Emma/clueless

Outline four main points that Giselle Bastin made in her lecture on Emma/Clueless.

In her lecture on the 5th of April 2016, Giselle Bastin discussed four main points: the narrative voice, the critics’ response to Clueless as an adaptation, the Emma and Clueless structural plot and character similarities, and the authenticity of Clueless as an adaptation.

The narrative voice in Jane Austen’s Emma is third person omniscient. As Bastin highlighted, this works rather well as the audience are guided by Austen’s subtle narrative skills in order to sustain an ironic portrayal of Emma as a character. Throughout Clueless, Bastin discussed how Heckerling employs a similar technique to Austin, however the narrative is delivered in a voice-over of Cher’s inner thoughts. An example of this voice over narrative is at the very beginning of the movie when Cher says, ‘“Is this, like a Noxema commercial, or what?!" But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl. I mean I get up, I brush my teeth, and I pick out my school clothes.’ Similarly to Austen, Heckerling depicts her main character as rather youthful and self- satisfied.

As Bastin discussed, Austen has a group of devout followers otherwise known as ‘Janeites’. These people closely critiqued Heckling’s adaptation of Emma and were disappointed that the main character, Alicia Silverstone, was rather slim. Bastin spoke about how in the century when Emma was written, a person who was larger was considered wealthier. However because this is a modern-day adaptation, the Janeites accepted that ‘thin’ was the new ideal body type.

Bastin described Amy Heckerling’s Clueless as a faithful loose adaptation to Jane Austen’s Emma. Bastin highlighted the many structural plot and character similarities between both texts. She discussed the similarity between Cher and Emma both being wealthy, respected, popular and are both inspired to read more. Essentially, each character profile in Emma, fits almost perfectly with Amy Heckerling’s Clueless. Bastin stated that the plot lines and structure are parallelll to each other.

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