Solo Instruments and Internal Focalization in Dario Marianelli’s Pride & Prejudice and Atonement

Abstract

The essay explores how Dario Marianelli uses solo instruments to represent individual characters, a convention that has a long tradition in opera, programme music and film music. In representing characters, solo instruments most often speak for and not just about those characters, and Marianelli states that in Pride & Prejudice (2005) ‘the piano is the inner voice of Elizabeth’. In this way, solo instruments are used for what French literary theorist Gerard Genette calls internal focalization, that is, the narrator presents information from the point of view of a character. The essay examines the role different solo instruments play in conveying the inner states of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice and Robbie Turner in Atonement (2007), but also how the subjective perspective in the latter film is made ambiguous by its denouement.