Jane Goes Gaga: Austen as Celebrity and Brand
Marina Cano2022, The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen. Edited By Cheryl A. Wilson, Maria H. Frawley
The title of this chapter might, at first sight, seem perplexing. After all, what does Lady Gaga, a modern Italian-American pop singer, have to do with Jane Austen, a British novelist from the Regency period? I am borrowing the first half of my title from Jack Halberstam's book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012). There Halberstam argues that pop star Lady Gaga functions as an avatar for a new kind of feminism, 'a sign of a new world of disorder', in the twenty-first century (xii). Lady Gaga's outlandish performances, free rhythms and lyrics and eccentric outfits, Halberstam continues, push cultural boundaries, pointing to wider sociocultural changes in the West (137). Halberstam uses the terms 'gaga' and 'going gaga' in the sense of going crazy, becoming wild, anarchic and out of control. He notes that the word 'gaga' precedes Lady Gaga herself and has similar sensibilities as the word 'queer', in that both evoke the spirit of anarchy and allude to an anti-normative world order-or rather disorder (6). My use of the term 'gaga' in this chapter departs slightly from Halberstam: I am first evoking Lady Gaga as diva and cult figure to argue that in the late 2010s and early 2020s Austen has entered the world of celebrity. Austen has become a celebrity idol to whom we expect round-the-clock access-as we do to Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and other notables of their generation. Yet some of Halberstam's meaning of gaga as the outrageous and preposterous also applies-for instance, one Austen event I analyse below invited fans to re-enact the pond scene from the BBC Pride and Prejudice (1995) in their backyard. Halberstam's sense of gaga as something culturally wild, anarchic and excessive is present in the recent Austen events and popular manifestations that I examine in this chapter. I am proposing a Gaga Austen: as celebrity, brand and object of endless scrutiny, contemporary Austen is going gaga. The sources I use for my examination of Gaga Austen are exhibitions, events and online platforms from the 2010s, many of which were part of the 200th anniversary celebrations of Austen's death in 2017. They include the exhibitions Which Jane Austen? at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (June-October 2017), which presented Austen as war novelist and savvy businesswoman; and Jane Austen by the Sea at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (June 2017-January 2018), which explored Austen's connection with coastal towns. Other sources are the Austen wax figure unveiled in 2014 (The Austen Centre, Bath), and Chawton House's fundraising campaign Reimagining Jane Austen's 'Great House', which aims to save the manor house belonging to Austen's brother Edward. Recent e-spaces also receive attention: the project Reading with Austen (launched in 2018) recreates Edward Austen Knight's library at Godmersham, and What Jane Saw (launched in 2013) reconstructs the London art gallery Austen visited, or might have visited, in 1796 and 1813. The instability and
