In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said is largely concerned with colonial rather than postcolonial discourse; that is, he prefers to use postcolonialism as a lens through which to view canonical Western texts and uncover an additional layer of meaning, a layer which betrays the Western author’s complicity, whether conscious or unconscious, in creating and sustaining Empire. The text I am going to look at is not quite canonical, unless you happen to be studying the canon of 1940s B horror films – if you were, I Walked With a Zombie would be one of your touchstone texts. And though Said might not have considered a second-string 1943 American horror film as canonical Western literature, it does have close ties to a work which certainly is, and which is often discussed in postcolonial terms – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Producer Val Lewton was given the title I Walked With a Zombie by his studio overlords and told to come up with a story to go with it. Rather than create a cheap exploitation-style horror film of the type the title would lead you to expect, Lewton chose to create a lush, moody reimagining of Jane Eyre set in the contemporary West Indies. Jane becomes Betsy, a young nurse just out of school who is sent to the Holland plantation in the Caribbean to care for Jessica Holland, the wife of the current plantation master. Jessica suffers from an unknown condition which has rendered her essentially mindless and passive – she appears awake and can follow commands, but cannot speak and reacts to nothing. She is, in fact, a zombie, not in the modern, post-Night of the Living Dead conception of dangerous, flesh-eating zombies, but in the cultic voodoo version which simply means a corpse reanimated through ritual into an entity devoid of self and obedient to its creators. In relation to Jane Eyre, she is Bertha Mason, rendered Other by the influence of Caribbean culture and now a burden on her husband Paul and his growing desire to romance Betsy.

The West Indian setting of I Walked With a Zombie makes explicit the power relationships that are more implicit in Jane Eyre, somewhat as Wide Sargasso Sea would do a couple of decades later. In this way, it is possible to look at I Walked With a Zombie as a postcolonial text rather than a colonial one – in fact, it is possible that Jean Rhys had Lewton’s film in mind when she created the moody setting of Wide Sargasso Sea (Aizenberg 463). However, just as the zombie itself is a liminal figure, caught between life and death, I Walked With a Zombie is a liminal text. In some ways, it seems to interrogate the (male) imperial power that subjugates both the master’s wife and the plantation’s black servants. On the other hand, it reinscribes stereotypes of “darkies” as inalienably different and naturally inferior, and ends with a problematic proclamation of the justness of Jessica’s death.

I have a few film clips to show. Note that I have edited them all to keep them brief, so if you have seen or do see the film and notice some dialogue or something missing, that’s why. This clip is the nurse Betsy arriving on the island and driving to the plantation with a black servant.

Though the driver tells of his ancestors being brought to the island chained on a slave ship by Holland’s ancestors, he has a smile on his face, not particularly seeming to mind that he continues to work for the slaver’s descendents, and Betsy answers this narrative of violent transportation by naively remarking on the beauty of the island – implicitly suggesting that the African slaves were coming from an ugly place to a beautiful place and thus should be happy. Martha P. Nichimson argues that Betsy’s very naivete works to create the opposite reaction in the viewer and that the film itself actively questions the imperial attitudes of the white plantation masters. Certainly she is correct for modern viewers, attuned to look for imbalances of power between majority and minority peoples; however, the depiction of blacks through the rest of the film upholds the existing imperial and Hollywood stereotypes almost completely. Hence, though perhaps Lewton does argue with the practice of slavery, he does not appear to deny the essential racial inferiority of the island’s black population. This seemingly contradictory position was espoused as early as 1902 in J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study, which Edward Said says “attacks imperialism for its heartless economics, its export of capital, its alliance with ruthless forces, and its façade of well-meaning ‘civilizing’ pretexts. Yet the book offers no critique of the notion of ‘lower races,’ an idea Hobson finds acceptable” (Said 241). I Walked With a Zombie appears to share Hobson’s attack on imperial economic practices such as slavery through plantation owner Paul’s apparent regret at the sadness of the black population which he recognizes as stemming from their former slavery, but also his willingness to define non-whites as ‘lower races.’

This next scene shows Alma, the black maid, bringing Betsy breakfast on her first morning on the island. Here Alma is the perfect picture of the affable, accommodating black servant, happy to provide luxury services to white ladies. Alma and the other servants residing on the plantation depict the domesticated Other, the one which is, Homi Bhabha’s terms, “almost the same, but not quite” as the white owners (86). The flip side of Alma’s “mimicry” of whites for Bhabha is the Other which remains a menace, exhibiting “a difference that is almost total but not quite” (91). That menace is embodied in the blacks who live not on the plantation, but at the Home Fort, the much more primitive black settlement. The mimic and the menace are not completely separate; though we never see Alma go to the Home Fort, she is quite familiar with it and after suggesting that Betsy take Jessica there to see if the witch doctor can cure her condition, explains how o get there and that they will have to pass by the guard Carrefour.

This journey undertaken by Betsy and Jessica crosses a liminal space, the boundary between civilization and savage. It actually takes much longer than the clip I have shown; I cut out about four minutes of them walking through fields and woods in order to save time. As they walk, the trail is marked by an animal and then a human skull, and finally by the encounter with the zombie guard, Carrefour. He is the embodiment of menace, his vacant stare marking him as almost completely Other. Both the high and low camera angles emphasize his towering height over the two women and thus the potential danger he poses them. However, he is not completely Other, because he and Jessica, a white woman, share the zombie condition.

Their shared condition suggests a connection between feminism and postcolonialism. Several critics have pointed out the similarity between the patriarchal domination of women and the imperial domination of colonial peoples (Williams/Chrisman 193-194). Even on a linguistic level, Freud has called woman “the dark continent” and imperialist adventure stories speak of “penetrating darkest Africa.” In I Walked With a Zombie, Paul’s half-brother Wesley, who also loves Jessica, accuses Paul of driving Jessica mad by forcing her to stay in the Indies when she wanted to leave (with Wesley). Jessica is also depicted by various characters as being overly passionate and sexual, another resemblance she bears Bertha Mason and thus the native Caribbean element, assumed to be sexually insatiable. Her zombification therefore appears as the punishment of a patriarchal system which fears female sexuality and simultaneously connects her to imperial subjugation of the African culture from which zombies come. Yet a black zombie and a white zombie are not quite the same: Carrefour’s condition, though menacing, is not depicted as inappropriate – Jessica’s zombie state is something foreign that should be cured if possible, whereas for Carrefour, being a zombie is appropriate to his race.

The person who links Jessica and the Home Fort within the film is Paul and Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Rand. She brought Western medicine and sanitary practices to the island, but had difficulty convincing the Home Fort blacks to follow her directions, until she figured out that they obeyed her if she told them their god Shango was the power behind the medicines: “it seems so simple to let the gods speak through me.” Mrs. Rand sets herself up as a god among the Home Fort people and eventually reveals that she is responsible for Jessica’s condition – angry that Jessica was tearing apart her family by causing rivalry between her sons, she asked the witch doctor to make Jessica a zombie. Paul and the doctor believe her imagination has run wild, setting up an ambiguity between Western domination and native voodoo. This ambiguity is further elaborated in the next clip.

In this scene, the Home Fort calls to Jessica through a voodoo doll. In the middle of this clip, Jessica is halted by Betsy, Paul and Wesley. Wesley argues for the power of voodoo, by which “they can make anybody do what they want,” while Paul claims it is not real, but only a trick used by the Home Fort people to frighten them. Here we have simultaneous action by the witch doctor and Wesley, one stabbing the voodoo doll with a pin, the other stabbing Jessica with an arrow. Is Wesley, as he would claim, being controlled by the voodoo, merely an instrument of the Home Fort’s need to eradicate a non-native zombie? Or is he appropriating voodoo as a scapegoat for his own actions? Either way, the Home Fort people lose – either they are a savage menace through the power of voodoo, or they are dominated once again by a white man using them to expiate his own guilt. The final voice over (the source or authority of which is unclear) states that Jessica’s death is just and that she is to blame for Wesley’s downfall as well:

“Oh, Lord God most holy. […] The woman was a wicked woman and she was dead in her own life. Yea, Lord, dead in the selfishness of her spirit. And the man followed her. Her steps led him down to evil, her feet took hold on death. Forgive him, Oh Lord […]. Yea Lord, pity them who are dead and give peace and happiness to the living.”

The “living” are Paul and Betsy, shown embracing as they are now able to embark on their life together, rid of the zombie wife and competitive brother. This ending is problematic. There is no evidence other than rumors from unreliable people that Jessica was “a wicked woman,” certainly not that she led Wesley into evil; there is a plausible argument that the film questions Jessica’s implication and obliquely suggests that Wesley and Paul are much more responsible for the family’s problems than either Jessica or the voodoo practitioners. On the other hand, even if the film does critique patriarchal and colonial values to a certain extent, and I think it does, it fails to make its colonized people anything other than domesticated mimics or savages, and upholds the distinction between a zombified black, which is nothing more than an extension of the black’s natural condition, and a zombified white, which is unnatural and deserves care and cure. Finally, the film ends with the unification of Paul and Betsy, thus reinscribing the colonial values of Jane Eyre, without even the mitigating punishment of Rochester’s blindness. Thus, I Walked With a Zombie stands as a somewhat nuanced colonial text, but a colonial text nonetheless, clearly showing the necessary Othering by which imperialism maintains control.

WORKS CITED

• Aizenberg, Edna. “I Walked With a Zombie: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 73:3 (1999): 461-66.
• Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. 85-92.
• I Walked With a Zombie. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. Prod. Val Lewton. RKO, 1943.
• Nochimson, Martha P. “Cinematheque Annotation: I Walked With a Zombie.” Senses of Cinema. http://www.senseofcinema.com/contents/cteq/07/44/i-walked-zombie.html Accessed 4/25/08.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Knopf, 1993.
• Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman. “Theorising Gender: Introduction.” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Crisman. NY: Columbia UP, 1994. 193-195.

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This paper originated as part of a paper on postcolonial theory for a course in Literary Criticism at Baylor University, April 28th, 2008.

The questions guiding me as I watched and analyzed the films included: To what extent do these similarly-themed films adhere to a common structure? To what extent is that structure modified by intersecting cultural, generic, and audience codes? What do the differences in structure between the films tell us about the culture, genre, and audience expectations? Can the unplanned pregnancy film be considered a subgenre, or do the differences turn out to be more significant than the similarities? I will go through each film and analyze its structure, particularly the way the pregnancy itself is treated and how the pregnancy fits into the overall goal and story-arc of the film, as well as the way the pregnancy plot is modified by other cultural, generic, and audience considerations. Then I will try to draw some conclusions about the nature of the way unplanned pregnancy is depicted in film and whether the "unplanned pregnancy film" can be considered as a genre.

Knocked Up

Knocked Up’s unplanned pregnancy stems from a drunken one-night stand between slacker guy Ben and ambitious career woman Allison. After Allison discovers she is pregnant, she and Ben try to have a relationship, but their attempts are complicated by their very different personalities and goals in life. A subplot involving the marital issues of Allison’s sister Debbie and her husband Pete mirrors the problems that Ben and Allison have trying to establish their relationship. Eventually, both the subplot and main plot are resolved amicably, and Ben, Allison and their child become a family.

Knocked Up’s treatment of pregnancy is the most straightforward and complete of the four films under consideration, hence it serves well as a starting point. In order to analyze the structure of the film, I have broken it into sixteen sections somewhat arbitrarily, but mostly guided by the stages of Ben and Allison’s relationship and of the pregnancy itself. The pregnancy plot is begun in Section Two, in which Ben and Allison meet and have unprotected sex. In Section Four, Allison finds out she is pregnant, a sequence which can be broken down into several steps. First, a title card tells us, the audience, that eight weeks have passed and we see a shot of cells dividing. Second, Allison is sick at work. Third, she confides in her sister, Debbie. Fourth, she and Debbie buy several pregnancy tests and they are all turn out positive. Fifth, she decides to contact Ben, who she has not spoken with since their rather uncomfortable morning-after breakfast. These two sections contain several pregnancy clues and indicators. (1) Ben and Allison have sex without a condom. This foreshadows for the audience but not for Allison that pregnancy is a possible (and given the needs of the narrative, probable) outcome; she does not know that Ben is not wearing a condom. (2) Cells start dividing after eight weeks—an indicator completely on the narrative level, which Roland Barthes defines as that level which foregrounds the relationship between reader and text (Barthes 110). No one within the story knows about the pregnancy at this point, or has any idea that cells are dividing to create a fetus, but the audience is given this information. (3) Allison is ill. Morning sickness is one of the most common indicators of pregnancy in films (in fact, it is the only one found in all four of the films under analysis), and it announces not only to the audience but also to Allison’s coworker that she is pregnant. (4) Multiple pregnancy tests are positive. Home pregnancy tests are, like morning sickness, found in many modern movies involving pregnancy.

Moving on in the plot, Section Six includes a visit to the gynecologist to confirm the pregnancy as well as Ben and Allison separately discussing the pregnancy with friends and family. In this section comes Knocked Up’s only mention of abortion, as Ben’s friends argue over whether it would be better if they just got the thing that rhymes with "smasbortion" and Allison’s mother recommends that she get it "taken care of." The actual word "abortion" is never used, and in fact, in creating a rhyming euphemism, Ben’s friends suggest that the concept should not really be discussed openly. Allison decides to keep the baby, but her decision is not explained. Sections Seven through Twelve are largely taken up by Ben and Allison’s not-wholly-successful attempts at building a relationship rather than by the pregnancy itself. Section Thirteen shows the parents, currently not together, getting ready for the baby—Allison getting ultrasounds and attending Lamaze classes, Ben preparing a nursery. Sections Fourteen and Fifteen concern the labor and birth itself, during which Ben and Allison are reconciled. Section Sixteen shows, in montage under the credits, the first year or so after the birth, as Ben, Allison, and their daughter form a happy family.

From conception to early childhood, Knocked Up shows all of the stages of pregnancy and includes most of the elements commonly associated with pregnancy: morning sickness, pregnancy tests, doctor’s visits, ultrasounds, hormonal mood swings, nursery preparation, labor, and birth. In addition, it indicates the passage of time to the audience by flashing up how many weeks into the pregnancy we are. It is more closely structured around the pregnancy than any of the other films, and is the only one which shows the initiating sex scene in chronological order. In the larger story of the film, Ben is the real main character; according to Propp’s spheres of action, he is the hero, the one with an implicit goal or quest—to learn to take on responsibility and mature into the role of father ("Dramatis Personae" 80). Allison is largely a static character, changing only enough to be able to accept Ben’s efforts. Taking the male point of view is somewhat unusual for a pregnancy film (the other three films under analysis have female protagonists), but it is not unusual at all for the other genres which inform Knocked Up.

Not only is Knocked Up a mainstream Hollywood comedy, but it falls into a specific subgenre of Hollywood comedy associated with writer/director/producer Judd Apatow. Apatow’s films, even the ones he produces but does not direct, constitute a genre of male-focused broad comedy, usually starring a schlubby sort of guy (Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, Will Ferrell in Anchorman and Talladega Nights, Jonah Hill in Superbad, John C. Reilly in Walk Hard) who either succeeds by flouting his image or by taking responsibility for his life through the encouragement of an attractive girl. In both cases, the women act as foils for the men; Allison is granted a little more personality than most women in Apatow films, but the journey of the film remains Ben’s. The pregnancy is plot is arguably used as a catalyst for some other goal in each of these films, but only in Knocked Up does that goal belong to the father.

Waitress

Waitress follows Jenna, woman whose incredible pie-making ability is overshadowed by her miserable marriage to self-centered and misogynistic Earl. She works at a little diner, trying to secrete enough money away from Earl to be able to leave him. After becoming undesirably pregnant, she carries on an affair with her gynecologist Jim. When the baby is born, she has gained enough self-confidence from Jim’s loving treatment and from becoming a mother to both kick Earl out and end the affair with Jim, and carries on her new life, just her and the child at the diner she has inherited.

It is more difficult to separate Waitress into discrete sections, largely because she has two ongoing relationships, one with Earl and one with Jim, which rise and fall at different times. In addition, her relationship with the elderly diner owner is an integral part of Jenna’s quest for independence and cannot be easily separated out and treated as an incidental relationship. The subplots involving her two friends and their romantic entanglements mirror and comment on Jenna’s own struggles, but are not segmented the same way structurally (Knocked Up’s subplot fell neatly into the same exact sections as its main plot). Waitress exemplifies Barthes’ statement that "sequences move in counterpoint; functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued" (103). Still, the elements of the pregnancy itself can be separated out and examined.

In only the second shot of Jenna (the first has her making pies, the central motif of the film, and a clue that she will not be as bad a mother as she expects), she is in the bathroom of the diner with her friends Becky and Dawn taking a pregnancy test, which is, to her dismay, positive. She goes to the doctor to confirm the pregnancy in Section Four; when she is clearly unenthused about the prospect of having a child, he starts to point out that they do not perform abortions, but she cuts him off before he gets to the word "abortion" and says she is going to have the baby even though she does not want it. As in Knocked Up, no reason is given for her decision, though she later writes a letter to her unborn baby that indicates she may simply respect its right to live—a pro-life statement despite Jenna’s lack of affiliation with any political or religious entities. Jenna has a bout of morning sickness in Section Five, and finally tells Earl about the baby in Section Ten; his only fear is that she will love the baby more than she loves him (an ironic fear, since at this point, she loves neither). She has an ultrasound in Section Eleven. The preparation of the nursery occurs in Section Fifteen, but only because Earl finds Jenna’s stash of money and she must pretend it was for the baby instead of for her escape from Earl. Section Seventeen contains the birth; as soon as Jenna sees her daughter, her demeanor changes completely and she falls in love with the child. Section Nineteen finishes off the film with Jenna and two-year-old Lulu happily baking pies for the diner, which now belongs to her.

Though the motivations and personalities involved are often quite different from those in Knocked Up, the depiction of pregnancy is remarkably similar on the functional level. Both mothers conceive during a rare, drunken sexual encounter (though in Waitress the sex takes place before the film begins, thus being part of the story but not of the plot [Bordwell, Narration 50]); both verify their pregnancy by home pregnancy tests first, with the moral support of one or more close confidants, and by a doctor’s visit second; both refuse abortions without any visible deliberation; both undergo ultrasounds; both postpone revealing their pregnancies to their employers out of fear of being fired, and are pleasantly surprised by their employers’ lack of concern; both films culminate in the labor and birth; both include brief scenes of the first year or two of the baby’s life and the family’s happiness. Both also include morning sickness, but it occurs in a different place in the narrative, which may point to a functional difference, since "the meaning which a given function has in the course of action must be considered" (Morphology 73). Allison is sick before knows she is pregnant, thus morning sickness serves as a clue to pregnancy which must be verified in a later scene with a pregnancy test, whereas Jenna’s experience with morning sickness occurs after the doctor’s verification, thus it becomes only a sign of an already confirmed pregnancy. In fact, in Waitress the signifier "being sick" signifies on both the functional level, the level of plot, and actantial level, the level of character, as defined by Roland Barthes (Image 88). Jenna is sick when Joe, the diner’s owner, reads something from his horoscope about "ones you love," and both Joe and Jenna admit that they don’t have any ones they love—thus her being sick conjures up the connotation of her revulsion regarding her husband, her unhappiness at her situation in life, and her desire to love someone. Hence "being sick" signifies both "pregnancy" and "desperately unhappy character."

As suggested by the integrational nature of the sign "being sick," Waitress is a much more character-driven narrative than Knocked Up. Though of course Knocked Up has actantial signs to indicate that, for example, Allison is ambitious and Ben is immature, there are far fewer of them than in Waitress, and many of them reinforce the same characteristics rather than reveal new or changed ones. Knocked Up has large sections that are intended only to be funny, furthering neither plot nor character, while in Waitress even the sections that are funny almost always reveal something new about the characters or refine their relationships with each other. This is largely due to the fact that Waitress is a less mainstream film than Knocked Up, aimed at festival audiences and arthouse theatres. It is not a completely independent film, being financially backed by a major studio’s specialty arm, but it has one foot in the indie world and one foot in Hollywood. This more and more common situation has led to the neologism "Indiewood" to describe such awkwardly in-between films. Indie films tend to be much more based in character than plot, and Waitress reflects that element of its indie heritage.

Juno

The expectant mother in Juno is a sixteen-year-old high school student, overly clever and a bit of an outsider. Her pregnancy is the result of her first sexual experience, which occurred before the film begins but is shown in brief, intercut flashbacks. Rather than abort or keep the child, Juno decides to give it to an adoptive couple, yuppies Mark and Vanessa. However, before the baby is born, Mark leaves Vanessa; Juno gives the baby to Vanessa anyway and renews her relationship with the Paulie Bleeker, her best friend and the baby’s father.

Again we find several of the same elements of pregnancy as in Knocked Up and Waitress, with a few notable differences. In Section Three, directly after the credits, Juno buys a pregnancy test at a convenience store (the third that day, the clerk notes) and takes it in the store’s bathroom. Though she does not have a confidant providing moral support, she shares the results with the store clerk, thus creating an ad hoc community around the confirmation of pregnancy. She then immediately calls her friend Leah, who will be a major, if rather flaky, source of support throughout the film. At this point, Juno assumes she will "procure a speedy abortion" (the only use of the term in the three American films). In Section Six, she goes to the abortion clinic, but is put off by the condom-offering teen receptionist, the general shabbiness of the place and the other women waiting, and the protestations of a picketing pro-life student. Ultimately, she cannot go through with it and decides upon adoption instead. Juno meets the prospective parents in Section Twelve, and mentions that she has been to the doctor, but that she hasn’t been sick at all. Though the doctor’s visit confirming pregnancy happens off-screen, it does occur, and though Juno is notably not subject to morning sickness, it is acknowledged as a normal sign of pregnancy. The fact that morning sickness is considered normative and Juno does not suffer from it indicates that she will not, in fact, fulfill the role of mother in the film. Also, Juno mentions that she is more concerned about getting fat, fearing the ridicule of her peers; this fear roughly corresponds to the fear that Allison and Jenna have regarding the reaction their employers will have to their pregnancies, replacing "job" with "reputation" as the potential loss. Section Fifteen contains the ultrasound. Vanessa takes over the role of motherhood that Juno has refused in Section Eighteen, as she prepares the nursery and reads What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The birth comes in Section Twenty-Three, and Section Twenty-Four wraps up the baby plot as Vanessa takes the baby home.

Note that out of twenty-three sections, only seven deal directly with the elements of pregnancy. The pregnancy is an undercurrent throughout, but most of the film deals with Juno’s attempts to make sense of a world in which relationships are easily broken, trying to find hope that two people can actually love each other forever. Mark and Vanessa seem to hold out that hope, but they break up, just as her own parents had. The pregnancy allows her to see a family which seems perfect but is deeply flawed due to Mark and Vanessa refusals to let each other be who they are, in turn allowing her to recognize the much more accepting and real love that Bleeker has for her. In one sense, the baby itself does not affect Juno’s life; she immediately gives it to Vanessa and returns to being a teenaged high-school student. But the experiences that being pregnant led to caused her to reconsider her relationship with Bleeker. Juno, like Waitress, is an Indiewood film concerned with character more than plot, yet the structure and signs of pregnancy again remain fairly similar to those found in Knocked Up.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

In 1987 Bucharest, Romania, university student Otilia makes clandestine arrangements for an unknown purpose that involve her roommate Gabita, a hotel room, a mysterious man, and a lot of money. Eventually it becomes clear that the roommate is pregnant and trying to get an abortion, which is illegal in Romania at the time, and must be handled with great secrecy to avoid arrest. After requiring extraordinary measures from the two women, the man, Bebe, induces a miscarriage, leaving them to wait until the miscarriage occurs, which could take a few hours or a few days. Otilia leaves briefly to fulfill a promised appearance at her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party, then returns to find the miscarriage complete and disposes of the fetus. The film ends in profound ambiguity, Otilia and Gabita scarred by the process, but with no clear resolution or vision for the future.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is vastly different from any of the three American films discussed above. It contains very few clues or signs of pregnancy until the mysterious man explains the about the abortion procedure, which does not happen until Section Five (out of thirteen), nearly halfway through the film. Before that point in the narrative, it would be nearly impossible to guess what is going on without having read synopses of the film. In fact, morning sickness is the only sign of pregnancy that appears in the film outside of the dialogue, and even that is not completely clear—Gabita sends Otilia to meet Bebe, claiming that she is too sick to go. And later, after Otilia tells her boyfriend that the timing of the last time they had sex puts her at risk of pregnancy (and by extension, of needing an abortion), she vomits in an alleyway. Whether these two instances of sickness can be tied definitely to pregnancy, however, is an open question—it is never revealed whether or not Otilia actually is pregnant. There are no pregnancy tests, no doctors, no ultrasounds, and obviously no preparation for a baby. The only "test" for pregnancy is having missed periods, a test which is itself ambiguous, since Gabita cannot remember (or will not reveal) how many she has actually missed. There is a birth, if the off-screen miscarriage onto the bathroom floor can be considered a birth.

Obviously the story of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days precludes many of the elements of the pregnancy plot that are present in Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno. A story foregrounding an illegal abortion stands in stark contrast to ones that follow a pregnancy to term and end happily for the protagonists. Yet it is not only the plot that interferes with 4 Months‘ use of the pregnancy codes exploited by the other three films. Initially, the film is structured as a thriller, presenting an enigma (what are these two women getting themselves into) which is answered by the revelation of the abortion in the middle; however, the questions begged by the abortion and its aftermath are never answered. Who and where is the father? He is never mentioned. Why is it so important that the baby be terminated? Presumably the cultural and political codes of the Eastern Bloc did not look any more favorably on unwed mothers than they did on abortion, and Gabita did not have the means to care for a child on her own. Relatedly, does Gabita really want to have an abortion? Several times her hesitation in answering Bebe’s questions indicates that she does not, as does her desire for Otilia to bury the fetus rather than dispose of it in the trash. Is Otilia pregnant or not? And if she is, what will happen to her? Will her boyfriend marry her, as he has said he will do in such a crisis? Or will she pursue an illegal abortion, too? In the final shot, Otilia turns and stares straight into the camera for a split second, as if relinquishing all attempts at making sense of the situation to the audience. But we have been given no more information than she has, and we are left as profoundly unsettled as she is.

The openness of the ending as well as the film’s very noticeable formal qualities indicates another genre informing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: that of the art cinema. David Bordwell suggests that art films, as exemplified by 1960s and ’70s European filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, have enough similarity in structure, style, and content to constitute a genre. He notes several elements of art cinema, including the open ending: "With the open and arbitrary ending, the art film reasserts that ambiguity is the dominant principle of intelligibility, that we are to watch less for the tale than the telling, that life lacks the neatness of art and this art knows it" ("Art Cinema" 722). 4 Months fits this description far better than any other genre it resembles, including the thriller, and as such is generically separated from the three American films, all of which are more or less comedies and essentially conform to Bordwell’s description of the classical Hollywood cinema in their tendency "to develop toward full and adequate knowledge" (Narration 159).

Comparative Analysis

This analysis shows a fairly regular similarity in the way that "pregnancy" is signified and structured in the American films. Signs that appeared in all three films include: morning sickness (or notable lack thereof, in Juno’s case), home pregnancy tests, friends and family providing moral support, a brief consideration of abortion (which is ultimately refused), doctor’s visits, ultrasounds, fear of recrimination from peers/employers, preparation for the baby’s birth (carried out in Juno by Vanessa, the surrogate mother figure), the birth itself, and a happy ending involving the creation of a couple or family unit, or both. In addition, all three American films depict the unplanned pregnancy as a fluke—none of the couples engage in frequent sex, either with each other or with other partners. The Romanian film contains only a few of these pregnancy elements, and they are either ambiguous or markedly different from the American films in most cases: possibly morning sickness, something like a birth but not really, a friend providing moral support (and in fact, Otilia, the friend, is really the main character), an abortion, and fear not only of disapproval, but of criminal charges.

The way abortion is treated across the four films is particularly interesting. Obviously it is the main plot point in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in a way that it cannot be in a post-Roe vs. Wade American film. Abortions are neither illegal nor difficult to obtain in the United States, and most people opposed to them are so out of moral or religious conviction. None of the women in the American films are portrayed as religious, and Allison and Juno have particular pressure on them from peers to get rid of the child. Jenna seems to have ethical reasons for not wanting an abortion, but neither her nor Allison’s decision making processes are revealed. Only Juno seems to seriously consider an abortion. One reason for this resistance to abortion is simply that the stories would not exist, could not exist in the modern United States without the mother’s conscious decision to keep the baby. The cultural norms demand that abortion be an option, but it must be eschewed, or the stories all end within twenty minutes. But why is the unplanned-pregnancy-leading-to-a-birth-and-happy-family story so popular all of a sudden? Perhaps we want to present an image of abortion as an option, but a desperate option; perhaps we want to say that keeping the baby is better and ultimately leads to greater happiness and sense of self. Ben becomes a more mature, more responsible adult through becoming a father. Jenna gains the strength and confidence to escape her marriage at least partially by taking on motherhood. Juno learns not to fear pursuing her friendship/relationship with Bleeker only after she has a child with him. In a way, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days follows this supposition, because for Gabita, abortion is a desperate option—so desperate that she is willing to risk murder charges to get one. Her historical situation is different from ours, but perhaps she is not so different from Allison, Jenna, and Juno, had the situations been reversed.

Conclusion

It might be possible to constitute a genre of the unplanned pregnancy based on the analysis of the three American films. The elements of pregnancy are treated quite similarly, and the effects of the pregnancy on the overall story, though clearly different based on the needs of the individual stories and to some degree on the expected audience, are generally the same: the pregnancy acts as a catalyst to improve the characters’ lives and relationships by encouraging them to become better or more understanding people. Thomas Schatz points out that differences between individual films of the same genre are to be expected, borrowing Saussure’s linguistic terminology to argue that "we might think of the film genre as a specific genre or system or rules of expression and construction and the individual genre films as a manifestation of those rules" (644). However, it must also be noted that even though the three American films fall into different subgenres of comedy (Judd Apatow, dramedy, teen comedy), they still remain essentially comedic and their depiction of pregnancy itself is not particularly altered by generic considerations. On the other hand, bringing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days into the mix creates a great deal more confusion. Its thriller and art cinema elements alter the pregnancy story quite a lot even beyond the obvious substitution of abortion for full-term pregnancy. Its purpose is not to create a happy family out of the situation, nor to make better people out of its characters. Rather, its purposes are ambiguous, more concerned with evoking a mood, a horror, and an unsettling of the audience’s assumptions about pregnancy and abortion than in creating a conventionally satisfying story around them. Because 4 Months is the only one of these films to break significantly from the rest, it seems to disrupt what was a fairly good generic construct. However, it is also possible that the only reason the generic construct worked for the American films is that they also share many other generic considerations. Hence, the question of whether or not "unplanned pregnancy" constitutes a recognizable genre does not yet have a conclusive answer. Perhaps they do only within American cinema. Perhaps they do only within a specific genre. If 2007’s burst of unplanned pregnancy films continues in the future, the question can be reopened as new films in different genres and from different countries are added to the corpus.

[1] A combination of drama and comedy, usually indicating a drama with a comedic edge or a comedy with dramatic undercurrents—too serious to be easily classed as comedy, but too funny to be purely drama.

[2] By "audience" in this paper, I mean whether the film was produced by a major Hollywood studio and intended for a wide release into mainstream multiplexes, or if it was produced by an independent filmmaker and was shown at film festivals and in limited release. Both Waitress and Juno fall somewhere in between.

Works Cited

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. Perf. Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov. IFC First Take, 2007.

Altman, Rick. "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre." Cinema Journal 23.3 (1984): 6-18. Rpt. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th Ed. NY: OUP, 1999. 630-641.

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. NY: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Bordwell, David. "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice." Film Criticism 4.1 (1979). Rpt. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th Ed. NY: OUP, 1999. 716-724.

—. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Juno. Written by Diablo Cody. Dir. Jason Reitman. Perf. Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman. Fox Searchlight, 2007.

Knocked Up. Written and directed by Judd Apatow. Perf. Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl. Universal Pictures, 2007.

Propp, Vladimir. From Morphology of the Folk Tale. Rpt. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2^nd Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 72-75.

—. "The Distribution of Functions Among Dramatis Personae." Morphology of the Folk Tale. 79-83. (class handout; do not know full bibliographic information)

Saussure, Ferdinand de. From Course in General Linguistics. Rpt. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2^nd Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 59-71.

Schatz, Thomas. "Film Genre and the Genre Film." Hollywood Genres. McGraw-Hill, 1981. Rpt. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th Ed. NY: OUP, 1999. 642-653.

Waitress. Written and directed by Adrienne Shelly. Perf. Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Cheryl Hines, Adrienne Shelly. Fox Searchlight, 2007.

This article was originally written in February 2008 for a class in Critical Theory at Baylor University.

Postmodernism’s relationship to modernism is similarly disputed, as some critics see it as a rejection, others as a continuation of the modernist project (Waugh 113). The fact that postmodernism has received the level of attention that it has indicates the real cultural and aesthetic shift it represents, but the degree of that shift changes drastically depending on who is evaluating it. Modernism itself is often considered the last breath of the Enlightenment’s grand view of human progress (Waugh 87), yet its literary practitioners explicitly rejected the previous generation of Victorians as well as the even earlier Romantic tradition (Faulkner 22). Each movement, it seems, believes it essential to declare itself at odds with the movement preceding it in order to establish itself as a new and important mode of thinking and behaving. However, close connections exist between modernism and Romanticism, from the emphasis on the individual and the growth of interior space to the rejection of established literary styles. Similarly, postmodernism may not be quite as complete a rejection of modernism as postmodernist critics like Ihab Hassan, who tabulates binary oppositions between the two in a table (Brookings 11), would have us believe. Many modernist writers, like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf are now being considered by Hassan and others for their postmodern tendencies (Brookings 11, Wilde 19), which either suggests that these authors were particularly ahead of their time in anticipating postmodernism (which has some truth in it, given their constant innovation, yet they are also considered the height of literary modernism), or that modernism itself contains the seeds of postmodernism and the relationship between the two is much more complex than Hassan’s set of dichotomies would indicate.

In order to explore the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, it is necessary to look more closely at the way the two terms are defined and used, especially by the postmodernists who wish to define themselves in opposition to modernism. In the introduction to A Postmodern Reader, Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon define postmodernism based on the large group of essays they have included in the anthology:

[The term is] used to describe a major […] shift away from modernity’s universalizing and totalizing drive—a drive that was first fueled, in the seventeenth century, by Descartes’ foundational ambitions and his faith in reason. […] Postmodern paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, and contingency are seen to replace modern closure, unity, order, the absolute, and the rational. (ix)

As Natoli and Hutcheon admit, this definition paints with broad strokes, but they stand by it as depicting the stance taken in the majority of the seminal essays they reproduce. However, as perhaps obliquely indicated in their definition, it is important to distinguish between the cultural conditions of modernity and the aesthetic movement of modernism. Modernity truly is the culmination of the Enlightenment project, which, skeptical towards religion and myth, refocused attention from divine authority onto human autonomy and placed its faith in rationality and human progress—a course of thought leading to scientific positivism, industrialization, and a belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Postmodernism rejects the “universalising and rationalist metanarratives of the Enlightenment” (Waugh 87), and hence one might naturally assume that it also rejects modernism. However, though the human focus of Enlightenment thinking is certainly included in modernism’s focus on individual consciousness and subjectivity, modernism is deeply suspicious of many aspects of modernity and to conflate the modernist movement with the condition of modernity would be to misunderstand modernism and its concerns.

In fact, the very words that Natoli and Hutcheon use in the quote above to define postmodern tendencies—paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, contingency—also describe modernist literature, and the words used to define modern tendencies—closure, unity, order, absolute, rational—actually describe what much of what literary modernism rejects. In 1966, when postmodernism was just beginning to become a critical category, Alan Friedman claimed that “a turn” had occurred in the history of the novel in the early twentieth century—he defined this turn as a shift from presenting closed endings to leaving endings open, with a sense that life and experience goes on after the end of the novel (17). He gives examples from Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, in which the heroic myth of the main character continues to expand even after he himself is morally defeated, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, whose ending completes the novel but not the lives of the characters (Friedman 32, 96). Numerous examples of modernism’s open endings could be cited, from Ursula’s ambiguous vision at the end of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) to Conrad’s inconclusive Heart of Darkness, in which Charlie Marlow never even finishes the last sentence of his narrative-within-the-narrative: “It would have been too dark—too dark altogether…” (77). All of these are modernist novels, yet their sense of closure is already being redefined—the postmodernist novel merely takes the tendency toward open endings another step, refusing not only “to be ‘final,’ but [insisting] on its right to be not even ‘satisfying’” (Friedman 105).

As well as reserving the right to be unsatisfying, postmodernist novels sometimes amplify their ambiguity by including multiple endings or possible narrative paths within the work itself, as in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). However, this step, too, is a progression from modernism, not a reaction against it. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway never completely resolves the ambiguity surrounding Clarissa’s relationship with Peter (why exactly did she not marry him, why is she suddenly thinking about him thirty years later, what sort of relationship will she pursue with him now), with Richard (why did she marry him, does she really love him, and what will Peter’s return mean for their marriage), or even with Sally Seton, whose kiss gave her “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” (52). The very ending is not only open in the sense that the characters lives are not complete when the book finishes, but is ambiguous, refusing to reveal for sure whether Clarissa remains in her comfortable but somewhat boring marriage to Richard or leaves it. The ending is not quite unsatisfying, but it does not provide complete closure, either. There may only be one ending, unlike postmodernism’s more experimental novels, but there are a multitude of possible interpretations of that ending.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is even more replete with ambiguity—is Kurtz mad, what made him go mad, what are the unspeakable rites, what is Marlow’s relationship to Kurtz, how does Marlow keep from going mad, does Marlow achieve redemption or closure, how will his story affect the other passengers, what is the heart of darkness? Conrad’s unnamed narrator lets the reader know immediately that Marlow’s story will have neither a simple meaning nor an easy ending:

But Marlow was not typical […] and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (5)

In a traditional adventure story, the reader might expect to finally understand what lies behind the heart of darkness and exactly what it is that has driven Kurtz to madness. However, the only clue Kurtz leaves is his final cry “The horror! The horror!” (69). Marlow claims that this statement is a summing up of Kurtz’s experience, but both Peter Brooks and Patrick Whiteley doubt this is actually so (Brooks 380, Whiteley 38). Throughout Heart of Darkness, Marlow consistently characterizes the darkness of the jungle, and by extension, the human soul, as “very quiet” (35), “mute” (65), full of “unspeakable rites” (50) and “unspeakable secrets” (62). Language is not sufficient to penetrate the heart of darkness, for it is silent there. Kurtz’s ambiguous “the horror” has no referent, cannot be fully articulated and thus cannot be fully known.

The inadequacy of language to express what really matters is a common theme in modernist literature; Conrad tends to be less optimistic than other modernist writers, and rather than try to overcome the inadequacy of Kurtz’s final pronouncement, leaves Marlow and the rest of the passengers stranded on the Thames, looking into “the heart of immense darkness” (77). The breakdown of language prompted more optimistic writers like Woolf and Joyce to invent new languages, modern languages, to replace the old, worn-out language (Malamud 6-7). Woolf uses stream of consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse to pour out a deluge of thoughts and sensory images unbounded by reason and logic (Malamud 9). Her language is instead ordered by the fragmentation of perception and memory, as she suggested novels should be: “The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old” (“Modern Fiction” 108). Randy Malamud points out the failure of language as communication in Woolf’s The Years (1937), quoting passages that repeatedly show people speaking things they had not meant to say, or being interrupted in conversation and unable to remember where they left off. Eventually, having given up on conversation, a new, nonsensical language emerges: “Each giving the other a little nudge, they burst into song: Etho passo tanno hai, / Fai donk to tu do, / Mai to, kai to, lai to see / Toh dom to tuh do— […] ‘But it was…’ Eleanor began. […] ‘Beautiful?’” (qtd in Malamud, 43-44). Woolf’s intention is to find beauty in a broken world, and she turns to seemingly meaningless language to do so. Even in her very first novel The Voyage Out (1915), which is generally quite conventional, includes this idea of the beauty of meaning-deprived language: “He shouted out a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled along lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the beauty of the words” (191). Both Malamud and Alan Wilde discuss Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts (1941), Malamud claiming it for modernism in its depiction of a new language for a new generation (Malamud 49-50), but Wilde claiming it for postmodernism in its linguistic and ironic ambivalence: “What we have here is not modernism’s balanced ‘either-or’ but […] postmodernism’s more comprehensive ‘both-and’” (Wilde 19-20). Woolf’s new language was meant to speak to the needs of modernity, but its implications and innovations stretch beyond modernism into postmodernism.

For Joyce, the need for a new language manifested itself in the mutating language depicting Stephen Deadalus’s increasing age and maturity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in the fragmented sensory descriptions in Ulysses, and in the wholly new language he created for Finnegans Wake (1939). His experiments in language and structure in both of the latter novels are often claimed for postmodernism as well as modernism, indicating a link between the modernist search for an adequate language to express uniquely modern concerns and the postmodern tendency to indulge in language-play. The distinction between the two is mostly purpose: Joyce and Woolf need to disrupt existing language and create new language to understand and describe modernity—they need new signifiers for a new signified; postmodern writers, on the other hand, have stopped looking for meaning in a meaningless, constructed world, and thus wish to explore linguistic possibility on its own terms—the signifier becomes all. Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947) is an early example of postmodern language play, giving the same extremely brief story over and over in different styles. The story has no meaning outside itself, and exists only for the sake of its stylistic and linguistic permutations. Though the distinctions are real, postmodernism inherits its desire to test the limits of language directly from modernism.

The attribution of “unity” and “order” is applicable to the modernist novel only in that modernist authors continue to seek some semblance of unity and order, though they suggest that if unity and order exist, they are only created temporarily and subjectively. The modernist trend is toward the fragmentation of self and experience rather than unity or order. Clarissa Dalloway draws the many disparate parts of herself together for public occasions, but that does not completely negate her fragmented self: “That was herself when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman” (55). Even more fragmented is the picture of the self Joseph Conrad depicts in Heart of Darkness, as Marlow and Kurtz can be read symbolically as two halves of the same person. Conrad’s narrative technique draws attention to the fragmented nature of experience—Kurtz’s character and actions are revealed slowly, piecemeal, from three or four different perspectives. Woolf rejects traditional linear order in her novels as she attempts to depict simultaneity and the psychological experience of time (Dick 54). Conrad, too, has Marlow narrate his experience out of order at times to emphasize the fact that perception and memory are not orderly things. The leap from modernism to postmodernism in this case is the leap from desiring a form of unity and order in a fragmented world to accepting and embracing fragmentation as inevitable. Though the two are admittedly different responses, postmodernism represents a natural progression from the concerns of modernism rather than a rejection of them.

Many postmodernist critics claim that postmodernism gives freedom from the unified “grand narratives” of Enlightenment modernism and instead presents “little narratives” (Waugh 87). However, far from endorsing a totalizing narrative, modernist authors are intent on showing individual experience, pointing out the subjectivity of all perception, and focusing on fleeting days and moments. Both Joyce and Woolf write one-day novels in Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, exploring different consciousnesses and different perspectives on the same things. Though the onlookers in Mrs. Dalloway’s London are united in watching the skywriting aeroplane, they cannot agree on what it is writing (29). Later in the novel, Peter’s point of view on the ambulance going by is vastly different that of Septimus, who is inside it, or the reader, who knows that Peter’s suppositions about it are inaccurate (229). In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe has difficulty with her painting because she insists on painting it the way she sees reality, rather than conforming to the way trendsetting painter Mr. Paunceforte has decided reality should be seen (18-19). She eventually finds meaning not through an overarching narrative, but through her art, which is built on momentary impressions: “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” (161). Woolf’s criticism argues that plot or narrative itself is not, or should not be, necessarily the goal for authors: “If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, and not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (“Modern Fiction” 108).

Conrad, too, shows the impossibility of a single authoritative narrative clearly in Nostromo. For the first half of the novel, Nostromo is more talked about than seen, and the various descriptions of him create a heroic figure of near-mythic proportions—a portrait which is dashed in the second half as Nostromo takes center state and reveals that even he is deeply implicated in the materialist culture around him. To drive the point even further, Conrad has a minor character narrate the final stages of the climactic revolution and his account, though apparently factually accurate, does not fit with what has previously been revealed about the characters in the rest of the novel (316-27). Conrad layers narration upon narration, encouraging the reader to question the reliability of any of his narrators. Not only is there no grand narrative for Conrad, but even his little narratives relentlessly expose the mankind’s corruption—the opposite of the Enlightenment’s hope for human perfectibility.

The self-consciousness of Conrad’s narrative strategies calls attention to another connection between modernism and postmodernism, that of self-conscious or self-reflexive writing itself. A hallmark of postmodernism is the self-awareness of its texts; for example, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), in which many books are started, none finished, and is ultimately about the process of reading itself. Several stories by Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote his major fiction in the 1940s, earlier than historical postmodernism, but has marked postmodern leanings) are explicitly about writing and the process of building a text (and thus a world), from the fiction-into-reality tale “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” to the consideration of what historical context means to authorship in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” and the description of the library which contains all possible permutations of all possible works, “The Library of Babel.” A distinction is often made here between modernist self-consciousness and postmodernist self-reflexivity—“Modernist works are about consciousness or reality, while postmodernist texts are about writing and fiction” (Caughie 31)—yet modernist authors are also very aware of their own work’s constructedness, their own writing process.

Calling attention to narration itself as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes calls attention to the unreality, the artifice, of the novel. In Under Western Eyes, Rasumov even argues at one point that he is “not a young man in a novel,” which of course immediately reminds the reader that that is precisely what he is (132). The multiple levels of narration in Heart of Darkness act even more strongly than the interpolated narration of Nostromo to question narrative reliability. Heart of Darkness’s unnamed frame narrator is neither omniscient nor objective and his descriptions of Marlow both support and undercut Marlow’s narrative, suggesting both that Marlow is like Buddha, a bringer of wisdom, and that he has faults as a storyteller (6-7). There is a sense in which Heart of Darkness is as much about storytelling itself as it is about the story being told.

Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative technique also draws attention to itself, asking the reader to interpret the work based on not only what the narrator says, but on whose consciousness is being evoked at any given moment. But there is an even more compelling example of Woolf’s self-reflexivity than her narrative technique. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe is an artist rather than a writer or storyteller, but Woolf’s depiction of her painting and the difficulty involved in realizing her creative vision closely mirrors the difficulty of writing, illustrating the close relation between all forms of creative activity:

She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. (19)

Lily is Woolf’s substitute for herself in the novel, the artist figure who attempts to create balance in her work. Lily is concerned about the relationship in her painting between light and dark; when asked about a dark shape, she says it impressionistically represents Mrs. Ramsay and James, and that it is needed to balance a bright spot somewhere else in the painting (52). In the third section of the novel, Lily moves her attention back and forth between the window she associates with Mrs. Ramsay and the boat carrying Mr. Ramsay and the children to the lighthouse, suggesting that if the dark shape is Mrs. Ramsay, the bright one is Mr. Ramsay, and her goal is to create balance between the two (Caughie 33). Of course, this is precisely what Woolf is doing in the novel—exploring the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their children (especially James) through a series of impressions and moments. Rather than ending with the moment of connection between Mr. Ramsay and James, the novel’s final chapter ends with Lily applying the finishing stroke to her painting, just as Woolf is writing the final words in her novel (Kolner). Pamela Caughie even attributes the narration of the last section of the novel completely to Lily, granting her a specifically authorial role as well as a generally creative one; if that is the case, then Lily’s connection to Woolf is even stronger (36). Either way, it is clear that Woolf’s self-awareness in To the Lighthouse is not only about consciousness, it is also about writing as a creative process.

Woolf is similarly self-aware of both her own writing process and older writing styles in Orlando, which verges on pastiche in its imitation of the pre-modern literary styles. Fredric Jameson defines both pastiche and parody as “the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles,” but then distinguishes them by suggesting that parody mocks the idiosyncrasies of the original work while pastiche uses previous styles without laughing at them (166-167). This marks, he says, the difference between modernism (parody) and postmodernism (pastiche), and locates the difference in the postmodern loss of stylistic norms with which to compare the idiosyncratic (167). However, though Orlando is quite humorous in tone, Woolf does not seem to intend to mock her literary ancestors in a negative way (as Lytton Strachey did in his Eminent Victorians)—hence even according to Jameson’s definitions, Orlando can probably be considered postmodern in its appropriation of earlier writing styles.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of postmodernism is, in fact, its gleeful appropriation of older styles, idioms, even earlier texts or history itself, leading poet Andrei Codrescu to proclaim “Get It Used” as the postmodernist answer to Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan “Make It New” (Kershner 76). Umberto Eco’s formulation of intertextuality suggests that in some way all works inform one another and “talk to each other” (“Borges” 122), and his novels deliciously play with the medieval (The Name of the Rose, 1980, and Baudolino, 2000), the cultic (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988), the Baroque (The Island of the Day Before, 1994), and pop culture (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2004). Discussing the use of irony in modernism and postmodernism, Eco suggests that “with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously,” going on to clarify, with quotes from John Barth and Leslie Fiedler, that the quintessentially postmodernist work would be instantly accessible to any audience, and yet have increased interest for those who “understand the game” (Eco “Postmodernism” 227).

The film The Matrix (1999) perfectly illustrates Eco’s concept of an easily-accessible yet richly allusive postmodernist work in its use of Christian, Buddhist, and even Lewis Carroll symbolism almost solely for the sake of reusing the past—the concepts are nearly divorced at times from their original contexts and depend only on a general and culturally available familiarity with the terms invoked. However, in the same essay Eco calls Joyce’s Finnegans Wake a postmodern novel, and Ulysses a borderline case (“Postmodernism” 227)—certainly he is not alone in claiming Finnegans Wake or even Ulysses for postmodernism, but in terms of accessibility, both of them fit much better in the intentionally difficult modernist paradigm. Yet this distinction, too, is not as definite as it could be. Eco’s novels themselves are rather inaccessible—not because knowledge of earlier styles and content is necessary to understand them, but simply because they require a level of attention and perseverance far greater than the average novel. Similarly, postmodernist experimental novels like those of Calvino or Thomas Pynchon may be read, but not necessarily enjoyed, without at least a cursory knowledge of their underlying conceits. On the other hand, modernist or borderline postmodernist works like Ulysses and The Waste Land rely heavily on mythic allusion and structure (Faulkner 21)—not perhaps in a way that could be labeled “pastiche,” but that certainly would fall under “Get It Used.”

Postmodernism’s at least theoretic move toward accessibility as well as its embrace of low culture and commercial art forms stand in opposition to modernism’s outcry against commercialism and the lack of interest in art they saw surrounding them (Kershner 43-44). If reality is artifice, as Jean Baudrillard argues (Baudrillard 188), then everything is art according to postmodernism, from literary novels and museum paintings to high-school doodles and traffic intersections. The erasure of the dichotomy between high art and low art may be the most clear distinction between modernism and postmodernism—though note in passing Woolf’s apparent endorsement of the low-culture circus in To the Lighthouse as opposed to the high-culture Ibsen (12) and William Faulkner’s use of the typically low-art detective story genre—and forms part of postmodernism’s general inclusivity as opposed to modernism’s exclusivity or elitism. Though all modernist writers did not always agree on the proper direction the movement should take, they generally agreed on what they were rejecting or excluding: Victorian codes of conduct, “traditional” forms of writing, representational art, externally imposed order, etc. Postmodernists, on the other hand, do not agree even on what they will take or leave from previous generations of writers. There are nearly as many formulations of postmodernism as there are writers, critics, or artists who are considered postmodernist. The effect of inclusivity is best illustrated by the explosion of interest in literature from marginalized groups, whether it be from former colonial areas, women, African-Americans, or others. Though postcolonialism is associated with poststructuralist theory, which is generally, though not exclusively, postmodern in outlook, there may be a foreshadowing of it in modernism.

Woolf is obviously a forerunner of feminist criticism, both highlighting specifically feminine narratives in her novels and arguing for a feminine literary tradition in her criticism, notably A Room of Her Own. She and other modernist women writers like Dorothy Richardson clearly anticipate the postmodernist criticism interested in literary feminism. If we allow art to intrude on our discussion of literary modernism for a moment, it is notable that post-impressionist and modernist artists, especially Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, were influenced by the art of “primitive” or marginalized groups. Gauguin, of course, is famous for his paintings of Tahitian natives, and Picasso gained inspiration from African sculpture and tribal masks. If literary modernism were extended to include the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, an extension some critics are more willing to make than others, then the connections between modernism and postcolonial literature become even stronger.

In all of the areas identified above—closed versus open endings, ambiguity, language, unity and order, grand versus little narratives, self-reflexivity, pastiche and appropriation, complexity versus accessibility, exclusivity versus inclusivity—modernism contains the elements that would later become central to postmodernism. In most cases, modernism had already taken one step in reaction against Enlightenment thinking, and postmodernism has just taken one more. Frederic Jameson admits the connections between modernism and postmodernism:

The principle objection to concepts of postmodernism of the type I have sketched here [is] namely that all the features we have enumerated are not new at all but abundantly characterized modernism proper or what I call high modernism. […] I must limit myself to the suggestion that radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes of content but rather the restructuring of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant became secondary. (177)

Refining this formulation, Brian McHale defines the dominant feature or focus of modernism as epistemological and the dominant of postmodernism as ontological. In other words, modernism foregrounds questions of knowledge—“How can I interpret this world of which I am a part?” (McHale 9)—and postmodernism foregrounds questions of being—“Which world is this?” (McHale 10). These questions are closely related, because they beg each other; each question, once it is answered, must be followed the other. McHale’s contention is that while both modernist and postmodernist fiction will ask both epistemological and ontological questions, one will always be asked first, determining the work’s status as modernist or postmodernist. My contention is that, as postmodern readers, these two questions are too closely related to ever be separated when we read either modernist or postmodernist fiction, and that modernism and postmodernism are thus too closely related to be separated into the dichotomies of opposites that critics find so appealing. There are distinctions between the two modes, but the distinctions are neither absolute, nor clearly demarcated. Both modernist and postmodernist tendencies can be found throughout modernist and postmodernist works, and trying to ignore that slippage is as reductive as trying to force either modernism or postmodernism into neat and tidy definitions.

Works Consulted

This paper originated in June 2007 for “Modern British Literature: Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf” at Baylor University.

However, such an economic answer is not very encouraging to the study of film as art, and indeed, does not fully explain the several recent Austen adaptations that either modernize Austen’s story to the present day or significantly modify the original novel, even to the point of alienating the very fans they seek. A 2003 version of Pride and Prejudice sets the story among twentieth century Mormons in Salt Lake City. Director Amy Heckerling transposes Emma to a Beverly Hills high school in her 1995 film Clueless. Modern-day India becomes the scene for director Gurinder Chadha’s 1995 populist Bride and Prejudice, as well as a South Indian version of Sense and Sensibility, titled Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It in Tamil), released in 2000. Perhaps most controversial of all, director Patricia Rozema’s 1999 version of Mansfield Park sparked outrage among Austen fans for a number of reasons: though she retains the novel’s nineteenth-century setting, Rozema conflates the character of Fanny Price with Austen herself (as revealed in Austen’s journals and letters), follows recent Austen poststructuralist criticism in emphasizing the colonial slavery that supports life at Mansfield Park, and plays up the film’s sensuality far beyond what is overtly in the novel. It is clear that these filmmakers are not even attempting to make purely faithful films. Yet both Mansfield Park and Clueless in particular are very well-made films, and both continue to garner much more critical attention than traditionally faithful renditions, suggesting that the status of fidelity as the only acceptable mode of adaptation must be reconsidered.

In Novels into Film (1957), the first book-length academic treatment of adaptation, George Bluestone lays out some fundamental principles of adaptation, taking into account the differences between the two mediums and the importance of translating a novel into a film-specific form in order for an adaptation to be successful. However, more recent theorists point out that Bluestone continues to give the novel priority over the film, and thus makes film “seem belated, middlebrow, or culturally inferior” (Naremore 6). Brian McFarlane points out that the fidelity mode of adaptation is doomed from the outset, since it “depends on the notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (McFarlane 8). Since any two readers may come away from the same book with different meanings, and certainly with different mental images of what the book “looks like,” a filmmaker who expects to please every reader is bound to be disappointed. Robert Stam suggests that explicitly viewing a film adaptation as one of many possible readings of the source work is a more helpful approach: “An adaptation, in this sense, is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogic process.” (Stam, “Beyond” 64) In other words, an adaptation is part of a conversation—the same intertextual conversation that has been going on between books for centuries, as when Virgil used The Iliad and The Odyssey as jumping-off points for the Aeneid, or when James Joyce recast The Odyssey into a single day in one Dublin man’s life (Stam, “Beyond” 66). Films are often excluded from this cycle of intertextuality, and treated as though their purpose is a bastardized way to experience literature for a culture that no longer reads—a sort of visual Cliff-Notes.

Stam’s healthier approach rescues film from a second-place cultural status, opens literature to include the contributions of the cinematic form, and allows filmmakers more freedom to exercise their own creativity. Some may suggest that this freedom is not, in fact, warranted—that the filmmaker should not have the right to reinvent their source, as Rozema does with Mansfield Park. However, such a position indicates a double-standard, because, as mentioned above, books have been borrowing from each other for centuries. As Stam points out: “The ideal of a single, definitive, faithful adaptation does not hold sway in any other media. In the theatre, conceptual reinterpretation and performative innovation—for example, in Orson Welles’s modern-dress Julius Caesar or his Haiti-set ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth—are seen as normal, even prized” (Stam, “Theory” 15). Even beyond the creative license taken in staging that Stam mentions, theatrical shows like West Side Story and My Fair Lady truly adapt and modify their sources. Hardly anyone would claim that these theatrical adaptations represent an affront to the original work, nor would anyone say that Joyce somehow “betrayed” Homer in writing Ulysses, or that Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is a lesser work because he modified his sources. Rather, they are celebrated because their works are creative and innovative. Only filmmakers, then, are castigated for doing what all other artists are praised for—adding their own sensibilities and visions to the literary conversation. Writer/director Alain Resnais once said: “Simply adapting a novel without changing it is like reheating a meal” (qtd. in Stam, “Theory” 16). So far from assuming that the film industry’s work is done once one definitively faithful adaptation has been released, the critical reading mode of adaptation allows for and even encourages many different adaptations, each filtered through the particular point of view of its respective filmmaker.

Not all critics working on adaptation theory are quite as polemical as Stam; McFarlane regards fidelity as one possible and perfectly acceptable type of adaptation, though he does wish to see fidelity criticism devalued from its present privileged status. He states that it is important to discern which type of adaptation the filmmaker is attempting—only then can the critic begin to determine whether or not the adaptation has been successful. Many theorists, including Dudley Andrew and narratologist Gérard Genette have formulated categories of adaptation based on varying degrees of faithfulness; one of the most accessible set of categories comes from Geoffrey Wagner, who postulates transposition as faithful adaptation, commentary wherein the “original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect,” and analogy, which represents “a fairly considerable departure for the sake of making another work of art” (qtd. in McFarlane 10-11). As McFarlane concludes: “There are many kinds of relations which may exist between film and literature, and fidelity is only one—and rarely the most exciting” (McFarlane 11).

Taking the idea of adaptation as critical reading a step further, Christopher Orr suggests that intertextual criticism sees the source text as a resource: “The issue is not whether the adapted film is faithful to its source, but rather how the choice of a specific source and how the approach to that source serve the film’s ideology” (qtd. in McFarlane 10). Many literary critics see the idea of literature as a resource as a threat—indeed, film itself has been seen as a threat to literature since its invention, and much of the criticism on adaptation has been based on an assumption of a bitter rivalry between literature and film, as though the existence of one meant the imminent demise of the other when really, each art stands to gain through exposure to the other. Indeed, theorist Béla Balázs, who also happened to be both a novelist and a filmmaker, suggested that a filmmaker “may use the existing work of art merely as raw material” (qtd. in Beja 80). One of the most compelling objections to using literature as a resource for film is the possibility that the film’s audience will be misled into a false understanding of the book. However, this is not an intrinsic problem with adaptation as much as a problem of audiences being used to spoon-fed adaptations dictated by goals of fidelity. If Stam, McFarlane, and others are correct and fidelity should be devalued as a criterion in adaptation criticism, then critics and filmmakers must lead the way, teaching audiences that watching the film is not the same thing as reading the book, but that experiencing both can be more valuable than either on its own. A second objection is based on the mercenary, unfeeling connotation of the word “use,” which suggests a betrayal by a lover. Perhaps rather than thinking of the literature-as-resource approach as a filmmaker wringing the life from a literary source and then tossing the used source away carelessly, it would be more helpful to see this style of adaptation as a recognition that the original story has value even beyond what the original author envisioned. Certainly Shakespeare could not have foreseen that Romeo and Juliet would one day be applicable to New York City street gangs, yet Steven Sondheim saw the relevance and created West Side Story. In this way, the original becomes even more pervasive and influential through its “use” as a resource.

I have been drawing my examples from the novels of Jane Austen and their adaptations, simply because there have been so many in the past decade, many of them very faithful to the book (the 1995 and 2005 versions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion), others very free in their adaptation. Clueless and Mansfield Park have already received a fair amount of critical attention, and Mansfield Park in particular exemplifies the idea of a film as a critical reading of the source text, since it does, in fact, incorporate postcolonial and feminist theory into the story itself. However, the Austen adaptation that best displays intertextuality is Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 film Bride and Prejudice. Chadha reimagines Pride and Prejudice in terms of an American-Indian culture clash, infusing Austen’s novel with elements borrowed from the mainstream Indian cinema, commonly called “Bollywood.” The term “Bollywood” is a mixture of “Hollywood” and “Bombay,” the city (now called Mumbai) in which the Hindi film industry is centered. Combining Bollywood with the South Indian cinema centered in Chennai, India has the largest film industry in the world, producing nearly twice as many films per year as Hollywood does, and grossing about $3.6 billion in worldwide sales annually, compared to Hollywood’s $2.6 billion (Kasbekar 181). Much of this worldwide popularity is due to the diaspora of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), especially in British Commonwealth countries. Recent years have seen an upswing in the number of Indian films specifically aimed at this diasporic population, such as Kal Ho Naa Ho, which is set entirely in New York City. Meanwhile, NRIs like Gurinder Chadha (she is of Indian heritage, but has lived in London from the age of two) are approaching the question of what it means to be Indian in an increasingly globalized world.

In Bride and Prejudice, the Bennets become the Bakshis, a middle-class farming family in Amritsar, India. Balraj and Kiran Bingley, NRIs living in London, arrive in Amritsar for a wedding, bringing along with them Balraj’s American friend Will Darcy, heir to a multi-million dollar hotel chain. From Will’s first meeting with Lalita Bakshi (the Elizabeth character), the two draw battle lines between Will’s perception of India as backward and Lalita’s perception of Will as an arrogant outsider. He struggles with the Indian clothes he wears, refuses to participate in the unfamiliar Indian dances, is discontented with his hotel (the best in town), incredulous that business can be conducted in India at all with its lack of infrastructure, and believes that arranged marriages are weird. Lalita takes these criticisms of her country as a personal affront, and her preconceived opinion of Will as an insensitive Westerner leads her to misinterpret everything he says. When Will suggests that his interest in buying a hotel in the resort town of Goa proves he does not think India is beneath him, Lalita retorts “You think this is India?” referring to the touristy resort area and disdaining the tourist trade which threatens to turn India into a theme park. In order to win her, Will must learn to respect all of India, not just those parts which most approximate the United States.

When Johnny Wickham arrives, Lalita is immediately taken with him because he seems to respect the Indian way of life, and does everything that Will fails to do. He tells Lalita the great thing about India is “you don’t have to have money to enjoy this place, and if you have money, you never get to see the real India,” a direct reference to Will’s wealth. Johnny’s attitude is contrasted what that of Mrs. Darcy (Lady Catherine de Bourgh, now Will’s mother), who declines to consider visiting India unless she can stay in a four-star hotel. When Johnny visits the Bakshi family, he greets Mrs. Bakshi with a “namaste,” the traditional Indian greeting/blessing, and that evening enters wholeheartedly into Indian dancing. However, to assume that Lalita’s desire that Westerners understand her country means that she herself is completely in line with its traditions would be a mistake. She is clearly not willing to submit to the traditional idea of marriage in India, with its connotations of a subservient wife. She faces this option in the person of Mr. Kholi, the Mr. Collins character, who has returned from Los Angeles to find a bride from among his extended family. But Kholi expects a bride who will cater to his every whim and fawn over him because of his million-dollar home and his connections with the business elite. Lalita will have nothing to do with this, preferring to go against tradition and remain single and childless unless she finds love. Of course, this is not necessary, since Johnny is revealed as less than honorable and Lalita and Will both learn to overcome their respective prejudice and pride as they grow to love each other.

An examination of the films Chadha has directed up to and including Bride and Prejudice reveals her preoccupation with Indian cultural identity and the relations between Indians and Westerners. Bhaji on the Beach (1993) follows a group of Anglo-Indian women as they go on vacation, dealing with issues of generational and racial identity, while both A Nice Arrangement (1994) and Chadha’s breakout hit Bend It Like Beckham (2002) deal with the attempts of traditional Indian families in London to keep their daughters from becoming too Anglicized—in the latter case, from playing soccer and dating the English captain of her team. It is important to note the focus of Chadha’s earlier films because, as the auteur theory suggests, many directors act as the author of their films, infusing all or most of their work with their own personal vision. The auteur theory was originated by film critics writing for the Paris film journal Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s, several of whom, including Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, would become directors themselves and usher in the French New Wave. Truffaut’s 1954 article Une certaine tendance du cinéma française posited a politique des auteurs, or a politic of the author—the author being the creative mind behind a film, usually the director. The Cahiers critics did not limit auteurism only to original scenarios, either—many of the directors they admired, including Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Nicholas Ray, worked primarily from novelistic sources, as did the Cahiers critics when they turned to filmmaking themselves. Although the specific formulation of the auteur theory espoused by the Cahiers critics is no longer in vogue, the idea that a director is the author of a film, and that there are often strands of similarity running throughout a given director’s work has been quite influential. Chadha does either write or cowrite the scripts for her films, one of the Cahiers critics’ criteria for an auteur, and her concern with Indian culture and its intersection with Western life runs throughout her oeuvre. Hence Bride and Prejudice belongs to Chadha much more directly than it belongs to Jane Austen. Allowing directors to be the authors of their films allows them also to have the freedom to present their own reading of a source text, or to use the source text as a starting point for their own vision.

In this case, Chadha takes the story of Pride and Prejudice, laden with class consciousness and misunderstandings based on social prejudices, and relates it to her own concern with cross-cultural communication and identity, as well as the social issues still facing India today. Choosing to place Austen’s story in India solves a difficulty that all Austen adaptations must face due to the drastically changing social and gender conditions in the Western world since her time. Even the most faithful period adaptations must convey to the audience why the women of Sense and Sensibility cannot just get jobs and why Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are so conscious of the differences in their social position. Period films, however, can rely to some extent on the audience recognizing that different eras have different standards. The modernizing filmmaker does not have that crutch and must decide how to portray classes in a largely egalitarian society, at least in Great Britain or the United States. India, on the other hand, shares a number of social characteristics with Regency England. A second reason to bring Pride and Prejudice to India is that “the themes of Jane Austen’s novel are so pertinent to contemporary India,” as Chadha states in an interview on the Bride and Prejudice DVD. Indian marriages are usually arranged by the family, take place within the proper caste, and a wife is in a lower position than her husband, both culturally and legally. Despite the fact that her identity is subsumed into that of her husband, marriage is an incredibly important part of an Indian woman’s life. Just as in Austen’s England, most women cannot own a significant amount of property or inherit land in India—laws supporting equal inheritance exist, but they are not universally followed (Henderson 126). Laura Reznick faults Bride and Prejudice for its failure to portray the very real financial difficulties that face the Bennet family if the daughters do not marry well (Reznick 94). In the novel, the Bennet estate is entailed to Mr. Collins, leaving little or no inheritance for the five girls, who do not have any possibility of earning a living themselves as the Bakshi girls do. Yet, even though opportunities for women in the workplace in India are growing, working women earn much less than men in the same jobs: in skilled professional circles, a woman’s wages are no higher than 80% of a man’s, but in the dominant agricultural sector they earn only half of what a man would (Dunlop 4). Thus, even though Lalita works on the family farm, her wage-earning ability is likely half that of a man, explaining why her ability (and desire) to work does not necessarily preclude marriage as her best financial option. Other critics have pointed out that Bride and Prejudice tends to present an image of a carefree and colorful middle-class India, despite the social inequalities that actually exist. This criticism could be leveled at Bollywood film in general, which is anxious to convey India’s upward mobility, especially to its diasporic audience. In fact, Bride and Prejudice does contain a scene in which Mrs. Bakshi laments not moving to American when they had a chance; now they are stuck in India with “an old house, an old farm, and new bills”—bills which are overflowing the end of the table as Mr. Bakshi and Lalita work their way through them. A similar scene was cut from earlier in the film, probably to avoid redundancy.

The Bollywood elements of Bride and Prejudice are what really set it apart from other adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. As the brief summary above shows, Chadha has not actually deviated very much from Austen’s basic story. Minor details such as changing Lady Catherine deBough into Will’s mother streamline the relationships, while the intensification of the Wickham-Georgina relationship to include pregnancy reflects modern American sensibilities regarding sexual conduct. In a very real sense, Chadha’s film adapts Bollywood to Austen (and a Western audience) much more than it adapts Austen to Bollywood. Chadha is not a Bollywood filmmaker, but growing up in London in an NRI family exposed her to a lot of Bollywood film in her childhood (London imports a lot of films from India, due to its large NRI population). Her status as an outsider to Bollywood allows her to draw on Bollywood traditions while also mildly poking fun at its conventions. Bollywood films are something of an acquired taste—many Westerners find them overblown and cheesy, but there is something undeniably delightful about them whether we want to admit it or not. A typical Bollywood film runs over three hours long, includes generic conventions from slapstick comedy to melodrama to action (yes, all in the same film), and infuses even the most unlikely stories with long musical numbers. These musical numbers often involve dream-like states wherein the characters are transported to different exotic locales; the characters are also often joined by backup dancers who appear from nowhere. The songs are in Hindi, and are often not translated by subtitles on DVD releases—the words to the songs are usually poetic, passionate, and melodramatic, but do not further the story in any way.
Sensuality is portrayed by drenched saris and seductive dancing, but almost never through physical sex or even kissing, though recent films such as Salaam Namaste! are breaking ground in this direction. According to a Sixty Minutes interview with lead actress Aishwarya Rai, the chaste nature of Bollywood on-screen romance mirrors a general lack of public displays of affection in India—another social constraint which fits quite well with Jane Austen’s own Regency England. Chadha subtly highlights the difference between Eastern and Western sexual mores in Bride and Prejudice by reversing the extent of Wickham’s dalliances from Austen’s novel. In the novel, he merely runs away with Georgina and intimacy is not assumed, whereas when he and Lydia run off, it is clear they are living together and must, according to social propriety, get married. In Bride and Prejudice, however, the affair between Johnny and Georgie leads to pregnancy, but he and Lakhi are found before anything untoward can happen. Simply running off with a consenting girl would not be as big a concern in the United States as it was in nineteenth-century England, but premarital sex for an Indian girl even today would be much more scandalous, yet a shotgun wedding would be a tough sell to modern audiences, especially for such an upbeat film as Bride and Prejudice. For Bride and Prejudice, Chadha takes the basic conventions and translates them into a form she thinks will be more accessible to Western audiences, partly by reducing the length and normalizing the genre to musical comedy, but also through her conscious use of intertextual references to both Indian and Western cinema traditions.

Christine Geraghty has applied Robert Stam’s theory of intertextuality to Bride and Prejudice, but she believes that Chadha ultimately weakens her film, compromising both Bollywood tradition and Austen’s novel. As she points out, reviewers of the film are sometimes unsure whether Chadha intends to homage or parody Bollywood (Philip French in The Observer), yet many acknowledge that her admittedly populist approach ultimately pleases (Carrey Rickey in The Philadelphia Enquirer). Certainly Chadha enjoys Bollywood film, but she is also well aware of its clichés, and she does not hesitate to use them for intentional comic effect. The love song which transports its lovers to unreal locations is replaced by a love song during which Will and Lalita cavort in fountains and on California beaches, and travel to the Grand Canyon in his helicopter. Even more tongue-in-cheek, one of the outtakes played during the closing credits shows Chadha herself and cowriter Paul Mayeda Berges dancing through the same fountains and sharing a kiss—something Will and Lalita never do in the film, in keeping with the conventions of both Bollywood and Jane Austen adaptations. The backup singers who appear from nowhere are transformed into a black gospel choir and choreographed surfers. If it seems a bit over the top, it is meant to be. Aishwayra Rai, as Lalita, is sometimes criticized for her broad acting style, but that again, is part of the Bollywood tradition. Philip French of The Observer claims that “Chadha is trying to have her chapatti and eat it.” However, in this film about East/West culture clash, it is only natural that Chadha allow the Eastern and Western acting styles to clash as much as their ideologies.

Through her amalgamation of cinematic traditions, as well as the content of the story, Chadha suggests a balanced approach of mutual understanding between the two cultures, each of which has something to offer as well as elements that may need to be left behind. India needs to revise its treatment of women in light of Western equality, but America must refrain from feeling superior over a still-developing country. The film presents a variety of cultural positions, some healthier than others, from the stereotypical extremes of Mrs. Darcy as the worst example of the American autocrat to Mrs. Bakshi as the ultimate Indian mama who only wants her daughters married well. Non-Resident Indians (or NRIs) Mr. Kholi, and Balraj and Kiran Bingley, all of whom were born in India but now reside in London or LA, present the possible reactions of those who literally straddle the cultural divide. Balraj is the most attuned to both his London setting and his Indian heritage, accepting both as part of himself and equally comfortable in both spheres, just as Charles Bingley moved between Pemberley and Meryton with relative ease in the novel. Kiran retains a conception of herself as Indian, but is disdainful toward India itself and the Indians who live there, claiming they “lack sophistication.” Mr. Kholi, on the other hand, does everything he can to shed his Indian identity. He continually uses what he thinks is current American slang in an effort to be “cool,” he prefers American hip-hop to the Indian Garba dances, and he proudly proclaims his status as a green-card holder. In fact, his only problem with America is the fact that the Indian girls there are too liberated and will not serve his ego the way he thinks a good Indian wife should. He is wholly self-interested, and his failure to hold on to the traditions of India or to embrace more than his superficial idea of America depicts the absolute wrong way to cross cultural boundaries. The central couple of Will and Lalita finally represent the balanced picture of a West that appreciates the East fused with an East that embraces both modernity and tradition.

As Geraghty mentions, Chadha gleans intertextual fodder from British sitcoms (in the portrayal of Indian mothers) and British and American movie musicals as well as from Bollywood itself. This is clearly evident in the songs used in Bride and Prejudice, which some have found uneven; however, in their style, usage, and progression, the songs integrally support the film’s cross-cultural theme. All of the songs retain the Bollywood convention of play-back singing, meaning that the actors lipsynch to a pre-recorded track sung by someone else. Play-back singers are celebrities in their own right in India, and reducing the practice by calling it “dubbing,” as several less-than-sympathetic reviewers have, is misinformed and somewhat condescending. The opening song “Kites Without Strings,” part of the wedding celebration which opens the film, is completely Bollywood in rhythm, melody, pitch, style, content, and language—in fact, it is the only song in the film not in English. The high pitched female part, vocal runs and lilting rhythms are distinctively Bollywood, and the lyrics are a verbal sparring match between groups of men and women, a type of song very common in Indian film. The next song, “Marriage Has Come to Town,” is performed by the entire village about the bride of this wedding. In its growth from trio to full production number, it draws generally on big-scale Hollywood musicals and specifically on the British musical Oliver!, in which virtually every song, no matter how intimate it starts, turns into an extravaganza involving all available extras. It also has Bollywood pitch and rhythm, but as the story pushes toward multiculturalism, it is sung in English and has far fewer vocal flourishes. When Lalita’s sisters tease her over Mr. Kholi in the broadly comic “No Life Without Wife,” the egotistical Kholi becomes as supremely ridiculous as Austen’s Mr. Collins in a way immediately recognizable to audiences brought up on American musicals like Grease—the performance of the song is especially reminiscent of Grease’s “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee.” First performed at a Goa beach party by Ashanti as bhangra-infused hip-hop, “Show Me to Love” is reprised twice toward the end of the film as a lyrical ballad, combining Indian instrumentation and pitch with Western melody and style. The Ashanti version of this number may seem like an out-of-place set piece, but it, too, draws on a Bollywood tradition of including nightclub-set numbers by popular cabaret singers—a tradition which has nearly died out now, but was very common in the 1960s and 1970s, during Chadha’s childhood. By the time Will and Lalita learn to love each other, the music itself has married East and West. The finale reprises “Marriage Has Come To Town” as Will and Lalita and Balraj and Jaya share a double wedding.
Ultimately, Geraghty believes that the very intentionality of Chadha’s intertextual references defeats her own purpose, making the film feel ponderous rather than spontaneous (Geraghty 167). She implies that intertextuality is only valid if it is inferred by the reader rather than included by the director. This suggestion is similar to ones by film theorists that film noir was a cinematic style restricted to the post-WWII era, when certain films seemed to use similar existential themes and low-lighting effects unconsciously, or that the auteur theory applies only to filmmakers who managed to imprint their films with their personal visions despite working within the restrictive Hollywood studio system. While there is certainly a specific delight for a reader in finding unconscious intertextuality, that does not necessarily mean that it is invalid when applied consciously. Taking this point of view merely leads back to the literature-film double standard—Umberto Eco’s use of ideas culled from the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges in his novels Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose is hardly accidental, nor is Shakespeare’s reliance on and modification of both earlier tales and history itself.

Nearly everything in Chadha’s film is intentional, including its populism. Though reviewers of Bride and Prejudice are split nearly evenly between those who recommend it and those who do not (according to Rotten Tomatoes.com), nearly all of them are agreed that the film is a crowd-pleaser, and many of them enjoyed watching it whether they ultimately felt it deserved critical praise or not. Bollywood cinema itself is rather populist, putting out hundreds of films per year full of bright colors, celebratory dances, pop songs, and happy endings; this is one element of Indian film that Chadha has not diminished at all. If anything, she has emphasized it, reducing as far as possible the spectre of poverty facing Austen’s Bennets and the fear of social disgrace from Johnny’s relationship with Lakhi. These elements are still there, but most of all, Chadha wants her audience to have a good time—a stylistic choice that could be seen as lacking the proper seriousness necessary to be a “good” film, especially a good adaptation of a classic novel. Yet, by focusing on fun, Chadha does realize an element of Jane Austen’s novels that is often not clearly brought out in other adaptations, though other Austen films have certainly better captured the desperation attendant on a family with only daughters. Kamilla Elliott refers to this selective adapting as the de(re)composing model, in which novel and film are decomposed, merged, and recomposed to form a new creation: “Many so-called ‘unfaithful’ adaptations […] are condemned as unfaithful because critics read only one way—from novel to film—and find that the film has made changes. But […] these ‘infidelities’ represent rejections of certain parts of the novel in favor of others, not total departures” (Elliott 157). Writing specifically about Pride and Prejudice, Brian McFarlane complains that his students always seem to focus on “Jane Austen’s moral insights, the wisdom of choosing marriage partners with care, and the like,” and points out that while these elements are certainly present in her novels, there may be another reason to read Austen: “Perhaps it doesn’t sound serious enough to come right out and say that this novel is enormous fun, that one might value it because it is wonderfully witty and entertaining as it goes about its more serious business” (McFarlane “Something Old” 7). Chadha does give us only the entertaining side of Austen, but in an age when an episode of Veronica Mars, one of the most intelligent shows on television, rejects Pride and Prejudice as irrelevant and boring, perhaps that is the very side we need.

WORKS CITED

This paper originated in December 2006 for Bibliography and Research Methods at Baylor University.

Hughes himself never joined the Communist Party, and would gradually distance himself from radical politics in the following decades, but his work of the 1930s reveals a strong commitment to leftist ideals. The communist movement provided an avenue to unite the cause of the oppressed American Negro with the cause of other oppressed peoples around the world—especially the dark-skinned Africans, Indians, Middle-Easterners, and even Chinese, but also struggling working-class whites. Through revolutionary poetry, Hughes connected his racially-inflected concerns to a global purpose and a global audience.

The Scottsboro incident in 1931 provided a huge impetus for the Communist Party among the Negro community. Two white women accused eight black men, aged twelve to nineteen, of raping them—all were stowaways on a freight train going through Scottsboro, Alabama. Though doctors denied any evidence of rape, and circumstantial evidence cleared several of the boys, they were imprisoned and underwent a series of trials which condemned some to life imprisonment and others to death. While the NAACP dragged its feet, the legal branch of the Communist Party (known as the International Labor Defense, or ILD) took the case, increasing public awareness of both the case itself and the communist role in the boys’ defense (Rampersad 216). Hughes would publish a one-act play and several poems in response to the Scottsboro trial, and clearly align himself with the leftist cause.
In “Scottsboro,” Hughes issues a globally and historically inclusive call to freedom fighters to rise up and defend the Scottsboro boys. Among those he names are Jesus Christ, John Brown of the 1859 Harper’s Ferry revolt, Jean-Jacques Dessalines of the successful Haitian slave revolution, Vladimir Lenin, Gandhi, and Augusto Cesar Sandino, a contemporary Nicaraguan leader (142) . In the breadth of his appeal, Hughes situates the Scottsboro incident in an ongoing worldwide fight for justice, freedom, and equality. The communist world responded to the events in kind, holding benefits and rallies to support the condemned boys and warmly welcoming Hughes to Moscow in 1932. He and several other black Americans were invited to Russia to make a film aimed at exposing and alleviating racism. Though the film was never made, it provided the opportunity for Hughes to travel throughout the Soviet Union and see first-hand the advances made in the treatment of non-whites.

Several of Hughes’s most radical poems were published during his travels in the Soviet Union. “Good Morning Revolution” attacks a capitalist leader characterized both by his wealth (“eats swell,” “owns a lotta houses,” “goes vacationin’”) and his anti-labor, anti-justice activities (“breaks strikes,” “runs politics,” “bribes police”). The narrator contrasts himself with his portrait of the boss:

But me, I ain’t never had enough to eat.
Me, I ain’t never been warm in winter.
Me, I ain’t never known security—
All my life, been livin’ hand to mouth,
Hand to mouth. (162-163)

The content of these lines could be said by any member of the working class or poor, black or white; even the diction is borderline. As Robert Shulman points out, the narrator does not have to be read as black, but the rhythm and repetition of the lines is reminiscent of jazz (274). Later in the poem, Hughes uses vernacular interjections to counteract the over-seriousness of the communist rhetoric: “We can take everything: […] / Bus lines, telegraphs, radios, / (Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)”; and again: “All the tools of production / (Great day in the morning!)” (163). Through these techniques, Hughes brings Negro rhythms and colloquial speech into the larger context of communist propaganda, creating a poem which both supports the cause of the workers and has a hopeful, lighthearted undertone.

Another poem written in Russia, “Always the Same,” shows even more strongly the expansion of Hughes’s racial outlook to include the oppressed blacks of every nation and unite their cause with proletarian ideals:

It is the same everywhere for me:
On the docks at Sierra Leone,
In the cotton fields of Alabama,
In the diamond mines of Kimberley,
On the coffee hills of Haiti,
The banana lands of Central America,
The streets of Harlem,
And the cities of Morocco and Tripoli.

Black:
Exploited, beaten and robbed […] (165)

Harlem is here, but it is just one of seven loci of imperial exploitation of blacks around the world. The solution is to join the communists and fight for freedom:

Better that my blood makes one with the blood
Of all the struggling workers in the world—
[…]
Until the Red Armies of the International Proletariat
Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown,
United to raise the blood-red flag that
Never will come down! (165-166)

Communism offers a global movement to connect and unify blacks struggling independently, to promise a revolution against “The force that kills, / The power that robs, / And the greed that does not care” (165). Though Hughes is concerned for the working class regardless of color, in “Always the Same” his focus is clearly on the imperialist oppression of blacks.

An earlier poem, “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,” bitterly satirizes the economic gulf between the wealthy Park Avenue district and the slums around it, a contrast Hughes saw often when visiting his patron at the end of the 1920s. Parodying a Vanity Fair advertisement for the newly remodeled Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Hughes invites “hungry ones,” “roomers,” “evicted families,” “Negroes,” and finally “everybody” to go enjoy the fine amenities of the twenty-eight million dollar hotel. Negroes are the last group of people specifically named, leading Michael Thurston to claim that Hughes “subordinates race to highlight his emphasis on class, poverty, and revolution” (92). The final, most radical section of the poem posits the birth of a “new Christ child of the Revolution,” a “red baby, in the bitter womb of the mob.” Mary is characterized as a “little girl—turned whore / because her belly was too hungry to stand it anymore” (146). This depiction of Mary as an exploited woman begs comparison with the black Mary of “Christ in Alabama,” whose Christ child is a tragic mulatto figure, born of “Mammy of the South” and “White Master above” (143). Though the two poems were not published together, they were both published in leftist periodicals in December, 1931. Reading them together suggests the possibility that the Christ child of the Revolution may be read as black, a “New Red Negro” (Political Plays 47). Hence, even “Waldorf-Astoria,” which seems to nearly forget Harlem, when read in context of Hughes’s contemporary writings, shows a deep commitment to the economic equality of the black race promised by the Revolution.

As the decade wore on, Hughes’s leftist poems continued to reflect global situations, supporting Ethiopia against Mussolini’s onslaught and Republican Spain against Franco’s fascists. In the poems and essays arising from his time as a war correspondent in Spain, the tone is less pro-communist and more anti-fascist—a reflection of Hughes’s own movement away from the left at the end of the 1930s. “Letter from Spain” shows the sad position of a Moorish soldier forced to fight for Franco (“They nabbed him in his land / And made him join the fascist army”) against the very people who would set him and other blacks free:

Cause if a free Spain wins this war,
The colonies, too, are free—
Then something wonderful’ll happen
To them Moors as dark as me. (201-202)

Hughes found virtually no racial prejudice in Spain during his time there, and worried along with many other Negroes who rushed to join the International Brigades and defend Spain that “if Fascism creeps across Spain, across Europe, and then across the world, there will be no […] decent place left for any Negroes—because Fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone” (Good Morning 107).

Interestingly, Hughes’s most grandiose statements on his hopes for America are found in one of his more famous, but less radical (and less racial) poems. Arnold Rampersad points out that “Let America Be America Again” was considered by some to be a compromise “written to satisfy others, and not indicative of Langston’s true feeling,” but that actually “Hughes was drifting away from the far left” (1:323). The Popular Front, made up of moderate communists and socialists, was coming to the fore at the expense of more radical factions. Perhaps for commercial reasons, perhaps for personal ones, Hughes’s poetry by the end of the decade and into the 1940s was more aligned with this moderate movement than with radical communism. In “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes uses a multivocal technique to simultaneously support and undercut the American dream:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.) (189)

This mumbling speaker turns out to be “the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,” the “Negro bearing slavery’s scars,” the “red man driven from the land,” and the “immigrant clutching the hope I seek” (190). Here, as in the earlier communist poems, Hughes joins the causes of all the oppressed classes in America in a vow that the America that never was “will be!” Yet, in the final lines, Hughes invokes a vision of the desired future, but rather than a Soviet industrial workers’ paradise, he imagines “The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. / The mountains and the endless plain– / All, all the stretch of these great green states” (191). In fact, he imagines an American much more in keeping with “America the Beautiful” than the Communist Manifesto (Shulman 302). “Let America Be America Again,” in fact, is one of Hughes’s most racially egalitarian poems, for here, he never does give precedence to the Negro’s cause. His exposure to communist ideals in the early 1930s enlarged his understanding of oppression to include both whites and non-whites around the world, and “Let America Be America Again” brings that understanding back home, envisioning an America in which every race is equal and thus there is no need to single out even his own.

Works Consulted

• Dawahare, Anthony. “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the ‘End of Race.’” MELUS 23:3 (Autumn 1998): 21-41.
• Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. NY: Vintage Classics, 1994.
• —. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest. Ed. Faith Berry. NY: Citadel Press, 1992.
• —. I Wonder as I Wander. NY: Hill & Wang, 1956.
• —. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes. Ed. Susan Duffy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
• Jemi, Onwuchekwa. “Or Does it Explode?” Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. NY: Amistad, 1993.
• Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Shulman, Robert. The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
• Smethurst, James Edward. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946. NY: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Thurston, Michael. Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

This paper originated in March 2007 for Modern American Literature: The Harlem Renaissance at Baylor University.

]]> http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/racial-leftist-politics-in-the-poetry-of-langston-hughes/feed/ 0 http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/john-boormans-multi-sourced-excalibur/ http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/john-boormans-multi-sourced-excalibur/#comments Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:53:35 +0000 Jandy http://frame.the-frame.com/?p=9 Excalibur claims to be adapted from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, but is in reality drawn from several sources, many of which contradict Malory's version of the legend; however, by adapting Malory in this way, Boorman is in fact following directly in his footsteps, for Malory also claims to draw from one source but uses many, in addition to his own imagination.]]> This paper discusses the film Excalibur and its relationship to Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and contains spoilers for both works.

John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur retells the Arthurian legend, purportedly from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the only source which is named in the film’s credits. However, Boorman freely borrows from several other sources, both literary and critical. Le Morte Darthur is a loose amalgam of tales, highly structured only at the beginning and the end. In contrast, Boorman tightens and focuses the narrative, emphasizing the inherent mysticism, the importance of the sword Excalibur, and the unifying villainy of Morgan Le Fay, in order to support his theme of the necessary unity between the king and the land.

Boorman highlights the mystical element, envisioning Merlin as a representative of the old nature religions, able to summon “the breath of the dragon” (mist from the Earth) in his service or that of the king. The idea that the Arthurian legends are steeped in pre-Christian nature and fertility religions was popularized by Jessie Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance, and would become the basis of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s revisionist The Mists of Avalon. In Excalibur, Morgan Le Fay (here Morgana, the daughter of Igrayne and the Duke of Cornwall, who was very aware of Uther’s violation of her mother) becomes the villain, seeking to learn Merlin’s magic to control the earth and revenge herself on Uther’s son, Arthur. Merlin knows that the time of magic is passing into the time of men (a concept as reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings as of Le Morte Darthur), and it is partially Morgana’s refusal to let go of sorcery that leads to the downfall of Camelot, and eventually, herself.

But the passing of magic does not mean that the power of the Earth has gone; rather, there is now a different means of communicating with it. The king derives his power and his connection to the Earth through the sword Excalibur; to this end, both Uther’s sword and the sword in the stone become Excalibur. Hence, Excalibur appears throughout the film, uniting Uther as the failed would-be unifier of England with the successful overlord Arthur, as well as with the kings of the future that Arthur suggests will need the sword and be given it by the Lady of the Lake when the time is right.

The film itself is structured in three sections, intended to symbolize the past, present, and future of mankind. The first section deals with the Uther-Igrayne story, and shows a mankind not quite ready for primetime—Uther is driven by base lust, the castles are ramshackle affairs, the settings are almost universally woods and virgin wilderness, and Merlin’s mysticism is at its height (note the abundance of standing stones, always identified with Merlin’s pre-Christian religion). The central section, after King Arthur and his knights have subdued all enemies, is civilization—Camelot is built and order reigns. The final section occurs after Arthur has lost Excalibur in anger over Lancelot and Guinevere’s betrayal—he discovers them together sleeping in the wood, and drives the sword into the earth between them, thus breaking his kingly duties both by thrusting the sword into “the dragon’s spine” and by leaving behind the sword, his connection to the Earth. After this, his kingdom becomes a Waste Land and can only be cured by finding the Holy Grail, which here has no Christian overtones at all, but holds a restorative to heal both Arthur (now conflated with Malory’s King Pellam, the Fisher King of the Grail Quest) and his Land.

Perhaps the biggest change from Malory is the use of Morgana as essentially the sole villain of the story. In Malory, Morgan LeFay is a sorceress and enemy of Arthur and his knights, but she does not have the power or the centrality that she does in Excalibur. Here, she connives with Gawain to reveal Lancelot and Guinevere’s love and begin the rift in the Round Table, seduces Merlin to gain his magical knowledge, seals Merlin in his cave, and uses the dragon’s breath spell to cloak herself as Guinevere and sleep with Arthur in order to bear Mordred (intertextual note: Bradley also makes Mordred Morgan’s son by Arthur, when both were in disguise). Clearly, the role of Margawse and partially that of Nimue have been collapsed into Morgana, and poor Gawain has had to become both Aggravayne (for purposes of reducing lesser-known characters) and Mordred (because he was not yet born in Excalibur’s version)—these changes make sense when moving from Malory’s long chronicle account of Arthurian legend into a film, which is both much shorter and expected to cohere more strongly.

Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair and ejection from Camelot happen much sooner than in Malory, as well. The trajectory of their affair owes a lot to the Tristan legend—they first meet when Lancelot goes to fetch Guinevere to marry Arthur, and though there is no love potion, the seeds of their love are planted during the journey back to Camelot. Lancelot’s attempts to stay away from Guinevere, much to her distaste, are found in Malory; however, Lancelot’s internal struggle, Gawain’s challenge to Guinevere’s honor and Arthur’s blindness to her and Lancelot’s love until he can no longer deny it (i.e., when he sees them together and drives Excalibur between them, much as King Mark leaves his sword to make Tristan and Isolde aware that he knows about their affair) all find closer analogues in Gottfried von Eschenbach’s Tristan than in Malory. Excalibur does retain from Malory a sense that Lancelot and Guinevere are not really to be blamed for the downfall of Camelot. When they come together in the wood, their scene of union evokes impressions not of sin and lust, but of the innocence of Adam and Eve. When they awake and discover Arthur’s sword, Lancelot’s reaction is not the expected “Oh, no, Arthur knows about us,” but “The king no longer has his sword,” bringing the story back around to Boorman’s main point—Arthur without Excalibur leads to a ruined land. For Malory, the adultery becomes the catalyst for Aggravayne and Mordred’s rebellion; for Boorman, the problem with the affair is that it causes Arthur to abandon his duty, and paves the way for Morgana to carry out her evil plot.

Boorman also collapses several knights into the character of Perceval, who becomes the main Round Table knight after Lancelot’s departure. He leads the Grail Quest, as he does in Malory, but he is the only one to see the Grail—Galahad and Bors are nowhere, and Lancelot has already left the fellowship. However, Perceval does not die in the Quest, but brings the Grail back to Arthur to restore him and the land, and remains Arthur’s right-hand man for the rest of the story, even returning Excalibur to the Lady in the Lake. Again, this reduces the number of individual knights Boorman has to deal with in the film, and makes Perceval an acceptable substitute for a Lancelot who leaves the stage much earlier than he does in Malory.

In a way, Boorman’s mix-and-match strategy mirrors Malory’s own creation of Le Morte Darthur—Malory claims to be pulling his story directly from “the French book,” but he actually uses a number of sources both French and English, and through his process of selection, modification, and addition, creates a work wholly his own. Many of the things he claims to have taken straight from his source are, in fact, his own invention. Boorman does much the same thing, crediting only Malory as his source, but finding inspiration in many other places, as well as adding some things himself, ultimately creating a film which is cinematic, meaningful, and evocative in its own right.

This paper originated in November 2006 for British Literature Through 1600 at Baylor University.

]]> http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/john-boormans-multi-sourced-excalibur/feed/ 0 http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/george-herberts-via-media/ http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/george-herberts-via-media/#comments Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:46:14 +0000 Jandy http://frame.the-frame.com/?p=8 The personal, devotional nature of much of George Herbert’s poetry belies the volatile religious climate in which he lived. The seventeenth century was a time of more religious conflict than almost any other time in history, as the divisions initiated by the Reformation in 1517 were multiplied many times over, leading eventually to the Thirty Years War on the European continent and the English Civil War. Yet, despite the fact that Herbert was prominent in higher education, politics, and the church (through his offices as orator at Cambridge University, a member of Parliament, and finally a priest in the Church of England), the poems which make up “The Church,” the largest section of Herbert’s masterwork “The Temple,” are remarkably devoid of explicit references to the politically-charged religious controversies (Bell 64). That does not mean, however, that he was uninfluenced by the atmosphere around him; rather, his poetry confirms him as a devout Calvinist, faithful Anglican, and a liturgical worshiper. These three things may seem antithetical from a vantage point three hundred years removed from Herbert’s time, but in fact, they are not, as a closer examination of the historical and religious time period will show.

The Lutheran Reformation began in 1517, when Martin Luther’s call for a debate regarding the practice of selling indulgences, or pardons for one’s loved ones languishing in purgatory. Luther did not intend to start a new church, but thanks to the newly-invented printing press, his Ninety-Five Theses against indulgences spread quickly throughout central Europe, caused his excommunication, and led to the foundation of Protestantism. Luther’s church, centered in Germany, remained very similar in structure and liturgy to the Roman Catholic church, but centered its theology on a trio of mottos: sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone), and sola scriptura (scripture alone). According to Luther, salvation from sin came only through faith, not through works; it came only by the grace of God, not from any human effort or merit; and it was revealed only through the Word of God, not through the traditions of the church.

In the early 1520s, Ulrich Zwingli led a further reformation in Zurich, Switzerland, accepting Luther’s reforms but going beyond them in his rejection of “all forms of false, external worship” (Benedict 24). Zwingli was against the ceremonialism, decoration, and iconography of the Roman church; under his leadership, Zurich stripped its churches of all images, statues, altars, and murals. The most heated debate between Zwingli and Luther was over theology of the Eucharist: Zwingli held a view of the Eucharist as purely symbolic, as opposed to Lutheran sacramental union, in which the physical presence of Christ is added to the essence of the bread and wine—a doctrine similar though distinct from Roman transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ. Although both Luther and Zwingli were reformers, Zwingli’s followers are generally grouped under the title “Reformed,” while Luther’s remain “Lutheran.”

However, the man most associated with the term “Reformed” is French reformer John Calvin, who based his ministry in Geneva, Switzerland. Calvin’s two major contributions to the Reformation were his monumental book of systematic theology The Institutes of the Christian Faith, and the Reformed community of Geneva. He is most associated with the doctrine of predestination, which states that God elected specific individuals to be saved and, therefore, elected others not to be saved. The doctrine was and is controversial, attacked both for being too harsh (would a loving God offhandedly condemn people to hell?) and too lax (if human actions mean nothing, what incentive is there to avoid sin?)—interestingly, it was more common at the time to consider predestination too permissive rather than too strict (Veith 28). For Calvin, however, it merely grew out of established tenets of Reformation theology: The idea that God is sovereign, that he initiates and completes the entire process of salvation, and that man is unable to contribute to his own salvation. Luther and Zwingli would have held these positions in common with Calvin (Veith 19), though Luther did disagree with Calvin’s wording of the predestination doctrine, preferring to concentrate on the saved rather than the damned. In practice, “Calvin taught predestination as a pastoral-oriented doctrine that was designed to comfort believers because it assured them that their salvation was not dependent on their own efforts” (Heinze 175), and thus it was a corollary to the central doctrine of God’s grace, not a central point in and of itself (Doerksen 14). Regarding the Eucharist, Calvin took a middle road between Luther and Zwingli. In opposition to Zwingli, he affirmed that Christ is truly present at the Lord’s Supper, making the meal much more than just a symbol, but that Christ’s presence is spiritual, not physical, as in Luther’s understanding (Heinze 176). But concerning church government and the use of images, Calvin was much closer to Zwingli’s non-hierarchical, iconoclastic views.

This is a very basic outline of the situation in Europe in the sixteenth century. England had a few twists of its own to add, largely the fact that its reformation was politically motivated. Henry VIII declared himself head of the English church in 1534 because he wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon, something the Roman pope would not grant. However, Henry remained devoted to Catholic theology and liturgy. His son Edward VI attempted a more theologically-based reformation, but was thwarted by his short life and his sister Mary’s ardent Catholicism. Many of the leading Protestants in England who fled the country to escape Mary’s persecutions went to Geneva, bringing Calvinism back with them when Elizabeth took the throne. Thus, when the English Reformation truly took hold under Elizabeth, it was thoroughly Calvinist in theology (Veith 26). However, Elizabeth was more concerned with securing unity within her kingdom than with theological concerns in and of themselves, and she tended to resist many of the demands for changes in the church’s structure and liturgy (Graves 247). Thus Elizabeth’s conscious via media largely consisted of moderate Calvinist theology combined with Lutheran/Episcopal church government and liturgy. When James I took the throne in 1603, he similarly disliked extremism on both Catholic and Separatist sides, seeing them as threats to his own authority, though he allowed for more autonomy in matters of ceremony.

By the time of George Herbert, the English religious landscape was spread along several different axes of opposition: theology, church government, and liturgy. It is far too simplistic to make dichotomous categories of seventeenth-century English religious thought, such as “Anglican vs Puritan” or “Anglican vs Calvinist.” The only definite opposition that can be made is “Protestant vs. Roman Catholic.” Any other distinctions must be careful to note which axis of opposition is under consideration. The question of church government sets episcopalianism (rule by appointed bishops) against presbyterianism (rule by elected presbyters) or congregationalism (rule by democratic vote). The issue of liturgy is between the High Church, which retains much of the liturgy and ceremonial trappings of Catholicism, and the Low Church, modeled more on Zwingli’s simple approach to worship and church decorations. Theologically, the Church of England was during Herbert’s life almost completely Calvinist. This did change almost at the same time as Herbert’s death due to the influx of Arminianism. Jacobus Arminius was a Dutch theologian of the late sixteenth century who argued against Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, claiming that it eliminated free will and personal responsibility. The Reformed community, including a delegation of Englishmen sent by James I, officially rejected Arminianism at the Synod of Dort in 1619, but in 1633 William Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury, and brought the Arminianism firmly into the Anglican church. Laudianism is directly connected with both Arminianism and High Church liturgy, thus it is all too easy to equate Anglicanism with liturgical worship and Puritan anti-liturgical worship with Calvinism. Indeed, this is very nearly a true picture of the religious standpoints at the time of the English Civil War, but for Herbert’s only slightly earlier time period, there was no problem at all with being a High-Church Calvinist, and it seems evident from his poetry that this is exactly what he was.

Herbert is especially concerned, as was Calvin, with man’s utter dependence upon God for salvation, and the humility that must accompany the knowledge of one’s own sin and the God’s grace. In “Nature,” he affirms first the essential depravity of mankind: “Full of rebellion, I would die, / Or fight, or travel, or deny / That thou hast ought to do with me” (1-3). Continuing on, he says that “If thou shalt let this venom lurk” (7), suggesting that God must proactively removes the venomous sin from him and “engrave thy rev’rend law and fear” (14) upon his heart—the speaker cannot do it himself. More specifically, in “Grace,” he denies that his works do him any good: “My stock lies dead, and no increase / Doth my dull husbandry improve: / O let thy graces without cease / Drop from above!” (1-4). The poem continues with “Drop from above” as a refrain reinforcing the speaker’s constant prayerful need for God’s grace. He shows in “Giddiness” his inability to come to God without God’s intervention: “Lord, mend or rather make us: one creation / Will not suffice our turn: / Except thou make us daily, we shall spurn / Our own salvation” (25-29). This passage suggests that it is not enough merely for God to fix us, as if our raw material was good but minorly flawed; no, we must be entirely remade, and daily—because we continue to sin daily.

Yet despite Herbert’s deep understanding of his own sin, he, like Calvin, was quite assured of his salvation. Though he does rebel at times, accusing God of not listening in “Denial” and striking out against his calling in “The Collar,” he consistently returns to the security he has in Christ. “Denial” itself ends with the answer to the prayer it contains, as the last two lines finally rhyme, indicating the final unity between the speaker and God. In addition to a very real, honest portrayal of the rebellion even a true Christian sometimes feels against God, “The Collar” clearly shows Calvin’s doctrine of irresistible grace. Though the speaker is currently unhappy and lashing out at God, when God calls to him, he cannot help but answer: “But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild / At every word, / Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child: / And I replied, My Lord” (35-36). Ultimately, Herbert knows that even in his most disobedient moments, he is still God’s child, a fact in which he takes comfort. Many other poems show assurance that God will forgive his sin and bring him to salvation, from “Repentence,” which begins with the speaker’s confession of his great sin and ends by asserting that “thou wilt sin and grief destroy” (31), to “Judgement,” which contrasts works-righteousness (“That some will turn thee to some leaves therein / so void of sin, / That they in merit shall excel” [8-10]) with the speaker’s reliance upon the substitutionary death of Christ: “And thrust a Testament into thy hand: / Let that be scanned. / There thou shalt find my faults are thine” (13-15). Finally, the last poem in The Church leaves no doubt as to Herbert’s assuredness of salvation. “Love (3)” describes the feast of heaven, which the speaker is not at first sure he should attend: “yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin” (1-2). But Love (i.e. Christ) draws him in, reassures him that he, Christ, “bore the blame” (15) and invites him to sit and eat, which he does. In this one poem, Herbert gives us the sinfulness of man, the proactive and substitutionary death of Christ, and the free gift of eternal communion with God.

As we see throughout Herbert’s poetry, the Calvinist awareness of sin leads to a greater appreciation of God’s grace, and the doctrine of predestination and its corollary perseverance of the saints lead to an assurance of salvation. Gene Edward Veith suggests that Herbert’s reliance on Calvinist doctrine is that major thing that distinguishes him from his contemporary and friend John Donne (Veith 34). Donne is fearful of his own damnation throughout his religious poetry, and he never seems to find lasting assurance that God will save him—Veith believes this was due to his Armenianism, which kept him constantly unsure of whether he had done enough to merit salvation. Herbert’s poetry, by contrast, shows a man deeply aware of his own shortcomings, but fully convinced of his own salvation through God’s grace. This is essentially the central theme of Calvinism.

Yet though Herbert holds to Calvin’s Reformed theology, he does not follow the Reformed views on church government and liturgy. The followers of Zwinglian and Calvinist in terms of church government preferred congregationally-elected leaders, rather than appointed ones, as in the episcopal system. The Anglican church is episcopal, meaning it is overseen by appointed bishops. Herbert himself was a churchman near the end of his life, duly appointed to the position of Rector of Bemerton, and he did not share the Swiss Reformers’ low view of ceremony and liturgy. Paul Dyck, in an illuminating consideration of the construction of the poetic The Temple in relation to Herbert’s rebuilding of the church at Leighton-Bromswald, points out that Herbert specifically made the reading pew the same height as the pulpit, though generally in Anglican churches it was lower. The liturgy was performed from the reading pew, the sermon from the pulpit. The difference in height was meant to emphasize the importance of preaching, a preference almost universal in Protestant circles both as an affirmation of the centrality of Biblical exposition as well as a denial of Roman Catholic ceremonialism. Herbert deliberately equalized the two, choosing in liturgical matters a middle road between Rome and Geneva.

His respect for the physical church building can be seen in the series of poems beginning with “Church-Monuments,” which show how the building itself and a person’s movement through it can be beneficial for the devotional process. “Church-Monuments” shows the proper use of burial monuments, not to increase the status or secure the memory of the deceased, but as a reminder of man’s mortality. “Church-Music,” far from eschewing the use of music in worship, as some of the more radical branches of the Reformation did, celebrates the ability of sacred music to bring the worshipper directly into the presence of God: “But if I travel in your company, / You know the way to heaven’s door” (11-12). And “The Church-Floor” sees the very tenets of Reformed spirituality (patience, humility, confidence, and charity) symbolically displayed in the physical properties of the floor of the church. The “Church-” series of poems shows that there can be something instructive about church decoration, and that the sort of complete iconoclasm that Zwingli performed in Zurich may have, in fact, destroyed something of value to the Christian life. In “The Priesthood,” Herbert implicitly accepts the appropriateness of the Episcopal form of government while also recognizing that no man is worthy to be a priest of God, except by God’s grace. And in “The Holy Communion,” he points out that it is not “in rich furniture, or fine array, / Nor in a wedge of gold” (1-2) that Christ comes to us, but in a meal, and even that meal comes only by grace (19). Throughout his poems, Herbert balances a respect for the contributions to liturgy and beauty inherited from the Roman Catholics with an understanding that the ceremonial elements are only valuable so far as they draw the worshipper closer to God. All of these poems, though dealing with public acts of worship in public places, are very focused on the individual’s experience of grace. They are truly Reformed theologically, but do not throw the Catholic baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, as some of the more reactionary branches of the Reformation did.

One of Herbert’s most seemingly anti-ceremony poems, “Sion,” suggests in its opening stanzas a dichotomy between ceremonial and plain worship styles: “Yet all this glory, all this pomp and state / Did not affect thee much, was not thy aim” (7-8). However, when we reach the bottom of the poem, it is not really a simpler worship style being contrasted with the ornate carvings and gold inlays of Solomon’s temple, but the groans and heartfelt pleas of the people. The differentiation Herbert is making is between an “inner devotion against an outward devotion that is an end in itself. For the person committed to keeping external forms, the danger always exists of relying upon those forms rather than upon their end” (Dyck 240). The outward beauty of Solomon’s temple was not a bad thing in and of itself, but it must not be the aim. Finally, “The British Church” sums up Herbert’s liturgical position, preferring the middle way of Anglicanism to either the completely externalized “wanton” worship of Rome or the too-plain worship style of Geneva/Zurich. The important thing to note about “The British Church” is that it is concerned not with theology per se, but with adornment of churches and forms of worship (Veith 30).

Herbert’s combination of Calvinist theology, centered on the grace of God, and an appreciation for a ceremonial liturgy is a healthy, tolerant one. He clearly sets himself against Rome both liturgically (“The British Church”) and doctrinally (“To All Angels and Saints”), but he is not reactionary even toward Rome. In “Anagram,” he reveres Mary for her role in the birth of Christ, but he refuses to pray to her in “To All Angels and Saints.” Though the Church of England may have been “but halfly reformed” according to the sixteenth-century reformers who desired to implement Calvin and Zwingli’s liturgical reforms as well as their theology, the poetry of George Herbert shows it is actually possible to hold a Reformed view of the personal relationship between man and God and still value the beauty and tradition of liturgical forms of worship.

WORKS CITED

• Bell, Ilona. “George Herbert and the English Reformation.” Essential Articles for the Study of George Herbert. Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1979. 63-83.
• Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2002.
• Doelman, James. King James I and the Religious Culture of England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000.
• Doerksen, Daniel W. and Christopher Hodgkins. “Introduction.” Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 13-27.
• Dyck, Paul. “Locating the Word: The Textual Church and George Herbert’s Temple.” Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way. Ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 224-244.
• Graves, Michael A. R. Revolution, Reaction, and the Triumph of Conservatism: English History, 1558-1700. Auckland, N.Z: Longman Paul, 1984.
• Heinze, Rudolph W. Reform and Conflict: From the Medieval World to the Wars of Religion, A.D. 1350-1648. Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Books, 2005.
• Janz, Denis R., ed. A Reformation Reader: Primary Texts with Introductions. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999.
• Spurr, John. The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603-1714. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.
• Veith, Gene Edward. Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert. London: Associated University Presses, 1985.

This paper originated in December 2006 for Seventeenth-Century British Literature: Metaphysical Poets at Baylor University.

]]> http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/george-herberts-via-media/feed/ 0 http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/henry-v-on-screen/ http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/henry-v-on-screen/#comments Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:38:11 +0000 Jandy http://frame.the-frame.com/?p=7 Henry V, one directed by Laurence Olivier in 1945 and one by Kenneth Branagh in 1989, use nearly the same script of the play but end up with very different attitudes toward war, each being influenced by their cultural and historical context.]]> This paper discusses the 1944 and 1989 film adaptations of Henry V; it contains spoilers for the play and both film versions.

In 1944, Laurence Olivier did something that had not yet been done: He created a successful cinematic version of a Shakespeare play. Up to that point, Shakespeare adaptations like The Taming of the Shrew (1929), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and As You Like It (1936) had suffered from stilted productions and miscasting. By the early 1940s, Shakespeare was considered box office poison. But Olivier’s Henry V would change that. Because of the history of failed attempts to bring Shakespeare to the screen, Olivier was very aware of the difficulties he would have to overcome in order to reach a mass movie audience with Shakespeare’s 400-year-old words. His solution was to demystify the Elizabethan theatergoing experience.

The film opens with a close-up of a playbill announcing that “The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with his battell fought at Agincourt in France by Will Shakespeare will be played by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the GLOBE PLAYHOUSE THIS DAY The FIRST of MAY 1600,” followed by a pan across sixteenth-century London, and a zoom into the Globe Theatre itself. After the cross-section of London society that made up the patrons of the theatre gets settled, the play begins. The early scenes of Henry V are filled with extensive speeches about a bill to take land from the church and the convoluted royal lineage which may or may not lend credence to King Henry’s claim for the French throne. Realizing that this information is important but unlikely to command the audience’s attention, Olivier uses these scenes to depict the relationship between the actors and the Renaissance audience, making them broadly comedic in tone. This strategy accomplishes a number of things: firstly, it removes the aura of reverence that makes Shakespeare seem inaccessible; secondly, the vociferous groundlings give the modern audience an example of how to react to Shakespeare; thirdly, by making the bishops objects of ridicule, it reduces the cynicism inherent in their plot to distract Henry from the bill by sending him to war with France.

Throughout his adaptation, Olivier systematically reduces the cynicism and complexity of Shakespeare’s play, mostly in order to appeal to an audience immersed in World War II. Henry V was produced partially as a propaganda film, a necessary concession in order to acquire the resources to make it—Technicolor film was not cheap, and movie studios did not consider Shakespeare a good investment. But Olivier’s portrayal of Henry as an upright, brave, and merciful English war hero struck all the right nerves, with both producers and audiences. In order to achieve this view of Henry, virtually all of the negatives about his character have been eliminated. In the play, Henry pardons a man suspected of treason in order to trap three traitorous nobles into condemning themselves; Olivier retains the pardon, but eliminates the three traitors, making Henry’s pardon purely merciful. The speech threatening Harfleur with pillage, rape, and naked babies stuck on pikes has been eliminated entirely, as has the scene of Bardolph’s hanging. The only scene, in fact, that remains to cast doubt on the justness of Henry’s war with France is the one the night before the battle, when a disguised Henry visits his men and they speak of the king’s responsibility for all the deaths in battle. By vastly reducing Henry’s cruelty, Olivier focuses closely on his heroism. This may make for a less interesting Henry, but Olivier is consistent in his portrayal, and it works for the film itself, which is very colorful and lighthearted.

The film contains three distinct sections, which fit inside each other, creating a chiasm of stylistic structure. The opening scenes are on the Elizabethan stage. Just before Henry’s first entrance, the camera moves backstage, hinting that the film is not going to be just a filmed stage play—nevertheless, the film remains stagebound throughout the first act. When Henry prepares to depart Southhampton, the camera zooms into the backdrop, which fades into a painting, and thence to a real-life ship in front of very obviously two-dimensional set paintings. These painted backdrops and flat sets continue until the battle of Agincourt. This section is modeled on Les Tres riches Heures du duc de Berry, a Book of Hours commissioned by Jean de Berry, uncle of King Charles VI, and completed around the same time as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Olivier especially models the scenes at the French court after medieval paintings, which is instantly obvious by the careful composition of actors, as if they were in a still picture. The third style is the naturalistic Battle of Agincourt itself, which is realistic in art design if not in gore. In fact, the scenes give an excellent sense of the differences in size between the French and English armies, though the weariness of the English, who have been marching through mud and rain since Harfleur, is talked about but not really believably portrayed. After the battle, a return to the painterly backdrops accompanies the return to the French court, and the film ends up where it began—with the Chorus’ epilogue on stage and a reverse pan across London. This structure highlights the centrality of the battle itself, and also creates a thorough-going Renaissance aesthetic, keeping it light and colorful and showing the heroism of past English kings in order to raise morale in a country five years into a devastating world war. Tellingly, the Chorus leaves out the lines of the epilogue telling that during Henry VI’s reign France would be lost and England would bleed. It would not do to remind a Britain struggling against Germany in WWII that Henry’s victory was temporary and his war was ultimately in vain.

Comparing Olivier’s Henry V with Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film of the play yields fruitful ruminations. Branagh gives a fully complex portrait of Henry, leaving in virtually all of the cruel and borderline bloodthirsty speeches which Olivier excises. His Henry is intense, conflicted, and comes home less a victorious hero than an exhausted king whose victory is costly. Branagh’s film is dark, both in tone and cinematography, there is little comedy, and the war scenes are brutally realistic. Yet, Branagh does not turn his back on Olivier’s earlier version, but homages it openly by having his Chorus begin backstage in a theatre before throwing the doors of the theatre open into the real world in which the rest of the film takes place. Also, comparing the texts of the two film versions with the text of the play shows that, excepting the lines that Olivier leaves out in order to keep Henry’s image pure, the two use and excise almost the same lines (for example, both leave out nearly all of the classical references so rife in the play, despite the use of the Chorus, a staple of classical drama). Branagh also mirrors almost exactly Olivier’s use of specific lines from the various prologues to introduce each scene, rather than the block of text Shakespeare has introducing an entire act. Branagh certainly makes Henry V his own, but he very clearly utilizes the editing work done by Olivier in 1944. Both film versions sparked a revival of interest in cinematic Shakespeare adaptations. Together, they prove the versatility of Shakespeare in his ability to inspire two films so different from each other, yet both excellent films in and of themselves.

]]> http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/henry-v-on-screen/feed/ 0 http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/poetry-explication-william-shakespeares-sonnet-55/ http://frame.the-frame.com/2007/08/17/poetry-explication-william-shakespeares-sonnet-55/#comments Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:05:56 +0000 Jandy http://frame.the-frame.com/?p=3 SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET 55

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared by sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wears this world out to the ending doom.
	So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
	You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Throughout his sonnet sequence, Shakespeare is often concerned with the deleterious effects of time, mourning that the object of his affections will eventually age and die, and usually affirming that the poem itself will outlast time, thus ensuring that the poet’s beloved will continue to live in verse. Many of the sonnets refer to the everlasting nature of poetry only in the couplet, resolving the discourse on the coming ravages of time that has occupied the three quatrains. In contrast, Shakespeare applies the entirety of Sonnet 55’s content and prosody to his claim that poetry is a memorial outlasting not only an individual’s lifespan, but even all other types of physical memorials.

Sonnet 55 is unusual for a sonnet in both content and meter. Generally, a sonnet introduces a problem or a question in the first quatrain, develops the problem in the second and third quatrain, then offers a solution and resolution in the couplet. All of Sonnet 55, however, answers an unasked question: Can a poem last longer than great monuments and memorials? The three quatrains break the answer into three parts: poetry lasts longer than marble and gilded monuments (1), war will not eradicate poetry as it does masonry (5-6), and the beloved shall be praised until Doomsday (10-12). The couplet confirms that the beloved lives on through the poem until he is raised again to physical life on Judgment Day, but, as Gerald Hammond notes (Hammond 173), it does not really add any further resolution to a sonnet which has already reached its conclusion from the first lines: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme” (1-2). Editors of the sonnets generally note that the idea of poetry as a lasting legacy is found as far back as classical Greek and Rome, yet Shakespeare, as usual, takes a concept older than himself and modifies it slightly for his purposes: Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains a passage very similar to Sonnet 55, 1 with the exception that Ovid claims that his words will make the poet live forever, while Shakespeare applies the preservative of poetry to his beloved rather than himself (Martin 158).

The meter is also odd, drawing attention to the contrast between impermanent physical memorials and “this powerful rhyme” (2). Although many poets stray from the sonnet’s normal iambic pentameter, placing stresses on off beats for emphasis, rarely do they unstress the final syllable of the line, the syllable containing the rhyme. Yet Shakespeare does exactly that on nearly half of these fourteen lines—three sets of rhymes—contrasting things inadequate to memorialize his lover with the more appropriate effect of a poetic memorial.

The first of these pairs contrasts the marble and gold “monuments” of line 1 with the “these contents” (i.e., the poem itself) in line 3. The first syllable of “monuments” falls on a normal iambic stress, but attempts to stress the last syllable, in keeping with metrical expectations, sound awkward. Similarly, “contents” could be stressed iambically, but that would make the word mean “things yielding contentment” rather than “things contained herein.” It is possible there is a pun on the word, but it seems to be a connotative stretch. The rhyme is also striking, because even though the end rhyme is only on the last syllable of the two words, the words trick the ear into thinking they are two-syllable rhymes, since “mon-“ and “con-“ rhyme and are both stressed, even though they are not on the same beat of their respective lines. By drawing attention to these two words through the unusual stressing, Shakespeare ties them together (the “content” of the poem becomes a “monument”) and also begins a motif that will continue through the other two uniambic rhymed pairs, wherein the first-named concept is rejected for the second.

The second quatrain gives the lines “the work of masonry” (6) and “The living record of your memory” (8), emphasizing that though the record of a person’s memory is precisely what a mason is trying to preserve, it cannot do so. Mere masonry will be destroyed by “wasteful war” (5). The mention of Mars, the Roman god of war (7), provides an echo of the classical roots of this sonnet’s subject. “Masonry” and “memory” are both dactylic words, following a stressed syllable with two unstressed ones. The assonance on the “o” sound in “masonry” and “memory” make them seem to rhyme for the last two syllables instead of only the final one, though they really do not. In this case, unlike the first pair “monuments” and “contents,” neither the actual rhyme nor the perceived rhyme are on stressed syllables.

“Enmity” (9) and “posterity” (11) form the final set of unstressed rhymes. Again, the former is something to be guarded against (“‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity”), while the latter represents the future generations that will continue to hear the poet praising the beloved’s worth “to the ending doom” (12). And again, stressed assonance on the short “e” sound in both words tricks the ear into hearing more rhyme than actually exists—but note that this time there really is a two-syllable ending rhyme. All three of these sets of unstressed rhymes highlight the value of the poet’s words over physical statues and monuments, while also showing the connection between them: “content” becomes a better “monument” than a monument itself could be, the “living record” of the poem preserves “memory” better than memorial “masonry,” and the poem will bring to all “posterity” what would otherwise be lost in “all-oblivious enmity.”

Though the lack of stress on these three sets of ending rhymes ties together and clarifies the opposition of physical monuments to poetical ones, in a way it also undermines the very point it makes. The reader must nearly swallow the rhymes in each case because of the meter, which effectively eradicates the “monuments,” “masonry,” and “enmity,” but also necessarily cuts off the “contents,” “memory” and “posterity.” Hammond suggests that the poet “promises preservation and immortality, but only on the poet’s terms,” and considers the poem itself as a sort of coffin which will hold the beloved until Judgment Day (Hammond 72). The speaker is perhaps warning obliquely that though poetry has the power to memorialize the beloved much longer than stone monuments, even that power is subject to the will of the poet, who may strike the beloved’s image from his poems just as surely as time defaces physical memorials.

The meter of Sonnet 55 makes it more ambiguous than has hitherto been seen, and shows Shakespeare’s skill at stretching the limits of the accepted sonnet form in order to draw attention to his theme and create rhythms that both reinforce his meaning and undercut it, hinting at a deeper level of significance.

NOTES

1. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 15, trans. by Arthur Golding (1567). rpt. in Mowat, Barbara A and Paul Wershire, eds. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Washington Square Press, 2006. p 617.

WORKS CITED

• Fontana, Ernest. “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55.” Explicator 45:3 (Spring, 1987): 6-7.
• Hammond, Gerald. The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.
• Martin, Philip. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love and Art. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
• Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 55.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Wershire. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Washington Square Press, 2006.

This paper was originally written in December 2006 for British Literature Through 1600 at Baylor University.

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