Camp Austen

by Ted Scheinman

  She appraised me again without smiling. “I am off for tea. We can conclude our discussion in Pemberley, if you like.”

  “It would give me pleasure.”

  I disengaged myself, wolfed two plates of fruit in the Hyde kitchen, donned and straightened my blazer, and made for the panelists’ table at Pemberley, there to chair the plenary on “Austen and Romance.” Inger had provided laminated cue cards, with which I was to signal each scholar when her time was winding down. The first said FIVE MINUTES LEFT; the final, YOU’VE DELIGHTED US LONG ENOUGH. Though it was a supposedly simple task, the enthusiasm of the speakers often dwarfed my modest efforts, and the cue cards, masterful bits of passive-aggressiveness as they were, proved less useful than, say, a shepherd’s crook, which would have been more direct.

  One of the panelists began to quote the first line of Pride & Prejudice—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—and by “acknowledged” the full audience had joined in. Seventy-plus adults intoning this sentence is wonderful and creepy in equal measure; think the Nicene Creed, delivered by ebullient zombies.

  TWO

  Dressing the Part

  So the secret got out, and still delights each new participant.

  —R. W. Chapman, introduction to Jane Austen’s letters

  Young men first starting out in life will often ask me how to land a regular gig playing Mr. Darcy. The procedure, I tell them (for I am generous with my counsel), is as follows. First, ensure a partial upbringing in England. It is desirable also that you will have spent your tween years falling in love with Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet in Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. But I also explain that the single most important element in becoming Mr. Darcy is simply to be the only male in a graduate seminar on the novels of Jane Austen. If you’re a guy in that scenario, and people start talking about dress-up, it won’t be long before someone squeezes you into tights and pushes you out in front of the crowd, enjoining you with a wink to “take one for the team.”

  If you’re at a ball, and a lady asks you to dance, oblige, even though Darcy might have done otherwise. If you are not dancing and you spot a lady looking demure and unspoken-for at the fringe of the dance, ask her for the honor of a turn about the room. Shyness is nearly as bad as conceit in a Darcy reenactor—either can prevent you from swinging a leg on the dance floor.

  A final piece of advice to young would-be Darcys—and this is far from trivial—is to identify and ingratiate yourself with some good dependable people in the Theater Department of the closest university. These are the people whose wisdom, and whose sewing machines, will see you and your six-piece costume through even the hottest summer conference—indeed, my costumer friends were soon serving in a sort of double capacity, offering spiritual support as well as roadside assistance; they bucked my spirit while mending my front-flap Regency breeches.

  The Janeites are famous for many things, but perhaps none so much as a delight in wearing the garb—the Empire-waist dresses, the cravats, the buckle shoes that squeak on a polished floor while you’re dancing to the “Duke of Kent’s Waltz.” You can call this dress-up, or make-believe, or adults behaving like children. The widely preferred term in the twenty-first century is “cosplay,” a modish portmanteau of “costume” and “play” that still, even after so many conferences and balls and Cornish teas, strikes a racy note in my imagination. The term is expansive and applies to people attending Star Trek conventions or KISS concerts or Renaissance fairs or Civil War reenactments, but also to various demimondes of sexual role-play.

  A young man always remembers his first Darcy outfit.

  * * *

  When I agreed to help organize the summer camp, I anticipated that the duties would be mainly clerical. I was not entirely wrong—there was no shortage of bureaucracy to administer, whether it meant collating Thursday’s dinner orders or apportioning space for the costumers or introducing the scholarly panels or striving against hope to persuade those panels to end. The grad students were scurrying around like servants at the inauguration of a country house party. But there were more flamboyant duties, too. The big news dropped on me one morning about a month before the camp in a warm but firm e-mail from Inger, informing me that I would need to be fitted for Regency breeches.

  “The committee has decided that we need a Mr. Darcy at the ball,” she wrote, before indicating that Adam would play Mr. Bingley and Ashley would play his sister. The e-mail concluded with a request that felt more like a fiat: “Will you be our Mr. Darcy?” The brain trust promised to provide a six-piece costume and was quite insistent that I shave my beard. Somehow the beard was the least of my concerns. Taking on the role of Mr. Darcy involves a lot of pressure, since any pretender is liable to suffer by comparison with the dreamy gents who have played the role in the past—foremost among them Colin Firth, whose rendition of the patrician hero is the high-water mark for civilized sexiness. This latter concern felt very real; while I have great faith in my posture and bearing and general manners, I have never labored under the delusion that I am a matinee idol. Simply to accept the role might smack of arrogance, I feared—“What, Ted thinks he’s sufficiently dashing to play Mr. Darcy?!” But declining, even politely, would be worse; no better, indeed, than Darcy’s own behavior at the Meryton Assembly, where he famously and unforgivably abstains from dancing “when gentlemen were scarce and more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner.” I had even been planning in secret to slip away from the ball early on Saturday night. Some men might have taken the e-mail as cause for vanity; I took it as cause for brief anxiety.

  But there was little room for refusal, and the following week I found myself on the second floor of the Carolina Performing Arts Center, where a professor named Jade tried to make me look elegant. Jade herself is a picture of elegance—she wore her hair semi-short in a sort of stylish neo-pompadour over an arch pair of tortoiseshell spectacles that would rise a bit on her nose whenever she smiled. Given my mechanical cluelessness in the face of these foreign raiments, she had cause to smile frequently.

  “Adam gets off a bit easier,” she explained as she arrayed the six pieces of the suit before me. We were in a dressing room down the hall from Jade’s office, surrounded by bonnets and muslins of various colors and some shiny, leathery numbers that felt out of place—more futuristic than retrospective. A pair of fake swords reclined against a mirror. “He’s wearing a black outfit, very clergyman, a bit less flashy.” Jade indicated the suit in question. She was right. It looked beyond clerical—the sort of outfit that Mr. Collins might have rejected as too stuffy. Mine, Jade warned me as I pulled on the flowy white shirt, would be rather more flamboyant.

  But first, the tights. Of the many kindnesses I have experienced in Austenworld, few matched the depth of generous patience with which Jade waited while I plunged one leg after the other into the tights that she had selected for me. This was not reticence on my part, and certainly not discomfort at what felt like close proximity to drag. It was a much simpler clumsiness that made me feel oddly emasculated.

  “You know, I used to be better at this,” I said after a moment, through the partition that Jade, in her regard for my modesty, had placed between us in the dressing room. It was true; my sophomore year in high school, I had appeared as Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during which I set several speed records slipping into a skintight costume. That verve and confidence of my younger self now felt very far away.

  Jade dealt gently with my incompetence: “Are there … any questions I can answer?”

  I acknowledged that, like Scrooge on Christmas morning, I had made “a perfect Laocoön” of myself with these stockings—that is to say, I had become tangled in my tights.

  “Have you watched women put on tights?”

  It felt like a loaded question. “Sure,” I said. “I mean, I grew up around women, and they were often putting on ti
ghts.”

  “Do you remember how they did it?”

  A pause. Duh. “They bunch them together and stick their foot in and then they sort of … never mind, I got this.” I bunched the tights, inserted my feet, and rolled the fabric up my legs, in imitation of the women in my life, regretting in silence that I had worn boxer shorts, which never fit well under tights. The effect was even snugger than I had anticipated but not entirely disagreeable. The silk integument of the tights offered a pleasant sense of support; the unfamiliar stricture gave me a feeling of powerful security. Jade handed me the breeches, then glided off to grab the centerpiece of the costume: the blue topcoat.

  “This is really something” is how she prepared me for the thing. It was a middle-weight wool affair that would qualify as “slim fit” by today’s standards, its stiff half-collar protruding above the broad-shouldered cut, tapering down to hug the waist; the train of the coat fell roughly to my knees, but the front ended just below the waistcoat, the better to display the handsome stitching of the vest and the imposing front flap of the cream-colored breeches. The style, I heard Jade explain (while I stared, smitten, at the coat), was “cutaway,” just like in the movies, and I had to admire the cumulative effect of the costume into which she had inserted me with such kindness and care. Jade angled me toward the dressing-room mirror.

  “Ted, meet Mr. Darcy,” she said.

  * * *

  The next time I tried on the outfit, it felt more comfortable. I was in my house and had just rolled the tights onto my legs when my housemate, Jerrod, came through the door. Our eyes met for a moment, in silence.

  “So you’re really going for this Jane Austen thing,” he observed, deadpan.

  I must have been a spectacle—poufy shirt dangling to my waist, where a pair of cream-colored tights encased my boxer shorts. Jerrod is a scholar of Edmund Spenser whose ambitious dissertation concerned early Semitic languages, but he is also at heart an unaffected man, who grew up as a hunter in Lorain, Ohio, and whose first jobs were all commercial fishing gigs on Lake Erie.

  “Laugh all you want,” I said, and Jerrod obliged. But he also helped me with the double-hook that fastened the pre-tied cravat to my poufy shirt, and stood to the side while I tightened the waistcoat and popped on the blue topcoat. I drew myself up in front of the mirror, arched an eyebrow, and tried to scowl.

  My own slender face stared back at me, and for a moment the effect was complete—I felt dislocated. Who was this in the looking glass? A long-lost ancestor. A caricature of a Janeite. A twentysomething punk who had decided to dress as Mr. Darcy for Halloween. I was peering at myself, but not. It was hard not to laugh. The blue topcoat felt both foolishly elegant and totally rock ’n’ roll. I could have been dressing as Darcy or as Prince.

  “You should send a pic to your mom,” Jerrod said. When I did, she called. By this time I had warmed to the costume and was making faces into the mirror.

  “I just got the photo,” she said, and I could hear her smiling because she sounded a little singsongy on the word “just.” I bowed to the mirror and mugged a face of deep seriousness before grinning like a toddler.

  “Isn’t this outfit just—” I had no adjective, and Mom cut me off.

  “You’re wearing that to the ball, right?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “James says it will be a majestic ball on the Saturday night.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “You know there will be a shortage of men.” She meant that I would have to dance. I weighed duty against some wordless aversion to the idea.

  “You realize they’re not paying me nearly enough for all this.”

  “I want you to make a good impression,” she said flatly. “It would mean so much to everyone there.” (Mothers are masters of projecting their prejudices onto the world.) I didn’t say anything, though some part of me knew I wouldn’t disobey. She pressed her point home: “Please don’t fight me on this.”

  I told her I would probably dance.

  “Please don’t say ‘probably.’”

  I felt we had wandered from the main subject, which was the awesomeness of my Darcy outfit.

  “Isn’t the vest just amazing?”

  “It’s a waistcoat,” Mom sighed. “Pronounced ‘west-kit.’ Don’t say ‘vest.’ Please don’t say ‘vest’ during the conference.”

  “Yes, Mom.” I pulled a Michael Jackson kick in front of the mirror, then tried and failed to moonwalk.

  * * *

  The “shortage of men” problem is a very real one at Austen gatherings. If you’re younger than sixty and a male, you’ll sometimes look up during a scholarly panel or a session of dance instruction or the Saturday tea and begin to worry that your fellow men have all perished in some far-off place. As the summer camp progressed, I began to feel more and more like an exotic creature, a man who through luck or connections has avoided the Napoleonic Wars and thereby become something of a hot commodity on the home front. By the second day, women my mother’s age were asking (with varying degrees of coquetry) whether I would save a dance for them. I would come to learn that this was the curious reception I could expect at any Austen event. At my first visit to JASNA, in Minneapolis three months later, a woman ushered her seventeen-year-old daughter toward me, calling me “the answer to a prayer.” At the following year’s JASNA meeting in Montréal, a woman dressed as Lady Catherine de Bourgh clasped my wrist at the ball and asked: “Where on earth did you come from?” It’s a lot of fun but also a lot of pressure.

  I do not wish to exaggerate. Dressing as Mr. Darcy at an Austen symposium is like playing Mickey Mouse at Disney World. I have now been to several major Austen conferences in the United States and Canada, wearing a modified version of the Darcy suit at each, and each time the effect was the same. And its effect on me was equally silly, and equally wonderful: I became quieter and somewhat gentler in my manners, and felt at the same time that I was an inch or two taller (the cutaway topcoat with tight shoulders basically requires immaculate posture). And this is the funny part of Austen cosplay—how un-silly it all feels: the escapist element is bound up with the element of discovery, and the costume allows you for a brief and hallowed moment to enter a new version of yourself. Anyone who has ever worn a tuxedo to a prom or a black suit to a funeral will understand some measure of what I’m describing—and the more elaborate or outré the costume, the more we feel a sense of regression to some earlier phase of life, when we celebrated pajama day in first grade and dressed as Groucho Marx for Halloween.

  But playacting as a twentysomething offers pleasures other than those of childhood. If the wordless enthusiasms of childhood dress-up have calmed with age, the costume has not lost its transportive quality. The right hat can induce gentility; in a fine cravat and topcoat, you wouldn’t think twice about lending your chaise-and-four to a beautiful young lady with a case of the sniffles. It’s not just about looks or some idealized reflection of yourself, though it is perhaps easiest to idealize oneself in a world unbound from time. The simple feel of the clothes, the grip of the starch, the Speedo-grade rectitude of the shoulders, not to mention the taut garments that support the body’s nether constituents—each of these elements will change your bearing from the outset, assuming you’ve been properly fitted. The point here isn’t that a high collar elevates your thinking, exactly. If Goethe tells us that “to speak another language is to possess another soul,” then donning a costume means adjusting your shoulders to the posture of another era. After I had tried on the outfit, I compared notes with Adam, asking him whether he felt at all different. He laughed.

  “The impression,” he said, “was instant.”

  * * *

  The weekend of the summer camp proved my awakening to the world of Austen-mania, but not until later that year, when I attended the big annual meeting of JASNA—again as a surrogate for my mother—did I begin to recognize the full scope of this frenzied love, the full varieties of this fandom. JASNA is simply huge; its official members number
more than five thousand, and each year, attendance at the annual general meeting numbers several hundred at least, and more in anniversary years—sometimes limited only by local fire codes. Attending JASNA in any year is a sort of hajj for Janeites; its sprawling membership is the empire in which our own modest Austen summer camp counted as a very minor province.

  There is no richer survey of American enthusiasm for Jane Austen than the public market at the Jane Austen Society of North America. JASNA’s market is usually a converted meeting room or business center on the third floor of whatever upscale hotel is hosting the annual conference, the sort of cavernous carpeted space that comprises anywhere between two and six rooms, demarcated by discreet accordion-dividers and generally reserved for sales conferences, corporate team-building activities, and prix fixe New Year’s dinners for discerning couples.

  When JASNA comes to town, the scene slips back two centuries. Miss Lisa Brown, proprietress of Regency Rentals, peddles her costumes (“Ladies Sizes 2–26; Gentlemen Sizes 36–52 [chest]”) and will corner you to point out an errant kerchief or an imperfection in a waistcoat, which she assures you she can restore with minimal damage to your pocketbook. Syrie James will pause from hawking the evening’s theatrical adaptation to press into your hands a copy of her novel Jane Austen’s First Love, a fictional account of Austen’s summer flirtation with Edward Taylor, upon whom (the Austen letters indicate) Austen had “fondly doted.” Women and men dressed as period haberdashers will remain in character while pressing homemade bonnets upon you; other people dressed as period haberdashers do not remain in character but nonetheless press homemade bonnets upon you.

  Outside the market, authors perch behind a row of tables, selling and signing books and answering questions from their public. At one table, several of the world’s most decorated Austen scholars share sympathy over their colleagues’ physical ailments while fielding breathless questions from graduate students for whom the presence of these scholars has the effect of an oracular experience. Four tables to their right, another author is peddling romantic spin-offs of the Austen novels—there is even a subset of fan-fiction predicated on subtextual homoeroticism in the original books; you wouldn’t believe what Darcy and Bingley get up to when the rest of Netherfield is asleep—and, to her right, two authors are signing mystery novels (The Suspicion at Sanditon!). If you poked your head in from the street, you might meet Devoney Looser, a professor at Arizona State University and an accomplished roller-derbyist who, when she’s on skates, goes by the moniker “Stone Cold Jane Austen.” Depending on the year, you might bump into John Mullan, a perceptive critic of Austen who has also answered one of the enduring questions of Austenworld: How many umbrellas appear in the novels? How many of them are furled? (The answers are seven and six, respectively.)