Adaptation Vol. 6, No. 3, pp.

338354
doi:10.1093/adaptation/apt014
Advance Access publication 25 July 2013

Jane Austen Now with Ultraviolent

ZombieMayhem
CAMILLANELSON*

Seth Grahame-Smiths Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Steve Hockensmiths 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.
Keywords Pride and Prejudice, zombies, Jane Austen, mash-ups, adaptation theory.

England, 1813, 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 Satans soldiers. Hordes
of shambling, soulless, brain-devouring monsters rampage unchecked across the green
and pleasant fieldsupturning 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. Amere 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 Austens Pride
and Prejudice (1813)a trilogy that includes Seth Grahame-Smiths mash up Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies, and Steve Hockensmiths Dawn of the Dreadfuls and Dreadfully Ever
After. The trilogy has been billed as a comedyindeed, it has been regularly castigated as a trite and meaningless frivolitybut it is also one of the more interesting
examples of what David McNally has called the capitalist grotesque (2). It effortlessly
blends regency comedy of manners and twentieth-century soap with elements appropriated from digital fan cultures and the genre of monster tales that for critics such as
Franco Moretti 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 Austens non-referential aesthetic (251), but also,
*Department of Communications, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Australia.
E-mail: Camilla.Nelson@nd.edu.au.
The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press.
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AbstractThis essay examines the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies phenomenon, including

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in an interesting variety of ways, symbolically acts out social fears about the monstrous
dislocations at the heart of contemporary existence.
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Grahame-Smiths Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a mash-up of Jane Austens classic
text, promoted by its author as 85% Austen and 15% Grahame-Smiththe 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 fansthe 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
mashupvideo mashups such as Becoming Hermione or Superwholock, to name a couple of
recent examplesPride 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 books 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) (Rekulak, in Anderson). GrahameSmith 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 plotline.
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, for example, in which a fan finds herself transported into the events of what is
indisputably Jane Austens most famous novel, also presents itself as a kind of industrymade fanwork, including a metacommentary on the popular 1995 BBC television series
starring Colin Firth. More recently, the cocreators of Sherlock Michael Gatiss and Steve
Moffat announced at the Edinburgh Television Festival that the BBCs Sherlock was
just a giant piece of amateur enthusiasm. We love Sherlock Homes so muchwere
obsessed with it. This is fanfiction (Gatiss, in Frost). However, unlike these other industry-made fan products, Grahame-Smiths adaptationinitially, at leastpositioned
itself in opposition to other industrial productions that implicitly or explicitly claimed
a respectful relationship to the text, even when it is a subversive-yet-utterly-respectful
relationship, to quote from Teemans review of Lost in Austen in the Times. 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 Austens 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 youd actually want to read.
This aspect of the text was highlighted in the first Pride and Prejudice and Zombies book
trailer, a mashup combining the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice with George
Romeros Night of the Living Dead, rendered with the kind of twenty dollars and four
pizzas aesthetic that is typical of amateur-made fanworks. Does Dialogue like

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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 explicate a passage from Fordyces sermons that she believes
to be of great doctrinal import. In Austens novel, Fordyce functions as an element
of the books 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, Janes 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
tracknamely, Ministrys Jesus Built My Hotrodas 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, namely a timeless tale of first impressions and social
classin Regency England.
Romeros 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-Smiths mash
up of Austen. In this classic of 1960s cult cinema, Romero and cowriter 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, or in the Romero remake Dawn of the Dead, which is conspicuous for the
way it substitutes fast-moving corpses for the slow shamblers of classic Romero. Indeed,
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. 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 pre-emptive strikes against contaminated humans and few pre-emptive 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

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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 arow.
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 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 UKs 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 Rekulaks promise of readability, perhaps, the hackles
of some commentators rose. The New Yorkers Macy Halford called the prose style of
the book one hundred per cent terrible. Grahame-Smith told the Sunday Times that
he had faced the wrath of Austen fans on blogs 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). 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 texts antifan position with the release of the interactive version of Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies for iPads and other tablet devices. In this version of the text, the
Grahame-Smith adaptation appears directly beside the original Austen novelpage
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.
Indeed, the trailer designed to coincide with the eBooks release advises the reader that
it is in fact far preferable to Read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies alongside Jane
Austens original text.
It may be that this shift in the paratextual frame was simply a question of marketing, predicated on a belated realization 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 Austens 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 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 an author, but what Henry
Jenkins would call a story franchise, 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

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of cultural value, but as part of an ongoing process of cultural negotiation. Regimes of

value are a product of social relations and arrangements of knowledge, as John Frow
has influentially argued, 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 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. Its such a landmark and important novel.
On another level, the shift in the texts 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, and Robert Stam. Recently, Thomas Leitch 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 has taken up a similar position, arguing that critics must take into consideration other media texts or subtexts that share familiar characters and narratives
(2). Jenkins and Thorburn have also argued with respect to media analysis more generally that critics must resist notions of media purity, recognizing 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 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 texts status as an adaptation.
The traces have the effect of highlighting distance, producing gaps 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 intertextual field of difference.
In this sense, despite its joyful pillaging of Austens words, Grahame-Smiths Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies mash up might be said to refer as much, if not more to the 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 audiencesincluding, scholars, bloggers and fanswere 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 accurately identified a subtextual theme of mystery

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and menace in the original book. Her novels are hostile environments, another Austen
scholar told reporters (Goodwin).
Hostility has indeed been the focus of much recent work by Austen scholars, who
have begun mining the uncomfortable and even violent sides to Austens texts to great
effect. William Galperin has drawn attention to the ways in which Austens 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 Darcyor more explicitly, on
the desire for Darcythere are many elements that appear not always consistent with
this orientation and the ideological function that it performs (25). Claudia Johnson has
also argued for a subversive agency in Austens 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 destroys real happinessJohnson 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-Smiths text is fraught with problems. It must be clearly balanced against an
understanding that this is a text that is made and mobilized in the context of twentyfirst-century American society. The mysterious plague that the text envisions has less to
do with the middleclassviolence that the historical Austen does or does not depict, but
is ratheror so this essay will attempt to arguea symptomatic representation of the
violence of the American Empiretoday.
In short, Austens text has been adapted to an altogether different purpose. Austens
novel was well suited for such adaptive re-use, according to Grahame-Smith, precisely because so many parts of the story are mysteriously missing. Theres 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? Its never really explained (Grahame-Smith, in
Goodwin). This is what Mary Pooveyin more formal academic prosehas called
Austens nonreferential aesthetic. The British militias are a frequent feature of Austens
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 Austens work. Famously, Austens life spanned the dramatic
social upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuriesthe 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 industrialization. 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 presentedthe
Bennets housekeeper, for example, is only occasionally referred to as Hill.

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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 classis seen, no classes are seen (117). To many
modern readers, there is something discomforting and even violent in this erasure, and
there are numerous uncanny ways in which Grahame-Smiths zombies seem to fill the
shape of this discomfort. In this sense, Grahame-Smiths text could be said to engage
in a radical democratization of Austens work, not by reducing the class dimensions
of the novel (as, for example, an earlier MGM adaptation of Pride and Prejudice 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 skillsor 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 the monster tales from which
the Grahame-Smith text also draws its influences. Franco Moretti famously argued
that Frankensteins monster is the ultimate proletarian monster, the terrifying product
of a system of capital that forms by deforming. In recent times, McNally has extended
Morettis argument, drawing attention to the ways in which the zombie of Haitian folklore has usurped Frankensteins position as a popular metaphor for human life subject
to the depredations of postindustrial 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, for example, and at the other end of the political spectrum Drezners Theories
of International Politics and Zombies, in which the author refused to present a Marxist or
Feminist case scenario among the political responses to a zombie invasion he analyses,
on the basis that the Marxists and Feminists would have empathized with the zombies). Indeed, Steven Shaviro in analyzing the zombie phenomenon has argued that
the zombierather like the dereferentialised Austenhas been torn from its historic
roots in Haitian Voodoo, within the material structures of imperialism and colonialism,
becoming a free floating signifier, without referent or origin, endlessly replicating itself,
figuratively and indeed literally. This might assist in explaining why Jane Austen and
zombies seem so aptly paired.
In this sense, it is also interesting to note that zombies are never rendered as individuals in Grahame-Smiths text. They occasionally carry markers that would seem to
point to their status as members of the working classone is clad in a blood encrusted
blacksmiths apron (91), for example, another appears in modest clothing carrying a

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child (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 textzombies
are commonly called dreadfuls or unmentionables throughout the series, as the Zed
word is deemed unfit for use in polite societyand divided from the uncontaminated
society by a concrete wall or Britains Barrier (117) such as that which encircles the
metropolis of London. This theme of the split societya common motif in monster
talesis 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 democratize Austens text is most readily apparent in the recognizably postfeminist
reconstruction of the kickarse Bennet sisters. In dealing with the gender issues that
are raised in Austens novel the textual strategy is generally to replace verbal sparring with physical combat, mining the theme of bodily excess and bodily humour
in Austen to which scholars such as Jill Heydt-Stevenson 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 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. 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 novels 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 Darcys trousers famously generated more column inches that any of the womens conspicuously heaving busts. Hence,
the repeated references to Darcys netherparts, the countless anachronistic puns on
the word balls, in addition to the more direct references as when Elizabeths 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 is clear to some
readers at least that Darcy, as figure of both authority and desire, is produced within
the text via a system of contrasts with an emasculated, unenergetic and thoroughly
unEnglish Otherin short, a zombie. There is also an unsettling sense, as the hero and

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the heroine unite at the tales end, that the gender politics being played out are more
akin to the pre-feminist politics played out in the MGM adaptation of Pride and Prejudice,
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 storys end. It is therefore incumbent on any feminist critic to point out that in the
historical Austens world a womans 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 ones male relativeshence, 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 Darcyin terms of
a feminist reading, at leastseems somewhat forced or false. Interestingly enough, this
is a narrative thread that Hockensmith picks up in the sequel, Dreadfully Ever After, 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 GrahameSmith 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 Austens novel, Charlotte marries Mr
Collins becauserightly or wronglyshe 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-Smiths text, the entangling of Charlottes fateful decision with her
transformation into the undead works to highlight the ways in which Charlottes life,
and lives of nineteenth-century women in general, were commodified. Charlottes life
is treated as a separable and detachable thing that is no longer seen as integral to her
personhood, but as something that can be alienatedthat 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 Charlottes life energies are detached from her person, her body
is reduced to a mere husk or empty shellshe is impelled by a strange and singular
desire (to eat brains), but is otherwise devoid of mind, energy and will. Indeed, in
Grahame-Smiths text, Charlottes situation is depicted with more understanding than
in any other Austen adaptationfor example, despite the democratic renovations of
Lost in Austen, Charlottes 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-Smiths 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 himselfaffording 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).

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Dawn of the Dreadfuls and Dreadfully Ever After

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, a suspicion that was echoed by critics internationally as Hockensmiths
Dawn of the Dreadfuls 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,

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Charlottes transformation is wonderfully explicable in terms of the politics of

Grahame-Smiths 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 Catherines ninjas, each
in a progressively more gruesome waythe 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 whichperhapsthe
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 the effect of adding additional layers of meaning
relating to power and race. In the context provided by Austens de-referentialised storyworld, the soldiers do not leave to fight Bonaparte on the continent or the Savages in
the colonies, rather the external 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 zombieand occasionally
the ninja aswell.
In many novels of Britains imperial age, foreign possessions help to establish wealth
and consequenceand therefore social orderat 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 Saids
influential study of Mansfield Park has famously argued that Austen may also have taken
the right to these imperial proceeds for granted. In Grahame-Smiths 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-Smiths 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 zombielike the ninjais in fact another invisibility tactic designed to mask
the presence of historic violence. This is the reading of Grahame-Smiths text that is
consistently mined and extended in Steve Hockensmiths 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 Hockensmiths additions to the series more radical and therefore
interesting.

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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.
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. 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. Were 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 youre not just
flipping around the dial of your remote, that things are actually combining in some way,
to form new things (Hockensmith, in Keenan). Hockensmiths argument echoes the
position taken by media critics such as Henry Jenkins. 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 user-generated content for Wikipedia or Second Life eloquently shows.
Hockensmiths Dawn of the Dreadfuls and Dreadfully Ever After 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 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!
One of the most striking aspects of the Hockensmith books is that the zombies
though they are still dreadfuls and unmentionablesare 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 Marywho are still young at
this point in the story and yet to be trained in the art of deadly combatinitially
resist Mr Bennets peremptory demand that they lop off Mr Fords 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 political issues

Jane Austen Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem 349

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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 within 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 gentrys amusement, chasing bait in the form of an Irishman, in
an obvious allusion to Britains 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. Theres 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-Smiths textthough 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 Ben Winters Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters 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 oncelike Lost in Austens Amanda
Pricethey throw the book into the fountain.
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 Bennets admirer Lieutenant
Tindall is perhaps the most prominent among the characters showing preference for
this English solution. At the novels 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 Iam 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 thatincluding our ideal of genteel
English womanhoodcan we even say weve 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

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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 cant go around being impolite when were 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 soldiers are dying in droves, he
refuses to leave off from his work. Keckilpennyit is finally revealedis attempting to
recondition zombies by talking to them gently, whileironically, of coursethey are
simultaneously bound and chained to the wall. Ominously, he refers to this pseudoscientific process as re-Anglification(231).
Keckilpennys scientific solution to the zombie problem is in turn contrasted with
the ideas of Master Hawkesworth, Elizabeths 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 didnt 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 treatmentthat
is, by amputationuntil 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 ideas 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 novels 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.
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 Wollstonecrafts
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 industrializing cities of the nineteenth century. It is not a representation

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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
developingsometimes called the majorityworld 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 realization 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 communitya 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 Marys chest in spots (165) so the sound of musket shots doesnt 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 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 bookspecifically 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 87)by stampeding the
Royal Re-coronation Ceremony and devouring the brains of King GeorgeIII.
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 livingas Elizabeth has found out through her encounters with Lady Catherines
ninjas following her attempts to defy Lady Catherine in the previous book. 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 realityas human beingsdo
not appear to require the readers attention. That is of course until the last book in the
series in which Hockensmith attempts to turn this cultural complacency on itshead.
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 Elizabeths 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 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.

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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 figuresthey 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 wordthat is, the cultural products of what Said
(Said 2003)has called the wests imperial fantasy, conjured out of countless narratives
of the violent, seductive, deadlyEast.
In Hockensmiths 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 foreignersand 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 themand 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 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 BackKitty will
undoubtedly marry Nezhu, for example, and presumably give birth to zombie immune
childrenand 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 mobilized in the text. It is an uncomfortable image because it is not one
of recognition of the Other but absorption. As Ziaudin Sardar 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 wests 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 is also in complex ways a product of that same
market processand in this sense the novels 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 as 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

Jane Austen Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem 353

ongoing violence of the American Empire as it is experienced in the world today. In

this respect, the image of contagion and inoculationthe literal ingesting of the blood
of Otherslike Money from Elsewhereis an inadequate metaphor for a solution to
the horrors that the final novel otherwise so eloquently proposes.
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