ColourBlind Casting

Image credit: Glamour Magazine

Over the past 25 years, we have seen many adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, and the adaptations have in several cases been visually very confronting and challenging, for some viewers. I believe this trend started with the Miramax adaptation of Mansfield Park, released in 1999.

While this production did not cast people of colour in the main roles, or even in minor roles, it is the first production ever to have vividly illuminated the cruelty, objectification and exploitation of slavery, as part of colonialism and enrichment, as practised by Sir Thomas Bertram, owner of Mansfield Park, in a way which shocks the heroine, Fanny, who is the moral centre of the story.

The revelation of the sources of his wealth and status show the questionable ethical conduct of the patriarch of this family, and provide a context for the subsequent moral disintegration of his children, who all fall prey to forms of temptation and depravity, even Edmund, who is intimately redeemed only by his affection for Fanny.

In more recent years, we have seen the quasi Regency Shondaland confection, Bridgerton, on our screens, openly using the slightest of speculations regarding the genetic ancestry of an English queen as a framing portal to usher in women and men of African and Indian heritage into the story landscape, each with their colourful back stories.

This inclusiveness and diversification trend has extended into the 19thC production ‘The Gilded Age’, in which wealthy African American families are brought into connection by the story writers with the Anglo-European families of New York.

In Bridgerton, the scenes where the elder sister of the Sharma family, in Season Two, participates with her younger sister and mother in the saffron/ turmeric paste beautifying rituals traditionally used by Indian brides before the impending wedding ceremony are beautiful to see. The love story between Miss Sharma and the eldest son of the Bridgerton family is based on an ‘enemies to friends’ arc which is very believable, and in which contrasting skin colour is no barrier to the recognition of beauty and desirable character qualities.

This preference to bring characters together across social barriers was foreshadowed in Season One when the eldest Bridgerton daughter falls in love with the dark and handsome Duke, and their magnetic attraction to each other is intensely illustrated in their words and actions, inter alia as a celebration of their equality or at least equivalence of social status.

In Jane Austen’s adaptations, we have not seen any casting director go beyond the pale, and venture into colourblind casting. Elizabeth Bennet may be accused by the jealous Miss Bingley of having ‘brown’ skin, but (fortunately for all of us clutching our pearls) it is only ‘tanned’, which is ‘no great wonder, in the summer’.

Shakespeare’s work, in contrast, has been often performed with people of all hues and from all ethnic backgrounds in the principal roles, and recent performances of Harry Potter on the stage actually cast a black Hermione Granger. The author herself, in her description of the characters, never specified Hermione’s ethnic heritage, only stating that she had bushy hair, and it is clear that the prettiest girls in Hogwarts School were the Indian Patel twins, and the Chinese Cho Chang.

Bridgerton aside, this embracing of diversity in the film and stage productions of beloved books which are regarded as central to the English literary canon is a trend about which I have mixed feelings. The realities of colonisation and the assertions of white supremacists created a conceptual underclass, in which people of colour lived their lives as minor characters and in service to the central characters. And therefore, in the cultural products of those eras, artworks were created in which people of colour were erased, or invisible.

The comments sections of Jane Austen online groups is an interesting snapshot of our times.

‘Mansfield Park has, to my mind, the best TV Austen adaptation of all time: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04vfvpn via @bbciplayer

Impeccable costuming, wonderful casting, fidelity to the novel, understanding of the period, and no painful, anachronistic, ignorantly woke attempts to force every third character to be black or trans.’

Shoehorning people of colour into European landscapes is problematic. But what seems to really offend some people is the high status which these people of colour are afforded, in these fictional narratives. It is ‘anachronistic and painful’, because it clearly offends supremacist beliefs that people of colour could be so well established, so dignified, and elegantly costumed, and coiffured, and move as equals through gilded drawing rooms, and be centered in narratives instead of sidelined.

One of the worst and laziest equations ever made is the lumping together of minorities as second class citizens, seen as having lesser value: women, disabled people, trans people, people of colour and people exhibiting other forms of divergence from a standard of normativeness which is male, heterosexual and with skin containing less melanin, into the messy category of ‘different’, which to the minds of many is a euphemism for ‘deviant’. Women are not even a minority, statistically.

In Georgette Heyer’s novel, These Old Shades, the Duke of Avon’s sister has a black servant boy, called Pompey. The social mobility we are being shown in what I term Regency concoctions is wish fulfillment on the part of those who prefer a more colourful and equitable world, and have chosen to create it themselves, in fictional storytelling, reality falling far short of the way they clearly wish the world to be.

Colourblind casting on the one hand asserts the primacy of human personality, of intelligence and soul and emotion, as being more significant than external identifiers of race, colouring, facial features, hair type, physiognomy and body shape. In these contemporary performances, it is visually suggested that calibre, and content of character, is more important than the colour of a person’s skin. We relate to the characters on our screens as human beings, and we become interested and involved in their challenges and experiences as if they were real, and relatable.

However, in our identity obsessed world, it is also a form of false equivalence, and erasure of difference. We are not all human flat packs, culturally constructed the same. Our unique social and anthropological characteristics, and the cultural traditions in which we have evolved, are part of us.

The genders are different, and more diversely and subtly formulated these days. The actor who played the eldest Bridgerton son could not be more than a good friend to the lovely Miss Sharma, in real life.

This celebration of difference is at the heart of any union of human beings, whether personal in marriage, or political, in the form of nations. Tolerance is not a grudging recognition of someone else’s equivalent centre of self, but ideally, in a less threatened and defensive society, a more positive delight in multifoliate hues and difference.

In our excitable contemporary world, in which people find it difficult to do anything other than compete for territory and contest the most desirable sociocultural space to occupy, and the most compelling platforms on which to speak their truths, it is the reinterpretations of classic stories which portray to us the evolution of our species. Both in the bold steps forward, with the diversification of what we are now being shown as admirable and worthy, and the hue and cry (often muted, in genteel literary groups) that inevitably follows.