My ‘Jennifer complex’

In one of my previous posts I alluded to a certain ‘Jennifer complex’ I have. It’s a little difficult to describe, and even more difficult, dear readers, to ‘lay out’ in the open in a blog format, as I hope you understand. I don’t want to cause embarrassment to people who might be affected by it. But it’s necessary, I think, to face it head-on, with the help of Our Lord and Saint Bede (whose feast we celebrated just this past week). It’s already led me in certain reactive directions. As I’ve said before, it’s shaped my æsthetics, my spelling habits, my political and moral vision, and it goes quite a bit deeper than the usual transferred nationalism. Consider this blog post, then, a further occasion for metanoia. (Not to worry: my spelling habits and so forth aren’t likely to change in the near future…)

As my readers know, I’ve long had a contrarian Tory streak. Various things have fed into that. In grade school, one of my closest friends, a self-described ‘hopeless Romantic’ and ‘frantic half-Greek geek’ from Finland (long story) and I used to play hot-seat multiplayer Conquest of the New World, and I distinctly recall that if I ever had my druthers I would always fly my ships under the Union Jack. Said Greco-Finnish best friend also introduced me to the Moomin books by that big-hearted Fennoswede Tove Jansson, whose FSG translations were all written in immaculate British English. I don’t think it’s an accident that I recall starting to use British spelling and punctuation styles in the fifth grade.

My Anglophilia deepened during my early teen years. I gained a love of Shakespeare from my homeroom teacher in the sixth grade, who taught both English literature and the natural sciences with a true and unfeigned passion. I have to admit, this was a teacher for whom I had one of those chaste, adoring late-childhood attractions. She was of course funny and approachable, but also had exacting expectations of her students. She managed to encourage me and push me out of my comfort zone in all sorts of directions that I never knew I was capable. She took our class to the American Players Theatre for our school field trips. Under her direction, I acted the part of Macduff in our public junior high school’s production of the Scottish play. In any event, my romantic – I use the term with the full range of connotations – love for older English literature certainly dates to my junior high years. (I won’t lie: my favourite part of teaching AP English is still A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)

In the seventh grade, my parents moved me out of the local state school and into a GATE academy in the Dane County suburbs. I can say without reservation that, for the most part, I hated it. I remember passing those two years as a frustrated, resentful, troublemaking ‘problem student’ who got sent to the office multiple times for picking fights with my classmates. I also remember being made painfully aware of being the picked-on ‘poor kid’ in rich-kid school. That was the beginning, I think, of my being drawn toward left-wing politics: nothing builds class awareness quite like suddenly finding oneself in the bottom one. There was one teacher, though, who left an impression on me, and that was the Anglo-Irish Catholic history teacher who taught our history class from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I was mostly impressed by her wit, the force of her personality, the crispness of her accent. She was also quite kind and understanding, but she expressed it in a very different way – I remember at one point she chided me about being unable to accept a compliment with grace. To be honest, her compliments rather took me aback, even when they were for something as simple as performing well on a history exam.

And then, at the age of fourteen, in my high school freshman English lit class, I watched the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle for the first time, just after we had finished reading the book. I truly don’t think I ever had a celebrity crush before or since deserving of the name; let alone any that came anywhere even close to that I had for Ms Ehle, based on her performance as Elizabeth Bennet. (Which is ironic, really, because Ms Ehle is herself a Carolinian – though her mother, Ms Rosemary Harris, is British, and Ms Ehle herself was trained at a drama school in London.)

‘Fine eyes’, indeed – talk about soft power. Jennifer Ehle’s version of Lizzie Bennet – eloquent, vibrant, subtly mischievous, by turns tender and devilishly arch, the loving elder sister and the wry observer of human folly – came to represent something of a Platonic ideal, in my early-adolescent-heterosexual-white-male psyche, of British femininity and all of its many virtues and potentials. There was a chiaroscuro depth and lightness to her rendition. Far more so than her face or her hair, rather, Ms Ehle’s expressions and her elusive turns of emotion smote me: the brilliance of spring sunlight in a smile or the rising storm winds in a glare.

Oh, she’s still got it.

Laugh as you like, dear readers. Tell me, which of us wasn’t an idiot at the age of fourteen? (Though I still say it cannot possibly be the mark of an idiot to be drawn to Ms Ehle and her acting.) At least in a conscious way, this infatuation lasted only about as long as the usual ones do – which is to say, not long. And it would be a serious mistake to pathologise anything so normal (and, let’s be blunt, American). But on a subconscious level I think it affected me in some strange ways.

I started reading John Milbank on account of his ‘radical orthodox’ critique of capitalism, but the continuing power his high-church Anglican ethos had on me came from his winged vision of an elder ‘Platonic, spiritual England’ that merged, in my mind, with a slightly-eroticised vision, through the lens of John Kenway’s camera, of the South West countryside. Again, this particular form of English Romanticism is an ethos that still works on me, just as it worked on Khomyakov. It fits in neatly with all the rest of my Anglophilic tendencies, and provides them a power at a level beyond rationality that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Likewise, my interactions with the work of Dr Cornel West have been shaped by his preference for Jane Austen, even where his love for Jane isn’t even necessarily the main point.

There’s not that much of a punchline here. I don’t think it’s either wise or fair to pathologise my Anglophilia wholesale; thus, I’m starting to doubt my choice of the word ‘complex’ is particularly apt. Still, it seems a useful exercise at least for the time being to throw a glance or two over my shoulder to see precisely where I’m ‘coming from’.