The Influencing Presence of Adaptation and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

The cinematic map that is created when Pride and Prejudice is translated into Joe Wright’s 2005 filmic adaptation is the distance about which Jean Baudrillard theorizes in his book Simulacra & Simulation (1981), “…between the real and the imaginary, [that] tends to abolish itself, to be reabsorbed on behalf of the model” (121). The model cast by the film adaptation precedes and determines the reading of the literature from the page. There is no way to reset this precession. The reader is in a predetermined and prejudiced hyperreal state of which they are little aware, provided with the presence of ghosts as simulacra for the imaginary.