Dressing as Mr. Darcy at a Jane Austen symposium is like playing Mickey Mouse at Disney World. Between presenting scholarly papers and researching a book on the world of Austen fandom, I have spent time at several major Austen conferences, wearing a modified version of a Darcy costume at each, and each time the effect was mortifyingly electric.
At my first visit to the Jane Austen Society of North America (Jasna), in Minneapolis, a woman ushered her 17-year-old daughter toward me, calling me “the answer to a prayer.” At the following year’s meeting, in Montreal, a woman dressed as Lady Catherine de Bourgh clasped my wrist at the ball and asked, “Where on earth did you come from?”
The costume’s effect on me was equally curious: Whenever I wore a pair of fine breeches, a puffy shirt, a brocaded waistcoat (pronounced “weskit,” as various Janeites helpfully reminded me), a cravat, and a divine blue topcoat worthy equally of Colin Firth and Prince, I would inevitably become quieter and somewhat gentler in my manners. I also felt that I was an inch or two taller (a stylish Regency cutaway topcoat with tight shoulders requires immaculate posture).
Austen gatherings offer a rare and desirable thing, an evenhanded commerce between scholars and their civilian counterparts.
The funny part of Austen cosplay is how unsilly it all feels: the escapism 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. The proper hat can induce gentility; in 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. 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 changes your bearing from the outset. The point here isn’t that a high collar elevates your thinking, exactly. If “to speak another language is to possess another soul,” then donning a costume means adjusting your shoulders to the posture of another era.
At Jasna, a sort of hajj for Janeites, one begins to recognize the full scope of their frenzied love. Attendance at the annual general meeting numbers several hundred at least — and more in anniversary years. When Jasna comes to town, the scene slips back two centuries. At the public market, women and men dressed as period haberdashers 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.
In the corridors outside the market, authors perch behind a row of tables, signing and selling books. 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 their presence has the effect of an oracular experience. There you might meet Devoney Looser, a professor at Arizona State University and an accomplished roller-derbyist who goes by the moniker “Stone Cold Jane Austen.” Or you might bump into John Mullan, a perceptive critic at University College London who has answered one of the enduring questions of Austenworld: How many umbrellas appear in the novels? How many of them are furled? (Seven and six, respectively.)
The democracy of Austen gatherings is their thrilling and disarming (and slightly anarchic) secret. The snobbery of the high academy toward hobbyists, emulators, and people so prosaic as to look for a moral in a story — these go briefly on sabbatical. It is a rare and desirable thing, this evenhanded commerce between academics and their civilian counterparts: Professors do honest trade with the costumers, and the costumers in turn are scrupulous in attending talks and panels. In many cases, thanks to the air of camaraderie and a general mash-up of 18th- and 21st-century fashion, the distinctions tend to blur anyway.
On one particularly embarrassing occasion, I stood for a quarter of an hour next to an elegant lady in bonnet and gloves before recognizing that this woman was, in fact, a prestigious professor and close friend. We laughed over it, because where else would you glance at someone and say, “Oh, just another person dressed as Henrietta Musgrove”? The embarrassment is momentary, forgiveness swift. In Austenworld the only crime is to remain aloof.
And that, more than anything else, is what separates a crossover Austen conference from, say, the annual general meeting of the MLA: the understanding that we are all in this together. You are welcome in Austenworld whether you have a Ph.D. or not. There are many paths to Austen, and at Jasna no one will censure you for not “doing” Austen in the sanctioned way. How different, this amiable exchange, from the academic cloisters I have known, where residual high theory and subatomic specialization can so often preclude engagement with simple social realities — picture the arcane scholar or absent-minded professor more concerned with principles than with people.
I recall one high-flying academic who scoffed when he heard I’d be embedding with the Janeites. Mixing with hobbyists is not the path to an endowed chair, he counseled me, adding that as a professional, I should spend my time listening to other professionals, not to hobbyists, who can teach you nothing. He was right about the endowed chair but wrong about everything else, and one of the wisest things I ever did was to ignore him.
Scholars are parsing, deskbound creatures. Even after the partial recession of high theory and Saussurean linguistics, the public profile of the learned academic is closely associated with deconstructive instincts, “moral relativism,” and every species of 21st-century sophistry, leaving us at once suspect and laughably shortsighted, prone to the micro-fixations of Mr. Collins, that cold fish who directs houseguests through his Kentish garden “with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind.”
As Donald Gray wrote in 1993, Pride and Prejudice, like Austen’s other novels, “is a story about people who learn, or fail to learn, how to be, do, and recognize good in the ordinary passages of lives that would be unremarkable if Austen had not made it clear that a kind of moral salvation depends on what Elizabeth and Darcy make of themselves by learning about one another.” Austenworld offers salvation for the academy in the reminder that a similar kind of moral salvation depends on what the scholar and the nonacademic reader make of themselves by finally spending time eye-to-eye. The pretentious-looking outfits then emerge as perversely egalitarian: It’s hard to feel superior when we’re all wearing the same silly clothes.
Ted Scheinman, a senior editor at Pacific Standard, did graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This essay is excerpted from Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), out this month.
