Stanzels control over fictional reality or Ricurs interventionist thrust justifies the changes

applied to Austens stories. Though often heavily criticized for either more or less radical
alterations, additions, and/or extractions, filmmakers have the opportunity to present original
stories and are not enslaved by the source text. The best adaptations therefore, are the ones that
offer a somewhat altered reading of Austen, imitations rejoicing in their difference. (Harris
66).
Imitation is used here in the sense it had in the eighteenth century which was a version of a
classical original into English which transposed events, characters and allusions into
contemporary equivalents (Wiltshire 43).
Like films in general, adaptations of Jane Austens novels respond to both trends in popular
culture and industry practices of the time of production (Dole Jane Austen and Mud).
Amis argues that such alterations reveal much more about the blatant sensuality of our own
imagination than about the latent sensuality of Jane Austens imagination (Margolis 34).
adaptations of Pride and Prejudice excellent indicators of the ideology and Zeitgeist that
informed them (Goggin Pride and Prejudice Reloaded).
Screenwriters and directors must slash the text to a manageable size and scale down the
complexity of Austens subtle and complex narrative voice to produce a focused, manageable
product suitable for screen (Macdonald 3).
the focus is on a hero and heroines courtship at the expense other characters or experiences,
which are sketchily represented (Kaplan 178). Even the analyses of the adaptation in this study
reflect this focus. The films revolve around the main protagonists and their romantic
entanglements.
The films endow Austens courtship romance protagonists with emotional display emphasizing
our current notions of romance rather than late eighteenth-century understandings of
courtship (Nixon 25).
The greatest change in Austens text, however, is the emphasis on male physical beauty.

The recent film adaptations are successful because they quite literally, flesh out her male
characters. It is imperative that the film reconfigure the novels romance heroes they also
reveal what we, the late twentieth-century audience do not like about Austen Austens
heroines fall in love with that we do not like: the male hero the films must add scenes to add
desirability to her male protagonists (Nixon 23).
Recent Austen adaptations also offer male protagonists increased screen time.
It has been something of a trend in the most recent Austen adaptations, particularly British ones,
both to fetishize the looks of the heroes and also to foreground that fetishization by a variety of
devices. (Hopkins 119)
Scopophilia looking itself is a source of pleasure (Mulvey Visual). the presence of a
woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in a normal narrative film, yet her visual
presence tends to work against the development of the story line, to freeze the flow of action in
moments of erotic contemplation (Mulvey Visual). In the 1995 Austen adaptation however,
this was vice versa, it was the male lead that the viewers gaze was directed to.
Cinematic Austen capitalizes on depicting repressed sexuality (Blum 164).
recent popular representations reveal a distinct trend: the harlequinization of Jane Austens
novels (Kaplan 178). Harlequinization [] necessitates an unswerving attention to the heros
and heroines desires for one another and a tendency to represent those desires in unsurprising,
even clichd ways (Radway qtd. in Kaplan 178).
If these phenomenally successful adaptations have harlequinized the Austen novels, such
changes have even been enabled by similarities of some sort that connect the Austen novels with
our contemporary phenomenon of womens romance novels (Margolis 26). The most
significant common factor is that both groups of novels consider a world of womens concerns,
framed by the perspective of use-value ethics (Margolis 26). Producers think less in terms of
ideology and aesthetics than of financial success (Margolis 26).