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

but to make his film epigrammatic in a more pervasive sense, even if his primary means of doing so involve acting, blocking, and camerawork rather than dialogue. It might be argued, of course, that in relying so heavily on techniques associated with visual exposition, Lubitsch risks the possibility that a large portion of the audience will overlook their wit (how Wilde makes his points) in the process of focusing on their exposition (what points are being made). But, as Lecomte makes clear in his analysis of Lubitsch’s handling of Lady Windermere’s discovery of her husband’s payments to Mrs. Erlynne, Wilde’s celebrated dialogue in the play is more often expository than epigrammatic itself.

Other contributors use adaptations to provoke a fresh look at their forebears. Wagner’s call for a critical “re-viewing” of literary legacies(p. 206) provides a persuasive defense of reading nineteenth-century novels through twentieth- or twenty-first-century movies. Even if it were not true, as many observers have noted, that Hollywood adaptations have gone far to define and extend the influence of Victorian fiction and culture, modern readers, unable to be Victorian readers, would still be obliged to read Dickens and Hardy through modern lenses—if not those of contemporary cinema, then those of contemporary fiction or journalism.

Nothing but a superstitious deference to Austen could prevent Michael Eberle-Sinatra from asking whether, because Christian Stovitz (Justin Walker) is clearly coded as gay in Clueless,Frank Churchill, the false suitor of Emma Woodhouse on whom Christian is based, might be gay as well. As Eberle-Sinatra acknowledges, such an investigation is “inconclusive by nature” (p. 130) because there is no realistic possibility of uncovering hard evidence that Frank is either homosexual or heterosexual in Austen’s novel. In taking off from Jill Heydt-Stevenson’s influential analysis of Austen’s presentation of sexual politics, however, Eberle-Sinatra not only pries open the once-forbidden topic of Frank’s sexual orientation but also raises provocative questions that arise from the novel’s lack of obvious sexual coding, which it would be fallacious to read as imposing a uniform code of unexceptionable heterosexuality throughout.

Louise McDonald also uses a film adaptation to reinterpret its nominal source, reading the mordant pessimism that characterizes Stanley