Neo-Victorianism on Screen

By engaging with current debates about the uses of cultural memory and cultural nostalgia in contemporary depictions of the past, this chapter locates the monograph in terms of both contemporary debates about postfeminist media culture and the relationship between neo-Victorian studies and adaptation studies. In the process, it introduces key topics that are the focus of this book: the ways in which neo-Victorianism on screen depicts women’s agency, family structures, gender relationships, imperialism and colonial space. In order to account for the vital role that neo-Victorianism on screen plays in the creation of cultural memories of the Victorian era in contemporary media, the phrase ‘neo-Victorian imaginarium’ is proposed as an umbrella term to draw out neo-Victorianism’s dual character: as a dynamic and generative (creative) process that builds upon preceding adaptations, and as an evolving compendium of these generated images.

Irene Adler is the only female character to outsmart Sherlock Holmes in A.C. Doyle’s fiction (‘A Scandal in Bohemia’) and this chapter explores how she is portrayed in the episode of the BBC television series Sherlock (2012), CBS television series Elementary (2012–2016) and the two Guy Ritchie films, Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). The analysis compares these screen renditions to the appropriation of Adler in the neo-Victorian mystery novel Good Night, Mr Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas ( 1990) and several earlier screen adaptations. The chapter demonstrates the imbrication of Adler’s on-screen afterlives and the contemporary postfeminist media’s use of the naked, sexualised, female body as the source of women’s power and agency—a linkage that is rendered additionally titillating through its association with the proverbially prudish and restrained Victorian text.

This chapter examines the relationship between neo-Victorianism on screen and heritage cinema by focusing on representations of Victorian gender roles and colonial space in Jane Campion’s adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair (2004), and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011). Comparing these adaptations of Victorian fiction to an adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel (Armstrong’s Oscar and Lucinda (1997)), a neo-Victorian TV show (Ripper Street’s episode ‘Pure as the Driven’ 2013 ) and a TV biopic (Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible 2016), it is argued that the attempts to re-vision and rewrite Victorian gender roles are frequently dependent on the elision of source texts’ colonial discourse analyses. In contrast, adaptations of neo-Victorian fiction that highlight the postcolonial critique of the novel are shown to downplay the novel’s feminist agenda. More specifically, this reading spotlights how the use of clothes in these adaptations relates to costume drama’s generic conventions that establish period authenticity, exposing the limitations of these (post)feminist and postcolonial interventions.

This chapter offers a reading of the ways in which the Victorian metaphor of the caged bird, standing in for the Victorian heroine, is visually translated in contemporary neo-Victorianism on screen through the use of period clothes, especially corsets and crinolines. The analysis examines Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and the director’s own neo-Victorian film The Piano (1993); Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001); Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and The Corpse Bride (2005); and Marc Munden’s mini-series adaptation of The Crimson Petal and the White (2011). These representations of Victorian femininity are shown to be reliant on stereotypes and assumptions about Victorian women’s clothes and subjectivity that reinforce rather than question received notions about the period.

Focusing on Alice in Wonderland (dir. Tim Burton 2010) and its less successful sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass (dir. James Bobin 2016), John Logan’s TV show Penny Dreadful (2014‐2016) and the TV film adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Affinity written by Andrew Davies and directed by Tim Fywell (2008), this chapter argues that what they have in common, besides their Gothic-visual style, is the way in which they employ tailoring and shape-shifting, transformation and re-fashioning as visual cues for adaptive interventions into Victorian gender dynamics and family structures. The chapter concludes that, even though these TV series and films perform a rejection of traditional, heteronormative family roles and structures through their stagings of gender-role reversal or constructed/queer families of choice, their production context limits the extent to which they manage to ultimately queer their characters and narratives.

The book concludes with an exploration of the representation of Queen Victoria in four contemporary biopics: Mrs Brown (1997) directed by John Madden; the two-part BBC mini-series Victoria & Albert (2001); the film The Young Victoria (2009), written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée; and the first season of ITV’s Victoria (2016). While Mrs Brown’s treatment of Victoria’s relationship with John Brown is interpreted as heritage cinema’s respectful depiction of monarchy, it also puts into relief the lack of interest in older women’s subjectivity in more recent postfeminist media culture, evident in the three later biopics which all depict Victoria’s early years and construct the queen as the ideal postfeminist subject thanks to their focus on her courtship, marriage to Albert and motherhood. Cumulatively, these portrayals of a youthful Queen Victoria are read both as generating a cultural memory that rewrites the received image of the monarch, and as indicative of the genre’s collusion with postfeminism through its focus on youthful, white, heteronormative, middle- and upper-class women.