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

Son and The Way We Live Now toward more sensationalistic writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The result has been not so much a shift from major to minor writers as a redefinition of “major.” Instead of being major because they are long, dense, self-serious novels by prolific authors, the Victorian properties that are now most often studied for their contributions to the cinema are “major in the sense that they have been and remain the subject of substantial critical work” (Palmer, 6). Adaptation theorists have always been drawn to the sensationalistic side of Dickens, even though they have been reluctant to acknowledge the importance of that sensationalism in defining the legacy of Victorian fiction (Altman, 330). Like Austen’s novels, Frankenstein has long been claimed for the Victorian period. So have Rudyard Kipling’s parables and critiques of English colonialism abroad. More frankly escapist writers such as H. Rider Haggard, however, for years written out of the Victorian canon as being barely a step above what Steven Marcus calls “the other Victorians,” have only recently begun to be welcomed back into the tent, along with vampire tales such as Dracula,detective stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles,and shilling shockers such as Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This volume adopts just such a comprehensive approach by including Thomas Leitch’s chapter on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tamara S. Wagner’s chapter on Sherlock Holmes, and Sarah J. Heidt’s chapter on Dracula.The result is to present a more decentered Victorian culture more deeply penetrated by the other Victorians, whose renewed prominence is largely a product of cinema’s incessant reimagining of the Victorians and their legacy.

There would be little point to expanding the Victorian canon, however, if the new entries did not yield new insights. Some of these insights are textual and tactical, such as Lecomte’s examination of the ways that Lubitsch’s use of space in Lady Windermere’s Fan mediates the highbrow theatrical tradition and the broader tradition of silent film comedy, both of which inform his adaptation. For Lubitsch as for Wilde, “style is all” (Lecomte, p. 60). Therefore, his goal is not to find a cinematic equivalent for every one of Wilde’s notoriously unadaptable epigrams