So…. I have this problem.

I don’t get told that I look like so-and-so a great deal.  You know how some people have celebrity doppelgangers?  How every now and then someone sends around that horrible facebook thing which requests everyone to change their profile pictures to some cartoon character, or movie personality, or otherwise famous individual who looks like them?

Well… I don’t have one.  Or didn’t have one.  Or shouldn’t have one.

This wouldn’t really be a problem since I hate most things about the institution of facebook (besides the nifty social networking functionalities via event invites and keeping track of my long-distance friends).  Here’s the real problem.

Flash back to the first year of my MA.  I was taking an Austen class.  This involved a great deal of reading from Penguin Classics.  The nifty thing about Penguin Classics is that they have pretty pictures on the front covers.  Often these pictures are portraits of individuals (usually women) who are dressed in keeping with the period of the novel and who may look something akin to the main character of the novel.

This is all wonderful.  Who doesn’t like pretty pictures with their academic reading?

Of course, wonderful things are always bound to disappoint you.

It happened the week we were reading Mansfield Park.  One of my colleagues came to class and said, “Hey… have you… looked at the cover of the book for next week?”

I hadn’t.  It was one of those weeks where I had barely squeeked by for this week much less valiantly attempted to forge ahead.

“Because… well… it looks kind of creepily like you.”  A quick poll of my colleagues who had also looked at the cover confirmed her suspicion.  Apparently it really did look like me.

Shocked and awed, I scurried home after class to get a glimpse of this supposed

uncanny.... unsettling... enough so that I wonder about the argument of reincarnation

doppelganger.  I picked up the cover of the book and there it was, staring me in the face.  It was me!  Or… someone that looked incredibly like me who happened to have lived in Paris in the nineteenth century.

It was just an odd coincidence for a while.  Then this year, something else happened.

I was with a few of my colleagues at the Boston Public Library when one of them said to me, “You know, Danielle, I’ve been seeing this face on my netflix queue and it reminds me of someone and I just realized it reminds me of you…”  He pulled up the picture and sure enough, there it was again, the cover of the DVD of Mansfield Park.  This cover depicted an actress, not a painting.  She didn’t actually look much like the painting on the penguin classic edition, but she did, strangely, look like me.  Again, a poll of our colleagues confirmed the matter.

Okay, what is with this?  A few things make it suspiciously weird and it’s kind of got me wondering if the universe is trying to tell me something…

perhaps this one is even weirder....

First and foremost, Mansfield Park is easily my least favorite Austen novel.  It is long and plodding with plot that comes in choppy chunks.  Its heroine, Fanny Price, is the least sympathetic heroine out of Austen’s oeuvre.  Compound that with a deep-seated childhood hatred of the fact that my name rhymes with “Fanny” and thereby I can be teased about being “Dani Fanny” and you have all the makings of a psychotic Austen break.

Perhaps a bit more weirdly than that, Mansfield Park is the only Austen novel which directly confronts the issue of theatre and theatricality.  Within the book, the characters decide to put on a play and this action takes up a large chunk of the aforementioned plodding plot.  When my Austen professor heard my initial reaction to the novel, he was surprised.  Granted, I have found that this novel warrants the most polarized opinions of Austen’s work, but my place in the opposition camp astounded him due to this confrontation of theatre.

Okay, universe; you take my face and put it on the cover of the book and the DVD of the only Austen novel that I actively dislike and also the only Austen novel that directly touches my area of scholarly expertise?  What the hell, dude?  What the hell?