs. Hill thinks to herself that “No matter how they got there, after all… The end was all the same” (Baker 328). Fittingly for a book structured in this way, it feels as if Mrs. Hill speaks for all of us as much as for herself: “no matter,” we say, as our economy of things, gigs, bodies, desires, and power bleed us of our wellbeing; “the end was all the same” (328). But what happens if, instead of simulating faithfulness to a bygone era, further complexifying our contemporary labyrinth of precarity, we recognize that the truth of all representation holds the question of the ever-new presentation? In other words, what happens when we own this inherent a-realism surging beneath every realism, this a-realism that has become our real, and practice a form of life that is not “all the same,” but looks toward a future that is always already in the making (328)?
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Baker, Jo. Longbourn. New York, Vintage Books, 2013.
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Halliday, E.M. “Narrative Perspective in Pride and Prejudice.” Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1960, pp. 65-7.