Re-creating the Classics: The Piano

Abstract

Since its inception, the cinema has turned to the British nineteenth-century novel in search of narratives that would speak to twentieth-century audiences. Given the domestic themes of these novels, such adaptations always spoke to contemporary dreams and anxieties relating to women, marriage, and the home. In the 1930s and 1940s American adaptations used these narratives to construct traditional domestic ideals that had been challenged by social and cultural changes precipitated by the Depression and the Second World War. In Britain, adaptations of the 1930s and 1940s constructed images of women that furthered British cinema’s larger goal of projecting an image of a unified nation successfully facing internal and external threats. Drawn more to writers such as Dickens and Eliot than the Brontes and Austen, British adaptations focused on Britain’s social goals and marginalized women characters. Despite this exclusion, the adaptations reveal intense feelings about the relationship of women to British society. In the 1990s, British and American adaptations used the British domestic novel to address uncertainties about increasingly fluid gender identities, to assuage anxieties about feminism’s uneven achievements, and to represent female sexuality in ways that were resistant to a mass culture increasingly catering to a male gaze.