Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation By Abigail Burnham Bloo ...

and the obligatory sequences such as the malevolent threat, the eleventh-hour rescue, and the happy-ending fadeout. Numberless commentators on silent adaptations have noted the similarity between two touchstones of novelistic and cinematic mimesis. In his 1897 preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!” (3: x). Sixteen years later, D. W. Griffith echoed Conrad: “The task I’m trying to achieve is above all to make you see” (qtd. in Jacobs, 119). Movies and novels, as commentators from George Bluestone to Brian McFarlane have argued, share the primary charge of helping their audience envision imaginary worlds.

Ever since synchronized sound upended the representational conventions that were established by silent films, “[m]ainstream cinema has owed much of its popularity to representational tendencies it shares with the nineteenth-century English novel” (McFarlane, viii). These affinities stem from early cinema’s “more or less blatant appropriation of the themes and content of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel” (Cohen, 4). Silent films borrowed their themes, tropes, and conventions from neither modernist classics nor novels of the American renaissance but from realistic, bourgeois nineteenth-century English novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch,and Barchester Towers. According to Sergei Eisenstein, they were especially indebted to the work of Charles Dickens, which “bore the same relation to [his readers] that the film bears to the same strata in our time” (206).

More recent critics have questioned or refined the allegedly Dickensian foundations of cinema. Keith Cohen announces that the analogy Eisenstein draws between Dickens’s and Griffith’s use of specific details in novelistic or cinematic montage “has always seemed weak to me” (4). Rick Altman claims more generally that the figure of Dickens provided “a spuriously pivotal function in discussions about the relation between the cinema and the novel” (330). Kamilla Elliott attacks historical models that assume “not simply that the nineteenth-century novel influenced western film, but that in some sense it became film, while the modern novel evolved