Women Adapting: Bringing Three Serials of the Roaring Twenties to Stage and Screen by Bethany Wood (review)

The measure of a piece of scholarship's contribution may be how many other modes of inquiry it inspires. In coining the term "adapturgy," Jane Barnette (2017) not only shed light on the poetics of adaptation but also forced a hard look at the means of production and the structures of labor surrounding a text. In her new book, Bethany Wood connects her work to Barnette's, conducting a case study of three early-twentieth-century adaptations, applying the material considerations of adapturgy to their historicized production processes. Focusing on a moment when film moguls consolidated power and aided and abetted constructions of white nationalist middle-class femininity, her chosen period is as edifying as it is provocative. However, like Barnette before her, the spine of the book also issues a sharp challenge to adaptation studies, emphasizing that "reading with an eye toward production" marks the trail forward for this field and its interdisciplinary reach (211).

In chapter 1, Wood examines the early twentieth century when cinema began to trawl print media for properties to be made into films, thereby commodifying narratives. Women were often victims of uncredited appropriations during this time of nascent copyright law. For example, during her research for what become Showboat, Edna Ferber "discovered that the showboat proprietors she was interviewing had dramatized some of her own magazine fiction for their shows" (13). However, copyright law became a more robust category as it concerned dramatization and screenwriting after the infamous Ben Hur case, Kalem Co. v. Harper Bros (1911). Consequently, a vigorous market for literary products emerged, giving rise to "the agent" as the conduit through which literary properties could be acquired. Initially, this market required writers to have strong literary ties to New York City, a region already dominated by men. However, as Wood recounts, the Kalem ruling leftfilm moguls wary of novice screenwriters. As film studios turned to magazines for adaptable material with clear copyright, women's magazine serials (the subject of Wood's study) became "an important entry point" for women into the film industry (15). While women's right to autonomous creative careers was everywhere challenged, copyright law did enable women some potential creative control over their narrative properties, leading to adaptation as a singular opportunity for women who wished to "influence representations of femininity in mainstream commercial entertainment" (31). To Wood's point: The adaptations themselves are figures, the labor conditions were the ground. Thus, Wood establishes early on that the examination of labor and the means of production is a fruitful mode of inquiry for adaptation studies, particularly for those scholars for whom parity and representation are paramount.

In chapters 2–4, Wood conducts a thorough materialist reading of the adapturgy of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. Wood illustrates the way magazine publishers forced an emphasis on romance and a manufactured female nationalism through the figure of the strong US American wife. Further, in 1924 Warner Bros. defied droit moral (the right an author has to protect her own work for alteration) to alter Wharton's original story against her wishes, demonstrating that "poor quality adaptations of works by women played into assumptions about gender and writing and thus posed more of a risk for women authors, particularly those without Wharton's venerated professional and social status" (78). The example of The Age of Innocence demonstrates the contortion of existing law in which Wharton was both contracted as the original author and its adaptor but had no control or oversight of the product. Warner Bros. was able to advertise her attachment to the project as a selling feature while disempowering Warton.

In chapters 5–7, Wood works through Showboat, spanning musical theatre as a genre, the figure of the Ziegfeld Girl, and the jump into adapting for "sound film." Wood depicts the first film adaptation of Showboat (Universal Studios, 1929...