Jamie A. Thomas
  • About
  • Portfolio
    • Digital Storytelling
    • Ethnography + Language
  • Teaching
    • AfroLatinx Podcast
    • [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED]
  • Blog
  • Connect With Me

#languagestory blog

Video & perspectives on communication, intercultural learning & the impact of anthropological research.

Orientalism & Female Empowerment in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

3/18/2016

1 Comment

 
by Fanyi Ma

Female Warriors and 'The Oriental'.

The first thing that caught my attention in ​Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the appearance of “the oriental” in the storyline. The Bennetts send all five of their daughters to China to study the martial arts, which is very economically demanding. What’s more, there are multiple moments in the movie that portray various characters' fetishization of “oriental” cultures, including scenes where Chinese and Japanese are spoken by the Bennett sisters and their companions. 

​While it’s reasonable for one to assume that the opportunity to study martial arts is a privilege of the noble class, these women's new fighting abilities are only tolerated by the nobility as a necessary evil. Even under the threat of attacking zombies, women are still held to a particular level of decorum and manner. This complex attitude towards female warriors underscores the prominence of gender inequality in the film.
Picture
I’ll just be honest with you—I am very disappointed by this movie. The zombie is a social concept we’ve been contesting throughout the semester, and it has so many potential ways to be embedded in Jane Austen’s novel. Being a by-product of pride and prejudice itself, the zombie can be a perfect tool for conveying themes like social class, self-identity, hatred, fear, etc.However, what I saw in the movie was just the thread of human vs. zombie simply synchronized and paired up with the plots of the original story, creating a logically flawed, overly dramatized and self-contradicting pandemonium.

Flawed Depiction of China-Western Relations.

Another detail of the film ​Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that caught my attention was the time period in which the story takes place. The early 19th century is a crucial era in the history of China-Western interaction. That’s when the falling empire of the Qing Dynasty clashed with rising Western powers.

Great Britain, along with many other European countries and westernized Asian countries, forced the historically self-sufficient agricultural empire to open its gate and pushed China into the trend of global trade. The weakened Chinese empire had no choice but giving away its land and sovereignty after several unsuccessful attempts at fighting back.

Foreign missionaries and businessmen swarmed into China to spread "civilization" and seek their fortunes. Encounters with Chinese culture were usually described as modern civilization converting the primitive, mysterious, and incompetent doctrines of the Chinese. If we keep this historical background in mind, the appreciation of what is referred to in the film as "Oriental culture" seems pretty out of place.


These two paradoxes--Orientalism and female empowerment in the early 19th century--both have the potential to escalate the original story to a deeper level of inquiry into gender and cultural privilege. However, the movie's directors don't seem to bother. Instead, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies easily focuses on  dramatic battle scenes, while leaving these two threads unresolved. 

Unpacking the Zombie Concept. 

Before we try to understand the connection between zombies and Pride and Prejudice, let’s check our glossary first.
  1. Zombie—an undead being created through the reanimation of a human corpse. (Wikipedia) Originated in Haitian Vodou, zonbi can mean several different beings, from a stolen soul to a spirit receptacle. (Kordas) However, since its first appearance in American pop culture in the 1932 movie White Zombie, “zombie” (note the difference in spelling with the original Haitian zonbi) has been depicted as a “reanimated, mindless, soulless corpse taken from its grave to serve the master who had awakened it.” (Kordas) The social and cultural representation of the zombie in the United States is usually strongly linked with social groups that are feared or considered threats by White, middle-class Americans, examples vary from immigrants of color to “modern, strong women.”
  2. Pride and Prejudice—a novel by Jane Austen. It follows the story of its main character, Elizabeth Bennett, the second of five daughters of an early 19th century English country gentleman, Mr. Bennett. The novel discusses multiple themes, including marriage, social class, morality, and identity in the society of landed gentry of the British Regency. (Wikipedia)
 
With these two key terms defined, we can now start unpacking some plots of the movie and try to spice it up (or nerd it up) with a hint of zombies. 
Picture

Why Fear Zombies At All?

Now that we’re talking about fighting zombies, I can’t help asking this seemingly stupid question: why do people (both characters of the movie and the audience) fear zombies in the first place? In its Vodou origin, the formation of a zombie (being awakened by master to serve the master) is a vital part of collective religious belief. In the movie, the transformation from human to zombie is also emphasized and contested at multiple points.

On one hand, the distinction between human and zombie, us and them, is clear from the very beginning. Whoever is found out to be a zombie will be outcast by the aristocratic community, just like how the chosen one is stoned by the villagers in Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery. On the other hand, no one is immune to the zombie plague.

Even main characters like Jane, Elizabeth’s own sister, have the possibility of being infected. When the warrior faces the fact that she might need to fight her beloved sister, her faith shakes. Elizabeth tries to protect her sister from Mr. Darcy’s suspicion that she’s bitten by a zombie. This is the director's opportunity to push the film's moral dilemma to the max. This is the moment when pride and prejudice can be penetrated and broken. But then again, everyone’s too busy fighting zombies with dazzling weaponry and flamboyant moves to really engage in these philosophical questions.
 
Overall, I’ll say the movie is TOLERABLE. The film is tolerable as a product of pop culture, aka mass “pride” and “prejudice”. The director has no intention to join Jane Austen for the timeless discussion on all those great moral themes. In fact, Jane Austen, in this case, is like a zombie, appropriated by pop culture makers and positioned as a source of entertainment.

As for all my disappointment mentioned above, forget about it. I blame it on my sociology-anthropology student mindset that complicates everything and makes me one of those obnoxious zombies.

About the Author.

Fanyi (Faye) Ma is a freshman at Swarthmore College studying music, anthropology, and religion. She’s also a proud speaker of Mandarin, Shanghainese, and a few other Chinese dialects. In her spare time, she loves making tea, listening to canton-pop, thrift-shopping, reading novels and ethnographies, searching for new music, and whining over life. 
1 Comment
coral
3/22/2019 08:29:29 am

People fear zombies because zombies kill humans and eat human brains. Zombies are predators, and humans are their prey. If the zombies were of no threat to human beings, people would not care about them.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Main Author

    Jamie A. Thomas is a linguistic anthropologist and digital media producer. Her forthcoming book Zombies Speak Swahili is all about the undead, videogames, and viral Black language. She teaches at Santa Monica College.

    Archives

    January 2022
    September 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014

    Categories

    All
    Afterlife
    Art
    Beginnings
    Bilingualism
    Body
    Borderlands
    Cinema
    Collaboration
    Colloquial Speech
    Colonialism
    Communication
    Communicative Competence
    Context
    Creation
    Cuba
    Cultural Exchange
    Digital Humanities
    Diversity
    Election 2016
    Emoji
    Engaged Research
    Gender
    Gentrification
    Hashtag
    Ideology
    Idioms
    Inclusion
    In-N-Out
    Intercultural Learning
    Interpersonal Communication
    Intersectionality
    Linguistic Inequality
    Local
    Mexico
    Modality
    Museums
    Participation
    Philadelphia
    Project Goals
    Public Ethnography
    Public Health
    Public Memory
    Race
    Saturday Night Live
    Semiotics
    Sexuality
    Sign Language
    Spanish
    Speech Community
    Stereotypes
    Storytelling
    Study Abroad
    Video
    Women
    Zombies

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly