Throughout her movie Clueless, Amy Heckerling has consistently used Jane Austen's classic novel Emma to highlight and satirise particular aspects of 20th Century America. Based on the English 19th Century novel, Clueless brings both visual and auditory colour to the well credited works of Jane Austen's novella, which follows the life of a young lady's (Emma) personal maturation in her restrictive societal context. Many of the values present in Austen's finest work are renewed in Clueless, although the near two-hundred-year gap in historical context demanded significant alterations for the transformation to be complete. Heckerling's movie successfully bridges this valley, while adding some new perspectives to the societal structure in which her subject (Cher Horowitz) is based.

The opening pages of Emma begin with a third-person narrative account of Emma's situation in life...