Pride and Prejudice and…Profile Pictures?

by Courtney Miller

They are the books read in high school classrooms across the country: Catcher in the Rye, Macbeth, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter.  We’re familiar with references to Holden Caulfield, Lady Macbeth, Lord Rochester and Hester Prynne, not to mention Scarlet O’Hara, Ishmael, and Romeo.  We’ve heard their stories and written essays on their significance.  Enter the modern twist: what if the next time you log on to Facebook, you have a friend request from Hamlet?

In Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook,
author Sarah Schmelling introduces literary classics to the world of social networking.  What results is a juxtaposition of cultures as the traditional meets the fast paced, oft-updated way of life.  Hilarity ensues.  Yet familiarity with Facebook is a must in order to fully appreciate the comparisons Schmelling makes.  Often subtly mocking the tools we use to communicate in the network—“poking,” “mafia wars,” “become a fan of”—she simplifies the plots and characters we’ve all studied.  But she doesn’t remove them from their elements; Juliet is still the teenage girl fantasizing on her balcony, expressed vividly by her enthusiasm for online lingo and giggly tone.  Schmelling merely carves them down to bare-bone characters: “Juliet OMG hooked up with random guy!  Don’t even know his NAME.”

The book is loosely connected using Shakespeare as the thread.  It begins with an invite from the bard himself to join “William Shakespeare’s Admirable, Righteous, Singular, and Incomparable Booke Club Group.”  His reason?  “I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let’s say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES.”  Yes, the capital letters are his (well, Schmelling’s).  Most of the literature examined thereafter has referenced Shakespeare within its pages, and throughout the threads and status comments that follow his introduction, he pops up as a whiny, self-centered bloke trying to refocus the attention on his work.

Like the slight narcissism of Shakespeare, the moods of characters jump off the pages.  Annoyance, frustration and indifference are easy to spot.  This becomes quite funny because so much subtext from their original stories has been “translated” by Schmelling into actual lines.  It’s as though she read your thoughts from when you originally read the tales.

Perhaps the best part of this adventure is how easy it is to slip into the characters minds and relate.  By bringing characters that usually exist in completely un-relatable worlds into ours, Schmelling emphasizes that their minds work similarly.  They get mad at their parents, they fall in love with the wrong people and they go off on long, wandering tangents (here’s looking at you, Don Quixote!).  She reminds us why these characters are timeless.

Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook is not a coherently flowing piece of literature.  It’s a collection of notes grounded in wit that reflects the chaos characters always seem to find their way into.  It’s the notes you wish you had in high school.  After all, how often do Dr. Frankenstein, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes complain about pop culture twisting their stories?

And it’s always good when Colin Firth and Bridget Jones pop up to comment on Jane Austen’s status update.