In both Douglas McGrath’s and Autumn de Wilde’s adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Christmas dinner scenes intimate the intersection of the familial love and comfort associated with Emma and Mr. Knightley’s romance. At the same time, these scenes draw attention to Knightley’s often paternalistic love for Emma. Taken together, these scenes at once associate Knightley to the comfort, conventions, and even the colors of the Christmas season, and crystallize his identity as the story’s central patriarchal figure. De Wilde’s Emma. (2020) shapes its “Winter.” chapter along the intersections of the romantic and familial plots of the story. The chapter opens with the arrival of Emma’s sister Isabella and her…
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Baby, It’s Cold Inside: McGrath’s Family Warmth and de Wilde’s Chilling Christmas Dinner
Douglas McGrath’s Emma (1996) stresses the importance of kindness and familial harmony, themes which are absent from Autumn de Wilde’s cool rendition, Emma. (2020). In the novel, Emma learns to be kind and caring to others as well as be considerate and helpful after her behavior is called out, and McGrath showcases this journey from performed kindness to genuine kindness. In de Wilde’s retelling, Emma remains cool throughout, even as she matures. The novel’s Christmas scene depicts a community gathering with its members caring for each other. Emma is witness to warm family togetherness. She cheerfully banters while talking to the Westons and Mr. Knightley. Family is important to everyone…
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“A Holly Jolly Christmas”: Oppositional Binaries in McGrath and de Wilde’s Emma
Both Douglas McGrath and Autumn de Wilde seize upon the holiday scenes in Emma (1815), the only Austen novel with a Christmas scene. Each film’s Christmas scene display the cultivation of relationships and community-building. However, in their respective representations of Emma and Mr. Elton (McGrath) and Emma and Mr. Knightley (de Wilde), the movies underscore binary and oppositional relationships. In these relationships a mirroring occurs, positioning Mr. Knightley and Mr. Elton against each other with Emma as an anchoring force—all against the backdrop of Christmas. In both films, Christmas becomes a kind of oppositional holiday, one that brings out the combativeness of others, not one that creates relationships among them.…
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“Do You See What I See?”: Christmas Scenes in Douglas McGrath’s and Autumn de Wilde’s Emma
The integration of the holiday season and all things Jane Austen might appear the doing of popular retellings. But many of Jane Austen’s contemporaries were probably reading Emma on Christmas and the days following the holiday given the novel’s publication on December 23rd, 1815. Although the overlap of the holiday and the novel’s publication is accidental, Christmas is mentioned eleven times throughout the narrative and key plot turns occur during and immediately after the Christmas party at Randalls. In fact, while we often turn to the novel’s opening to recite the famous first line which lists everything that Emma is—“handsome, clever, and rich” —and has—”a comfortable home,” a “happy disposition,”…
