![]() ![]() The 2005 adaptation directed by Joe Wright similarly foregrounds Elizabeth Bennet’s pedestrian activity, depicting her strolling through the countryside whilst reading a book, a gesture which gives an intellectual dimension to her walks. ![]() Furthermore, Elizabeth’s elevated panoramic gaze marks the picturesque landscape below her as her (imaginative) own and invokes her future role as the mistress of Pemberley. Against costume drama’s predominant compression, Lizzie’s enjoyment of the walk with its relative physical freedom, for its own sake, becomes particularly poignant” (2000: 126 emphasis in original). One of her examples is the opening scene of the 1995 BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, in which – in contradistinction to the indoor conversation in Austen’s novel – “Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle) strides, cheerful and apple-cheeked, through the idyllic countryside” carrying “an independent, dynamic, freethinking force as a compelling heroine. They challenge female confinement by deliberately mobilising individual characters. (2000: 124)Īccording to Pidduck, such adaptations consequently assume a critical perspective on the spatiality of their pretexts. Rendered through the heightened feminist sensibility of the 1990 s adaptations, Austen’s female protagonists retrospectively long to partake in the acquisitive ramblings of their male counterparts. Pidduck argues thatĪusten adaptations map out the limits of historical feminine middle-class mobility and aspiration, while seeking to overcome them. They adopt and foreground instances of transgressive female movement that are already present in her works, but equally undermine or even eradicate the spatial constraints faced by her heroines according to their contemporary agendas. As Julianne Pidduck suggests, since the 1990 s, adaptations have displayed a new attentiveness to the politics of gender, space and mobility in Austen’s pretexts. This crucial role of walking has not gone unnoticed by the numerous filmmakers and writers who have adapted and rewritten Pride and Prejudice in the past three decades. The manners in which Elizabeth Bennet and the other gentry characters walk and comment upon their peers’ walking reveal, often in an ironic manner, their temperaments, aesthetic sensibilities and prejudices. Several scholars have examined the multifacetedness of this pedestrian theme: walks function as subtle modes of characterisation and satire at times walking even serves as an emancipatory tool for the female characters. ![]() The heroine walks on every possible occasion and in every location, and many of the crucial encounters and conversations in the book take place while two characters are walking together”, notes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001: 97). “Walks are everywhere in Pride and Prejudice. Along with her real-life companion Dorothy Wordsworth, Austen’s protagonist Elizabeth Bennet is one of the most well-known female country walkers of early nineteenth-century English prose. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is a seminal work in the literary history of female walking. ![]()
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