The first half of the book is a delight, despite my being unable to quite shake off the suspicion that Jean Perdu as literary apothecary owes rather too much to Joanne Harris’s Vianne Rocher in Chocolat. The second half was disappointingly ordinary. The inclusion of a list of literary remedies as end matter was too pretentious by half, with the inclusion of several ‘remedies’ unavailable in translation, simply infuriating. I suppose giving recipes at the end was to allow the book to cash in on success of the current chick lit trend in ‘coffee and cupcake’ love stories, but it just seemed to me to compound the schizophrenic nature of the book.
30 April 2016
Austen, Emma
Emma has been described as ‘the most fiendishly difficult of detective stories’ (Blythe, Introduction to Austen, Emma (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 37). It is also, in my view one of the most elegantly and economically constructed. Each of the characters contributes to the plot, but this is contrived with great skill. How does Austen bend the narration to create the distortion necessary for the mystery? What is the effect of this distortion on the reader? Is there a character whose perspective is trustworthy?
Austen’s heroines tend to have absent or unhelpful fathers, and Emma is no exception. How does Mr Woodhouse’s extreme helplessness affect Emma? Does the introduction of a backstory in O’Hanlon’s adaptation of the text alter the viewer’s response to this character and/or to Emma?
Clueless has been described as ‘a kind of image anagram for the Emma-familiar viewer to solve’ in relation both to events and characters. For example, Mrs Weston can be seen as represented both by Miss Geist and by Dionne. It has also been argued that, at the same time, that, although there is no direct equivalent of Jane Fairfax in the film, aspects of the relationship between Jane and Frank Churchill are represented in that between Dionne and Murray. Is Heckerling’s adaptation ‘an inspired contemporary use’ of elements in Austen’s text as the critics claim; or is it a deplorable commercialisation of a serious novel?
Austen’s heroines tend to have absent or unhelpful fathers, and Emma is no exception. How does Mr Woodhouse’s extreme helplessness affect Emma? Does the introduction of a backstory in O’Hanlon’s adaptation of the text alter the viewer’s response to this character and/or to Emma?
Clueless has been described as ‘a kind of image anagram for the Emma-familiar viewer to solve’ in relation both to events and characters. For example, Mrs Weston can be seen as represented both by Miss Geist and by Dionne. It has also been argued that, at the same time, that, although there is no direct equivalent of Jane Fairfax in the film, aspects of the relationship between Jane and Frank Churchill are represented in that between Dionne and Murray. Is Heckerling’s adaptation ‘an inspired contemporary use’ of elements in Austen’s text as the critics claim; or is it a deplorable commercialisation of a serious novel?
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