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9 "As If!" Translating Austen's Ironic Narrator to Film Nora Nachumi It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that each of Austen's novels ought to make a good movie. Four of them already have. Between 1995 and 1997 versions of Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Persuasion were released as feature-length films, and on television, the BBGA&E Pride and Prejudice was watched by over eleven million viewers in England alone (Randle). Despite mixed reviews from its viewers, the MeridianlA&E version of Emma nevertheless earned a great deal of critical respect. As Caryn James writes, "its charms are those Austen herself might have valued. It is understated and sly, loaded with a sense that even a society as well-ordered as Emma's leaves plenty of room for comic misjudgments and happy endings" (21). Granted that a movie need not be "just like the book" in order to be good, there is a crucial problem in translating Austen's novels to film: what happens to the ironic, third-person narrative voice when Austen's novels are made into movies? As this look at the three large-budget, non-BBC movies illustrates, the loss of the ironic third-person narrator requires some form of compensation. Although Emma Thompsons adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1995), Douglas McGraths Emma (1996), and Amy Heckerlings updated Emma, entitled Clueless (1995) employ strategies that make the movies "work" in and for themselves, the solution achieved by Clueless-a solution which foregrounds the incongruity between the film's visual and verbal elementsis the solution that comes closest to replicating Austen's ironic narrator. Consequently Clueless, a film that its own heroine compares to a Noxema commercial , is the pop-cultural film that remains most faithful to Austen's spirit of critique. In the context of Austen, irony is best understood as a mode of expression that calls into question the way things appear. As Marvin Mudrick remarks , "irony . . . consists in th~ discrimination between impulse and pre- "As In" 131 tension, between being and seeming, between ... man as he is and man as he aspires to be" (3). Irony, he adds, is not always comic: "it becomes comic when its very neutrality is exploited as a kind of relief from man's conventional response of outrage and involvement toward delusion and error" (3). Austen, however, used irony for satiric as well as comic effect. Often, then, the ironic comments in her novels do more than expose her characters' misguided assumptions; irony helps her condemn the social norms that help foster such beliefs. In Austen's novels, irony can appear in innumerable ways. It can occur during a verbal exchange. For instance, in Sense and Sensibility, this is how Elinor defends Colonel Brandon's use of a flannel waistcoat: "Had he been only in a violent fever, you would not have despised him half so much. Confess, Marianne, is not there something interesting to you in the flushed cheek, hollow eye, and quick pulse of a fever?" (Austen, Sense 38). Obviously , the real object of Elinor's remark is to reveal the absurdity of Marianne's romantic sensibilities. Sometimes Austen's irony is visual. For example, in Emma, the fact that Emma blithely idealizes a portrait of Harriet Smith underscores the fact that Emma imagines much that is not true about her new friend. Austen's irony may also depend upon a disparity between what can be seen and what is invisible. Willoughby's "person and air" are "equal to what [Marianne's] fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story" (Austen, Sense 43); however, he behaves like a cad. The disparity between Willoughby's appearance and character calls into question readers' assumptions about what heroes ought to look like and casts doubt onto novels that glOrify excessive sensibility. I am not, however, suggesting that Austen does anything as straightforward as condemn novels of sensibility. The structural irony in Sense and Sensibility makes this quite clear. After all, Elinor's refusal to succumb to romantic assumptions fails to protect her from the same kind of heartbreak that grieves Marianne. To make a large claim, and to echo Claudia Johnson, I believe that Austen's irony exposes social structures that make women dependents and fools and that weaken and corrupt men.1 Integral to this campaign is her witty deflation ofliterary tropes that train readers to reproduce romantic cliches. In Sense and Sensibility, for instance, the narrator ridicules silly ideals of romance by remarking upon Willoughby's "incivility in...

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