there is no place like home – the house as confinement, character and idealized space in the movie pride and prejudice

Abstract

This paper analyzes three ways in which the figure of the house is represented in the 2005's film version of  the book Pride and Prejudice: as a space of confinement, as a character and as idealized space of affection. To serve as a support for the analysis of this adaptation of one of Jane Austen's books, we use the theories of film and mass culture and feminist theories. To look on the cinematic language of the audiovisual work allows us to show how, far from being an idealized and pacified space as the film tries to present, the figure of the house is usurped of all other meanings in the narrative and especially in the story of the female characters, to offer a fictional strengthening of the patriarchal view of the house as the only space allowed to heroin, which is allowed to move in very different spaces from those covered by the male hero.