A Survey of the Tradition of the Scarlet Letter in Film and on Television, 1926-1995
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THE SCARLET SCREEN: A SURVEY OF THE TRADITION OF THE SCARLET LETTER IN FILM AND ON TELEVISION, 1926-1995 by JENNIFER ANNE SOLMES B.A., The University of Western Ontario, 1993 M.A., The University of Waterloo, 1995 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies [English/Theatre/History]) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required 'Standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA May 2001 © Jennifer Anne Solmes, 2001 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada DE-6 (2/88) ABSTRACT Frequently called the first American classic, and the only American classic never to be out of print, The Scarlet Letter has been indelibly marked on the American consciousness since Nathaniel Hawthorne published it in 1850. Generations have grown up with its characters and their profound struggle against each other, their community, and themselves. Since the earliest days of film, The Scarlet Letter has been re-presented to each of those generations in a series of diverse cinematic adaptations, providing audiences with an opportunity to re-evaluate those characters, their struggle, and the lessons implicit in them. This dissertation surveys those films in order to produce a production history—one that extends beyond the production details and critical reception to consider how the lessons of The Scarlet Letter have been made to contribute to the cultural conversations of the American twentieth century. Following Chapter One's presentation of the method and intent of the study, in Chapter Two I consider the most enduring film in this novel's cinematic tradition, Victor Sjostrom's 1926 production starring Lillian Gish. In Chapter Three I examine Robert Vignola's 1934 'B' movie version in the context of Depression-era sexual politics. In Chapter Four, I unearth two live television plays that come to terms very differently with the Red Scare and the social retrenchment of Eisenhower's America. Chapter Five also presents a comparison of two very different but contemporaneous Scarlet Letters, one an eccentric feature from Wim Wenders (1972), and the other a prestigious PBS miniseries (1979). Finally, in Chapter Six I examine the 1995 Demi Moore vehicle in the context of the Family Values debates. By identifying the specific re-presentation strategies as rhetorically motivated, and linking them with the most salient social debates of their times, I argue for the ideological flexibility of the novel as a key to its endurance. I also demonstrate the effectiveness of film study, and specifically of a film adaptation production history focusing on one novel, as a tool for understanding emerging cultural attitudes and values. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iii CHAPTER I Introduction: Cultural Portraiture 1 CHAPTER II The MGM/Gish Scarlet Letter (1926) 19 CHAPTER III The Scarlet Letter (1934), the Production Code, and Depression-Era Womanhood 69 CHAPTER IV The Scarlet Letter on Television in the Fifties 106 CHAPTER V The Scarlet Letter in The Seventies. 146 CHAPTER VI The 1995 Scarlet Letter 172 CHAPTER VII Conclusion: "That Isn't Hawthorne's Hester": 209 Bibliography 215 in Chapter One—Cultural Portraiture Hester Prynne is on the scaffold, awaiting the judgement of the magistrates and her punishment. Amid the jeers and catcalls of the assembled townsfolk, she can hear her baby crying. Against all extremities, she has held fast to her principles and her love for the father of the wailing child, and she has not named him. A commotion erupts. A dark cloaked figure with a flowing mane of black hair storms into the scene on horseback, then flies up the scaffold and addresses the crowd in tones first breathless then rising. He demands the release of Hester and her fellow women condemned for witchcraft (one of whom is her best friend, Harriet Hibbins). After delivering an impassioned plea for tolerance, Dimmesdale (for that is his name) offers to be hanged in their place. But at the moment the noose is flung around his neck, an Indian war party attacks and sacks the town. Later, amid the ashes, Hester and Dimmesdale ride off into the sunset with their child, their hearts full of hope. If this is not The Scarlet Letter as you remember it, how about this: Hester and Dimmesdale fall in love as children in England and are secretly married aboard ship on their way to the new world. Or perhaps: Hester Prynne gives birth to a daughter, Pearl, whom her husband, Roger, will not own (although he is the biological father) because he wishes to punish Hester for her lustful thoughts (but not deeds) about another man. Each of these is The Scarlet Letter, or was intended to be. Each is the plot of a film adaptation of the novel (though only the first version recounted here ever reached the screen) intended to refit the story to the needs and desires of the film-going community— to re-author, re-shape, and re-present it—in, in these cases, 1995 and 1926. Each re• delivery of The Scarlet Letter to a popular film or television audience in the twentieth 1 century represents part of a continued project to appropriate its considerable cultural capital—as an icon of Americanness, America's first serious novel—to direct the novel's, and the novelist's, presumed authority toward a fixed position in contemporary cultural conversations. This study explores how film seeks to influence the national consciousness. In these cases, filmmakers pursue this aim by bringing to a popular audience (and to national debates) the tremendous cultural authority of a classic text, and re-shaping it for maximum rhetorical effect. In his discussion of The Scarlet Letter in Practicing Romance. Richard Millington describes how Hawthorne consistently reframes the story to appeal to a mid-19ht century sensibility—for example, in narrative appeals to Victorian sentimentality. "Taken together," he writes, the effects of this ongoing comparison between the Puritan community and other cultural arrangements, especially those of his own middle-class America, are complex and crucial to an understanding of what Hawthorne is up to in The Scarlet Letter.. .These versions of cultural comparison finally produce in the reader the sense that a culture is a structure of meaning that is not "natural" or automatic but locally variable, historically changing and thus both inescapable (one is always in relation to one's cultural system) and humanly revisable as the changing meaning of Hawthorne's letter within the Puritan community makes clear. And the final reverberation of Hawthorne's cultural portraiture is this: the nineteenth-century middle-class culture that he writes from and to, and makes a presence within the book, is also revis• able and always also the subject of The Scarlet Letter. (68-9) This study represents an attempt to extend Hawthorne's project into the twentieth century. The diverse ways in which his text has been made flexible by filmmakers from 1926 to 1995, for certain incarnations of the American culture, expose the 'revisability' of that culture and its values. While refitting the story's value structure to contemporary 2 norms, several of the films also use a rhetoric of comparison to either valorize progress by emphasizing our difference from they of the Puritan period, or criticize the current culture by linking it with the "dark age." Thus this study aims to be, like the novel itself, cultural portraiture. The seven feature and television films I propose to examine engage their audiences (in 1926, 1934, 1950, 1954, 1972, 1979, and 1995) in a discussion about a variety of contemporary concerns—the changing role of women and society's reaction to it, the place of traditional morality in a modern America, the conflicting pulls of individualism and social order, and the constant reexamination of national identity— through a culturally-specific redelivery of the classic text. The Scarlet Letter has remained a touchstone of national feeling through these re-presentations. Each film is a battleground where conflicting ideas about the national character—especially in terms of moral values, since that is the novel's most obvious application and one of continuing popular and political interest—often produce a confused and self-contradictory film that is, actually, an accurate register of the confusion in the culture. As the classic American novel, The Scarlet Letter, through these interpretations, allows Americans a chance to interrogate their values. Each adaptation re-shapes the novel to its own rhetorical program, and its own culture. Taken together, these re-tellings demonstrate the novel's peculiar ability to speak to a variety of cultural debates and historical moments as diverse and contradictory as the 1920s and 1930s, or the 1950s and the 1970s. The Scarlet Letter has been read, by its first reviewers, modern critics, and certainly filmmakers, in often-contradictory directions. Sometimes a parable of crime and justice, it has been at other times a tragedy of overzealous persecution and hypocrisy. It has always been a reflection on the American character—whether the reader believes the national character is best represented in the outlaw lovers or the pious townsfolk. It is the novel's ideological flexibility that has been crucial to its continued success in both classroom and movie house.