Re-Vising the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Gender and the Adaptations of Fortunata Y Jacinta and La Regenta

Abstract

The evidence of an affinity between the nineteenth-century novel and screen narrative, and hence the particular felicity of adapting that source, is both theoretical and actual. Film theorists have persuasively argued that film is more suited to adapting novels than plays using the Dickens/Griffith model, although drama offers equal potential for cinematic creativity, as we have seen with respect to Carícies. The supposed parallel between the mimetic capacity of nineteenth-century literary realism and classic narrative film apparently explains adaptors’ attraction to novels of that particular period. Approaching the question from a historical rather than theoretical standpoint, we may alternatively account for the affinity by the two media’s chronological contemporaneity and contiguity. However, neither of these positions sufficiently accounts for the continued preference for adaptations of novels from this period. Critical responses to such adaptations of English literature emphasize ideological explanations. The popularity of the ‘bust and bustles’ period drama formula, such as the Merchant/Ivory productions of the 1980s and the staple of Victorian novel adaptations in British television, is considered a manifestation of the nostalgia of the ‘heritage film’ genre as a whole, discussed in chapter two. However, just as in the preceding chapters I have shown that the relationship between the historical context of a film adaptation and that of its literary source raises issues more complicated than mere nostalgia, a consideration of gender also points beyond the impasse of interpreting the heritage phenomenon exclusively in terms of postmodern superficiality.