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2 Popular Culture and the Comedy of Manners Clueless and Fashion Clues 7 Maureen Turim “Of all the Austen film adaptations, Clueless is my favorite one to teach,” a feminist eighteenth-century scholar whose specialization extends through the Regency period told me recently. “Maybe it’s the contrast between the film and novel that makes it the most useful in getting students to think about what is at stake in Emma and for women during Austen’s lifetime.”1 Such sentiments seem readily understandable when one considers the problems presented by the other Austen film adaptations. To the extent that such adaptations attempt to illustrate directly Jane Austen’s writerly voice with images meant to embody her prose, so much of the discussion focuses on the adequacy of the transposition. To the extent that such adaptations simply borrow Austen’s settings and plots to tell a subtly different story, the differences and their purpose become the focus. In either case these films’ contemporary reenactment of the historical inevitably shifts details. It may become difficult to extricate readings of the novel from the visual interpretations that begin to color it. Rewriting for film introduces patterns of glance-object or shot-reverse editing, for example, where they are deliberately absented from Austen’s narrative design. Consider the end of chapter 6 in which Mr. Elton watches Emma paint the portrait of Harriet, a situation that confirms for Emma Mr. Elton’s fascination with the friend with whom Emma has decided to match him. In fact, Emma is mistaken, which we learn later; Mr. Elton is attracted to the artist, 33 Emma, and not the sitter. Austen’s task as author is to narrate this event in such a way as to allow the reader to adopt Emma’s speculations, while still setting up the elements of reversal that will be revealed latter. Mr. Elton’s gaze is an object of the description. The scene is in some ways quite cinematic: The sitting began; and Harriet, smiling and blushing, and afraid of not keeping her attitude and countenance, presented a very sweet mixture of youthful expression to the steady eye of the artist. But there was no doing anything, with Mr. Elton fidgeting behind her, and watching every touch. She gave him credit for stationing himself where he might gaze and gaze again without offence; but was really obliged to put an end to it, and request him to place himself elsewhere. It then occurred to her to employ him in reading.2 The delight of this passage is in many ways retrospective and established for rereading. The phrase watching every touch gives a hint of Mr. Elton’s preoccupation with Emma’s activity. Another phrase, she gave him credit for stationing himself in fact is an interpretation by Emma of a skillfully hidden voyeurism, but she is mistaken about the object of Mr. Elton’s visual fascination , as the object of the gaze is not Harriet so much as herself. For all its apparently cinematic preoccupation with the voyeuristic pliers connecting artist and model, a trope that began in early silent film history in such films as Georges Méliès’ 1900 L’Artiste et le mannequin (Artist and Model) and continues through Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991), we have in Austen’s narration a twist of voice that belies any configuration of mise-ensc ène. Adaptations tend to supplant the provocatively distant writing with a more accessible substitution, staging the scene, but evacuating the voice. Emma continues with recounting a second day of sitting without such attention to placement at all. Then there is a typical dialogue passage, in which numerous characters debate the verisimilitude versus the invention evidenced in the portrait of Harriet that Emma has painted. The dialogue is given without any indication of spatiality, no fullness of representation of bodies in space interacting with glances, movements, and gestures, but rather a chorus of competing voices articulating their respective positions. Austen’s writing thus has its whim with spatiality, with the fullness of corporeal representation, presenting it ambiguously or ignoring it altogether when authorial purpose is elsewhere. It would take a far different sort of adaptation to foreground Austen’s writing; think perhaps of the film techniques Robert Bresson chose to adapt Georges Bernanos to the screen in Journal d’un curé de compagne (Diary of a Country Priest) (1952) and Mouchette (1967). Forceful, deliberately framed images, combined with a voice-over citing directly and selectively from...

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