The Language of Austen's Emma in Modern Film

Although the works of Jane Austen are firmly rooted in Present Day English, our modern usage 21st Century usage of the English language varies significantly from that of 1815, the date of Emma’s publication. One of the most popular Jane Austen film adaptation that came out of the era is no doubt the 1995’s Clueless, an adaptation of Austen’s beloved Emma. In addition to its earning power and popularity, Clueless serves as an excellent study in modern English, as it serves as a foil in order to represent the distinct differences between the diachronic spectrum of Present Day English. Furthermore, one can make an interesting study from contrasting Clueless’ use of American slang with British English of the early nineteenth century. Through analyzing the English used in Clueless, and comparing it to that of Jane Austen’s Emma, one can see that despite the linguistic differences of their colloquial speech, both the movie and the original novel express the same themes, such as social status and love, and actually supports the writing style of Jane Austen herself.

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, England. A prominent authoress during the Romantic period, Austen has continued to gain followers with each passing year. Director Amy Heckerling took on the great challenge of modernizing one of Austen’s best loved novels, Emma, and found it to be surprisingly malleable and ready for adaptation to a contemporary setting (Ferriss 123). This modernity of the updated version leads to the necessary inclusion of 1990s technological terms. As scholar Suzanne Ferriss points out, “photography substitutes for portraiture, convertibles for carriages, parties in the Valley for fancy dresses…Even Emma’s mother’s death receives the 1990’s treatment: Cher’s [the main character of Clueless] mother died undergoing liposuction” (123). Here the viewer sees the updating of the Emma story through modern technological terms. English language scholar David Crystal points out that “However impressed we are at the evolution of regional standards and the re-emergence of nonstandard English over the past century or so, this is nothing compared with the linguistic developments which are about to take place as a result of…new technology” (518). Crystal’s observation fits in exactly with the evolution of new technological terms seen in Clueless. These terms, such as “convertible,” “driver’s license,” “cell phone,” or even “lipstick,” would make an original reader of Jane Austen’s Emma utterly left in the dark.

Before diving into the juxtaposition of the Romantic text against the modern film adaptation’s linguistic differences, I should point out that, like its later adaptation, Emma set new fashions during its first publication. In the novel, eight words—whether by original vocabulary or by functional shifts—appear in the English lexicon for the first time: two verbs, coddle and smarten; two nouns, sympathizer and in-between; and four adjectives, spoilt, unfastidious, unmirthful, and unmodulated. As she illustrates in her adjectives, Austen is famous for adding the negative “un” before a work to create a negative and expand the bound grammatical morpheme. Because of the liberties that Austen takes with the vocabulary’s function, many subsequent authors use this added prefix to formerly only affirmative words in order to create an Austenian style that lends the new literature, or in this case the adaptations, a certain amount of respect.

Taking the following two scenes, the first from Emma and the second from Clueless (with Cher as the modern Emma character), the modern audience can immediately see the obvious distinctions between the works that both take place in Present Day English. In both situations, the main character is giving advice to a young woman of lower social rank in attempts to influence her behaviors enough that she will rise up the social ladder:

Emma: You understand the force of influence pretty well, Harriet; but I would have you so firmly established in good society, as to be independent…I want to see you permanently well connected, and to that end it will be advisable to have as few odd acquaintances as may be… (Austen 24).
Cher: …as someone older, can I please give you some advice? It is one thing to spark up a doobie and get laced at parties, but it is quite another to be fried all day. (Clueless)

One can learn a lot from studying the word choice between these two scenes. “Acquaintances” can well be said to be the 1990s version of “parties,” where peers and people meet. Furthermore, the British early nineteenth century class system, where good society and connections are of such great importance, is echoed in the California Valley social scene of Clueless. Both of these quotes warn of things which will inhibit the other character from social climbing: Emma speaks of bad acquaintances, and Cher speaks of marijuana use as particularly uncouth. Both societies have their unique colloquial languages, especially as seen in this scene by Cher’s California drug slang. The Oxford English Dictionary places the first appearance of “doobie” (a marijuana cigarette) in 1989 in Maupin’s Further Tales of City, thus establishing it as a twentieth century form of slang. Furthermore, this topic of discussion is prevalent because it is Cher’s attempt to tell her friend of proper and improper social behavior, an issue with which both the modern and original Emma is obsessed.

Another topic with which both female characters are obsessed is love and matchmaking. The original Emma, for example, is sure Mr. Elton is in love with Harriet because of a riddle he wrote to the girls about “courtship”. Emma states that this type of affection is “A very proper compliment!...my dear Harriet, you cannot find much difficulty in comprehending… There can be no doubt of its being written for you and to you” (Austen 59). In contrast, Cher’s view of love is clearly more sexual when she finds proof of Elton’s affections: “Would you look at that body language? Legs crossed towards each other. That is an unequivocal sex invite” (imbd.com). The language of Emma’s love is based on such terms as “marriage,” “courtship,” “respect,” or “proposals.” The 1990s vernacular of love is clearly “sex,” “dating,” “lust,” or “hooking up.” The languages of love differences continue as Emma and Cher get into more and more dilemmas throughout the story. For example, the Frank Churchill character is a man whom both main women in both versions set their eye upon for a romantic match. The secret engagement of Frank Churchill prevents the original heroine from her planned romantic arrangement, but it is quite the opposite in the modern version. The Churchill character of Clueless cannot love Cher because he is in fact homosexual or “gay” as the film terms it, thus adding minority vocabulary into the world of contemporary Emma. Scholar Suzanne Ferriss writes that the Churchill character’s “gayness is, along with the film’s ethnic diversity, a clear sign of its contemporaneity, not to mention Heckerling’s remarkably flexible updating of the plot” (125). As the following lines from the movie shows, the vernacular to describe this condition is far different than anything that would be seen in Jane Austen’s time:

Murray: Your man Christian is a cake boy!
Cher, Dionne: A what?
Murray: He's a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde reading, Streisand ticket holding friend of Dorothy, know what I'm saying?
Cher: Uh-uh, no way, not even!
Murray: Yes even, he's gay! (Clueless)

What the viewer walks away from, with a quote such as this, is a modern sense of the traditional Emma story; that although the language is so vastly different, it is still the same core idea of a young woman coming to age in the midst of facing love and social class restrictions. And as scholar Nora Nachumi points out, “Clueless, a film that its own heroine compares to a Noxema commercial, is the film that remains most faithful to Austen’s spirit of pop-cultural critique” (1). By this argument, the use of modern vernacular, maybe even going as far to include phrases such as “doobie” or “liposuction,” in fact supports the very style of Jane Austen, the great commentator of society and behavior. It is for this very reason that Cher, with all of her Prada shoes, convertible cars, and high school woes, may be closer to the British author than one may think.


Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Emma. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
"Clueless (1995)- Memorable Quotes." The Internet Movie Database. 2008. 24 Nov. 2008
Crystal, David. The Stories of English. New York, NY: The Overlook Press, 2004.
"Doobie." Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Ferriss, Suzanne. "Emma Becomes Clueless." Jane Austen in Hollywood. By Linda Troost.
Lexington, KY: The UP of Kentucky, 1998. 122-29.
Nachumi, Nora. "'As If!' Translating Austen's Ironic Narrator to Film." Jane Austen in
Hollywood. Lexington, KY: The UP of Kentucky, 1998.
Parrill, Sue. Jane Austen on Film and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,
Inc., 2002.