Blame it on the (lack of) narrator

More romance, less irony in Jane Austen’s film adaptations

Abstract

Austenian acidity does not seem to translate well onto cinema, TV, or streaming media. Working on this hypothesis, we argue that the systematic increase in romantic emphasis accompanying the migration of Jane Austen’s work to audiovisual media is closely linked to the lack of the third-person narrator. To illustrate such phenomenon, we present excerpts from various adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, the two Austen novels that have generated the largest number of audiovisual re-creations. Our discussion shows how, despite her enormous contemporary popularity, Austen’s works are frequently misread as more romance-driven and naïve than they actually are, thus exemplifying the broader challenges involved in adapting literature to a different medium. As a counterexample, however, we examine the adaptation of the epistolary novella Lady Susan, whose absence of a narratorial guide in the source text allows the film Love & Friendship (2016), by Whit Stillman, to re-create Austen’s irony through cinematic devices such as intertitles and visual framing. In this case, the director mobilizes filmic strategies to recover the sharp wit often muted in adaptations of the major novels, demonstrating that Austenian irony can, under specific conditions, be successfully translated onto the screen.