The Passion Translated: Literary and Cinematic Rhetoric in "Pride and Prejudice" (2005)

Significant tropes and identical stylistic techniques emerge from the analysis of the rhetorical devices employed in the novel Pride and Prejudice and in its film adaptation released by Universal in 2005.1 Many scholars have focused their studies on what Alice Chandler has called "Jane Austen's indirections" (391), for example, the rhetorical codes adopted by the author to conceal the characters' corporeity and sexuality without erasing them completely. Every aspect of cinematic transpositions is analyzed, and the added scenes of blatant sexuality, the new focus on the body, the role of symbolism, and the importance of the glances among the characters are all seen as aspects that contribute to transform Austen's novels into a visual, and sensual, experience.3 There is a direct correspondence between the rhetorical and stylistic techniques chosen by Austen to transform and mitigate the destabilizing power of passion and the visual equivalents employed by the cinema.