Bodice-ripping Jane Austen adaptations obscure her genius

Part-way through the trailer for the forthcoming Emma adaptation the filmmakers proclaim:

BEHOLD

A NEW VISION

OF JANE AUSTEN’S GREAT COMEDY

This message is interspersed with clips of the all-star cast including Miranda Hart, Bill Nighy, Josh O’Connor, Johnny Flynn and Anna Taylor-Joy bringing to life famous moments from Jane Austen’s novel.

For the two centuries after Austen’s death, it seems that every author, scriptwriter, and filmmaker has had “a new vision” of one or another of her famous works. Television is beset with reams and reams of male actors masculine-ly galloping on horses and veritable empires of dancing empire-line dresses. The adaptations have ranged from the supposedly “period” dramas of Sense and Sensibility (1996), and Pride and Prejudice (1995) with smouldering Colin Firths and shy Hugh Grants, to the decidedly less Regency-inspired Clueless (1995).

I do not wish to judge the new Emma before it is released, and, if the cast and trailer are anything to go by, it looks set to be quite amusing. But what does need to be considered is whether we do need all our Austen adaptations to be “new”, ground-breaking, and vastly different to the original novels. Perhaps, in continually altering aspects of Austen’s texts to make them more appealing to contemporary audiences, their original radicalism has been diluted.

To take a famous example, the lake scene in BBC’s Pride and Prejudice (subtitled “Colin Firth strips off” on the beeb’s very own youtube channel) has absolutely no textual basis in the novel. Rather, as the screenwriter Andrew Davies has explained, he wanted to make it “as physical” as possible “without being ridiculous about it” to remind the viewers that the novel is about “desire and young people and their hormones.”

There’s definitely an argument to be made that engaging period dramas interest viewers in Austen who otherwise would not read or know of her work, but this “darcymania” has come at the expense of the substance. To hypersexualise and bare the “desire” in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is to ignore the novel’s concern with repression and what is left unsaid and unshown. Right from the first line of the novel – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” – Austen creates a comically ironic narrator who never directly proclaims what she thinks about the novel’s twisting romantic plot, but subtly hints at it, much like her Regency heroines’ clipped communication. Darcy’s “stripping off” lays waste to this comment on Regency constraints and reduces them to parody; his first line to Elizabeth when she comes across him undressed is “Are your parents in good health?”.

To reduce Austen’s novel about sisterhood, marriage, the terrifying possibilities of spinsterhood and the fallen woman to a gratuitous wet shirt is to do more than just hypersexualise it; it circumscribes Austen’s social commentary to the realm of bodice-ripper.

The academic George Steiner famously said that “at the height of political and industrial revolution, in a decade of formidable philosophic activity, Miss Austen composes novels almost extra-territorial to history”. Many adaptations make use of this assumption that the narratives are “extra-territorial to history”; Alexander McCall Smith has rewritten a modern Emma in which the eponymous heroine drives a Mini, Bride and Prejudice (2004) places Elizabeth Bennet in modern-day India with an American property-tycoon type as her Mr Darcy, and Clueless (1995) sets Emma in an American high school. Authors and screenwriters alike have treated Austen’s narratives as portable and untethered.

I do not wish to say that modern adaptations of old novels are intrinsically flawed. Many are often very good, and Clueless is able to capture the ironic commentary of Austen’s narrator better than any other on-screen adaptation I have seen. But to pretend that Austen’s novels have no context of their own other than the fashions their characters wear is unhelpful. Throughout Austen’s novels girls marry soldiers (Mr Wickham in Pride and Prejudice), have brothers who are in an actively fighting navy (Fanny Price in Mansfield Park), and marry members of the navy who have made their fortune in colonial wars (Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion); it is ludicrous to pretend that the context of a burgeoning Empire and the Napoleonic Wars does not press upon Austen’s texts. By ignoring this context – a sin which is not just that of popular culture adaptations but academics too – Austen’s texts are further trivialised and relegated as romantic stories of little importance.

Evidently the 2016 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes the martial context of Austen’s novels a little too far (and seems almost obsessed by women in regency dresses wielding phallic-like swords), but perhaps its only redeeming feature is its awareness of Austen’s interest in the world which lay beyond her villages, Bath, and country walks. Or maybe someone just thought weapons and dresses were hot.