Jane Austen For Dummies (60 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Bringing Austen Novels to Stage, Screen, and Television
In This Chapter
Figuring out why Austen's novels are so adaptable to other media
Looking into your choices of media to watch
B
esides being free of copyright restrictions, Austen's novels are attractive to producers for several good reasons. Great works of literature â and Austen's novels are great works of literature or “classics” â have long been used by film studios as sources for movies. Just think of Audrey Hepburn in Tolstoy's
War and Peace,
Henry Fonda in Dickens's A
Tale of Two Cities,
Cary Grant in
Gunga Din,
or Ralph Fiennes in
The English Patient,
and we remember how many popular and critically acclaimed films have their source from novels or poems (Rudyard Kipling's
Gunga Din
). In fact, coming from a classic literary text gives a film or television show a certain cachet. And when to that cachet we add (for the ladies) Colin Firth emerging from a dip in a lake wearing a clingy, sheer white shirt, or (for the gents) Jennifer Ehle breathing heavily in her décolleté dress, is there any wonder that 1995's
Pride and Prejudice
miniseries had viewers of both genders glued to their TVs? This chapter explores the reasons for Austen's dramatic adaptability and provides an annotated list of all the productions for stage and screen (TV and film) that exist up to the point of this book's writing.
Because Austen's novels are public domain, there are no royalties to pay: this lack of an extra expense means that using one of her works for a play or film is cheap. Austen's literary classics have a high stature, so using one of her works is a sign of classiness. But Austen's novels are adaptable for other reasons than just cost and borrowed elegance.
As I observed in Chapter 1, Austen tells a great story. All of her novels deal with young and (usually!) attractive men and women looking for true love, and what's more, they find it after overcoming odds of various types â mutual pride and prejudice in one book (you know which one!), overcoming blinding self-absorption in another
(Emma),
and reuniting with a suitor eight years after rejecting him in still another
(Persuasion).
So while all Austen's novels are courtship novels, the courtships and the lovers involved in them all differ. And who doesn't like a love story? If you don't, and you're still reading this book, think again!
Austen's heroines appeal particularly to females, whether readers or movie-goers or both.
Elizabeth Bennet, Austen's most popular and possibly most admirable heroine, has a sense of self-possession about when and whom she chooses to marry that was unusual in a young woman for her time and still admirable in ours.
Even Austen's most passive heroine, Fanny Price of
Mansfield Park,
holds out for true love despite numerous pressures to the contrary.
Such heroines are attractive to women, young and not-so-young. In fact, Austen's heroines can be viewed as prototypes of feminism. But they aren't the strident bra-burners of the 1970s. Jane Austen is far more subtle than that! Instead, Austen's heroines show that the events and thoughts of a woman are worthwhile â worthwhile enough to read about for 300 or more pages.
While all Austen readers have their own mental pictures of how these characters look â keeping in mind that she gives relatively little physical description â to see how they're portrayed on screen is always fun. For me, personally, two of the best portrayals in terms of Austen's verbal descriptions of them are as follows:
Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth Bennet in the 1980 BBC miniseries of
Pride and Prejudice
because, for me, Garvie looks and acts just as I perceive Austen's depicting Elizabeth in the novel.
⢠Garvie has beautiful bright eyes (such as Darcy admires in the novel), along with wit and charm.
⢠Garvie is extremely petite, and in the novel, Mr. Bennet talks of his “little Lizzy,” suggesting that while she is not the youngest Bennet sister, she may well be the most petite of the five (PP 1:1).
⢠Garvie's petite physique makes her look as though she could be “crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles [fences] and springing over puddles,” as well as running “gaily off” as Elizabeth does in the novel (PP 1:7, 10).
⢠Garvie has a look of mischief in her eyes that Elizabeth
must
have when she plays Miss Pert to Darcy!
Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma in the 1996 commercial film of
Emma
⢠Paltrow is handsome in this film and looks to the manor born. (
Emma
opens with a description of its heroine as “Handsome, clever, and rich.”)
⢠Her performance is marked by the sad, almost hangdog look she shows whenever Emma realizes that all of her good-willed planning to help others doesn't work out. This reaction reminds even the film viewer who hasn't read
Emma
that our heroine's meddling interference is usually â at least in her mind â well, even kindly, meant and that she is chagrined when she fails.
⢠Paltrow looks both “Handsome” and sweet â an important combination for the film version because Emma's meddling can really irritate the reader or viewer.
⢠Paltrow has what Emma has: in the words of the novel's Mrs. Weston, “âregular features, open countenance with a complexion! oh! what a bloom of full health, such a pretty height and size; such a firm and upright figure'” (E 1:5). Paltrow looks the part.
One of Austen's greatest skills as a novelist is delivering her plot in dialogue. This way of presenting the story is a much livelier and more realistic way than doing straight narration. Dialogue is more realistic because it replicates the way we come to know people and deal with situations in everyday life: by conversing with others. When and how a person talks tells a lot about the character who's speaking, sometimes more than the character even realizes. This aspect of fiction is called dramatic irony. For example, in
Pride and Prejudice,
Miss Bingley attempts to demean Elizabeth by saying in front of Darcy that Elizabeth's uncle lives in Cheapside, London, a commercial, rather than fashionable, area, in the city. But she conveniently forgets â though the reader remembers â that Miss Bingley's father made his money in trade, too (or commercially, instead of inheriting it as Darcy did his) (PP 1:8).
When you're reading
Pride and Prejudice,
you come across pages when dialogue occurs without even a “he said” or “she said.” Austen, herself, noted this when she received her copies of her newly published novel. While noting that adding these words would clarify the dialogue, she then remarked, “[B]ut âI do not write for such dull Elves'” (Letter, January 29, 1813).
Austen's speech lines can be rather long. In fact, when Jennifer Ehle played Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995
Pride and Prejudice
TV miniseries, she observed that Austen's lines were harder to memorize than Shakespeare's because of their length and structure of (grammatically) complex sentences with the subject sometimes coming at the end of the sentence. But listening to witty, well-spoken talk â whether in our mind's ear while reading or from the mouths of actors on the screen â is always a pleasure to the mind or ear. As a result, most adaptations of Austen for the screen â commercial or home â borrow whole sections of her dialogue from her novels. So while Emma Thompson won a highly-deserved Oscar for Best Screenplay for her 1995-adaptation of
Sense and Sensibility,
she shared that award with Austen â a fact Thompson, herself, graciously noted when she made her acceptance speech for Best Screenplay at the 53rd Annual Golden Globe awards in 1996.
Austen's world is a polite world where adhering to decorum and courtesy was a given for the gentry characters who inhabited her novels. (For more on the class known as the gentry, see Chapter 2.) So after a long day at work where you get doors slammed in your face all day, going home to watch ladies and gentlemen dressed in beautiful early-19th-century British costumes, bowing to each other, is a nice change of pace.
Even insults in Austen are delivered with class. For example, in the Box Hill scene in
Emma,
Frank Churchill facetiously declares that Emma desires to hear everyone say “âone thing very clever . . . or two things moderately clever â or three things very dull indeed.'” The innocent, well-meaning Miss Bates immediately replies (because she can't resist a chance to speak), “âThree things very dull indeed. That will just do for me. . . . I shall be sure to say three things dull things as soon as I open my mouth, shant't I?'” The narrator then inserts that “Emma could not resist,” saying with “mock ceremony,” “âAh! Madam, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me â but you will be limited as to the number â only three at once'” (E 3:7). Miss Bates is, of course, devastated by Emma's cruel comment, but you have to admit that Emma's language was quite polite!
Costume drama has a wide appeal because it transports the viewer to days gone by when men wore breeches and bowed to ladies dressed in lovely gowns. Watching costume drama provides an occasional escape from everyday life. Add to the costumes, the scenery of the beautiful, green English countryside and the indoor scenes filmed in glorious 18th-century country houses (mansions), and a cold, rainy day in New York City becomes a vicarious trip to the late-18th- and early-19th-century English countryside in springtime.
While some earlier television versions of Austen novels have been shot on location, instead of inside a studio, all of the Austen-based films and TV miniseries since 1995 have been filmed on historical sites in England, painstakingly chosen to represent scenes in the novels. The 1995 film
Sense and Sensibility
used the gorgeous Double Cube Room in Wilton House, Salisbury, for an indoor ballroom scene, and Saltram House, near Plymouth, built and landscaped in the 18th-century by the two foremost architects and landscape artists of the day, Robert Adam (founder of the neoclassical Adam style) and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, was used for the exterior and interior of Norland Park. Seeing such sites delights the sight of the viewer.