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Jane Austen … Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem

This essay examines the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies phenomenon, including Seth

Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Steve Hockensmith’s Dawn of

the Dreadfuls and Dreadfully Ever After. It considers the proliferation of these differently

adapted texts across a range of platforms in the context of a converging and market driven

media landscape, including associated book trailers, an interactive eBook, a video game, and

media reviews. It argues that the texts signal, configure, and perhaps even mask

contemporary fears and anxieties over class and race, and the social processes of

commodification under capitalism.

England, 1815, a once green and pleasant land is beset by a plague of the living dead.

In a quiet country village, corpses dig their way out of graves. Crypt doors burst

open. The churchyard becomes a breeding ground for an army of Satan’s soldiers.

Hordes of shambling, soulless, brain-devouring monsters rampage unchecked across

the green and pleasant fields — upturning coaches, and invading the houses of the

rich. The zombie herd may be terrifying, but the horror it inspires is nothing

compared to the threat of contagion. A mere scratch from a zombie is enough to

transform a feeling, sentient being into a rapacious, brainless, ghoul destined to

multiply the armies of the undead …

This is the plotline of one of the most recent adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and

Prejudice (1815) – a trilogy that includes Seth Grahame-Smith’s mash up Pride and

Prejudice and Zombies (2009), and Steve Hockensmith’s Dawn of the Dreadfuls (2010)

and Dreadfully Ever After (2011). The trilogy has been billed as a comedy — indeed, it

has been regularly castigated as a trite and meaningless frivolity — but it is also one

of the more interesting examples of what David McNally (2011, p.2) has called the

‘capitalist grotesque’. It effortlessly blends regency comedy of manners and

twentieth century soap with elements appropriated from digital fan cultures and the

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genre of monster tales that for critics such as Franco Moretti (2005) have traditionally

signalled the presence of popular social anxieties over the processes of

commodification under capitalism. In the Jane Austen trilogy published by Quirk,

the mysterious zombie plague that terrorizes the good citizens of Hertfordshire

seems at once to map the unseen social forces hovering at the edges of what Mary

Poovey has called Jane Austen’s non-referential realism (Poovey 2012), but also, in

an interesting variety of ways, symbolically acts out social fears about the monstrous

dislocations at the heart of contemporary existence.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) is a mash-up of Jane Austen’s

classic text, promoted by its author as 85% Austen and 15% Grahame-Smith — the

15% comprising the maraudings of the undead and the Bennett sisters fighting back

with their death-dealing katanas. The most notable feature of the runaway bestseller

is the way in which it appropriates elements and techniques of amateur creativity

more commonly associated with digital networks of fans — the amateur-made mixes

and mash-ups that populate You Tube, for example, or the alternate universe and

slash scenarios that populate websites devoted to fanfiction. However, unlike the

most pervasive form of mashup – video mashups such as Becoming Hermione or

Superwholock, to name a couple of recent examples – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is

an industry made text, one of a series of books commissioned by Jason Rekulak, the

editor of Quirk. Indeed, the oft-repeated impetus for the book was avowedly

industrial. Rekulak told interviewers at the time of the book’s launch that he had

developed a list of ‘popular fanboy characters like ninjas, pirates, zombies, and

monkeys’ with a list of public domain book titles (that is, books no longer in

copyright that can be published for free) (Anderson 2010). Grahame-Smith was

commissioned to begin with the original Austen text, and in the manner of a video

mashup to weave the zombie and ninja elements into the existing plot line.

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Indeed, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is one in a recent spate of industry-made texts

that have moved to appropriate elements of fan culture. The successful BBC series

Lost in Austen (2008), for example, in which a fan finds herself transported into the

events of what is indisputably Jane Austen’s most famous novel, also presents itself

as a kind of industry-made fanwork, including a meta-commentary on the popular

1995 BBC television series starring Colin Firth. More recently, the co-creators of

Sherlock Michael Gatiss and Steve Moffat announced at the Edinburgh Television

Festival that the BBC’s Sherlock was just a giant piece of amateur enthusiasm. ‘We

love Sherlock Homes so much — we’re obsessed with it. This is fanfiction’ (Frost

2012). However, unlike these other industry-made fan products, Grahame-Smith’s

adaptation – initially, at least – positioned itself in opposition to other industrial

productions which implicitly or explicitly claimed a ‘respectful relationship’ to the

text, even when it is a ‘subversive-yet-utterly-respectful’ relationship, to quote from

the Times review of Lost in Austen (Teeman 2008). Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was

originally promoted as the work of an ‘anti-fan’. It originally positioned itself as a

form of populist rebellion against the oppressive cultural authority of Jane Austen’s

work, particularly as this cultural authority is evinced in the classroom and the

lecture hall. The mock discussion questions that appear at the end of the text satirize

the pedagogical practices of book clubs, librarians and high school teachers. As the

promotional blurb on the back-of-the-book puts it, this is a work that ‘transforms a

masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read’.

This aspect of the text was highlighted in the first Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

book trailer (Wright 2009), a mashup combining the BBC production of Pride and

Prejudice (Langton 1995) with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (Romero

1968), rendered with the kind of ‘twenty dollars and four pizzas’ aesthetic that is

typical of amateur-made fanworks. ‘Does Dialogue like This … Make You Want to

Gouge Your Eyes out with Boredom?’ the title text asks the viewer. The trailer then

cuts to an exchange between Jane Bennet and Mr Collins in which Jane asks him to

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explicate a passage from Fordyce’s sermons that she believes to be ‘of great doctrinal

import’. In Austen’s novel, Fordyce functions as an element of the book’s layered

satire. Fordyce was an eighteenth century cleric and author of a book of sermons

designed to warn young women against the moral dangers of reading popular

novels. In the featured BBC scene, Jane’s real object is to remove Mr Collins from the

proximity of Elizabeth. The book trailer, with its own set of ironies, helpfully

suggests, ‘Maybe You Need Some Zombies’. The sound shifts abruptly to a speed

metal track — namely, Ministry’s ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’ — as the trailer promises

‘gut-eating zombies’, ‘kick-arse sisters’, ‘ninjas, swordfights and … zombie

mayhem.’ Ironically, the trailer also offers to supplement this with a ‘bit of

refinement’. This ‘refinement’ is presented as a pastiche of the cover lines that

commonly appear on the back of more orthodox editions of Austen, viz. a ‘timeless

tale of first impressions and social class in Regency England’.

Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which dominates the second half of the book

trailer, is the paradigmatic zombie film and an obvious touchstone for Grahame-

Smith’s mash up of Austen. In this classic of 1960s cult cinema, Romero and co-

writer John Russo are commonly credited with introducing the zombie apocalypse

to western culture, effectively transforming the zombie or soulless slave of Haitian

Voodoo folklore into a flesh-eating ghoul. Night of the Living Dead was the inspiration

for five sequels and two remakes, as well as an ever-expanding crowd of associated

films and stories. These films have long-functioned as objects of critical fascination,

and are commonly understood to express anxieties over a range of domestic threats,

civil rights, violence arising from the war in Vietnam, as critiques of contemporary

consumerism or the military-industrial complex. In more recent times, there appears

to have been a further transformation of the zombie figure, seen, for example, in the

sharply vicious nature of the living corpses in 28 Days Later (Boyle 2002), or in the

Romero remake Dawn of the Dead (Snyder 2004), which is conspicuous for the way it

substitutes fast-moving corpses for the slow shamblers of classic Romero. Indeed,

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the zombies that feature in the Quirk trilogy are polite by these standards. They are

not the harmless slap-stick zombies played for belly laughs that feature in what

seems to be an emerging subgenre of zombie comedies such as Shawn of the Dead

(Wright 2004). They are old-fashioned zombies that single a return to the monsters

that populate the earlier films. There are, in the Quirk trilogy, for example, few

preemptive strikes against contaminated humans and few preemptive executions

(though there is a memorable one outside the gates of fortified London in the final

book). The emphasis inevitably falls on polite amputations or honorable suicides

carried out by the victims, which are ironically evoked as being in the ‘best English

tradition’.

Indeed, the Quirk trilogy is notable for the way it breaks many of the conventions of

the zombie genre. Rarely, for example, do zombie narratives feature period or

futuristic settings. Zombie films are more commonly set in the present and generally

address contemporary fears and anxieties. As well, zombie films are for the most

part set in claustrophobic city landscapes, showing zombies invading shopping

centres and apartment blocks, whereas the Quirk trilogy features a rustic well-

mannered social setting — at least, until the final book of the trilogy in which much

of the action is set amidst the dangerous and polluted spaces of nineteenth century

London. Zombie narratives also rarely feature happy endings. They are one of the

few mainstream genres that regularly adhere to the convention of the nihilistic

ending. The typical zombie narrative features a social order in tatters, with a small

group of survivors, who, for the duration of the film, at least, gain a brief respite

from the pervading terror. Even though a handful of the characters survive through

to the end of the film, the implication in the conventional zombie film is that the

survivors will not in fact survive for long. This makes the Quirk trilogy different, for

the books feature three decidedly happy endings in a row.

In early 2009, awareness of the forthcoming release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

started to rise mostly due to Internet bloggers. Newspaper articles followed. In

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response, Rekulak increased the initial print run from 12,000 to 60,000 copies. On

April 9, 2009, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies moved from 300 to 27 on Amazon UK’s

bestseller list, moving to number three on the New York Times bestseller list the same

day. At the elite end of the market, responding to Rekulak’s promise of readability,

perhaps, the hackles of some commentators rose. The New Yorker's Macy Halford

called the prose style of the book ‘one hundred per cent terrible’ (Halford 2009).

Grahame-Smith told the Sunday Times that he had ‘faced the wrath of Austen fans on

blogs’(Goodwin 2009) and certainly there were a number of blog posts on Austen

fan sites that started, ‘Purists will hate this book …’ or ‘Purists will vomit …’.

However, as the Sunday Times pointed out, despite the apparently oppositional

stance adopted by the publicists, ‘Austen fans are loving this unholy romp’

(Goodwin 2009). Grahame-Smith was soon to be found telling audiences at

bookshop signings that they ought to be reading the original Austen. The death knell

finally sounded for the text’s anti-fan position with the release of the interactive

version of the book for iPads and other tablet devices (Grahame-Smith 2011). In this

version of the text, the Grahame-Smith adaptation appears directly beside the

original Austen novel — page for page. Rekulak states that the eBook was published

in response to requests from readers, ‘and an iPad allows you to compare the two

texts side-by-side very effectively’ (Rekulak 2013). Indeed, the trailer designed to

coincide with the eBook’s release advises the reader that it is in fact far preferable to

‘Read “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” alongside Jane Austen’s original text’

(PadWorx 2011).

It may be that this shift in the paratextual frame was simply a question of marketing,

predicated on a belated realisation that ‘Our Jane’ and her gigantic fandom are of

course highly saleable commodities. But the reversal also draws attention to the

diverse ways in which the cultural values attached to Austen’s work are constantly

being altered by the commercial demands of the media industry, which, in its

innumerable adaptations, is not only rewriting Austen but continually rewriting the

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modernist conceptual divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. The idea of the literary

‘cannon’ and ‘canonicity’, for example, appears to have found a new function in the

market-driven economy of the media, becoming one in a wider range of technologies

for branding and consumption. In this shifting media landscape, Austen is no longer

a writer, but a ‘story franchise’ (Jenkins 2006a and 2006b, Johnson 2013), and Pride

and Prejudice and Zombies is just one of the more recent outgrowths from this larger

shifting structure. Hence, the assault on canonical prejudice that Pride and Prejudice

and Zombies initially envisaged was an assault on a hierarchical cultural formation

that the media industry had already redrawn. Moreover, this redrawing should not

be understood as a collapse in traditional regimes of cultural value, but as part of an

ongoing process of cultural negotiation. Regimes of value are certainly a product of

social relations and arrangements of knowledge (Frow 1995), but in a market driven

economy the production of cultural objects will also be governed by a shifting and

sometimes anomalous perception about what will appeal to the greatest segment of

the market as possible. Rekulak recently confirmed, ‘I expected hate mail’, but the

response of Austen fans was ‘a delightful surprise’. He went on to argue that despite

the obvious satirical content of the novel, ‘Seth is not making fun of Pride and

Prejudice.’ ‘He understands that generations of readers love this book.’ ‘He knew it

would be crazy to make fun of it.’ He also reaffirmed the cultural status of the

Austen brand. ‘It’s such a landmark and important novel’ (2013).

On another level, the shift in the text’s market position also sheds light on the long

discussed problem of fidelity discourse in adaptation studies. This movement

beyond fidelity discourse was originally pioneered by critics such as Deborah

Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan (1999) and Robert Stam (2005a, 2005b, 2005c). Recently,

Thomas Leitch (2005) has progressed the argument further, stating that critics should

not limit themselves to a single literary source, but should have regard to a wider

range of works in an intertextual field. Costas Constandines (2010) has taken up a

similar position, arguing that critics must ‘take into consideration other media texts

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or subtexts that share familiar characters and narratives’ (2). Jenkins and Thorburn

(2004) have also argued with respect to media analysis more generally that critics

‘must resist notions of media purity, recognising that each medium is touched by

and in turn touches its neighbours and rivals’ (11). In short, whether or not the

relationship between adaptations and perceived ‘originals’ ought to be construed

horizontally (rather than hierarchically) as Linda Hutcheon (2006) argues, in terms of

the actual cultural practices of readers, adaptations are certainly texts that demand

to be read relationally. Adaptations are texts that are radiant with the traces of other

texts, and the flaunting of traces is often used to affirm the text’s status as an

adaptation. The traces have the effect of highlighting distance, producing a gap in

which the possibilities of the text begin to proliferate, uncontrollably at times,

especially for a reader who is literate in the discourses and genres that the

adaptation inhabits. In negotiating such a text, the reader oscillates not only between

the text and its perceived ‘originals’, but also between the text and its adaptations

across an inter-textual field of difference. In this sense, despite its joyful pillaging of

Austen’s words, Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies might be said to

refer as much, if not more to the famous 1995 BBC adaptation, and to countless other

adaptations, than it refers to the ‘original’ or historical Austen.

The complexity, and indeed, flexibility, of the processes of reading an adaptation,

can be registered in the ease with which diverse audiences — including, scholars,

bloggers and fans — were able to reconcile ‘Our Jane’ with a rampaging herd of

zombies. The same blog posts that claimed ‘Purists will hate this book …’ also went

on to explain why the blogger was not a so called ‘Purist’, arguing that far from

rolling over in her proverbial grave ‘Our Jane’ would surely have appreciated the

joke (indeed, in the early nineteenth century the relationship between high and low

culture was far less rigid). Even Halford in the New Yorker, while decrying the

lugubriousness of the prose style, immediately went on to invoke the work of a

respected Austen scholar who argued that the Grahame-Smith mashup had

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accurately identified a subtextual theme of ‘mystery and menace’ in the original

book (Halford 2009). ‘Her novels are hostile environments,’ another Austen scholar

told reporters (Goodwin 2009).

Hostility has indeed been the focus of much recent work by Austen scholars, who

have begun mining the uncomfortable and even violent sides to Austen’s texts to

great effect. William Galperin (2003) has drawn attention to the ways in which

Austen’s ‘light, bright and sparkling’ world is also a dark, multilayered and

complicated reality. He argues that although the plot interest in Pride and Prejudice

centres on Darcy – or more explicitly, on the desire for Darcy – there are many

elements that appear ‘not always consistent with this orientation and the ideological

function that it performs’ (25). Claudia Johnson (1990) has also argued for a

subversive agency in Austen’s writing. Property, marriage and family are dark and

hostile institutions in Austen, according to Johnson, and although Pride and Prejudice

is often seen to represent some kind of ‘failure of nerve’ (74) – evading questions

about the fate of educated women in a patriarchal society, or suggesting that the

existing state of society sustains rather than disrupts true happiness – Johnson

argues that ‘to imagine versions of authority responsive to criticism and capable of

transformation’ is not necessarily to ‘corroborate conservative myths’ (74).

However, any appeal to the historical Austen as a means of uncovering meaning in

Grahame-Smith’s text is fraught with problems. It must be clearly balanced against

an understanding that this is a text that is made and mobilised in the context of

twenty-first century American society. The mysterious plague that the text envisions

has less to do with the middleclass violence that the historical Austen does or does

not depict, but is rather — or so this essay will attempt to argue — a symptomatic

representation of the violence of the American Empire today.

In short, Austen’s text has been adapted to an altogether different purpose. Austen’s

novel was well suited for such adaptive re-use, according to Grahame-Smith,

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precisely because so many parts of the story are mysteriously missing. ‘There’s this

militia camped near Meryton. They are there for the young Bennet girls to flirt with,

but apart from that, what are they doing there? It’s never really explained’ (Goodwin

2009). This is what Mary Poovey — in more formal academic prose — has called

Austen’s non-referential aesthetic (Poovey 2012). The British militias are a frequent

feature of Austen’s work, but they do not appear in any political sense. They appear

purely in relation to the romantic plot. Poovey applies this idea to many aspects of

social life and politics as they are represented in Austen’s work. Famously, Austen’s

life spanned the dramatic social upheavals of the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries — the American War of Independence, the French Revolution,

the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, but none of these upheavals feature as

threats or otherwise in her fictional world. Pride and Prejudice was written at a time

when the enclosure acts were steadily driving the rural working classes off the land

into urban areas, which were rapidly undergoing industrialisation. By 1811, militant

Luddites were smashing machines in revolts over working conditions, and towns

like Manchester and Birmingham were already undergoing the painful

metamorphoses that would ultimately transform them into the shock cities of the

industrial era. None of these contemporary social realities appear in Austen. Mrs

Bennet has relatives in ‘respectable’ trade, but few members of social classes outside

the gentry or upper echelons of the middle class are presented – the Bennet’s

housekeeper, for example, is only occasionally referred to as ‘Hill’.

Nevertheless, much of the ‘mystery and menace’ that is played out in Austen does

relate to class politics. Austen is always acerbic and penetrating in her representation

of the foibles of her own class, but as Raymond Williams has argued, ‘All her

discrimination is understandable, internal and exclusive. She is concerned with the

conduct of people who, in the complications of improvement, are repeatedly trying

to make themselves into a class. But where only one class is seen, no classes are seen’

(Williams 1975, p.117). To many modern readers, there is something discomforting

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and even violent in this erasure, and there are numerous uncanny ways in which

Grahame-Smith’s zombies seem to fill the shape of this discomfort. In this sense,

Grahame-Smith’s text could be said to engage in a radical democratisation of

Austen’s work, not by reducing the class dimensions of the novel (as, for example,

the earlier American MGM adaptation (Leonard 1941) did, democratically

distributing silk petticoats and giant bonnets to all of the characters), but by

exacerbating them. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the material possession of

wealth and class actually assumes an increased importance, as only the wealthy are

able to build dojos, employ armies of ninjas, and devote their time to training for

combat. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, for example, is not merely respected for her

wealth and position, but for her deadly combat skills — or rather, wealth, position

and class sensibilities are rendered concrete through the retinue of ninjas, the

impressive dojo, and deadly combat skills.

Of course, class politics are a traditional concern of monster tales from which the

Grahame-Smith’s text also draws its influences. Franco Moretti famously argued that

Frankenstein’s monster is the ultimate proletarian monster, the terrifying product of

a system of capital that forms by deforming (Moretti 2005). In recent times, McNally

(2011) has extended Moretti’s argument, drawing attention to the ways in which the

zombie of Haitian folklore has usurped Frankenstein’s position as a popular

metaphor for human life subject to the depredations of post-industrial capitalism. In

Haitian culture, the zombie represents the historical memory of slavery; the image of

one human enslaved by the will of another. In the wake of the global economic crisis,

not only the western culture industries but western scholars have appropriated the

zombie image for their own use, as a metaphor not only for individuals but also for

social classes and institutions depleted of their intellectual and affective energies by

vampirous capital (hence, Quiggins’ Zombie Economics (2010), for example, and at the

other end of the spectrum Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies

(2011) in which the author refused to present a Marxist or Feminist case scenario

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among the many other political theories he presents, on the basis that the Marxists

and Feminists would have empathized with the zombies).

In this sense, it is interesting to note that zombies are never rendered as individuals

in Grahame-Smith’s text. They occasionally carry markers that would seem to point

to their status as members of the working class – one is ‘clad in a blood encrusted

blacksmith’s apron’ (2011, p.91), for example, another appears in ‘modest clothing’

carrying a child (2011, p.92) – but they are more commonly designated by generic

group descriptors such as ‘the herd’. This ‘herd’ is constructed as outcast and alien

within the text — zombies are commonly called ‘dreadfuls’ or ‘unmentionables’

throughout the series, as the ‘Zed word’ is deemed unfit for use in polite society —

and divided from the uncontaminated society by a concrete wall or ‘Britain’s Barrier’

(117) such as that which encircles the metropolis of London. This theme of the split

society — a common motif in monster tales — is also echoed in satirical descriptions

of the relationship between the upper and lower social orders of the

uncontaminated, as in the ironic praise of Mr Darcy tendered by his Pemberley

housekeeper, for example, who informs Elizabeth, ‘I have seen him savagely beat

but one servant’ (197).

This concern with social commentary or what might be construed as an attempt to

democratise Jane Austen’s text is most readily apparent in the recognisably post-

feminist reconstruction of the ‘kickarse’ Bennet sisters. In dealing with the gender

issues that are raised in Austen’s novel the textual strategy is generally to replace

verbal sparring with physical combat, mining the theme of ‘bodily excess’ in Austen

to which scholars such as Jill Heydt-Stevenson (2005) have already drawn critical

attention. Elizabeth and Darcy frequently engage in deadly combat with each other,

as well as with the zombies, only to discover that they are equally matched. In this

way the satire seems to be aimed against the strictures of an historic patriarchal

society in which women were regarded as chattel. The official video game of Pride

and Prejudice and Zombies certainly advertises itself in this way, offering a classic ‘beat

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‘em up’ game experience in which players are advised to ‘upgrade your special

attacks while you avoid both the repulsive undead and deadly repulsive suitors’

(Freeverse 2010). Yet the paratext provided by the computer game presents itself as

something of an optional extra to many readers of the novel. In the Grahame-Smith

text itself, the potential for an anarchic feminist reading is somewhat blunted by the

fact that towards the novel’s end it is of course Darcy who turns up on his steed to

save a strangely hapless and unprepared Elizabeth, who is being pursued by

zombies on his Pemberley estate. Darcy appears out of nowhere, like the lone sheriff

in a Sergio Leone Western, ‘upon a steed, holding a still smoking Brown Bess’,

swathed in gun smoke, his horse letting out a ‘mighty neigh’ as it ‘reared upon its

hind legs’ (199).

The image is, of course, ironic but for diehard Austen fans it seems to conjure up the

galloping horses that featured in the opening scene of the 1995 BBC series, through

which writer Andrew Davies attempted to endow Bingley and Darcy with certain

masculine qualities. Indeed, the Grahame-Smith text constantly strives to reference

the quality of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ that fuelled the so-called ‘Darcy-mania’ that

accompanied the BBC production, in which the tightness of Darcy’s trousers

famously generated more column inches that any of the women’s conspicuously

heaving busts. Hence, the repeated references to Darcy’s ‘netherparts’, the countless

anachronistic puns on the word ‘balls’, in addition to the more direct references as

when Elizabeth’s Aunt informs her, ‘there is something of dignity in the way his

trousers cling to those most English parts of him’ (206). This is allegedly good fun.

Nevertheless, it should be clear to some readers at least that Darcy, as a figure of

desire and authority, is constantly being produced within the Grahame-Smith text

via a contrast with an emasculated, unenergetic and thoroughly unEnglish Other —

in other words, a zombie. There is also an unsettling sense, as the hero and the

heroine unite at the tale’s end, that the gender politics being played out are more

akin to the pre-feminist politics played out in that earlier MGM adaptation (Leonard

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1941), in which Elizabeth is allowed to gain the upper hand by besting Darcy in an

archery competition, but all the unruly Bennet sisters are married off and safely

subservient at the story’s end. It is therefore incumbent on any feminist critic to

point out that in the historical Austen’s world a woman’s choice was invariably one

between getting married and not getting married. Moreover, the consequence of not

getting married was invariably one of complete dependence on one’s male relatives

— hence, not much of a choice at all. However, in the parallel universe of Pride and

Prejudice and Zombies the characters and their situations are in fact utterly

transformed. They are, in this sense, entirely different characters. In Pride and

Prejudice and Zombies, Elizabeth has a choice between marriage and a career as a

zombie slayer and so the decision to marry Darcy — in terms of a feminist reading,

at least — seems somewhat forced or false. Interestingly enough, this is a narrative

thread that Hockensmith picks up in the sequel, Dreadfully Ever After (2011), which

opens with Elizabeth bitterly regretting the diminution of her freedom.

In terms of gender politics, the most intriguing element of the Grahame-Smith

adaptation is perhaps the reshaping of the Charlotte Collins plot. In the Grahame-

Smith adaptation, Charlotte is ‘stricken’ by a zombie during a walk to Longbourn

(the moment is revealed by Lydia who notices in a comically understated way that

Charlotte had a ‘rather disconcerted look on her face’ (89)), but nobody save

Elizabeth appears to notice what is happening to Charlotte as the plague takes its

toll. Charlotte turns a ghastly shade of grey, and her table manners are rendered

increasingly grotesque. She gradually looses the capacity to speak. In Austen’s

novel, Charlotte marries Mr. Collins because – rightly or wrongly – she comes to

believe that marriage is the only way to negotiate some limited form of freedom

across the repressive discourses of her time. In Grahame-Smith’s text, the entangling

of Charlotte’s fateful decision with her transformation into the undead works to

highlight the ways in which Charlotte’s life, and lives of nineteenth century women

in general, were commodified. Charlotte’s life is treated as a separable and

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detachable thing that is no longer seen as integral to her personhood, but as

something that can be alienated — that is, handed over to somebody else for a

stipulated period of time in return for financial gain, or, in this case, financial

security. Hence, as Charlotte’s life energies are detached from her person, her body

is reduced to a mere husk or empty shell — she is impelled by a strange and singular

desire (to eat brains), but is otherwise devoid of mind, energy and will. Indeed, in

Grahame-Smith’s text, Charlotte’s situation is depicted with more understanding

than in any other Austen adaptation — for example, despite the democratic

renovations of Lost in Austen (Zeff 2008), Charlotte’s failure in marriage results in her

being banished to the wilds of Africa, condemned to disappear from the plot and the

television screen altogether. Charlotte loses her selfhood in Grahame-Smith’s text,

but it is significant that the loss is clearly documented and rendered visible. Collins

position in the Grahame-Smith plot is also interesting. On eventually finding out

that his ‘beloved’ has been transformed into a zombie, Collins valiantly kills himself

— affording his character a greater measure of redemption than is seen in any other

Austen adaptation (ironically, however, he ruins the possibility of final salvation by

allowing Lady Catherine to first behead his ‘beloved’ Charlotte on his behalf).

Charlotte’s transformation is wonderfully explicable in terms of the politics of

Grahame-Smith’s text, but the text contains many apparently anarchic incidents that

are more difficult to explain. One of the most extraordinary is perhaps the scene in

which Elizabeth, wearing a blindfold, slaughters three of Lady Catherine’s ninjas,

each in a progressively more gruesome way — the last being strangled with his own

intestines before his ‘still beating heart’ (197) is devoured by a cannibalistic

Elizabeth. Fan sites would perhaps label this image OOC (meaning ‘Out of

Character’) or worse still FWC (meaning ‘Fuck With Canon’) primarily because it is a

scene in which — perhaps — the excess so undercuts the irony that the satirical

point seems somewhat lost. However, at a deeper level, the image of Elizabeth

devouring the still beating heart of a ninja is profoundly disturbing because it has

16

the effect of adding additional layers of meaning relating to power and race. In the

context provided by Austen’s de-referentialised storyworld, the soldiers do not leave

to fight Bonaparte on the continent or the ‘Savages’ in the colonies, rather the threat

is transformed into a domestic one in which the katana-wielding Bennett sisters

become the unlikely figures called upon to participate in the violent suppression of

the Other in the form of the zombie — and occasionally the ninja as well.

In many novels of Britain’s imperial age, foreign possessions help to establish wealth

and consequence — and therefore social order — at home. ‘Money from Elsewhere’

in the guise of profits from the East India Company, or exotic colonial plantations,

provide the means for many a plot resolution in Dickens or Trollope, and Edward

Said’s (1993) influential study of Mansfield Park has famously argued that Austen

may also have taken the right to these imperial proceeds for granted. In Grahame-

Smith’s text, the upper social classes go to the ‘Orient’ not to acquire wealth, but to

acquire the ‘deadly arts’ that will allow them to impose order on society in a more

direct and violent way. Hence, despite the apparently democratic renovations of this

twenty-first century adaptation, the persistence of such cultural blindness is

worrying. Grahame-Smith’s ninjas, like the zombies, are figures appropriated from

American cartoon culture, and retain the anarchic violence of that genre. However,

the problem is not that the ninjas in the text are treated ‘cartoonishly’, but that the

Orient and its ‘Orientals’ continue to function within the text as sites of exploitation.

This also raises the question as to whether the use of the zombie — like the ninja —

is in fact another invisibility tactic designed to mask the presence of historic violence.

This is the reading of Grahame-Smith’s text that is consistently mined and extended

in Steve Hockensmith’s prequel and sequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it

is the attempt to deal with the violence entailed in such images that makes

Hockensmith’s additions to the series more radical and therefore interesting.

Dawn of the Dreadfuls and Dreadfully Ever After

17

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a publisher in possession of a million

dollar bestseller, must be in want of another million dollar bestseller,’ wrote Jeff

Sparrow in the Melbourne Age (Sparrow 2010), a suspicion that was echoed by critics

internationally as Hockensmith’s Dawn of the Dreadfuls (2010) found its way into the

bookshops. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sold close to one million copies in the

United States, causing fanworks to proliferate, or at least, to be picked up by

mainstream publishers at a remarkable rate, including, Little Women and Werewolves,

Little Vampire Women, Alice in Zombieland and Jane Slayre, to name just a few. At

Quirk, Rekulak had also been busy attempting to replicate his own success. In

addition to the prequel and sequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, he had

commissioned and published Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters and Android

Karenina. The mainstream media were also keeping up with what was now being

touted as the ‘monster mashup’ phenomenon, as USA Today put it, ‘no classic title or

historical figure is safe’ (2010).

Hockensmith had already produced a successful fanwork of his own before being

approached by Rekulak, namely Holmes on the Range, a Sherlock Holmes-style

mystery set in the Wild West (Hockensmith 2006). In interviews following the

launch of Dawn of Dreadfuls Hockensmith pointed out that his work was part of a

wider creative phenomenon thrown up by a media savvy generation saturated in

popular culture. ‘We’re really used to having the power of the zapper: flip, flip, flip,’

said Hockensmith. ‘People consume things much more quickly, and in much smaller

bites, and I think that lends itself to thinking of things in a much more slice and dice

way. The next logical step is that you’re not just flipping around the dial of your

remote, that things are actually combining in some way, to form new things’

(Keenan 2010). Hockensmith’s argument echoes the position taken by media critics

such as Jenkins (2006). People are not merely consumers of popular culture, but

active producers of it. New media technologies have not so much engendered, as

given greater visibility to ‘amateur creativity’ as the extraordinary quality of the

18

user-generated content for Wikipedia or Second Life eloquently shows. Hockensmith’s

Dawn of the Dreadfuls (2010) and Dreadfully Ever After (2011) reference the tactics of

‘amateur creativity’ not by deploying the strategies of the mashup as Grahame-

Smith did so much as by extending and drawing out the story world of a prior

adaptation. It is clearly an adaptation of an adaptation.

However, it is interesting to note that despite the repeated invocations of amateur or

fan culture the Quirk book trailer that launched Dawn of the Dreadfuls (Haine 2010)

actually abandons the edgy amateur aesthetics of the original Pride and Prejudice and

Zombies book trailer, replacing them with expensive period costumes, professional-

looking actors and the kind of high production values that would seem to allude to

British Heritage Film. In the book trailer, a darkly handsome Master Hawksworth

announces to the Bennet sisters gathered for combat training in a startlingly white

and shiny Georgian dojo, ‘your days of ease and luxury are over’. The next line of

dialogue is turned on the potential consumer. ‘Are you ready?’ The Bennet sisters

answer, ‘Hai!’ Rekulak states that he had little to do with the creation of this trailer

‘other than signing off on a general concept and the team that we hired to create it’

(2013).

One of the most striking aspects of the Hockensmith books is that the zombies —

though they are still ‘dreadfuls’ and ‘unmentionables’ — are no longer nameless and

faceless. Rather, it is clear from the very start that these zombies were once sentient

human beings with lives, loves and occupations. The prequel commences when Mr

Ford, a village apothecary, rises up from his coffin at his own funeral. Ford is a petit

bourgeois shopkeeper with ‘a heavy thumb upon the scales’ (22) and not much

admired by the Bennets. Consequently, though Elizabeth and Mary — who are still

young at this point in the story and yet to be trained in the art of deadly combat —

initially resist Mr Bennet’s peremptory demand that they ‘lop off’ Mr Ford’s head as

‘easy as pruning a rose’, neither are they overly stunned. Mr Ford, in short, is not

sympathetic. Nevertheless, as the series continues, so too does the exploration of

19

political issues around class and race. The swelling armies of the ‘stricken’ are no

longer presented as faceless monsters, but families rising up from the ghastly hovels

where they have been struck dead by poverty, typhoid, cholera or straightforward

starvation.

Grotesque figures proliferate between the pages as the drama unfolds. There are

military officers sporting mutton chop moustaches, rendered armless and legless,

including one carried around in a wheelbarrow by ensigns called ‘limbs’, and

another in a cart drawn by two dogs. Gangs of hungry orphans turn seamlessly from

pickpocketing to brain chomping. The gentry, represented by the cartoonish figures

of Lord Lumpley in the prequel, and Bunny Farquar in the sequel, are shown to be

sadistic, irresponsible and crass. In Dreadfully Ever After, the final book of the trilogy,

zombies are run in the Ascot races for the gentry’s amusement, chasing bait in the

form of an Irishman, in an obvious allusion to Britain’s first imperial project. Indeed,

the colonial relationship with Ireland is a regular feature of the Hockensmith books,

with the first zombie wars nostalgically recollected as the ‘Troubles’. As the action

escalates, retaliation on the part of the authorities also becomes increasingly brutal.

Infants and toddlers are cut down as mercilessly as their parents. Entire families are

slain. In the final book, tainted citizens are dragged from their carriages and

summarily shot before the gates to the walled city of London. ‘There’s only one cure

for the plague,’ the executioner informs the hapless, lisping victim (61). What is

being played out in the prequel and sequel is of course the threads of the theme of

class and race that sits only slightly below the surface in Grahame-Smith’s text —

though the exploration of this theme is arguably foreclosed by the formal constraints

of a mash up with a heavy reliance on 85% Austen. (It is perhaps worth noting, in

this respect, that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Winters 2009) featured only

60% Austen.) Indeed, it may be that the author of an adaptation is only free from the

constraints imposed by the adapted work once – like Lost in Austen’s Amanda Price –

they throw the book into the fountain.

20

In the Hockensmith books, the zombie problem is overtly presented in relation to the

theme of Englishness. In Dawn of the Dreadfuls, Mr Bennet, a former zombie slayer,

recollects how he turned to the East during the ‘Troubles’, when others would have

‘preferred an English solution to an English problem’ (28). Jane Bennet’s admirer

Lieutenant Tindall is perhaps the most prominent among the characters showing

preference for this English solution. At the novel’s end, he dies an ‘honourable

death’ at the Battle of Netherfield Hall, blowing his brains out rather than being

contaminated when he finds himself surrounded by zombies. ‘What I am is a soldier

who loves his country,’ Tindall tells Elizabeth. ‘Its traditions. Its values. Everything it

stands for. And if we destroy the unmentionables but allow them to destroy all that

— including our ideal of genteel English womanhood — can we even say we’ve

truly won?’ (153). Elizabeth, recently trained for combat at the behest of Mr Bennet,

declares that she would rather fight than remain genteel. Tindall tells her, ‘You must

keep faith with those things that have made England great, Miss Bennet’. Elizabeth

retorts, ‘General Cornwallis thought that and last time he was seen feasting on his

own dragoons’ (153). The ‘English solution’ is clearly open to criticism.

Elizabeth, in the course of the prequel, is presented with two suitors who personify

alternative solutions to the zombie problem. The first is the dashing Master

Hawksworth, who has been hired by Mr Bennet to train his daughters in the art of

deadly combat. The other is Dr Keckilpenny, who is attempting to invent a solution

to the zombie problem along scientific lines. Keckilpenny opposes the English

solution represented by Tindall. ‘We can’t go around being impolite when we’re

about to be overrun by reanimated cadavers! Egad — the English!’ (101). He

devoutly believes that science will provide a better answer. ‘I would point out that

we are now in the nineteenth century. Time has marched on … science shall prevail’

(231). Keckilpenny constructs a laboratory in the attic of the Netherfield mansion

that has been transformed into a military barracks. In the thick of the ensuing battle,

as local villagers cower in the ballroom, as zombie armies overrun the defences, as

21

soldiers are dying in droves, he refuses to leave off from his work. Keckilpenny — it

is finally revealed — is attempting to recondition zombies by talking to them gently,

while — ironically, of course — they are simultaneously bound and chained to the

wall. Ominously, he refers to this pseudoscientific process as ‘re-Anglification’ (231).

Keckilpenny’s scientific solution to the zombie problem is in turn contrasted with

the ideas of Master Hawkesworth, Elizabeth’s other suitor who has been hired by Mr

Bennet to train his daughters in the deadly arts. ‘[Keckilpenny] puts his faith in the

sciences rather than the deadly arts,’ Elizabeth explains. Hawkesworth retorts, ‘They

believe we can think our enemies away. Fools! Understanding didn’t stop the

dreadfuls last time’ (129). In spite of these and other noisy warlike declarations,

Hawksworth inevitably turns out to lack the very courage that he protests. Faced

with death at the hands of the zombies, he steals a horse from a hapless soldier in the

thick of the battle of Netherfield and runs from the fight. Meanwhile, the zombie that

Keckilpenny is holding captive in his laboratory strikes back at his tormentor and

Keckilpenny proves himself to be a coward of a different sort. Keckilpenny refuses

medical treatment — that is, by amputation — until his condition becomes so bad

that he, too, must be dispatched.

In short, the zombies in the Hockensmith books are overtly produced as an Other to

Englishness, with its attendant notions of gentlemanliness, and the critiques of sex,

class and race it entails. But it soon becomes clear that it is not zombies, but the

spectre of Otherness itself that is the real target of novel’s attack. This is particularly

apparent in Dreadfully Ever After, the last book in the series, in which Darcy is

stricken by a zombie child (who is, of course, unceremoniously clobbered), and

Elizabeth, now Mrs Darcy, must locate the mysterious zombie vaccine that according

to Lady Catherine de Bourgh is to be found in a medical clinic run by Dr Farquar in

London.

22

Elizabeth is joined by Kitty and Mr Bennet on this daring quest, but it is Mary,

transformed from a prosy reader of sermons to a feisty fan of Mary Wollstonecraft’s

A Vindication of the Rights of Women, who is ultimately responsible for locating the

vaccine. Mary slips passed the guards to the gates of Twelve Central in the walled

city of London, and enters a gothic inferno. Corpses are piled waist high in the

gutters outside ramshackle buildings, ‘some with their heads removed or crudely

crushed, others ready to reawaken to darkness at any moment’ (125). There are

‘naked children, empty bellies protruding before them like little drums, staring at

her with glassy, sunken eyes’ (125). There are soldiers ‘tossing the corpses onto the

back of a dray already heaped high’ beneath ‘the chimneys of a crematorium that

spewed black over the nearest rooftops’ (125). The gruesome poverty of Twelve

Central goes beyond the image of poverty associated with industrialising cities of

the nineteenth century. It is not a representation of a city that has been built on

industrial growth, so much as on rural dislocation. In the twenty-first century

context it resembles nothing less than those cities of the developing — sometimes

called the majority — world whose inhabitants must eke out a living through theft,

scavenging and prostitution in what is euphemistically called the ‘informal

economy’. Mary comes to the shattering realisation that the walls of Twelve Central

‘were as much for locking this horror in as keeping the dreadfuls out’ (156).

In Dreadfully Ever After the fear of invasion by alien Others that is represented by the

zombies, alternates with the fear that an exclusionary or divided society may turn

into a kind of cannibalistic community — a nightmarish trap, rotting from within. In

this sense it might be argued that the zombies do not stand for a threat to social

order from without, but rather represent the social processes that produce and

enforce order. Hence, the soldiers in Twelve Central use sabres to decapitate the

corpses ‘the heaps reaching as high as Mary’s chest in spots’ (165) so the sound of

musket shots doesn’t disturb the peace of the gentry in the adjoining suburbs, who

are to be kept in continued ignorance of ‘how very, very wrong the wrong side really

23

was’ (165). Ultimately, the repressed in the form of class politics is allowed to return

in a blackly comic moment towards the end of the book — specifically in the guise of

Mr Cricket, who, after a ‘miserable life in a Whitechapel workhouse followed by an

adulthood stoking furnaces at the Hackney Crematorium and Glue Factory’ (251),

drained of his life energies by an oppressive system of capital, rises from the dismal

hovel in which he has perished, and finding himself transformed into a zombie,

enacts a ‘magical revenge’ (Shapiro 1993, p.87) by stampeding the ‘Royal Re-

coronation Ceremony’ and devouring the brains of King George III.

However, in the Hockensmith books, the terror of the Other that is such a constant

theme of monster narratives most conspicuously plays itself out in the theme of race.

Ninjas, as in the earlier novels, are presented as tools for the violent imposition of

social order. They are not only to be used against the undead, but also against the

living — as Elizabeth has found out through her encounters with Lady Catherine’s

ninjas following her attempts to defy Lady Catherine earlier on. In Pride and Prejudice

and Zombies, the ninjas are textual figures somewhat akin to the figure of the

household retainer in the nineteenth century novel. They are fixtures or props in the

text, whose work is necessary to the functioning of the world of the text, but who, in

all other respects, remain anonymous. The ninjas are people on whom the social and

political economy of the text depends, but whose social reality — as human beings

— do not appear to require the reader’s attention. That is of course until the last

book in the series, in which Hockensmith attempts to turn this cultural complacency

on its head.

Indeed, contempt for the ninjas is an attribute that many characters in the

Hockensmith books share. Even Mary, despite her proto-feminist transformation,

happily beats up on the household ninjas when she arrives at Elizabeth’s temporary

residence in London —the house in which Elizabeth, Kitty and Mr Bennet have

taken up residence as they embark on their quest for the zombie vaccine that is

needed to cure Darcy. Elizabeth tells Mary that the household ninjas could not have

24

told Mary where Elizabeth was, for example, because the ninjas do not speak

English. ‘Ah,’ Mary responds. ‘That would explain why the conversation was going

so poorly’ (101). Kitty begins to complicate the relationship between the Bennets and

the ninjas by falling in love with the ninja leader Nezhu, despite what is ironically

conjured up as the ‘scandalous fact of his race’. Kitty is forced to confront her

prejudice. She has been taught that ninjas are ‘Sneaky, deceitful little snakes’ and

‘dirty, dishonourable, backstabbing curs’ (144). The ninjas, of course, are textual

figures — they form an intertext with other genres, specifically, martial arts cartoons.

Grahame-Smith calls them ‘Orientals’, but Hockensmith makes them ‘Orientals’ in

the modern sense of the word — that is, the cultural products of what Said (Said

2003) has called the west’s imperial fantasy, conjured out of countless narratives of

the violent, seductive, deadly East.

In Hockensmith’s text, it is consciousness of the oppressed Other in the form of the

ninja that provides the solution to the zombie problem. As Mary penetrates to the

heart of Twelve Central, she discovers a locked hospital where a vaccine has indeed

been made that is capable of inoculating the living against the zombie plague. This

vaccine is made of the blood of foreigners — and ‘lots’ of it. Hitherto, this blood has

been obtained from young orphans, such as the Punjabi children Gurdaya and

Mohan, who are held prisoner in the hospital where the sinister Dr Farquar conducts

his experiments. Despite the various hurdles thrown up by the plot, it is indeed this

sinister vaccine that ultimately cures Darcy of the zombie plague. Darcy and

Elizabeth thank the orphans by ‘adopting’ them – and the reader is presented with a

strange pastoral image of these colonial orphans and ninjas romping through the

gardens of Pemberley, ‘some looked Indian, some Mohammedan, some African. Not

one had blond hair or blue eyes or fair skin’ (257).

Hence, the nihilistic ending of the zombie narrative, and, indeed, the cautionary

ending of the traditional monster narrative, is forsaken for an apocalyptic ending in

which the hero functions to lead the survivors to a new or ‘promised land’ where

25

society will be refounded anew. On one level, it seems that the new pluralistic

multicultural society figured in the novel represents a case of the Empire Striking

Back — Kitty will undoubtedly marry Nezhu, for example, and presumably give

birth to ‘zombie immune’ children — and this is therefore, perhaps, a cause for

celebration. However, there is also something exceedingly disturbing about the

metaphors of contagion, vaccination and cure as they are mobilised in the text. It is

an uncomfortable image because it is not one of recognition of the Other but

absorption. As Ziaudin Sardar (Sardar 1998) has argued with respect to postmodern

culture more generally, it ‘takes the ideological mystification of colonialism and

modernity to a new, all-pervasive level of control and oppression of the Other while

parading itself as an intellectual alibi for the west’s perpetual quest for meaning

through consumption, including the consumption of all Others’ (40).

The action of the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies trilogy has a carnival character that

is wickedly appealing. The figures of high culture are knocked off their proverbial

pedestals, and the figures of low culture are resplendently dressed in high cultural

garb. However, it is also important to ponder the ways in which a text that is

seemingly so resolutely about the ‘capitalist grotesque’ (McNally 2011) is also in

complex ways a product of that same market process – and in this sense the novel’s

carnival values need to be read as market mediated. Finally, it is important to

constantly recollect that the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies trilogy should not be read

as a representation of nineteenth century British culture, still less as a representation

of the hostility and menace of the historical Austen, but a product of twenty-first

century American culture. It references the historic violence of nineteenth century

imperialism and capitalism, but only as a figure for the ongoing violence of the

American Empire as it is experienced in the world today. In this respect, the image

of contagion and inoculation — the literal ingesting of the blood of Others — like

‘Money from Elsewhere’ — is an inadequate metaphor for a solution to the horrors

that the novels otherwise so eloquently propose.

26

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