3. Re-presenting the Past: Gender, Colonial Space and Cultural Nostalgia in Neo-Victorianism on Screen

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.