麻豆社

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Jane Austen's beloved 1811 novel features three sisters and their widowed mother, struggling to make ends meet after the death of their father. Certainly the Kardashians were far from destitute after the death of their dad Robert in 2003, but what they were lacking in was social currency. As Kim later stated to Vogue: "I was obsessed with fame. Like, embarrassingly obsessed." In Austen's work, the sisters use their sensitive, sensible traits to do what they can for family survival. In Kardashian land, it was Kim that bit the bullet and worked as a stylist to socialite Paris Hilton, biding her time and learning the tricks of celebrity before launching her own career and taking her sisters with her into the world of fame. As Pandora states on the Unreal podcast: "Kim latched on to just about anyone famous, like a Juicy Couture wearing krill swimming in the slipstream of a famous shark."

THE SCARLET LETTER

Nathanial Hawthorn's 1850 tale of scandal, anger and revenge has certain echoes with Kim's notorious rise to fame. Kim broke through into wider public consciousness on the release of a sex tape. Though Kim sued the company that released the film, some commentators believe she was somehow involved with the leaking. As Sirin told the Unreal podcast: "Kim has always maintained that she didn't give permission but she does acknowledge that the tape helped to make her famous." In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is shunned and punished for conceiving a child and refusing to reveal the father. This scandalous act, after years of hardship, eventually leads to wealth and security for her family. Kim's tape suddenly turned her into a household name and she consolidated this notoriety to help launch her television career.

THE GREAT GATSBY

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1925 story of wealth, corruption and unrequited love features characters who are enormously rich, but are also enormously unhappy. As the Kardashians have discovered, possessing all the accoutrements of life: money, cars, property and fame, can still leave you feeling unfulfilled. Fitzgerald's heroine Daisy Buchanan feels like a proto-Kardashian. She presents a perfect, beautiful, refined image to the world and makes, sometimes unpleasant, choices to achieve her own ends. Carey Mulligan, who played Daisy in the 2013 film adaptation, claimed the character could have been a Kardashian type celebrity, living in a dream and shunning the real world.

MIDDLEMARCH

The doomed marriage of Dorothea Brooke to the ill-suited Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's 1871 classic has echoes of Kim's failed nuptials with basketball star Kris Humphries. In both cases, family warnings concerning the relationship were ignored. For Dorothea, it was because she had literary ambitions that she felt her husband could help her achieve. For Kim, it was the pressures of lucrative endorsement deals and her TV show needing some intrigue and glamour. As Sirin told the Unreal podcast: "Everything has a storyline, even the messiest, most humiliating heartbreak. Why not turn your tears into gold?" Both in the novel, and on TV, the marriages failed. The sub-plot of Middlemarch's slightly quackish young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who sells his own suspect health concoctions also resembles the Kardashian family penchant for advertising slightly dubious medical treatments such as diet lollipops and waist trainers, especially in the early years of their fame.

VANITY FAIR

Kim shares a number of characteristics with Becky Sharp, the heroine of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 novel. As Sirin Kale stated on the Unreal podcast, like Becky, Kim excelled by: "social climbing her way to the apex of reality TV fame." Becky's ambitions are single-minded and even deadly. She will stop at nothing to ensure she obtains the wealth and status she desires. Kim's ambitions have changed somewhat over the years. Once painfully driven, she's now a billionaire and one of the most famous faces on the planet. But unlike Becky, she's attempting to use her position to help others. She's trained as a lawyer, advocates for death row inmates and may possibly run for US President one day. Even Becky Sharp never managed that.