Screening Novel Women: From British Domestic Fiction to Film (review)

Liora Brosh begins by making a strong case for the necessity of this study, in which she looks closely at a selection of British and American film adaptations (and a few BBC television adaptations) of nineteenth-century British novels—all examples of what she calls “domestic fiction”—and sets them in a sociocultural frame. According to her introduction, the questions that film criticism now asks about adaptations have changed. No longer is the main concern with whether or not screen versions of literary texts are “faithful”; instead, adaptation theory has moved on to examine cinematic works in relation to the cultural forces that produced them, not merely in relation to their sources. Even so, according to Brosh, there has been little sustained attention to one of the most important phenomena connected with the various cinematic treatments of fiction by Jane Austen, the three Brontë sisters, and Charles Dickens—that is, the surge of interest in restaging their novels during decades when gender norms were most under pressure and/or in flux. Brosh contends that this is no coincidence, for nineteenth-century domestic narratives focus on visions of femininity and present a range of conflicting ones, both conservative and progressive. Given their inherent ideological complexity on the subject of gender, domestic narratives have offered the perfect vehicles through which screenwriters and directors could fashion cinematic arguments that either reinforced or overthrew cultural norms, especially those involving women’s social roles. Thus, they have been, in effect, the “go-to” texts for filmmakers who have tried both to reflect and to influence contemporary gender debates while entertaining mass market audiences.

Screening Novel Women confines itself to the sound era and to only two periods in the twentieth century—the 1930s through the 1940s and the 1990s. In each period, Brosh finds dominant patterns, though differing ones for Hollywood and British productions. American adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights seem to her to use nineteenth-century women’s texts to resolve economically based gender conflicts of the Great Depression by rewarding heroines who choose love over money and castigating those who do not, while Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre of 1944 supposedly represents an anxious response to middle-class women’s war work and an expression of the desire to see them leave paid employment. On the other hand, British films, such as Tim Whelan’s 1937 The Mill on the Floss and David Lean’s two post-World War II adaptations of Dickens novels, are allegedly characterized by greater concern with English nationalism, communal over individual interests, promotion of feminine self-sacrifice, and renunciation of female desire. In the 1990s, with media being created and consumed in a global marketplace, Brosh sees a convergence in American and British filmmaking so that adaptations from both sides of the Atlantic borrow notions from pop-culture feminism to sell versions of Austen and Brontë narratives that emphasize “female empowerment” and thus “offer far more optimistic resolutions than do the novels” (p. 124).

The most admirable feature of Brosh’s study is her talent for close reading. Film studies classes, as well as literature faculty who use excerpts from adaptations as teaching tools in the classroom, will be thrilled with the careful, original discussions of individual cinematic moments, such as the opening shop-window scene of Robert Z. Leonard’s 1940 Pride and Prejudice (pp. 21–22), the tearing down of Miss Havisham’s curtains that Brosh brilliantly likens to the “blackout curtains of wartime Britain” at the end of David Lean’s 1946 Great Expectations (p. 86), and Fanny Price’s autoerotic horseback-riding in Patricia Rozema’s 1999 Mansfield Park (p. 136). Her interpretations often make excellent, persuasive use of visual details as evidence, and some of her conclusions about films of the 1990s, especially her characterization of them as “female utopian fantasy of erotic fulfillment and feminist triumph” (p. 141), are perceptive and convincing.

Where this study falls short, however, is in...