Emma: The Merits of Multiple Adaptations

The various film versions of Jane Austen’s Emma offer fascinating insights into the broader nature of film adaptation. Audiences tend to categorize films based on genre, first and foremost. And by incorporating the expected conventions, filmmakers can make their product more marketable. Austen adaptations tend to be period pieces—films that strive to capture the look and feel of certain time period. And although this can make for tempting Oscar-bait, it is not always accessible to the masses. Thus, film iterations of Emma typically emphasize the romantic and comedic aspects of Austen’s novel—comfortably placing their films within the extremely marketable (and inexplicably popular) romantic comedy.

This seems like a pretty solid game plan for an adaptation attempt. Austen’s novel has humor and satire, drama and romance, and the dialogue (though perhaps insufferable by today’s standards) is certainly distinctive of her time. What is curious, then, is why so many attempts have been made—seemly upon the assumption that all the previous attempts were somehow lacking.  

Interestingly, the novel has been adapted for film in a feature-length format, as well for television, with a more episodic treatment. Personally I find that the episodic format more accurately captures the “everyday life” aspect of Austen’s novel, allowing us to spend a little more time to “live with” the people of Highbury, as Emma does. I cannot say for certain whether it succeeds or not, since we did not screen them in class; however, I would expect that having more time to live with Emma would form a better equivalence of meaning with both the complex social interactions and the sprawling character arc that Austen writes for Emma.

With that being said, more streamlined feature-length adaptations emphasize the “big picture” plotline, which one could argue is equally important. To be honest, it is not that complicated of a story, and audiences are much more likely to invest two hours of their time rather than several evenings.

The two feature length version of Emma that we watched in class, Emma (1996) and Clueless (1995), offer different insights into Austen’s novel. Both are good films in their own right; it is difficult to compare them in any meaningful way, except by their relation to the novel. The filmmakers strove to emphasize different aspect of the source text, and in this regard, I think each was successful.

 Emma, staring Gywneth Paltrow, emphasizes the look and feel of Austen’s era, most especially through the characters’ speech. Some of the dialogue is borrowed directly from the text. It streamlines the story and emphasizes the romantic and comedic aspects (the tagline is “Cupid is armed and dangerous!”) to make it more accessible to modern audiences, while still firmly rooted in the visual and linguistic setting. While the film does a good job of showing us what the period “looked” like, it does help us much with understanding it. Austen’s subtle social criticisms of Highbury’s elite are largely glazed over. It focuses the attention of Emma’s character and her various flaws and virtues, and the lower class is almost never shown.

"Cupid is armed and dangerous!"

 Clueless helps us to understand Highbury a little better: as a complex social network, complete with cliques, social classes and social protocols. As the writer of Clueless realized, the story and plot of Emma is universal enough that it could potentially take place anywhere that those criteria are met. And since those criteria are distinctive characteristic of any high school movie…the genre makes a whole lot more sense than one might initially think. The parallels abound; indeed, the necessity of finding a husband in Austen’s time is quite comparable to the social pressure felt by high schoolers to date.  In the high school movie genre, it is immediately understood that there is a lower class: the “unpopular” kids. By casting the farmers of Austen as the stoners of Clueless, we are better to able to understand why Emma does NOT want Harriet to marry Mr. Martin. In one of the most brilliant parallels, the film is as definitive of the 1990’s as the novel is of 1816 England. In the modern literary world, Clueless does Austen’s novel a great service by giving today’s audiences a much better understanding of the world in which Emma lives.

Note the distinctive period costumes. 

Again, quite distinctive. It's definitely the 90's.

Film theorist William Galperin claims that this attention to the world around Emma/Cher is in fact more faithful to Austen than the numerous other adaptions. This may be true, but I still prefer to say that the film simply emphasizes that aspect of the text better than some others. Each adaptation gives us new ways of thinking about the text. It is an excellent example of the choices filmmakers face when producing an adaptation, and how not all of their approaches are necessarily as bad as they sound.