Inf(l)ecting Pride and Prejudice: Dialogism, Intertextuality, and Adaptation

 

Mireia Aragay
Gemma Lopez

© Editions Rodopi B.V.
Amsterdam 2005

This chapter examines the network of cross-references among Jane Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice, and its metamorphoses into three quintessentially late twentieth-century popular modes of entertainment: a TV mini-series (the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice), 'chick lit' (Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) and the cinematic sub-genre of the 'chick flick' (the films of Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) - all of which share both a common theme, romance in relation to notions of femininity and masculinity, and a common anticipated female audience. Starting off from Julia Kristeva's concept of intertextuality, derived from Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, it is claimed that adaptation is a prime instance of cultural recycling, a process which radically undermines any linear, diachronic understanding of cultural history, proposing instead a synergetic, synchronic view of the mutual inf(l)ection between 'source' and adaptation(s). Ultimately, this approach reveals the need to decentre the notion of fidelity in discussions of adaptation.

 

Diachrony into Synchrony: The Return to/of Pride and Prejudice

 

Kristeva's rendering of Bakhtinian dialogism gives rise, as is well known, to her own concept of intertextuality. In the classic formulation in 'Word, Dialogue and Novel', Kristevan intertextuality regards any text 'as a mosaic of quotations... [as] the absorption and transformation of another' (Kristeva 1986: 37).1 Thus, rewriting, in Kristeva's view, is all-pervasive. Authors read con-texts and texts so as to rewrite them in their own act of creation.2 As opposed to Barthes's proclamation on the 'Death of the Author', for both Bakhtin and Kristeva the author performs as a conduit through whom 'textuality enters into dialogue with other determining elements [...] The author is not dead, but in rememoriam' (Orr 2003: 26, 32). With authors as mediators, all texts function as rejoinders in an ongoing dialogue which bypasses simple before-after hierarchies, undermining in turn any simple notion of diachrony:

 

Diachrony is transformed into synchrony, and in light of this transformation, linear history appears as abstraction. The only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this abstraction through a process of reading-writing; that is, through the practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to another structure. (Kristeva 1986: 36)

 

That is, it is by inserting themselves in history and engaging in a dynamic dialogue with other texts that authors, however paradoxically, transcend the concept of linear time by inf(l)ecting those other signifying structures and allowing them in turn to inf(l)ect their own. Intertextuality, in sum, describes the process of cultural recycling: 'it is a permutation of texts [...] in the space of a text, many utterances taken from other texts intersect with one another' (Kristeva quoted in Orr 2003: 27).

 

Any process of adaptation paradigmatically represents the Kristevan transformation of diachrony into synchrony. More precisely, adaptation sets up a scenario of intertextual dialogues which replaces the binary diachrony/synchrony with a synergy that flows both ways. Seen in this light, adaptation undermines the traditional conception of the 'original' text or 'source' 'as if it were a hermetic and self-sufficient whole, one whose elements constitute a closed System presuming nothing beyond themselves, no other utterances' (Bakthin 1981: 273). Not only is the 'original' text intertextually inf(l)ected by other previous and contemporary texts and discourses, but it is necessarily, as this chapter hopes to demonstrate, open to inf(l)ection by subsequent con-texts. That is, viewed through the lens of intertextual dialogism, the source is neither hermetic, nor self-sufficient nor a closed System. As Robert Stam has recently argued, 'Film adaptations... are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin (2000: 66). In this light, all creation becomes adaptation as 'Prior text materials lose special status by permutation with other texts in the intertextual exchange because all intertexts are of equal importance in the intertextual process' (Orr 2003: 28). Thus, to the social impact of film adaptation - the frequently noticed fact that far more people see the film than read the book, or read/buy the book only after having seen the film - must be added its theoretical dimension, which places adaptation as part of the larger phenomenon of rewriting and of a theory of intertextuality.

 

This chapter focuses on the intertextual dialogic interactions between the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), the film version of Fielding's novel (2000) and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), all of them presumably feeding from a common source, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), which in turn, we will claim, has been and continues to be irrevocably inf(l)ected following its immersion in dialogic heteroglossia in the mid- to late 1990s. This group of texts constitutes a tapestry of conscious quotations and allusions, involving themselves and the reader/viewer in a game of seemingly endless permutations. When asked whether she intended to follow Pride and Prejudice from the outset of writing her first Bridget Jones novel, Fielding replied: 'Yes. I shamelessly stole the plot. I thought it had been very well market-researched over a number of centuries' (Fielding 1998). Indeed, Bridget Jones's Diary rewrites the plot of Austen's novel to the extent of featuring a male protagonist with the same surname. But the novel also engages in intertextual dialogue with the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, in which Colin Firth played a memorable Darcy - so memorable in fact that he was chosen to play Mark Darcy by Fielding herself and director Sharon Maguire for the big-screen adaptation of her novel.3 The intertextual whirl continues in the second Bridget Jones novel, as Bridget is appointed to interview Colin Firth in Rome while negotiating the ups and downs of her relationship with Mark Darcy.

 

This network of dialogic cross-references is an emblematic example of Bakhtin's point that 'between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme' (1981: 276). In the present case, the common theme shared by the texts and screen adaptations is, we suggest, romance in relation to notions of masculinity and femininity. And, we would add, not only is there a common theme, but crucially, a common anticipated audience: women. Bearing these two aspects in mind, the rest of this chapter addresses the question as to how and why early nineteenth-century, supposedly diachronically distant, notions of romance, masculinity and femininity become synchronic with the late twentieth century, a period which saw itself as post-feminist. It also suggests that the intertextual dialogue established through adaptation/rewriting rejuvenates the presumed source - Austen's Pride and Prejudice - while synergetically throwing light on the con-text in which that source is adapted/rewritten. This will ultimately allow us to reflect on the process by which a text that was initially produced as a popular narrative for women - Austen's Pride and Prejudice - subsequently acquired the status of a classic, finally to be metamorphosed again into quintessentially late twentieth-century modes of entertainment, that is, a TV mini-series (the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice), 'chick lit' (Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) and the cinematic sub-genre of the 'chick flick' (the films of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason).

 

Romance, Female Spectatorship, and Models of Femininity and Masculinity

 

In an insightful article first published in 1992, 'From Casablanca to Pretty Woman: The Politics of Romance', Rob Lapsley and Michael Westlake point out that at the end of the twentieth century, the spectator 'is no longer able to believe in romance [...] yet at the same time wishes to do so' (1993: 180). As evidence of the pervasiveness of the myth of romance in contemporary Western culture,4 they quote David Bordwell’s 1985 count to the effect that out of a sample of one hundred Hollywood films, ninety-five contained a romantic element, while in about eighty-five, romance was the main plot line - which, apart from anything else, confirms that romance means excellent box office (1993: 190). As mentioned above, Helen Fielding's awareness of the incredible market potential of romance is confirmed by her rewriting of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, an all-time romantic best-seller.

 

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen arguably constructs a subversive fantasy of female autonomy through the portrait of Elizabeth Bennett, a heroine endowed with the intelligence and wit that enable her to exert a power of choice denied to women in the context of the social, economic and gender realities of her time (Newton 1994). The operative word here is 'fantasy' in so far as Elizabeth embodies an Imaginary plenitude, a lack of lack. Although she is not wealthy or particularly beautiful, both essential requirements for the construction of Woman as desirable in the early nineteenth century, her intelligence prevents her from experiencing this as lack, and hence as powerlessness. For this reason, Elizabeth is a focal point of identification for female readers. However, for Tania Modleski, as for other commentators, romance is deeply contradictory.5 On the one hand, the urgently expressed desire on the part of women for open, unambivalent relationships, autonomy and commonality constitutes the utopian dimension of romance - and the utopian function it fulfils for the female audience it addresses. On the other hand, this utopian dimen­sion is a flawed one, in the sense that while romance provides outlets 'for women's dissatisfaction with male-female relationships, [it] never question[s] the primacy of these relationships' (Modleski 1982: 113). To return to Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the successful completion of the Elizabeth-Darcy relationship, wedding implicit, encapsulates the dual character of romance - it is the means by which Elizabeth is granted access to a utopia of autonomy and community, while simultaneously it signals her inevitable incorporation into the patriarchal institutions of marriage and the family.

 

In the first part of Austen's novel, up to Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, there are numerous occasions where the gaze is as central as the characters themselves. Darcy's gaze in this part of the novel, specifically during Elizabeth's stay at Netherfield, could be described in Laura Mulvey's hugely influential terms as scopophilic (1975: 8). Inquisitive and possessive, this kind of gaze is a source of pleasure and power for the onlooker in its commodification of its object. In a patriarchal culture such as Austen's, men are usually the bearers of the scopophilic gaze, while women are its passive recipients (Mulvey 1975: 11). But contrary to expectation, Austen's Elizabeth actively resists Darcy's scopophilic gaze, by means of her wit and sense of humour and, most importantly, by returning the gaze, to some extent becoming its subject. The BBC mini-series establishes an intertextual dialogue with this dimension of the novel to the extent of transforming the gaze - not only Darcy's and Elizabeth's but, crucially, that of the female spectator the series obviously anticipates - into a major structuring principle. Indeed, as Lisa Hopkins demonstrates in 'Mr Darcy's Body: Privileging the Female Gaze', scriptwriter Andrew Davies and director Simon Langton introduced a series of additional scenes and productive camerawork which are worth examining in some detail precisely because the gaze functions in them as a fundamental structuring motif.

 

The first episode itself opens with one such added scene. As Bingley and Darcy ride into view to observe Netherfield, which Bingley will eventually decide to take, they are oblivious to their being the objects of Elizabeth's gaze, who watches them from a slightly elevated plateau. This not only makes Elizabeth the subject of the gaze within the diegesis, but also, equally importantly, invites the viewer to share her point of view. This is relevant in so far as it is the beginning of the construction of Darcy as the object of desire of the female spectator. Camerawork is also decisive here; although we can clearly see Bingley's face, Darcy's remains partly hidden throughout, provoking primarily a desire to see. Gradually, over subsequent episodes, this man the female spectator desires to see comes to embody, we would argue, a late twentieth-century Imaginary fantasy of male completion and self-sufficiency, what has been popularly labelled the 'new man'. This construction of Darcy is achieved mainly through the added scenes which, contrary to the first one, repeatedly turn him into the subject of the gaze he directs at Elizabeth, and simultaneously into the object of the female spectator's desiring gaze. Furthermore, the added scenes also provide insights into Darcy's feelings which the novel, because it is mostly focalised through Elizabeth, does not fully explore.6 This promotes the female spectators' sympathy towards a hero who embodies a masculinity which differs greatly from that of Austen's Darcy. While the nineteenth-century character remains mostly distant and impenetrable, Colin Firth's 'new-man' Darcy is allowed to express weaknesses, doubts and emotions which the late twentieth century constructed as desirable in a man and which would have been unthinkable in Austen's milieu, the basis of which was an Enlightenment reason-based understanding of masculinity which valued emotional restraint, rather than the new 'cult of sensibility' which favoured the physical display of emotions (Nixon2001:25-7).7

 

Elizabeth's unexpected stay at Netherfield during Jane's illness proves the perfect occasion to develop this portrait of Darcy. In three separate added scenes, Darcy's scopophilic gaze is highlighted. In the first one, Elizabeth steps into the billiards room by mistake to find Darcy, who fixes his eyes on her in a desiring regard that lingers for a few seconds and is only broken on Darcy's initiative. In the third one, Elizabeth is unaware of Darcy's intensely gazing from an upper window at her and Jane's carriage as they leave Netherfield. Crucially, in addition to the motif of Darcy's gaze, what these two episodes have in common is the camerawork, which 'frames' Darcy as an object of desire, almost an objet d'art, for the female spectator.8 A triangulation of desiring gazes is thus created, the effect of which Lisa Hopkins describes as:

 

What we want to see, I think, is not just Darcy in the abstract, it is Darcy looking - particularly at Elizabeth but also, on other occasions, at images which have contextualized as being poignantly redolent of her absence. These looks too can signify his need. And we look back in a silent collusion, because it is in that need that we most want to believe. (2001: 120)

 

Returning to Lacan and Mulvey, we would suggest that the need Hopkins refers to can be equated with Lacan's definition of lack. That is, Darcy's scopophilic gaze does not merely imply mastery and domination, but the desire to master and dominate, thus signifying lack - which is why when he cannot fix his eyes on Elizabeth, he fixes them on her absence, as he does when she leaves Netherfield with Jane in the episode mentioned above. In addition, we would claim that the female viewer anticipated by the mini-series becomes the bearer of the look, thus complicating Mulvey's theorising of the gaze. According to Mulvey, 'In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed' (1975: 11). In the BBC Pride and Prejudice, this simultaneity is disrupted: Elizabeth is looked at by Darcy, while Darcy, not Elizabeth, is displayed for the female spectator. The female spectator - not the male, as in Mulvey - becomes the bearer of two looks: on the one hand, the scopophilic gaze which she directs at Darcy; on the other, the narcissistic gaze which signifies her identification with Elizabeth, the object of Darcy's desiring gaze. We would argue that the intense involvement of British female viewers with the BBC mini-series and the 'Darcymania' it gave rise to strongly suggest that the narcissistic gaze by which women fantasised themselves in Elizabeth's place far outstripped the commodification of Darcy afforded by their scopophilic gaze.9 Mulvey's statement, 'By means of identification with him [the male protagonist in 1940s and 1950s mainstream films], through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too [the glamorous, highly eroticized female lead]' (1975: 13), could be reformulated as: by means of identification with Elizabeth, through participation in her Imaginary power to make good the lack in man, the female spectator can indirectly be possessed by Darcy, thus making good her own lack. All this bears out the conclusion reached since the 1980s by critics who have attempted to theorise female spectatorship in the wake of Mulvey's germinal essay - namely, that in genres which specifically address women, they occupy a position defined by Teresa de Lauretis as 'the masochist position, the (impossible) place of a purely passive desire' (1984: 151). The fact that a television series released in 1995 endorses such a disempowering trope of female spectatorship calls into question late twentieth-century West­ern culture's view of itself as post-feminist.

 

In between the two scenes described above, there comes one that provoked numerous sighs among British female spectators when the mini-series was first released. Still at Netherfield, Darcy comes out of his bath and walks to the window, from which he gazes at Elizabeth playing with one of the dogs in the garden. In addition to the interplay of gazes described above, this episode, more blatantly than any previous one, fetishises Darcy's body. In this case, the window works as a 'frame', thus underlining Darcy's partly-revealed body as an object of desire for the female spectator's scopophilic gaze, while simultaneously allowing her an insight into his lack, which is expressed through the lingering look he directs at Elizabeth. Once again, by narcissistically identifying with Darcy's object of desire, a fantasy of power is produced for the female spectator. The bath scene anticipates the climactic episode in the BBC adaptation, namely that in which Darcy, arriving unexpectedly at Pemberley, plunges fully clothed into a pond and walks towards the house with his loose shirt still dripping to come upon an utterly surprised Elizabeth, who has been touring the estate with her aunt and uncle. The pond scene is significantly crosscut with Elizabeth gazing up at Darcy's imposing portrait in the portrait gallery at Pemberley. Far more emphatically than in the billiards-room scene at Netherfield, this self-reflexive gesture creates the impression that the BBC's Darcy has broken out of the 'frames' that constrained him in previous readings, to offer the mini-series's female audience a thoroughly desirable, 'corpo-real 'new man'.

 

The tremendously erotic charge of the pond scene centres, once again, on Darcy. It links up not only with the earlier bath scene, but also with previous episodes where he is shown involved in vigorous physical activity in an attempt to control his passions - the fencing scene interpolated at the start of Elizabeth's visit to Derbyshire is a case in point. These added scenes also keep Darcy firmly present in the female spectators' minds, inviting them to wonder about those passions he seems to need to control - why does he mumble to himself, 'I shall conquer this - I shall!', after the fencing match? Why does he plunge into the pond? Further, all these elements contribute to the construction of a far more Romantic Darcy than Austen's generally restrained hero. As Cheryl Nixon notes about the BBC adaptation, 'Darcy's physical actions speak a twentieth-century emotional vocabulary' (2001: 24), one strongly coloured by Romantic notions of demonstration of feelings. The adaptation's economy of the gaze comes full circle when Elizabeth's and Darcy's eyes meet in mutual (mis)recognition in the piano room at Pemberley. Indeed, this would epitomise the fantasy of romance, were it not for the fact that, from the narrative point of view, the story is far from finished. One last difficulty remains to be overcome, namely the consequences of Lydia's elopement with Wickham. The mini-series's treatment of this episode, adding two sequences where we see Darcy fearlessly making his way through London's seedy underworld in search of the couple, bears out Lapsley's and Westlake's argument that, 'The presence of obstacles can ... be explained as a means of both making the object desirable and of preventing its exposure as nothing' (1993: 192). That is, it works to further increase the female viewer's desire for Darcy/to be Elizabeth, and her renewed belief in the Imaginary fantasy of romance, finally clinched by the inclusion of a wedding scene and a passionate kiss. The BBC mini-series, then, fulfils the late twentieth-century Western female spectator's desire to believe in romance - its incredible popularity and success only confirming the persistence of such desire and of its need to be satisfied.

 

To sum up, then, the BBC 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice engages in an intertextual dialogue with Austen novel whereby it offers an updated concept of masculinity through a trans-formation of Austen's courtship plot into a romance tout court which addresses a very specific audience - late twentieth-century Western female spectators. The added scenes in the mini-series, as has been shown, repeatedly eroticise Darcy, increase his presence, provide insights into his feelings and generally construct a model of masculin­ity far removed from Austen's in its emphasis on physicality and emotional expression. This construction of masculinity clearly implies a model of femininity - late twentieth-century Western women, the series strongly suggests, continue to be under the spell of romance, and they desire a man like Darcy, who is handsome, rational, sensitive and in command, and who desires them passionately.

 

The enormous success of Bridget Jones's Diary, both the novel and the film, testifies to the continuing persistence of the myth of romance and its concomitant models of masculinity and femininity. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary not only bases its plot and its hero's surname on Austen's novel, but it is also directly involved in an intertextual dialogue with the BBC mini-series, which was being broadcast while Fielding was transforming her weekly Bridget Jones columns in The Independent into her novel:

 

Just nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice [...] Love the nation being so addicted. The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth [...] They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. I do not, however, wish to see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest [...] Mr Darcy was more attractive [than Mark Darcy] because he was ruder but... being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked [...] surely Mr Darcy would never do anything so vain and frivolous as to be an actor and yet Mr Darcy is an actor. Hmmm. All v. confusing. (Fielding 1996: 246-8)

 

The speaking voice here, as throughout the novel, is Bridget's, who in her own idiosyncratic way is providing a theory of romance surprisingly akin to Lapsley's and Westlake's Lacanian account.10 She reveals the paradox at the core of romance, that is, the desire to see Darcy 'get off with Elizabeth' and yet 'not see any actual goals' being achieved. As Lapsley and Westlake put it, romantic narratives in cinema are concerned with deferring the satisfaction of desire precisely and paradoxically as a means of evoking it and of keeping the desired object - in this case, Mr Darcy - at a distance: 'On the one hand the exchange between spectator and film produces a subject who lacks and hence desires [Bridget], and on the other hand objects that will apparently satisfy those desires [the BBC's Mr Darcy]' (1993: 192). However, interestingly enough, Bridget, pace de Lauretis, does not seem to occupy as a spectator the impossible place of passive desire; on the contrary, she is well aware of the imaginary status of Mr Darcy and of the fact that the masculinity he embodies and the romance he promises are both performative acts - after all, Mr Darcy is an actor!11 Ironically, the implication for the female reader - if not necessarily for Bridget - is that the same points can be made about Bridget's own Darcy and about her fantasy of romance. As is well known, Fielding's novel has been criticised from feminist perspectives as an exercise in 'chick lit' that merely repeats romantic clichés and is devoid of a political agenda (Whelehan 2002: 57-63). However, Bridget Jones’s Diary is so thoroughly steeped in ironic double-coding that its final effect on the reader is, we would suggest, to playfully allow her to have it both ways - that is, to provide the utopian promise of happiness that romance brings while at the same time acknowledging its Imaginary status. It is precisely through such double-coding that the novel involves itself in a playful intertextual critique of the BBC mini-series and of the passive female viewer it posited.

 

In fact, we would argue that Bridget's nostalgic faith in romance should not be taken entirely at face value. The extract quoted above, to take but one example, is permeated by Bridget's brand of humour, which instantly became one of the trademarks of 'Bridget-ness'. The most frequent target of Bridget's humour is herself - witness her description of what she calls 'date-preparation':

 

Being a woman is worse than being a farmer - there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done [...] The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature [...] Is it any wonder girls have no confidence? (Fielding 1996: 30)

 

Bridget's ironic, self-deprecating description of her trimming of her body to conform to the established standards of beauty culminates in a rhetorical question which subtly interrogates the sexual politics underpinning 'so much harvesting and crop spraying', so much disciplining of the female body with a view to gaining access to the Imaginary status of heroine of romance. In short, this passage, as so many others in the novel, reveals that Bridget is aware of the perfor­mative nature of the femininity implied by late twentieth-century Western conventions of romance.

 

The film adaptation pursues Bridget Jones's Diary's critique of the BBC mini-series by placing great emphasis on masculinity as masquerade through the already-mentioned casting of Colin Firth, the BBC's Mr Darcy, as Mark Darcy. The film's Mark Darcy is modelled on the BBC character, even as far as his physical traits are concerned. Near the end of the film, Bridget's telling Mark to rethink the length of his sideburns functions as an obvious intertextual reference for the female viewer who, like Bridget herself in the novel, had avidly followed the BBC mini-series and noticed Mr Darcy's spectacular sideburns. Sideburns apart, we would argue that in their insistence on casting Firth - who had become inseparable, in the (female) collective imaginary, from his role as Mr Darcy - novelist and co-scriptwriter Fielding and director Sharon Maguire were trying to (playfully) make a point about the Imaginary and performative nature of the mythical male hero and the romantic completion he promises. Once more, the target audience is a late-twentieth century female spectator who no longer believes in romance yet at the same time desires and even needs to do so. A key scene in this respect is the fight between Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy - non-existent in the novel - which parodies the conventions of romance in various ways. The scene is initially set up as the clichéd confrontation between two male rivals for the attentions of the woman, but it immediately turns into farce.

 

Far from showing a macho-style fight with lots of punching and blood, Daniel and Mark seem to concentrate rather on grabbing at each other, pulling each other's hair and kicking the air. This near mock-fight effect is further enhanced by the soundtrack, which features Geri Halliwell's version of the gay classic 'It's raining men' - all of this parodically undermining the traditional romance concept of masculinity.12

 

Another turn of the dialogic screw comes in the 1999 sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, where Bridget is sent to Rome by The Independent to interview Colin Firth.13 By way of preparation, Bridget informs us that she has watched the scene where Firth dives into the lake in the BBC Pride and Prejudice no less than fifteen times, which leads her to describe herself as a 'top-flight researcher' (Fielding 1999: 158). She obviously overdoes it since, when the actual interview takes place, she obsessively returns to the issue of the wet shirt, much to Firth's exasperation. In fact, Firth is at pains to insist on the distance between his real self and his performance as Mr Darcy, thus highlighting the mythical status of the latter:

 

BJ: ... What was it like with your friends when you started being Mr Darcy?

CF: There were a lot of jokes about it: growling, "Mr Darcy" over breakfast and so on. There was a brief period when they had to work quite hard to hide their knowledge of who I really was and ...

B J: Hide it from who?

CF: Well, from anyone who suspected that perhaps I was like Mr Darcy.

BJ: But do you think you're not like Mr Darcy?

CF: I do think I’m not like Mr Darcy, yes.

BJ: I think you're exactly like Mr Darcy.

CF: In what way?

BJ: You talk the same way as him.

CF: Oh, do I?

BJ: You look exactly like him, and I, oh, oh ...

(Protracted crashing noises followed by sounds of struggle) (Fielding 1999: 177-78)

 

In the film adaptation of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, where Colin Firth plays Mark Darcy again, the above interview has been suppressed, thus obliterating what, to us, is one of the novel's crucial comments on the gap between the actor and his role as Mr Darcy. This is in tune with the film's overall approach - some key scenes in the first Bridget Jones film are visually quoted in the second, such as the fight between Darcy and Cleaver, but such repetitions, far from pursuing the intertextual game, are entirely devoid of irony and ultimately prove to be wholly unproductive.14

 

Adaptation as Cultural Dialogue

 

The adaptation/rewriting of Austen's classic in the 1995 BBC mini-series, Bridget Jones’s Diary (novel and film) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is not, we believe, an instance of cultural nostal­gia, but rather, to borrow Leo Braudy's theorisation of remakes, it is

 

...concerned with what its makers and (they hope) its audiences consider to be unfinished cultural business, unrefinable and perhaps finally unassimilable material that remains part of the cultural dialogue - not until it is finally given definitive form, but until it is no longer compelling or interesting. (1998: 331)

 

The adaptation/rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, that is, reveals that the notions of masculinity and femininity articulated in romance have remained compelling in Western culture as unassimilated material in a self-styled post-feminist milieu. With a common anticipated audience in mind, which is female, each of the texts and films discussed in this chapter intervenes in an ongoing cultural and intertextual dialogue while making different emphases. The BBC 1995 Pride and Prejudice constructs a model of masculinity which eroticises the male body and highlights the expression of emotions, thus implying a specific model of femininity embodied not in the main female character, but in the mini-series's implied audience. Bridget Jones's Diary addresses the same kind of audience in order to offer them a playful intertextual critique of the BBC mini-series and of the passive female spectator it posited, while the novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason lays bare, equally humorously, the gap between the fantasy (Mr Darcy) and the reality (Colin Firth), thus epitomising the mythical nature of romance.

 

The wheel comes full circle when the reader/viewer of these late twentieth-century popular texts/films returns to Austen's Pride and Prejudice to realise how it has been irrevocably inf(l)ected by its absorption into dialogic intertextuality at the end of the twentieth century. A fresh light is cast on Elizabeth Bennett when she jostles against the more farcical, self-deprecating Bridget Jones - inevitably, the inauspicious beginning of Elizabeth's and Darcy's relationship at the Meryton ball is coloured by the comically disastrous first meeting between Bridget and Mark Darcy at Bridget's parents' New Year's turkey curry buffet, as depicted both in the novel and in the film. Even more radically, Austen's Mr Darcy is infused with a new dimension as a result of his dialogic crosspollination with the BBC's Mr Darcy and Fielding's Mark Darcy - most noticeably, perhaps, he gains an erotic charge that did not seem to be there in earlier readings. In other words, the significance of rewriting/adaptation stretches well beyond the specific intertextual exchanges it sets up to encompass a radical undermining of a linear, teleological understanding of cultural history in favour of dialogic, synergetic notions of recycling and permutation. From this perspective, the concern with fidelity simply pales out of view.

 

Notes

 

1 'Word, Dialogue and Novel', originally entitled 'Bakhtin, le mot, le dialogue et le roman' (1967), was included as the fourth chapter of Semeioteiké (Kristeva 1969). It was not translated into English until 1980 (Kristeva 1980: 64-91). We quote the essay from The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi (1986). For a more recent appraisal of Kristeva's term and of its reception in both the French and English-speaking contexts, see Orr (2003).

 

2 We borrow the term 'con-texts' from Barker and Hulme's 'Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest' where they argue that con-text with a hyphen signifies 'a break from the inequality of the usual text/context relationship. Con-texts are themselves texts and must be read with: they do not simply make up a background' (1985: 236).

 

3 Thus hearing witness to the fact that 'In the cinema the performer also brings along a kind of baggage, a thespian intertext formed by the totality of antecedent roles' (Stam 2000: 60).

 

4 In this connection, see de Rougemont (1983: 232-5 and passim), and Lapsley and Westlake (1993: 185-6).

 

5 See Dyer (1981), Jones (1986) and Radaway (1987).

 

6 In the novel, the reader is allowed a certain degree of access to Darcy's emotions primarily through the use of irony. For example, we read of the common dislike between Darcy and Elizabeth while understanding that this may not be so. As is well known, Austen sets the ironic tone in the first sentence of the novel.

 

7 This is a recurrent motif in Austen's novels; e.g. in Sense and Sensibility Willoughby obviously embodies a type of masculinity based on the 'cult of sensibility' which Austen ultimately condemns.

 

8 Further, in the billiards-room scene, behind Darcy there happens to hang a huge full-body portrait of a gentleman. In addition to underlining the 'framing' effect, this introduces a contrast between Darcy as he was traditionally read - primarily as a socially-constrained being, mimicked by the gentleman in the portrait who is effectively constrained by its frame – and Darcy as the BBC mini-series constructs him - the late twentieth-century 'new man' in the flesh, far more emotional and sensual.

 

9 Mary Ann Doane sees Mia Farrow's 'spectatorial ecstasy' in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as demonstrating 'the extent to which the image of the longing, overinvolved female spectator is still with us' (1987: 1-2).

 

10 Where Elizabeth was a mere focaliser, operating at the level of colouring (albeit frequently and intensely) the narrative voice, Bridget's voice pervades the novel throughout - it is indeed a diary.

 

11 The same actor, as mentioned above, who was later to play Mark Darcy in the film adaptation of Bridget Jones 's Diary, that is, Colin Firth - but more of this in due course.

 

12 Colin Firth confirms that Hugh Grant and himself 'decided to fight like a couple of wallies... No big cowboy punches for us' (Firth 2001: 38).

 

13 In addition to continuing the intertextual dialogue with the BBC Pride and Prejudice and therefore Austen's novel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason draws from the plot of Austen's Persuasion, thus bringing yet another text into the dialogic interplay.

 

14 The DVD extras do include the interview. Shot in the studio after the day's work was over, the text has been edited in such a way as to omit the key passage quoted above. Moreover, director Beeban Kidron introduces the scene by claiming that there was no way the interview could have been integrated into the diegesis - unless, we would argue, the filmmakers had chosen to emphasise the performative nature of Darcy's masculinity and to pursue the playful critique of romance present in both Bridge Jones novels and in the first film.