Reading Beyond Loss (1) (Essay‪)‬

This paper proceeds from the notion that literature and film can provide important insights into the production and dissemination of public discourses, as well as interrogating the value of the Western literary canon. My aim in this paper is to evaluate the importance of the canon as an authorising marker for the historical text, and to explore the extent to which both text and author inform the production and reception of film adaptations through both their presence and absence on screen, as well as their appropriation within a field of marketable nostalgia. Jane Austen is one of the few female authors whose work is widely considered a "classic," situated amidst a largely male-dominated literary canon. The mythologised author provides a spectral background to contemporary treatments of the historical novel--treatments which often rely on reconstructions of the past in a nostalgic, romanticised mode. Investigating the most recent film adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, I suggest that this text is produced and marketed within a discursive climate of "loss" that replicates and valorises certain representations of Regency England, and omits others. The 2005 release of the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright, and with an adapted screenplay by Deborah Moggach, was met by critics, academics and the wider public with a combination of anxiety, excitement and suspicion, and has fuelled continuing debates about adaptation, the literary text and textual "loss" or infidelity. In approaching the film, it is important to uncover the mythologies that circulate around the name of Jane Austen and her social setting, as well as the set of visual signifiers of the past that have come to be associated with her texts (the "Austen industry"), which are evoked in both academic and popular forums. I suggest that amidst ubiquitous discourses of social and literary "loss" in Britain and Australia, the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is marketed and produced as a "fashionable," "educational," and "literary" text, in order to situate itself amidst the acceptable and normative representations of literary history and the "Austen" tradition of period drama on screen. Finally, in a very brief comparative gesture, I will also explore the ways in which Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet (2002), adapted into a BBC television mini-series by Andrew Davies, works within the traditions of the BBC historical drama to simultaneously reproduce and confound the structures of the historical narrative and traditional, nostalgic reproductions of the nineteenth-century female subject. Whilst Austen's Pride and Prejudice is inevitably informed by a palimpsest of prolific adaptations, and the saturated sign of "Austen" as author and industry, Tipping the Velvet, is not anchored by a canonical literary status, nor does it wholly sustain the tradition of Victorian visual aesthetics in its representations of women and domesticity in nineteenth-century London. Indeed, as this reading will begin to highlight, the adaptation of Tipping the Velvet has the potential for stretching and undermining periodising stereotypes that inform what we know and assume about the past. Francesco Casetti writes that films should be approached as "sites of production and the circulation of discourses ... symbolic constructions that refer to a cluster of meanings that a society considers possible (thinkable) and feasible (legitimate)." (2) What Casetti suggests is that film adaptations --and I would note, especially adaptations of "classic" and historical texts --do not simply point to, and replicate, a previous narrative moment, but in fact have just as much to say about their contemporary settings. So instead of reading "back" to an original text through an updated filmic reminder, we should instead ask, what role does nostalgia play in film adaptations, and what does it reveal about contemporary ideological and rhetorical fashions? Accordingly, I sugg