‘As If!’ Translating Austen's Ironic Narrator to Film

Nora Nachumi

An essay by Nora Nachumi published in Jane Austen in Hollywood, ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, The University Press of Kentucky, Kentucky, 1998. Reproduced by kind permission. All quotations from this text should be credited to The University Press of Kentucky, and to the JASA website.

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 BBC/A&E Pride and Prejudice was watched by over eleven million viewers in England alone (Randle). Despite mixed reviews from its viewers, the Meridian/A&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 Thompson's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1995), Douglas McGrath's Emma (1996), and Amy Heckerling's 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 elements is 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 film that remains most faithful to Austen's spirit of pop-cultural 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 the discrimination between impulse and pretension, 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 of literary tropes that train readers to reproduce romantic clichés . In Sense and Sensibility, for instance, the narrator ridicules silly ideals of romance by remarking upon Willoughby’s ‘incivility in surviving [the] loss’ of Marianne (Austen, Sense 379). Romantic convention, asserts the narrator, requires that he at least ‘[flee] from society or [contract] an habitual gloom of temper, or [die] of a broken heart’ (379). In Emma, the heroine's ignorance of her own heart is suggested thus:

Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love [with Frank Churchill]. Her ideas only varied as to the how much. At first, she thought it was a good deal; and afterwards, but little. She had great pleasure in hearing Frank Churchill talked of ... she was very often thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter. ... But, on the other hand, she could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to be less disposed for employment than usual; she was still busy and cheerful; and, pleasing as he was, she could yet imagine him to have faults. [Austen, Emma 264]

By the end of this passage, the only thing more apparent than Emma's indifference to Frank Churchill is the absurdity of her criteria for judging the extent of her own affections. As Rachel Brownstein points out, the danger facing Emma, and all of Austen's heroines, is that they may ‘let the right man and the chance for action pass them by’ (90). Consequently, she adds, the happy conclusions of the novels depend upon the heroines' ability to know their own hearts and to interpret the world around them correctly (91). Often, as in Sense and Sensibility or Emma, this requires that the heroines reject romantic conventions. Despite her earlier prejudice against them, Marianne finally realizes that second attachments may actually work while Emma eventually accepts the difference between her real and imagined worlds.

A stage direction when Willoughby leaves Barton Cottage describes him as ‘looking about as virile as his horse’.

Written by Emma Thompson and directed by Ang Lee, the 1995 movie version of Sense and Sensibility actually celebrates the conventions of romance the novel condemns. The book ends as it begins, by foregrounding the relationship of Elinor and Marianne. The movie concludes with the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne and – in direct opposition to the novel – emphasizes Willoughby's sorrow. The book tells us that Willoughby ‘lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself' (Austen, Sense 379). The screenplay, however, ends with Willoughby on a white horse, ‘on the far edge of [the] frame,’ watching as Brandon tosses coins into the air. ‘As we draw back further still,’ the screenplay concludes, ‘he slowly pulls the horse around and moves off in the opposite direction’ (Thompson 202).

Willoughby's white horse, and horses in general, are a key to the movie version of Sense and Sensibility. That Willoughby rides the white horse of a hero suggests that Emma Thompson clearly understands Austen's intentions regarding the disparity between the way Willoughby looks and behaves (a stage direction when Willoughby leaves Barton Cottage describes him as ‘looking about as virile as his horse’ [Thompson 1001). However, the fact that Brandon's black charger is equally, if more subtly, virile points to a crucial difference between the novel and the film. Despite a few reservations, Thompson's screenplay intentionally glorifies the romantic conventions that Austen deflates. In her published diary, Thompson remarks that ‘making the male characters effective was one of the biggest problems… in translating the novel to film’ (269). ‘In the novel,’ she remarks, ‘Edward and Brandon are quite shadowy and absent for long periods’ (269). In a movie that ends up celebrating romance, this is a serious problem.

Colonel Brandon, as played by Alan Rickman, is far sexier than Austen intended him to be.

Thompson's solution was to ‘keep [the men] present even when they're off screen’ (269). One way this was accomplished was in the casting. Austen's Edward Ferrars is not a hunk. He ‘was not recommended to [the Dashwoods] by any peculiar graces of person or address’ remarks the narrator. ‘He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing’ (Austen, Sense 15). In the movie, Edward is played by Hugh Grant, a man Thompson describes as ‘Repellently gorgeous ... much prettier than I am’ (212). Although he is not precisely pretty, Alan Rickman as Brandon is definitely more macho than someone who is described as wearing flannel waistcoats has a right to be. He frequently is filmed with a gun or a horse, and his disheveled appearance as Marianne lies ill out-Byrons Willoughby ‘Give me an occupation,’ he murmurs to Elinor, ‘or I shall run mad’ (Thompson 181). After this, the screenplay asserts, he is ‘dangerously quiet’ (181). This is much more exciting than Austen's description of a man who, ‘with a readiness that seemed to speak the occasion, and the service prearranged in his mind ... offered himself as the messenger who should fetch Mrs. Dashwood’ (Austen, Sense 311). Clearly Brandon, as played by Rickman, is far sexier than Austen intended him to be.

Indeed, the movie works hard to create the impression that Brandon is the perfect romantic hero for Marianne. Specifically, Thompson's screenplay revises the novel so that Brandon's later actions mirror Willoughby's earlier behavior. In the movie, both carry an incapacitated Marianne through the rain. Both ride powerful chargers, and both recite poetry to her with heartfelt conviction. Brandon even concludes his poetry reading with what the screenplay describes as a ‘soul-breathing glance’ (Thompson 187). Austen, in contrast, is notoriously reluctant to describe love scenes of any kind. In the novel, the courtship of Marianne and Colonel Brandon is described thus: ‘With such a confederacy against her – with a knowledge so intimate of his goodness – with a conviction of his fond attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it was observable to everybody else – burst on her – what could she do?’ (Austen, Sense 378). Thompson's movie works, but, ironically, it works by celebrating the very tropes Austen destabilizes.

Like Austen's Sense is also not really about romance. Emma is a story about how a girl learns to be kind. Set on a pedestal by virtue of her social position, spoiled by her father, Emma ‘dangerously imagines herself a splendid free young goddess whose connection to most people is an amused puppeteer's’ (Brownstein 104). Throughout the novel, Emma gradually learns that she is like everyone else. However, until she learns to value and join a community, the third-person narration mercilessly exposes Emma's delusions and satirizes the social conventions that nurture them.

Viewed in this light, Douglas McGrath's Emma is a vexed piece of work. Although the film ultimately refuses to knock Emma off her perch, it occasionally succeeds in exposing the delusions of its principal characters. One illustration of Emma's ignorance of her own heart, for instance, is accomplished through the casting. Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma and Jeremy Northam's Mr. Knightley are extremely good-looking. Moreover, the sixteen-year age gap that exists between Emma and Mr. Knightley is, here, invisible. Their union is so aesthetically pleasing that Emma's inability to see Knightley as anything other than a brother-in-law is called into question within the movie's first five minutes. The camera also insists that the two be viewed as a pair. Whenever the two share a scene, the camera either frames them within a single shot or shows us that they are aware of each other. We see Mr. Knightley watch Emma with more than brotherly interest at a piano recital. Later, at a ball, we observe Mr. Knightley rescue Harriet Smith from Emma's point of view. When their eyes meet, Emma and Mr. Knightley are inevitably drawn to each other. At the recital, Knightley joins Emma on the sofa and a close-up shuts out the rest of the room. At the ball, the two turn away from the camera and the camera pulls back, dramatizing their intimacy by shutting us out. Subtly, the casting, the blocking, and the camera work all expose Emma's lack of self-knowledge. This dramatic irony is what helps us see Emma's mistakes. We are aware of Emma's delusions and suspect the plot's outcome before she has a clue.

McGrath's movie is a comedy, and his use of visual irony occasionally reveals the characters' misconceptions in broad strokes. Knightley's sense of entitlement is lampooned, for example, when he complains about leaving his home for a ball. ‘I just want to stay here, where it's cozy,’ he mutters to Emma as the camera swings around to reveal the enormous proportions of Donwell Abbey. In a longer scene, an archery game turns ugly when the two disagree about Harriet Smith's rejection of Robert Martin. Dressed in pink and equipped with bow and quiver, Emma resembles nothing so much as a peculiar combination of Diana and Cupid. Although her sense of herself as a virginal goddess remains relatively intact, her incompetence as Cupid quickly becomes apparent. As Emma defends her actions, her shots grow wilder. ‘He is not Harriet's equal,’ she says and her arrow bounces off the target. ‘it would be a degradation for [Harriet] to marry a man I could not admit as my own acquaintance,’ she huffs, and her arrow sinks into the target's outer edge. ‘Upon my word, Emma,’ says Knightley, ‘better be without sense than misapply it as you do.’ Emma misses the target entirely and almost kills Knightley's dog. The incongruity between what Emma says and what we see on the screen clearly points out that Emma is wrong. As when Knightley insists upon the comforts of home, this juxtaposition of visual image and verbal display provides the most obvious and effective way of exposing and commenting on a character's point of view. As the arrows bounce off the target, Emma's snobbery and her ill-judgment are not only made apparent but are also condemned.

So why, with her faults, is Paltrow's Emma so appealing? Austen herself wrote that Emma was a heroine that ‘no one but myself will much like’ (quoted in Austen-Leigh 157), and to all intents, she should have been right. In her review of the movie, Janet Maslin remarks ‘what makes the hauteur of Emma so forgivable are the facts that the heroine will know better by the time the story is over and that her instincts are so reliably wrong' (C1). The movie's ability to depict Emma ironically, Maslin suggests, releases us from the burden of judging Emma for ourselves. We can like Emma (both the movie and the character) because we are certain that the movie, which espouses our values, will chastise Emma for us.

Or will it? Another aspect of McGrath's Emma substantially undermines the movie's efforts to portray its heroine in an ironic light. This movie banked on its ability to make Paltrow a star. Timed to coincide with the movie's release, countless articles were written lauding Paltrow's beauty and charm.² Almost all of them mentioned her romantic relationship with the actor Brad Pitt. So prevalent was this deification that Paltrow's public persona seriously interferes with our view of the character she portrays. Despite her credible performance, Paltrow cannot avoid her reputation as the golden girl who landed the best-looking guy in the movies. With Paltrow as Emma, Emma's union with Knightley is a foregone conclusion. Moreover, as a star, Paltrow's apparent perfection works against the notion that Emma must get off her pedestal and rejoin the human race. Despite her faults, this Emma ends the movie where she begins it, firmly fixed upon Mount Olympus.

Indeed, the movie works hard to deify Paltrow. She is lit to perfection. In interior scenes, she always seems to be in a little more light than the rest of the cast. The camera, notes Maslin, loves to linger on her ‘fine-boned beauty,’ often to the detriment of the supporting players (Cl). As befits an Olympian, Paltrow is often dressed and posed like a Greek goddess. While her empire waists correctly recall the period's obsession with ancient Greece, other details are somewhat anachronistic. Unless she is at church or visiting the poor, Emma tends to show a substantial amount of bosom and neck. She frequently wears only one color, a device that reinforces the sense that she is a complete entity unto herself. Her upswept hair is never allowed to curl near her face, and she is often bareheaded. Dressed thus, she resembles a statue brought to life or a girl on a pedestal.

Emma's poses reinforce the impression. As Emma awaits the Coles' invitation, she is shown on a settee built to resemble the double scrolls that top Ionic columns. The white curtain behind her and the two potted orange trees that frame the scene emphasize the neoclassical aesthetic organizing the tableau. At another point, Emma's superiority to Mrs. Elton is dramatized by her appearance and pose as they sit drinking tea. Dressed in a dark red long-sleeved dress, Mrs. Elton sits on a couch at least four inches lower than Emma's chair. Her curls hang to her shoulders. Clad in pale green, Emma sits perfectly upright on the edge of her seat. Her hair is pulled back and ornamented with a green and white ribbon. Considered together, Mrs. Elton's appearance amounts to an ostentatious display of self while Emma's reflects a fondness for understatement and simple, pure lines. In a movie so besotted by the physical beauty of its hero and heroine, Emma's good looks thus become an indication of her moral worth. This Emma, the film tells us, deserves to be on a pedestal because she truly is a young goddess. She may make mistakes, but she is never really in need of any serious improvement. Thus, what could have been a Bildungsroman – a story of a young woman's education – ends up as a simple comedy of manners.

While McGrath's worship of Paltrow ultimately undermines the movie's original project, Amy Heckerling's Clueless faithfully replicates the ironic spirit of Austen's fifth novel. The protagonist Cher's skewed perspective and the role her environment plays in her misconceptions are dramatized by the contrast between her oh-so-literal narration and what we see on the screen. Her insistence, for example, that she is a normal teenager who gets dressed in the morning accompanies a vision of Cher in her dressing room coordinating outfits on a computer. Her matter-of-fact description of her mother's accidental death during a ‘routine liposuction’ identifies a terrifically tacky portrait of a woman with feathered hair. Later, Cher's need for a quiet place to relax introduces a shot of the shopping mall. In this manner, the film makes the relationship between the realities of Cher's environment and her self-absorbed image hilariously clear.

Although Heckerling's Clueless has been dismissed as a charming but ‘light’ version of Austen, Clueless is the only one of the three non-BBC films to recognize and replicate the most profound of Emma's ironies. The genius of Emma is that it forces its readers to question the values and expectations they bring to the book. As Terry Castle points out, ‘we enjoy Emma because she is smart and she is good; but we positively dote on her mistakes because they allow us to feel superior’ (xv). Upon reflection, however, we have to admit that we are not so superior, nor Emma so wrong, as we originally thought. Many first-time readers, for example, are surprised to learn about the secret engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax.³ Indeed, without the narrator's help, many of us are no more perceptive than Emma herself. Emma, moreover, is not so misguided as she initially appears: ‘Emma's wish to improve Harriet’s situation is not intrinsically wrong,’ remarks Claudia Johnson (132). Indeed, Mr. Knightley points out that Emma chose better for Mr. Elton than he did himself.. ‘Harriet Smith has some first-rate qualities, which Mrs. Elton is totally without’ (Austen, Emma 331). Emma is also correct in suspecting Jane Fairfax’s involvement in a secret romance. Austen's irony thus functions on multiple levels. While Emma's ‘mistakes’ expose her own arrogance, they also open the door for a critique of those social conventions that deem a Harriet or Jane less of a ‘catch’ than a woman like Mrs. Elton. Austen's irony, I think, encourages her readers to call into question those things we take for granted. If the fact that we misread the evidence suggests that we, like Emma, are shaped by the shape of our worlds, then Emma's awakening suggests that we also are able to consciously improve how we think and behave.

Although it tries, Clueless, does not go this far. Unlike Frank's love for Jane, Christian's homosexuality is probably clear to most viewers long before it is apparent to Cher. As in McGrath's Emma, Cher's union with Josh is also obvious from the start. However, Cher's moral growth and her genuinely likable nature pose a challenge to those of us who harbor stereotypes about spoiled teenagers who live in Beverly Hills. More seriously, the film goes to great lengths to reinforce an image of Cher that it eventually dismantles. The first-person narration is extremely important to this endeavor because it makes Cher immensely appealing. It lets us know that a good heart beats within that shell of self-involved ignorance. The fact that Cher finally understands her own heart is – importantly – signaled by a newfound harmony between what she says and what we see on the screen. Like a giant cartoon lightbulb, a huge glowing fountain erupts in the background to signify the truth of Cher's revelation. Cher's new perspective is more than a realization about her feelings for Josh. She sees her old behavior as shallow, and this gives her the power to alter her world. There is no question that Emma is a less ‘silly’ book than Clueless a movie. But, in its own charming way, Clueless encourages its viewers to ‘makeover their souls.’

Notes

1.  According to Claudia Johnson, Austen employs ‘strategies of subversion and indirection’ to create novels of social criticism (19). Throughout the book, Johnson demonstrates that irony is one of those strategies of indirection.

2.  Hendricks's ‘The Lovely Gwyneth Paltrow’ webpage lists over twenty-five articles on Paltrow in magazines such as Vogue, Time, and New York Magazine. See especially Corliss's profile, where he calls her ‘that cheerfully ravishing wraith on the arm of Hollywood dream supreme Brad Pitt’ (74), and Rochlin's discussion of Paltrow and her celebrity status.

Here I disagree with Castle who, in her introduction to Emma, remarks that ‘it must be a colossally incompetent reader who misses ... that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are in some manner romantically involved’ (xiv). As Johnson observes, ‘Such is the consummate mastery of Austen's plotting ... that Emma's misapprehensions seem utterly plausible when we read the novel for the first time, and she appears willfully to 'mis-read' the sunny clarity of truth only when our own repeated readings of this romance, the stuff of literary criticism, have laid her misconstructions bare’ (133).

Works cited 

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----. Sense and Sensibility. Ed. R.W Chapman. Rev. Mary Lascelles. 3d ed. Vol. 1 of The Novels of Jane Austen. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966.

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Brownstein, Rachel. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982.

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Clueless. Writer and director Amy Heckerling. With Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd. Paramount, 1995.

Corliss, Richard. ‘A Touch of Class.’ Time 29 July 1996: 74~75.

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Hendncks, Ben. ‘The Lovely Gwyneth Paltrow’ Online at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~bh/gp/GPreal.html (20 July 1997).

James, Caryn. ‘An Emma Both Darker and Funnier.’ Review of Emma. New York Times 15 Feb. 1997: 28.

Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Maslin, Janet. ‘So Genteel, So Scheming, So Austen.’ Review of Emma. New York Times 2 Aug. 1996: Cl.

Mudrick,Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952.

Randle, Nancy Jalasca. ‘Austen – A Woman for All Seasons.’ Standard-Times, 16 Feb. 1997. Online at http://www.s-t.com/daily/02-97/02-16-97/e07ae311.htm (1 April 1998).

Rochlin, Margy. ‘Like Emma, Setting Her World All Astir’, New York Times 28 July 1996: sec. 2, p.11.

Sense and Sensibility. Writer Emma Thompson. Director Ang Lee. With Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant. Mirage-Columbia (Sony), 1995.

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