In 2020 I found myself viewing video after video after video on the topic of living the life of a housewife from another decade. It seemed to be all the rage with the younger youtube community. Before long I found I had fallen down a rabbit hole of videos by married women who were living their daily life as if they were in the 1950's. I was spellbound and mesmerized by the aesthetic of the clothing, the decor and the hairdos. I also understood the appeal of the need to spend the entire day cooking a three course meal from scratch, not too mention the desire to keep the house spotless in case the neighbours dropped by. However, I did not understand the appeal these women had of trading in their modern independence in order to wait on their husbands. But, to each their own.
This whole scene got me thinking about morals and values and how each subculture or culture have their own. How each decade has run it's course by the social etiquette of that time. How the books and movies of the last hundred years have influenced every one of them since. I started to wonder if this was something I could in fact myself do? I mean, it has already been done by author A.J. Jacobs in his 2007 autobiography The Year of Living Biblically and so many young youtubers seem to be happy enough with their experience of it.
So, I had to ask myself a few questions before starting this social experiment. First off, what would I be pulling from? Book or movie? Would I be using as my source material something that already is close to my own values/morals or something that goes completely in the other direction from me? How long will I put this into affect? What do I hope to get out of this in the end?
I decided to go with an entire genre actually; and use Jane Austen stories. This allowed me to pull from the movie adaptations and the novels themselves. And gave myself a year long time frame. Then I had to ask myself how far do I take it? As in, do I live as if we're once again in the Regency Era? That was where I decided to draw the line because I just don't have the patience to be that devoted to realism. Thankfully, there has been more than a few modern adaptations of her works from The Jane Austen Book Club which encompasses all of the major novels, Clueless (Emma), Twilight and Bridget Jones's Diary (both adaptations of Pride and Prejudice) just to name a few. You can even find major elements of the novels within the television series Sex and the City. With this in mind, I decided to make Bridget Jones's Diary the foundations to this. The character of Bridget starts her new year off with a moderate plan to improve her life. She does this by adding some basic rules and cutting things out of her life.
That's where I am as I write this first article of the experiment. I am one week into 2021, and have been keeping track of my daily routine. Nothing too strenuous yet, as we are still under the lockdown of 2020 where I live. As the year 2021 progresses so shall my articles.
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