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Emma and Clueless

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Emma and Clueless
How does Heckerling’s "Clueless" sustain interest in the values represented in Austen’s "Emma"?
Clueless sustains interest in the patriarchal values and social stratum of Emma by manipulating the mediums for relaying information to the audience and allow them to resonate with the messages portrayed by Austen. The teenpic Clueless (1995) directed by Amy Hecklering employs the materialistic world of LA to make a multi-layered social commentary about the patriarchal values and social strata elucidated in Jane Austen’s 19th Century novel, Emma. Hecklering draws parallels to the rigid social hierarchy of the Regency period and the role of women in a patriarchal society with issues pertaining to female power and control, present in Emma. In order to sustain interest Hecklering has transformed aspects of the mediums portraying the themes in the Regency Period novel Emma to allow the values represented to resonate with the modern audience of a materialistic era.
Austen presents the women of Regency period as living within a patriarchal society where most women lack power and control. Women were dependent upon the male of the relationship to provide financial security and the exclamatory tone with cumulative listing of bleak words? by Mr Knightley at Box Hill, “[Miss Bates] is poor;…has sunk from comforts;…live to old age…sink more” highlights the severe repercussions on single women if they are not married. Patriarchal values are further depicted through the metaphor in “Boarding school, where…accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price” and the trivialisation “girls…scramble themselves into a little education without any danger of coming back prodigies.” The “accomplishments” are a metaphor for labels put on young women to advertise them as suitable for marriage and the trivialisation reflects the Regency period’s belief that women are not educated to be successful but rather serve well in a household. Furthermore the complaint by Emma, who belongs to the upper

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