Tidying as We go: Constructing the Eighteenth Century through Adaptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels, and Crusoe

What exactly does a film adaptation do, and how does it go about doing it? For one set of critics, adaptations offer a retrospective insight into the workings of a source text.¹ In this view adaptations are dependent or ancillary texts without full meaning in their own right that provide insight retrospectively into an originary text. The adaptation helps an audience to uncover a meaning for, and by extension a relevance of, the source text.² Recently, this approach has essentially given way to an intertextual one that regards an adaptation as a valuable text in its own right, and that sees the relationship between it and its source as dialogic, so that each affects the meaning of the other.³ The time is right to complicate this intertextual approach still further by recognizing that the contexts of adaptation and source are also part of the interaction between these works. Texts inevitably interact with their contexts, whether the context of their creation or the context of their consumption or both, and texts have long been used to create or recreate an understanding not just of the present but also of the past. An adaptation can be used to construct an interpretation of a source text, but it can also construct a cultural function for the source in the source’s original moment, in the adaptation’s moment, or in any moment in between. The three adaptations discussed in this article—Becoming Jane (2007), Gulliver’s Travels (2010), and Crusoe (2008–9)—demonstrate how adaptation can function inter-contextually as well as intertextually. Each of these recent adaptations constructs a narrative of the Anglo-American past by erasing historical conflicts involving gender, race, and empire, a maneuver with consequences for constructions of the eighteenth century, of history, and of the present.

A key difference between earlier forms of adaptation theory and recent versions is the role that history or context plays in understanding the relationship between the texts. Traditional approaches assume a one-way connection between past and present. In this formulation, the past or the original text has a certain stability against which or with which the adaptation and the present moment can react or engage: there is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for example, and then there are responses to it such as J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe or Derek Walcott’s poem “Crusoe’s Journal.” The intertextual approach on the other hand refuses to privilege chronological order. As Linda Hutcheon says: “One lesson is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative.”⁴ Such an egalitarian relationship has a powerful impact on the understanding and cultural capital of both texts.⁵ Hutcheon points out that adaptations are “haunted at all times by their adapted texts” so that when we know a prior text well, “we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly.”⁶ Currently, intertextual adaptation theory generally considers this impact in a positive light: Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan see film adaptations “increasing” or “enhancing” an original text or author’s “cultural capital,” for example. Critics who are less sanguine about intertextuality express concern about these interactions, particularly about the function of ideology in the relationship between source text and adaptation. Martine Voiret and Sara Maza, for instance, show how adaptations can use source texts and authors to support conservative, even misogynist, classist, and racist ideologies, ideologies that can in turn reduce the quantity or quality of the text or author’s cultural capital.⁷

In addition to the ideological aspects of the connection between source and adaptation, there are the contextual aspects of this connection. An adaptation not only interacts with a source text and with that text’s historical context but also with the notion of history itself, an interaction with potentially profound implications. Adaptations influence the present cultural moment through their effect on the interpretation and cultural standing of the source text and, by extension, through a construction of the...