Jane Austen’s characters have taken centre stage in meme culture as they have been discovered by a “young generation of digital natives” in the post-MeToo era, according to research.
The influential novelist who died in 1817 has had audiences swooning over Mr Darcy since she wrote of his romance with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Her works have spawned a collection of screen adaptations and Darcy has now emerged as a “meme idol” online, the authors of a study published in the journal Humanities wrote.
They suggested the popularity of Austen’s characters on social media is in part because her books effectively contained memes-in-waiting before the concept existed, in a “foreshadowing of post-millennial memes”. The authors also argue that Darcy, through famous portrayals by Colin Firth in the 1995 BBC series of Pride and Prejudice and by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film, has “activated new re-imaginings of masculinity and heterosexuality in the post-MeToo epoch”.
Georgios Chatziavgerinos, a doctoral researcher at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education and one of the study’s authors, said: “Lots of authors are memed, but Austen memes have become a cult of their own. A whole generation of young adults have grown up in a digital world where they use this sort of content to bond over shared values.
“Among classic authors, Austen is probably second only to Shakespeare in terms of how much this happens." The study’s authors said that Darcy alone has featured in hundreds of memes on social platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr, most of them drawing on the screen portrayals by Firth and MacFadyen.
One example, the study observes, uses a still from Firth’s famous lake scene with the text: “A truth universally acknowledged: you either love Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, or you’re wrong.”
Another repurposes a well-known meme template of Wolverine from the Marvel X-Men comics, lying in bed and gazing into a photo frame which he holds in his hands, with a close-up of the frame showing that Wolverine is admiring MacFadyen’s fan-favourite “Mr Darcy hand flex”.
The study argues the big themes in Austen novels – such as love, marriage, codes of behaviour and private desire – provide ideal material through which younger audiences can discuss masculinity and femininity, sexual consent and non-conformity.
Darcy’s brooding “alternative masculinity”, and the way he is motivated by his love for Elizabeth Bennett to become a better version of himself, has long provoked the sort of fan-worship that, for example, prompted Darcymania around Firth in the 1990s.
The quantity of memes alluding to Darcy’s complexity, inner struggles and vulnerabilities has spiked in recent years, according to the study.
“It’s no coincidence these memes skyrocketed after #MeToo,” Mr Chatziavgerinos said.
“Darcy, who balances conventional male qualities with sensitivity and respect for women, is in many ways the perfect antidote to the male behaviour that legitimately prompted such outcry.”
He continued: “Obviously I’d urge everyone to read the books, but what’s interesting is that often you need to have done so in order to really understand these memes.
“Memes are now becoming one of the main ways in which younger audiences discover Jane Austen.
“They are breathing new life into her work and further cementing her immortality as a writer.”
Another of the study’s authors, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, said that memes are “cultural replicators that give audiences mini-bursts of irony”.
“Austen’s writing foreshadows this because she often recontextualised other work to tell new truths about society,” she said.
The study, titled OMG JANE AUSTEN’: Austen and Memes in the Post-#MeToo Era, is published in the journal Humanities.
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