“Victorian Fiction on Stage and Screen”
“No, I haven’t read it – but I saw the movie!” Throughout the twentieth century and continuing in the twenty-first century, Victorian novels have figured in the popular imagination in large part because of film and television adaptations. In the nineteenth century, stage adaptations helped to create and to sustain a novel’s popular success. In this course we will explore how adaptations from the Victorian period to the present have contributed to the cultural production of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. How do the adaptations define their source texts? Why does a particular adaptation come to be considered “the” adaptation (“but I saw the movie”)? Why are some novels more frequently adapted than others? To what extent do the adaptations reinscribe, revise, and/or subvert the ideological assumptions – with respect to gender, class, race, sexuality, aesthetics, ethics, religion, politics, education, etc. – implicit in the novels? In attempting to answer these and other questions we will move beyond issues of fidelity to explore how adaptations productively engage with their source texts.
Victorian novels and their adaptations are not known for their brevity. Pre-reading and pre-viewing of the following are highly recommended.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World’s Classics); 1848 play, Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, adapted by John Courtney (Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898, UBC Library); 2006 BBC miniseries, directed by Susanna White (UBC Library); 2011 film, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (UBC Library); 2015 play, directed by Sally Cookson (Drama Online, UBC Library).
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Broadview); 1994 play, adapted by Helen Edmundson (Drama Online, UBC Library); 1997 BBC telefilm, directed by Graham Theakston (UBC Library purchase requested).
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford World’s Classics); 1882 play, adapted by J. Comyns Carr and Thomas Hardy (to be posted on Canvas); 1967 film, directed by John Schlesinger (UBC Library purchase requested); 2015 film, directed by Thomas Vinterberg (UBC Library).