Film Adaptation: The Case of Wuthering Heights

Abstract

To talk of “using” film adaptations of novels in order to teach literature will immediately raise the hackles of all film and television critics who quite justifiably choose to focus on these media for their own sake. One of the reasons that adaptation studies has enjoyed a fairly low status among film critics is, as John Ellis notes, its employment in literary departments to encourage “recalcitrant students … to read the original novel” (qtd. Cardwell, 2002, p. 37). Ira Konisberg’s entry on adaptation in The Complete Film Dictionary actually defines it as a “subliterary discourse” designed to show that “great novels” are resistant to filming (qtd. Griffith, 1997, p. 6). While recognizing the centrality of adaptation studies to “any history of culture” interested in “the transmission of texts and meanings in and across cultures,” Mirceia Aragay also deplores the way it is “often taught in literature departments as a way of sugaring the pill of (canonical) literature for an increasingly cinema-oriented student population” (2005, p. 30). Robert Ray is even more dismissive of the way in which the “same unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?)” is transparently designed to elicit “the same unproductive answer (The book is better)” (2000, p. 44). That, of course, is not the model of such comparative study of novels with their adaptations which I want to advocate.