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This essay interrogates two film adaptations of Jane Austen's Emma, Amy Heckerling's Clueless and Douglas McGrath's Emma, reading the portrayals of "femininity" as complex and unstable: simultaneously conservative and progressive.
This essay examines representations of the "feminine" as they come together in the protagonists of two large-screen adaptations of Jane Austen's Emma: the 1996 Miramax Emma, directed by Douglas McGrath, and Paramount's Clueless, directed by Amy Heckerling and released in 1995. Resonances and divergences between the films and the novel will be investigated in an attempt to chart the anxiety that can haunt filmic constructions of "femininity." As adaptations, Emma and Clueless have been described as Hollywood-style and Imitation, respectively, the latter term designating a film that "uses a novel's plot and character but updates the setting to focus on a modern-day highly structured society" (Troost, "Nineteenth-century" 76). The historical literary film adaptation, whether it preserves the "historical" setting or replaces this with the "present day," is inevitably in dialogue with the time of its making. Through processes of appropriation and invention, it manifests complexities and uncertainties that resonate both with the literary text from which it draws inspiration and with the society that produces it. Some critics have observed that the spate of film and television adaptations of Austen's novels released in the 1980s and 1990s promoted the writer's status in popular culture as a conservative icon (North), often containing the texts' potential subversiveness, and representing a "cultural antifeminist articulation of nostalgia for an unchallenged patriarchal order" (Sonnet 59). Instead of viewing these films as a neutralization of the novel's subversive potential, as liberal-feminist "rewritings," or as deadlocks between contrary tendencies, it seems fruitful to consider them as an overlaying of discourses of submission and agency.
Thomas Leitch, among others, has discussed the tenacity of fidelity as a criterion for the analysis of adaptations. Much of the critical response to Emma and Clueless appears to have adopted this criterion, appraising the films in terms of their fidelity to a spirit, essence, or intention attributed to the original; an essentialist rhetoric of authenticity and inauthenticity, depth and surface, has been invoked to justify a perceived hierarchy in which novel outranks film. Several subtler readings, however, have avoided value judgments of this kind and insisted...