Title: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Author: Seth Grahame-Smith
Date of First Publication: 2009
Place of Publication: Quick Books
Type: Novel
Characters: No Character
Themes: ANDROID; BYRONIC HERO; POSTHUMAN
Critical Summary: Seth Grahame-Smith takes on the traditionally and famously known novel, Pride and Prejudice, by inserting, and slightly altering, certain scenes to add in the concept of a zombie apocalypse. The love story of the two eldest Bennet daughters continues: with inclusion that all five daughters are now skilled in the deadly arts. In order to make events interesting, Seth Grahame-Smith added miniscule characters in order to be killed and have zombie scenes make sense. The attitudes of the characters are unaltered by this inclusion: Jane still sly, Elizabeth still stubborn, and Lydia still very much flirtatious. The plot continues the same as prior with the addition of battle scenes and chopping of heads. In the end, although two characters, Mr. Collins and Charlotte, who have, rather, content endings prior now killed, all the characters receive the endings that they dutifully earned in the original, Jane marries Bingley and Elizabeth marries Darcy: all while Lydia still marries Wickham, but one who is now very much lame. This novel is complete with romance, betrayal, heartbreak, skilled combat, and rotting corpses.
Although this novel does not contain a traditional plot line of Mary Shelley’s story or Frankenstein characters, themes and influences can be analyzed throughout the novel. The main characters are strong independent females who take it upon themselves to fight the “unmentionables,” which is the label title of the zombies in the novel. The original and adaptation can see influences of Mary Wollstonecraft, through the inspiration of Jane Austen possibly reading some of Wollstonecraft’s writings of feminism. Although Jane Austen died a year prior to the release of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, it did appear with a prior novel of her interest in the topic of the sublime and tales of terror, Northanger Abbey.
The concept of the zombie falls under the theme of Androids in which we would question the definition of humanity in part to one scene in which a zombie is found caring for a zombie infant. There is no denying the character of Mr. Darcy as being written under the exact definition as a reader would believe a Byronic hero to be written; Mr. Darcy is skilled in the same deadly arts as that of the Bennet’s, superior due to his aristocratic breeding, and dark and foreboding persona. Lastly, the novel is set to be in an 1800s apocalypse, drawing on the theme of posthuman, where it is the survival of the fittest…or be eaten by the growing undead population.
Administrative Notes: Danielle Marie Dickey, CSUF; Cynthia Alvarado (editor); Sam Drake, CSUF (editing)