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8. Emma Becomes Clueless
- The University Press of Kentucky
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8 Emma Becomes Clueless Suzanne Ferriss Ranked among the top ten entertainers by Entertainment Weekly (AscherWalsh ), Jane Austen is "the posthumous queen of genteel cinema" (Maslin). Recent film versions of Emma invite speculation about the novels appeal in the 1990s. Written in 1816, Emma traces a classic comic arc: a misguided matchmaker, overconfident in her abilities, learns the error of her perceptions and discovers love in the process. As in other Austen novels, the female protagonist's success comes through marriage, a clear reflection of the texts comic roots and also an indication of its essential conservatism. Apart from the outspokenness of its protagonist, the novel bears few signs of the nascent feminism introduced in Britain by Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), published decades earlier. What accounts, then, for the novels current vogue in the popular media? Three cinematic versions of Emma have appeared since 1995. Two of the three, Douglas McGraths Emma, featuring Gwyneth Paltrow, and Diarmuid Lawrence and Andrew Davies's Emma, with Kate Beckinsale, go to great lengths to evoke the Regency period. In the Merchant-Ivory school of filmmaking, they lure audiences with the traditional promise of escape into a cinematic reconstruction of the past. Plunged into an ornately costumed, socially stratified society characterized by lavish, but tasteful, displays of wealth, inordinate amounts ofleisure, and strong family values, moviegoers may leave behind the burdens ofcontemporary existence : economic uncertainty, family conflict, racial strife. As faithful adaptations , both productions succeeded owing to their remoteness from our day. Amy Heckerlings inspired update, Clueless, brings the novel into our own era, successfully translating Emma into the California high school culture of the 1990s. Heckerling offers a series of suggestive parallels between Austens heroine and her cinematic counterpart, Cher (Alicia Silverstone), despite their surface differences. Clueless features the same key themes relating to the roles of women (the fallibility of matchmaking and flirtation; the danger, in the words of the novel, of a girl "having rather too rrmch her own Emma Becomes Clueless 123 way" and thinking "too well of herself' [Austen 1]). In fact, Heckerlings version presents women of the 1990s as less empowered or enlightened than women in the original novel. Ironically, the more faithful adaptations are more modem in their re-presentations of Emma than the "modernized" Clueless. In Heckerling's hands, Austen's novel proves itself to be surprisingly malleable and readily adaptable to the contemporary period. Some updating is only minor: photography substitutes for portraiture, convertibles for carriages , parties in the Valley for fancy dress balls. Others are less obvious: Mr. Woodhouse's preoccupation with his digestion and Emma's concerns about his health undergo a contemporary twist in Cher's imposition of a low-cholesterol diet on her father. Even Emma's mother's death receives the 1990s treatment: Cher's mother died undergoing liposuction. More significant changes challenge the rigidity of time boundaries: class differences in the novel are complicated as the film adds racial and sexual diversity to the mix (the orphaned Harriet Smith becomes a Hispanic transfer student, Frank Churchill is revealed to be gay, and Emma's best friend becomes a moneyed African American). Heckerling exploits the contemporary medium offilm to create an Emma for our time. This, in itself, is a significant achievement, for Austen's works cannot be described as intensely visual. Austen was, after all, writing well before the invention of photography. She was also, as Martin Amis has noted, "notoriously cerebral-a resolute niggard in her descriptive dealings with food, clothes, animals, children, weather, and landscape" (34). Rather than simply filling in the visual gaps in the plot-clothing Austen's characters in period costume and placing them against the sumptuous settings of drawing rooms and English landscapes-Heckerling employs cinematic techniques to capture the satiric dimension of the novel. She reveals the glaring gap between the heroine's perceptions of events and the events themselves. While written in the third person, the novel is told from Emma's point of view. The reader perceives events as Emma does, and thus is deliberately misguided. The chief delight of the novel comes through revelation, through the comic recognition of Emmas lack of insight. Swayed by Emma's own confidence in her perceptions of events, the reader is equally startled when her views are found to be wildly in error. Cinema inevitably transforms narrative point of view. Since the photographic medium represents exterior states, film can only suggest interior states through subjective point-of...