Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen

Robert Mayer rightly notes in his introduction that fidelity criticism, which assesses a film based on its adherence to a literary text, has been found lacking for some time—not only for privileging the literary text over the filmic one, but for the limitations of a comparison/contrast exercise in which the conclusion is largely predetermined. The task at hand is to develop a criticism that, as Mayer suggests, “embraces the view that the film has no responsibility to, even though it often has a compelling relationship with, a text” (11). The eleven essays in this collection respond to this challenge in various ways: by analyzing films as texts and readings of literary texts; by evaluating film techniques that translate text into film; and through contextual analysis of the conditions of production, cultural history, and so on. By re-calibrating the relationship between literary text and film, these essays exemplify the emerging paradigms in adaptation studies.

Analyzing adaptations as texts and interpretations moves beyond fidelity criticism towards ideological readings of text and film. In “Adaptations of Defoe’s Moll Flanders”, Catherine Parke develops an elegant thesis that the 1965, 1995, and 1996 film versions of Moll Flanders can be distinguished as being female, feminine, and feminist. Robert Mayer’s “Three Cinematic Robinsonades” reads The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952), Man Friday (1975) and Crusoe (1989) through the lens of postcolonial theory. For Mayer, depictions of the Crusoe-Friday relationship reflect the appropriation of Defoe in light of twentieth-century cultural conflicts as much as critical engagement with Defoe’s novel. Richard Frohock shifts the balance still further from the source text, claiming that Les liaisons dangereuses 1960 (1959) and Dangerous Liaisons (1989) comment on contemporary culture far more than Laclos’ novel. While Mayer and Frohock delineate modern uses of eighteenth-century fiction in film, Janet Sorensen evokes the characteristics of eighteenth-century films for her study of Rob Roy (1995). In “Rob Roy: The Other Eighteenth Century?” Sorensen argues that the film displaces the camp sensibility of visually opulent eighteenth-century films with sentimentalism and naturalism, while emphasizing nationalist and ethnic conflict at the expense of class conflict. In so doing, Rob Roy recasts the eighteenth century and Scott’s novel to fit the paradigm of the British heritage film, in which an idealized, “authentic” culture becomes a subject for the contemporary audience’s nostalgia and nationalist pride.

The essays analyzing film technique arguably best capture the process of adaptation, as they attend to the translation from word to image in detail. Martin Battestin claims that “analogy is the key” (88) in adapting novels to film, and his discussion of Tom Jones (1963) demonstrates that the theatricality of cinematic effects—freeze frames, screen wipes, voice-overs, parodies of silent film technique, and so on—echoes the tone and style of Fielding’s novel. Battestin skillfully delineates strategies of adaptation, including scenes that represent cultural correlates but not original narrative (like the stag hunt), those that condense narrative (the montage of Tom and Sophia’s courtship), and those that vivify narrative (the dinner between Tom and Mrs. Waters at Upton). Alan Singerman also argues for analogy between media in “Jacques le fataliste on Film: From Metafiction to Metacinema.” As characters move in and out of the studio set and enact multiple narratives in the foreground and background of the same shot, the artificiality of film, editing, and performance depicts the interrupted (and interrupting) discourse of Diderot’s novel. Singerman does a superb job describing camera movement, visual composition, transitions, and voice-overs, and in the process, he elucidates the mechanics of fiction and reality in both novel and film. Cynthia Wall’s “The Spaces of Clarissa in Text and Film” discusses the filming of space and light in the BBC version of Clarissa (1991), as stairs, doors, windows, and rooms depict the claustrophobic psychology of Richardson’s novel. Wall’s crafted essay outlines the visual aspects of Richardson’s novel (and his readers’ visions of Clarissa) and elaborates upon the challenges and pitfalls of previous adaptations, before turning to the BBC production and its visual rhetoric. (Similarly, Margaret McCarthy’s essay on Wilhelm Meister and Wrong Move [1974] describes the spatial elements of Goethe’s novel and the Bildungsroman, then turns to Wender’s film; but the film largely abandons the classic Bildungsroman, which leads to a radically different use of space and to ideological disjunctions that the argument does not fully accommodate). For Peter Cosgrove, the key to eighteenth-century film adaptations lies in their use of spectacle, which may be incidental or even absent from the original text. Cosgrove’s visual analysis draws on the production histories of Barry Lyndon (1975) and Tom Jones (1963), particularly the efforts to achieve historical accuracy, to argue that the visual pleasure of these films makes concerns of narrative fidelity largely irrelevant. Of all the contributors Cosgrove seems least interested in the adaptation of a source text, and most concerned with film qua film and cinematic experience.

Cosgrove’s turn to production history incorporates the third critical strategy noted above: contextual analysis. Kevin Jackson’s retelling of the efforts to produce and censor Jacques Rivette’s La religeuse (1966) exemplifies this critical practice. Perhaps most significant are Jackson’s comments on Rivette’s intentions, which involved multiple, inconsistent, formal ambitions regarding film, rather than ideological issues regarding Diderot, nuns, or the Church. That Rivette was radically misread as heretical by many of his contemporaries (and staunchly defended by many who hoped that he was) allows Jackson neatly to deconstruct the film, its reception, and some of the unspoken assumptions of film adaptation and analysis—starting with the notion of film as a finite product that manifests an artist’s vision.

Intention, reception, methodology, and ideology signal ongoing issues in adaptation studies—issues cognate to those posed by fidelity criticism. If a text is a source but not a blueprint for a film, to what extent does the degree, method, or purpose of adaptation matter? As a cinematic experience, potentially very little, as Cosgrove and Jackson suggest. (And I suspect that millions of viewers of Clueless [1995] who never heard of, much less read Austen’s Emma would agree). Maybe there is a vanishing point from which an adaptation is no longer connected to its origins. But for scholars of the eighteenth century, film, and cultural studies, both terms of the relationship—text and film—are necessary to understand adaptation, representation and cultural circulation. Perhaps it is inescapable that the comparison of film and text underpins the analysis throughout this volume, but the good news is that these scholars are not bound by it. (Admittedly, there are occasional rumblings of fidelity criticism: Battestin considers Joseph Andrews [1977] to be a travesty, as much a misreading of Fielding as it is a bad film—and the same could be said of Alan Chalmers’ response to the 1996 version of Gulliver’s Travels). This collection expands the conversation about the “compelling relationship” between film and text, and in so doing, the contributors have admirably succeeded at their appointed task. Further work remains to be done: Stage adaptations of texts (such as Liaisons dangereuses and La religeuse) open avenues of inquiry about media and adaptation theory, as eighteenth-century films not based on novels point towards issues of genre and adaptation theory. One could wish for essays by film adapters and screenwriters, or by film scholars approaching the eighteenth century. Yet Mayer’s collection has moved the discourse of adaptation considerably forward and laid the foundation for the next phase in eighteenth-century film studies.