Riding the Wave of Modern Sentimentality by Griselda Heppel

Joy Margetts’s post on 23 July, A Tale Most Tragical, set me thinking.

Anne of Green Gables by
L M Montgomery

I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables; but I’ve listened to the audiobook, which I hope counts, and watched a delightful BBC dramatisation about 30 years ago, and loved both. Even if I hadn’t, I’d back Joy to the hilt about interfering with another writer’s work; but loving the story as I do, I was aghast at what Joy revealed the makers of Anne with an E on Netflix have done with it. Not happy with the storyline as written by L M Montgomery in 1908, which lacked the modern required exploration of racism, colonialism and homophobia, the creators of Anne with an E have cheerfully added several new characters and storylines to make up for this. Joy kindly gives the screen writers the widest possible benefit of the doubt, judging that perhaps only this way could the series attract a modern audience. 

Really? Anne of Green Gables is a timeless classic, a wonderful tale in its own right, whose strong, determined, flawed and irresistibly engaging heroine speaks to any age and any culture. Of course it would attract a modern audience. But – and here’s the thing – would it be good for them? 

Eric, or Little by Little
by Frederic W Farrar

Nowadays we laugh at the way many nineteenth century children’s books sought, not to entertain. but to inculcate a moral message in their readers. Eric, or Little by Little by Frederic Farrar (1858) is a classic example, being a tale in which the hero destroys himself by a succession of moral transgressions, tiny to begin with, but each one leading to another just a bit worse… you get the picture. Religious correctness in the Victorian era was the equivalent of political correctness today, and books like these were designed to teach young people how they should think.

Lovers' Vows by Elizabeth Inchbald

In the century before, a wave of sentimentality swept through literary Europe, leading to a wealth of appallingly bad plays, featuring nothing but good, decent, pure-minded characters, in reaction to the licence and naughtiness of Restoration comedy. The emptiness, hypocrisy and sheer tedium of sentimental drama is shown up brilliantly by Jane Austen, and it says everything about the genre that we’ve only ever heard of one example – out of the hundreds if not thousands written – because Lovers’ Vows by Elizabeth Inchbald (1798) plays an important role in Mansfield Park (1814).

I have drifted somewhat from Anne with an E. From what Joy says it’s well written and the new storylines and characters well drawn, so it’s not fair to equate it with those dreadful sentimental plays. My point is that, no matter how much we scoff at the way previous eras used literature to instil morality into young people – who, by implication, would otherwise do all sorts of frightfully wicked things – we can’t stop doing the same ourselves. And while it’s one thing to create our own stories with a clear moral purpose, rewriting someone else’s work – and a great classic to boot – so as to incorporate Modern Received Morality is pure cheek, in my view. (See my annual despair at productions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol). No matter how good the intention, this is parasitism disguised as righteousness. 

Bowdler did the same with Shakespeare, after all, massacring some of the world’s greatest literary works to purify the minds of his readers.

Shakespeare's works, bowdlerised by
Thomas Bowdler, 1818

I'm sure the last thing the screenwriters of Anne with an E would want, or expect, is to be seen as present day Bowdlers. (Oh come on, of course they'll have heard of him. Or the verb, at least, to bowdlerise. 

Or not.)

OUT NOW

The Fall of a Sparrow 

by Griselda Heppel, author of 

Ante's Inferno 

www.griseldaheppel.com 

https://griseldaheppel.wordpress.com/