Slide 1

Dr Hila Shachar, Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort Universityhila.shachar@dmu.ac.ukThe Classic Novel on Screen: A Cultural Memory

Part IThe Classic Novel During Hollywoods Golden Era

Jane Eyre (1940)

Appearing as it did at the start of World War II and with British actors and a British screenwriter, it becomes a film designed to strengthen the British and American alliance at a fragile moment. Huxley and Murfin [screenwriters] aim to make the England of the film into a world worth protecting and the characters of the film into people Americans can identify with (and eventually fight alongside). (Linda Troost, p. 76)

Jane Eyre (1943)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PI8GcRW79s

The Proposal SceneI am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at Gods feet, equal as we are! (p. 253)

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you. (p. 253)

Wuthering Heights (1939)Samuel Goldwyn: why an audience would pull for a capricious, irresponsible girl or a hate-filled man bent on revenging his miserable childhood; a story of undying love [] that transcends the gloomy nature of its backgrounds.

The hilltop lovers Motif

the picture of Catherine and Heathcliff together, as adults, on the hilltop, silhouetted against the sky which represents their mutual aspiration, has become a visual emblem of what the novel means. By 1989 it was so well known that Monty Pythons Flying Circus could assume that two lovers on a hilltop constituted a cultural icon to which a mass audience would respond. (Patsy Stoneman, p. 127).

The hilltop lovers Motif

Part IIAusten and the Bronts in the 1990s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hasKmDr1yrA

The Lake Scene

We already knew that people were aware of the novel Wuthering Heights. Also, a lot of people were aware of the Laurence Olivier film of the 1940s. However, despite this awareness, not everyone who knew about the book had read it [...]. They remember the image of the scene on the moors, which they have probably seen on the television [...]. Most people remember that it is a romantic novel and also a classic. [...] From our research we found that the film played especially well to female audiences (as expected). We thus decided to concentrate on the idea of the story being a romantic adventure. [] Because we felt that women were an important part of the audience we made two decisions firstly to make the character of Heathcliff and the actor who plays him, Ralph Fiennes, central to the campaign [] We wanted to present the character of Heathcliff to be charismatic and intriguing to the audience. (Ken Green, pp. 21-2)

Wuthering Heights (1992)

Heathcliff or Fabio?

The Letter Scene

Jane Eyre (1996)

Part IIIThe Branding of the Classics in Contemporary Culture

Cross-promotion

Wuthering Heights or Pride & Prejudice?

Wuthering Heights or Pride & Prejudice?

Branding the Classics

Jane Eyre (2011)

Lost in Austen (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WOCU7eHzeI

Postmodern moment

in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole. (Umberto Eco, p. 447)

The cult object

Eco, U., (2013) Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage, in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. by David Lodge and Nigel Wood (New York: Routledge).Fuchs, B. (2004) Romance (New York; London: Routledge).Glancy, H. M. (1999) When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood British Film, 1939-1945 (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press).Green, K. (1992) Selling the Film in I. Wall (ed.) Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights. The Making of the Film: Study Guide (London: Film Education for U.I.P.).Ingham, P. (2006) The Bronts (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Lawson-Peebles, R. (1996) European Conflict and Hollywoods Reconstruction of English Fiction. The Yearbook of English Studies, 26, 1-13.Nixon, C. L. (1998) Balancing the Courtship Hero: Masculine Emotional Display in Film Adaptations of Austens Novels in L. Troost and S. Greenfield (eds) Jane Austen in Hollywood (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky).Sadoff, D. F. (2010) Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press).Shachar, H. (2012) Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan).Stoneman, P. (1996a) Bront Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (London: Prentice-Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf).Troost, L. V. (2007) The Nineteenth-Century Novel on Film: Jane Austen in D. Cartmell and I. Whelehan (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Whelehan, I. (2000) Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (London: Womens Press).

References