scholarly journals Melodrama's afterlife : Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Woman in White from the Victorian stage to the silent screen

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Karen Laird
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Written Word

Unique in building a much-needed bridge between fiction, theatre, and film, "Melodrama's Afterlife" proves that writers working in all three genres throughout the long Victorian era engaged in a reciprocal relationship bound by their common use of melodrama. Covering dramatic adaptations of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Woman in White staged between 1848 and 1878 in London and New York, this dissertation argues that the first playwrights prioritized experimentation over fidelity to their source texts. These three case studies reveal the Victorians to be pioneers in the art of adaptation. Silent film directors depended more heavily upon these Victorian playscripts as sources for their film adaptations than the original novels. By unearthing the adaptation strategies of the Victorian theatre and early twentieth-century cinema, "Melodrama's Afterlife" ultimately challenges the theory predominant among adaptation scholars today, which holds that the experimentation evident in contemporary film adaptations represents a revolutionary break from a century-long concern with fidelity to the written word. This study proves that our new focus on originality and experimentation in film adaptation is not so much a breaking away from an older model of film adaptation. Instead, it is a return to Modernist adaptation approaches that were rooted in Victorian melodrama.

Blue Jeans Stage and Screen

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
David Mayer ◽  
Helen Day-Mayer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Attempted Murder ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Blue Jeans

Scholars of Victorian and Edwardian theatre necessarily piece together their accounts of ephemeral performance through manuscripts, reviews, and other responses preserved in print and visual culture. However, films made between 1895 and 1935 offer frequent, unexpected, and sometimes curiously skewed glimpses of the Victorian and Edwardian stage. This essay focuses on John H. Collins’s 1917 silent film adaptation of Blue Jeans, Joseph Arthur’s melodrama, popular from its New York debut in 1890. The melodrama is perhaps most famous for ‘the great sawmill scene’. This iconic scene, an early example of an episode in which a helpless victim is tied to a board approaching a huge buzz saw, turns a mundane setting into a terrifying site for suspense, violence, and attempted murder. Whilst the film made alterations and abridgements, the overall effect was to preserve the play’s distinctive features. Our essay shows how the stage version is preserved within Collins’s film adaptation so that the cinematic artefact gives unique access to the Victorian theatrical work. Films not only preserve Victorian forms in modern media and extend the reach of Victorian culture, but also open a new resource and methodology for understanding Victorian and Edwardian theatre.

Rewriting Ibsen for the big screen

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audun Engelstad
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Henrik Ibsen is regarded as the champion of realist theatre. In the early days of cinema, there were several silent film adaptations of Ibsen’s plays. One would think, given his standing as a playwright, that there would be a continuous interest in Ibsen’s work after the conversion to sound. This article examines how the realist theatre – heralded by Ibsen – relates to classical (Hollywood) cinema and how Ibsen in various ways has been rewritten and has recently re-emerged within contemporary cinema.

scholarly journals Women’s Voices in the Victorian Era – Feminist Consciousness in the Bronte Sisters’ Works

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 81-85
Author(s):  
Linshuo Qi
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Feminist Consciousness ◽  
Narrative Thread ◽  
The 19Th Century

Before the Victorian era, it was rare for women to be authors and writers to fix the protagonists of their works as female characters. However, in the 19th century, there was a rapid increase of women writers and emphasis on feminist consciousness. Among all the works of women writers, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights which were written by the Bronte sisters were distinctive. The Bronte sisters conveyed their feminist consciousness and described the society in their works. Both works emphasized romantic relationships as the narrative thread. By shaping the female characters in their works as self-reliant women who fought for equivalence and freedom in the era where male chauvinism occupied leadership roles, the Bronte sisters conveyed their eagerness for freedom, equality, and their feminist consciousness. This paper combines features of the Victorian era and the Bronte sisters’ life experiences to analyze feminist consciousness in these two works and make comparisons between them.

Morúa’s Continuum

2021 ◽  
pp. 177-206
Author(s):  
Carmen E. Lamas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
Translation Practice ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
The Us ◽  
Florida Straits ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Wendell Phillips

Martín Morúa Delgado’s vision for Cuba’s future and his concern for Afro Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits extends beyond the island to the Americas and is found not simply in his literary production but in his translation practice. Completed in the early 1880s in New York City, just as Morúa’s disenchantment with the politics of Cubans in exile began, his translation of James Redpath’s rendition (1863) of John R. Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti (1853), reflects Morúa’s belief that the written word had the power to wield a hemispheric influence and could serve to support political transformation in Cuba and by extension the Americas. Toussaint L’Ouverture and this translation were at the center of this vision, for Morúa would reference the Haitian liberator throughout his literary and journalistic career, thereby expounding his belief that a leader modeled on L’Ouverture would bring true political independence to Cuba, inaugurating social change across the hemisphere. It is through this figure and the translation that Morúa conceived an alternative vision for Cuba and for the Americas, one that did not involve the leadership of the US-compromised Americanized Cubans and Latin Americans he so feared. Countering such political thinkers as Wendell Phillips, Rafael Serra, and Juan Gualberto Gómez, his vision placed Afro Latina/os, Afro Latin Americans, and African Americans as the new foundation of a truly politically and socially free hemisphere, one redeemed of its racial prejudices and biases.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 239-240
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fleeger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Class Session ◽  
The Past ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Selection Of

Part of living at a distance has meant relying on a stream. Today alone, so much information has streamed into my home from so many sources on so many devices I would have trouble accounting for all of it. While my daughter streamed her class session upstairs, a selection of music I would be likely to enjoy streamed on my phone, and my son streamed a movie from one of the services to which I hastily (and regrettably) subscribed when the pandemic began. We streamed a bedtime story read remotely by Dolly Parton, a Shakespearian sonnet read by Patrick Stewart, and a silent film playing on the wall of a New York City apartment. Unlike the tsunami of my emotional state for the past few months, these streams have been rather comforting. But how does the metaphor of the stream hold up to the discourses and dangers of ventriloquism we have been addressing throughout this collection?...

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