Girls on Film: Postmodern Renderings of Jane Austen and Henry James

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper examines recent .lm adaptations of novels by Jane Austen and Henry James, arguing that, through their innovative rendering, the directors bring to the surface unfixed elements of the text, its internal contradictions, which have been the object of contemporary literary or interdisciplinary debates. Feminist problematics, like the commodification and marketability of womanhood through the persistent portraiture of the female body in our day, are adapted for the screen, acquiring a historical perspective and revealing an anity in constructions of femininity between the nineteenth century and our day. In the last thirty years, feminist film theory has been striving to theorize the position of woman in film: that is, both the representation of woman in films and the reaction of the female spectator. Many critics, such as Laura Mulvey, Ann Kaplan, Mary Ann Doane, and Teresa de Lauretis, have concentrated on the gaze, as this is the faculty that comes into play most crucially in our experience of the cinema. The difficulty of arriving at a satisfactory formulation concerning the female gaze rests in the primarily masculine nature of the gaze, deriving from patriarchal constructions of experience. As Mary Ann Doane acknowledges, 'even if it is admitted that the woman is frequently the object of the voyeuristic or fetishistic gaze in the cinema, what is there to prevent her from reversing the relation and appropriating the gaze for her own pleasure? Precisely the fact that the reversal itself remains locked within the same logic.' (1) If, therefore, the gaze is always masculine--even when it is taken up by women--then it is reasonably accepted that woman, whether subject or object of the gaze, is deprived of a subjectivity that transcends the confines of the patriarchal binary opposition between male domination and female passivity. The sociological and psychological complexity of the position of the female spectator has led to hypotheses which, as several critics have asserted, have created an artefact, a female spectator that does not exist. (2) Nevertheless, contemporary film with feminist concerns does seem to try hard to address the real woman spectator and, as I hope this paper will show, to provide us with an alternative version of female subjectivity. In this sense it is significant and paradoxical at the same time that the directors I shall look at have attempted to achieve this goal through the medium of nineteenth-century fiction. Novels by Jane Austen and Henry James do offer film opportunities for presenting women in cumbersome situations, striving to avoid the uniformity imposed by their domestication and indiscriminate objectification. These authors grant their heroines narrative space for exploring their perception, consciousness, and individuality--a subjectivity that is set against the entrapping and homogenizing female profile dictated by social convention. But they do not, according to traditional readings, make them transcend the patriarchal limitations. Austen's and James's heroines distinguish themselves by frequently challenging rigid male expectations of female excellence, but in the end cannot help acknowledging the marketability and objectification that they undergo. Since the social graces assigned to womanhood in Austen's time are definitely out of date in an age when women have dominantly established their voice in the social arena, it may initially seem surprising that eminent film directors continually turn their attention to such novels, which concentrate on the limitations of womanhood in the nineteenth century--limitations long forgotten and dated. We need, in other words, firstly to ask ourselves the reason behind this ongoing interest in the idea of woman escaping the confines of a rigid patriarchal society. After all, have we not already accomplished that? The most thoughtful film adaptations attempt to address contemporary problematics concerning gender and sexuality, approaching the nineteenth-century novel as a source of issues with topical interest. …