"Demon barbers", "Scarecrows of fidelity", and "Dialogical deviances" in neo-Victorian film : the case of the French lieutenant's woman

Abstract

The current academic discourse on the adaptation of novels in film continues to shift back and forth from George Bluestone' s 1957 model of equivalences and correspondences between literary and cinematic forms and, by contrast, the auteurist approach which tends to emphasize "difference" rather than "similarity''. Undeniably, since the 1960s the parameters of discussion have been widened through the inclusion of such influential concepts as those held by Robert Stam, who argues in his Bakhtinian analysis that "an adaptation [...] is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogical process". And yet, even though the lens has been significantly refocused through the theories set forth by Linda Hutcheon, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan, Kamilla Elliott, and Sarah Cardwell, to mention only a few, the spectre of fidelity with its rhetoric of ownership and preservation still haunts the field of adaptation studies. Shaped by tropes of excess and enchantment, or conversely, loss and impoverishment, such a rhetoric lies at the heart of Tony Whall's definition of Harold Pinter's screenplay of The French Lieutenant's Woman as "a remarkable failure".