Emma Adapted: Jane Austen’s Heroine from Book to Film (review)

Several books have appeared analyzing the ways in which Jane Austen’s novels have been brought to film and television. Marc DiPaolo’s study is nevertheless the first to look at all of the adaptations of one novel—the work often considered Austen’s masterpiece: Emma (1816). DiPaolo’s book considers the eight versions that have graced the large and small screen from the late 1940s to the 1990s (three of these no longer exist on film). DiPaolo’s use of screenplays (when available) and his examination of the versions that survive on film afford an opportunity to focus closely on the similarities and differences in the filmic retellings of a “handsome, clever, and rich” heroine’s story. DiPaolo’s project is to make “interpretive and critical connections between the films and the novel” and to “offer examples of how the films ... deviate from the book” (3). He sets out to “determine to what extent these deviations retain the spirit of the original novel” (3).

DiPaolo assesses the Emma adaptations using film theorist Geoffrey Wagner’s The Novel and the Cinema (1975) as his guide. Wagner identifies three categories of literary adaptation. The first, transposition, aims to be faithful to the novel, putting it on the screen with as little interference as possible. The second, commentary, purposely or inadvertently alters the novel, causing a re-emphasis or restructuring. The third, the analogy, involves modernizing a tale and duplicating a story, often setting it in the present. As DiPaolo argues, “Though loosely defined, these are useful categories of distinction, and each one describes a corresponding Emma adaptation” (18). Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the adaptations DiPaolo examines, as well as a review of the theories that have emerged in the study of literature and film over the past forty years.

One of the most intriguing parts of DiPaolo’s study is his attempt to locate literary critical impulses (direct or indirect) behind each adaptation he considers. Chapter 2, “Emma and Literary Scholarship,” summarizes and categorizes a selection of scholarship on the novel. DiPaolo believes that the novel is “akin to a crystal held up to the light, able to project different—but equally beautiful—readings” (21). He describes his chapter as a canvassing of “readings of the novel that could be categorized as domestic Bildungsroman readings and those that could be called social critique readings” (36). This binary is employed throughout the rest of the book, which divides adaptations as following the criticism that concludes Emma must change from within (the Bildungsroman) versus those following the criticism that finds society wanting for forcing Emma to fit in and become what everyone expects her to be (the social critique).

DiPaolo’s summarizing and categorizing of the adaptations themselves begins in chapter 3, considering the early television versions (1948–72). He finds all of these to be transposition adaptations. First, he describes the Judy Campbell screenplay (which survives, though her 1948 BBC TV version does not), looking at the ways in which gossip is shown to be benign and “is consistently beneficial to the community” (48). Next, DiPaolo looks at the NBC Kraft Television Theatre Emma (1954), identifying the ways in which it becomes a silly romp. Especially engaging are DiPaolo’s descriptions of how Roddy McDowall’s playing Mr Elton as straight man steals the show. Vincent Tilsley’s 1960 BBC screenplay (“slightly masculinist and antifeminist in its concerns”) and the lost adaptation (CBS, 1960) are next considered (70; 73). Concluding the chapter is a summary and analysis of the BBC2 Glenister-Constanduros version (1972), which DiPaolo clearly prefers to the others, as it is “scrupulously faithful to Austen’s novel” (74). (This adaptation has been the subject of a previously published booklength study by Monica Lauritsen, on which DiPaolo draws.) DiPaolo concludes that this version “is the first Emma adaptation to seriously address the evils of Emma’s circumscribed life instead of subordinating them in...