Studies and research: movie and literature
BODIES AND CORPORA:
THE VISUAL JANE AUSTEN
The visual body of Jane Austen’s work has
grown considerably in the past decade. Over the course
of just a few years, devoted readers of the six finished
novels by Austen have been offered a profusion of iconic
remakes. My text focuses on an exploration of the ways
in which the body, politics and history — categories rather
subdued and kept at bay in Jane Austen’s fiction — are
represented in contemporary film and television adaptations
of her novels, when the iconic and the visual are used
as a means to find the missing link between an old, elusive
discourse and its new consumers.
The decorous fading of the bodily features in Austen’s
novels is in the new, visual versions of her texts replaced
by vibrant new representations which see the body as the
necessary site of discourse. Even though in most cases
(with the exception of Heckerling’s Clueless), late
eighteenth century decorum is
maintained, the visual representation of the actors’ bodies
introduces the possibility of subversion, action that is
possibly improper and dangerously sexual. The sex drive
introduced by the representation of the actors’ physique
is all the more significant if one bears in mind that all
of Jane Austen’s novels deal with one subject — premarital
courtship. Moreover, this new body is both visible and
invisible, it paradoxically acts underneath the clothes,
so that the costume functions as a kind of mobile screen
simultaneously revealing and concealing, frustrating yet
encouraging recognition and interpretation — a counterpart
of the very screen on which the film itself is shown. This
other representation is therefore not one of a nude body,
but of a body struggling for representation, or rather
defying representation itself, just as is the case, on
a different level, with the synecdochic bodies in Jane
Austen’s text.
The marriage market that Austen is perpetually involved
with unavoidably foregrounds the politics (of representation).
Once the marriage market has been recognized as the principal
interest of story telling, representation itself participates
in the political impact of matchmaking. The performance
of her characters is therefore a social act as well, in
which narration affects and is affected by the transactions
on the marriage market. Furthermore, the marriage market
of Jane Austen’s novels neatly reflects the politics of
adaptations of her novels for film or television. In other
words, Austen’s novels too are goods on a film or TV market;
by managing to preserve their appeal, they are never short
of suitors in guise of film and TV producers. Austen’s
plots operate as parables of their own consumption: they
portray heroines on the marriage market and are themselves
goods attracting eligible admirers — readers, viewers,
writers, producers.
This brings me to the question of history. Repetition
and its longevity are essential for the social practices
in Jane Austen: obsessive and decorous repetition is the
inciter of the historical otherness of her discourse. Consequently,
the repletive and overflowing time of the six-part TV series
(the 1995 BBC production of Pride
and Prejudice, for example) captures the temporal
dimension of Austen’s novels usually lost in the succinct
duration of a feature film. It therefore follows that
the representation of the past in a six-part period piece
— as opposed to that of a feature film — rests on a symptomatic
temporal paradox: the longevity of history is in a way
echoed in the very time-consuming effort to film, view
and represent the past. In more ways than one, the growth
of the visual body takes time.
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