She's a Legend, She's an Icon: Austen, Fordyce, and Fire Island (2022) (2023)

Undergraduate: Malika Amoruso

Faculty Advisor: Inger Brodey
Department: English and Comparative Literature

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Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island (2022) is a contemporary adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice featuring a found-family dynamic of five gay men coming together for a vacation week in Fire Island, NY. The film, taken with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Fordyce’s conduct books–widely circulated preceding and during Austen’s life and writing career–reveals both emancipatory and insidious dynamics present in the gay community today. This article aims to parse these dynamics, trace the treatment of courtship roles and dynamics from Fordyce, through Austen, to Ahn, and track the presence of what Fordyce terms to be “gendered-virtues” as imperative qualities in courtship dynamics. Further, this paper will, with Ahn’s Fire Island (2022) as a case study, illustrate how such “gendered-virtues,” while clearly a dated and amply incorrect term in today’s world, still have echoes even within the gay community itself.

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