(Re)Imagining the (Neo)Victorian Spinster: Gothic, Sensationalist and Melodramatic Reflections of Miss Havisham By Maria Dimitriadou A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki January 2014 (Re)Imagining the (Neo)Victorian Spinster: Gothic, Sensationalist and Melodramatic Reflections of Miss Havisham By Maria Dimitriadou APPROVED: 1. ________________________ 2. ________________________ 3. ________________________ Examining Committee ACCEPTED: _____________________ Department Chairperson Table of Contents Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................v Abstract.........................................................................................................................vi List of Figures............................................................................................................vii Introduction..................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Victorian Representations of the Spinster 1.1 Before Miss Havisham: The Gothic/Sensationalist Background of Great Expectations.......................................................................................................................9 1.2 Dickens and Gothic Fantasy: Imagining Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.....................................................................................................................20 Chapter 2: Miss Havisham in 20th Century Film 2.1 Adapting the Dickensian Novel in the Age of Modernity.........................................30 2.2 Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946)....................................35 Chapter 3: Re-Imagining Miss Havisham in 21st Century Adaptations 3.1 The Neo-Victorian Approach in Adapting the Victorian Novel...............................41 3.2 Miss Havisham through BBC: Brian Kirk’s Great Expectations (2011) and Mike Newell’s Great Expectations (2012)......................................................................46 Chapter 4: Beyond Adaptation 4.1 Tim Burton’s Gothic Fantasy: Representing the Victorian Culture through Animation and Parody.....................................................................................................56 4.2 The Tragicomically Grotesque: Reflections of Miss Havisham in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005)........................................................................................................59 Epilogue........................................................................................................................66 Works Cited................................................................................................................69 Appendix......................................................................................................................75 Dimitriadou v Acknowledgements My engagement with Great Expectations and Miss Havisham in particular began in 2012, when I decided to write a paper for the conference “Charles Dickens: Births, Marriages, Deaths” that was organized by the School of English in fall, in order to celebrate Dickens’s bicentenary. The paper on Miss Havisham’s death was written and rewritten several times and this gave me the opportunity to think on it and expand it into my thesis. Apart from my own efforts, I feel that I wouldn’t have been able to finish without my family’s support that had to put up with my constant talking about Dickens, Miss Havisham and the films all this time. I also feel obliged to thank my dear friend and colleague Lizzie who was always eager to listen to my ideas, comment on them and share my enthusiasm. Finally, I want to thank my supervisor Katerina Kitsi- Mitakou for her valuable advice and feedback on my thesis, as well as for her support during the conference. Dimitriadou vi Abstract This project explores the representation of Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations and in cinematic adaptations of the 20th and 21st century through the gothic, sensationalist and melodramatic artistic modes. I will examine how the Victorian spinster is imagined by Dickens in the novel and how it was shaped by earlier writings. Moving on to Dickensian cinematic afterlives, I will explore how this image is transformed in films that reflect contemporary popular culture and our own perception of the Victorians. I refer to David Lean’s classic masterpiece Great Expectations (1946) as a brilliant example for all films that follow and I adopt a postmodern and neo- Victorian approach to examine the most recent adaptations: Brian Kirk’s Great Expectations (2011) and Mike Newell’s Great Expectations (2012); however, my interest in contemporary representations of grotesque jilted brides does not stop at films based on Dickens’s novel. I consider animation equally important and therefore I will also refer to Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005) as another film that reflects on Miss Havisham in a dark and humorous way. Dimitriadou vii List of Figures Fig. 1. Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham...........................................................................76 Fig. 2. A more detailed view of the room with the bridal decorations............................77 Fig. 3. Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham....................................................................78 Fig 4. Helena Bonham Carter acting the role of Miss Havisham....................................79 Fig. 5. Anderson’s Miss Havisham exhibiting signs of hysteria.....................................80 Fig. 6. Miss Havisham committing suicide.....................................................................81 Fig. 7. Carter’s acting of Miss Havisham’s death...........................................................82 Fig.8. The corpse bride grabbing Victor’s arm...............................................................83 Fig. 9. Emily’s appearance as a dead bride.....................................................................84 Fig. 10. The maggot popping out of Emily’s eye............................................................85 Dimitriadou 1 Introduction As Linda Hucheon argues in A Theory of Adaptation “the Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything” and, as their immediate ancestors, “we postmoderns have clearly inherited this same habit” (xi). In Great Expectations1 (1860-1861) Dickens propels the reader into a world of dream and gothic fantasy. It is difficult to interpret the novel as an exclusively realistic, given the fact that Dickens draws on several genres including Gothic and sensationalist fiction, melodramatic conventions and even fairy tales in order to create Miss Havisham and her surroundings. Taking into consideration how these genres influenced Dickens’s writing, this project will initially explore the Victorian representations of the jilted bride reflected in Dickens’s fiction. Then I will examine how this figure has been re-constructed and re-imagined over the years in the different subversive versions that cinematic adaptations offer. Robert Higbie writes in Dickens and Imagination that the fictional world of Miss Havisham is “a nightmarish world that closes out reality and, by indulging imagination’s selfish desires, cuts off the self from belief as Miss Havisham cuts herself off from light” (146). Like Pip, every time the reader enters the Satis House scenes, he/she enters the realm of the fantastic. Tzvetan Todorov mainly argues in The Fantastic that the reader is unable to answer the following question – what is real? Todorov describes the fantastic as being the feeling of confusion and hesitation of the reader to decide whether what is described is real or not. In the case of Miss Havisham it is not only the reader, but also the character (Pip) who is unsure whether he is in a state of dream or wakefulness. To put it in Todorov’s words: 1 The abbreviation used in the parenthetical references for Dickens’s novel is GE. Dimitriadou 2 The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work – in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic” interpretations. (33) Therefore, the fantastic according to Todorov is a genre that causes an uncertainty as to whether an event or the representation of a character is based on natural or supernatural sources: “The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). As readers of Great Expectations, once we are confronted with one explanation or another – especially with regard to Miss Havisham – we have to decide whether we will believe or not