Killing Mr. Collins

I love to read Jane Austen fanfiction. Fanfiction, in case you don’t know, is a book written by someone other than the original author, taking the characters, plot and setting of a popular book and continuing the story. For example, people love to write about what happened to Elizabeth and Darcy (from Pride and Prejudice) after their wedding.

For me, some of the most interesting aspects of fanfiction are their similarities. For example, people who write fanfiction about Emma are always marrying off Miss Bates. In Austen’s novel, Bates is the consummate spinster. She’s an annoying but strangely lovable and sympathetic character. Fanfiction authors cannot help themselves – they nearly always marry her off to a kind wealthy man.

But the most fascinating fanfiction similarity is this: almost every fanfiction Pride and Prejudice novel I’ve ever read kills off Mr. Collins. This includes the zombie version (sorry to spoil that for you). Yes, Mr. Collins is an insufferable little man. Yes, we all wish that Charlotte had done better. But why do we feel the desparate need to kill him off?

Austen didn’t.

This is key, folks. Jane Austen did not marry off Miss Bates, nor did she kill Mr. Collins. Miss Bates and Charlotte stand in for many Regency women, the examples of either perpetual spinsterhood or a barely tolerable (yet financially stable) marriage. Austen’s heroines live the fantasy, but her side characters are firmly grounded in reality.

Let me return to the need to rescue Charlotte and Miss Bates. Henry James believed that his novel and the characters in it existed somewhere in an ideal form (a somewhat Platonic ideal). James called this the “clear matter;” critic J. Hillis Miller calls it a “shining, trackless field of snow.” The rough idea is that a novel, its setting and its characters are “living” somewhere in their ideal form, and that the author has only to catch a vision of this “clear matter” in order to write the book.

So what does that have to do with killing Mr. Collins? First of all, fanfiction itself presupposes a sort of clear matter. The fanfiction writer usually feels an obligation to stay true to the characters and setting as presented by the original author. If there is no clear matter, there is nothing to stay true to. Why can Elizabeth Bennet not slay a dragon in a fanfiction novel? She could, of course, but as there are no dragons in Pride and Prejudice, it would require a fanfiction author to jump through many hoops in order to introduce dragons into that clear matter. Sometimes (as in the case of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) the characters are inserted into a completely different setting, in order to deal with the continuity problem of the clear matter.

So, the fanfiction author who kills Mr. Collins seems to have some belief that Charlotte does exist out there in the clear matter in some ideal form. By killing off Mr. Collins in a novel, the the fanfiction author can rescue the ideal Charlotte (who Austen so inconsiderately left at the end of Pride and Prejudice chained to the odious Mr. Collins).

I certainly don’t mind fanfiction authors who try to tie up the “loose ends.” It is as marvelously satisfying to kill off Mr. Collins as an author, I’m sure, as it is to read about it. I would simply ask fanfiction authors to consider Austen’s intentions. She was not forgetful or lazy; she did not overlook Charlotte or Miss Bates.

So, fanfiction writers: If the fanfiction is simply a continuation of the fantasy, then by all means: marry Miss Bates to Mr. Woodhouse and be done with it. However, if you are striving to see the “clear matter,” don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you are cleaning up after Austen. She knew what she was doing.