Everyone knows that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a classic feminist novel that should be on everyone’s must-read list. But what happens when you take the beloved novel into the 21st century by giving it a YouTube spin?
Well, you get the Emmy-award winning series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, of course!
That’s right, the Lizzie Bennett Diaries (LBD for short) is a modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice told through a series of video blogs. This new YouTube series was co-created by Bernie Su and Hank Green (yes, this is the brother of famous Kenyon-made John Green!) and stars Ashley Clements as Lizzie Bennet and Daniel Vincent Gordh as William Darcy.
LBD tells the tale of Lizzie Bennet, a 24-year-old grad student who decides to start a YouTube channel with her best friend Charlotte to document her life. The vlogs also feature her two sisters, Jane and Lydia, along with many other characters. Lizzie Bennet’s channel has over 200,000 subscribers and about 39 million total views. But the story doesn’t merely exist on this channel; rather, it is fully brought into the social network-loving 21st century with the use of additional YouTube accounts and other social media. Each character has his/her own twitter account and they interact with one another as if they are all real people experiencing the events of the story together. When something major happens, they react to it just as anyone who has a Twitter would. This advances the plot and makes the characters come alive in a way that has never been done before.
Along with breaking the online fourth wall time and time again by making the characters feel like more than just characters, LBD also breaks norms regarding representation of gender, race, and sexuality.
Those who have read Pride and Prejudice know that it is full of feminist ideals. In 1813, creating a protagonist like Elizabeth Bennet was extremely uncommon. The creators of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries kept Jane Austen’s feminist vision alive by not only bringing her story into the modern age, but also by adapting her social beliefs to have 21st century relevance as well.
The most obvious way that this was accomplished is in the casting of the series. In TV and movies, we are often bombarded with stereotypical portrayals of different races, sexualities, and genders. Rarely does a character that is not a heterosexual Caucasian male have a story line that does not center around the fact that he/she is something other than a heterosexual Caucasian male.
This clearly isn’t the case in LBD. Five out of thirteen characters are non-Caucasian, yet their plot lines have nothing to do with their race. Further, the show features a gay character whose homosexuality is not used as a plot device, but simply as part of his identity. What’s more, the majority of the cast is made up of women, including three of the four main characters. Each character goes on a journey throughout the series that fully reveals that character’s personality regardless of gender, sexuality, or race.
It’s a little sad that casting like this doesn’t happen more often, but hopefully LBD’s huge success will inspire more TV shows and films to move towards more equal representation of race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in their casting choices.
So, whether you are a die-hard Pride and Prejudice fan or you have never even touched the book, I would highly recommend that you grab a plate of Snickerdoodles and a cup of tea and watch The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (you’ll understand the significance of these specific foods as you watch the series). More importantly, though, you’ll experience one year of a strong-willed–and sometimes downright stubborn–woman’s life.
What’s next for Hank Green and Bernie Su? Watch out for their new series Emma Approved, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Emma, premiering on YouTube on October 7th.
[Photo Sources: Facebook, IMDB, YouTube, Giving Kudos to Brilliant Content]