Adapting Henry James to the Screen: Gender, Fiction, and Film

Brenda Austin-Smith
The Henry James Review, Volume 31, Number 1, Winter 2010, pp. 89-91 (Review)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/hjr.0.0070

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89 Laurence Raw. Adapting Henry James to the Screen: Gender, Fiction, and Film. Landham: Scarecrow, 2006. 297 pp. $50.00 (paperback).

By Brenda Austin-Smith, University of Manitoba

For someone who sought and did not find success in the theater, Henry James has nevertheless proved a remarkably bankable producer of screen treatments. Despite its fabled difficulty, his work has been persistently attractive to screenwriters and directors, who have devoted their attention to its cinematic and televisual potential for many decadesindeed, for about seven decades, according to Laurence Raw. In his book on Jamesian adaptations, Raw ranges from 1933, the year of the earliest screen version of The Sense of the Past, to 2001, when the Merchant-Ivory production of The Golden Bowl was released. The twenty-three rather short chapters comprising this book canvass twenty-seven adaptations of the Master, all of them produced for Anglo-American consumption. Raw distinguishes his approach to the subject of adaptation from other studies by stressing his books departure from formalism, something he associates with a fixation on the screen works fidelity to the literary text. Instead, he concentrates on a number of features that constitute the context of any screen work: the period of a film or television shows production, the influence of production codes and censorship, and the specific conditions of studio production. Most important, Raw focuses on the ways in which various adaptations have taken up Jamess own interest in gender ideology, tracking the representation of gender roles and, in particular, of female sexuality through the thickets of Hollywood studio era repression and into the putative openness of post-studio independent film and television production. Among other elements, Raw also identifies narrative style as one of the means by which directors achieve a feminizing of an adaptation, further drawing our attention to matters of gender. He concludes the introduction by stating two goals for the book: showing that in James filmmakers find material allowing them to comment on the present through the past and demonstrating that cinema enabled James to find the popular audience he craved (13). Neither of these statements is really news to those who might pick up this book. The first observationthat adaptations are conditioned by the social and historical contexts in which they appearis a bit of a given in adaptation studies. The same can be said, for example, of adaptations of any writer, whether it be Austen, Dickens, Nabokov, or James. And the second claim, that James not-so-secretly craved popularity, is very familiar to Jamesians. There is, however, a lot to appreciate about this book. For one thing, Raw identifies the Jamesian sources of certain screenworks that readers might be familiar with but not think of as adaptations. How many would recognize Vincente Minnellis On A Clear Day as having been inspired by The Sense of the Past? Who knew that Henry James had been set to music (sung by Streisand, no less)? Raws use of press

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books also provides us with interesting details about the conditions that shaped the production of particular films. And he has amassed an interesting bibliography, including works on audience reception and the history of the womans film. His attention to context also draws attention to the cultural work of entities like PBS and BBC, and the ways in which the cachet of James as a highbrow writer dovetails with their public service ethos (117) in adapting works such as The Jolly Corner. Nevertheless, Raw reminds the reader that James has also consorted, at least in his adapted form, with the so-called low-brow attractions of gore, violence, and explicit sadomasochism. Organization and commentary suffer in places. The chronological treatment of the many adaptations of Jamess works seems a good idea at first, but this approach soon proves repetitive and unhelpful in keeping the books thesis in clear focus. For example, the reader encounters several chapters on works that have been adapted more than once over the years. There are three chapters on adaptations of The Sense of the Past, and six on versions of The Turn of the Screw. Some of these adaptations appeared within the same decade, but each is nevertheless given its own (brief) chapter. After a while, keeping the various achievements of these adaptations in mind requires a reader to flip back and forth in order to keep track of the similarities and differences among and between these interpretations. The problem becomes most apparent in the many chapters on The Turn of the Screw. After a while, Raws method of organizing his discussion requires him to return to summaries of previous adaptations merely to set the stage for the adaptation currently being discussed. Given that all chapters are rather shortsome no more than six pagesprecious space one might want dedicated to analysis is instead given over to plot summary and references to previous chapters. After a while, a certain weariness sets in when the reader turns the page to discover yet another chapter on an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw that offers yet another plot summary but little close analysis of how this adaptation distinguishes itself. A better approach, since the point is to emphasize the ways in which James has been understood by screenworkers in different decades, might have been to dedicate a substantial chapter to each James text and bear down on the ways in which these various incarnations of that text took up, or took issue with, their particular contexts as well as with each other. A longish chapter on the various cinematic manifestations of The Turn of the Screw from 1961 to 1999, for example, would have been able to emphasize more efficiently, and in more comparative depth, the ways in which female desire in these dramas is conceived as demonic or liberating, as an expressive possibility, a threat to social order, or maybe as a convenient excuse for showing some skin. And while attention to the social and historical milieux in which James has been interpreted and re-interpreted is welcome, Raws attempts to link cultural movements and sensitivities to particular adaptations can be awkward and unconvincing. Writing of the 1947 production of The Lost Moment (an adaptation of The Aspern Papers), to take one example, Raw emphasizes the influence of Helene Deutschs depiction of restless women as neurotic and deviant and the warnings of other contemporary authors that feminism would lead to social chaos. He begins the next sentence with the phrase Despite such fears, many Hollywood films chose to focus on the issue of female identity . . . (29). This transition makes it seem as if moviemakers either

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shared the fears of Deutsch and her ilk, but went ahead anyway, or were explicitly challenging her anti-feminist psychological theories (Damn that Deutsch womanI say roll em!). The relations between contemporary thought and cultural production are rarely as blatant or as immediately apparent as this. A similar lack of subtlety in reading adaptations as expressions of their time affects later discussions of masculinity in the chapter on The Jolly Corner. On the other hand, Raw sometimes refrains from criticism of characters on film in ways that blunt his analysis. An example occurs in his chapter on Jane Campions The Portrait of a Lady, when, perhaps in an attempt to be a liberal feminist supporter of the film, he emphasizes the multiple and/or contradictory perspectives that cluster about the depiction of Isabels reaction to abuse by her husband (164). The impression created here is of a critic reaching for critical clichs, defending Isabels freedom to enjoy pain in her marriage rather than perhaps querying the negative in her character more intensively. Raws concluding chapter reviews in helpful but often workmanlike prose the part played by the Production Code in earlier adaptations of James and the ways in which the growth of independent film provided opportunities for the production of more obviously feminist interpretations of James. Still, his conclusion that despite changes in production practices, some filmmakers emphasize the radical elements of the source text while some underline the conservative is an obvious one. We seem to end up with an earnest study of what makes some Jamesian adaptations feminist, and therefore good, and what makes others anti-feminist, and therefore not-so-good. And in most cases, the good films are the most recent ones. The complexity and paradoxes of the studio era, in which the Production Code could spur filmmakers and actors to achieve creative subversions, are overlooked, and the books argument is the weaker for it.

Michle Mendelssohn. Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. 328 pp. $130.00 (hardcover).

By Talia Schaffer, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Michle Mendelssohns Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture studies the relation between James and Wilde intensively, parsing almost every mention of one man by the other, and using the resulting insights to define the strains and complexities of Aestheticism itself. The book is written with eloquent and fervent belief in its findings and in the significance of its account of the movement. It brings to light previously unknown or underread details about the mens relationship. And it is elegantly structured, pairing comparable texts by each man in each chapter and tracing a trajectory from their first meeting to their last interactions.