‘From Carts to Jet Engines’: The Afterlife ofTess of the d’Urbervillesin Michael Winterbottom’sTrishna

Abstract

Our affiliation with the Victorians has been continuously encoded into practices of adaptation, from the earliest years of filmmaking to the 2010s’ culture of media convergence. One of the first feature films, an American silent drama film directed by J. Searle Dawley and released in 1913, was an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Several adaptations of this Victorian novel followed, including two TV series directed by Ian Sharp (1998) and David Blair (2008), and feature films by Roman Polanski (1979) and Michael Winterbottom (2011). Regarded by critics as a ‘loose’ adaptation of Tess, Winterbottom’s Trishna relates to Hardy’s novel in ways that are different from earlier English-speaking adaptations. This cinematic-interpretive encounter with Hardy’s text refashions the Victorian period, the apex of the British imperial project, by retelling one of its possible presents—one that is not British context bound, but bound instead to its erstwhile empire. Through a double focus of analysis resting on representations of Indian economic prowess and the Indian sexed body in the film, this article argues that Winterbottom’s adaptation posits a relationship of un/likeness between present-day India and nineteenth-century England that revives Orientalist representations.