And yet the filmmakers keep trying.
It’s an unenviable task, condensing the value of volumes of social criticism, sparkling dialogue, and characters so beloved they’ve inspired an entire love interest archetype. But often these films succeed and even reveal new layers to Austen’s canonical works. At the very least, they inspire debate among his many readers.
CNN spoke to several Austen scholars and enthusiasts to explain what they look for in an adaptation of Austen’s work — and why the magic of his words can be so difficult to translate to the screen.
Why We Love Adapting Austen
In a way, Austen’s tales are quintessential romances. They have all the hallmarks of the genre: disapproving family, mismatched couples, love-hate relationships, long-awaited reunions, swoon-worthy declarations of love.
On the one hand, it’s a smart business decision to revive Austen — there’s always an audience for his work, said Jillian Davis and Yolanda Rodriguez, hosts of the “Pemberley Podcast,” in which they analyze various adaptations of the work. of Austen.
“Complex interpersonal relationships will never go out of style,” Davis and Rodriguez told CNN in an email.
Although Austen’s novels have always incorporated love and marriage into their plots, the author has not always portrayed marriage as the flawless happy ending her heroines yearned for. It’s a financial decision and a family duty, of which her female characters are well aware. Austen women are often ambivalent about what it would mean for their independence if they got married, even when they really love their partner, said Inger Brodey, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
“Austen is a way for today’s readers to romanticize soul mates and maintain their self-esteem,” said Brodey, who has published several articles about Austen.
And so, in this way, she says, Austen’s tales continue to inspire and empower today: they are lucid love stories told from a subtly feminist perspective that still give their protagonists a kind of ‘agency.
What Are Austen’s Best Adaptations
A strong adaptation of Austen need not repeat the original text or even be set in late 18th century England. In fact, Brodey said, she’d rather a movie not feel beholden to the source novel. The CNN Austenites interviewed agreed – for an adaptation of Austen to succeed, it must maintain the spirit of her work, especially her incisive depth and incomparable wit.
“What’s hardest for any Austen adapter has to be capturing her fiction’s incredible combination of comedy, irony and social critique, along with genuinely moving courtship stories,” said Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and author of “The Creation of Jane Austen.” “It’s obviously difficult to get that balance of characters in the content in two hours, along with the required and satisfying happy endings.”
“I would say that I find any adaptation of Austen successful if it makes me think or rethink any part of the original,” Looser told CNN.
Take the seemingly divergent but thematically faithful “Clueless,” a ’90s retelling of “Emma.” He’s not an obvious candidate for the most accurate Austen adaptation (the chef’s name is Cher, for one, and his closet comes with software that helps him coordinate outfits), but researcher Brody and Austen’s William Galperin said Amy Heckerling’s film is an exemplary take on a film that modernizes elements of the story while retaining Austen’s spirit.
“Clueless” “celebrates a certain kind of self-reliance, playfulness and togetherness among women,” the genre Austen also took seriously, said William Galperin, a Rutgers University English professor and author from “The Historical Austen”. And like “Emma,” “Clueless” is more concerned with Cher’s development than her romantic escapades, and even those storylines serve to solidify her character.
Films that update, modernize, or remix Austen for a new time, place, or culture are, paradoxically, “more capable of revealing new aspects of Austen than films that attempt to follow his novels more slavishly.” , Brodey said. Even “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” though anything but subtle, found a parallel between “settling down” and zombieism.
But aside from the rare battle between Bennets and the walking dead, Austen’s stories extract narrative richness from relatively mundane events in English mansions, among members of a few local families.
“What (Austen) is trying to suggest on a grand scale is that what happens in the daily basis of all of our lives is filled with all kinds of implications,” Galperin said. “It doesn’t need to involve big things like fights and power struggles on a grand geopolitical level. Ordinary daily life is filled with all sorts of complexities. And the closer the movies get to that, the better they are. “
Where Austen’s Adaptations Fail
Condensing hundreds of pages of rich text — peppered with social criticism, gorgeous phrasing, and revealing inner musings — into a two-hour movie or even a six-hour miniseries is no small feat. So, Galperin said, some filmmakers focus on the most obvious part of the story: the plot of the wedding.
Relationships are of course important in Austen’s novels, but more often than not, according to Galperin, the plot of marriage is merely “scaffolding,” the skeleton of a story. The meat, he said, is in the narrative episodes that reveal the true intentions of its characters.
“The novel is extremely good at demonstrating this tension (between love and duty), while the film flattens that into early rejection,” Galperin said.
Often, Brodey said, films “indulge heavily in romance at the expense of social satire.”
Why Austen’s Stories Will Live Forever
Even if new versions of “Persuasion” and other classics don’t necessarily succeed in reinterpreting Austen’s work, they’re still worth making, Looser said — at the very least, they’ll inspire new audiences. to fall in love with the brooding Darcy, the beachy bliss of Sanditon and the cunning and resourceful Lady Susan.
“If we don’t recreate Austen’s stories from the 19th century for our own time and attract new generations of viewers, then these texts will not survive,” Looser said. “So I’m definitely for adaptations that use Austen’s material as inspiration and make their own mark on it, rather than treating her originals as blueprints that must be religiously copied.”
