too familiar with the source material

[tempestsarekind]

Hee. Clueless was on TV yesterday. When I first saw this movie in high school, I hadn't yet read Emma (I'd read P&P, NA, and possibly Persuasion, depending on when Clueless first came out), and I didn't actually know that it was based on the novel. Now, of course, this is manifestly not the case, which meant that last night featured a lot of

Comments

[skirmish_of_wit]

Every time you post one of these I find myself agreeing with just about everything you say. Never having read Emma in a class, I'm totally shocked that people could call her a drama queen and yet like Catherine and Heathcliff! WTF! This is madness.

I really love Emma for being so believably flawed. And I adore Mr. Knightley -- and my crush on Jeremy Northam absolutely results from his portrayal of Mr. Knightley in that really uneven version starring Gwyneth Paltrow. (For "uneven," read: Paltrow wasn't very good and her accent was worse, while Northam is dreamy and Alan Cummings wonderful.)

I do wonder about this, though:

Can you imagine early Darcy deigning to visit the Bateses (a duty Emma always performs, even if it's less often than she should, because she knows she should)? Darcy, who does nothing but coldly bow to Mr. Collins? Not likely.I don't know -- I think that if Darcy saw it as his duty to one of the families in the environs of Pemberley, he absolutely would. His housekeeper praises him and says that the tenants

[tempestsarekind]

I'm glad at least one person agrees with me! I often seem to be the dissenting voice in favor of characters--which is odd, because I don't feel like I'm reading them in any radical way. But then, I suppose I wouldn't, would I?

And yeah--it's one thing not to like Emma, but to approve of Catherine and Heathcliff...I'm still confused! I think it had something to do with their being "real," whereas everything in the world of Emma was all straightlaced and proper and boring 'n' stuff. *shrug*

I agree about the unevenness of the Miramax Emma. And about Jeremy Northam--I can't really get behind Mark Strong's dour, disapproving Mr. Knightley in the Beckinsale version, because I feel like JN does such a good job of showing the humor behind Mr. Knightley's disapproval.

I think that if Darcy saw it as his duty to one of the families in the environs of Pemberley, he absolutely would.I think you're right about Darcy. I was comparing tiresomeness to tiresomeness and thinking that his behavior to both Mr. Collins and the Bateses would be

[lareinenoire]

You make me want to reread Emma now, which I haven't wanted to do for ages. I think part of the reason I didn't enjoy it very much was because back in the day when I was first reading Austen (I read P&P in late elementary school and the rest through middle and high school), I had no desire to read about beautiful and popular girls, and Emma was one of them. Granted, Lizzy Bennett is as well, but I didn't notice it for some reason.

Really good points about Emma's behaviour in contrast to Darcy. And I adore Knightley -- mostly because of Jeremy Northam (I was also one of those people who first saw him in the Emma film and haven't recovered since).

Also, Regency McDreamy? ::snort::

[tempestsarekind]

You make me want to reread Emma now

Yay! My work here is done!

I think it's probably a good thing that I didn't read Emma until college, for just the reason you mention. Elizabeth, for all that she's pretty and clever, is in the position of constantly being an outsider to the upper echelons represented by the Bingleys, Darcys, and de Bourghs--so one can still root for her (especially at Netherfield--one awkward situation after another!). It's hard to root for Emma when she's already *got* everything, in a lot of ways.

I *may* have seen Jeremy Northam first in The Net, but I think I saw both films around the same time, because I was very conflicted about thinking he was really cute and charming while trying to kill Sandra Bullock. :)

[lareinenoire]

This is true about Elizabeth -- people are arrayed against her even though she's a lovely and popular person otherwise. Emma, much less so.

I *may* have seen Jeremy Northam first in The Net, but I think I saw both films around the same time, because I was very conflicted about thinking he was really cute and charming while trying to kill Sandra Bullock. :)

::snicker:: That is amusing. I distinctly remember seeing him in Emma and rediscovering him soon afterward in The Winslow Boy. No conflict whatsoever.

[valancy_s]

I've been leapfrogging amongst your posts via embedded links, so please don't find it too strange that I'm commenting on this two years later!

I just wanted to say that I think the Emma/Darcy comparison is really, really interesting. Because you're totally right, they're both people for whom pride has become something of a vice yet who have no idea this makes other people see them as rude, and who are genuinely troubled by that realization.

But I think the reason Darcy and Emma get treated so differently by readers must have to do with identification. We aren't asked to identify with Darcy; we identify with Elizabeth, resent Darcy's behavior on her behalf, and are willing to forgive him when she does. But by making the "Darcy character" the protagonist in Emma, Austen is asking for us to identify with her, and it makes sense to me that readers resist this (no one wants to think of themselves in that light) and are therefore harsher on her than they would be if they were judging her as just another character

[tempestsarekind]

Oh, no problem! I'm glad you found it worth the following of links. :)

That is certainly a difference between Emma and Darcy, their relative centrality to the narrative. Interestingly, that's what makes me *more* ready to forgive Emma than Darcy (not that I'm *not* willing to forgive him too, of course). We see Emma's immediate contrition, her desire to make things right; we don't see any of that from Darcy, simply because we're not there when he undergoes it. And that makes me very sympathetic to Emma.

Though I don't tend to identify with literary characters anyway... It's not really a part of my literary toolkit. I *love* lots of literary characters, and can sympathize with them, but I don't see novels as asking me to see myself as those characters or recognize them in myself. (Which is why I find it interesting, if frustrating, when my students use "relatability" as a standard in class--I've just never read that way.)