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Sadist, Land Shark, and Reptile: Autumn de Wilde's EMMA.

2023; Wiley; Volume: 56; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpcu.13194

1540-5931

Rita J. Dashwood, Andrew McInnes,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Nobody likes someone who is handsome, clever, and rich. Jane Austen knew this, reportedly saying of her 1815 novel Emma, that it would include “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like” (Austen-Leigh 204). Autumn de Wilde knows this, opening her 2020 film adaptation of Austen's novel, EMMA.,1 with an early morning scene in which Emma instructs her trailing servants exactly which flower to cut: “Not that one.” Critics of de Wilde's film know this, complaining that it turns Austen's heroine into a “sadist,” a “land shark,” and a “reptile.”2 We argue that “Emma Woodhouse, sadist, land shark, and reptile” is equivalent to the opening words of the novel duplicated on screen in the adaptation, “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich”: it is simply the critics saying out loud what Austen and de Wilde have said quietly. Emma's privilege makes her a heroine who is difficult to love, and both Austen and de Wilde revel in the opportunities this affords them, delighting in Emma's superficial delights. We propose to take the superficiality of the film's style seriously as a performance of what D. A. Miller calls “Austen style,” which Devoney Looser has recently rechristened “Jane Austen camp.” Premiering in 2020 just before the COVID-19 pandemic began, EMMA. provocatively offers its audience what Miller describes as a “utopia of those with almost no place to go” (Miller 29): our straitened, even claustrophobic, circumstances since March 2020 have brought us all into unexpected proximity with the restrictions of Regency life dissected by Austen in her novels and repackaged in pastel style by de Wilde. Perhaps, Austen's oppressive utopia offers us pleasures we were not ready to understand before our experience of lockdown. Pleasures for which de Wilde's film prepares us. Taking as a starting point Austen's place in recent popular culture, and particularly recent reimaginings of Emma, this article will consider how de Wilde's movie presents Emma as a character who falls between modernity and periodicity, unmooring her from recognizable categories, making her ridiculous. By adopting a humorous tone, which emphasizes the ridiculousness of the characters and the situations in which they find themselves, the film adaptation risks antagonizing some viewers, even as it attracts others. The same is true for its characterization of the heroine, which places the privilege that comes with her wealth and position in society in the foreground: de Wilde's Emma is colder and less likable than her predecessors, as the critics' descriptions of her as “sadistic,” “land shark,” and “reptile” convey. By comparing actress Anya Taylor-Joy's Emma with other privileged (anti)heroines in pop culture, such as Suranne Jones's portrayal of Anne Lister in Sally Wainwright's Gentleman Jack (2019), back to their unexpected antecedents in Disney villainesses such as The Little Mermaid's Ursula, this article explores how de Wilde's EMMA. harnesses the queer pleasures of these gender nonconforming figures to chart the disorientating paths of desire in the film, between first Emma and Harriet, and then Emma, Harriet, and Mr. Knightley. Critics of Austen in the 21st century draw on her juvenile writing of the 1790s, inspired by and responding to the revolutionary politics of that period, as well as reflecting on the overt sexiness of her pop cultural renaissance in the 1990s, to explore alternative approaches to sexuality in her novels, her biography, and in adaptations of both. Austen honed her craft in the juvenilia of the 1790s, learning how to sublimate the political turmoil of the British response to the French Revolution into her special brand of subtle social satire. Critics have traced the impact of this revolutionary decade on Austen's writing from Warren Robert's once dismissed Jane Austen and the French Revolution (1979) through Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), which takes a perverse delight in positioning her as an arch conservative, to Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (2004), which directly rebuts Butler by tracing Austen's more liberal inheritance from philosophers including Smith, Hume, and Godwin. Popular and academic approaches to Austen emphasizing alternative sexualities combined in the 1990s, with sexed-up productions of her novels, especially Andrew Davies' TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1995), and an academic debate about her sexuality ruffling the pages of the London Review of Books. Titling Terry Castle's review of Deirdre le Faye's collection of Austen's letters “Was Jane Austen Gay?” the London Review of Books sparked a flurry of replies defending Aunt Jane's honor as well as celebrating her proto-queerness. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” continued to uncover “an alternative, passionate sexual ecology” (834) in Austen's writing, as well as arguing against a critical paradigm focusing on scenes of a girl being taught a lesson that had come to dominate normative analyses of Austen's novels. D. A. Miller paralleled Austen style with what he terms the unheterosexual, using Sense and Sensibility as an example of a text in which Austen creates a “utopia of those with almost no place to go” (29). De Wilde‘s EMMA. presents its audience with just such a utopia, a queer space that confronts the viewer with expressions of heterosexuality as a disorienting spectacle. Of course, when Merleau-Ponty discusses queer effects he is not considering “queer” as a sexual orientation—but we can. We can turn to the etymology of the word “queer,” which comes from the Indo-European term “twist.” Queer is, after all, a spatial term, which then gets turned into a sexual term, a term for a twisted sexuality that does not follow a “straight line,” a sexuality that is bent and crooked. (67) Before she reaches this alignment of sexuality with spatiality, Ahmed muses on how the normative aligns with straightness, with deviation from the straight line experienced as disorienting, wonky, or queer: “Things seem ‘straight’ (on the vertical axis) when they are ‘in line,’ which means when they are aligned with other lines. Rather than presuming the vertical line is simply given, we would see the vertical line as an effect of this process of alignment” (66). Building on Austen's own “unheterosexual” attitude, de Wilde's film revels in the disorientation caused by paying attention to this process of alignment: although the film flirts with offering us a queer Emma, with de Wilde describing her relationship with Harriet Smith as her “first love affair,” EMMA. shows instead the strangeness of straightness, uncovering the effort that goes into coming into alignment with others. Although this article deploys queer theory to read EMMA. and its engagement with both Austen and pop culture, it stops short of claiming that de Wilde offers us a queer Emma. Rather, the film presents something much closer to what Looser calls “Jane Austen camp.” Reading Austen's juvenilia as “fully realised camp literature,” finding campiness in the canonical novels (including the prospect of Emma's Mrs. Elton arriving at Mr. Knightley's party on donkey-back) and in pop culture adaptations of Austen's work, Looser argues that “it is not camp that sets out to overwhelm or to deeply shock. It is a form of camp that provides harmless, mild sexual surprise” (7–8). De Wilde's film depicts Emma warming her bare backside by the fire, Mr. Knightley in deshabille, and depicting Mrs. Elton in a delightfully campy costume in vivid orange with bows. EMMA.'s campiness combines with its flirtations with queer desire to show the strangeness of straightness, representing the disorienting process of sexual relations coming into alignment. EMMA. was the last film the authors watched in the cinema (separately) before we watched it again (together) to prepare for this article. When Andrew McInnes first watched the film, he enjoyed Anya Taylor-Joy's cool representation of Emma Woodhouse—her haughtiness, distance, even otherworldliness—and appreciated the way de Wilde found ways to puncture her punctiliousness: her screwball interactions with Mr. Knightley, shared laughter when holding a farting baby, her horrified reactions when her “imaginist” versions of reality were confronted with the truth. He remembers being disappointed by the film's decision to “humanize” Emma by the end of the film: her continuing friendship with Harriet Smith is an alteration of the book's more class-bound rejection of her, but also the scene in which she realizes Mr. Knightley is proposing to her replaces her quick thinking with a nosebleed, stressing her physicality rather than her intellect (though we reinterpret this scene below). McInnes felt that the film had reneged on its more authentic representation of Emma as a privileged antiheroine by softening Austen's representation of her in the book as an unrepentant snob. Like McInnes, Rita Dashwood remembers her excitement at seeing Emma represented on screen as the arrogant, spoiled, and stubborn character that Austen created. Upon first watching the movie, Dashwood gasped excitedly at Anya Taylor-Joy's gift for comedy. Taylor-Joy makes Emma's lack of concern for Miss Bates's feelings obvious both in the dismissive tone in which she delivers the lines, but—what was even more original for a depiction of Emma—in her physicality. The way in which Emma opens the carriage to Miss Bates with a single finger, walks away from her when she corners her at the haberdashers, and glances indifferently (or disappointedly) when Miss Bates concludes a story by saying that Jane Fairfax almost died but, in the end, survived, all show joy in depicting a character that is unashamedly haughty that made the film all the more entertaining. Only the film's attempt to bring all the characters together in harmony at the end seems to go against Austen's refusal to have Emma and Harriet be friends, which, like McInnes, she saw as an unnecessary partial rehabilitation of a character that had until then been so much fun to watch precisely because of her flaws. When we watched the film again, two years after the COVID-19 pandemic had changed the way we thought about health, community, and even physical contact (all key concepts in Austen's Emma and de Wilde's adaptation), EMMA. felt both significantly different and strangely familiar. Dashwood noticed how care is choreographed in the film, for example, in the scene in which Mr. Woodhouse has the servants move various fire screens around so that Emma and Mr. Knightley may have a moment of privacy after his proposal. For any of us cohabiting under the various lockdowns, these crafty ways of finding some privacy seemed more recognizable than ever. The claustrophobia Emma hints at when she asks Mr. Knightley whether he would be willing to move into Hartfield and “live constantly with my father in no house of your own” resonated with those of us having to share our personal space with others, and really brought home the privilege he was giving up. Under these circumstances, their subsequent shared laughter as they touched and kissed behind the screens became all the more daring and endearing. Dashwood also appreciated anew how various moments throughout the film emphasized the power Austen attributed to Emma within a deeply patriarchal society, more so than would seem possible under her father's roof and soon to be under a marriage contract that would see her fortune—unless protected by a trust—under the control of her husband. Even in a room full of men, it is still Emma who commands and gets the better of a situation. McInnes appreciated Taylor-Joy's trajectory over the course of the film from a lonely, alienated, and aloof young woman to someone able to laugh at herself as well as others. De Wilde's film carefully reveals the vulnerability underpinning Emma's existence, from her heartbreak over losing her governess at the start of the film to her tears after she is chastized by Mr. Knightley for mocking Miss Bates, but keeps a steady eye on her silliness too—even at the end of the film, she is shown delivering a gift of a goose to goose farmer Robert Martin.3 If Emma shifts from a disconnected figure at the start of the film to a connected one by the end, she remains ridiculous throughout, and it is her ridiculousness which forges these connections. Allow us to be ridiculous now in connecting Taylor-Joy's portrayal of Emma to a range of modern pop culture heroines that range from the obvious, such as Alicia Silverstone's Cher in Amy Heckerling's Clueless, an update of Austen's novel set in a Beverly Hills high school, to figures who seem less clearly related, such as Disney's queer-coded villainesses like The Little Mermaid's Ursula, who assures Ariel that she, much like Emma Woodhouse, just wants to help “poor unfortunate souls” find their match. De Wilde's EMMA. shares aesthetic preoccupations with melding together fashion consciousness and screwball comedy with Heckerling's high school update of Emma. If the link to Disney films seems unlikely, de Wilde's EMMA. draws on a Disneyfied aesthetic to represent the Regency period as one of pastel shades and chocolate box views, as well as sharing a sublimated fascination with queer culture which gets similarly sidelined in preference for heteronormativity over the course of the film. Sally Wainwright's Gentleman Jack is a modern period drama that attempts a more “realistic” vision of a similar time period to EMMA., at the same time, it unashamedly focuses on queer desire. Gentleman Jack is based on the partially encoded diaries of Anne Lister, a lesbian landowner in the early nineteenth century. Anne's privileged position as landowner and mining magnate means she shares a class background with Emma Woodhouse, while her out and explicit queerness casts shade on the flirtation with lesbian desire in EMMA. Suranne Jones's sophisticated performance as Anne Lister, combining power, privilege, and vulnerability, balances the viewer's sympathy for a woman presented as breathtakingly ahead of her time with a more disconcerting sense of her timeliness, especially her conservative class politics, alongside questions about her motives—does she pursue the wealthy Ann Walker for love or money? Jones's Anne and Taylor-Joy's Emma seem designed to both attract and repel viewers: we argue that their power, privilege, and vulnerability can best be understood by thinking of them through the lens of Disney villainesses, especially figures like Maleficent and Cruella who have recently been the focus of reinterpretations providing viewers with sympathetic back stories for their villainy. Sympathy for these devil women involves viewers in a consideration of both their privilege and their queerness, positioning them as curiously of and out of their own time. Earlier adaptations of Emma opt instead to stress their heroines' relatability. Amy Heckerling's Clueless demonstrates Austen's adaptability and updatability by swapping Regency England for Hollywood. In Clueless, Alicia Silverstone plays Cher/Emma, a spoiled and self-absorbed teenager who is nevertheless utterly compelling and likable. In contrast to a high school bully like Regina George from Mean Girls, Cher has no interest in terrorizing her fellow high schoolers, but instead, as she herself puts it, “[uses] her popularity for a good cause” by befriending the underdog “Harriet Smith” character, Tai. The irony in Austen's narration finds a worthy substitute in Cher's lack of awareness of her privilege, as she declares, “But seriously, I actually have a real normal life for a teenage girl,” as she picks out her clothes using a computer program, soundtracked by David Bowie's “Fashion,” a song comparing the conformism of fashionable trends with neo-fascism and providing an ironizing counterpoint to Cher's naivete. As Maureen Turim affirms, “[t]he music, which may be mistakenly heard as pop teenage anthems, figures in the film as relatively brief inserts of longer pieces from a wide range of contemporary groups, many of which express in their punk, funk, or rap an edgy critique of the very culture Cher represents” (43). Alternatively, we suggest that Heckerling's musical irony functions as Austen style does in the novels: their edgy critique of contemporary culture brackets off their heroines from blame, provoking sympathy for both Cher and Emma instead of ridicule. More recently, the BBC returned Emma to the Regency period with Romola Garai in the title role in the series Emma (2009). In this adaptation, Emma's comparative privilege is emphasized, as is her tendency to regard people as objects she can manipulate at her wish. An image of a young Emma sitting under a table, playing with her dolls, as she eavesdrops on the conversations taking place between the adults, is referenced in a subsequent episode in which Mr. Knightley chastises her for her attempts at preventing a marriage between Harriet and Robert Martin: “They are not your playthings, your dolls. They are people!” However, Emma's petulance and immaturity are emphasized, her matchmaking presented more as a trivial occupation to fill the hours in which she is evidently bored due to the absence of any intellectual equal aside from Mr. Knightley, rather than a tyrannical exertion of her social privilege. Most recent of all, Bernie Su's Emma Approved (2013) YouTube series places emphasis on Emma's perfectionism. Once again, Su's adaptation situates the narrative in the contemporary USA, this time reimagining Emma as a lifestyle coach who runs the Matchmaking Style Division of the Developing Highbury Partners Lifestyle Group (which she communicates at the speed of light in the first episode). Emma's self-centeredness is made immediately clear through her declaration that she is making these videos as a way of documenting her work (or her “greatness,” as she puts it) for when she receives the Lifestyle Achievement Award in Lifestyle Excellence, which she regards as the inevitable recognition she will receive for becoming “like Oprah, but better.” The company was, naturally, established with her father's money, and Mr. Knightley is a partner and responsible for business development and bookkeeping (or “the boring stuff,” according to Emma), while Harriet is a recently-hired assistant who, as Emma puts it, “listens to everything I say and does everything I tell her. I mean, what else could you ask for?” Transposed into a different context and period, the portrayal of Emma's self-centeredness and arrogance as a result of the protected life of privilege and adulation she has always received nevertheless makes this YouTube series strikingly true to Austen's original. Although Emma's privilege is evident, so is her desperate need to show her skills in matchmaking by earning a perfect client success record. Emma's vulnerability comes through as she fears that she may not be able to achieve this, the apparently impending failure of her most recent match threatening her business and everything she has worked for. While de Wilde's adaptation also immediately begins by exposing the vulnerability that hides behind the veneer of the heroine's confidence by showing her sadness in parting from her governess, Emma's privilege remains intact. This is not so for the introduction of Emma in Emma Approved, which starts by emphasizing the fragile state of the business Emma cares so much about, immediately making her sympathetic and non-threatening to her audience. Pop culture adaptations of Emma from Clueless to Emma Approved diverge from Austen's original by striving to make Emma likable from the start. Austen's Emma, unlike the precariously positioned Austen heroines who came before and after her like Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, cast out from the family home after their father's death, or Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters, threatened with a similar expulsion, is not just the possessor of a stupendous fortune, but also the future co-inheritor of an estate. In fact, Emma holds far less in common with her fellow heroines than she does with a very different kind of Austen character: her villainous wealthy woman. Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice, and Lady Denham in the unfinished Sanditon (1817) all share common characteristics: they are deficient in accomplishments, obsessed with their status in society, and keen on exerting control over other people's lives. Despite having access to many more opportunities than the other women in Austen's novels, these women are not interested in becoming the accomplished, charity-giving, charming hostesses that any society's great lady would have been expected to be. Instead, they relish any opportunity to remind others of their superior standing in society and entertain themselves by forming matches between them. For anyone who has read Emma, this might sound strikingly familiar. With Emma, Austen was setting herself an interesting challenge: how do you make a character who is self-centered, egotistical, and tyrannical compelling? We argue that de Wilde and Taylor-Joy may have taken a hint from the popularity of gender-nonconforming villainesses in Disney films, from the animated originals to more recent live–action reimaginings of its classic animated films, which aim to rehabilitate the villainess figure by the end of the films, presenting them as fully moral people. Taylor-Joy's Emma shares a key characteristic with Disney villains: a queerness that both attracts and repels viewers. Elizabeth Bell and Laura Sells explore the representation of queer characters and their nonconformity to cultural norms of gender in Disney films, arguing that gender-nonconforming characters became increasingly associated with evil, with a contrast being established between them and the moral, openly heterosexual heroes/heroines (although Sells also suggests that their destabilization of gender offers viewers ways to critique gender norms). Both critics cite Ursula, the villain of The Little Mermaid (1989), as, in Sells' terms, “a composite of so many drag queens and camp icons - Joan Collins, Tallulah Barhead, Norma Desmond, Divine” (182). Ursula's recognizably queer characteristics include her flamboyance as well as her cynicism toward heterosexual relationships. Despite or perhaps because of this, however, Disney fans who identify as queer have a long history of reappropriating Disney, and the villains have become such firm favorites among its fanbase that Disney has started paying attention, as indicated by the increasing number of villain-themed celebrations at its theme parks as well as the reimaginings of villains such as Maleficent and Cruella in recent live–action movies. The recent Cruella (2021), which tells the story of the eponymous villain from the animated 1961 classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians, based on the novel of the same name by Dodie Smith, is an excellent example of this. The 1961 animated Cruella, much like the original from Smith's novel, is introduced through the loud sound of a motor horn. She is the perfect parody of a decadent English aristocracy that regards the world as their playground and that looks on everyone else as property they can use to their liking. This sense of entitlement and toxicity that privilege and extreme inequality are likely to breed are thus taken to the extreme in Cruella, a character so inexplicably evil that she is willing to murder the tenderest of animals—puppies—in order to make herself a coat. Contrast that with the new Cruella, who receives an Oliver Twist makeover: she is tragically orphaned, and, unaware of her aristocratic origins, is forced to steal with her troupe of friendly bandits in order to survive in the mean streets of London. She does not find out that she is the lawful heiress of her large estate until the end of the movie, so the concept of privilege is never tackled. “Call me Cruella,” the movie's title song by Florence + The Machine, may contain an invitation to embrace one's darkness, but paradoxically this Cruella has none of the darkness of her animated counterpart. Instead, in the end, she is fully rehabilitated: from a wannabe dog killer in the 1961 adaptation, she becomes a dog lover and a matchmaker, who presents Roger and Anita with the dalmatian puppies that will bring them together. This rehabilitation of the previously villainous woman in Disney films like Cruella contrasts with Austen's aims in Emma to explore the limits of readerly sympathy for a heroine she suspects no one but herself will much like, but reflects upon de Wilde's directorial choices, encouraging the audience's critical distance from Emma at the start of the film before shifting to a more sympathetic representation by the film's close. Still, by the end of Emma and EMMA., the heroine has it all—the man, the house, the money, and the social privilege—and she is wholly unapologetic about it. Emma may feel guilt at her treatment of Harriet in the novel, but what prevails at the close of the novel is a feeling of joy, with Emma's laughter more easily comparable to that of a Sleeping Beauty leaving Aurora's baptism after cursing her than Aurora's own quiet happiness at having found her prince: “She must laugh at such a close! Such an end of the doleful disappointment of 5 weeks back! Such a heart – such a Harriet!” (373–74). Disney turns a villain into the heroine of her story; Austen turns a heroine into the villain; de Wilde challenges her audience to find the heroine in the villain. In doing so, de Wilde is building on a tradition to present a deeply flawed and morally dubious protagonist as a simultaneously magnetic and compelling character that also extends to other recent period dramas. In Gentleman Jack (2019), the audience is first introduced to Suranne Jones' Anne Lister by witnessing her driving a carriage as fast as it will go through the streets of Halifax, despite the outcries of both the passersby and her fellow travelers in the carriage. This act immediately contributes to the characterization of Anne as someone who is independent in spirit and pursues her own goals and desires even when they go against societal and gendered expectations. On one hand, viewers take delight in witnessing the power that Anne's social privilege and financial independence grant her. With her full-hearted acceptance of her sexuality and the confidence which comes from this self-acceptance, Anne becomes a charismatic character who would appear to fit seamlessly into the modern period. On the other hand, we are also introduced to the less-attractive aspects of Anne's personality, namely, and like Emma, her social conservatism and her consequent snobbishness and disdain for others. This extends to members of the working classes, but also more broadly to all of Shibden, her estate, including her own family, as she despondently reflects on how she has “flown too close to the sun” and has now “crashed back to earth, to shabby little Shibden and my shabby little family,” sharing a resigned look with the camera that invites the viewer's sympathy. This perhaps Fleabag-inspired direct address of the viewer successfully draws the viewer in by making them complicit with Anne. By sharing Anne's secret plans and ambitions, the viewer cannot help but root for her, even when her actions can be described as manipulative. Having decided to pursue the wealthy heiress Ann Walker with the intention of making her wife, Anne purposely monopolizes Ann's time with the intention of having her fall in love with her. “Good Lord,” exclaims Anne as the clock suddenly chimes, indicating that several hours have passed, “I have been here for hours. How did that happen?” She says this apparently genuinely, but immediately afterward she bites her lip as she stares at the camera, her intentions clear to the viewer, if to no one else. Like Emma, Anne is obviously lonely, lacking her intellectual equal in Shibden, which attracts the viewer's sympathy. The quality of appearing to be simultaneously very much of their time and also ahead of it makes these characters both familiar and unfamiliar, their villainous haughtiness and manipulative tendencies inevitably attractive to some viewers and repellent to others. De Wilde's queer-coding of Emma resembles the gender nonconforming traits of gender nonconforming Disney villainesses, although it falls short of the open celebration of lesbian desire in Gentleman Jack. Despite this, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Lister do share a charismatic power rooted in their class privilege. When asked in a recent interview with the LGBTQIA-interest magazine The Advocate about the timeless themes in Emma, particularly that of preordained marriage, something her interviewer Tracy E. Gilchrist affirms all queer people have to face, de Wilde explains: “I think that the relationship between Emma and Harriet is the first love story. Until she realized how much she loved Harriet and how she couldn't live without her, then she was able to love Mr. Knightley properly.” De Wilde adds that “by the time you get to the end [of the film], through the central character, you realize that the right place to put value is in good people who take care of each other despite social standings and preconceived notions set there by society. It's about people being kind to one another.” This is certainly a fair description of de Wilde's intentions in bringing the relationship between Emma and Harriet to the foreground of her film, as exemplified by such scenes as the marriage proposal, in which Emma reacts to Mr. Knightley with an initial refusal: “I … I cannot. Harriet … she's in love with you!” followed by “I cannot break her heart again.” Here, Emma's concern for Harriet's well-being prevents her from immediately accepting Mr. Knightley's offer, her love for Harriet momentarily taking prominence over her lov