DOMESTICATIONS AND DISRUPTIONS: LESBIAN IDENTITIES IN TELEVISION ADAPTATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELS by Heather Erin Emmens A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (May, 2009) Copyright © Heather Erin Emmens, 2009 Abstract The first decade of this century marked a moment of hypervisibility for lesbians and bisexual women on British television. During this time, however, lesbian hypervisibility was coded repeatedly as hyperfemininity. When the BBC and ITV adapted Sarah Waters’s novels for television, how, I ask, did the screen versions balance the demands of pop visual culture with the novels’ complex, unconventional – and in some cases subversive – representations of lesbianism? I pursue this question with an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from queer and feminist theories, cultural and media studies, and film adaptation theory. Chapter Two looks back to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC 1990). I examine this text – the first BBC television serial to feature a lesbian protagonist – to establish a vocabulary for discussing the page-to-screen adaptation of queer identities throughout this dissertation. Chapter Three investigates Waters’s first novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) and its complex intertextual relationship with Andrew Davies’s serialized version (BBC 2002). I also examine responses to the serial in the British press, tracing the ways in which dominant cultural forces seek to domesticate non-normative instances of gender and sexuality. Chapter Four examines Waters’s novel Fingersmith (2002) in relation to Peter Ransley’s adaptation (BBC 2005) to situate adaptations of Waters’s retro-Victorian texts amid the genre of television and film adaptations of Jane Austen novels. I argue that Ransley’s serial interrogates the notion of Austen as a “conservative icon” (Cartmell 24) and queers the Austen adaptation genre itself. To conclude this study I address Davies’s television film (ITV 2008) of Waters’s second novel Affinity (1999). In this chapter I examine how the adaptation depicts the disruptive lesbian at the centre of the text. I argue in particular that by casting an actress who does not conform to dominant televisual norms of femininity, the adaptation is able to create a powerful audiovisual transgendered moment which adds to the novel’s destabilization of Victorian hierarchies of gender and class. This chapter considers, finally, how Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and Affinity have contributed to lesbian visibility on British television. ii Acknowledgements Queen’s University funded this project through a Queen’s Graduate Award, an R. S. McLaughlin Fellowship, a Queen’s Spring/Summer Thesis Completion Bursary, and a Graduate Dean’s Travel Grant for Doctoral Field Research. I gratefully acknowledge the opportunity I had to carry out archival research and interviews in the UK. I would like to thank Sarah Waters, Andrew Davies, Peter Ransley, Georgina Lowe, Gwenda Bagshaw and Sarah Simpson for their time and generosity. I’m enormously indebted to Chris Bongie for all his supervisory support. Massive thanks also to Maggie Berg; my dissertation buddies Lindsey and Jen; my parents; and to Ellie for her endless patience. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ iv Chapter 1 Introduction: British television and lesbian visibility ..................................................... 1 Chapter 2 A Case Study of Lesbian Adaptation: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ....................... 46 Chapter 3 Taming the Velvet: Domestications and other cultural adaptations of Tipping the Velvet ....................................................................................................................................................... 72 Chapter 4 Queering New Ground: Sound, silence and subjectivity in Fingersmith .................... 117 Chapter 5 The Quack and the Dead: Spiritualist deception and gender disruption in Affinity .... 148 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 178 iv Chapter 1 Introduction: British television and lesbian visibility Part 1. Lesbian hypervisibility on British television In 2006 queer British media watchdog Stonewall published a report on the issue of queer visibility on BBC television entitled “Tuned Out: The BBC’s portrayal of lesbian and gay people.” The report’s authors, Katherine Cowan, a Policy Officer at Stonewall, and Gill Valentine, a Professor of Geography and Director of the Leeds Social Science Institute at the University of Leeds, “set out to investigate how gay people and gay life are represented and portrayed on BBC Television” (6). Their research questions included: “How does the BBC portray gay people’s lives?”; “Does television have a positive or negative impact on gay people’s lives?”; “What impact does the portrayal of lesbians and gay men have on heterosexual people?”; “Does the BBC challenge homophobia, or does it reinforce it?”; and “Do lesbian and gay licence- fee payers get value for money?” (6).1 The British Broadcasting Corporation has long been committed “[t]o enrich[ing] people’s lives with programmes and services” that, as the official tripartite mission statement goes, “inform, educate and entertain” (“About the BBC”). This mission includes “bring[ing] people together from diverse backgrounds to share experiences that bridge potential divides (for example, of age, class, faith, ethnicity, sexual orientation or varying abilities)” (“About the BBC”).2 With the money from its licence fees the BBC maintains eight national television channels plus regional programming, ten national radio stations, forty local radio stations, “and an 1 This last question pertains to the BBC’s status as a public service broadcaster. Founded in 1922, the BBC is funded not by advertising or government subsidies but, as of Royal Charter in 1927, by licence fees, to which anyone wishing to “use any television receiving equipment” in the UK must subscribe annually (“About the BBC”). 2 This statement is, incidentally, the only explicit reference I could find on the BBC’s extensive website to “sexual orientation”; generally its writers employ vague phrases like “diverse communities.” 1 extensive website” (“About the BBC”). The flagship channels, BBC One and Two, were the object of Cowan and Valentine’s investigation; the researchers estimate that queer viewers contribute an estimated £90 million to programming for these channels from an estimated total £190 million in annual fees. Despite the BBC’s statement about diversity, the reality, according to Cowan and Valentine, is quite different. Between May and July 2005 Stonewall researchers watched BBC One and BBC Two every other night between 7.00pm and 10.00pm (6). Later in the year they held focus groups with both queer and heterosexual viewers to add “qualitative research” to their “quantitative study” (6). In brief, Cowan and Valentine found that during 168 hours of BBC programming, gay, lesbian and bisexual characters and references filled a total of 38 minutes. During this time queer characters were represented positively for only six minutes: 4 minutes and 50 seconds for gay men, and 1 minute and 10 seconds of positive representation for lesbians. The report’s conclusions with regard to lesbians and bisexual women are thus doubly damning: on the one hand, as Cowan and Valentine put it, “[l]esbians hardly exist on the BBC” (6); on the other, insofar as they do exist on television, queer women are overwhelmingly associated with negative stereotypes. In response to Stonewall’s “controversial” report (Carolin 31), well-known British lesbian magazine DIVA published an article called “Lesbians on TV,” in which journalist Louise Carolin asks: “Are they [Stonewall] watching the same telly as us?” Citing Cowan and Valentine’s statistics, Carolin states: “In these circumstances, you might expect a babble of condemnation from lesbians and gay men, outraged by the BBC’s neglect, but the response has been oddly muted and ambivalent. Do we really not care that the BBC spends our money on putting us down, or is it that we just don’t watch telly in the same way Stonewall does?” (31). Answering her own question she goes on to state: “Of course, part of the issue is that most people don’t only watch two channels for three hours a night” (31). Cowan and Valentine focus on the 2 BBC in order to record queer representation on the most mainstream and accessible channels in Britain, and they examine both factual and fictional output. For Carolin this perspective is simultaneously too broad (all genres) and too narrow (one network). “If you’ve got the full complement to choose from, the picture improves considerably,” she writes. In fact, lately it’s felt like you can’t switch on TV without snagging a dyke story line. Far from feeling hard-done by, many lesbian channel hoppers are thinking they’ve never had it so good. Just think of EastEnders (BBC1), Neighbours (BBC1), Bad Girls (ITV1),