Escapism has always been the greatest tool for the everyday sufferer. You don’t even have to use a word as dramatic as sufferer to describe the people who choose to partake in this activity. For myself, I mainly use books to distract me when life gets insane, while others may use movies, creating art, TV, and even drugs. Though the ways people partake in escapism have changed in some ways, one key principle hasn’t; that no matter what you are going through, something will always be there to help ease your reality.
In the movie “Austenland”, we see this escapism taken to the extreme. The main character, Jane, is tired of her mundane relationships and life, and due to an absurdly unhealthy obsession with Jane Austen she embarks on a stay in the English countryside that replicates Austen’s works to the extreme. This movie embraces all of the overused tropes that Claudia Johnson and Deidre Lynch mentioned in their articles “Austen Cults and Cultures” and “Cult of Jane Austen,” respectively. Each discussed how the want for “old world elegance” has created this form of nostalgia that is unprecedented, therefore forming a consumeristic opportunity that has sent its takers into a frenzy.
Jane’s transplantation into an Austen themed world encapsulates Johnson and Lynch’s thinking to a T. This resort has everything a fanatic could want: the clothes, the activities, and the romance. It is a physical manifestation of the cult surrounding Jane Austen, and represents how the majority of her readers only focus on the romance and balls, the very materialistic and artificial things that Austen was satirizing in the first place. The viewer thinks by the end of the movie that Jane has learned her lesson in believing in these kinds of things, but she ends up falling in love anyway; thus continuing the romance trope that Austen readers seems so obsessed with, and which is what Austen seems completely opposite of.
Anna's exploration of Jane Austen 