Adaptations

4

CONSERVATIVE AUSTEN, RADICAL AUSTEN

Sense and Sensibility from text to screen

Julian North

 

John Lyttle, commenting on the wave of adaptations of classic novels in the 1990s, argues that costume drama is ‘an essentially conservative, backward-looking genre’ in which ‘[production values tend to smother political points’. He gives as evidence Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995), which, as he argues, ‘emphasised a woman's vulnerable place in impolite society, yet visual intoxication and the RADA mannerisms thought appropriate to the genre displaced good intention’ (Lyttle 1996: 2).

Lyttle's claim is that no matter what the ideology of the novel adapted for screen, the form of classic adaptation itself will ensure the failure of challenges ...