One of the things I found most interesting was the notion, noted in Lynch’s Cult of Jane Austen, is the idea that “imagined territory ‘Jane Austen world,’ the balance between our authoring and [Austen’s] authoring may have gone off-kilter.” Lynch goes on to further say, “Austen movies in the last decade have overshadowed the books: Austeninans touring country houses turned film sets that Jane Austen never saw inspect exhibits of costumes made for the movies, clothing that nineteenth-century people never wore.” This brings to light a very interesting paradigm that Austenland seems to draw on as its underlying message of the film: it is often hard to tell fiction from reality. Clearly, as a nod to Hollywood, popular opinion of 19^th century attire and lifestyles has become conflated with the appropriations we are given today. This, within itself, creates a massive problem in the margin of accuracy and sustainability. As Jane sees herself from a chaotic, bedlam-esque stay at Austenland, there are little to no similarities between what she has seen on television and what reality of the lifestyle is. Furthermore, she could never gain a full, comprehensive experience of what living in Austen’s time would have been like solely from the very blatant class favoritism.

As noted in Johnson’s Austen cults and cultures, there are a lot of critiques that venture beyond the “Janeites” rhetoric. Johnson quotes C.S. Lewis is his critique of Austen, “Lewis insists that Austen’s comedy is inspired by ‘hard core morality’ and a vein ‘of religion.’” What becomes interesting about the scape of viewing Austen is how it juxtaposes with Austenland. Whereas Austen’s literature may indeed have been proliferated with extreme morality, the opposite seems to apply to the film. The movie seems to make use of a whole slew of male tropes: the misogynist, the villain masked as a hero, the closeted gay, the narcissist, and the misunderstood curmudgeon. Though there is a significant amount of “morality” within Jane, the main protagonist, it is constantly at odds with nearly every other character’s agenda. It then becomes a battle between reality and fiction, between the popularized romanticism of Austen time and where it truly sits in actuality.  

On a side note, Jennifer Coolidge and her god-awful accent really made the movie.