The Presentation of Speech and Thought in Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' and in Joe Wright's Film Adaptation

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, language: English, abstract: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been a widely read and studied novel and has been known to serve as a suitable model for the research of different topics. A special emphasis has been placed on the way Austen portrays her characters' speech and thoughts. To her, dialogue is described as the most appropriate means in order to achieve a preferably close approach to reality. Due to the fact that Austen strived after combining a realistic depiction of her characters and their surroundings with psychological depth, she had to find gradations of the ordinary dialogue between the characters. Utterances could be regarded as important or less important, a character could appear more strongly than another in the course of the story or whole scenes could excel others in their prominence. In order to be able to illustrate the different emphasis and to present these contrasts comprehensibly to the reader, the dialogue in Pride and Prejudice is expanded with direct and indirect versions of speech. The same applies to the portrayal of characters' thoughts, which accounts for a dominant part of the novel. By alternating between the various possibilities to depict speech and thought, thus putting emphasis on certain situations, it was possible for Austen to insert her own views on specific circumstances and characters. Nevertheless, direct speech is the prevailing method to display the characters' utterances since it is the nearest and most dramatic manner. The vivacity of the characters' persona, their feelings and different tempers are perceptible through their dialogues and provide a narration that is as realistic as possible. In the following, the different versions of speech and thought presented will be analysed in terms of their occurrence in the novel, their importance and their meaning to the narrator and the reader, as well as exemplified on the basis of selected passages. This can be achieved after giving a detailed description of the terms. Furthermore, the analysis will proceed to a brief, but close investigation of how speech and thought are dealt with in the most recent film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. (...)