The Influencing Presence of Adaptation and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

By Kiera Polzin

The cinematic map that is created when Pride and Prejudice is translated into Joe Wright’s 2005 filmic adaptation is the distance about which Jean Baudrillard theorizes in his book Simulacra & Simulation (1981), “…between the real and the imaginary, [that] tends to abolish itself, to be reabsorbed on behalf of the model” (121). The model cast by the film adaptation precedes and determines the reading of the literature from the page. There is no way to reset this precession. The reader is in a predetermined and prejudiced hyperreal state of which they are little aware, provided with the presence of ghosts as simulacra for the imaginary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781387377985

Book preview

The Influencing Presence of Adaptation and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

THE INFLUENCING PRESENCE OF ADAPTATION AND JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Kiera Polzin

Text copyright © 2017 by Kiera Polzin

Kiera Polzin

English 499: Honours Thesis

Advisor: Dr. Daniel Keyes

University of British Columbia

Kelowna, Canada

May 3, 2016

Table of Contents

Contents

THE INFLUENCING PRESENCE OF ADAPTATION AND JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Table of Contents

Introduction: Adaptation Becomes a Map

Filmic Adaptations: Creating the Hyperreal State

Elizabeth: A Contradiction to the Regency Period

Borges’s Map: An Allegory for All Forms of Simulation

The Lost Myth of the Regency Era: Interchangeable as History

Fictional Novel: Historical Myth

Modes of Consumption: Real Life Experience

Neverending Simulations: Studying Literary Adaptations

Cinematic Adaptations: Filling the Empty Space

Cinematic Model: Darcy Rewritten

Cinematic Map of Influence: Lost in Translation

A State of Hyperreal: Pride and Prejudice as History on Film

Conclusion: The Cinematic Map That is Created

Works Cited

About the Author

Introduction: Adaptation Becomes a Map

The contemporary reader and viewer of Jane Austen is an observer; they have not directly experienced the regency period of England.  Without direct experience, a reader and viewer can instead develop a model or mental map to access the setting for Pride and Prejudice (1813).  Director Joe Wright’s 2005 film version of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as a simulacrum or representation, obscures Austen’s novel by superimposing as a model or map of layer of interpretation over the novel.  Literary critiques of the novel add another layer that cannot help but include interpretations exchanged between the novel and the filmic adaptation.  Wright’s film version is an example of model or mental map a reader can use to explore Pride & Prejudice (2005)[1].  This map, created by the reader’s subjective interpretation, is no longer distinguishable from the setting itself; it is created in the reader’s imagination and strongly influenced by the visual representation of the film.  Film adaptations of literature have an influencing presence, prejudicing first impressions in the same way reading the novel will influence how its adaptation is viewed.  Adaptations of the novel become models through which the reader and viewer can navigate Austen’s original work.

Filmic adaptations of Austen’s novel becomes a model.  This essay will examine Joe Wright’s filmic adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where the adaptation becomes a map for consumers of Austen, which is part of a larger simulation which is Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality.  Within a survey of literary criticism on Pride and Prejudice, adaptations other than Wright are discussed.  I have attempted to narrow the amount of images with which I would be imprinted by various adaptations that would have to compete with Austen’s novel, however, I cannot expect to only find scholarship that has done the same.  Any references to adaptations other than Wright’s are secondary to my initial observation that the consumption of Pride and Prejudice becomes an experience that creates a model of meaning which is a hyperreal state.  Adapting literature to film is asking literature to take part in a simulation.  If adaptation is the simulacrum, and with adaptations historicizing the novel, then the novel can become ‘real.’  The more real the filmic adaptation, the less fictional the nature of the source novel becomes.  For example, the historical recreation of the dance in literary criticism has been interpreted beyond what Austen wrote in the novel.  Austen’s novel will have to compete with the images imprinted by any adaptation that has been consumed.  I specifically examine Wright’s adaptation because he wanted realism, but any idealized version can then take on