Recreating
Jane Austen

John Wiltshire

© John Wiltshire 2001
Cambridge University Press

Lots of fun with Jane Austen's novels is had in Helen Fielding's two volumes of Bridget Jones's Diary. The man of Bridget's dreams, as is now well known, is called Mark Darcy. She and Mark are introduced at a New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet, arranged by friends of Bridget's parents. When she first meets him, Mark (a 'top human rights lawyer') is standing aloof, scrutinising the contents of their bookshelves. Bridget, prejudiced against Darcy from the first, thinks him a snob, and her new boyfriend, the rake, Daniel, confirms this opinion when he tells her that he's known Mark since Cambridge and he's a nerdish old maid. Bridget and Mark continue to bump into each other at parties and cross swords, in a series of conversations, though Bridget gradually comes to see that Mark might really care for her. When Darcy goes to great lengths to rescue the family from the financial disaster that Bridget's insufferable mother's romantic escapade has plunged them into, she is ready to fall into his arms - or rather to climb the stairs to his bedroom.

Bridget - daffy, honest, good-natured Bridget, daughter of Cosmopolitan culture, traumatised by supermodels - resembles Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland more than she does Lizzy Bennet, but it's not hard to read the novel as a reworking of Pride and Prejudice. What is more interesting is that the book calls the reader's attention to the issues this involves, as in what one might call a meta-novelistic conversation where Bridget and her friends discuss television adaptations of classics. Bridget works for a publisher, and at a book launch Mark's stuck-up fiancée (as inclined to sneer at Bridget's enthusiasm for the TV show Blind Date as Miss Bingley was at Elizabeth's traipsing across the fields) weighs in against what she calls 'the ultimate vandalisation of the cultural framework' involved in using opera arias as themes for the World Cup, and the conversion of great novels into television serials. '"I must say", said Natasha with a knowing smile, "I always feel with the Classics people should be made to prove they've read the book before they're allowed to watch the television version."' But this ploy seems to cut no ice with Mark.

Bridget Jones's Diary raises a question that is central to this book. In Classics and Trash, Harriet Hawkins described the 'cross-fertilisation' that so often takes place between classics and more popular films and novels with a broad appeal. But what is happening in the Diary is more like - to adopt a term from film criticism - a 'transcoding'. It is a kind of borrowing that plays fast and loose with the original but is, it might be argued, redeemed by its lightness of touch. Aware of the difference between our times and Austen's, it switches and changes and finds different ways to meet similar ends - which might be defined, roughly speaking, as exploring the pressures on young women to conform to the expectations of their culture. One could argue, as Natasha might do, that the novel simply makes off with the plot outline and a few references to Pride and Prejudice, and that Bridget Jones's Diary is more indebted to the 1995 BBC serialisation of the novel (of which Bridget, of course, is an avid fan) than Jane Austen's original fusion of social criticism and romance. There would be some truth in this, though at least Helen Fielding's novels would remind us that Jane Austen began and ended her writing life a satirist and that if Bridget, like her younger contemporary Cher Horowitz of Clueless (Paramount, 1995) finds Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus an absorbing read, that is more or less the contemporary equivalent of the Gothic bestseller of Austen's youth, The Romance of the Forest.

I suggest though that this novel is emblematic of a phenomenon that is typical of cultural production in this era of greatly diversified means of mechanical reproduction. Remaking, rewriting, 'adaptation', reworking, 'appropriation', conversion, mimicking (the proliferation of terms suggests how nebulous and ill-defined is the arena) of earlier works into other media is an important feature of the current landscape. If Bridget Jones's Diary is a different kind of product, and emerges from a different reading of Jane Austen than prequels and sequels like Pemberley or Darcy's Story - which are also interesting manifestations of contemporary culture - then it is important to consider why. Every age of course adapts, modifies and remakes, as the history of Shakespeare's reception indicates obviously enough. Every cultural creation, even a cathedral, has an afterlife, unpredictable, uncontrolled by its original architect, when another era, another cultural configuration, turns it, adapts it, to its own uses. Texts (however we interpret that word) only partially belong to the original author: they are constantly being reworked, rearranged, recycled. Redesigning and plundering the creations of the past, indeed, rather than their preservation, is a process so continuous and so endemic, that it is arguable that it is the central motor of artistic development.

It is only recently, however, that the emphasis in representing Jane Austen has shifted away from notions of preservation and 'faithfulness', that Jane Austen has been so widely recreated, or, to use the deceptively simple word which will play an important role in the argument of this book, 'used'. How are we to understand this use, and how can it be distinguished from the more inert, more slavish 'usage'? The verb itself oscillates between exploitation and honourable deployment. But, as Meagan Morris puts it, '[w]hen any and every text can be read indifferently as another instance of "strategic rewriting" ... something more (and something more specific) is needed to argue how and why a particular event of rewriting might matter.' So that the conversation in Bridget Jones's Diary opens an important question: how do we sort out the various strands and styles of rewriting, remaking? What makes some more significant than others?

These recent adaptations, transcodings and appropriations of Jane Austen's original novels form one subject of this book, for they are instances of a more general phenomenon, the fantasies which surround the name Jane Austen'. The transformation of Jane Austen's novels into several television productions and films which by general consent are more substantial and interesting than previous versions has already led to at least two critical collections and a great number of papers and commentaries. In her chapter, 'Piracy is Our Only Option', Kristin Fleiger Samuelian takes a remark of Edward Ferrars in Emma Thompson's script for Sense and Sensibility and reads it against its author. Samuelian, like several contributors to the same volume, Jane Austen in Hollywood, regards Thompson's screenplay as a virtual betrayal of the novel, a reversal of its system of values, and a capitulation to notions - simultaneously romantic and conservative - that the novel pits itself against. 'Piracy' she writes, is the appropriate term for Thompson's postfeminist usurpation of Austen's original text. 'Piracy - the appropriation and adaptation for profit of Austen's courtship novel - is for Thompson a way of deflecting what is unanswerable in the eighteenth-century ideology the novel depicts.' Such serious charges are made repeatedly in different forms by other writers - that in adapting Jane Austen to the needs of a modern audience, in seeking to please that audience, not only has the difficult balance of Austen's irony been lost, but history has been traduced, and the ethical emphases of her work have been reversed. Some writers even go so far as to intimate that the film versions may, for a modern audience, liquidate or 'erase' the novels.

No one is likely at this point of critical time, to wish to underestimate the material conditions of a text's production. That decisions about products costing millions of dollars are influenced by what are perceived as the desires and demands of their audiences is not in doubt, nor that writers and producers dwell within the same cultural climate, broadly speaking, as their audiences. But that these govern choices, are exclusively determinative, or even dominant may well be a more disputable matter. Even in Hollywood films are still made because a writer or producer wants to make them, believes in them, and pushes them through. It is just as evident that Jane Austen, who hoped to make money by her books, was influenced to some degree by what she thought her readers would enjoy and accept. Material conditions influence the ideological messages of films also, needless to say, in a less crude and more radical sense. The technical conditions of their production mean that books and moving pictures occupy or employ quite different signifying systems. The very obvious points that films and television serials are predominantly visual media, that they must largely therefore signify emotion by symbol, by expression and action, that the interiority of their characters is represented through such signs rather than through language, that they encourage the gaze rather than the immersed reader's imagination, are all factors that have cultural and ideological implications. What can be represented in the visual media emerges from these conditions and presents itself to the audience, or the viewer, as the natural and inevitable. Furthermore, it can be argued, the audience is formed in the image of that at which it gazes. Thus transcoding from one to the other system of signs may involve effects that, in some instances, are incommensurate.

'In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful.' Whatever one may think of Walter Benjamin's sweeping aphorism, it can be suggested that this focus on the films as commercial commodities largely governed by the consciousness and expectations of their intended audiences tends to remove the scriptwriter or filmmaker as a designing subject from view. So does the Bourdieuian notion of 'cultural capital', the question his work leaves aside being precisely what internal possession of such capital means for the individual. The notion of piracy at least restores the notion of the author of the filmic text; brings him, her or them back as an agent. In this book I approach the question of influence and adaptation from this perspective - the supply side. I imagine that scriptwriters and filmmakers are agents and creative consciousneses, and that film and television versions do emerge - all things considered - from intelligent and coherent encounters with the original works. I do not disregard the differing cultural conditions in which Austen wrote and in which, two hundred years later, readers receive her novels. As W.J.T. Mitchell has remarked, in the current stage of capitalism, 'the common thread of both the marketable and the unmarketable artwork is the more or less explicit awareness of "marketability" and publicity as unavoidable dimensions of any public sphere that art might address'.

But if one is to focus on remaking or adaptation, and put the adaptation or remade product into some kind of relation with the 'original' (however different this original is) it is impossible not to impute or imply an intelligence or imagination which has made choices, either to preserve, rework, or refuse the predecessor text. A criticism that focuses on the cultural context of texts, though often making a grudging acknowledgment, à la Barthes, that a certain 'mixing' of the given signs takes place - that the activity of deployment or shift makes the object under consideration a novel and distinct thing - finds it difficult to theorise the author, or 'auteur'. I propose then that scriptwriter and filmmakers be understood as readers, and that one advantage of all such revisions is that they make public and manifest what their reading of the precursor text is, that they bring out into the discussably open the choices, acceptances, assumptions and distortions that are commonly undisclosed within the private reader's own imaginative reading process.

In the conversation I have quoted from Helen Fielding's novel, Natasha goes on to complain of the arrogance with which a new generation imagines that it can somehow create the world afresh. Mark Darcy replies 'gently', 'But that's exactiy what they do, do.' One might add that indeed each generation produces its own works of art, but not entirely out of their own materials. Rewritings of Austen are primary examples of this process.

The second volume of the Diary, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, contains an even more cheeky reworking of Jane Austen. Appearing the same year, it offers a contrast to Patricia Rozema's treatment of Mansfield Park in being utterly different from, yet sympathetic to, the original. In a chapter called 'Persuasion', the role of Lady Russell is taken by Bridget's friends, Jude and Shazzer. Rather against her will they get Bridget to break off her relationship with Mark Darcy, who's been seen with another woman, Rebecca. Despite Mark's sleeping with Rebecca (Bridget has an awful moment when she finds the Newcastle United boxer shorts she bought him for Valentine's Day neady folded on Rebecca's bedspread), he is still keen on Bridget. But every time he comes near her and tries to tell her so, another man gets in the way, particularly a colleague of his called - no surprises - Giles Benwick. Benwick is depressed by his wife's seeking a divorce, and Bridget is helping him find support and consolation in self-help books. Then the next day, sitting behind a hedge in the garden, Bridget overhears a conversation between Rebecca and Mark. 'If I decide I love someone then nothing will stand in my way', declares Rebecca. After lunch, despite Mark's protests - 'I trust my own judgement' - she jumps off a bridge. The water isn't deep enough and she twists her ankle. Bridget reaches in her bag for the mobile phone and rings for a doctor.

Like the references to Pride and Prejudice in Nora Ephron's script for You've Got Mail (1998) the borrowings are entertaining, unpretentious, and part of an authentic contemporary context in which lots of other amusing things occur. Such 'use' of Austen is quite different from the sentimental and conventionally symbolic status attached to the name 'Jane Austen' and can accommodate, in the case of Ephron's script, the character Joe Fox's disparagement of the figure and text he is unwittingly re-enacting. (Where have we come across this before, I wonder?) But Jane Austen, as I have emphasised, is a writer who transcends comedy and romance, who engages the reader's deepest responses to the dilemmas of civil society. Helen Fielding's books have none of the tautness of structure and not much of the underlying personal urgency of Austen's. But she is not prone to the fantasy of inhabiting Jane Austen's mind or imagination, like the writers of biographies, prequels and sequels: instead her novels engage familiarly with their originals, treating them cavalierly as only those who are secure in their relation to the mother text can. Like Austen's own handling of earlier authors, including Shakespeare, they are expressions of affectionate authorial consanguinity, having fun with, and even recreating, Jane Austen.