In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 "A Correct Taste in Landscape" Pemberley as Fetish and Commodity H. Elisabeth Ellington "He liked the landscape well enough, but the natives, Colonel Fitzwilliam, the natives! What boors! What savages! Utterly insupportable. Isn't that so, Mr. Darcy?" -Elizabeth Bennet to Colonel Fitzwilliam, 1940 film of Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice, written in the 1790s and extensively revised before its publication in 1813, is, arguably, the first ofJane Austen's novels to make extensive use of what Austen in Mansfield Park terms "the influence of place." According to Ann Banfield, the "influence of place" determines the development of individual characters as physical setting "interacts with and forms consciousness" (35). In Pride and Prejudice, this is best illustrated in what Roger Sale refers to as the "Pemberley chapters" (42), which describe Elizabeth Bennet's journey to Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle and their tour of Mr. Darcys ancestral estate at Pemberley. As Elizabeth interacts with the landscape surrounding Darcy's home, she is, depending upon one's reading, either inspired for the first time with feelings of love for Darcy or first recognizes the feelings that she already has for him. In either reading, the physical setting of Pemberley forms Elizabeths consciousness of her love for Darcy. As she facetiously tells her sister, Jane, who asks when Elizabeth first began to love Darcy, "I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley" (Austen 373). As Michael Riffaterre persuasively argues in Fictional Truth, Darcys grounds and home symbolize their owner; the repetition of adjectives such as "large," "beautiful," and "handsome" in Austens description of Pemberley refer not to the landscape or the house itself, but to its owner, who becomes, through his landscape and through his role as a landowner, worthy of Elizabeth's love. Landscape, in Pride and Prejudice, becomes the sign of desire. "A Correct Taste in Landscape" 91 Austen's use of landscape in Pride and Prejudice is, however, much more complex than Sale allows in his examination of the Pemberley chapters. Through landscape, Austen addresses the wider social and economic issues many critics of her fiction claim she ignores. Class issues come to the forefront in Pride and Prejudice: we can read the history of land transformation through enclosure and agricultural advances, the vogue for landscape gardening , as well as the growth of middle-class consumerism in the rise of domestic tourism. Austen's was an age of art about nature: connected with the agricultural revolution and the rise of domestic tourism was a new interest in looking at the land and representing landscape in paintings and poetry and in theorizing principles of Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque landscape . The ideas about landscape and ways of reading landscape that were current during Austen's lifetime inform all of her works. In reading Pride and Prejudice, we become, in effect, consumers of landscape as much as of love story. Pride and Prejudice, easily the most visual of Austen's six completed novels, is, not coincidentally, the most frequently filmed of her works, lending itself to cinematic adaptation more readily than her other novels through its extensive use of visual imagery and language. Both the 1940 Hollywood version, adapted for the screen by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin and directed by Robert Z. Leonard, and the 1995 joint BBOA&E version, scripted by Andrew Davies and directed by Simon Langton, capitalize on the "visual pleasure" of the text (Mulvey 412) and borrow many of Austen's own devices for setting scenes, such as shots divided by windows which place the spectator on the inside looking out at the scene or on the outside looking in on the scene. Langton and Davies enjoy certain advantages that Leonard and Huxley/ Murfin simply did not have available to them, such as a six-hour running time and the possibility of filming on location. Landscape imagery is thus much more developed in the 1995 version. Both films, however, offer readings of Austen that, through landscape, direct our attention to or away from certain episodes, offer subtle rereadings or (perhaps) misreadings of the novel, and show us what elements of Austen's narrative were ideologically current and thus worth emphasizing in 1940 and what elements are ideologically current in the 1990s. The films, like Austen's novel, convert the viewer/spectator into a consumer , both of pastoral English landscape and of what constitutes Englishness at a given time period. In this essay, I will focus on the ways in...

Share