North and South and Literary Adaptations

I love literary adaptations.  I do.  Especially the variety comprised of a multi-hour costumed, accent filled, extremely detailed,  mini-series event.  

One of my oldest loves is Anne of Green Gables from the mid-80s, starring Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie as Anne and Gilbert.  Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth as a Marilla and Matthew have so come to embody those two characters in my mind that I now see them when I read the books.  The sequels are progressively more terrible as they go along, but the first two part mini-series is a work of brilliance, which beautifully captures the spirit of the book.

The other great love of my mini-series viewing life is Pride and Prejudice from 1995.  Starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth as Lizzy and Mr. Darcy, it is a practically perfect reenactment of the story.  Yes, it has been criticized for its sexying up of the Mr. Darcy character, what with the jumping into a pond and emerging with a wet clinging shirt scene.  However, I think that does nothing but make the otherwise very faithful adaptation more accessible to a modern audience.

I own each of these two adaptations on DVD, and they are among my most frequent go to choices for a film to pop on while I’m doing some sewing or housework.   For each of these two films I’ve been familiar with the books for some time prior to watching the movie.  In the case of Anne of Green Gables, my parents had read me the story before I saw the movie.  I remember distinctly being incredibly excited when it first aired.  It was just before Christmas, and we were living in a house that had a combination living room/dining room.  I remember watching the movie while my mom and I sat at the dining room table and made little satchels of potpourri in decorative fabrics to give to teachers and others for Christmas presents.  In fact, that is the first time I remember working with my mother on a craft or task while we watched a fabulous literary adaptation.  That tradition definitely carried on into our obsessive viewing of Pride and Prejudice through my late high school years, and on to the present.  We have painted a family room to it, wrapped presents with it, made strawberry jam and holiday cookies while listening to it, watched it curled up in front of the fire, and generally seen it more times than seems at all reasonable.  We started by taping it from TV.  We wore out one VHS, lent out and lost another, and made it onto a third.  I have a DVD set, and my mom did, until one of the two discs got lost when it was stuck inside a DVD player when it died, and was irreversibly scratched in the extrication process.  I had read the book, and then most of the rest of Austen, before the movie came out, but I think I can credit it with making me the true fan I’ve become.   

You’ll perhaps have noted that the more recent of these two films was made in 1995.  So, what has come out more recently that might make it into obsessive rewatch status?  I think the likeliest candidate has got to be North and South from 2004, based on the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, and starring Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage as Margaret and Mr. Thornton.

While this isn’t new, it is much newer than either of the other two films I mentioned.   There is also an older mini-series of the same name about the American Civil War, starring Patrick Swayze, and based on a novel by someone called John Jakes.  I haven’t seen that.  I hear it is not super good, so make sure you’re finding the correct North and South.   This North and South is based on a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.

While I’ve been a devotee of the mini-series for several years now, I just finished reading the book for the first time this week.  It is a dense read, but very worthwhile.  After reading it I am even more impressed by the mini-series.  It manages to catch the deeper themes of the story, as well as some of its truly wonderful moments.

The book was published in 1855, originally in serial format, in a magazine edited by Charles Dickens.  The North and South of the title refer to the north and south of England.  The story takes place in the midst of the industrialization of manufacturing processes.  The main character, Margaret Hale, is a Southerner.  She grew up in a pastoral town where her father was the parish priest, then lived for a few years with a wealthier aunt in London.  As the story begins, Margaret has moved back to her parents’ home, only to find that her father has given up his position, and plans to move the family to a manufacturing town in the north of England.

This sets up the tension of the narrative.  Mr. Hale, Margaret’s father, takes on a job as a tutor in Milton, the manufacturing town.  John Thornton, the owner of a cotton fabric mill, becomes one of his students.  Almost immediately Margaret and Mr. Thornton find themselves simultaneous intrigued and repelled by each other.  Margaret is a young woman who speaks her mind, and who has very strong opinions about the world.  Mr. Thornton has his own opinions, developed from his completely different circumstances.  The two clash through a series ideological arguments, and moments of misunderstanding.  The development of their relationship is, in this way, very similar to that of Lizzy and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

However, this is also a very Dickensian tale in many ways.  Some of it reminds me very clearly of Hard Times, which I read in a class about the Industrial Revolution and its effects on the people.  While living in Milton, Margaret becomes acquainted with some of the labourers in the mills.  She begins to understand the ways of their town.  She comes to see the horrors of their way of life, but also the great freedoms of it.  One of the workers she befriends, Nicholas Higgins, is a union leader, and one of the driving forces behind a strike that forms much of the action of the plot.  Here, too, Margaret becomes involved in philosophical discussions about the nature of work, and about human nature.

Reading back over what I’ve written there, that all sounds a bit dense and dull.  It is not, I assure you.  It is a gripping read, which brought to life for me the struggles of a people in a time when the world was changing, and what it meant to be human needed to change too.  As work processes were mechanized, people had to find a way to assert their value in the workplace, and to balance the needs of the person, with the needs of the much faster means of creation enabled by the machines. In fact, it is quite timely in our world now, when we face yet another revolution in how we manufacture and build.

On top of this, the characters are excellent.  While I already loved them all from the movie, I love them more from having read them.  The romance is also everything you could wish for in a 19th Century British female author’s work.  It is chaste, but has an underlying passion.  They are intelligent and independent, and need to find themselves before they can find each other.

So there you have it.  Watch a book.  Read a movie.  Enjoy the smoldering glories of Richard Armitage as John Thornton, the beauty of the musical score, and the luxury of several hours worth of drama in which to become acquainted with the characters and their stories.

Explore posts in the same categories: Books, Bright Lights