Jane Austen Society of Australia: Study Guide

An Overview

Williams Phillips

All of Jane Austen's six novels have been brought to the screen, many more than once. We are concerned with the one from 1995, in which the eponymous heroine of Emma becomes Clueless, which is also the title of the movie¹. This movie is an adaptation, or transformation, of Austen's novel Emma, which was first published in December, 1815 (dated 1816). Emma was the fourth of Jane Austen's novels to be published and was the last one published during her short life. The twist is that Clueless is set in mid-1990s Beverly Hills, California, an extremely posh section of Los Angeles.

Books on the Big Screen (or the Small Screen)

Before you begin to examine the movies drawn from Austen novels, you might want to spend some time thinking in general terms about the activity of making movies using material that starts out as some other kind of art – usually, although not exclusively, literature.

The overall term for the kind of movie based directly on a novel is 'adaptation', as anyone who goes to the movies surely knows. At the Oscar Awards in Hollywood each year there are two separate awards given for screen writing. 'Best Original Screen Play' and 'Best Screenplay Adapted From Another Medium.' We are concerned with movies in the second category, although it seems to me that it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference. I recently ran across an estimate that throughout the 20th century, something like 25% of all movies made in English were based on some kind of pre-existing literary source.

I've listed a few sources which discuss film adaptations of literature in the 'Resources' section. I am sure you'll find others. I hope they enrich your appreciation and enjoyment of these Jane Austen related movies as well as many other movies.

I suggest that you begin this study by making a log of your own movie viewing/book reading activity.

Make a list of movies you have gone to see AFTER you read the books they were based on.
Now make a list of books you read AFTER you saw movies that were based on them.
If you did list some things, now choose one of the book-movie pairs and make a list of the things you liked about the book in one column and things you liked about the movie in another column. If the movie was a 'good' adaptation, you will probably have listed something that is almost the same in both the 'book' column and the 'movie' column.

If you haven't yet read a book and then seen a movie based on it or been inspired by a movie to read the book it was based on, then you have a new experience awaiting you - though of course it is perfectly acceptable to enjoy or dislike a movie on its own terms apart from any literary source. I like to use a movie based on a well-loved novel like a commentary on that novel. I hope the movie will suggest new ways for me to re-engage the novel, to raise new questions about it in my mind, and to help me come to new insights about the novel. I obviously think that the experience can be both enjoyable and stimulating. I suggest that you let Jane Austen provide (or extend) that experience.

Notes

1. I love that word 'eponymous.' Ever since I learned it I look for opportunities to use it. If you don't know the word, I give it to you to enjoy too. You don't need to look it up. A few examples will make the definition clear. Here are some examples of eponyms (the noun form). Some 17th century Dutchman named Abel Janszoon Tasman is the eponym of a body of water near Australia as well as the country's southernmost state (in this case deposing the previous eponym, another Dutchman called Van Diemen). Mr. Daimler's daughter, Mercedes, is the eponym for the posh, hyphenated automobile that her father built with Mr. Benz.