Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- A note on texts
- Introduction: ‘Jane Austen’ and Jane Austen
- 1 Imagining Jane Austen's life
- 2 Recreating Jane Austen: Jane Austen in Manhattan, Metropolitan, Clueless
- 3 An Englishwoman's constitution: Jane Austen and Shakespeare
- 4 From drama, to novel, to film: inwardness in Mansfield Park and Persuasion
- 5 Pride and Prejudice, love and recognition
- 6 The genius and the facilitating environment
- Notes
- A note on films cited
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The genius and the facilitating environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- A note on texts
- Introduction: ‘Jane Austen’ and Jane Austen
- 1 Imagining Jane Austen's life
- 2 Recreating Jane Austen: Jane Austen in Manhattan, Metropolitan, Clueless
- 3 An Englishwoman's constitution: Jane Austen and Shakespeare
- 4 From drama, to novel, to film: inwardness in Mansfield Park and Persuasion
- 5 Pride and Prejudice, love and recognition
- 6 The genius and the facilitating environment
- Notes
- A note on films cited
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In health: the False Self is represented by the whole organisation of the polite and mannered social attitude, a ‘not wearing the heart upon the sleeve,’ as might be said. Much has gone to the individual's ability to forego omnipotence … the gain being the place in society which can never be attained or maintained by the True Self alone.
D. W. Winnicott, ‘Ego Distortion in terms of True and False Self’There's a scene in Clueless when Cher Horowitz, nervously searching for an outfit to wear to her biggest challenge, the driving test, offhandedly asks the maid, Lucy, to have a word with the gardener for her, since she ‘speaks Mexican’. Lucy indignantly replies that she's not Mexican and flounces off. When Cher tells Josh she doesn't understand why Lucy is so upset, Josh tells her Lucy is from El Salvador and rebukes her: ‘You get upset if someone thinks you live below Sunset.’
For some commentators, this is one of the film's parallels or analogies with Emma. It mimics that important exchange in the novel when Emma, thrown off her stroke at the Box Hill picnic, lashes out – the spite not the less pointed for the politeness of the address – at the vulnerable, accommodating spinster, Miss Bates, who has just taken up Mr Weston's invitation to entertain the company, if not with wit, then with ‘three things very dull indeed’: ‘That will just do for me, you know.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Recreating Jane Austen , pp. 125 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001