Rewriting Women: a Feminist Examination of Lolita's and Pride and Prejudice's Costume and Revisionist Adaptations Courtney A

Ursinus College Digital Commons @ Ursinus College English Honors Papers Student Research 4-29-2019 Rewriting Women: A Feminist Examination of Lolita's and Pride and Prejudice's Costume and Revisionist Adaptations Courtney A. DuChene Ms. Ursinus College, [email protected] Adviser: Carol Dole Second Adviser: Alice Leppert Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/english_hon Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits oy u. Recommended Citation DuChene, Courtney A. Ms., "Rewriting Women: A Feminist Examination of Lolita's and Pride and Prejudice's Costume and Revisionist Adaptations" (2019). English Honors Papers. 10. https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/english_hon/10 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at Digital Commons @ Ursinus College. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Honors Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Ursinus College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rewriting Women: A Feminist Examination of Lolita's and Pride and Prejudice's Costume and Revisionist Adaptations Courtney DuChene April 21, 2019 Submitted to the Faculty of Ursinus College in fulfillment of the requirements for Interdisciplinary Honors in English and Media and Communications Studies. Abstract This project examines costume and revisionist media adaptations of Lolita and Pride and Prejudice to see how adapters have altered the texts in order to increase the agency of the female characters. It consists of four chapters: one on the 1962 and 1997 cinematic costume adaptations of Lolita; one on the 1995 BBC mini series and the 2005 film costume adaptations of Pride and Prejudice; one on the Pride and Prejudice revisionist adaptations, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and the 2012-2013 Youtube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; and one on the revisionist film adaptations of Lolita, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and Una (2016). The texts reflect the choice adapters have made to change the original novels by incorporating some feminist themes, but they ultimately expose the ways in which the media works to contain radical feminism. 1 Introduction Pride and Prejudice and Lolita are two of the most well known texts written in the English language. Their popularity has inspired numerous adaptations and reimaginings. With each subsequent version, the texts are altered to fit the cultural context of the times. One of the major ways adapters update these two families of texts is through their portrayal of women and the agency that the female characters have over their lives. In this project, I will examine costume and revisionist adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Lolita to see how they update their source texts in order to increase the agency of the female characters in response to audience ideologies and cultural sensibilities. Each of these texts will be examined using adaptation theory, textual analysis, and cultural and historical contexts to see how a variety of factors influence the adapters as they create their own versions of these familiar characters. Adaptation Theory Film adaptations of literary texts engage in a process of reinterpretation that brings new meaning to the source material. Adaptation theorist Timothy Corrigan writes that “adaptations should be considered as extended and multiple variations of core myths [and] stories… that accumulate meanings through their numerous social and material incarnations” (30). In this view, film adaptations are taking core stories from the culture and building new meanings into them with each subsequent version. These accumulated meanings build on what existed in the original text while simultaneously imparting new interpretations based on the ways they have altered the original. The relationship between the texts is, therefore, not that of an unalterable source text to which adaptations must remain faithful, but rather two texts that speak to each other over time. The idea that a source text and its adaptations produce new meaning through 2 their joint dialogue can be understood through Dennis Cutchins’ idea of interdetermination which is “the recognition that all texts… are constantly in dialogue with other texts” (75). Consequently, when viewers see a new adaptation of a source text it can change the meaning of the original and, likewise the reputation, criticism, and story of the source text affect a viewer’s understanding of the adaptation. Adaptations often alter their source texts in ways which fit the cultural sensibilities of the current time period and, as a result, they have the ability to reshape the ways in which we understand the original. Adaptations take on their “meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment” and they therefore “cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads” (Bakhtin qtd. in Cutchins 74). In this quote, Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates that adaptations are not only in dialog with their source texts, but that they are also influenced by the time period and culture that surrounds them during their creation. Twentieth and twenty-first century adaptations can make Jane Austen’s proto-feminist themes seem like a greater challenge to patriarchal structures of the time, or they can give their female protagonists complete apparent control over their situations and mask the need for feminism in the first place. Similarly, adapters can choose to accept Humbert’s depiction of Lolita as a sexually promiscuous 12-year-old or they can search for her voice within the original text and translate her pain onto the screen. Costume adaptations, which are bound to the period, characters, perspective, and storyline of the original text, must look for creative ways to update novels whose values differ from those of twentieth and twenty-first century audiences. Part of this fidelity to the source text is the result of the fact that costume adaptations are meant to be direct interpretations of the originals and, 3 consequently, audiences expect to see few changes. Another reason for this emphasis on fidelity to the source text, however, results from the potential for feminist gains to be undermined within the texts by a revising of history. Austen critic Rebecca Dickson writes about the dangers of representing Jane Austen’s female heroines as having more agency than was actually available to them in costume drama adaptations. She notes that films can “[mislead] viewers about the nature of women’s roles in the early nineteenth century” and goes on to describe how that undermines the beginnings of the feminist movement (Dickson 45). In other words, if costume adaptations of Pride and Prejudice make it seem like Elizabeth Bennet has complete agency over her life they run the risk of making it seem as though the feminist movement was unnecessary. Similarly, if Lolita costume adaptations make it seem like Lolita has control over her sexual relationship of Humbert Humbert, they run the risk of diminishing the role sexual abuse plays in the lives of women. Adapters, therefore, who are updating these texts to appeal to modern women who have more control over their lives, must be sure to balance a desire to increase the female characters’ agency with the reality of their historical situations. Revisionist adaptations, on the other hand, can change and produce new meanings of the texts by updating the time period and changing the perspective to give the female characters more of a voice. In his essay “Revisionist Adaptation: Transtextuality, Cross-Cultural Dialogism, and Performative Infidelities” Robert Stam explains how revisionist adaptations have the power to “dramatically transform and revitalize their source texts through provocative changes in locale, epoch, casting, genre, perspective, performance modes, or production processes” (239). This radical transformation of source texts allows adapters to reinterpret the themes of the original stories and update them for more modern cultural and political sensibilities. 4 Additionally, revisionist adaptations can manipulate the perspectives of the text in order to retell the story from another character’s point-of-view. While Pride and Prejudice revisionist adaptations have used diary formats to center the female protagonists’ voices, this is not a far cry from Austen’s novel which, though written in the third person, hardly strays from Lizzy’s perspective. Lolita revisions have much more to gain, therefore, because they often shift the perspective from that of Humbert Humbert to Lolita herself. As a result of this shift, the texts are more fully able to grapple with both the damage Humbert inflicted on Lolita as a result of his sexual abuse and the amount of agency, if any, she had in their relationship. The Texts This project will examine costume and revisionist adaptations of both Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice and Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita. The first chapter, will analyze the two existing costume adaptations of Lolita directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and Adrian Lyne in 1997. After analyzing the Lolita costume adaptations, the project will then turn to Pride and Prejudice costume and revisionist adaptations. Chapter two will consider the 1995 BBC mini-series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as well as the 2005 film adaptation directed by Joe Wright, as they are two of the most popular of several adaptations. For revisionist adaptations, chapter three will examine how postfeminist media sensibility affected two revisionist adaptations of Austen’s novel: the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary which is based on the 1996 novel of the same name, and the 2012-2013 YouTube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Among the many revisionist Pride and Prejudice adaptations, these two were selected due to the fact that they remain set in a Western culture and update the story of the novel for the twenty-first century.

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